Transforming marketing spend into business growth, with Sean Doyle

In tough times, many businesses feel the urge to cut back on marketing spending.

But what's the potential downside?

Your brand might start to fade away, missing chances to connect with customers and falling behind the competition.

Marketing isn't just about letting the world know about your business. 

It's also a powerful tool to control your business. It directly affects your cash flow and drives your bottom line.

So, how do you make sure your marketing budget is working as hard as possible to meet your customer's needs and to grow your business?

In this episode, Sean Doyle discusses the importance of effective marketing spend and its direct impact on business finances. He shares insights on optimizing resources for growth and reaching customers closer to “cash” or conversion.

Sean is the principal at FitzMartin Inc., a leading consultancy focused on sales marketing and management, sales and marketing technology services, and revenue operations. 

Sean and his team at FitzMartin are focused on long-term value creation through a sales-first, scientific approach to driving revenue. 

Over a 25+ year career and more than 5,000 client engagements, Sean has amassed unmatched expertise in helping B2B companies sell more to their most profitable customers.

We discuss: (timestamps)

2:12 The significance of optimizing marketing spend rather than cutting it

2:37 Impact of Marketing Strategies on Financial Performance

10:00 The "speed to cash" mindset

Focusing marketing efforts on target groups close to making purchases

13:04 Marketing as a business tool, not just a creative or communications tool

13:38 Understanding business objectives is crucial for effective marketing

16:52 Hiring and Building a Strategic Marketing Team

23:36 Marketing budget based on top-line revenues or some variant of EBITDA

30:50 One actionable step to take to fine-tune your marketing

31:22 Centricity: Putting the buyer at the center of everything a company does

Resources:

Sean Doyle, Author, Speaker, and Advisor, FitzMartin Inc
https://seanmdoyle.com/
https://fitzmartin.com/

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/fitzmartin/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/fitzmartinmarketing/

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/FitzMartinb2b

Email:
sean@fitzmartin.com

Author :
Shift: 19 Practical, Business-Driven Ideas for an Executive in Charge of Marketing but Not Trained for the Task by Sean Doyle
https://www.amazon.com/Shift-Practical-Business-Driven-Executive-Marketing/dp/1605440574

Kathy Svetina, Fractional CFO:
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/

Blog post | Transforming Marketing Spend into Business Grow

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Chapters

• 2:12 The significance of optimizing marketing spend rather than cutting it
• 2:37 Impact of Marketing Strategies on Financial Performance
• 10:00 The "speed to cash" mindset
• 11:36 Focusing marketing efforts on target groups close to making purchases
• 13:04 Marketing as a business tool, not just a creative or communications tool
• 13:38 Understanding business objectives is crucial for effective marketing
• 16:52 Hiring and Building a Strategic Marketing Team
• 24:49 Marketing budget based on top-line revenues or some variant of EBITDA
• 32:03 One actionable step to take to fine-tune your marketing
• 32:35 Centricity: Putting the buyer at the center of everything a company does

Transcript

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there and welcome back to another episode of Help! My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I'm your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business is eventually going to end up in your finances and to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. How do you get there? Well, this is what this podcast aims to help you with. You know, when businesses struggle, many attempts to slash their marketing budget, and I see that as a fractional CFO all the time. But it's not a really good move. Because what happens if you do slash your marketing budget? Your brand can fade into the background, you lose opportunities to engage with your customers, and you risk falling behind your competitors. This is because we know that marketing is a way for you to reach your customers and tell them about your business. But what many don't realize is that marketing is also a powerful tool to control your business and your finances. It can bring you closer to cash and directly impact your bottom line. So the question here is, of course, how do you optimize your marketing spend so that you can get the most out of your money and really give your customers what they want and need versus just, you know, throwing stuff on the wall and see what sticks? So as a quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discussed, and each one has its own blog post. You can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode's show notes. My guest today is Sean Doyle. He is the principal at Fitz Martin Inc, a leading consultancy focusing on sales and marketing management, sales and marketing technology services, and revenue operations. Sean and his team at Fitz Martin are focused on long-term value creation through a sales-first scientific approach to driving revenue. Over a 25-plus year career and more than 5000 engagements, Sean has amassed unmatched expertise in helping B2B companies sell more to their most profitable customers. It's going to be a great conversation. So please join us.

Kathy (host):
Welcome to the podcast, Sean.

Sean (guest):
Hello, it's good to be here. It's been a while.

