Is Your Marketing Team Actually Making You Money? 7 Questions to Ask

All right, guys, welcome back to another episode of Running with Wolves. Today's episode is a little bit different, which I'm really excited about. Good Lord, you guys. I've been filming way too many episodes and being drinking way too much caffeine. So that's where we're at for today. But this is going to be off of a tick talk that I created that you guys ate up. So I'm bringing it to the podcast because I got so many questions around it and I got so many people being like, "Oh, thank you for talking about this." So today, we're going to talk about questions you should be asking of your current marketing and sales team or if you are thinking about hiring your marketing and sales team to make sure that they actually give you an ROI. Because I want you to really sit back and ask yourself, obviously, close your eyes if you're in the car driving, don't do that. But close your eyes and think about, like, do you actually know if your marketing and sales teams are making you money right now? Because I have had so many conversations with people who either have teams, have had teams in the past are considering hiring teams and they're like, "I'm paying these people money." Number one, I have no fucking clue if they're actually giving me an ROI on my investment or if I'm even breaking even on my investment. And number two, sorry, why do I feel like I'm still doing all the work I hired you to do? Which is not the vibe, obviously. I don't want you to ask yourself, are they busy? Are they posting? Are they sending emails? Are your closures taking calls? Is your team sending you these beautifully formatted PDFs of these reports of your data? No, no, no, no. I don't want you to pretend like they're busy. I want to know, can you draw a straight enough line between the activity that they are doing in your marketing or your sales and their revenue to know whether you're getting an ROI or not? Because one of the biggest problems that I see as a consultant with business owners is that you hire someone, you delegate a function, and then accidentally delegate their understanding of the function as well. Okay, so suddenly marketing is, that's my marketing director's department. Sales is, that's my sales director's department. And when I ask the founder very basic questions about their numbers, whoops, we don't know. Okay, which is super fucking dangerous, you guys. You're the CEO of your company, which means that all these different people marketing and sales report to you. Okay, so yes or the CEO, but also even if you're like a million dollar business, multi-million dollar business, even an eight figure business, you probably are at a stage where you've either just hired a chief revenue officer or you are the chief revenue officer as well. Okay, so you're the CEO and the CRO. It is your business to make sure that your business is scaling. Okay, you don't need to become the marketing director. You don't need to become the sales director, but as the CEO, you need to know enough about whether the people you hired are actually doing their jobs and hitting their goals and their numbers. So today, I'm basically going to give you a list of questions that I would ask if I walked into your business tomorrow. And I wanted to figure out is marketing working as sales working? Are we losing money? Where are we losing it? And is the team actually producing an ROI? Okay, so let's fucking get into it. All right, so step number one, please start measuring your team by how busy they look. Okay, this is one of the easiest traps to fall into as a business owner because no matter what stage of business that you are at, no matter how big or small your team is, likely they are doing a lot. Marketing is posting every day, sending emails, creating graphics, writing blogs, creating lead magnets, editing videos, running campaigns, sending you data, right? Sales, they're taking calls, they're looking at their pipeline, they're scheduling follow-up calls, they're sending proposals, they're updating the lead tracker, they're updating everything. Okay, so everyone looks busy. But activity is oftentimes conflated with performance. You could have the busiest marketing department in the entire world and still have really shitty marketing. Okay, and the reality is that you can have closers who take freaking 50 calls a week and still make no money. I literally just had a consulting client start with me where I'm like, why are you operating expenses through the roof and you're not making any money? She's a multi-seven figure business, could be an eight figure business with how much activity she has. And yet, both her marketing and sales departments look insanely busy, but they're doing jack shit for her. And so the CEO question is like, as a CEO, when you look at the cost of these hires, when you look at what you're investing into your business to make it run, you need to ask yourself, like, what result is this activity supposed to produce and is it doing that? Okay. So like, for example, earlier this year, I decided to hire on an ads person. And as they were, you know, running ads, doing different things, I'm spending money not only on their labor, but then also on ads meant the only reason that I hired on an ads team in the first place was to amplify the sales that we were already seeing. Guess what happened? The ads that they ran, like completely fucked up our organic algorithm. So we were doing great with organic sales. And it basically broke our entire funnel. They did not know why. I knew why, because I knew our data, I knew our numbers. So I had to tell the expert that I hired for ads to be like, this is what you need to change. This is what you need to do. All this money that I am spending to amplify our sales and create more sales. To me, with that investment, I was like, if I could just break even every