Bonkers Budgets in Marketing | E74 with Jamie Pagan

In this episode of Blame It on Marketing, Emma, Ruta, and guest Jamie Pagan dive into the gritty realities of marketing budgets. From the awkward dance of asking for money to the headaches caused by mismatched sales and marketing priorities, they unpack the budgeting struggles marketers face daily. Jamie shares practical advice from his years in B2B marketing, offering insights on educating leadership, proving ROI, and making the most of lean budgets.

This episode tackles why tight budgets make for tight-lipped marketers and how better communication and alignment with sales can turn things around. 

If you’ve ever had to justify your existence to the finance team, this one’s for you.

Takeaways:

• Budgeting in marketing is often ignored until there's a problem.
• Misalignment between marketing and sales creates budget gaps.
• Sales cycles heavily influence budget timing and strategies.
• Proving ROI isn’t just nice; it’s non-negotiable.
• Educating leadership on marketing's value is critical to securing funds.
• Shoestring budgets lead to lackluster engagement and retention.
• Free tools and creativity are lifesavers when the budget is tight.
• Building trust with leadership pays off in future budget negotiations.
• Regularly tracking and sharing your impact builds a case for investment.
• Negative past experiences with marketing can skew leadership's perception.

We’re Ruta and Emma, the marketing consultants behind Blame it on Marketing. 

If you’re in B2B SaaS or professional services and looking to do marketing that actually drives revenue and profit, we’re here for it.

Visit blameitonmarketing.com and let’s get this show on the road.

Transcript

0:00

So hello everyone and welcome back to Blame It on Marketing with Emma and Ruta. And in this week's episode, I can't believe we haven't actually done a budget episode before. I know we've talked a lot about marketing budget, but we haven't actually done one dedicated to it. So that's what we're gonna do. We've got a very special guest. Jamie, who's from our sponsor Dealfront. So Jamie, over to you, please tell us a bit more about yourself. Jamie, said, director of content here at Dealfront. But yeah, background in B2B marketing for around 12 years now. So I've had my fair share of budgetary discussions slash arguments slash frustrations. So I think when we were discussing topics, this was one of the first ones that came to mind. So happy to... Happy to chat all things budget. Amazing. I'm personally really excited for this episode. So, but before we jump into budgets and talking about why they're bonkers, Would you tell us your deepest darkest marketing fuck? This was my first role out of university. I worked for the Royal Mint, so the company who mints coins for the United Kingdom. And we used to do a trade show over in Beijing each year. And we had to ship product weeks ahead to get it to Beijing on time for us to sell it in China. And you can imagine the customs documentation for that was fairly lengthy and all in Chinese, which was great. So we would spend a good few days, if not weeks prepping this paperwork. And I basically just got the calculations wrong. you not only had to put the recommended retail price of the product you were selling, so gold or silver coins, you also had to put the raw metal value. the each metal that's involved in the gold coin, which isn't just gold, it's got like copper and it's got other metals in. and you had to work all of those out per coin and then for the total amount you were taking. So it was a ridiculous amount of. maths based on the makeup of each coin and every single coin's a different makeup, et cetera, et cetera. So you can imagine it got pretty complicated. I got it wrong. We had a deadline. We basically just had to pull an all -nighter and do all the calculations again and then fly out to Beijing the next day. So that was fun. you know when you hear stories like that and you think why does that shit land in the lap of marketing? why were you the one working out the cost of the metal in the coins? i know like it's our job to ship stuff for events whatever but come on. surely someone else should have been doing that. it's an interesting one. the mint basically marketing would pitch a product to the business and then you'd have a product marketing manager sort of manage that through. We were just doing the trade events and choosing what products we were taking. So we had to check the, you basically have like a bill of materials for every coin that was ever minted and you had to check the bill of materials, look at the makeup of the coin. calculate how much of each precious metal or materials used, turn that into a real value of that material at the point of sale so that you could pay China enough tax based on what you had sold in the country. So it was one of those, it's one of those slope shoulder things of, okay, it's your trade show. You calculate what the coins made of basically. I absolutely love that. So speaking of calculations and maths and budgets, great, great transition there, Ruta, put on the back. I feel like everyone in B2B marketing has always felt like they didn't get quite the right budget. But Where do you think it's going