SPEAKERS

Pete Fairburn, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp  00:00

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on Mission, and I’m your host. Christian Klepp, today I’ll be talking to Pete Fairburn. He is the director and co-founder of morphsites, and has a proven track record in helping businesses grow online by maximizing revenue potential and improving efficiency. Pete and his team focus on delivering strategic, bespoke web development consultation and digital marketing for businesses. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. 

Christian Klepp  00:31

Mr. Pete Fairburn, welcome to the show. 

Pete Fairburn  00:34

Thank you for having me. Good to be here. 

Christian Klepp  00:37

I’m really looking forward to this, Pete, and I’m going to say Happy New Year, although I know that this this episode is probably coming out in February, but it is a new year, new start. So yeah, let’s dive right in. This is going to be an interesting conversation. No doubt. 

Pete Fairburn  00:52

Looking forward to.

Christian Klepp  00:53

Fantastic. Okay, so Pete, you have a proven track record in helping businesses grow online by maximizing revenue potential and improving efficiency. So for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission. And in a previous conversation, we’ve talked about this at length, how B2B marketing teams can measure what matters for better results. And I believe it was Peter Drucker that said, what gets measured gets managed, right? Incidentally, that’s probably one of the most misquoted quotes of all time, because a lot of people say what gets measured gets done. But let’s kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat, yeah. So on that topic, what do you think is the biggest frustration in digital marketing, and where do you see a lot of marketing teams falling flat?

Pete Fairburn  01:46

I think the answer to that varies depending on who you speak to, because in any marketing function, you’ve got a lot of different people with a stake in the outcome. So you’ve obviously got the marketers themselves who need to prove that what they’re doing is generating results, and that that can be frustrating if it’s hard to prove that. So they might be working really hard, but you know, when they’re asked, well, what we’re getting for this is sometimes it can be really don’t know, or it’s nebulous. 

Pete Fairburn  02:18

You’ve then got the sales team who are hungry for good leads, and you know, to a large extent, they may be dependent on marketing activity to get that so if those leads aren’t the right quality or properly qualified, that can be hugely frustrating for them. You’ve got business owners or C suite members who are just interested in how all this activity and expenditure, because they don’t often see marketing as an investment, right? They they see it as expenditure. All they’re interested in is, well, how is this affecting the bottom line? And then on top of that, you’ve often got digital marketing agencies who are sometimes somewhere in that mix, trying to justify their fees and existence. So the frustrations can vary, but I think a lot of it does boil down to not being able to truly grasp what’s working and moving the needles for a business or brand. 

Pete Fairburn  03:11

And where do I see a lot of marketing teams falling flat? This was a tricky one, because this is massive generalization, but broadly speaking, we’ve seen marketing teams and agencies fall into two types. So this, like I say, with the caveat, it’s a massive generalization, but you’ve got what I call the fluffy scatter gun teams that focus purely on the creative. They don’t really have any kind of coherent strategy or reason for doing what they’re doing beyond we’re doing marketing right. Make some noise, and they will come. That’s not to take away from the effort they’re putting in. They put huge amounts of effort into campaigns and creatives, but they never really measure or assess the effectiveness or the results of that. It’s essentially a box ticking exercise based purely on output. 

Pete Fairburn  03:28

So have we done our monthly newsletter? Have we done our five blogs this month? Have we done our 10 social posts, and it doesn’t really change or react, exact change or react, except at when or at the direction of some stakeholder within the brand or the business, and often, along with that comes a target audience that is everyone and the channel that is everything. So everything spreads super thin. There’s no targets. The marketing team aren’t given anything to perform against, no metric to perform against, so they are literally just outputting and hoping that some of it sticks so that that’s that I see happening a lot. And then you have teams who do have a strategy. They know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They have a plan. They they have targets, they have metric. Looks at the business is set in place. Might not be the right ones, but they have them. They probably have the right audiences and the right messaging. So they’re more business focused, outcome focused, but they fall flat because they cannot effectively measure that outcome of the activity that they’re doing. So then they get grief from sales or owners, or C suite executives. 

