Funnel Reboot

Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry.  In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult.  Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight restrictions on what you can say about the product and how it's used. After they enter most markets, the products must be coded so insurers will reimburse patients who use them.   So if you have a health or medical technology product, how can you market it when you face all these limits?" For the first time here, the mic will be in somebody else's hands. That person is Cindy Grabowski, founder of Mind Grove, a US-based training platform built specifically for MedTech professionals. Have to disclose that I have no affiliation with Mind Grove, other than giving them a  no-charge review of the marketing course on their platform.  Anyway, she turned the tables on me to hear me answer how you can market in the Healthcare space with so many constraints.  As I present my points on healthcare marketing, listen for tips on:  Building your digital assets throughout your product's lifecycle Setting up campaigns on digital channels without breeching privacy  Engaging your patient population to create your content for you Getting buy-in from decision-makers on upgrades to your marketing program.    So give this unique talk I have with Cindy a listen - I imagine even if you aren't in Healthcare Marketing, you'll come away with better ideas on how to overcome your own constraints.  Let's go hear how we can navigate around constraints. Timestamp Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Cindy Grabowsky 01:07 Glenn takes a turn as guest on the show 03:09 What we'll cover in Healthcare Marketing 04:33 The Big Question: Why is Healthcare so hard? 06:38 Leveraging Data in Healthcare Marketing 09:56 Case Study: EndoGastric Solutions 17:27 Optimizing Digital Presence and Compliance 33:57 Skills for measuring, managing Healthcare Marketing Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I'm talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing.  Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The concepts they gave linguistic expression to are stitched into everything that comes out of our mouths.  You'll hear a passionate discussion today by two guys who both did an undergrad in classics. But you won't need to know anything about this to get great marketing lessons from today's talk. Believe it or not, the ancients can teach us a fair bit about marketing! Our guest's undergraduate courses taken at the University of Oxford in Classical Greek Language and Literature inspired him to write the book we're discussing today.  He is a trainer, author, strategist, and lecturer who applies Storytelling, Behavioural Economics, and insight-driven thinking to brands and communications. Serving as a Course Director for several professional institutes, he also delivers TEDx talks and has spoken on stages around the world. His clients span organizations such as the BBC, Panasonic, Nokia, The Royal Albert Hall, and the UK National Health Service. An accomplished writer, he has published several award-winning books, including The Storytelling Book, which has sold 40,000 copies. His seventh book, The Classical Marketing Book, is being released in North America at the start of 2026. Let's go to the UK to speak with Anthony 'Tas' Tasgal. Chapters Timestamps 0:00:00 Introducing Tas Tasgal 0:02:48 How Ancient Cultures Inform Modern Marketing Today 0:06:29 Uncovering Marketing Power in Word Origins 0:10:26 Using Ancient Myths for Market Segmentation 0:13:33 Connecting Behavioral Economics with Storytelling Power 0:17:21 Strategies to Avoid Marketing's 'Junk Folder' 0:21:52 Crafting Persuasive Frames with Historical Stories 0:26:43 The Power and Peril of Condensed Language 0:30:53 Mastering Persuasion with Ethos, Logos, and Pathos 0:34:48 Satire and Timeless Human Patterns in Marketing 0:37:57 Tapping into Ancient Wisdom for Modern Marketing   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That's especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It's a live feedback loop marketers can't get anywhere else. Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other's meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly. Our guest today understands that better than most. He's a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He's known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach's tone to get them back on track.  And he doesn't restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let's go talk with Karl Ortmanns. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable.  You don't have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we're going to hear a process that's been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. .  Listen in as we delve into the book's process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we've got to Embrace. We'll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand by thinking of it as an Iceberg. Lastly, we'll drill into a brand's DNA to find out how we can spread its unique outlook.  