month on like ad spend and labor, which if I signed one client a month would make me not only like get my investment back, but I would profit off of that ads investment. I was like, we're doing great on the organic side for sales. So if I could just break even, this investment will be well worth it, because I know ads is a long game. It's very much something that you have to build on totally fine by me. It fucked over our organic sales. So when I had to sit there, because they were like, do you want to renew? Like we're getting better. I'm like, I understand at the end of like a 90 day contract, essentially, that you can only expect so much, but what is the result that this activity is supposed to produce? This activity was supposed to amplify our sales and is it doing that? No. Are we anywhere close? No. Does this person know why we are nowhere close and what strategic decisions to change moving forward in order to create that result? No. Is this a smart decision moving forward based on all of this? No. Okay. That story kind of brings up this point. There's a massive difference between delegation and abdication. Okay. Delegating is like, hey, hire. You're responsible for marketing execution. Here are the key performance indicators that we are watching or in normal everyday non corporate jargon. Here's what would make us be like, wow, you're really good at your job. You are doing exactly what you should be doing. You're hitting the results and the metrics of success that we have put in place for you. Abdicating that role is you are now the marketing person. Let me know how it's going, and if you have any questions, which is a massive difference. And this is so dangerous, you guys, because when the person reporting the performance is also the person whose performance that you are evaluating, it's absolutely insane. Okay. So for example, if I had just let that ads person roll with it. And then six months later, I'm like, hi, hello, why are we spending so much fucking money on ads? And we're not seeing any sales that come from it. And they can't answer that. And they're still not hitting their KPIs. Why is that a person that I would have in that role? Okay. So of course, their report, whether it was that ads person or any other person who you hire is going to emphasize, oh, my God, we increased your reach. Engagement followers. Amazing. Did sales increase? Because, and this is something that I will call bullshit on. Okay. Because I have been in the marketing and sales space for the last decade, I've owned this business for the last six years. Anyone who tells you that marketing, any part of marketing is not meant to be responsible or drive revenue responsible for or drive revenue means they do not know how to do that for you. So they're basically making excuses for it. Okay. There are different types of marketing. Yes, there's visibility, there's engagement, there's conversions. Someone who's stepping into your business as a strategist and an executor should have an understanding of how marketing and sales relate to each other, how marketing drives revenue and should be coming to you and being proactive. I just had a conversation about this with a client that I ended up signing into tier two because she was like, well, I have someone who does my marketing for me. And I'm like, cool, what are they telling you about this issue that you're presenting to me? Because we're having a conversation about marketing and sales and you wouldn't be here if you're current marketing team. Like if you were super happy with the results that they were providing for you. Okay. So I was, she was like, well, I just told her that this is a marketing issue. So she's presented all these changes to me that we should make to the strategy. And I go, well, why didn't she give that to you six months ago when you started to see this issue? And she was like, I don't know. And I go probably because she didn't see it as an issue because she's not tracking data. She's not developing your strategy. She's not paying attention to the numbers because that's not a huge part in her mind of marketing. We are not comparing apples to apples here. Your marketing and sales higher should be proactively bringing things to you. Here's what I'm seeing in sales conversations that I think we should bring over to marketing. Here's where people are stuck. Here's what I think we should do about it. Here's what's worked really well for us. And here's how I think we should double down on it. Anyone who's developing your marketing strategy should have a wherewithal for your data and an understanding of how it informs your sales. OK, so anyone that's my little tangent that anyone who is a marketing and sales quote-unquote expert that's like, no, marketing doesn't control your sales run red flag run. OK, absolutely run. So question number one, where did our sales actually come from? OK, this is probably one of the first things that I would ask a team member. Where did these customers or clients come from? Last month was one of the best months for sales that I've had like year to date. OK, so if someone else was running my marketing, I run our marketing. But if someone else was running my marketing, the number one question that I would be expecting them to bring to me, and this is a huge part, I would say, of our or just like flow as a team is that during our team meetings, as the CEO, I expect my sales director, my operations director, my chief of staff, my client success manager, I expect all of them to have an understanding of what their goals are, what their key performance indicators are, meaning what it looks like for them to be on track to hit their goals, and I expect them to, and it's built into our team meeting forum for them to bring me numbers that basically say, here's where we are, here's where we're doing really well and here's how we're gonna double down on it, and then here's