Christian Klepp  05:24

Absolutely, absolutely fluffy scatter gun teams. I’m gonna, I’m gonna steal that one and use that from now on.

Pete Fairburn  05:32

You’ve seen it. You must have seen it.

Christian Klepp  05:34

Absolutely, and I did have a follow up question there. I mean, you’ve brought up a lot of, like, very important points. And this might be a leading question, but I am going to ask it anyway. Do you feel that a lot of that has to and I know it’s very top level, like, like generalizing here, but do you feel a lot of that has to do with the lack of a holistic or coherent strategy, and also for all members involved, whether it’s the marketing team, whether it’s the agency that’s executing upon the plan, it’s also a lack of under their lack of understanding of the customer and that ecosystem in which the customer thrives and lives in.

Pete Fairburn  06:19

Yeah, I think it’s all of those things. So you’ve got to have, you’ve got to have someone who owns that marketing function. I don’t necessarily mean the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), or that could be the CMO or the business owner, but someone, often is those, depending on the size of the organization that’s doing the marketing, you’ve got to have someone that says, This is what we want to achieve from our marketing. This is what we want to get out of it, other than just hey, we’re getting some brand recognition here. So I think someone needs to own it and set those goals. And what else did you ask? Sorry, it was a big question. 

Christian Klepp  06:55

No problem, no problem. It was. One is certainly the lack of a coherent strategy. And the second one is really that neither side, so whether it’s the marketing team or the agency, have done enough due diligence on the customers, right, on that ecosystem. Because oftentimes in B2B, even in B2C, we’re not just talking about like one target group. It could be multiple, right? Like in B2B, sometimes you’re also talking about a buying committee or consisting of different functions, different roles, different responsibilities, and you have to appeal to each of them.

Pete Fairburn  07:28

Yeah, yeah. So I do think that that’s a hugely common thing, and I think the problem for that is because it’s, it’s the perception I get is it’s really hard. So there’s this mentality that we don’t know who our target audience is, which sounds crazy, but it does seem to be the thing. It’s like, well, our target audience is everyone. Well, you get the classic. Our target audience is 18 to 85 male, female, every demographic. And yet there are some very simple things that you can do to really narrow that down very quickly. But I think it’s just that not having those methodologies and techniques to do that you just end up, or marketing teams or agencies can just end up appealing to everyone, and that just comes from not doing enough planning and due diligence and discovery up front to understand who the customers are, and alluding to what you said as well within an identified target audience, understanding at what stage that individual is in the funnel. 

Pete Fairburn  08:34

You know, are they just the researcher, the awareness gatherer, not the decision maker, but understanding where they are on the funnel, and then also understanding the pain points that you need to address for that person so that you’re speaking their language. And that just seems to bypass a lot. Yeah, it’s actually, you know, it’s an easy thing to do when you know what you’re doing, like anything. I guess.

Christian Klepp  08:58

Absolutely, absolutely, I’m going to move us on to the next question, and it’s about key pitfalls to avoid, and again, on this topic of measuring what matters. And you’ve probably seen it all, but maybe like some top level pitfalls that marketers should be avoiding.

Pete Fairburn  09:15

Still see a lot of marketers getting trapped in the focus on vanity metrics, and hopefully your listeners know what that means. But the things that sound good and are quite easy to say, Hey, we’ve had 10s of 1000s of this or that, or people have spent this amount of time on the website, that kind of thing probably harder with GA (Google Analytics) 4 than it was with Universal Analytics, but still focusing on those sort of easy to achieve things that don’t really tell you anything. So they get trapped in that rather than looking for metrics that have a higher indication of value to the business. So conversions is the obvious one, but it could be other interactions that move a user along the funnel towards conversion. 

Pete Fairburn  10:00

So that would be one focusing on the wrong channels that aren’t actually help, helping in some measurable way, just because someone said, hey, we should everyone’s doing TikTok, we should do TikTok, and nothing against TikTok, or whichever platform. But it’s like, that goes back to your target audience, right? So well, are your audience there are? Is it the right time to talk to them? And that’s often just not even considered. It’s just, oh well, we’re going to do it because everyone else is doing it, or our competitors doing it, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting results from it, because no one’s measuring it. So that that will be a second thing. 

