Do Less, Lead More: Marketing Leadership in the Age of AI

What are you up to? Anything you wanna promote? Like, what what what are you doing now? What's up? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm I'm launching something cool. I'll share it here, and, you know, not intended to promote it widely yet, but hey, why not? We just redid the whole portal. So our whole portal for the group, and I'll share my screen. Just wanna show you what it looks like if you're curious. So some of this is like mock data, but this is local host. But, you know, this is our new portal. So you log in here, and we operate in cycles. So every six weeks, we do one thing, And every week, we support the group in that. So rank and search is our new one starting June first. So it talks about rank and search. And then we have our upcoming events. And these are all weekly calls. We have an AI studio call every Friday. So they can see the calls are coming up, which is pretty cool. So this is an improvement from where we have been in the portal. I can show you the old version, but then also now we have the road map baked in here, which is super cool. So I've taken my road map PDF and now it's part of the portal. So you can pop into these, and this is the current one obviously, so you can pop in there. And then in that module, you know, for the six weeks of our cycle for ranking search, they can go through the six, you know, core modules there. And then each of these is pretty cool because as you go into it, there's a video to watch, which is TBD right now. But then every every one of these has an activity that you do, like an interactive worksheet, and so you fill out, you know, the items here, and then as you the video tells you how to fill this out, and as you fill it out, it generates, you know, here's the preview of how to put your keyword into your meta tags as an example for SEO. So then you can copy these or if you don't like them, you can, know, generate a new one. And so it's all AI powered worksheets that give you the stuff to literally copy and paste to do the work, which is super cool. And then you complete that and the next module. So if you follow these steps, that's just a fast track, you know. So six weeks to rank and search and do all the stuff you need to do. But then there's like all of them. So wanna do like more. We have like tons more of things you could do and should do to improve in search, etcetera. So pretty cool. And then you can go, of course, and watch any call you missed in our recordings, and they're all grouped. And obviously, this is all it's different stuff, but you get the idea. So, yeah, it's a huge what I call glow up from where it has been with our current portal, which right now is over here. Just to give you a quick peek at where it's coming from. Yeah. Show me the The current one doesn't even load apparently. So it's definitely an improvement. That's that's how big of an improvement is. We decided to make it actually load this time versus not loading. But, yeah, over here, this is the current one. So it's like Yep. Ugly and old and a little bit, you know, yeah, it doesn't have all the cool fancy stuff, but, yeah, it's Dang. So all the AI power stuff is are are you, like, powering that through Claude or what? There's a variety of things, but my goal is always to make it as I believe that everything should be as little AI usage as possible. That with the right frameworks, and with the right process, and then having AI just a little bit, a little, you know, seizing on top to help you save some time, but all the thinking goes from your perspective, and then the tools, and the framework, and the process. And then AI just kind of helps fill in the blanks, if that makes sense. So very little AI. Only enough that's necessary. It's it's a dangerous tool. I feel like you could with with much power comes great responsibility or what it is. It's like AI is like that same mentality with with gives you great power, but be cautious of how you use it because you could be just like throwing out tons of crap everywhere. It's so true. It doesn't follow your prompts. Right? And so that's why I looked at some of these marketing skills that people have are sharing online with Claude skills and all that. It's all the all the rage. And if you actually open up the files, the markdown files and read the skills, they're terribly written. They're probably AI generated, and most of them don't have enough context or data or understanding. One of your business and your ICP, but two of even how to do marketing. A lot these are built by people who have no clue, having actually done the work of what actually works. And they're just promoting these things as lead magnets or whatever. And so you run these skills, and they're terrible. You know, I've run several of them and compared them, and they're just bad. And even if you took all of them, I tried to take all of these from a different skill sets and combine them into one, you know, like take all the pieces and merge them in. It was still bad because it still misses the right frameworks, the right process, the right double checks, the right information. Like, this doesn't work, guys. I don't think this AI thing is what we thought it was. And so you're right. You can't rely on AI because it is a crapshoot. And even they've shown now that, you know, a ran fish can a lot of people in SEO have done this test as well. If you ask AI the same question multiple times in different sessions, in the same session across different AI tools, you get wildly different answers. And it's never consistent. And so you can't rely on consistency, and being deterministic is incredibly important in the work that we do. That to have a different answer