Present Beyond Measure, with Lea Pica

Present Beyond Measure, with Lea Pica

Episode 204

Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion – this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.

But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.

That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their  presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action

She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.”  Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00   Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica

00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to

00:18:04 Building meeting’s name around message

00:32:14 PSA

00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas

00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides

00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs

01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea

 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

 Lea Pica’s website

The Present Beyond Measure podcast

The Book can be found on her site or on Goodreads:

Present Beyond Measure: Design, Visualize, and Deliver Data Stories That Inspire Action

Lea on LinkedIn



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Present Beyond Measure book

The AI Playbook, with Eric Siegel

The AI Playbook

Episode 199

Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.

Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. 

With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise – He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. 

My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”

Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro
00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel
00:01:56 Barrier we face isn’t technical know-how
00:06:05 Despite a strong start – AI’s been slow to spread
00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML
00:27:41 building a custom algorithm
00:29:45 PSA
00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover
00:54:03 Contacting Eric

People, products or concepts mentioned in the show:

Eric speaks at: Generative AI Applications Summit and at Machine Learning Week

Reviews of The AI Playbook and book’s site

Eric works at Gooder.ai

Geek Professor Drops Rap Video, Tries to Dance

The AI Playbook | Eric Siegel, author | bizML

Clayton Christiansen

Malcolm Gladwell

 

 



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AI playbook diagram

Ecosystem-Led Growth, with Robert Moore

Bob Moore ecosystem-led growth

Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

 

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

 

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

 

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

 

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

 

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let’s head there now to meet Bob Moore.

 

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ecosystem-Led Growth book

Bob on X

Bob on LinkedIn 

Bob is formerly Co-founder of Stitch Data

Bob is currently CEO at Crossbeam

Metcalfe’s Law

 

 

 



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Partnering on Customer Acquisition, with John Wright

John Wright Partnering on Customer Acquisition

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else’s channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies’ shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.

 

 

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John

People, Products and Concepts mentioned in Show:

statsdrone.com

John@statsdrone.com

StatsDrone on Instagram

 



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Analytics – in-house or outsource? with Luke Komiskey

Luke Komiskey

Episode 195

We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.  

But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It’s hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this. 

But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven. 

We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest. 

Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis’ first Analytics Hire. 

In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.

Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:02:14 – Welcome Luke

00:17:38 – PSA

00:18:16 – Calculating value of having good data

00:49:29 – The MSP model

00:49:59 – Where to contact Luke

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

 

Luke on linkedin

Luke’s company is Datadrive

Jerry Macguire



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https://funnelreboot.com/episode-151-analytics-worth-the-investment-with-martin-mcgarry/

https://funnelreboot.com/episode-138-how-data-pipes-operationalize-analysis-with-noah-learner/

 



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