where we could actually improve things, and here is my proposal essentially for how we can pivot and shift things. The exact same expectation would fall onto my head of marketing, and then for me, on an ongoing basis, like usually a couple times a month, I'm not gonna say how many times, because I know my team listens to this, but I secretly audit all of my team members work so that I know on those calls what's going on with data, where we're at as far as our goals, what we need to do to improve, and I give them the opportunity to bring that to me first, but then I still, as the CEO who is responsible for scaling the company, I still have an understanding of that data and where we are at so that I can step in if I need to. I wanna give them an opportunity to do their job, however, and then I'll ask questions if they don't, and like coach them through it basically, right, so that they actually are still leading this process, and I'm not micromanaging, but if I need to step in to shift things or pivot things as we scale, I need to have an understanding of what's going on in order to make that happen, okay, so if you are, if you already have a marketing team or you're considering hiring one, the number one question you should be asking them, is last month, if we had a really fantastic sales month or a poor sales month, where did those customers or clients come from, and I do not mean Instagram, I don't wanna know what their like, quote unquote referral source was, do not show me your Shopify dashboard, like kill me now, okay, that's not what we're doing. I wanna know what platform did they come from, what piece of marketing did they come from, what link did they come from, what email did they come from, what podcast, what campaign, what ad, what referral source, what lead magnet, what was their first touch point, what was the touch point that actually triggered them to then go purchase, okay, I have an understanding that attribution meaning for those of us who do not speak marketing, where you can pinpoint your customers or clients coming from, okay, I know that's never gonna be perfect, unfortunately, like even for my e-commerce brands, when I look at your Shopify dashboards, they're like referral sources, say direct for TikTok, and then they attribute TikTok for like 20% of like the results or whatever that's happening, and so I know that's wrong. So I know attribution is never going to be perfect, okay, especially with organic marketing, because the buyer's journey between all your different organic marketing verticals can all be so combined, someone could discover you on TikTok, follow you on Instagram, listen to your podcast, join your email list, and then finally inquire from an Instagram story, so you can't sit there and be like, they came from an Instagram story, then it comes from the sales conversations, okay, great, like yeah, you listened to this podcast episode, which made you wanna inquire, but like, where'd you first find me? Was there something that I said that made you be like, oh my god, this is so amazing, I have to talk to Savannah about it, right? If you only track the final click, you might say Instagram made that sale, when that is not true, your entire ecosystem made that sale, but imperfect attribution does not mean, fuck it, let's stop tracking the data, it means we need to track better, and we need to track each stage of the buyer's journey. So couple things there for you guys to have set up. Number one is like, bitly or unique links, okay, and this is just a quick teaching moment before you get back to the other like hiring conversations. You need to make sure that you have unique links for every organic marketing platform. So if you go to Bitly, this is, I love Bitly just for their analytics, but it's a super easy platform for you to use. Basically, I call it like a cover link or like a jacket link, technically it's a UTM, a unique tracking metric. So if you go to like my link in bio on Instagram, in the link in bio you'll see bitly.com/, I forget what the forward slash is, but when you click that link, it takes you to my website. Okay, so the destination link is still the same, the user experience is still the same, but then I log in, www.bitly.com, I log in, and it has analytics and not only can I see how many people clicked my link in bio, but then each of my individual link in bio buttons, podcast, consulting, accelerator application, contact form, any of those things. I can also see how many unique clicks those get. So it also tells me if I had a thousand people click my link on this day, right? And 500 of those people went to our freebie or our email list or a podcast with that tells me is we're probably not bringing in qualified leads. If they all went to application, but then no one submitted an application like is the link broken is something wrong with our buyers journey, right? Every single data point gives you more information to go off of for your marketing, okay? Then you also want to ask how did you hear about us on any and all forms that you can? You want a CRM lead source field, you want to track podcast links separately, email, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, track paid ads separate from organic. Basically what you need is like show me where our leads came from over the last 30 days and then show me which sources actually became clients or customers, okay? 