or say something's good, and then say it's bad later, is not going to work. Like, some of the best use cases that I've seen for AI has come from folks that know a process is working well. Like, they understand the process very well. And then they're creating MD files or skills in Claude of just chunking down each of the steps of the process that they know and understand that works well, and then Claude can just go execute that process step by step by step. And that's where I'm seeing some of the biggest potential. But did you have to already know what the process is, have it already nicely defined, and then it can go execute. Right. Which is that's the hard work. Right? Like, at that point, AI is really just saving you time and a little bit of thinking. It's not doing it for you, and too many people are willing to throw it over the fence and say, hey, AI, go do it. Go figure it out. Tell me what I should do. Well, you said, if you don't know what to do, then AI is not gonna help you. It's gonna mislead you or misguide you or give you a bunch of junk. And we're seeing that more and more. I'm hearing a lot of my clients say that, you know, their teams are using AI, and instead of thinking, they're just throwing stuff to Claude or chat, and then they get back like a sixteen page PDF that they're not reading. Right? Or like, it sounds cool. I've made more work. And then they send off to the next person. So then that person takes the sixteen page PDF and puts it into AI to summarize it. Right? Because like, I don't wanna read this paid PDF. Then they take that summary and put it into Clawton chat and say, hey, now tell me what I should do. And that generates a twelve page PDF that now they share, and it's like, where does this end? This is ridiculous. It's such a waste of meanwhile, the AI overlords are like counting their tokens going up, and they're like, we're making money. You know? It's just Yeah. It's terrible. It's such a terrible Yeah. It's funny. Like, we've seen it with some of our own customers, own clients. So, you know, we have a a process that we follow for interviews. And sometimes they they just ignore it all, and they send us this massive, like, two or three page document of our here's what we wanna get out of our customer interview that we wanna do. And we can tell it's generated by ChatGPT or Claude, because it's just massive, and there's just so much content. And we can tell is they talk to all of their stakeholders, whoever this person is our contact, and they're like, alright. And then I collected it all, and then I just threw it in a ChatGPT, we're like, yeah. We can't use this. Sorry. No. It's ridiculous, isn't it? Yeah. That's crazy that they would expect so much from it too. You know? And also, like, what is the essence? What's the point of it? Because I feel like we're in this volume mentality where it's just do a bunch or, like, just create a bunch, produce a bunch. And no, less is more. You know? There's one thing on our roadmap called do less better, and I think that's the idea is we don't need all this stuff. Like, no one has time to do all that stuff, to think about all this stuff. If you get like three good clips from a customer, right, that's huge. But if you get like twenty seven clips you don't use, who cares? Yes. A phrase that Brendan Hufford uses is we're in a content cold war. He stated that before, I and I like that imagery of like, oh, I gotta do more because they're doing more, and I gotta do more because they're doing more, and it's going to a very bad place. It already is. Yeah. We're we're there. And so it's like what rises above the noise still is ideally things that are standout. They're they're not they're just not copy pasting what they were doing before. Granted, there are some folks that are somehow gaming the system because they found a way, but I'd like to think consistently going forward are the ones that are doing less, but they're doing more with those smaller things. Yes. I mean, there's so much we waste, right, that we spend with things that don't work or things that we want to work or think work, but don't. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right that doing less and moving forward with that is is best. And, hey, it's also easier. Right? It's it's easier and faster to do less. Or you could say it's it's more effort to do less. You know, I love the quote or the story of I forget who it is, but some famous president from long ago, you know, wrote this long letter and put it in a drawer and said, you know, I would have written you a shortened letter short letter, but I didn't have the time, you know. Yeah. That's that's right. That's how I feel. That's how I feel like we are in marketing right now. It's like everyone is just doing so much, and we feel the obligation to use AI, and it produces so much junk and stuff that then we feel like we have to manage that, and think about it, and use it. And if we don't do all of it, and don't follow every step it tells us, then we've missed out on some opportunity. And the reality is, no. You've missed the opportunity already because you wasted all this time doing a bunch of junk you didn't need to do. And I'm seeing this more and more in in our business, you know, we do a couple things. We do them well, I'd like to think, but I'm realizing we can do them, you know, two times, three times, five times better. And yeah, we don't need to do more. And I have, I'm sure as you are, like unlimited ideas. Right? Like, there's a ton of cool stuff I'd love to do, and yeah, and think about in Chase. Some of it makes a ton of sense. Some of it is maybe questionable, but I need to put it all aside and say, the stuff we're doing is working. Just do more of that and do