wrong? So is it founders and board members that are kind of... thinking about things wrong? it marketers expecting too much or asking for too little? Where do you think that kind of first area of what am I trying to say? Where do you think that first kind of hurdle comes when it comes to setting a budget? I think if I was to summarize it at very top level, I'd say lack of alignment, lack of education, and probably... Unrealistic expectations in terms of ROI. So in terms of alignment, think depending on the, the how modern or mature a company is, you've got sales marketing that's in, in a revenue function, or you've got sales and marketing that's in very, very different functions. And they argue over attribution and lead gen and all that sort of fun stuff. so I think the first thing that I say on the whole, most people, most companies get wrong is just lack of alignment between marketing. sales and the overarching business goals with we're very, fortunate deal front that we have a company goal and then you have objectives by team. OKR's. That basically filter down that all linked to that original company goal. So you're all pointing in the same direction and you're all chasing the same thing. So lack of alignment. I think they fail to the, the underestimating the complexity of B2B marketing, I think is a, another thing to factor in. I don't know what's the average B2B sales cycles now it's like. four to six months or something ridiculous 270 odd, it's yeah forever. Yeah I'll be retired by the time some of these deals close. Yeah so I think because they're longer and more complex than ever I think boards often or boards founders, C -suite sometimes fail to realize that it's not just about that immediate lead gen you know put out an ad and you get five leads great happy days. It's more about the building relationships and trust and value over a longer period, which I think the reason for that is probably because it's hard to measure trust and rapport and those relationships that you're building with clients in a digital world. And I think that sort of links to the dimension of the ROI. So I think probably every single founder, C -suite, of companies I've worked for over the past 12 years, bar deal front, would say, focus far too much on the short term ROI. So it's what can we do in the next 30 days to boost this or what campaigns can you run in March, like a March campaign? whilst I do understand the benefit of having a focus campaign for a month, maybe you cover a topic for a particular month. when you actually zoom out and think of it in terms of a much sort of bigger picture, I think this world of AI, like even more so C -suite are just obsessed with this immediate ROI and like mass outbound and I will get 400 ,000 leads and convert them at whatever percent and it's gonna be sort of overnight. So I think, yeah, lack of alignment between marketing and the rest of the business. I'm glad you mentioned the whole sales cycle thing because one of my favorite things to do when I get asked or forced myself up on someone to do their budgets is I like to basically look at their sales cycle and be like, so if in 2026 you want to make a million pounds and your sales cycle is six months, guess what? That marketing budget has to kick in in June of 2025 to actually make target for 2026 and they're like, well, like the budget's already been set. And I'm like, well, you've got a six month sales cycle. Like if you don't start doing that activity and spending on whatever you need to be spending on, like you're going to be six months behind by the time January comes. And like, there's no way of catching up on that. so I'm glad you mentioned sales cycle. I don't know if you've kind of had those conversations as well. Yeah, I think it's strange. You'd figure in a world that we're in that people would understand compounding interest, right? You have to put in a lot of work upfront for things to snowball and eventually turn into the leads that you're looking for. And that takes time. And I think we we obviously do throughout the year, you would do multiple iterations or multiple updates of like readjustments of budgets and things like that. But yeah, for sure, for sure. think it's, they seem to think, we'll do it in November for January. And that's just the way when you do it. it's, yeah, it's just not the case. just the that's just the sales cycle right? like that doesn't even include the bit that happens before. you could probably add another six three to six months on top of the kind of like marketing if you want to call it marketing nurture or whatever else you know we get up to like that what that means before someone even just books the demo. people forget that as well. i'm... Ruta knows i'm very hot on the old velocity thing and that you know you want to make sure that you like you can do an event and a person can sit in it as an event lead for 400 days you know before they ever book a call things like that it's wild and then you're expecting you're like yeah but we did that event why didn't we convert anybody like yeah because it takes forever so yeah there's a lot of short -sightedness around that and it really makes our lives very difficult so that comes on to us and are we in fact actually part of the problem I think