Customers are mostly done with their research before they even reach out to you

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It’s fun to build a website and think about all of the people that will come to your site to do their research about your product. It certainly happens, but it’s far less often than you might think.

In Kara Smith Brown’s book “The Revenue Engine” she shares this bit of data about B2B buyers:

“Seventy-four percent of B2B buyers have done more than half their research online before they ever talk to a seller.”

That’s a huge number! 3/4 of your customers have already done more than half of their research before they reach out to you, so their decision is often made before you have a chance to say a word. Some of them may have gotten info from your website, but many did it via third-party sources like LinkedIn, ChatGPT or Reddit.

This ties back to the idea of branded searches continuing to rise on Google. Consumers are researching on their own, and then looking you up on Google once they see you as a solid choice.

You need to have a fantastic website and deep knowledge of your industry, for sure, but if you’re not finding ways to be seen across the entire internet you’ll never get the chance to talk to your prospective buyers because they’ll have already gone somewhere else.

Evidence versus intuition

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Over the past two weeks I’ve heard two opposing takes on trusting your intuition, and it’s been interesting trying to match them up.

First, I was listening to an episode of the Founders podcast about Oprah Winfrey, which covered her rise to fame. When she was first looking to start her talk show, people told her not to waste her time trying because Phil Donahue was already dominating and couldn’t be beat. She was confident that she’d succeed because both of their audiences were largely female, and her perspective and her intuition on topics would lead to success. She was clearly correct.

On the flip side, I saw this quote while reading the book “Multipliers“:

As discussion leader, it was liberating to ask the questions but not give the answers. In fact, I found it strangely powerful. And when the students spouted off their views and interpretations of the story, it was thrilling to look them straight in the eye and say, “Do you have any evidence to support that claim?” Initially, they looked terrified. But they quickly learned that the cost of an opinion was evidence.

So which wins — evidence or intuition? It’s a tough call, and I think the answer is situational. I see this with my team from time to time when they suggest ideas: sometimes with evidence and stats, and sometimes just with intuition.

When it comes to marketing, a frustratingly large portion of what we learn comes in the form of intuition versus data, particularly as attribution becomes harder to track. There will be more and more cases where reliable data isn’t possible, leaving you no choice but to default to intuition.

However, if you have data, bring it. More importantly, if you have evidence and the other side doesn’t, you win!

Businesses don’t need to be moral to succeed

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There are a lot of ways to run a business and make good money in a way that is fair to everyone. There are also ways to run a business that are manipulative and exploitative, and those can make good money as well. A great example would be those companies that are using AI to make life worse for all of us, but are probably succeeding — at least for now.

In a recent podcast episode from Seth Godin, he explained his take on things:

The business model of building an asset around acting like a leader. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only business model. There have always been business models exploited by capitalists that don’t meet most of our standards for how moral leaders ought to lead.

He also explains that where there are a lot of different business models, one direction is clearly better than the other:

There are many different business models. I have spent 20 years encouraging people to look at an overlooked one. It is the business model of trust and attention, of generosity and care, the business model of humanity, of being the one who’s worth paying extra for, of being the one we would miss if you were gone.

You can work to make things better for everyone, or you can work to take as much as you can for yourself. I hope you choose the right one.

There’s no copying, there’s just execution

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It’s easy to think that your ideas are to be tightly controlled so that no one “steals” them, but that’s almost never the case. I shared a few years ago that almost every NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) that I’ve signed has been unnecessary. I’m happy to sign them to appease the other party, but they’re not needed, as knowing an idea is miles away from actually making it happen.

In that post I shared thoughts from Austin Netzley:

“To achieve big success, it’s not about ideas or information. It’s about implementation and execution.“

and from Howard Aiken:

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

This also came up in the book “Masters of Doom“, the story of John Carmack and John Romero and their creation of the legendary video game “Doom”. From the book:

“All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea — it just seems so fundamentally wrong.”

And then in a recent podcast episode, Gary Vaynerchuk took it a bit further, saying:

“There’s no copying. There’s execution. I promise whatever anyone who’s watching right now thinks somebody copied them on something, you copied someone else. So I don’t need that.”

I’m not condoning that you steal from others, but ideas often aren’t anything amazing. For example, our website design/build process has been honed over the years and works amazingly well, but it’s not all that unique — it’s our execution of it that makes it work so well.

I spend a lot of time looking for new ideas, but almost all of them involve learning from others. Share what you know so we can all improve, but the real power comes from executing better than anyone else ever has.

Branded searches are taking over Google

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As time has gone on, and our search engine patterns have changed, a big new trend is beginning to emerge: people are using Google for branded searches more than ever before.

Put another way, people are searching for “Nike” instead of “best running shoes”, or “GreenMellen” instead of “web design companies in Atlanta”. People are doing their research elsewhere, generally on social media or in AI tools, and then using Google to take them to the company site.

SparkToro‘s Rand Fishkin recently shared some amazing data in this LinkedIn post, culminating in this image:

So what does this mean?