it better. And just get so far ahead of everybody that those things are exceptional. You know, like the portal revamp I just showed you, that is probably ten times better than it was, but it can get about five times better than that. And it's like, okay, this is step two. Let me just double down on this I don't have to make more stuff. I have to do better of what I'm doing. So, yeah. AI helpful, but also a huge, huge distraction. Yes. I have a sign here. It says, beware of distractions disguised as opportunities. Oh, I love that one. Yes. That's good. That's so good. It's such there's so many of them. I feel like every, yeah, opportunity is a is a distraction. Is it potential? Very few are good. There's a question I wanted to bring up as a topic starter, so we can see where it goes. Someone gets either promoted or hired, and now they are leading marketing. What are the few, you know, one, two, three things that they can do, should do in their first ninety days that they're gonna get the most bang for their buck? Right? So they're gonna get the best return on that investment in that initial goal. So when they get to the end of the ninety days, they could say, wow, look, here's what I've done. Yeah. And and accomplish to show their their their leadership, the executive team. I love that question. I have several clients in this situation, so I'd love to share that. Yeah. Do you want me to give my full perspective of this, do wanna like, I share one, you share one, or what's your take? I don't have any specific ones yet. So Sure. But they'll come to me. So you you dive in. Yeah. Tell me, what what would you say to a new marketer first ninety days? What should they do to get the most out of it? Yeah. Lately, we've had more and more people coming to me with this situation. So it's been fun to see their journey, you know, from pre hire, you know, getting getting the job accepted, but not yet starting to, I just started and, you now what I do. And yet, this is why you have the road map too. The road map walks you through this, which is super cool. So it's it's a helpful tool, you know, plug there. But number one is measure what matters, and that is that whenever you come in, you know, the first thing is to get a grasp on measuring the things that actually matter. And in most cases, it's either one of two things. One, they're not measuring anything and so you have a huge opportunity to start to measure stuff. Or two, they're measuring a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter. And so you can cut that, you know, in half and a third and a quarter and say, here's the three or four things that actually matter. That in of itself gains you a lot of respect by doing that. It also gives you a lot of information about what's happening in the company and how they look at things, what has been measured in the past. For example, a lot of companies measure, you know, leads or traffic or whatever. Well, do those matter? If if you're counting leads and trying to get leads to go up, but your close rate is point o three percent, you know, maybe we should be measuring that instead, and let's get the right people coming in versus more leads. Or maybe we don't even know what a lead looks like, you know. We just have a bunch of people who are coming to our website, we like to see that number go up or impressions. So point being, measure what matters. That's the number one place to start. It has the biggest impact. And like I said, it gets you respect, it gets you information, it gets you moving in the right direction. Everything else builds upon that in my opinion, and I think you have to start there. We have to know what the end goal is, and you only know how to reach that once you know what it is. You know what it is by deciding what are we measuring that actually matters. Let me pause there. Keep going or you got some thoughts? I the first thought that comes to my head is it comes back to the FOMO. Like, well, okay. I guess I should cut things. Like, I don't need to measure that, but maybe I should. It's always like, maybe I should track that. Maybe I should do this. There's there's this preconceived notions of of what was important, what someone thinks it's important, but it's like truly knowing what drives the business. How quickly can a marketer, like, look at those numbers? And maybe maybe it's not. Maybe it's just me. Maybe the other marketers don't have this issue, and they maybe can dial in and know what are the numbers that they should be tracking and what's important. I don't know if the others express that that challenge of of dialing in. They do. Yeah. And that's where having a coach and a coaching group that can help you that has all the experience, you know, is a great thing to have. So, you know, plug the advisory board is the best place for marketing directors because it would make it really easy, yeah, to win. But you're right. Like Yes. Anything, it's like sometimes you can't you can't think it in your head, and you know, you can't ask Claude or Chachi, you could, but having another group of peers that are in the space makes that difference. It really does. And I didn't realize this, Alex, until, like, I niched down. Because I used to, you know, I consulted advise CMOs and marketers and every every level. And then as soon as I made the coaching group for marketing directors, you know, the round table we do every month is for marketing directors. I have calls every week with marketing directors. We have our coaching calls every week with marketing directors. I work one on one with marketing directors. I run a conference just for marketing directors. If anybody knows marketing directors, I would like to think I do. And so it's cool when I work with them because