Are Growth Hacks Holding Your Business Back?

In this episode, we interview Mark Osborne, a marketing expert, award-winning strategist, and author of Are Your Leads Killing Your Business? Mark shares his journey from managing bands in the 90s to helping B2B companies create winning systems that drive results.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why chasing growth hacks can hurt your business.
• How to build marketing systems grounded in strategy.
• The role of technology in scaling effective processes.
• Steps to identify and attract your ideal customer profile.
• Tips for balancing transactional and account-based marketing strategies.

Get ready to transform your approach and focus on what truly works!

Transcript

Mark Osborne (00:02)
But again, it starts with having some of those foundations in place that you can then use to build the systems on top of. And then you can layer in technology that makes it run better. You can actually use technology that'll

Bump a lead up against your ideal customer profile so that you don't have to manually evaluate it. The technology will do it for you and give you an automatic score of this person is 80 % likely to be one of your best customers. Put all your resources on it. That's the way to use technology. But without doing that fundamentals work and then building the system, the technology itself isn't that valuable.

Ben (01:02)
welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Mark. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark Osborne (01:07)
Thanks so much for having me, Ben. I'm really excited to be here.

Ben (01:10)
Yeah, Mark, I think this is gonna be a fun conversation. We're actually talking on a Halloween, so this is like an extra special episode. This is gonna be great stuff, but Mark, before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you, get to know your background, all of that fun stuff. And then we also ask, what do you love about content and marketing? So let us kind of get to know you.

Mark Osborne (01:30)
Sure. So you and I were chatting earlier and you asked how I got into marketing and I was telling the story. In the mid 90s, when people first started getting access to the internet, they didn't have access to it all the time. was sort of like the billboards at their local grocery store where people put an ad up and then you'd like peel off a phone number.

And so at the time I was in college playing in bands and managing bands and I noticed that people would go on these, you know, billboard use that groups.

and trade concert tapes. So I've got Dave Matthews in Birmingham. So I knew that they liked bands like Dave Matthews and I knew they lived somewhere near Birmingham. So I started building databases of all the email addresses because there was no such thing as spam. People wanted you to have their email address. And then I would email all these folks when one of the bands that I was managing that sounded like Dave Matthews went to Birmingham, selling out concerts for these little unknown acts. And so that sort of led to a job with a record label.

led to a job at a radio station, which led to more of a kind traditional advertising sales career. But I wanted to sort of upskill that into more kind deep marketing and more strategic marketing. So I an MBA, focused a lot on analytics within my MBA, and in fact got really deep into using data and technology to sort of improve marketing. AdAge gave me an award for it some years ago. And I realized that

There's been a whole generation of marketers that their entire career has been just finding the next new thing in data or the next new thing in technology. Think about like the first company to optimize their site for search engines. Suddenly they got all this traffic and they sort of blew the doors off. same first one to advertise and paid search, the first to advertise on Facebook and all those things. But what I've noticed over the last five years or so is

There's just so much innovation and so much pace of change that these one things, these silver bullets, these growth hacks aren't really the path to success anymore. and in fact, I've seen companies where, know, they'll chase this growth hack for 90 days and then really pay off or it pays off in unqualified opportunities, or then they'll chase this other growth hack and for another 90 days. Next thing you know, like a year's gone by and they don't really have much to show for it. Instead, companies that are taking the time.

to really build systems built on solid foundations of strategy and fundamentals, and then layer in the data and the technology they need to make those systems run better, faster, stronger, 24-7 without errors, all those things. Those are the companies that are really finding success in the B2B space.

And so I noticed these trends. published a book on it last year that went to number one and 10 plus categories on Amazon called, are your leads killing your business? But it's all about how companies are building those systems to attract more of the right prospects.

Instead of sort of drowning in unqualified leads to accelerate those best opportunities through their sales pipeline and then to activate their existing clients for faster renewals, larger upsells, more referrals, all without sort of drowning in this deluge of unqualified leads or chasing these growth hacks that never pay off. And oftentimes without, you know, sort of wasting money on ads that don't work.

which is often, you those are kind of the three big challenges that companies face. Building these systems and then layering in the data and technologies are really sort of a key to that.

Ben (05:00)
I love it. I love it. So that's the perfect way to introduce the subject, chasing growth hacks versus building systems. Where does it make sense? Where doesn't it make sense? Why you should build systems, things like that. And I think that was a perfect introduction to why people chase these growth hacks. Because like you said, I love that visual of it blew the doors off and everyone's hunting for those and books have been written left and right and blog posts about

Mark Osborne (05:07)
Sure.

