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Episode 98: Built to Change: How to Future-proof your Marketing Team, with Amanda Farley

Change is the constant in today’s Marketing. The firms that adapt to that reality will survive. Those marketing employers that hold to conventional practices like daily office commutes and spliffs like Starbucks gift cards won’t survive this environment for long. 

My guest Amanda Farley knows this very well. She has been a marketer, performance strategist, and business success leader for over a dozen years. She is VP of Growth at Aimclear, a marketing agency dominant in customer acquisition and winner of 17 US Search Awards including 5X most recent Best Integrated Agency.

Amanda speaks at conferences such as SMX, HeroConf, PRSA Detroit, FoundCon, and TogetherDigital. She has appeared in publications including SearchEngineLand and MarketingLand. Amanda judges the annual Global Content Awards and UK App Awards. She has also been a finalist for Landy’s Search Female Marketer of the Year.

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Episode 97: Reacting to a Reengineered Sales team, with Rick Endrulat

No corporate function in B2B was impacted by the events of 2020 as much as sales. Salesforces had to reengineer themselves just to survive. We in marketing had better understand how these new sales dynamics are affecting us. My guest will help us do just that. 

Rick Endrulat’s passion for revenue generation began at Watcom, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo. He was there as it grew and was acquired by the sixth-largest software company in the world. He then co-founded Virtual Causeway, a consultancy that helps enterprises scale up their demand generation.

Rick is a Quantum Shift Fellow with the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. A past recipient of Waterloo Region’s “40 Under 40,” Rick has also received Wilfrid Laurier’s MBA Alumni Award in 2008 and 2013, and Communitech’s Tech Impact Award for outstanding leadership and involvement in the local technology community. He is a member of Laurier’s President’s Council of Advisors, and a two-time winner of the Laziridis School of Business — Entrepreneurship & Innovation award. He has an Honours Degree in Arts and a Masters of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Not one to stand still, Rick co-founded School of Rock Kitchener-Waterloo, which rapidly grew to become the largest music school in the community. He is also Co-Founder and Director of 100 Guitars for 100 kids, as well as a Founding Board Member for Sustainable Waterloo Region.

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Episode 96: Is the Marketing Services Model Broken? with Leona Hobbs

Is the Marketing Services Model Broken?

My guest is calling BS on the state of agency-brand relations. Considering her qualifications in this space, it’s worth hearing her out. Leona Hobbs joined global public relations agency Fleishman-Hillard right out of school. She worked on strategy across several sectors and rose to become a vice president there. 

The 1990s and early 2000s had her working with internet clients like Yahoo and Tucows as director of communications. Working in agencies and through her own Reset Digital brand, she consulted with leading automotive, industrial, financial services, cruise line, and consumer brands. She also had an extended account leadership role with a Fortune 50 semiconductor firm.

People, Companies and Concepts mentioned in this episode:

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Episode 95: New database technology paradigm, with Chris McLellan

Big Data has a problem. It’s not just its bigness; it’s the rigidity of the databases that hold and that force us to make data copies. Resulting problems, from privacy to fidelity loss, are so severe, we should revisit the first principles of how databases are built. Let’s be honest, if we could build our whole data infrastructure over again, would we do it differently? 

Today’s guest says we would have built data like a network. Thankfully, next-generation technology will allow us to store data in this new way while still making use of old-style databases.   

My guest is Chris McLellan. He splits his time between the nonprofit Data Collaboration Alliance, and Cinchy, the leader in enterprise data fabric technology. Coming out of Bishops University with a degree in Political Science, his career has included stints at VarageSale, and Lyft, as well as startups like Flexday and ChangeJar. He also created the go-to-market strategy for Hailo, the taxi network of 35,000 licensed drivers. 

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Episode 94: Winning People’s Buy-in by Telling Stories, with Amy Hebdon

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ve taken on a marketing initiative that is finally going somewhere, and it’s now time for management to see what you’ve done and approve more funds, or give you props for  all your hard work. But on presenting your data, you’re only met with blank stares or nit-picking centred around how you put your data together. 

What’s going wrong when this happens? It’s probably that your audience couldn’t boil it down into something that makes sense to them. The universal structure that all of us use to do this is stories.  

My guest uses stories to present the performance of her marketing programs. It’s her contention that using a story-like framework works to your advantage when presenting data. Amy Hebdon has managed Google Ads Since 2004, working her way through at least a half dozen agencies.  In 2017, she and her husband James co-founded Paid Search Magic, which provides coaching, consulting, audits, reporting, and courses for those who want to get better at search engine marketing. She has lived in a handful of states and two central American countries, and she joined us today from the new “Home-base” which is in Tennessee. 

Fun Fact: she once worked for a man (named Mr. Schneer) who was in charge of the company website and didn’t know how to use the internet (he asked which was the “dot” key in typing “dotcom”)

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P-A-S framework:

  1. Problem
  2. Agitate
  3. Solution

Episode Reboot. 

Frame your statistics in a way that illustrates the impact on what your audience cares about.