I can say, this is exactly what you need to do. This is exactly the number to track in your situation. I've seen it literally hundreds of times. And so it really helps. And so having that, like you said, in a group with peers, with someone who's got level of expertise, it's unparalleled. And so I like to say that my job in the group is to make their job really easy because I just I I can bring all the answers, all the experience, all the things that are relevant to them. So I I love that, and I hated the idea of niching down forever. I resisted it. And because I thought this is a bad decision, but it has been the best decision I've ever made in a number of reasons. The number one reason being, I can help people so much better by having that level of depth. And deeper. Alright. So next one. What's the next one? Next one. Number two, this is important, is to go get leads, because you're starting out. Right? Everyone wants to show results. The number one question I'm asked in this situation is, how do I get results fast? You know, we all want results fast. And the good news is there's a lot of really good ways to do this, but nobody does them. And so you know my IP, but not everybody does. But if you think about concentric circles, the marketing funnel, look down the funnel, and it's a bunch of rings of an onion, you know? And so from the outside, you have people who don't know you, and then inside that, you have people who follow you on social media or see your social posts. Inside that, it's people on your website. Inside that, it's people who join your email list. Inside that, it's people who jump on a call with you. Inside that is people who had a sales conversation. And in the center, the core, the target is people who have bought from you, who have given you money. And so what marketing does is we try to work down this funnel. We try to work outside in and get people down the funnel. It's stupid. It makes no sense to waste time pushing people through this funnel. It's expensive. It's slow. It's difficult. Everybody hates it. And so the answer is to flip the funnel, to go inside out, to start with the people we already have. And if you join any new company, you have assets. You have an audience. You have the founder or CEO's network. You have an email list, most likely. Most people, it's number three. It's email list. And so just go after those people. And we do this with the cookie where we create something irresistible for people that qualifies them, that builds a demand for the next step. And then we go to our list and we say, hey, I've got this really cool thing for you. It's gonna help you. I know you want it. Do you want it? And then people say yes. And I just shared this with my friend Jakob. He sent his instant yes email is what we call it. It's a short email to get people to say yes. And he just emailed me, and I could even show you the email. But he's like, dude, I sent this email, and I got an overwhelming number of people replying and saying yes. What do I do now? And that's like the best response I love getting is like, awesome. Let's now do something with it. Know, Samantha, who's in our group, sent the email, didn't tell her sales team. They got fifty three people emailing sales to say, wanna talk to you. And the sales team was like, pissed because they're like, you didn't warn us about this. Now we have to all these calls. I love that. You know, that's what I want for people who start a new job is to say, look, I know how to get leads and we're getting leads. And Marie, who's one of my clients also, just started a job. And within a month, her CEO has already given her a raise. Just starting the job, already getting a raise one month in, right, from getting results, bringing leads and stuff like that. So when you can get results fast and show your leadership and your team that you know what you're doing, people sit up and listen, which is just the coolest thing in the world. It's powerful. Those low hanging fruit, we often try to tackle too big of a of a a task at first, I think. So it's that powerful looking at that. Okay. Where's the the most lowest hanging fruit we can can go after? Yeah. Next one is cut the waste. This is good. There's so much waste in a company, and they need someone to step in and cut the waste. And we don't do this first because you don't know what to cut until you measure what matters. And you wanna get some initial traction results. So that's, you know, getting some results first. And then we wanna cut the waste. And this is where there's so much waste. Know, it could be time waste of meetings. Like, why are we meeting about this? It could be like we were talking about before, tactics or campaigns or strategies or channels. Like, why are we on Instagram? Our ICP's not there. Or why are we messing around with Pinterest? You know, come on. Let's wake up. Or it could be budget. Like, why are we paying this vendor, this SEO agency that we haven't been ranking or our rankings are slipping? Like, let's cut that. There's so much waste. And if you come in and you identify the waste, number one, don't say, hey, here's all the waste. Let's cut all these things. You say, look at all this waste. Now let's prioritize and say, let's cut twenty percent of this. So you're not the bad guy. You are the cleanup person saying, hey, let's organize this. Let's clean it up. Some of the stuff can go. Get some buy in. Again, you're showing your authority, starting the new job. You're also cleaning up some stuff. And spoiler, you're making some budget room for yourself to then spend on things that will work so you can get even better results, you know, initially quickly. So cutting the waste is massive. And the easiest place to start is tools. We're