Sep 9, 2021
Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert.
Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we’re going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.”
The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes.
About six months ago, Ken’s agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken’s agency’s assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency’s book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win.
ReveueZen’s clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C “outliers” are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen’s methodologies, don’t know what kind of solution they need, or don’t know the right provider.
What do they know? They want results.
Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don’t understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend.
Ken will be moderating a HubSpot’s Inbound2021 session, “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” In answer any participants’ subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that “Chatbots are the future,” Ken will be asking such probing questions as: “For whom are chatbots correct?” What other marketing stack does the company use?” “How will the company measure effectiveness?” The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they’re appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year’s online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14.
Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies:
- Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects’ form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat.
- Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations “learned” over time.
Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency’s website at: revenuezen.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It’s just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover.
I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken.
KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency’s superpowers, what you’re known for, where you succeed well for clients?
KEN: There’s the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman’s terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert.
Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we’ve got a hybrid and best of both worlds.
ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it’s a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you’re articulating.
KEN: That’s exactly right, and that’s why we utilize the terms “demand gen” and “lead gen” very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole “These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases.” We’re former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy.
ROB: I’m going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen?
KEN: That’s a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR.
When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn’t have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn’t that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I’m a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That’s what I love to do. [laughs]
ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there’s a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of “Hey, maybe we should get together,” and number two, “How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we’re together?”
KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I’m the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building.
What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I’m really gangster when it comes to those two things.
So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don’t do well – I hate this word because it’s overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability.
ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey.
KEN: Exactly.
ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What’s the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well?
KEN: At this point it’s all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they’re the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They’ve got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don’t have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider.
So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it’s those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They’re already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them.
ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way?
KEN: Yes. Actually, when I’m qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it’s just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that’s actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don’t understand those values, they’ll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they’re worth or if it’s even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that’s pretty imperative.
ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that’s an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there’s that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen?
KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it’s about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we’ll get is when we are doing let’s say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we’ll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It’s part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it’s appointment setting as far as how far we go.
ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You’re hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it’s people who seem interested in buying your software. That’s a good way to wake up in the morning.
KEN: Right. That’s why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn’t have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There’s urgency. But that’s why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, “You’ve built my trust, you’ve educated me, I’ve compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down.”
ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey?
KEN: Not that amazing, but I’m pretty proud of it. For me, I think I’m the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors’ trash and put it on my parents’ lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn’t really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that’s what it was called and how to start a company.
I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, “What should I be doing? I don’t really like this sales thing” when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She’s like, “You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing.”
That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that’s actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I’ve always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That’s why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them.
ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable?
KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That’s the big one. That’s the pure validation of “Somebody’s willing to pay me money for this thing.”
But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they’re now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I’m like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I’ll just say “In the first 90 days, we’re going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it’s now an actual business.
That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn’t have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation.
ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don’t have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you’ve understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.?
KEN: I think I’m going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I’m a technician, I’m a strategist by trade. I’m not a banker, I’m not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up.
But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I’m with this bigger organization and there’s four executives, our COO might say, “Here’s how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency.” The CEO is like, “Here’s how we hedge against risk.” I’m sitting here – and I think that’s why it’s such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends.
So for me, the answer is simple. It’s my job, and that hasn’t changed at three companies. [laughs]
ROB: That’s a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you’re moderating is “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” Inbound is in October this year. I think it’s usually Labor Day week, if I’m not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you’re going to talk about, and especially how you’re thinking about moderating that session.
KEN: I’ll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they’re talking about and why it’s effective.
For instance, if somebody says “All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future,” I’m not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That’s how I’m planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they’re appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven’t talked to them about that, but now they’ve heard. That’s my style of moderation. That’s how I talk and that’s how I do business.
As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I’m like, “You’re so niche, and there’s this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?”
There’s no right or wrong answer. I’ve actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let’s dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That’s my philosophy.
ROB: There’s a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they’re doing, and they’ll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they’re looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they’re also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really.
KEN: Yep.
ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it’s on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that’s important? Certainly that isn’t a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight.
KEN: While we’re on this topic of qualifying leads and once something’s in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I’m actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I’ve even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they’ve gotten qualified on the form.
Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I’m describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I’m interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that’s the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who’s a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction.
I think that’s where a lot of opportunities get lost. It’s the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that’s inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That’s also played out. People don’t want that. They need a hybrid of both. That’s what I’m excited about and what I’m hearing and seeing.
ROB: That’s really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they’ve been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they’re getting the right reps to the right leads?
KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let’s say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let’s say if the person comes in and they typed in “SEO” for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, “This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we’ve created within the CRM.”
And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We’re talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There’s lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it’s the fact that it’s seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That’s where I think the benefit is.
ROB: It’s almost a way to see how the things that they’ve announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it’s accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I’m like, man, I don’t think I’ve seen that in someone else’s CRM before. How’d they get that? Because we’re a vendor. They’re not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them.
KEN: Exactly.
ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way.
KEN: I was going to say, that’s so spot on. It’s that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that’s seamless that’s the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria.
But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven’t taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we’re still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger.
ROB: It’s really interesting. It’s really meaningful. I think something that’s also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don’t know if anybody’s doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don’t sound like templates.
KEN: Yep.
ROB: I need tools for that, I think.
KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we’ve attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I’ve also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we’re expecting.
That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for.
ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently?
KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of “I’m only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can’t help them that well because I’m personally burnt out from doing too much work.”
I think that’s a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we’re so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that’s affordable to a broader market. So that’s thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that.
The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, “This is to make sure we’re a good fit.” Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we’ve taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it’s just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them.
I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it’s a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it’ll save you.
ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, “This person’s in a closet by themselves and they haven’t built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?”, you’ll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes “Here’s someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with” and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really.
KEN: Ain’t that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like “You’re not a good fit, but here’s some standard resources and here’s a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with.” That’s exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better.
ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can’t help but highlight – you’ve mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that’s like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost?
KEN: I’ll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, “There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don’t actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I’d rather just expedite that by paying somebody.” The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my “product” back then.
But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who’s done it multiple times but isn’t so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn’t want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he’s clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn’t that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him.
Those two components – he’s done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he’s not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it’s often worth it. That’s what I would say.
ROB: That’s a great point also. Price is significant, but it’s not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there.
KEN: Hundred percent.
ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you?
KEN: You can check out either my or Alex’s LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we’re building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we’ll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That’s always a great place to start.
I’ll say it now and I’ll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn’t our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I’ve been doing it for a while. So it’s always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I’ll give you something to walk away with every time.
ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it’s going to be on YouTube in real time.
KEN: I used to do that. That’s how I used to prospect. That’s how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I’d give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, “You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren’t you an SEO provider?” I’m like, “Exactly.” [laughs]
ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it’s back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing.
KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you’re welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers.
ROB: Brooklyn’s awesome. Cheers.
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