we probably are at times. I think some marketers are not great at asking for what they need. And then I think when you go into the boardroom and you've got your seat at the table and people are grilling you and asking you why you want to spend money on things, I don't know that we're always very good at pushing back. So I don't know, Jamie, if that's been your experience and how you might think about countering that. Yeah, I completely agree. It would be, it'd be naive of me to think that it's, it's marketing on, you know, perhaps even 50%, maybe sometimes more the issue in terms of asking for more budget and getting necessary budget. I think it's not necessarily a skill that you're kind of taught. I don't know, like in university, are they, they teaching, like optimal budget requests and the best way to get more money? an email when I left uni. It was fucking wild. And I economics. It wasn't even like artsy -fartsy subject. I didn't know how to write an email that was like, you know, like a sales email. What? You don't necessarily go into a role knowing how to effectively pitch or correctly pitch for budget and how you give the right to business case and all these, you know, formal things that you need to do. I mean, if it's your budget you're asking for, you need to sort of bear almost all of the responsibility for getting that budget. What are some of the kind of, I guess, key things that you're thinking about when you are pitching for budget? One of my favorite things is the education side of it. I sort of mentioned it in the last sort talking point, but I think... We wrongly assume sometimes that people know what we're talking about, the tactics that we're, you know, pitching, the strategies that we're looking to implement. And I think that's, that's unfair in the same way as I might sit there and listen to someone in sales and not have a clue what they're on about or not have a clue about Salesforce campaigns and Salesforce build and things like that. I think. It's not just about informing them or just asking, it's about educating. So I think we need to educate people on the value of marketing. marketing is, I mean, think about the last 12 to 24 months, how much marketing has changed in terms of like how much of a step forward it's taken like Chris Walker of Refine Labs was what three or four years ago now and since he sort of shared that initial wisdom I think things have changed massively but I think we need to make sure that we're putting as much effort into supplying data as well into educating as much as just supplying data so it explains to them how content and thought leadership works in the bigger digital ecosystem and how brand positioning contributes and how a tone of voice can implement things. I think education is a, is a massive part of it. over -communicating I think works well. I think that could come across sort of negatively depending on how, how you, how you take it. But I think sometimes, well, I'd say more often than not C -suite are lacking information. or founders or C -suite are lacking information. So I think if you overshare information, it kind of does, two things. It shows you're on top of your data. You're on top of your reporting. but I think it, it's like that proactivity in communicating. you're working like imagine that back in the days when you were told show your workings in an exam it's that whole thing of like if you over communicate the whole thinking and strategy and planning you know the scribbles on a piece of paper on a board the mirror board you've got whatever it is i think over communicating can sometimes help gives a bit more confidence we speak about building trust and rapport with people outside of the business but it's exactly the same inside of the business so over communicate i think is a is a good one And then the last one's almost like a non -negotiable, right? It's to demonstrate the clear ROI. So one of the first things I did when I came into role and I've done it every other role is build a report and dashboard that shows what I'm doing as quickly as possible. Cause it's the easiest way to ask for more, more money, more people, more heads in the team. So I think in terms of, if I turn that into like a real world example, thinking about full funnel sort of tracking like PQLs. conversion of that to SQLs, the volume of SQLs, the conversion of that to close one ARPA ARR, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you can show and link back everything you're doing to demonstrable ROI, they almost can't argue with you. If there's not a founder on this planet that's going to say no to having three pounds back for every pound spent as long as you can show that. so yeah, I think educate, over communicate, and then just be rock solid on demonstrating ROI. I one of the things that's definitely, almost definitely gonna be on the minds of some of our listeners where they maybe don't have particularly invested CEOs or C -suite is this inability sometimes to demonstrate ROI. the way that we're talking about it because for those of us who've got access to the data and who have got platforms that are able to do these sorts of things, who are able to do the maths, that's that's easy for us. For everyone else listening who is kind of like how do