More than ever before your company needs to be the answer, not an answer. You need to be active in social media, you need to be showing up in AI answers, and you need to be showing your expertise to your prospective clients. Once they see how great you are, then they’ll head over to Google and find your website.

(and make sure your website doesn’t disappoint)

There are certainly still some people that search for “best running does” and “web design companies in Atlanta” on Google, but those numbers are fading. If you rely on that kind of traffic, the next few years could get pretty rough for you. Take the time now to build your entire presence, and reap the rewards when people head over to Google to find you by name.

How your brand can grow

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Most companies are looking for ways to grow their brand, and options for doing so are nearly limitless. However, some strategies will work much better and have longer-lasting results than others.

In his book “This is Marketing“, Seth Godin lays out his overall philosophy on this:

The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organizations that thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing. They grow because users evangelize to their friends. They grow because they are living entities, offering ever more value to the communities they serve. They grow because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they’re able to produce.

You can pour increasingly large amounts of money into advertising, and that can certainly help, but the biggest brands grow because users want to share them with others. Word of mouth still dominates marketing, and most podcasts grow because of individual sharing and not because of their iTunes ranking.

You need to get the core pieces in place first, like a solid website and great marketing, but if users aren’t compelled to tell their friends about you and the value you offer, real growth will be hard to find.

I haven’t heard anybody complain

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Hearing complaints from your customers can be a good thing. While we ideally don’t want to hear any because we’re doing a great job, complaints can be a great way to improve your systems for the next person.

However, a lack of complaints doesn’t mean you’re doing things perfectly — you may just be not hearing them.

From a recent podcast of his, Jay Acunzo puts it like this:

“But you know, I haven’t heard anybody complain. And I’m like, boy, should you learn about a concept called non-response bias. Just because you haven’t heard people say anything negative doesn’t mean you’re not leaving a wake of damage in your trail.”

It could be that people are afraid to give you bad news, or they don’t know how to reach out, or any number of reasons. Perhaps things are indeed going very well, but there are likely complaints out there that you’re missing, and tracking them down to resolve them would be a great thing for everyone involved.

Assumed execution

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I’ve shared a few times how the trust I have for my team can make my life so much easier. Specifically, if I email any of them with a task or question, I can just let it go and be confident that it will be taken care of (or that they’ll respond with follow-up questions, if needed). I don’t need tasks to check back in with them, which saves time and effort and is just awesome.

In Juliet Funt’s book “A Minute to Think“, she calls this idea “assumed execution”. She says:

If we worked in an environment of “assumed execution,” we’d need none of these. How much lighter our inboxes would be if we made an explicit pact with our email community to assume every email was delivered, read, and thoughtfully attended to. Let’s assume an even broader gesture of trust. Let’s say on the rare occasion when the ball got dropped, we’d reliably find out about it sooner or later and the price paid would be lower than we fear. If we could make this leap, we’d all reclaim hundreds of annual hours in needless reading and deleting. (However, many bosses enjoy and expect this kind of loop-closing, so get permission before altering this behavior.)

Of course, if I’m assuming execution on the part of others, I need to make sure to be reliable on my end as well. For me, the main key to that is inbox zero. While that applies primarily to email, I think all other inboxes count as well: text messages, LinkedIn messages, Slack messages, etc. Limiting your inboxes can help a lot, but for any that are available you’re responsible for being reliable. If not, the other party will lose trust in your ability to execute, and that’s a slippery slope.

Assumed execution isn’t an easy place to get to, but it’s a great place to be.

Blameless Postmortems

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The idea of a “postmortem” is something we try to do after every major project. We look back at how things went, be glad about what went well, and work on things to improve for the next one.

The key to a solid postmortem, and to leading a solid team, is to focus on the core issues and not lay blame on humans. If something went wrong, what really was the cause? Google’s SRE (“Site Reliability Engineering”) site explains further:

Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the “wrong” thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.

There certainly may be times when a human is at fault, but there is almost always a cause above that. It could be distractions, excessive workload, unclear procedures, or any number of other things.

As Google shares, if you immediately go to finger pointing you’ll get less and less feedback during future postmortems. These can be a gold mine of useful information, so treating them the right way for this one and the next one will help lead to increasingly great results down the road.

People who do great things are doing them for the first time

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Having a fresh perspective on an existing system can be a great thing. With GreenMellen, I attribute part of our success to the fact that Ali and I never worked for another agency before starting ours, so we weren’t saddled with bad practices and messy ideas.

Related, this is why we love that fact that most of our hires DID work at another agency; they can help us find the gaps. The combination is great, and it allows our fresh approach to shine will still getting guidance from others.

In a recent Founders podcast episode about John D. Rockefeller, the host shared a quote from Marc Andreessen that talked about people trying things for the first time. He said:

“I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.”

The balance between “it’s our first time” and “we hire people with experience” goes back to the idea of Chesterton’s Fence. We make it very clear to our team that we want their ideas and suggestions, but only after they understand why we do things the way we do.

The right blend of those can be magic.