spending so much money on tools that no one's using, people haven't logged into, people aren't using all the features for it, especially in B2B. Oh my Don't get me started, I'll name names. But there's so many B2B tools that are a joke and a waste, know? We chase these. It's like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars that don't have any impact. Save some money, and then another way to get promoted or get a raise. Yes. That's right. They save you money. Spend the money on me instead. Right? That'd be great. Yes. Rather than your tools. I love that to to get the final final results. Brilliant. Those are three good ones. I love them. Yeah. Yeah. They're all effective, you know. Simple. Anybody can do them. You know, if I had a sort of fourth bonus one, you know, we hate meetings, so get out of your meetings. You know, meetings are the worst. I have one client, you know, he started a new job. And a couple months in, maybe three months in now, and he's just crushed by meetings. He's got a team of, you know, I think four four or five people. But there's meetings, you know, below him, at his level, above his level. There's just way too many meetings. And he's like, I can't make any progress. Can't get anything done. You gotta cancel those meetings, get out of those meetings. You know, we call it f your meetings, which is fix your meetings, just to be clear. The f is for fix. Yeah. But there are, you know, four ways to fix your meetings, and you gotta do that. Gotta get out of meetings. You can't stand meetings. You gonna share the the four f's, or should should we leave that as a call to action to go see more? Yeah. Go go see more. Sure. No. I mean, one of them is the is the format. Right? Like, change the format of the meeting. It doesn't have to be a meeting, a Zoom meeting. It can be an update. It can be a Loom video we send out. Maybe, you know, something like that. But change the format. That's the first one. Frequency, you know, do we have to meet every week, really? Like is that necessary? Let's change the frequency. I think that would be great to just get rid of it. You know, forego is another option. You could just forego the meeting and say, hey, I'm not coming to this meeting, you know. Too bad. Deal with it. A lot of people are afraid to do that, but if you do that, and maybe don't tell people you're not gonna be there, they realize they don't need you, which is awesome. The other one is follow-up, which is to say, hey, I'm gonna follow-up with you, or you follow-up with me after the meeting. You know, send me the notes, and if I see something I need to do something about, awesome. And if you tell me I need do something about it, I'll do it. But I'm not coming. I'm not gonna be there, but I'm available to support you in this. And I do support you in it, but I'm not gonna have attend. It's it takes a a level of confidence in to be able to tell That is true. Anyone, but definitely leadership or or someone who are adjacent to you is Oh, yeah. No, you don't need me, or, you know, I'll check the the meeting notes later, and I'll follow-up with you versus just showing up. Well, that's really interesting, Alex, because I love your thoughts on this. This is a biggest problem, I think, in marketing that I see, and I'm sure you see with your clients as well, given that you help them with, you know, extracting the value from their customers as well, is confidence. Like, I imagine in your guys' case, like, the confidence of your clients to actually ask for, you know, testimonial. It's it's huge. They're afraid. Yeah. Which is which is wild. Right? Because if someone who I worked with, if like I hired a vendor or something and they asked me for a testimonial, like, I would be thrilled to, you know. And and I always say yes, and I always wanna do a good job because I'm I'm happy that they've provided me with value. And usually, it's been a good relationship, you know, and we enjoy working with each other. And and so, yes, of course. And we think there's this like imposition. But in addition to that, marketers themselves have confidence issues. And what you just mentioned is so key that they're afraid to brag about themselves. They're afraid to share their accomplishments. They're afraid to speak up in meetings. They're afraid to say, I'm not doing something. You know, to say no, to push back, to ask why even. Like if the CEO has an idea, even saying, well, why is that or why should we do that? You know, that's challenging. So confidence is such a big issue. How does it show up with your clients? Very much. So the first part is that, as I said, I don't know why they're afraid to ask their customers. It's like they're they are happy, and it's like they don't want to push back. Too often, marketers, I think, in the mindset of order taking versus that questioning and clarifying and taking charge and pushing forward. And I think the ones that are truly successful are the ones that do that. And particularly in this age of AI, I think if you wanna make sure, you know, you keep your job, it's like your leadership around you. If you actually ask clarifying questions and you try to dig deeper versus just go do something, AI is an order taker, but you need problem solvers, you need critical thinkers in your in the organization, and the level of perceived value, if you're doing that, just suddenly skyrockets. Yes. That is a great point that, yeah, your boss can ask ChatGPT if this is a good idea, but getting your perspective is even better. And for you to push back, shows that there's some level of critical thinking there. Especially these AIs are all like, also order takers, as you said, but they're just yes men. Right? It's like, that's a brilliant idea. Know, this is a great idea. I'm so glad you thought of this. You're like, really? This is hard. Right. Right. You're so genius. Yeah. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah. I wish that we could develop this. I feel like it's even something that just takes time, unfortunately, to, which is why, you know, measuring the right stuff helps. But when you have something to go back on and say, well, this is why. This is what justifies it. It's easier. But I think for a lot of us, you know, they're just asking AI, and so then all you have is a straw man AI to point to and say, well, Claude told me this, or like ChatGPT said this is what we should do, versus having some other source. And in your case, you know, your clients are not relying on themselves. They're relying on their customers to show evidence. And for my customers, you know, they can rely on this peer group we have to say, well, I know with confidence this is gonna work or this is a way because I've seen other people do this. I know it works. I have the evidence, you know, before me, even if they haven't done it themselves. But I feel like we do need some source of validation or confidence to lean on, that can't be just whatever AI tells us, because it is making it up as it goes. Yeah. There's something about that. Yeah. External validations, particularly if it's coming not from opinion, but experience. Yeah. And so, when you have that that validation of, alright, this has worked. This is how it's worked for me in the past. This is something you can take away and you can apply. It's huge. Like, this referral promo that we're doing for TeraLeap right now, that came from a marketer that I met. We sat down. We were talking at a conference, above the fold conference, and he was saying, yeah, we ran this thing. It was huge. It worked. Here's how I did it. Here's the number of emails I sent. And I was like, we're digging in deep, and it's Nice. We're doing it a second time. I'm like, okay. And I'm scribbling down notes. I'm like, alright. Now my time to roll it out. The ability to hear something that's worked and then start to apply it is huge. That that said, each of our business is a little different. So you can't it's not a one to one copy. Like, that was a software company. We're a service company. Something that I realized based on our conversations too, is I feel like I should have had a promo or something to give to the people that are being the referees. Like, to your point, like, I you can't send anybody. If you're referring someone to me, you can't send them to the landing page that I sent you. Right. That's promoting the referral Yeah. So now I'm like, oh, crap. Now I need to expand on it. And that's the process of iteration though. Right? It's like figuring out where's the bottleneck, and then tweaking that and improving upon it. And some of it can be good enough to get some initial results, but then, you know, you improve upon it and get even more. And I feel like that with the round table we do, it's been two and a half years of doing it now, you know, I don't know, it's been thirty or some events. And it's crazy to see like where it started, and where it's come to now, and there's still so many things, so many things to improve upon it, you know. Like things I forget to do still, or like that aren't good enough, and it's just like, okay, one step at a time. And I am not that way. I'm like, I wanna do the whole thing right now. Tomorrow, have this idea, and tomorrow, it'll be done. Right? And I'm launching it. I'm stay up until five AM, and it's gonna be working. Rather than, this month, there's one thing I can improve. Yeah. That's that's not me at all. So it's hard to do that. Go go go. Yeah. And it's so difficult. Yeah. I I was just chatting with another fellow. I think his post will actually have come out already by the time these ones air, but his name is Omar from sales sales speak. And he was talking about the importance of of today's marketer is the rate of experimentation Yeah. Of constantly experimenting, constantly testing. Well, let's try this thing. Let's try this thing. Let's try this And he feels that AI is what it's enabling is allow us to experiment more more things faster, easier, and it's just a question of, okay, we still have to have guardrails so you're not experimenting too often or too many things or things that don't matter. But I found that interesting of just the rate of experimentation is a KPI that he tracks. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. See, is fascinating to me because my background is in conversion optimization, and so experimentation obviously is a core part of that. And every client I would work with, you know, we'd see how many tests are you running right now? Oh, zero. Okay. Well, let's start to run some tests. The goal is to get to like eight, ten, twelve tests per month, depending on the size of the business, because there's a lot of stuff to test. And for some of my smaller clients, it'd be like, okay, let's do two to four tests a month, because you need to be testing a lot of stuff. But what I've realized now is I was naive in my approach in my, you know, younger years, because I thought, yeah, like you said, just test a bunch of stuff and see if it works. And I feel like a lot of CRO agencies do that. We're gonna test the button color. We're gonna change the headline. We're gonna do but it needs to be like down a path. Right? Like, we've done some research, we know this page gets a lot of traffic, the conversion rate's much lower than it should be, and so we're gonna test on this page until we get it right. But not just like any change, we're gonna do these things in order because this has the biggest impact, whatever. And