Pete Fairburn  10:40

And a big thing, and we have this frustration as an agency for years, is only measuring what happens in the digital space on the website. i.e., so you’re measuring everything coming into the website. You’re measuring what people do on the website, and then it goes into this black hole. And we have this problem for ages with customers where we were saying to them, Hey, we’ve got you all these, you know, all these people filling in conversions on landing pages. Or we can see you’ve had this many phone calls this month, but we had no idea what was happening next. And sometimes the customer would say, yeah, we’re getting some great stuff. Keep it going. Or, well, I mean, we have one, one legal firm as an example of this, where they had a very specific target audience, and they were getting lots of inquiries, but they just couldn’t tell us what happened once they captured the inquiry, once the form had been filled in. 

Pete Fairburn  11:38

And it was this just was really painful, manual process to try and identify the inquiry and attribute it and say, Well, what happened to it? Did it actually convert into something and how much was that worth? But if you, if you do that, you get lulled into this false sense of security, of thinking, hey, we’ve got loads of conversions, loads of people filling in the contact form or the landing page form or picking up the phone, but they could be just, I mean, tide was, you know, spam, that kind of thing, that could all be there, and you’re just getting loads of that. So that kind of ties into my, my final Pitfall, if you like, which is not connecting the marketing activity with the sales process. So not connecting it to a CRM(Customer Relationship Management), not having a sales process for that CRM, or more often, more often than you think, not even having a CRM beyond a spreadsheet or post it notes. So those are some of the pitfalls, and then you’re just into guesswork.

Christian Klepp  12:38

Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, I mean time wasters, time vampires, I heard, I heard another one the other day, which I coined,  EV, so “energy vampires”, exactly the same thing, right? So, yeah, not, not electronic vehicle, energy vampires, right? So, yeah, so, no, absolutely, and especially that last point, and I think correct me, if I’m wrong, that’s where some of this conflict between marketing and sales persists, because they have no way of actually accurately measuring, okay, so Well, this is actually coming in from marketing, or this is, this is marketing’s contribution to this entire initiative, right? So that’s where some of this persists. I did have a follow up question for you, and I’m wondering, if you’ve seen this, I certainly have. Do you sometimes find that there are marketing teams out there that spend way too much time planning and not executing? They’re just like, always like, Okay, we’ve got to do more research. We’ve got to do, you know, we’ve got to wait until we’ve got the perfect plan before we you know, we let it take off, right?

Pete Fairburn  13:44

Absolutely. One of my big bug bears, not the biggest, but don’t get me wrong, planning and strategy, you know, for any new client, we on board. We do Discovery sessions to find out who the clients are, what the pain points are, and that kind of thing. But you just need to get some traction. I’ve just seen so many times businesses spin their wheels for months, years, or that they just never get anything going. And you can sometimes it’s cultural. A lot of the time it’s it’s the fear of failure from not planning effectively. But not planning effectively isn’t the same of planning to perfection, because there is no such thing as perfection,

Christian Klepp  14:23

Absolutely, absolutely. You touched on it a bit like earlier in the conversation, Pete, but I’m gonna just dive a little bit deeper, if you will. How can, how can B2B marketers work more collaboratively and strategically with sales regarding metrics? So how can the marketing team be held accountable.

Pete Fairburn  14:43

Sales and marketing should be best friends. They’re often not. Because marketing is saying, we’re giving you loads of leads, and sales are going, Yeah, but they’re rubbish, and that doesn’t help anyone. It just creates friction. So. So if you can get a sales and marketing team to understand that they’re two sides of the same coin, or different sides of the same coin, sorry, and loop, loop the marketing team into the sales process, loop them into the CRM, so that when leads drop in from the website, be it a form, an email, phone call, text message, whatever it might be, the marketing team can see what happens to that lead. So if they’re running, I don’t know, a Google paid search campaign, and they’re getting loads of conversions, they think this is going great. If they can look in without even saying to the sales guys, what’s happening to these if they can look in and go, these are shocking. 