I show ROI when I don't have access to some of this data, this is a bit on the spot but is there anything you would suggest that those people could do that's slightly different? I mean I know there are other metrics accessible to people you know you can go into your Google Analytics and stuff like that, but is there anything else you can think of those people could do? Yeah. okay. In the, in the realms of attribution, two things, put self -reported attribution on the website. That would be, it's not necessarily the most accurate thing as this, as a standalone metric, but you know, the, did you hear about us? or where did you see us? That sort of stuff. had, I implemented that at the last company and I was at something like 30 % of people that filled out said LinkedIn. So that's great. That's 30 % of people coming in and saying that they found us on a marketing channel. Fantastic. That's showing ROI of LinkedIn ads or LinkedIn organic. The second would be speak to customers. I think there's always these, I don't know, this advice floating around that you should speak to X number per week. it's difficult to find the time to speak to customers, especially if you're, you know, if you haven't got the budget for the tool, we've probably got a smaller team and lack of time, but try your best to speak to customers or leverage CS to ask customers where they heard about you. It might be quite manual. It might be quite like Google Sheets, Excel based. But yeah, I think self -reported attribution and just speak to customers, see where they heard about you, see where they found you. have you got any examples of where you have been having budget conversations and basically the responses are just like, okay, I don't think they get it and kind of how did you get around that? The reason why I'm asking is that I know your talking points will probably be similar to what you just said, but it'd be great to kind of talk through an example of that if you have one, if not, that's completely fine. yeah, probably like, I mean, like I said, I've been in marketing 12 years. I've, I've made a fair few mistakes in terms of budget requests in that period where it's, I've seen something on LinkedIn that other companies are having success with. And then I just go to my founder or CEO or VP and say, I want to try this kind of have 5k. And it's sort of like, no, you, you, you know, no, you can't have 5k. So, it's like back to the drawing board and, and write a business case. I think it can be very, very tough to write a business case without actually any data or any proof. think then you lean on perhaps industry trends, you lean on data that you can find online, success stories. So just trying to find as much data, perhaps externally, if you don't have it internally. I don't know if that sort of answers the question. I've got an example of where I have done this, but what I've ended up doing is alienating the senior leadership in front of me, if that's a worthwhile story. So where we have been able to demonstrate ROI and been able to show them this is exactly the amount of budget that we should be spending on marketing to hit the... hit the target set, you know, this is how much money we want to see coming from inbound. And the reality was this company wanted to spend 60 grand on marketing, but they actually needed to spend more like 300k. And then, you know, that you see the cut, their faces drop and they're like, my God, there's no way we can spend 300K on marketing. And lead us to say they did not continue working with me. So even in the situation where you're like, that's the absolute reality, you know, that's how their marketing's performing. That is roughly what they need to spend. It's based on their ROI. It's not based on anything crazy. Sometimes, you know, that news, that bad news that you might have to spend. more than you were first willing to needs to be delivered in a certain way and it's certainly taught me something about how you deliver that news because most of the time people do need more money than they're prepared to put forward. and perhaps what I could have done instead differently, had I had my time again, was to basically break down the budget a little bit further for them and to sort of see so they could see that this was not like an upfront 300k you're gonna need to spend tomorrow. This is something that's like phased across the year, that's ramping up, that your targets ramp up in line with it, that you know if you're doing well and you're getting that payback that you can then afford to spend more money on marketing but equally if we're not seeing the return. we're not gonna spend that amount of money. So like that to me was like my ultimate, that was one of my fuck ups. Like just being like, boom, you need to spend 300K and them all going, no. Probably cried themselves to sleep after that conversation. So yeah, don't do that. surprised. Yeah, I'm always surprised that the willingness to invest in a large sales function, that, I don't know, 20 heads will just increase the number of dials, 50 dials a day will have 20 of them will have this many demos. I've always been surprised at the willingness to double the size of a sales team versus investing in marketing. But I think, know, It's one of those maybe