'Cause those can be two totally different answers but your marketing team needs to have both sets of answers, okay? Question number two, what content is actually driving action? Okay, I do not want and this is something you will see from most marketing people. How did we do this month? They send you a report. Oh my God, together, oh my gosh, okay, this gives me such an example that I want to talk about. I just brought on a new consulting client who had worked with one of my top competitors previously and she goes, we worked with them for a year and a half. They actually did her marketing for her and they gave her an off-boarding document that essentially was everything that like, quote unquote worked for them in their time together, okay? I'm not even gonna get into what was missing on that form but here's what was so wild to me because this is something you see from a lot of people, okay? People being, and when I say people, I mean like marketing agencies, social media managers, they sent her this report and they're like, we did such amazing work together. We grew your following over 5,000 followers in the last year and a half, we've created like an obsessed audience. Yeah, and her fucking sales are slipping. They suck, she's getting a ton of objections, her conversion rate is terrible. Anyone who applies are not, they're no showing calls, right? So there is a very clear like difference in definition of success when it comes to marketing for business owners versus their team. Okay, so your marketing team is probably, if you have one right now, sending you a report at the end of every month being like, look at how amazing we're doing, here's how many views we got, here's how many followers we grew, community engagement growth, so on and so forth. And you look at this report and you go, great, where's the money? Because when I look at our sales, they're the exact fucking same. So you're saying they're doing amazing and I'm infuriated because if our marketing is doing so well, where are our sales? Where's the revenue, right? So when you ask your marketing team for marketing that is driving action, they're going to try to push back and be like, what do you mean? People are liking, they're saving, they're sharing, they're looking at your profile, no one cares, okay? Yeah, that's an important part of the ecosystem. If that was not happening, I'd have some concerns. However, if what we're looking for is sales, I'm looking for link clicks, DMs, applications, discovery calls, email signups, purchases, abandoned cart rate, I'm looking for everything, okay? Fucking everything, receipts, timeline, screenshots, that's what it reminds me of. If you're a bravo watcher, you know what I'm talking about. Because your highest viewed post and this happens for most people, your highest viewed post probably is the one that drives the least revenue and a post with 2,000 views, probably drove like 200K in revenue for you, okay? This is why I hate when marketing reports lead with vanity metrics. I genuinely do not care because reach is an input, revenue is an output and both of those are important, which is why, like I said, your definition of the role that marketing plays when it comes to your revenue and your sales is so important for you to ask somebody of like, what do you believe that marketing's job is? Because if they genuinely do not believe it's meant to drive revenue in addition to reach and engagement and community and things like that, you're fucked, okay? So this does not mean that every single piece of marketing needs to convert directly. A track marketing has a job, warm marketing has a job, convert marketing has a job, but the ecosystem collectively needs to move people through to a purchase, okay? So ask your marketing team, what were our top performing pieces of marketing in the last month from a track to warm and convert? Not just like, hey, what got the most views for us, okay? Question three, what is our conversion rate at each step? This is where I see businesses completely lose the fucking plot, you guys. Everyone knows revenue, no one can tell you where the revenue is leaking, okay? So what I want you to do is map the funnel. So if you have a service-based business, here's your funnel. Content views and reach, profile visits, link clicks, applications, number of qualified applications, number of calls booked, number of calls people actually showed up to, number of offers made, number closed, number paid, okay? If you can't tell me where people are falling off, you can't tell me where they're out in the buyer's journey, which means you can't tell me what to put in your marketing to move them through to purchase. Now calculate conversion at every single transition. I want you to imagine your marketing generates like a thousand link clicks in one week. Of those 1000 link clicks, only 100 people apply, 50 book calls, 40 show up to those calls, and only 30 of those 40 buy. That tells me something. So fucking different about your problem, rather than a thousand linked clicks, 15 people apply 12 calls book, 10 show, eight people close, okay? In the first scenario with the 100 people apply 50 calls booked, I would be looking at why do you only have 100 people applying after a thousand people click your link in one week? That ultimately tells me they're interested, they're not pre-sold yet. Why did only half of the people who applied booked calls, excuse me, is it because you offered them availability that was too far out, is it because there was a lack of urgency in your marketing that made them be like, I need to fix this problem now, is it because your sales process is wonky or they don't trust the team they're having a call with? Your no show rate is pretty good, and a 40 people who you pitched, 30 of them bought, sick conversion rate. What that tells me is that we need to get more people from clicking the link to applying, we need to build more trust, more urgency, pre-sell them a little bit more, and then get more of the people who apply to actually book a call, so we need to figure out the issue there. That process, if your marketing team can't do that and interpret it properly, you're screwed. A product based equivalent to that would be like reach website sessions, product page views, add to cart, check out abandoned cart, purchase, repeat, purchase, where is the drop off? If there's tons of website traffic but no add to cart, you have