Kathy (host):
I know, it's been a while. You know, I'm gonna dive right into this because marketing spend is one of the topics that I'm tackling the most these days as a fractional CFO. Not how to spend it, how to optimize the spend. And I'd like to point out here that I said optimize, not cut. There's a big difference between optimizing and cutting.

Sean (guest):
You guys are always cutting my budgets.

Kathy (host):
I know. I know. Yeah. It drives me crazy, because I've had so many conversations when marketing is the first thing that gets cut, when we have to figure out where do you actually get the money from? And how are you supposed to grow when the business doesn't have good marketing? So it can go into a whole rabbit hole with this. So I want to ask you, what is one of the biggest problems that you see when it comes to businesses making decisions on how they should be spending or saving their marketing dollars? What's one of the biggest things that you see out there?

Sean (guest):
Yeah, that's an incredibly good question. I would love to—I can answer this a couple of different ways. But let's start with this: Most of our work at Fitz Martin is to help clients that are in this emerging middle market space that you're so good at, Kathy, and you're so many of your clients. I think what often happens, what I often see, is businesses that have yet to discover marketing as a business tool. They think it's an outbound thing that's supposed to get done. And as a result of that, it's a checkbox. And it's not often taken seriously at the executive team level. In fact, I would ask you and your listeners right now, I mean, how many of you have marketing representation at the executive team table? That's a great test to see if you really take it seriously. And by seriously, I don't mean what we spend money, we take it seriously. I mean, do you see it as somebody that contributes strategically, versus get stuff done. The emerging middle market space often will come from where the executive or the shareholder, and if it's family, that's fine. But there's a chief executive typically. He has held that vision, and they've brought in help to execute on that vision. But at some point, that chief executive has to get other stuff done. It's a pretty big job, and they might enjoy marketing, because it's visionary in nature, and many executives are visionary in nature. So I could ramble on that for a little bit. But just ask the question: Is your marketing team contributing strategically at your executive table? Does your CFO think that—since we're talking about this difference of finance and marketing—does your CFO see value being delivered by whatever marketing resource? So in that emerging space, it's very natural. We see that transition very naturally happen somewhere or when a business exceeds maybe 15 to 20 million in top-line revenue. That's where the stress starts kind of coming in. And that's where the need for more clear roles comes to play. Somebody over 50 million, that's probably when you start seeing a full-time CMO executive team level. So if you're feeling these tensions in your business, the struggles of seeing things as a cost or an expense, and if your accountant is a cost accountant, you're gonna see it as a cost, right? That tension is normal. And you're coming up to that barrier. And to break through the barrier to the next level, you're going to need an executive team representation of marketing that thinks beyond the doing, the craft of talking and outbound. For example, we helped a client as a fractional CMO, which is very parallel to what you're doing, identify a new market, because there was too much variability in their particular space, in that niche. It was a great niche, they were highly well-positioned in that niche, and they were making money in that niche. But it was tied to an economic—radical fluctuations in economic variables. They needed to stabilize the business. So we were able to work with them to identify what skills, what expertise, what could they do that was very solid, and they could have a good go-to-market. But the goal was not marketing. The goal was to stabilize the finance, to stabilize the inflow, to allow the business to have less variability on a month-to-month, year-to-year basis. So just to get more control. So marketing should be about control. That's—that would be my second way to answer the question. If you're seeing marketing as a tool to control your business, then you're using it properly. If you see marketing as something we do to communicate outbound messaging, that's not an incorrect use. You're just not using the lever of the business tools that you could have. So that'd be two ways to answer it. We could—I could come up with a third one, but everybody's gonna get bored too.

Kathy (host):
No, I would want to hear the third one too. I especially like the marketing as a tool, because like I said, I see this all the time. When you have a CFO or you even have an accountant, they see marketing as just another cost. And when business gets tough, they want to slash that cost naturally, because that's what cost accountants do. That's really their job. I mean, it's literally like you're cutting yourself at the kneecaps when you're trying to run a marathon. And it just drives me—like I said, it drives me up the wall that people don't think about marketing as an investment. It truly is an investment. It's not a cost. It's not a slush fund. I always say you want to make sure that the marketing spend that you're putting money in is effective. You want to take a look at that. But not think of it as a slush fund, where you can just get the funds for whatever else.