it's When you think of most founders like I'm thinking like legacy historical sort of companies They are a bit older generationally. It was very very different It was just a case of having a massive sales team increased your sales But yeah, I'm still surprised that nowadays how common it is where they're happy to investor sizeable amount in sales, but not marketing. And they look at three hundred k marketing is upfront cost, but three hundred k headcount in sales is that's a solid investment. Yeah. I think also a lot of people have been burned by bad marketing and bad agencies and bad consultants and all of that stuff. it's not necessarily, I'm not saying that those are bad people that are doing that. It's just things aren't set up the way they should be, or they don't get enough budget or the product market fit isn't right yet. You know, they're not ready to market. Someone's micromanaging, you know, a whole plethora of things can happen. And then a couple of those experiences I think are bad enough because obviously as humans we weigh. negative experiences higher than equal positive experiences where you're like, yeah, no, marketing's not for us. Like, or yeah, no, I don't want to spend, you know, an X amount of marketing. I'll just have them just do enough, you know, just stick around kind of thing. So I think that can happen quite a lot. I was gonna say, if you think about like more often than not, the senior leaders, historically have been more from the sales background, like the sales function, they, they move up in the business, they up being C -suite. So it's, it's, guess it is again, it's kind of, it's kind of wrong of me to assume. that they understand the value of marketing when their background over the past 20 years has been mainly sales. And you think those people who have got a background mainly in sales are going to look for support and look for external resources to help them with the areas where they're not most confident. was a CEO in the past who said to me, I've hired you because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing in, in, marketing. So that's why I've brought you in as an expert to do that. So I think to your point about, sort of bad quality marketing and issues with agencies and everyone being burned. I mean, I get advertised every single day. these agencies where it's basically a 23 year old kid who's just graduated uni is promising you a thousand leads a month. And it's probably just some sort of AI mass app out thing that he's doing. And you think that the chances of someone who's got a 20 year sales background in a senior leadership position to click on one of those and be like, he'll sort me out, get burn and then hate marketing for the rest of their careers quite high. Right. Yeah, I've got a mate who works in cyber he asked me for some advice and to just give him some advice on what they could do strategy wise. He mentioned that they had brought on a SEO agency that were only charging something like a thousand pounds a month, 1500 pound a month. And they were saying that they were going to produce, produce blogs, optimize, they were bringing in strategy. And I said to him, what, on paper, like, what are the deliverables? And he was like, no, they're just like, they're our agency, they're going to handle SEO. I was like, a thousand, that's not even paying one person's, like a junior, that's not even paying a junior's wage, And I think it's too, yeah, too often you can just go in and it's, like you said, the scope of work is just. basically someone logging in, just logging in, logging out and that's what you're getting. ridiculously fashionable nowadays, isn't it? These young uns with like one year experience pitching agencies and stuff. Absolutely. But this isn't an episode about shit agencies. I'm sorry I diverted us. What happens when marketing teams don't have enough budget? So we, we use something internally called, bow tie marketing. mean, it's an industry, a well -known phrase is not a deal front thing and different brand new thing, but bow tie marketing is essentially everything from the point of, them finding out who you are awareness all the way through to retention. bit in the middle of the bow tie is the conversion point, the close won so I think when you break it down into that sort of view under investing, I think if we go left to right, limited brand awareness. you're going to find it really, really difficult to compete against some of these big names. let's be honest, C -suite and founders love to reference your competitors when they're talking to you in marketing of like, you see, see what they're doing. It looks great. Can we do that? And you're like, yeah, give me five K a month and I'll do it. And they're like, no. so in, in ability to compete. reduced top of funnel, ineffective pipeline generation. Sales are going to be unhappy, poor pipeline conversion because you're not nurturing them. You're not producing any content that's going to get them sort of to the point of more trust and rapport. therefore you're not going to have much revenue generated by marketing, lack of customer engagement, the other side of the bow tie, lack of customer retention, because you're not showing them how to use the product, whether it's playbooks or