a marketing selling product offer merchandising problem. If you have a ton of add to cart but low checkouts, it could be a price issue, shipping, trust, check out, friction, marketing, great conversion rate but low traffic. You have an acquisition problem, right? What I am trying to tell you guys is that your numbers tell you what problem you're actually trying to solve so you're not throwing speedy at the wall constantly and until your team knows how to interpret those numbers and/or is even pulling them and paying attention to them, your sales is a guessing game, okay? So question number four, what are people saying on sales calls? Your marketing and sales department should not exist in separate fucking universes, okay? Are, I would say like half of the conversations we have in our team meeting are between our marketing and sales departments. Everything else is like client success operations, how do we optimize it? How do we refine it? How do we button it up? But it's like sales has some of the most valuable market research in your entire company. So I want your marketing department to know on a daily, if not weekly basis, what objection are coming up? What questions are people asking? What are people confused about? What language are they using? What words are they saying to describe their problems? What do they think their problem is? Why are they saying no? Why are they saying yes? What alternatives are they comparing us to, okay? And then guess what? Your marketing response, it's reactive in addition to being proactive, okay? So if sales is saying like, oh, everyone is on our calls saying they don't have time to execute this strategy. Marketing should go great. We're going to make marketing about time, case studies from busy clients, an email about implementation, stories showing up about how much support exists, content reframing the cost of waiting. Sales objections are now your market research. And so if your closer hears the same objection 30 fucking times and marketing hasn't addressed it, your departments are not communicating. And that is super important. Question number five, why are we losing sales? If your sales team is like they weren't ready, they had objections. I don't care. I don't care. That is a useless excuse, okay? Why weren't they ready? I want to know, was it money, timing, spouse, they didn't trust the offer, didn't understand value, didn't believe that they could execute. What was the reason? What was the reason? That's the TikTok that it makes me think of, okay? I would say your lost sales data should be categorized, okay? If 40% of your lost sales are saying I don't have time to execute, again, I said this earlier, I heard from a previous business coach, if it's a pattern, it's a problem. And if it's a pattern, we investigate is the offer perceived as like two labor intensive is marketing, explaining implementation, are we attracting overwhelmed buyers? Like, what's the issue here? This is where data, I would say, prevents ego or like the run around, okay? Without data, marketing blames sales, blames marketing, founder blames everyone. And everyone has a fucking opinion that is an opinion. We want to know the truth. Data does not lie, which is why I love it because it removes the drama or the emotion over it. Sometimes someone's like, well, this is my opinion, and it's conflicting with someone else's opinion. I'm like, okay, cool. What does the data say? Because that's what I'm going to make a decision around, not your opinions, okay? With data, you're very easily able to pinpoint and say, this is the bottleneck, and this is what we need to fix. Question number six, what is our sales team's actual performance? So if you have multiple closers, I do not want a company wide close rate, okay? I want a close rate by closer, show rate, qualified close rate, revenue collected, payment plan versus painful follow up conversion time to close lead source by closer. If leads are distributed differently, okay? Because averages will hide problems. I just experienced this with another consulting client of mine. She has actually two consulting clients have this problem. They have a killer closer, but their capacity is like basically gone because they take all the calls. So they brought on one or two other closers that are still ramping up right now. And so the problem is that this one closers percentage is like 70% close rate. The other two are like 12 and 20%. So the company average looked like it was like 45% close rate and I'm like, what is going on? That's not normal. And then she was like, oh, yeah, it's actually because our other two closers are super green and they're ramping right now. I'm like, okay, well, where's the separate data? And she's like, we don't have it. And I go, girl, if you're not tracking that, that means that I think or you think your conversion rate is 45%. So I'm about to put into your marketing a fuck ton of stuff to increase your conversion rate when that was not the problem to begin with. The problem is that your sales team, one or two of your closers need way more time to ramp and you're also giving them leads that are not appropriate for them. They're giving them like the coldest leads that don't even know anything. I'm like, no, no, no, you should be giving them your warmest leads that are the easiest close for them to ramp and you're more like senior closer who has a great close rate should be given your most cold leads. Anyways, I digress, but I would also say like don't weaponize your close rates. Okay. A closer getting extremely qualified inbound leads should close differently than someone taking colder leads. Okay. So that context matters. So if they're really experienced closer is getting super cold leads and their close rate drops from like 70% to like 30 or 40% that's okay because they're insanely cold leads. It's a longer sales time, but that also tells us what we need to