Pete Fairburn  15:42

We’re not even able to quote on them, let alone convert them, because they’re just they’re all trash, trash inquiries. They can start going right. Well, what’s wrong with that campaign? Is it the messaging? Is it the targeting? Is it the creative? Can they tweak it to make it better? Or can they go actually, this campaign over here is driving all our good leads, but we’re only spending 5% of our budget and time on it. Let’s flip that around, because we all have our pet channels, don’t? We all have our pet platforms that we like and our our things that we want to do. But if, if the marketing team can see the feedback from the sales team on what’s going on, they can focus their effort on the most profitable and effective channels, and you kind of get this positive feedback message, then where the sales team are going? We want more of those. Yes, please. So they got to do their bit, but the marketing team can go, okay, yeah, we can do that for you, because we can see exactly where it’s coming from, rather than to know where it’s coming from.

Christian Klepp  16:40

Yeah. No, absolutely, absolutely. And I did have a follow up question there, because I’ve seen this happen a lot, where marketing people come in to the sales and say, okay, but you know, in order to, like, pull this off and to generate the leads that that you guys need and want, we’re going to have to come up with the right strategy. And sometimes I’ve come across sales people that you know once, the moment you say strategy, they’re like, Okay, well, why do we need that? Let’s just hit the ground running. Let’s just, let’s just skip all of that, and let’s, let’s just go right. So what would your advice be to those marketers that need to get buy in from the sales like, look, we need to take this time to come up with the right strategy, because that’s going to get us the right results.

Pete Fairburn  17:25

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think, I think sometimes semantics, word choice can can hinder that, because strategy sounds really grand. And let’s face it, there are plenty of agencies out there that can do just what we were talking about earlier, they can strategize forever, because strategy is fairly safe if you just keep planning, but you never activate, you never execute, then you you never fail, in danger of it failing or not getting the results you want. So I think sales people have probably seen a lot of strategy over the years, whether it’s either months and months and months of research and personas and all that kind of stuff that US marketers love to get into, and they’re kind of like, we ain’t got time for that. 

Pete Fairburn  18:12

We need to start getting some results now. So sometimes just framing it correctly, rather than say, hey, we need to do a big strategy piece, it’s like, okay, day one, can we just sit down with you? Who are you talking to? What? What job roles are you talking to? What type of people are you talking to, and what conversations are you having with them, that the ones that actually go somewhere, what are the pain points that you’re talking about? What? What is the sweet spot for you in terms of customers? 

Pete Fairburn  18:38

And you know, a few hours just sat with the sales people, actually just asking them questions, then listening. Can can build you up a target audience very quickly and understand the pain points very quickly. And even if, even if you want to do it’s natural, as marketers, we want to do the big strategic piece and then the big rebrand and the big launch. But sometimes the best thing you can do before you make all that investment, the time and energy and cost, is do that little piece first, put in, put in place some some smaller pieces of work, maybe, I don’t know, just a few landing pages around those target audiences, on the right channels, and you can start justifying your existence. And then the good thing about that is you’re you’re you’re starting to get results which justifies a bigger expenditure. And the sales team get what you’re doing. So when, when you come to them and say, can you just tell me a bit more about this target audience, or we’ve noticed we’re getting a lot of channel, you know, leads from here. Tell me more about those. The sales team buy into it, rather than just thinking marketing aren’t sending us any good leads.

Christian Klepp  19:45

Absolutely, absolutely. You know what you just mentioned that really resonated with me, and I’m sure you’ve gone through the same experience. But a couple of years ago, I wasn’t, I was in corporate marketing, or, sorry, on the client side, rather than I was a product marketer, and one of the. Things that we did was we, one of our first mandates was to make sure that the sales people are our friends, right? And what that basically meant was that I was sent out into the field together with the sales people so I could hear it, hear it. I could hear it from the client, essentially what the challenges were, what the objections were to the product that we were selling at the time, what questions the client was asking, right? Because at some point, especially if they were targeting the same industry in the same type of like persona, these people will basically have the same questions. So one of the things that we did was, when we went back, was we listed all these questions out, and we came up with, I wouldn’t say argumentations, but how we came up with answers to address these questions, to address these objections, right? So that way, that way the salespeople won’t be fumbling or just winging it, as they like to say here in North America, right when they’re going out on field visits. 

