The Push
The Push is a podcast for senior marketers eager to hear honest perspectives from peers who tell it like it is. We speak directly to your day-to-day reality and don't bother with superfluous tactics you don't need.
We understand that senior marketing is uniquely frustrating.
- You have to sell the 'why' more than any other department.
- You're held accountable for results beyond your control.
- You're forever dealing with non-marketers who 'know better than you'.
- Stakeholder politics, opinions, and “gut feelings” constantly get in the way.
- You're so busy dealing with stakeholders, there's little time left to conceptualise new strategies and hone your craft.
We bring together senior marketers to candidly share stories, analogies, strategies, and mental models they've used.
You can use these conversations to:
- Explain complex concepts to non-marketers.
- Get more client buy-in.
- Explore new strategy ideas.
- Better articulate your existing knowledge.
- Explain the 'why' behind your strategy.
- Keep your own team engaged.
- Better navigate marketing politics (which are inevitable).
- Remember that you're not alone in your experiences.
No empty buzzwords. No listicles. No generic advice.
Whether you’re in-house, agency-side, or a consultant, you’ll leave feeling empowered to speak up and lead with confidence.
The Push is hosted by Jack Ferguson, a Brand Strategist with 15 years of marketing and brand experience across 20+ industries.
The Push
S3 E70: When Great Marketing Execution Still Fails: Understanding Buyers, Markets, and Risk
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Most companies blame execution when growth plateaus.
So they start doing more outbound, making better ad creative, creating new landing pages, building sharper sales scripts, and tightening the alignment between sales and marketing. But often, the problem isn’t execution, it's market understanding.
In this episode, Jack Ferguson hosts Buyer Researcher Ryan Gibson to help you understand when poor growth is an execution problem and when it is a market understanding problem.
Using examples from SaaS, enterprise software, startups, and B2B sales environments, they explore how buyers make decisions, why status quo bias is stronger than many realise, and why customer feedback alone is seldom enough to glean broad market insights.
They cover:
- How Amazon use qualitative data to break the tie of a GTM decision
- The % of revenue Salesforce reinvests back into their GTM
- How to get feedback from buying committees you don’t ordinarily get access to
- How to know if you have a market understanding problem or execution problem? (incl. real examples of each)
- The lead and lag indicators that indicate a company lacks the market understanding to effectively grow
- The issues with using surveys for quantitative research
- How you can use AI to complement your market research efforts
- Low cost approaches to doing B2B market research
- Ways to get your company to start investing in market understanding
- How to get market and buyer truths
- What strong resistance to pricing tells you
- How qualitative conversations uncover what dashboards and CRM data can’t
- The benefits and drawbacks of relying on sales teams for market understanding
- What conditions need to be in place for large B2B companies to change providers
- The limitations of relying on customers for market insight
Helpful Links:
Where to find Jack:
- LinkedIn
- Website
Where to find Ryan:
- LinkedIn
- Content Lift Website
Where to find The Push:
- LinkedIn
- YouTube Music
- Instagram
- TikTok
- Website