reports. or guides, tutorials, academies, whatever you want to call it. Unhappy business, lack of, no further investment in marketing. Everyone's unhappy from a team perspective. Lack of resources is ultimately going to lead to low morale and motivation, which let's be honest, it doesn't take very long. What one quarter of a lack of budget and you're going to be feeling pretty overwhelmed. That leads to burnout, employee retention issues. So customer retention issues, employee retention issues. failure to attract new customers. Yeah. Not, not a happy time. Nope. Lose -lose for everyone. Everyone go spend a lot of marketing. Yeah. Yeah, like we spoken about like legacy and historic views on marketing. Let's be honest. Nowadays, if you don't have at least semi decent marketing, the whole company's job is going to be almost impossible. So, you know, every single day we're having, we have conversations with ourselves guys of that, that reciprocated. can we help? What can we, what can we be doing? What's working and what's not? And you just think like, if you were looking for a tool yourself and you're on a website and it's got no content and it's got no like personal tone of voice on their social no posts like that's not going to be good for sales you're going to get almost no inbounds no one's going to trust you you're going to click on it and go it looks like a dodgy company So I think in the 2020s that we're in, as much as we joke about marketing being involved in everything and the overarching thing, really is, it's part of that revenue generating function. And I think people are going to start looking at it as an equal share between sales. customer success or, you know, account management and marketing. It's all part of the flywheel. to hear you say that. like, how can it not be? Like, just, it doesn't make any sense, but I mean, plenty of organizations that seem to be still going and still making money and not be that way. So something's happening. I don't know what it is. Yeah. Yeah. To be, yeah, to be devil's advocate, think, like we spoke about earlier, some marketers just shoot themselves in the foot by not reporting on the right stuff, not being able to communicate what impact they're having because they haven't tracked it because they didn't need to maybe do that previously to be promoted and succeed and that kind of thing. So it's a bit of a shock to the system when that does come because of those things. So if you're really struggling, leave, leave the marketing in so they can do customer retention and upsell and cross sell. which again, is not a thing that most companies go to. Yeah, I think it's, it's probably a bit swayed because I've seen I'm connected with a lot of marketers. I'm also connected with a lot of salespeople, but I think over the, certainly for 2024, I've heard and seen a lot of movements within marketing functions way more than I've seen it in sales functions in 2024. That was different in 2023 to be fair, but it has definitely found that even some of the companies that I looked at and I was like, I wish our marketing was as good as yours. I've seen like big downsizing in marketing teams at those places and then it's mad like their content feeds just go super quiet and you're like who did you get rid of because they were clearly basically your entire function Mm. So this as in if you've got no budget and C -suite unlikely to give you any, what would I do to get budget? Okay, so I think three steps or three tactics. I think the first one, this is actually based on. to Alice de Courcy from Cognism. I think I read for the first time CMO. And there was an interesting point in that where the first time that she pitched this demand gen play, the business weren't necessarily entirely confident on it. So the first tactic is that last ditch like budget request. So, okay, you're not going to get a 300k to use your 300k example. They've said no to 300k or you're not confident you're going to get the 300k. Can you get 5k signed off like realistically for you to say 5k, which is? the monthly salary of a pretty mid -level sales, a sales role nowadays. Or like an AE role based out London would be 5k a month, give or take like salary wise. So last ditch budget request would be like, you give me 5k fenced off for 12 months or six months? Cause it's going to take six to 12 months for us to prove anything. And I can do what I want with it. You can't, you've got no control over it, but you give me 5k a month for the next six to 12 months. So I would try that and then use that 5K to just prove like a tiny bit of the strategy. Or like a dulled down version a much like more streamlined version of it if you can turn that 5k into seven and half K They might give you 25k. They might give you 100k. Whatever it is So I would try that last ditch like Egg, borrow, steal, whatever you want to call it. 5k is not that much to ask for If you can't get five two and a half like two and a half K a month could be one Campaign on LinkedIn or it could be one direct mail campaign that you get four times return on build up the confidence So that'd be number one The second would be, think, a pretty obvious one, which is just leverage all the free stuff you've got access to, which I think, to be honest, is a kind