Sean (guest):
So let's run down that path a little bit, okay? One, I think you should be looking at this as marketing should be able to have a direct impact in regard to cash flow. So when your marketing strategies can directly affect cash flow by accelerating the sales process, we're condensing the pipeline. That's an impactful thing that every CFO, every finance person should get a hold of, and enjoy. If you're talking to your marketing team and that concept, what I just said, is like they're looking at you with glazed eyes, then you've probably got a craftsman who's good at creating outbound messaging. And again, that's an important skill. But as a business, you need to be able to say to your marketing team or your marketing leader, "Let's talk about cash flow. We need to accelerate cash flow right now." Okay, well, great. Why wouldn't you accelerate cash flow? Well, there are reasons to not accelerate cash flow. For example, you may not need the inflow of cash, you may have too many new customers at once that you can't onboard. You may have—you may be trying to use your cash flow to look better on the books for external shareholders or external reviews. There's kinds of reasons to do it and not to do it. Another angle of that would be you could talk about revenue growth. Well, if it's a strategic goal for the business to have revenue growth, marketing should be looking at how do we expand that customer base? How do we identify a new market or a new demographic, and then execute—working with sales, of course—execute to that end. Or innovation around product and market development play into that role at revenue growth. Profitability is obviously something important. I literally sat in a meeting this morning, where we were looking at setting up a part store in an e-commerce fashion to serve current clients of one of our clients. And we can identify the 60% of SKUs that have the most margin. Well, why would we not be promoting the highest margin parts? And why would we not identify, for example, something like a warranty that's almost passed through to net income and start cross-promoting that? Why would we not identify ways—and the shareholder wants this too, right? Let's just transition to shareholder value. Again, with the ways I think marketers should be thinking, we break it into two parts. There should be a speed-to-cash effort. I was talking to a steel manufacturer in Mexico this week. And they were bored stiff with everything I had to say about marketing and branding and all this stuff. And then I said, "No, we do have a program called—" and they were even giving me kind of the pat on the head, like, "We're gonna meet internally. And we'll get back to you," which we all know means, "Go away, marketing guy. You're talking about marketing stuff." But then I said, "Well, you know, there's something that when we work with PE firms, when they bring us in, they want us to have a speed-to-cash mindset. And we have a specific program built around how to do that very thing. Would you be interested in hearing about that?" And it was like, you could just see, like, energy came back up. Everybody in the room was like, "Yeah, tell us more about that." Because I was then talking about what they cared about. And they had a speed-to-cash problem. They'd had a bad year last year. They needed the cash. They needed a quick way to get there. And the way we work at Fitz Martin, and I'll give you my—here's our secret sauce. One of the things we do we call "selling backward." So selling backward, what's that mean? I'd say 90%—and this is also probably every executive listening is gonna go, "Yeah, I'm frustrated with my marketing spend." But 90—and here's why 90% of your marketers start work as far away from cash as they possibly can. And they're going to call it something like lead generation, or "We're going to build awareness." Like that's literally as far away from a cash register as you can get. What we do is we sell backward. We work and look at the data, we analyze, and work with sales, and identify the target groups that are as close to cash as possible. And let's start marketing there. We might not at all elevate a business's awareness that they exist for a year, because we're focused on who's close to cash. How do we identify those people? How do we step alongside of sales and develop and help those people remove the obstacles and help those people over the finish line? And that has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool. So again, I'm going to—here's another test: If you can say these things to your marketing firm, then you've probably got a good executional craft firm. And that's not uncommon. If you can't, then you just need to elevate the leadership you have, so that they can talk through these kinds of strategies. Shareholders seem to care about these things. And there's that short-term speed-to-cash they care about. And there's that longer-term value and brand equity. Most people, if I talk to them about longer-term value building, get glazed over, because it just sounds like marketing talk. Most people, especially the people like you, Kathy, if I start talking about speed to cash, even your eyes lit up. You thought of somebody when I said that—you did. I saw dollar signs coming. Yeah. It just makes sense. This is a business tool. This is not an art tool. We happen to use art. So it gets confusing. But it's a business tool, and it should be. Anyway, that's—that's a lot. Did that help answer any of your questions?

Kathy (host):
It did. It really, it really shows that you know how good marketing impacts the business. Because what I'm seeing out there, you know, from the financial standpoint, there's a lot of like brand awareness and awareness activities, which is all great on a long-term scale. Obviously, you know, you want to have brand awareness. You want to build a brand. That takes a very, very long time. And if your business needs to bring in the money yesterday, like how do we get there? How do we use marketing as a tool to get us to get that cash injection?