Christian Klepp  21:01

I think the other thing that we did, which I think was extremely important, was, as we were developing the campaigns, especially early on, on the piece, we got the sales people involved. And you know where I’m going with this, right? It’s to get their buy in, to get them to make them feel like, okay, we’re doing all the work, but we’re involving you, right? Your your opinion matters. I know I sound a little bit like an MP (Member of the Parliament) now, but like your opinion matters. We want to get you involved in this. We want to hear your opinion. We want to hear what you have to say, whether this will work or not, and why, and by using that approach, rather than, you know, the big reveal with fanfare and all that which five times, all the time, would fall flat. The sales team felt invested. They felt like they were a part of this. And then it was easier to get buy in. And then we were sitting in the board meetings, and the sales people would vouch for us, right? So.

Pete Fairburn  21:54

Yeah, yeah, absolutely the right way to go, get make friends with the sales too. That’s That’s brilliant, and get all your stakeholders bought in C suite as well, or the owners, the leadership team, if you can. But critic, that critical point that you said about going out field visits with clients, we always try and do that if we can. Desk research is great, but there’s nothing better than speaking to clients and asking them for everything, warts and all, because they’ll tell you, they’ll tell you. They probably won’t always tell the sales guy if they, if they, if they got a good relationship with the sales guy, but they’ll often tell the marketing team if you say, we just want to make things better. But yeah, that’s a really good approach. 

Christian Klepp  22:42

Absolutely, we even did that when we were trying to launch a new product and we were, we were trying to, like, interview clients and tell them, in theory, what we were trying to come up with in terms of a solution. And that was no filter, they would tell us, like, not, totally can’t use that. That’s, that’s absolutely, like, not going to be helpful to my business at all, but that’s how we took those learnings, and then we went back to whoever was developing the product and saying, Hey, listen, we tested it out, and this is what the client said, and this is how they would iterate it, right? Of course, sometimes you have to take what clients say with a grain of salt, because not all of it, not all of it, is going to be real. You can’t implement it realistically sometimes, right again, it depends, depends on the topic, depends on the situation, depends on what part of the journey they’re at to right so, yeah. 

Pete Fairburn  23:34

Yeah, yeah. But we’ve seen that same thing with with both lead generation, sort of digital marketing strategies, but also with the other side of our business, where we’re we’re looking for the the innovative thing, the magic one question for clients. Sometimes you can go in and you’ve, you’ve often been given a preconceived idea about what the solution is, and you go into the client and they go, no, no, that’s not a problem at all. If, if we could sort this problem out. But why is that a problem for you? Oh, because of X, Y and Z, and sometimes it’s the perception that that’s a really hard problem to solve. But if you you can find out what those are and they are solvable. And like you say, Not everything’s feasible, but if you can find a way to do that, it can really give you an edge, only your competitors, particularly if you’re in a commoditized B2B market, you know, where everyone’s basically doing the same thing, you can do something that stands out as different, makes the service offering of the product better, or what have you that can be a game changer for a business.

Christian Klepp  24:36

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay. Pete, I mean, it is 2025, and I will have to ask you this question, measuring what matters and AI (Artificial Intelligence), what’s your take on that? Like, where do you see AI, fitting into this whole ecosystem of digital marketing? Marketing teams working with sales and using artificial intelligence to make that whole measuring what matters, for lack of a better description, ecosystem more efficient and beneficial for everyone?

Pete Fairburn  25:15

Yeah, that’s a hugely important question, and I’m always quite cynical about new things, new shiny things, not because I don’t like new shiny things, but I like to prove them first. And I think AI has has had a bit of a danger of the The Emperor’s New Clothes, to a degree. However you’ve, you’ve hit on a really salient point here in that AI can take away a lot of guesswork. To give you an example, maybe about eight years ago, we had a client. Who we were, we were we had a phone recording system where we could listen to calls, understand where they were coming from, and that kind of thing. Nothing particularly new in that. 