Yeah.

Ben (05:26)
Hey, I did this and I got a million leads in one week and all that kind of stuff, but they never talk about what happens the next day when their sales team actually has to call and talk to those leads, things like that. So my question for you is what kind of systems are we talking about? Like what does an actual system for a marketing team look like day in and day out to make those incremental growth elements actually scale their business? What does that actually kind of look like?

Mark Osborne (05:29)
That's right.

That's right.

Yeah, so we typically divide them into those three different areas. The attraction systems, so attracting more of the right prospects. Those acceleration systems, it's more like sales stuff or account-based marketing, accelerating your best deals through the sales pipeline. And then activation systems for activating your existing clients for faster renewals, larger upsells, more referrals.

And each of those systems really depends on having some foundational work and some fundamentals done, which is really knowing who your ideal customer is. If you're, you know, the the Cheshire cat phrase, like if you don't know where you're you'll never know when you get there. It doesn't matter which direction you go. And so by really defining that ideal customer,

by defining the persona that ideal customer that you want to work with, that you wind up being successful with, that winds up becoming your top tier, the 20 % that generates 80 % of your revenues. By knowing who they are really well, not only from a firmographic perspective, like they're a company of this size and they work in this industry, but also from like a context perspective of they're experiencing this problem versus that problem. Companies that are growing,

and looking for solutions like yours are very different oftentimes than companies that are contracting but looking for solutions like yours. And you might find that you work particularly well with one company that's in a certain context versus another, your competitors might be better suited to work with that other type. And then also just sort of like the mindset of the decision maker or the champion, those different personas of the user or the,

people that you'll engage with in the sales cycle, by establishing who that is upfront, then you can hold up every opportunity that comes through the door and say, is this likely to become a tier one opportunity? If it's not,

Okay, what did I do to attract this person? Because maybe that's the wrong thing. Maybe I should change my marketing motions, my attraction systems to repel some of those non-good fits and attract more of the right fits. And then once you do identify that they are a good fit, that again is a system that then triggers a whole other set of processes of, okay, they have the potential to be one of my best clients. It's full court press because so many times companies that

treat every lead the same, they don't have systems to identify those best potential. They lose the best opportunities in the marketplace because their competitors have built systems that help them identify, yes, this fits our ICP. yes, this kind of buyer is the one that we love to work with. We're going to put all our resources on this. They're getting a call from the CEO. They're getting all of our best content customized specifically to them versus if you're like,

yet another lead, let's set a call and maybe learn something about them. Maybe we do a little bit of customization, but I got 10 other leads I got to deal with. You're going to lose when you compare those two. So then you're just left with the scraps from your competitors. So sort of having that identification is one of those key systems. And then...

You know, setting real metrics around what percentage of the leads that come in should match our ideal customer profile. Should it be 50%, 80%, 30 %? But once you set that benchmark, then you can start to collaborate as a team on, what did we do that got us the result we have today? How can we hypothesize ways to improve that? Let's put that in place and then test it for.

30 days, 90 days, see what happens. And that's where you really start to create a system that has feedback into it, as well as sort of an outcome metric so that you can see what's working better, what's working not so well.

But again, it starts with having some of those foundations in place that you can then use to build the systems on top of. And then you can layer in technology that makes it run better. You can actually use technology that'll

Bump a lead up against your ideal customer profile so that you don't have to manually evaluate it. The technology will do it for you and give you an automatic score of this person is 80 % likely to be one of your best customers. Put all your resources on it. That's the way to use technology. But without doing that fundamentals work and then building the system, the technology itself isn't that valuable.

Ben (10:12)
No, I love that. And that's interesting because when I think of systems, you know, I am thinking about the machines that are built to just generate more and more and more leads. But I love that your first system that you talked about is disqualifying and finding the right people. And then really, it sounds like you've built a system to say, OK, this person deserves all our efforts. So let's have a system to know how to treat them.

And how do we treat the people that aren't the perfect ICP? What do we do with those? And it's really about, you know, almost turning away business as well. I think that's super cool. I remember this ad here locally. live in Utah, ski resorts are everywhere. And one of the local ski resorts, they had gotten a Google review and it was a one-star review. And they said, the slopes are too hard. And they put a full page ad in a magazine.