Sean (guest):
So let's talk about bad direction from the executive team to the marketing team based on what you just said. "I need you guys to bring in cash quickly. And I want you to build long-term value. And we need to cut budgets." You just gave me two objectives. And you can do both. You can do a speed-to-cash work while building long-term value. But they're very different methodologies. You've got to approach them very differently. Here's another request I got from a company in Atlanta we're working with. They said—well, actually, it's not even—we're not working with them quite yet. And they said, "We've decided we want to do an RFP," and one of the sections or segments of that RFP says, "We need to have a social media presence." So I said, "Okay, that's great." So I hit reply, and said, "Thank you for the RFP. We don't usually fill these things out. And what we typically do is we have a strategic session before we work with somebody to understand what their goals are. For example, the social media thing you're wanting a budget on, I can't give you a real number now because I don't know if you're doing brand building. I don't know if you're trying to influence your HR pipeline. I don't know if you're doing social media around the demand gen technique to sell a particular product or service. I don't know what your social media is trying to achieve. So saying 'social media' is meaningless." So how can anybody, any marketer that would give you a number without understanding your business objective is just making up stuff. And I'm trying to control my language. You've got to understand, when you give a marketer a bad direction too, then you've got to understand that they should be answering with questions, not budgets back. But he's like—you've had—social media is such an easy one to pick on, because I don't know what you're doing. If it's a demand gen platform, meaning I'm trying to drive people in a thought leadership manner to understand more about a particular product or service, then great. I know how to do that. I can give you the structure between the thought leadership content piece to the 50 pieces of content that we're going to flow out of that, and then even points B to the platform. We're probably not going to do a lot of Instagram. We're gonna do a lot of LinkedIn. Oh, wait, you're trying to build your HR pipeline, because employee turnover is a problem for you? Okay, great. Now I know it needs to do brand culture. And I need to understand core values. And I'm trying to probably use Instagram and Facebook more to reach a geographic area around your facilities where you're trying to hire people. I mean, you see, I can bid on that, although I wouldn't bid on it. I could price that versus "give me some social media." So we get bad—I'm saying marketers get bad direction often. And then it's a foregone conclusion, if you get bad direction. If you don't know the questions to ask back, then you're going to have bad outcomes, and you get fired. And you move on. Think about it this way, Kathy: if you went to your doctor, and said, "Let me tell you, I really think I need this particular medicine because of, you know, my elbow hurts. And I play a lot of tennis. So what I want you to do is prescribe me PT, an ice bag and these three meds." What should your doctor do?

Kathy (host):
Well, if you have a good doctor, they'll say stop reading WebMD, Googling your stuff. Right? Talk first, right?

Sean (guest):
Yeah. Well, you actually need—let me be the doctor, you'd be the patient. So if you—what's the great management consultant? I always misquote them as Michael Porter. But you have a perfect system for doing what it is you're doing now. So when you tell your marketing team to do stuff, and it doesn't work, it's you, man. You—you were the doctor and guess what? Your diagnosis wasn't correct. So a good—a good—I just encourage anybody, and I can't—I'm not on this podcast to try to get all the business, get all Kathy's clients to call me. There's lots of good marketers, but get one that asks a question back. Get one that when you tell them what to do, they say, "Thank you, Kathy. That's so interesting that you want to do social media. Tell me a little bit more. Tell me what your goals are. Tell me what your objective is. How will that impact your business, Kathy? Is that measurable financially to you?" "Oh, yeah, we can—you know, if we can fix our employee turnover, that costs us about $160,000 per person per year. And if we can reduce that by 10%, that's $300,000," or whatever the number is. And now, "Okay, so if we're gonna save you $300,000, would it make sense to spend $100,000 to solve that?" "Okay, great." We just did a budget without knowing anything about what we are going to do, because the budget was based on the value to the business. That's a much better conversation. And Kathy, the CFO, is happy.

Kathy (host):
Yes, yes, very happy. But that's really the difference between the marketing that it's an order taker and the marketing that is strategic, right?

Sean (guest):
Absolutely. So when you're hiring people like this, whether it's a marketing agency, or whether you're looking for someone who's a fractional CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer, like what are some of the questions that you can ask them in that interview process to truly understand whether they're the order taker, or whether they're strategic, especially if you don't really understand marketing yourself?