Pete Fairburn  25:59

And they, commissioned us to build a new website because we felt we could improve on the one we’ve done before, after the learnings that we had and the market changed a bit their strategy as a business of change. So what we did is we we downloaded maybe 80 conversations between an inquiry a prospect and one of the sales team, but to analyze those, we literally had to have someone listen to everyone, and not just, you know, hear it, but listen to it and pull out salient points. And we got some really good insights out there. It was a very, very worthwhile thing, which you can from that it’s the same as going for a client interview. You can say, we think you should be doing this, and a business owner will go, no, no, no, people aren’t interested in that. And then you show them the Bank of calls where people are absolutely interested in that. And it can be very useful for other things, like sales quality, telephone call quality, that kind of thing. 

Pete Fairburn  26:55

But putting that side, what we do now is we do that same process using AI, so we can get AI to summarize a conversation, summarize, you know, the the the feeling of the client. So was it happy conversation, or was it negative one? What was the intent of the user, what was the salient points of the conversation? What keywords can we pull out to see if there’s some commonality? An example of this, we’ve got a client that operates in the automotive sector, but they they only deal with clients who have absolute pristine credit records. So what we found when analyzing calls is that certain customers would be talking up front when they were phoning up our client, saying, I haven’t, you know, I’ve got a few spots on my credit record. Well, for them, that’s not interested at all. So what that enabled us to do then is say, well, okay, if we change the positioning and messaging on the ads. 

Pete Fairburn  28:01

Does that help? Yes, it does. It cuts them down. Less of those, are they coming from certain channels? Well, actually, in this case, they were, they were coming from so certain social media platforms. So it’s like, okay, so it tends to be sub prime credit inquiries are coming from a particular platform. So let’s not do that as much. There was still some good stuff coming out, so AI enabled us to do that on the scale of 1000s of calls, as opposed to 100 and you also haven’t got a poor junior marketing person literally dying of boredom, trying to not just listen to the calls, but pull out salient points. So for things like that, AI can be an absolute game changer, and that made a real difference to those clients inquiries.

Christian Klepp  28:48

Wow. That is a that is an excellent example, because Pete, I have been one of those junior marketers listening to all these recordings. So and one thing, and you, you brought it up. It’s, I mean, what was it? You said 80 conversations. I mean, just think about the like prior to AI, the number of hours you needed to invest to listen to those recordings and to and to extract those insights, right? And I think 80, probably by the by the 10th recording, you had already run out of steam, right? And I think one of the things that you mentioned about AI is like, especially in this particular situation, it, it just saves you an incredible amount of time, right? That way you it can extract those insights for you. And I don’t know what transcription software you guys are using, but we, for example, are using otter. And otter has one of these AI assistants where you can go into, let’s say, the interview recording, and just type in what were the key pitfalls that the guest mentioned, and it will extract that within seconds versus. You having to read through the entire transcript, right?

Pete Fairburn  30:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we use otter for client meetings and that kind of thing, video calls, teams meetings, when we’re doing on site workshops, and then for our lead generation activities, we’ve got some other software that will record the call, obviously, with the appropriate GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) caveats at the beginning. That’s a ck, that’s a Europe thing GDPR, but privacy statements that calls are recorded. We take that data where, where customers want to use it, where the client has opted into it, and we can analyze that for lead generation. So again, we can start to understand it’s another way of refining your target audience, the pain points, the frequently asked questions, and yeah, it can just save you a huge amount of time on what something is hugely valuable but very mundane to do, and is actually, historically, been a tough sell to the customer. When you say, I want to pay a junior to sit for 80 phone calls and pull stuff out. So that’s where AI for me is, is a big winner is just on automating the stuff that you know is mundane that then, using the brilliance of the human brain, the creativity the marketers have to then analyze that and go, how can we leverage these insights to the maximum?

Christian Klepp  31:30

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us some already. But if there were somebody out there, a B2B marketer listening to this conversation between you and I, what are like, three to five things you would say they can act upon right now, right to leverage metrics and generate better results, just from a top level perspective?