Our guest was tired of working with brands that felt like they were screaming into the void, so he designed a process that let customers feel, remember, and advocate for a  brand. He honed his methodology as a creative director, and founded the brand agency called Make More Creative to help brands that had this problem solve it outright. He is also Host of TheRebelRebelPodcast and Speaker and mentor for the Canadian Trade Accelerator Program. Let's go to Calgary Alberta to speak with Michael Dargie.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Here's a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities  When it's so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them.   A new book came out in 2025, called Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Even though Gen AI that's all around looks set to marginalize content marketing, this book predicts that AI's knock-on effects will bring old retro practices back into vogue. If Wired Magazine were to meme it using their Wired/Tired/Expired phrasing, it might say that Humans Interacting with no machines = Expired  Machines Monopolizing Interactions = Tired Human-Human interaction via Machine = Wired The book also argues that marketing & communications folks have to make different types of content for segments of the buyer journey, all held to different goals and different time horizons. Don't dump random content on social channels. Like instruments in a score, your pieces need to work together—not add noise. It also said being Human-Centered extends to where and how we use our messages. Our leaders have to go to trade shows, make podcasts, meet people, and have real conversations. Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard.  The author of the book is by day, a speaker and is currently Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva. By night, she's a Singer, actor, and fitness fiend. Let's go to Northern California to talk with Ashley Faus.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Up to the 18th century, making and trading things was harder than it needed to be. You had to deal with a bewildering patchwork of local constants and norms. It was actually the French Revolution & administrators who came out of it that started to codify how we measure things. The standards they adopted were ultimately formalized in 1875 at a Convention  whose name you may recognize, the Metre - or should I say Meter -  Convention.  The Standard set at the convention spread beyond France to most of Europe, removing friction in commerce and everyday life. Engineers could spec parts to the same tolerances; pharmacists could dose reliably across borders; food producers could print consistent nutritional labels; shipbuilders and container makers could agree on common dimensions; and architects and builders could order materials that matched on site. Over decades that shared language of measurement turned local guesswork into dependable infrastructure for industry, science and trade. Today, About 95% of the world's population lives in countries that have officially adopted the metric system. "Metric" in that sense solved disagreement about how much — it replaced local guesswork with a shared language of measurement so engineers, traders and regulators could trust one another. Businesses face the same problem today — only the units have changed. Instead of metres and kilograms, modern organizations trade in clicks, sessions, impressions, cost, conversions and revenue. These are the metrics that power decisions, budgets and boardroom arguments. If one team's "conversion" counts form submissions, another's counts purchase intents, and a third's counts paid signups, you get the same mess Europe lived with before standardization: wasted effort, mistrust, and bad decisions. That's why the digital-era equivalent of adopting the metric system matters: a single, governed vocabulary of business metrics (clear definitions, lineage, owners and calculational rules). Give everyone the same definition of "revenue," "LTV," or "ROAS" — and the same ability to trace where those numbers came from — and you turn noisy arguments into aligned action. In short: standardize the units, restore trust in the numbers, and your dashboards start to behave like the modern factories that metrication once enabled for Europe. Turn to how many marketing teams are now constrained by the disparate marketing measures we have - it's the choke-point preventing us from sharing dashboards between groups, asking bigger questions, and getting full bang for money spent on our analytics infrastructures. If we're going to keep our sanity, we must get on with Metricizing our metrics. Going down a path where business metrics are treated as standardized units opens up possibilities as big as the Metric System opened up for our global economy.  Our guest is a Proud Swiss-Canadian, technologist and entrepreneur. In 2001 he co-founded analytics software company Klipfolio, one of whose products aims to address metric management. Note that I'm having him on today to give his personal perspective - there's no sponsor or affiliate relationship here. When he's not working in or talking about analytics, you'll find him cycling in the city we both call home. Let's go talk to Allan Wille.    For links to people, products or concepts mentioned, visit the Funnel Reboot site's page for show #219.  