Mark Osborne (10:58)
Okay.

Ben (11:05)
with this really crazy skier going down a slope that looked brutal and it had the one star review saying the slopes are too hard. Cause they knew the audience that they wanted to attract and they knew who they wanted to push away. If you're looking for a good bunny hill, go to a different resort. Kind of an idea. So when you're talking about it, I mean, you mentioned like the CEO gives a call. This sounds very account-based marketing kind of an idea. What about the businesses that are a little bit more transactional?

Mark Osborne (11:20)
That's right.

Ben (11:31)
that they get bigger quantities, how are they building systems to really interact with those people and know kind of the level engagement that they should build around that? How does that kind of work for those kinds of businesses?

Mark Osborne (11:43)
Yes, new-

almost every business has the opportunity for the kind of one to one versus one to a few versus one to many kind of sales and marketing processes. But just sort of knowing how to decide that, like even those businesses that are doing a higher volume, they do have certain clients that are, you know, kind of must wins or have the potential to expand because they could do a hundred licenses versus 10 licenses. They could, you know, have all the bells and whistles

versus just the basic sort of service offering. So being able to identify those to make sure that they then get that one to few or maybe one to one is one of the key things. But again, it comes down to defining like what's the objective and really sort of focusing on that.

for those companies that tend to be sort of more transactional and sort of like low cost SaaS. And most of, to be fair, most of my time is spent with like professional services and software with a service or software as a service companies that are chasing really large contracts, which then means multiple decision makers, which then means a long sales cycle. And that's where I spend most of my time. But I've certainly worked with some of the more kind of freemium.

kind of SaaS products. And it's all about just sort of defining what are the success criteria. Once you define that sort of the process and flow from an anonymous target to one of our best customers and each step along the way and the key performance indicators and metrics that measure whether or not you're doing it and your strategies that you're using to impact each of those key performance indicators, that really starts to open up.

the view on, it starts to a lot easier where you should focus and where you should put your time and attention.

Ben (13:31)
I love it. So when we think of systems, and I love how you address this, we naturally lean towards technology, right? We immediately say, okay, well, what systems do I have to go buy as opposed to creating systems? love and correct me if I'm wrong. It sounds like the advice is go build the system manually.

Mark Osborne (13:38)
Yeah.

Sure.

Ben (13:51)
And then when you've proved that it's worked and it's getting those outcomes, see if there's technology to invest in that can maybe automate it. Is that kind of the approach that you take?

Mark Osborne (13:59)
A little bit. So I'm sure your audience is familiar with the triangle of digital transformation of people, process, technology. And we live in a culture where we want to believe that there's a magic pill.

will make it easy to be rich and handsome and successful or whatever else it is. But that's not really true. Almost in every scenario, it's people process technology. But because we have sort of a cultural bias towards this magic pill, we want to believe if I just buy the technology, it's going to solve it. But the order of the people process technology piece is important.

and very often starting with the people and having the mindset of we need to build a system and then the process of, all right, now let's build the system out. Then the last step is going to seek that technology. So as you said, yeah, we usually recommend that the people think through the, the real thought work of what are we trying to do? Like, where are we trying to go? Then the process of, well, how are we going to get there?

And then the technology of how do we go faster, better with less resources, more efficient.

Ben (15:11)
I love it. Well, Mark, again, we keep these episodes short so people can get their daily dose of content marketing. This has been amazing. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you and find you online, how and where can they find you?

Mark Osborne (15:24)
Sure, so a couple ways. First off, I wanna give a gift of this book to anyone in your audience. As a content marketer, I'm a believer in sort of go give. And I wanna give away as much value as I can. So free copy of the book, just go to modernrevenuestrategies.com slash free download. Get the whole book as well as all the templates, calculators.

You know, sort of structures and frameworks that I talk about in the book that we've talked about a little bit today around building those ICPs, some of those foundations. It's all there for free. And so I'd be happy to, you know, sort of talk anyone through it. I'll be happy to spend time on the phone. If anyone's interested in talking more about how some of these solutions might work for their business, feel free to email me, mark with a K at modernrevenuestrategies.com. And I'd love the chance to engage with anybody.

Ben (16:15)
I love it. And for anyone listening, there'll be links in the show notes, so it's easy to find Mark and his website. Again, Mark, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really appreciate it.

Mark Osborne (16:25)
Thank you, Ben. I really enjoyed it.