Sean (guest):
Yeah, that's an incredibly good question. And this is going to sound like I'm selling a book. So I wrote one of the worst selling books in the history of book writing. It's called Shift. I think there's still a copy of it on Amazon. And if it's not there anymore then just send me an email and I'll send you one. I've got a few cases of leftover. Every first-time author is sure that they're going to sell thousands of books, and very few do. But in this book—and ironically enough, I didn't market the book correctly. But that's a whole other story, Kathy. That was a bad ROI. In this book, chapter four, if I remember, gives you the questions to ask in that setting. Broadly speaking, what I would do is—I would ask Kathy, when you want to be our CFO, that's great. Give them a problem of some sort. Give them—give Kathy a real business problem, and see how Kathy answers. And if Kathy answers with tactics, "Oh, you know, Facebook's great for that," or, "Oh, we got to build a website," okay. They're revealing what's in their head and heart with that tactical expression. If you get a tactical answer, then you're talking to a tactical person. If you get a strategic answer, meaning, "That's interesting, you want to solve this problem. Tell me what it means to the business. How important is this to you? How much money do you think you could make or are you losing a year?" Those kinds of questions, then that would be a good sign that you're talking to a strategic person. So I would ask something simple, give a problem and listen, are they giving strategic? Or are they giving tactical answers? And that'll pretty quickly reveal itself.

Kathy (host):
That's really good. Because you know, what they say, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Sean (guest):
Absolutely. And that's a challenge, you know, the old-fashioned term is integrated marketing, or multivariant marketing or, you know, there are all kinds of phrases for it. But you really do—I believe a good CMO is somebody who understands a touch about everything. They're not good at anything. I am not good at anything. But I've got about 53 people, my resources in my resource pool, that are really good at narrow things. And that's what I want from a CMO. Somebody who can understand business, talk about what's your return on marketing investment, what's your customer acquisition cost? What's your marketing as a percentage of customer acquisition cost? Those kinds of simple metrics are super easy. Kathy, you can use those three and get a good start to any kind of dashboard that you're building for any of your clients. Those are the three I would point you to. You don't have to know a ton to know to ask those questions to understand finance. I like to say nobody has ever hired me for what I do. What do you mean by that? Nobody wants marketing. Everybody wants the results of marketing. Nobody wants marketing. Why would you buy marketing, unless you just like websites? No, nobody wants a website. People want the result of a website. And that's probably another thing. It's important for an executive to understand. If you buy marketing, yet marketing—if you buy the results of marketing, then you're pointing toward a different thing.

Kathy (host):
And I think this is very similar to any of the other fractional roles. Like if you really, truly have a fractional CMO, a fractional COO, a fractional CFO, like myself, we are good at a lot of things. And you can see the business holistically. You want those roles to see the business realistically and to see where—how everything connects together. We might not be great at like, for example, you know, SEO or what could be like copywriting. You have people specialized for that. But there's definitely a value to have someone who can look at all these different ways of what can happen, attribute to the business in the right way, and actually manage those resources for you—the same thing on the finance side as well. For example, you know, I don't do tax preparation. I definitely do not do bookkeeping. I know a little bit about all of those things that I can manage people in there. But I know how to connect the dots between the sales, the marketing, the operations, the finance people and move that together. So it's really important that when you have people in these fractional roles that you hire the right people that are strategic, that they can help drive the business forward. So that's my little soapbox right here.

Sean (guest):
That's great. Can I flip the table and keep you talking? It's about you, not about me. Oh, that's true. But you—you've got a finance mind. Let me ask you this one question. Do you think that you should budget based on top-line revenue or some variant of EBITDA?

Kathy (host):
That's a great question. And my answer to that would be it depends.

Sean (guest):
Come on now. I think it's an interesting question. I recently had a client pose it to me. She's a brilliant CMO. And I've always preferred top-line revenue, because my work in marketing is so closely attributed, or attributable, to top-line revenue. There's just a connection there that's undeniable. There are so many things that by the time you're down to EBITDA, that can play a factor in there that I just think it's murkier. But she had the polar opposite opinion. So I'm trying to help you be my teacher, so I can be smarter next time I talk to Amy, because she really has this other opinion. And she's pretty good.

Kathy (host):
That's interesting. What is her take on why should EBITDA be taken into consideration?