Pete Fairburn  31:54

Okay, I’ve got four. So I thought three to five. I go, go in the middle, be safe. So the first is to measure the entire lead life cycle. Don’t just stop at the website conversion or something that happens on the website. Understand what happens to the lead after that and its lifetime value. And if you have to do it manually, do it manually. There are, there are tools that can help you with that and make it much more easier to manage. But you can do that from day one. Just talk nicely to your sales team, record it, get access to the CRM, whatever it needs to be. That’s point one, whole lead life cycle. 

Pete Fairburn  32:33

Second point is, once you are measuring that whole lead life cycle, the other danger we have is that we say, right, we’re measuring that now and then. We never look at the data, never analyze it. So don’t just tick the box and say, I’m doing doing an analysis. Sorry, I’m doing measuring. I’m measuring. That’s good. Analyze it. Don’t just leave it. Look at what channels, what campaigns, what messaging is working and which is not so, identify what’s working. 

Pete Fairburn  33:04

And then the third point, which kind of follows on from that, is act on it. Don’t be afraid to curl something that isn’t working. Don’t be afraid to change something that could be improved. Even if you’ve spent ages on the creative part, you think, Oh, that’s really good. Just change it if you can make it better, do it. And if you find something that’s golden, do more of it. So, you know, if you’re if you find this golden channel that’s just bringing in these absolutely brilliant leads, and I don’t know, you’re spending $10,000 a month on the the PPC (Pay-Per-Click advertising) for that, spend 20. But keep measuring the results. Is there a drop off? Sometimes there is you don’t, but sometimes there isn’t. And as long as you can prove, well, that 20 turned into 250,000 or whatever your ROA (Return on Advertising) is, then just keep doing more of that and but let people know. 

Pete Fairburn  33:55

And that’s, that’s the fourth point really, is keep that feedback loop, that measuring, analyzing, changing, going, but ensure that everyone is in the loop on that. So your marketing team, if you’re an agency, the people you’re reporting to your sales team, your leadership team, understand what the results are and why they’re working, because then, you know, you breed confidence in the whole business, and they don’t have to go, Well, I think we should try this channel or this channel, because they don’t marketing’s got that under control. They’re looking at it. They’re feeding back. They’re changing things suddenly. You’re if you’re doing a weekly or a monthly or a quarterly marketing meeting, if you’re doing that, the look on faces when you report back on that, rather than, yeah, we’ve got some results, but we don’t really know where they came from. 

Pete Fairburn  34:43

Of course, no more frames it that way. But if you can just say Yeah, we were, we’ve been spending X amount on Facebook ads, but we were finding that they were just bringing in poor quality leads. So we’ve called those but what we’re finding is LinkedIn when we’re targeting these personas or these job type. Or whatever it is, are bringing in absolute gravy for the sales team. And the sales team will go, yep, because they’re getting what they need, and every everyone looks good. Yeah, that’s what we’re all here for, is to justify, right? So that’s my four top tips.

Christian Klepp  35:13

Win, win. Everyone’s happy, right? 

Pete Fairburn  35:16

That’s, that’s what’s got me. Everyone’s got…

Christian Klepp  35:18

Absolutely, absolutely. Let me just quickly recap that I think it’s worth repeating. So number one is, measure the entire lead life cycle, and the second one is, don’t just tick the box. Find out what’s working. Three is act on it. Analyze, analyze it. Three is act on it, and four is keep that feedback loop going, right? 

Pete Fairburn  35:40

Just keep doing it. 

Christian Klepp  35:41

Absolutely.

Pete Fairburn  35:42

Don’t, don’t rest on your laurels, because over time, things can change, and therefore you need to tweak or a new product or service comes along that your business is offering so that may not fit into the same nice loop that everything. So you might need to change that.

Christian Klepp  35:57

Right, okay, so time for you to get up on your soap box, a status quo that you passionately disagree with and why.

Pete Fairburn  36:10

You probably guess what it is. It’s that whole notion that marketing cannot truly be measured, and that all noise is good noise, and that may have been true before digital. I don’t know. It’s probably before my era, although I’ve been doing this for 25 years, but the true non digital era is well and truly behind us, but I don’t think it’s true now. I’m not saying there isn’t a degree of brand and awareness marketing that brands need to do to drive awareness that you can’t directly attribute, but lead generation can be measured and the ROI (Return on Investment) quantified for lead generation campaigns. 