For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we'll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey,  For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey's, surgery isn't an if, it's not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations.  But throughout all that, he's displayed unwavering courage.  His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, "Scar Tissue." And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you'll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings.  Let's get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

One of the best known events in the modern Olympics is the High jump. Since its dawn in 1896 all jumpers used the same technique. They would run towards the bar, then begin their vault by putting one leg over, or trying to go head-first over the bar. But someone came to the 1968 Mexico City games, who couldn't win on physicality, but who did have a hack no one had thought of.    That person was 21 year old American Dick Fosbury, who you wouldn't find anything notable looking back at his track career.  Back in high school he'd struggled to master  all the motions used in the high jump; and coaches noted how little he practiced; when time came for track meet qualifiers, his jumps came up short.    But when he got to University for civil engineering, he began to experiment with other ways of jumping. In his studies he learned that our ability to jump is limited by our centre of gravity. Lifting our whole body over a bar at the same time demands that we raise our centre of gravity to that same height. So Fosbury analyzed to see if there was a way to get a human over the bar one part at a time, which temporarily moves our whole centre of gravity to somewhere below us, even below the bar. That means that without jumping any higher, we can clear a higher bar - it's playing a trick on physics.    Fosbury used the technique selectively for 2 seasons because his coach still went by the tried-and-true technique, and the heights he cleared got higher & higher. It wasn't until a month before Mexico City that he secured him a spot on Team USA.    The Olympics was the first moment where everyone saw Fosbury's new  backflip maneuver - the press coined it the Fosbury Flop. Everyone also noticed his performance - he didn't miss a jump right up to the metal round.  I bet as international competitors watched him advance while they hit the bar must have felt pretty disarmed by that flop. The bar was raised in the finals to  2.24M or 7 ft 4¼ in, higher than at any games before. Fosbury missed on his first two attempts, but cleared on his third, winning the Olympic gold medal and broke the Olympic record    Ever since, this back-first technique has been the obvious way every jumper has used. Fosbury's style so clearly solved the high jump problem, we don't even question it.      Lots of problems seem unsolvable until an obvious solution is posed. It's a phenomena today's guest commonly sees on websites. Her recently-launched book puts it this way: "The solutions we implemented may seem obvious in hindsight, but the problems and opportunities remained hidden until we analyzed their data in depth-and that's the point!"   Our guest has spent 25 years teaching  digital marketing strategy and analytics at business schools and consulting to companies whose websites generate hundreds of millions of dollars. She is the author of "42 Rules for a Website That Wins" and came out in 2025 with "Website Wealth: A Business Leader's Guide to Driving Real Value from your Analytics". Let's go to Northern California to speak with Philippa Gamse.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for episode 216.

Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here's what OpenAI's Sam Altman said "It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI."   What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence.    This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI.   Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today's guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about  public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows.   Today's guest  graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group.   He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025.   So let's go to Chicago now to speak about "The Path to AGI" with its author. Let's welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson.  Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Hey, Glenn here. It's the middle of summer when I'm recording this; a time we don a pair of shades, a beach towel and a good book. Funnel Reboot usually shares talks with marketing book authors, but for this show I'm going to share some reads that go a little farther afield.  Come along with me through six books that are all amazing. The subjects range between business, humanities, technology and science fiction.    Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:01:44 The Discoverers 00:12:43 Blindsight 00:19:05 How Big Things Get Done 00:24:12 Private Truths, Public Lies 00:27:41 Seveneves 00:30:01 Other SF recommendations 00:31:00 Earth Abides 00:34:57 conclusion Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode, #214.

Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths.  In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane's entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they'd taken enemy fire and  either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel.  Wald's team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed. Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren't examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn't  make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn't sample could have  been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they'd been lucky! the returning planes weren't the rule, they were the exception.  Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that's not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution.  This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today's episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we'll get a bit more comfortable using them. Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he's learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs. Let's now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad. Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

We as consumers do a lot of things just because the people around us are doing them. For proof, look no further than some historical examples—from the 17th-century tulip bulb craze in Holland to doomsday cults and prepper movements in the lead-up to Y2K. Buying fads such as pet rocks, fidget spinners, Beanie Babies, and NFTs all show how easily prevailing thoughts influence individual behavior.   The science behind this is well understood. The evolutionary drive to fit in with our peers is very strong. When a group of people's purchases are plotted as a histogram, we always see the majority of them clumped near the centre - we see it so often we came up with a term for it - the Bell curve.    So even when people think they are  expressing themselves, showing individuality by their brand choices, they are only veering slightly away from the norm.    Hey, Glenn here—welcome to Funnel Reboot. Our guest today—who I really do think has positively impacted marketers' careers—argues that marketers are just as susceptible to conformity as consumers are. We get caught up in prevailing marketing practices when doing our job, while ignoring better marketing options. That's a recipe for mediocre results.    Our guest is the author of three marketing books and the co-founder of an eight year old digital agency that has attracted clients whose annual spend ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. What does he credit for this marketing success? The time he's spent on the edges of the Bell curve - doing things that most of us view as too far outside of our comfort zone. And he says to be a better marketer, you too should reject the orthodoxy of conventional marketing.    Unorthodox is the name of his latest book, and I'm glad to welcome back for a second time, Gil Gildner.  All people, products and concepts mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot site's shownotes page. 

Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives.  In a recent post put out by OpenAI's head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says "We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we'll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other."    Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: "Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change"   This all sounds wonderful; it's used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it's been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It's essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that?   Where we are here in 2025, it's a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that "many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]" by then. How do we unlock AI's activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks?   I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on "Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales" at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes.    The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress.   I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends.    And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales.   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.    

Since July 1st, 2023, the world of web analytics has undergone a seismic shift—and if you're still reeling from the transition to Google Analytics 4, you're not alone. In this episode, we unpack what many are calling the 'Armageddon' of digital measurement. You'll hear why GA4 isn't just a new version of an old tool, but a completely different ecosystem In human years, GA4 is still a toddler. But it is growing  rapidly and some are giving it a chance to mature.  Many marketers took their licks in the forced transitioning to GA4 and there are still some raw emotions about how this tool was rolled out. But our guest says that even though change is hard, he guest believes GA4 is the change we didn't know we needed.  Our guest grew up in the New York tri-state area, which gave him two passions. The first one is hockey and watching people grow up playing the game they love - he's a lifelong Islanders fan. Working in Manhattan, he also worked a lot with numbers. Over time, he morphed from analyzing financial data to analyzing digital marketing, in tools like Google Analytics And  Adobe Analytics. He built this expertise at industries giants like American Express travel and entertainment's NBC Universal. Wanting to use these skills without the constraints of being in a big corporation, he went independent and relocated to Las Vegas, where he now gives all kinds of companies insights into their analytics data.  Let's go talk to Neil Shapiro. See Shownotes page for all people and products mentioned in the episode. 

Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example:  The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who'd commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it's a posterchild for poor projects because it didn't open until 1973.    Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental  of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B.   A last example: In 1998 NASA's Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe.    These failures are so huge, it's bound to bring out our inner cynic. It's natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: "what were they thinking?"   I don't scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions. When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited. Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest. At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You'll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn't tell us what would happen if we didn't. All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due  an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I's hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van,  carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we'd come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset. Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher.  My guest also believes it's our fault that projects fail as they do, and she's got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we're all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success.  She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let's go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer 00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects 00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs 00:25:07 PSA 00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating 00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows 00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers  as a foreign language? 00:43:12 AI's potential role 00:47:55 About Nilufer, book Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 208 People resist change. They only stop resisting when they're convinced the change is needed. They're only convinced change is needed when they grasp the truth. The best way to present them the truth is with data.    You might think that what works on people is a dry statistical presentation of the data in all its Indisputable, inscrutable glory.  Nope. Those avoiding change give themselves offramps by arguing about your data. History shows that to persuade people to take an action, it takes taking them through data in a way that grabs them emotionally. Some examples include: Florence Nightingale, 1854 Al Gore, 2006 Princess Diana, 1997   Numbers prove, but a story compels. This has so much to do with marketing. Here's why. To do what we do, our bosses / clients must be convinced in how our work is yielding results. That is the core of every story that a marketing presentation tells.  Our guest is a Data Storyteller. After graduating from Massey University in 2002, she moved into data analytics. She earned a digital design degree in 2015, combining her design and analytics skills, which led her to specialize in data storytelling. In 2016, she founded Rogue Penguin, a company focused on bridging analytics and business operations.  She now leads workshops for professionals in data science, marketing, and design. And she's the author of "the data storytelling handbook" Let's go to New Zealand to speak with Kat Greenbrook   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00      Intro 00:05:48    Welcome Kat 00:07:45    when data storytelling is needed 00:09:00    two ways of communicating data 00:13:55    Data stories improve communication between groups 00:26:38    PSA 00:27:18    Canvas for making time stories 00:30:05    making visuals relevant to the business 00:33:19    How to present when you only have part of story 00:39:06    Conserving data-ink 00:43:00    More you show - the less you contrast 00:48:20    Getting the book or contacting Kat Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 207 Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I'm doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true. I've picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions. However, it's hard to pass these insights along to others. They're often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire. Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book. As I leaf through its pages, I'm delighted to see many concepts I've known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form. Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life.  He's one of the nicest authors I've had on, and he's back on this show for a third time. Let's go to England to speak with Dan White. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00      Intro 00:02:27 Welcome Dan 00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement 00:09:18 Uber's clever transit ad 00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads 00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset 00:23:49 PSA 00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story 00:33:19 How brain perceives messages 00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor 00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan   For links to the people, products or concepts mentioned in the show, head to episode 207's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot website.   