do with your marketing. If your warm leads are being given to a closer and their close rate is like 20 or 30% maybe we got a different problem as a whole. Okay. So context matters, which is why your data is needed. Then question number seven, what are we testing? Okay. This is one of my favorite questions to ask a marketing team, which is what are we testing right now? Because if the answer is nothing, what are we doing? You guys, what are we doing? Truly, marketing should constantly be gathering hypotheses, okay. We think this hook will improve retention. We think this landing page will improve opt-ins. We think founder content will increase warm leads because we looked at this data. This is what it told us. Let's test it this way. It's test, measure, learn, and then iterate. It's literally test, look at the data, see what it tells us. Then we have our findings and then we keep refining the system and the strategy based up of what we learned. Otherwise, you're just producing content and that content production is not a marketing strategy. It's basically like you plugging your ears, being like, la, la, la, la, la, I don't care what my audience says. And just like thinking that they're going to continue loving your marketing. You have to listen to how your audience is reacting to your marketing and then refine and react based on that, okay. So here's my kind of like, I would say last few parts for you is ask your team what they should stop doing, okay. So this is like one that I think is kind of sneaky, but I love because it really gives you an understanding of what your team's like mindset is, okay. So I would ask your team specifically if you had to cut 30% of what we're doing in marketing tomorrow, what would you cut and why, okay. Because they should know what's producing, what's promising, what's neutral, and what's really like wasting resources. I can tell you right off the top of my head, a couple of pieces of content that I've put out in the last month or so that I'm like, that did fuck all for me, okay. And I can cut that immediately. If I, if my grandma, like my grandma was in the hospital last month, if she was in the hospital again, you're getting my bare bones marketing strategy and the only thing that's going out is the shit that I know will go viral and convert super, super well. Everything else is kind of like fluffy filler marketing. Your marketing team should have a pulse on what those things are, okay. And same for sales, what meetings are unnecessary, what followups aren't working, what steps to the sales process are bullshit, which lead sources are wasting closer capacity, so one and so forth, this gets you away from doing more. And that's another problem I see for a lot of brands and businesses is that you're like, we got to do more, more, more, because that's going to scale us. And a lot of times it actually waters down your messaging, gives your team busy work, and then your conversion rate plummets, okay. So sometimes scaling is not like, oh my God, we have to do more. It's actually like stop doing shit that isn't working and move those resources to what actually is next is that your marketing and sales teams should be able to explain their numbers. We've already kind of talked about this a decent amount. But USCO should not have to know every number off the top of your head, okay. But somebody should. And when you ask why did sales drop 20%, the answer cannot be, I just think people are buying less now. And this is something you have to train your team on, I will say, okay. So like if you have team members that have been with you for a while, that you've kind of been allowing to like get away with this, you need a full fucking factory reset to be like, okay, you guys, here's where we've been, which is not having a clear understanding of numbers data. What's working. What's not, here moving forward is my new expectation. Every single time we have a team meeting, every single time we have a standup for marketing and sales, here's what I expect you to bring to the table. And more than that, I expect your interpretation of it. So like, if my sales director is just like, here's a bunch of numbers and like, doesn't give me an explanation. I'm going to say, cool, what's your, like, what do you make of that and what moves do you think that we should be making to increase our sales? And if she doesn't have an answer for me, I'm going to be like, cool, come back to me when you do. And I need to answer by tomorrow or whenever it is. But I've trained her from the beginning to say, here's what I'm seeing. Here is my hypothesis of what we should change and or test based off of the data that I'm seeing, do agree, disagree. And then from there, I can give my perspective off of the data. But if she just showed up with random numbers, and be like, that's not what we need. I need numbers and an interpretation. Okay, and that's ultimately what leadership looks like. It's not just like fixed sales. It's sales are down 18%, traffic is flat. Qualified applications are actually up 4%, but our show rate dropped from this to this and close rate dropped from this to this. So here's what I want to investigate. I've done a little investigation. Here's what I've found. Here's how I suggest that we update our strategy. Now, that is something that you as the CEO can do with and say, yes or no, or like, maybe, but what about this, did you think about this, right? That is your leadership team's job. If you've hired any sort of agency expert marketing and sales expert marketing and sales director anything like that, they should be able to give you that information. Okay, so if I were your CEO of your company, here is the meeting that I would have with marketing and sales every month. Okay, so I want a recurring meeting where we answer what did we spend, generate, where did leads come from, which sources produced customers or clients, what