of non -negotiable anyway. You shouldn't be asking for budget if you're not nailing these anyway. So things like content marketing, it's basically free to write a blog. Like, okay, yes, you're probably paying for your website and you're hosting, but that's already in existence. You're not asking for more budget for that. So writing blogs is free. recording a podcast can be done like super cheaply. I mean we're on Riverside right now and it's like you can get it for $15 a month. That's an easy ask or just pay for it yourself. I know you shouldn't have to do that but $15 like it's palatable. So blogs, white papers, case studies, all stuff that's pretty easy to scale and to write. Social media, again non -negotiable really, one post a day. really, really easy. It's free. It starts to build up those, those organic channels. Email marketing is super, super affordable, if not free, like MailChimp, all those providers have free packages. And that's going to help you do targeted personalized campaigns. Partnerships and co -marketing, think is another one where you can leverage peers, connections, mates, like other companies who are in a similar position to you and host events together, spread the cost, that sort of stuff. All of that, like I said, I think it's kind of a non -negotiable. You should be doing that anyway, is like your BAU, or like BAU underneath all the sort of projects you could be running. And then I think the third one is build trust and then build your case. So even if you can't secure the budget now, don't give up. Like it could be next month that the winds change, the industry changes, the market changes. You have one big deal come in and they're on a high and you might be able to get budget. So I think If you can't get budget now, do what you can to build out that reporting dashboard that I spoke about, get as much data as you possibly can. But the dashboard that I use just for content is like 12 sheets and there's hundreds of metrics on there in their own right. They don't really mean too much, but if I can give you five graphs that show we're going in the right. it's going to start to build confidence. The more time you invest in building that trust and rapport with the C -suite and the more data you can give them, it's going to help you further down the line. It's kind of that demand gen mentality of invest into building the trust and rapport so that when you next ask for budget, they're far more likely to give you the money. So those three things. I think it kind of almost nicely summarizes everything we've spoken about in this podcast just under a stressful situation. So Jamie, have you got any marketing gossip for us? Anything that's been living rent free in your mind that you've seen that's annoyed you, that you've loved, that you'd like to share with us? Yeah, I do know why the one that I jotted down with is probably just a career bugbear like it's just It's I think it's got it's got better Like since since I've moved to the upfront. I've not experienced it. That's the that's the good thing But for the first 10 10 11 years, it's the grass is greener syndrome It's like the it's it's just that poison right in in C -suite founders mind of like Why can't we do that? Look at those guys. It looks like they're closing so many deals. So I think there's the way it sort of has come across over the past 10 years is changing strategies like every month. So you agree something, you get budget for it, happy days, and you start it. And then after a month, they're like, we haven't seen any inbounds from those LinkedIn campaigns. Can we try direct mail? And you're like, come on, like you've got to give it like three to six months. So constantly changing strategies. overvaluing competitor stuff. So when we see competitors activity, it's always through a rose tinted goggles. Like it looks amazing from the outside, but they might not have closed any deals. And if they have closed the deals, they might have a three year payback on those deals that they've acquired because they might have money they're spending. Their customer retention might be horrendous. So you've only got this like outsiders view on things. Shiny object syndrome. think that's massive. especially in the last year because of AI. And it's, can't we try AI? Can't we sprinkle AI on the tool? And I think you can, of course you can, if it's done right. Doubting the team's capabilities, again, based on the other things I've just mentioned. That's a hard one because I think it kind of links to that micromanagement, it's... when you overvalue what competitors are doing and you assume that your team aren't doing those things because you can't see it or whatever, that's a tough one. And then I think that just, yeah, unrealistic expectations of what you're gonna get with budget and impatience. I think they're like the obvious ways it presents itself. thank you so much for joining us. It's been a really great episode and it's nice to hear our director of content talking about all these things, even though I know you're more of a journalist background, but that's a conversation for a whole other day. Thank you everyone, to everyone who's listening. We hope to see you on blameitonmarketing .com and we wanna thank you Dealfront for sponsoring us.