Episode 206 There's no denying that ChatGPT and other GenerativeAI's do  amazing things. Extrapolating how far they've come in 3 years, many can get carried away with thinking GenerativeAI will lead to machines reaching General and even Super Intelligence. We're impressed by how clever they sound, and we're tempted to believe that they'll chew through problems just like the most expert humans do.  But according to many AI experts, this isn't what's going to happen.   The difference between what GenerativeAI can do and what humans can do is actually quite stark. Everything that it gives you has to be proofed and fact-checked.  The reason why is embedded in how they work. It uses a LLM to crawl the vast repository of human writing and multimedia on the web. It gobbles them up and chops them all up until they're word salad. When you give it a prompt, it measures what words it's usually seen accompanying your words, then spits back what usually comes next in those sequences.  The output IS very impressive, so impressive that when one of these was being tested in 2022 by a Google Engineer with a Masters in Computer Science named Blake Lemoine, became convinced that he was talking with an intelligence that he characterized as having sentience. He spoke to Newsweek about it, saying:   "During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words."  All the same, GenerativeAI shouldn't be confused with what humans do. Take a published scientific article written by a human. How they would have started is not by hammering their keyboard until all the words came out, they likely started by asking a "what if", building a hypothesis that makes inferences about something,  and they would have chained this together with reasoning by  others, leading to experimentation, which proved/disproved the original thought. The output of all that is what's written in the article. Although GenerativeAI seems smart, you would too if you skipped all the cognitive steps that had happened prior to the finished work. This doesn't mean General Artificial Intelligence is doomed. It means there's more than one branch of AI - each is good at solving different kinds of problems. One branch called Causal AI doesn't just look for patterns, but instead figures out what causes things to happen  by building a model of something in the real world. That  distinguishes it from GenerativeAI, and it's what enables this type of AI to  recommend decisions that rival the smartest humans. The types of decisions extend into business areas like marketing, making things run more efficiently, and delivering more value and ROI. My guest is the Global Head of AI at (EY) Ernst & Young, having also been an analytics executive at Gartner and CSL Behring and graduating from DePaul with an MBA.  He has written five  books. His 2024 book is about the branch of AI technology we don't hear very much about, Causal AI. So let's go to Chicago now to speak with John Thompson.   Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:04:36 Welcome John 00:09:05 drawbacks with current Generative AI 00:16:09 problems causal AI is a good fit for 00:22:47 Way Generative AI can help with causal 00:26:50 PSA 00:28:08 How DAGs help in modeling 00:38:36 what is Causal Discovery 00:47:52 contacting John; checking out his books   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 204 Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion - this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation. But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that's tuned for people's minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.  That's a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she's helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their  presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action She's a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We're going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 "Present Beyond Measure."  Let's go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.   Chapter Timestamps: 0:00:00   Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica 00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to 00:18:04 Building meeting's name around message 00:32:14 PSA 00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas 00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides 00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs 01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.  

Episode 203:  How many words does a message need to be for it to be useful? Would you believe under 35 words, or under 160 characters? Here are some examples: Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address: "We cannot dedicate. We cannot consecrate we cannot hallow this ground. The world will little note nor long. Remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."  Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst declared, "We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers." Henry David Thoreau, in his book Walden, on experiencing Nature should be accessible to all, regardless of social or economic status. "The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode".  JFK "the goal, before this decade is out, [is] of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth." Pierre Trudeau: proposed in 1967 that Canada should decriminalize homosexuality. He said "The view we take is, there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." Hilary Clinton 2008  when she lost out to Barack Obama for the nomination to run for president said "we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," but added proudly, "it's got about 18 million cracks in it," a tally of her primary votes. Having heard those, you'll agree that this is doable.  Someone who believes a concise strategy is what it takes to lead people  What's more, she believes we must show them this learned skill so they can craft their strategies and develop into leaders themselves.  Our guest is storyteller, a framework-maker, a brand-builder, who talks about strategy, communication skills, and how to forge your own path. She is the CMO for a security technology firm called Field Effect. Shea Cole is a wife and mom and  a 2024 Recipient Ottawa's top 40 under forty.   Timestamps/Chapters: 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:23 Welcome Shea Cole 00:11:27 Build deck & meeting around vision 00:18:04 Slide 1 00:29:20 PSA 00:30:00 Slides 2 through 6 00:36:25 Adding parts that turn strategy into dollars 00:46:06 Contacting Shea   Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.