content drove meaningful action, what were our funnel conversion rates, where was the biggest drop off, what objections did sales here, why did we lose deals, which closer performed best or worse than why, what did we test, what did we learn, what are we changing next month? This is not a two hour meeting, you guys, not a 74 fucking slide deck, okay? I want you to come prepped and ready to go with the numbers, the diagnosis and the plan. And more importantly, your marketing and sales should be having a conversation because marketing affects sales, sales gives intelligence and research back to marketing, and it's this ongoing loop, okay? All right, so before we close, I want to talk about how to know if you have the right people on your team, because this is where founders sometimes get scared, because there's a lot of people who are like, I don't know enough about marketing to challenge my marketing director, and you don't necessarily need to know the answer. You need to be able to ask why, okay? So a good team member can explain, and this is in-house or an outsource. They can explain the decision, they can show the data, they can know what they're testing, they can admit when something does not work, and they can change strategy based on evidence, and they understand their function contributes to revenue. A red flag of anyone, an internal hire and outsource, a business coach, an agency, a social media manager, a strategist, it doesn't matter, is if they hide behind jargon, they only report flattering metrics, they can't explain why something happened, they have no hypothesis, they blame the algorithm, economy, or leads every month, keep doing the same thing despite declining performance, and they get defensive when ROI is questioned. So the only distinction I will make, and other marketers listening to this, are gonna be like, Savannah, your expectations are so high, okay? No, they're not, because I also understand nuance. Marketing is not a vending machine, I get that, okay? You don't like put 10K in and immediately get 50K out. Your brand matters, your organic attribution isn't perfect. Long sales cycles do exist, not everything can be measured perfectly, but marketing is nuanced, often becomes an excuse for zero accountability, and it pisses me off, you guys, 'cause you're wasting fucking money on people who don't know what they're doing, don't get you results, you get upset because they promised you the sun, the moon, and the stars, and they're like, actually, it's your fault. And you're like, how did we get here? Like, what is happening right now? So if you can ask people these questions, it should mitigate that for the most part, okay? So in closing, here's kind of the thing I want you to take away from this episode, okay? You can delegate the job, 100%, but you cannot delegate accountability. This is, I would say the biggest takeaway is that as your company grows, you should stop doing everything. You should not be posting every reel, editing every email, taking every sales call, updating every CRM field. That's not what you should be doing with your time as a CEO, but the higher you climb in the company, the more important it is to understand what's actually driving the machine, okay? So you can delegate execution and management and reporting, you cannot delegate the responsibility to understand whether your company is making good decisions or not. So if you spend 30K a month on marketing and you cannot tell me what it's supposed to accomplish, what metrics indicate it's working, where your leads are coming from, what happens to those leads? You don't have a marketing strategy. You are crossing your fingers, hoping something happens and throwing spaghetti at the wall. And it's the same thing with your sales. A system gives you visibility. So you know what's working, what's broken, what you're testing, what you're changing, and where the next dollar of growth is most likely to come from, okay? So next time you have a team meeting with your marketing and sales, I want you to bring these questions. I hear you guys all the time. You message me, you're like, I bring your videos into our marketing department. Cool, play this podcast, let them all listen to it and just watch their faces. That would be amazing. And maybe take a picture if you can for me. But take this episode, make some notes, bring it into your next marketing meeting. Maybe you're in a stage where you're considering hiring someone, if you're considering hiring someone, ask these questions up front and make sure you find someone who can genuinely drive ROI for you. And I have several people in my back pocket who are social media agencies, social media managers, people who actually execute on marketing or even run ads, things like that, that do phenomenal work that actually create an ROI. So if you guys need a referral or anything, please message me on Instagram because there's a lot of people who I will absolutely vouch for and be like, they're fantastic at what they do. They will actually create an ROI for you 'cause they do these things. But yeah, hopefully this gives you guys a little bit more clarity to save you some money and some headache because I know team, especially when it's tied to like creating revenue, can be one of the most frustrating parts of being a business owner. So if you guys have any questions as you're listening to this episode, please send them through to me. If you're someone with a massive marketing and sales department and you even want to have a conversation about that, go below here, below this episode in the show notes, apply and book a call to have a conversation with me 'cause I'd love to chat with you and hopefully give you as many insights as possible and obviously talk to you about how I can even support you in this area as well. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and I'll see you in the next one. Bye guys.