Funnel Reboot

When you've founded a startup, you need to do marketing long, long before a marketer comes around.      You'll meet two remarkable founders who have built their companies' sales and marketing engine, even though that isn't their area of expertise.     Rebecca Wormleighton is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Zendelity, where she leads operations, including sales and marketing. Zendelity is a platform that lets hotels monitor, enforce, and react to compliance and governance issues, using smartphones, near-field communication, and IoT to keep track of staff and of things like alarms, thermostats, and elevators. Before Zendelity, Rebecca spent years in enterprise product marketing, leading Mitel's enterprise marketing strategy and IBM's worldwide marketing strategy for analytics on the mainframe. She's based in Ottawa. Divine Eyo is a software engineering student at Carleton University and the founder of Spequlo, a student-built fashion-tech startup developing an "agentic fitting room." Spequlo uses AI to let online shoppers virtually try on clothing, so they can judge fit, styling, and sizing before they buy. The idea grew out of Divine's own frustration as both a developer and a frequent online shopper, and he's combining computer vision, generative AI, and personalization to solve it. He's a software developer with experience in Java, embedded programming, and full-stack work, based in Ottawa. Timestamp/Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:40 Two Founders' Dream Dashboards 05:28 Search Console to Analytics 06:00 LinkedIn as Lead Engine 07:06 Reading LinkedIn Metrics 08:40 Personal vs Company Posting 10:45 Spequlo Content That Converts 13:56 Tracking Posts With UTMs 14:35 Sponsor Break and Offer 15:35 LinkedIn Insight Tag Pixel 16:26 Where Leads Get Stored 18:16 Follow Ups and CRM Hygiene 20:55 Batching Outreach With AI 23:08 Pipeline Stages and Forecasting 25:22 Cold Outreach Tools and Tags 25:57 CAC LTV and Paid Growth 27:47 Key Takeaways and Wrap Up Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

I want to share three experiences I've had and I want you to see if there's anything off about them: A while ago I sat with a RevOps leader, while they scrolled through a CRM where every single lead was tagged as an MQL. "Marketing sets them all to that," they said matter-of-factly. Sales knew, marketing knew, and everyone went along because the company was venture-backed and under executive demands to produce. Marketing simply bent the metric so the dashboard would look healthy.  A Director of Marketing I knew understood that he could put a large budget bump in his annual plan. His boss, the VP of Sales, had encouraged him to think big. So he did, and it was approved. Long after budget season had ended, the purchases were denied and the money went to sales expenses. He understood what had happened and didn't push back, because his job depended on the VP of Sales. The budget had looked real until the moment it turned out not to be. A marketing leader once walked me through her martech budget. The marketing automation system, with its data-append module and a long list of add-ons, cost far more than I thought was reasonable. I asked if it was worth it. "It's everything to us," she said. I asked if they could drop the data-append module and use an intern, which would cost much less. "Finance would never approve us asking for more headcount." The software subscription flew with no problem, and even though hiring a person was cheaper, they didn't want to rock the boat with finance. The same pattern runs through all of these situations: marketers contorting themselves under pressure from some outside force. Our guest argues that force is structural. Marketing is saddled with baggage that keeps it from meeting what today's organizations expect, and the only way to keep up is to restructure.  My guest is the Chief Marketing Officer and Head of the AI Center of Excellence at 2X, where she helps enterprises use strategic outsourcing, AI and marketing performance management. Before that, she spent two decades with agencies, then went brand-side in C-level roles at several large brands. There she worked alongside major consulting firms, which changed how she thought about the way marketing should be organized. She has written three books for growth leaders: Brand Gravity; The Revenue RAMP, which has been spun off into the Revenue Accelerator course; and The Limitless CMO, published in 2026.  Join me as we head to Detroit Michigan to talk with Lisa Cole. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Up to the end of the twentieth century, the only ads that appeared on a screen were the ones arranged by a handful of TV networks. They were the only ones who could sell commercials, and only the biggest companies could afford what they charged for 30 seconds of airtime. Then, about 25 years ago, some digital marketing innovations started to make a new ad model possible. In 2000, Google launched a self-serve ad platform, and it was later joined by display ad exchanges like Right Media and DoubleClick. For a while, they displayed image ads, but faster broadband internet eventually meant they could serve video, and by the end of the decade an ad-serving standard was set. Thanks to internet protocol, new screens provided information back to bidders. Now, instead of buying by the time slot, advertisers pre-set what they'd bid to show an ad to viewers, based on what is being watched and possibly the viewer's demographics. The marriage of all these has enabled ads to be shown to consumers streaming on their smart TV, Apple TV, Roku or Fire Stick at home. It also opened up a whole new inventory — almost anywhere there's a screen: at the grocery store, in the elevator at the office, at the gas pump. Maybe you don't buy these ads. But it's almost certain that your customers face these screens daily. The question is whether you should put your ads on them. My guest is a graduate of Bishop's University who has spent twenty years inside that marketplace, including time at Samsung. He runs the consultancy Marcus & Muse and founded the Ottawa Ad Club. Let's bring in Aaron Foley. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Some of us are lucky enough to work in a place with analysts who can help us make sense of our data. But there are added challenges in making this  collaboration work.  Analysts may struggle with the questions marketers ask, finding them too vague for analyzing.  Marketers may get data back that they find irrrelevant; they may assume the analyst misunderstood their request. I'll grant that we can speak the same language, but that isn't enough. An Analyst cannot look at all the data, they cannot do analysis that will answer all your questions. The outcome you get will match the old movie Cool Hand Luke, which put it this way, WHAT WE'VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE. The solution is for both sides to learn just enough of how the other's world to have meaningful dialogues all the way from problem scoping to decision-making. My guest today has been on the analyst's side of that table. He knows what practices determine whether this partnership works or fails. Graduating with a B.Sc. in Statistics, he has served as a Business Intelligence (BI) professional at various Government agencies and school boards. He is at home using tools like GA4,  IBM Cognos to Microsoft PowerBI and writing in languages like SQL, DAX and Python. He's also previously been a professional jazz musician, which led 17 years ago to him founding JazzGuitarLessons.net, a site selling online guitar courses to budding musicians.  running the ecommerce and email aspects of that site using his knowledge of analytics  proves how well he knows what information we need on the marketing side of the business.   Let's go to Gatineau Quebec to learn what analysts need from marketers to do their best work, with Marc-Andre Seguin. Chapter Timestamps   00:00 Intro 03:07 Meet Marc-Andre 05:58 Bias And Ground Rules 07:10 Data Quality And Signal 08:51 Cost Of Analytics Stack 11:35 What Makes Analysts Great 13:35 SME Habits That Help 17:29 Communication And Personalities 19:32 Chatbot Announcement 19:59 Stats And Tools For Marketers 23:53 Using LLMs With Guardrails 26:20 Wrap Up And Where To Find    Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.