I feel like with my clients now, marketing directors, having the roadmap gives them that, where it's like the bumpers on bowling. And so now that we set up the bumpers, you basically can't miss. Right? But you're still gonna roll the ball. You might hit one pin. You might hit ten pins. And so now, we can experiment within that of like, how do you throw the ball to hit more pins? But it's not, hey, let's just throw the ball and hope that we don't get a gutter. We've now have a path where we've set up the, you know, guardrail, so you can't get a gutter. Now it's experimentation. I feel like that's the one nuance there that I would add is, I think experimentation is key. But like we said before about AI, you can do a lot of stuff and waste a ton of time. And so you have to have some guardrails or some path to say, experimentation in this context is gonna be productive, versus everything else out here might be a waste of time. Yeah. Speaking of tests, I'm gonna put this in the chat. Let's try it out. So open that up, and this is the game. I love it. And go ahead and share your screen so I can Yeah. Let me share your Let me share so I can embarrass myself here. Let's see. Yes. It's it's a short one. Good. That's good. Short embarrassment. Mini marketing mini game marketing thing. Nice. Okay. Oh, yep. Marketing director two thousand five. Team size u. Nice. Okay. Let's let's see here. Press start. Okay. Cool. Oh, relaunch the website. Hold the document to do your work. Okay. Nice. Nice. That's terrible. Okay. I gotta remember after click and hold. This is hilarious. Oh, I have click those things? Okay. Yeah. It's like clicking. I see. Okay. I'm with you here. I should warn you, I played StarCraft two for years, so I might beat this game. You're ready for this. That's right. Q two review. Not enough. Ow. Just brutal. Brutal but true. Okay. I'll put bank forty. Nice. Work your rock but stalls get sick. Okay. Pure fire drills. I like that. I think this one's the best templates. Okay. Oh, I have more. Okay. Nice. Alright. I should have saved some, I guess, for next quarter, but we'll see. This is awesome. I love this. This is so cool. Okay. The only problem with clicking these is I don't have time to read them. I'd love I'd love to read them all. You know, maybe afterwards, there can be a thing where it's like, tells me what I what I missed there. This is awesome. I love it. Nice q three. Eleven big I mean, I'm dominating. Eleven rocks. That's good. I'm I'm doing well. I'll get promoted soon. Okay. The easy button. Oh. Tap it. Your big rock just gets done. Nice. Oh. Okay. I'm gonna save that, because I don't I think I'm gonna need it. I'm afraid. Interesting. Oh, so you're not even gonna press it? I'm not I'm not that tempted. No. I I could do this. You're not gonna press it? Should I? Should I? Yes. Okay. That's it. Oh, boom. Okay. I I didn't realize could press it more than once. I thought it was like a one time use. Okay. Nice. Dude, it's a good connection. Yeah. But for customer videos, they're terribly easy button. Nice. Was sweet. I enjoyed that. That was really good. Okay. I'm impressed. Yeah. I wanna play it again. Think that's the ultimate litmus test. Right? Like, I wanna That's the wanna do it again. That's a good thing to to well, anything that would have made it more fun or better was like a it was annoying, I should change? Yeah. Well, I I feel like what is the replay value? Because I completed everything, so I feel like if I did it again, it would be the same number of rocks. Is that correct? It it it would. Well, you you could get more. I could? Okay. Yeah. How? How could I get more? Didn't know, like, I didn't mess up today. Hit the the easy button more. I see. I see. Okay. That's fair. Oh, well, let's go again then. Yeah. The other thing is it seems like there's a bug. I'm not sure. I have to test it. But if I if I am clicking and holding at the top right of this, when a pop up pops up, it like it seemed to click it for me, if that makes sense. Like, if I if I clicked here and then moved up there, but if I was already clicked out now, well, maybe not. It seemed to work one time. I'm not sure if that makes sense. Wonder if I save my if I bank my output, does that help me? I don't know. Probably not. I already missed something. Yeah. This is cool. I love it. I love the graphics. I love the idea of it. I could see like other things happening, you know, to get in your way. Like the coffee spills on my keyboard. Have to like, you know, move left and right to like, wake it up or something. Like, that'd be cool. Okay. Now, let's go. So do I have to still click the other things or like, this gets all does this get rid of menu Yeah. I was trying to make it like, just feel super easy. Nice. Like, ridiculous. You hold it down or you can't hold it down? Okay. Yeah. Nice. That's awesome. Dude, I love it. Okay. Nice. I had like, I could keep building this to make it, like, actually, like it's a like, the incremental game mindset. So, like, the cookie cutter, like, some of the text based ones originally. But Yeah. I I also wanted them to land on the the final page too. Right. Yes. I think that's important. Yeah. I had this weird idea about the thirty six. I think my first one was like fifth sixteen and then thirty six. I'm wondering if there was some even more direct tie in to the product that said something like, you know, you've earned thirty six percent off your first whatever, you know, or three hundred and sixty dollars off your first whatever. Just an idea of like making my accomplishment achievement related to that. For some reason, it feels more connected versus more like an ad read of like, great. Here's the ad. But like, hey, I did something. I've earned something towards something else. You get a little coupon. Yeah. Yeah. Not sure if it's related, or maybe it's just like the same coupon every time, but just an idea. That's pretty cool. Okay. And that that actually would make them wanna play again. Can I get a higher score to get more profit? Yeah. It's like play again to earn more. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Very cool. That's My only other feedback is this is a lot of text. But It is. You're right. Maybe it's just like a side by side, like an image with some text. But, this is awesome. I love it. Think I'm gonna press the x. I'm gonna get Oh, yeah, please. That was super cool. I love it. Great work. That's something I'm one of my experimentations is to promote that mini game. My thought is actually create a video of some sort, then the call to action of the videos will go play the game. Yeah. Kind of a thing. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Well, that's that's really interesting. One, kudos to you. I'm super impressed. You know, the quality of it's really good. It was fun to play. I wanted to play it again. Like, that's success. So I love it. I think it's awesome. The graphics are simple but clear. It's exactly what it needs to be. I love this. Super cool. Appreciate that. I was gonna ask if there's any experiments that you're you're running or exploring right now. Yeah. I'm afraid to say because I haven't had the chance to yet. Sometimes I do these private workshops for companies, and I found that the best way to do it is with Lego. And so we do Lego workshops, where there's a thing called Lego Serious Play. And actually was invented by the company Lego. They used it for their own strategy and business, and you play with Legos to solve business problems, and it's really interesting. And so I'm doing another one of these at Disney for a client for one of their conferences in July, for a hundred people, a hundred marketers. And so I had to buy a lot more Legos, because I've only done like, you know, twenty, thirty person workshops before with Lego. And so, you know, a hundred people, you need like a bunch of Lego. So now I just bought eighteen thousand more Legos. And you know, we have like all these boxes in my back room of of Lego, you know, the giant bricks. And so it's been fun for my daughter to play with. But I was thinking, I have all these Legos. I wanna make video content. So what if I made like stop motion Lego videos about marketing? And so like having a little office with like a marketer who's like, know, typing on a computer. And then like the boss comes in the office and it's like, hey, make some stuff. I need some content. And they're like, oh, ChatGPT logo. They're like typing, but then like out of the screen, like all this like white bricks flow over them. It's like all this AI slop, you know, covers them up. So I think like that's where I'm headed now. So I have some setup over here to like have my little like stop motion studio with all these Legos. I've been trying to play I've had a couple of video ideas. Before? Not very well, but hey, you can learn. Right? Yes. I've I've got arrogant and egotistical, I'm like, can't be that hard. Right? You're gonna stay up till five AM. Right? As you said Exactly. Yeah. I'm patient. No. I love I love stop motion. I love Claymation. They're some of my favorite movies. Yes. And so combining that with Lego, which is awesome and relatable to everybody. But like, what if I did it for real, with real Legos about marketing? I have a bunch of Legos. I have the time to do this. Like, this would be awesome. So that's probably what's next for me is fall LEGO videos. Yeah. I I am so excited for it, because I I think there's a there's a beauty of like, real art that people like, grab Exactly. Yes. Right now. If it's if it's not faked, if it's and how they do it, I was just watching this video the other day, is make sure you do always two videos. The actual video, and then the behind the scenes video. Yes. Because then they see that it's actually real. And generally, the BTS one will outperform the first one, but they point to each other. So Yes. That's great. That's good advice. Well, I love those videos where you see like, the captions like, haters will say it's AI. And you see like, you know, Loch Ness and it's the lake. And all of a sudden, like, this like stuffed animal, you know, comes up in the screen. You're like, this is great. You know, I love it. I love that stuff. But yeah, you know, my wife and I were talking about, to your point, about the show Antique Roadshow, and how we love this show that it's a celebration of these, you know, unique one off artistic pieces, you know, handcrafted or designed or whatever it is. Like, real true craftsmanship went into these things. They've lasted the test of time. And, you know, there's this one that's like this little like pocket watch, and it looks like flat, like a flat disc. But then you hit a button, and out pops this like three d bird. Somehow it constructs itself out of like almost wood origami, and builds like a three d bird that flaps its wings. Like this is just and it's and it's so small, but so detailed, and ornate, and intricate. And it's extremely impressive, you know, the craftsmanship that went into that type of thing, and for it to be whatever, sixty, a hundred years old is incredible. So yeah, we've lost that with this AI vibe coding, AI slop stuff of yeah. Someone spending time building true art that communicates a message and makes you feel something that's relatable. Yeah. I love that. Which is why I love, as I say, claymation, stop motion. So much effort goes into it, and it's just Well, I'm already looking for Falls. Stop motion They go sooner. I gotta do it.