Sean (guest):
I think—I think she'd say it's—I can't argue this. I think she's saying it's closer to what the shareholder cares about than top-line revenue. And you can make an argument that top-line revenue is meaningless. My argument would be top-line revenue is meaningless if you don't manage everything in between the net income to the top. But that's not all my responsibility. So if production is just terrible then, you know, we could have done demand forecast, they could have bought the right inventory, but they didn't have the capacity in production. So that would mean I brought the wrong revenue in or too much revenue or revenue that wasn't at a high enough gross margin to make it flow through to the net income line. But I just think arguably, she's right, right? EBITDA is closer to the net income line. And that's what shareholders want. So I don't know. I just thought I'd play with that.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, there are a lot of variables in the EBITDA. And EBITDA means earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization for anyone that doesn't know that term. So as you said, there's a lot of stuff that happens in between once you get the revenue and all the other costs, all the operations, the HR—all the IT spend or whatever you might have. So there are just a lot of variables in there. There's definitely a good argument there that that's what shareholders care about. However, as I said, it really depends on what type of industry the business is in and how the business is structured. And I think that needs to be taken into consideration. So in my personal opinion, is that you two are both right, depending on the business that you're working with.

Sean (guest):
Okay. I'll tell Amy that I spoke with an expert. And yes, the answer is yes. Yes, sir. Yeah. If I'm listening to your podcast, I just want somebody to tell me like, what should I spend on marketing? My CMO tells me something. And I don't know if I can trust them or not. My CFO, you know, Kathy is a penny pincher. And she's just trying to cut budget, and I'm not sure she's right either. So what's the truth? Where does the truth lie? And I should have asked you beforehand, but I'm glad to share with any of your listeners, Kathy, I built a spreadsheet that's all built around third-party data. It's built around Gartner, Deloitte, Wall Street Journal, Duke, Darden School, and some other resources to show all kinds of different numbers. I think if you do a top-line revenue model, then I think you're looking somewhere typically between maybe 3, 4, or 5%, if you just want to maintain the status quo of top-line revenue. And for growth, an average marketing budget, focused mostly on B2B, B2B product and B2B service, average budgets are 6-7-8 percent in that space. And if you're consumer, you're looking at more like 13-14% of revenue. So there's a widely varying set of numbers, and there are about 20 numbers on the sheet I'm looking at, but it's a simple plug model that gives you some visibility. And I think the reason I built this was somebody asked me once, "It's fine that you have all these arguments inside a business about how much you're spending. But if you drove in a NASCAR race, and all you looked at was your own dashboard, would you have any idea how you were doing?"

Kathy (host):
I have a very strong opinion about benchmarks and looking at the industry standards and stuff of other companies. Very, very strong. I like to look at it as informative, but I'm always cautioning businesses not to get married to it. Because if we're just looking, for example, you know, 10% of marketing, that's two and a half million in top-line revenue, which is fine. But the problem is we don't know how effective that is. Are they truly using the right marketing people? Do they have just, like we talked about, tacticians, not someone who is strategic? And they're just throwing money on the fire?

Sean (guest):
Yeah. Are we benchmarking? We're benchmarking against a thousand lemmings who are all running to the edge of the cliff, right? Exactly.

Kathy (host):
Are we just throwing, you know, mud on the wall and trying to see what sticks? Or are we truly looking at the marketing strategically and figuring out what actually works for the business? And the other thing I have, when you're comparing numbers to other companies, you don't know what exactly is in there. So does that 10%—does that include the salary of your other marketing people? Or is it just ad spend? Right? Or is there a fractional CMO that's included in there? Right? What is in that number? That's a good question. So that's my argument about—yeah.

Sean (guest):
I wouldn't say that's an argument against what I said. I think the answer is if you're racing, if you and I are racing in NASCAR, and one of us is only looking at the dashboard, then we don't know if we're being lapped or if we're in the lead. And if one of us is only looking out the windshield, we don't know if our engine's about out of gas or not. And the answer is yes, both. It's helpful to have some benchmarking. But it's not the only guide. And it's really wise to look at your own dashboard, because your situation is unique. And I can give you the example that breaks the benchmark. We have a highly performing client who is spending about a third of what industry averages are. And I know for a fact they're outpacing their competitors significantly. And I wouldn't tell them to spend a nickel more or a nickel less. But if they were all they're doing is looking at benchmarks then it wouldn't be helpful. But if they do look at—and they're looking at their internal dashboards, it's helpful once in a while to go, "Oh, you know what, we're spending a third, we're performing very well against our competitors." Okay, now, the more important numbers are, are we passing enough through to shareholders? Are we hitting our internal targets? And the other variable that is very easy to not understand or monetize is, let's say we were working for a very, very well-positioned company, where there ain't nobody in the world that sells what we sell, which is always going to be an exaggeration, but that marketing budget should be pretty small. If it's a well-positioned company, that is your marketing budget. The position is your marketing budget. It's the investment in your product and maintaining market share. For example, if you have 80% market share—I actually have a prospect right now, who has 70 to 80% market share, and they don't want to talk about it because they're so strong. But they're—and they do some marketing, but then they're starting to look at other purposes of marketing. What do you do when you have 70% of market share? Not—that's—that's pretty strong. Well, there are answers there.