Pete Fairburn  36:52

And I’m specifically, I’m not talking about E commerce here. E commerce is a different proposition, because you make the transaction on the site that’s, that’s, it has its own pitfalls. It’s easier, but I’m talking about lead generation, where you’re looking to provide a proposal, quote, service, a product that needs interaction. You can measure that the notion you can’t isn’t is you’re either being you’re either being lazy, that’s a bold thing to say, or you just don’t have the right tools and skills in place, and you just might need some help to do that, but it can be measured.

Christian Klepp  37:30

I absolutely agree with that. And yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s worth mentioning that that like, yeah, it could be a combination of all of those factors that you mentioned, right? It’s a you can’t be bothered, you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the right software, or you might not just have the right, know how, right. Maybe you’re dealing with somebody that doesn’t know how to set up Google Analytics, right? And that’s why they can’t measure the traffic that’s coming to their website. They keep talking about it, but then they don’t have any actual metrics to measure all of that against, right? So, no, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, and I work a lot in the B2B branding field, and the main objection that we get is, well, branding can’t be measured, right? And it’s to your point, I would, I would dare say, I would push back and say, yes, it can, actually, it just has to be measured in a different way, right? Like, don’t talk about impressions. And I think that might have been like a point you mentioned earlier in the conversation, these vanity metrics. Oh, we got 150,000 impressions. And so what? 

Pete Fairburn  38:33

So, show me the money. That’s what that’s what business owners are interested in. Or, if you C suite, you got to report to shareholders. That’s you just got to justify your reason for that.

Christian Klepp  38:47

Exactly, exactly. Okay, here comes the bonus question. And I was thinking long and hard about this one. Okay, so here it goes. If you were to pick a song that would be kind of like the soundtrack of your life. What song would that be and why?

Pete Fairburn  39:06

Oh, the soundtrack of my life. That’s a really hard one, Christian.

Pete Fairburn  39:15

Yeah, some radio Rage Against the Machine. Ideas are coming into a headco.

Christian Klepp  39:21

Wow. Okay.

Pete Fairburn  39:23

No, I think the soundtrack of my life would be Love Shack by B-52s. 

Christian Klepp  39:31

Nice.

Pete Fairburn  39:31

Because whenever you hear the start of love shack, you have to be a cold hearted person not to want to get up and dance to that. It’s a real good feeling song. It’s liked by most people, and it can’t help but make you smile. And I’m a fairly chipper person in life, fairly cheerful, and I just like to get on with things, and and, yeah, so I would say that would perhaps be the soundtrack. My life? It’s an interesting question, so I’m going to go with that out. 

Christian Klepp  40:04

I love it. I love that song too. Yeah, my mine would be, maybe not so chipper, but it is a song that will make you get up and scream at top of your lungs. It’s Journey. Don’t stop believing. 

Pete Fairburn  40:17

Oh, nice. 

Christian Klepp  40:19

Except that I’m not a city boy born and raised in South Detroit, but other than that, yeah. Like, other than that, yeah, fantastic. I like, yeah, fantastic. I like. Pete, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your expertise and experience with the listeners. So please a quick introduction to yourself and how people out they can get in touch with you.

Pete Fairburn  40:40

Thank you for having me Christian. I’ve really enjoyed it. So I’m Pete Fairburn. I’m co founder of morphsites. We help businesses and brands grow online by maximizing their revenue potential, improving their efficiency and innovating digitally across all sorts of different things. We’re also pretty good at helping marketing teams build meaningful measuring into their funnels so you can get in touch me. Yeah, exactly. So if you need some help with that, or some tools, or both, you can get in touch with me via LinkedIn or by visiting morphsites.com. That’s MORPH SITES.

Christian Klepp  41:20

Fantastic. Fantastic. Pete, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and see you soon. 

Pete Fairburn  41:27

Yeah, thanks Christian, good to see you. 

Christian Klepp  41:29

Bye.