Kathy (host):
Right. Your marketing might look more like innovation programs to protect your share for the future, probably, to attract the people that you want to hire as well. Exactly. You're thinking of more of as a tool for hiring, then attracting customers?

Sean (guest):
Well, we've covered people and money. I think those are the two easiest parts of anybody's job.

Kathy (host):
Well, yeah, it's not the easiest of all of them. So Sean, this has been absolutely a delightful conversation with you. We went through so many things, but you know, if someone is looking at their marketing, and they're trying to get to that strategic marketing that we've talked about, that you talked about so well on this episode, and you gave us so many great examples too, but they have no idea like how to get there, what is the one thing that they can do in the next couple of weeks to fine-tune their marketing? Obviously, it's going to take a while, but what is the one next step that they can do, something actionable?

Sean (guest):
Well, obviously buy something from me. That's not—that is not the answer. No, I think the smartest thing—I am old enough and have enough substance to believe that I can't help everybody in the world. So I try to have a generous idea or mindset. We have spent a tremendous amount of time building some intellectual property we called Centricity, which really is nothing more complicated than a statement of buyers have to be at the center of everything you do. And that means your sales team, your marketing team, your customer service team, and then the technology stack that represents—as represented by those four words represents all of those—that the buyer lives in from a CRM record standpoint. Those four points of view all have to be aligned to the buyer. Now, the interesting thing about it is when you do that, sales and marketing end up aligned to each other. Think about it: If you try to align sales and marketing to each other, you can do that. A lot of people talk about that. And the outcome of that seems clear. But my supposition is, who cares if your—if your sales and your marketing teams are aligned? You left out the buyer. Let's just align everybody to the buyer. And then the outcome of that will be sales and marketing will be aligned. Let's align customer service to the buyer. And then the buyers will have their needs met, you know, and sales and marketing all understand the same language because they understand the same person, the buyer. So if you can do that, then you've got a great tool. So I would encourage you—we have built fitzmartin.com/freehelp. Fitz Martin: F-I-T-Z-M-A-R-T-I-N.com/freehelp. And on that

Sean (guest):
And on that you can download Centricity, you can download the framework and just start by looking at that framework and think about your questions. There's some other free help stuff there that I think is kind of cool. And I think there's a video there that explains Centricity a little bit more deeply. But just—if the one thing, if I could do one thing to help everybody, it would be just to get them aligned to the buyer, not to each other. And you'll make money by doing that.

Kathy (host):
Easy peasy.

Sean (guest):
Really hard. I've got a friend who's a film director, and he says, "What I do is incredibly simple, and very, very hard." Yeah, I think that's what this buyer alignment is—incredibly simple, and really hard.

Kathy (host):
So we're gonna put all of those links in the show notes as well. So Sean, I'm assuming people can find you on your website. Anywhere else that you live on the interwebs?

Sean (guest):
All the obvious LinkedIn stuff and all that, and feel free to shoot me an email. It's just Sean, S-E-A-N, at fitzmartin.com. And I'll be glad to send you a copy of the book if you want one. I'll charge Kathy for it. Don't worry about it. And I'll send you the spreadsheet, this third-party validation or look out the data at the dashboard at the window—any of this stuff that we've talked about today, I'm more than glad to share with you. I promise it's not a sales trick. So just glad to share stuff. And I hope I can be helpful to folks. So thank you. Yeah, it's Sean M. Doyle, S-E-A-N, letter M, Doyle, D-O-Y-L-E. Thank you for having me on the show, Kathy. You have such a great show and an interesting segment that you work in and you're obviously so smart and add so much value to them. I hope this was of some help to you.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, sure was. Thank you so much, Sean, and it was very delightful.

Sean (guest):
Thank you. Good afternoon.