I was sitting in the back seat when the windshield of the car smashed into the cabin. Time had slowed down and it was like I could see each piece of glass sparkle as it flew by. I don’t remember any noise but it must have been deafening since the car hit so hard it was nearly cut in half. The next thing I remember was seeing my sister laying on her side, halfway to the ground.
My sister died that day.
About a week earlier, my parents had finalized their divorce and my dad gave me the “you’re the man of the house now” speech. I was 2 and a half.
People wonder what motivates them to do extraordinary things. I don’t.
For me, the day I looked down at my sister’s grave, with all of its horrible finality, was the day I decided I would always measure up. I’d always have what it takes. Over the years I learned measuring up means you’ve got to be measured — and you’ve got to be found wanting. And I came to love it all — the success, the failure and the growth.
I turned to the martial arts and learned to use my body and mind in motion under pressure. Later, I joined the Army to be a Green Beret to put my skills and mind to the test in the real world of combat.
After the Army, I found the world of stocks, options, futures, and FOREX. And I learned a new domain to be mastered — money. The markets are fast and millions can be made, and lost, in just minutes.
When the financial crisis hit and my firm shut down, one of my mentors told me to start a “newsletter.” So I did. I learned marketing, selling, and became a coach.
Have you ever gotten $695 in the mail from a complete stranger you’ve never talked to? I have. I’ve sent FAXes on Monday and had a FAX back on Tuesday morning with a credit card number on it.
Have you ever seen the thrill on someone’s face as they tell you the story about how they have been able to reach heights they never thought possible? I have. I trained a kid (right out of college) enough skills to get a job on one of the most competitive trading desks on the planet — Goldman Sachs. He made it to partner, too.
Empathy is the foundation
Some people believe empathy is genetic or a superpower. I think it comes from literally walking a mile in another person’s shoes. From getting the same electricity of emotion they are feeling.
Empathy is like digging a deep foundation for a skyscraper. The deeper the foundation, the higher you can build. And that’s what makes a good CMO (and marketer, really) — empathy. But…
What makes a great CMO is experience. The ability to know what to do and when to do it. I bring that to the table, and more. Like…
- Kindness
- Intelligence
- Creativity
- Knowledge
- Attention to detail
- Solution-based thinking and
- Sales experience
- (and maybe a sense of humor, too)
How we invented omnichannel marketing before it was cool
I’ll state the obvious: humans are humans. They act like they’ve always acted and they will keep acting that way until Elon makes us the Borg.
That simple realization helped me dig out of a deep hole in 2012… One of my largest marketing partners turned into a competitor overnight. They’d duplicated my product and most of the copy. They had a lot more money than I did too.
We were doing about $48M a year by that point so the budgets had gotten large (about $250k a month per campaign across multiple channels). And this new competition was driving CPAs through the roof. Since these were lead gen campaigns, I decided to approach the problem from a variety of new angles.
30% higher profit by ignoring marketing “rules”
First, we re-invented the business model. Everybody said “the money is in the back-end.” For us, the money was in refunds. I implemented a “Refund Reduction” process that:
- dropped refunds from 38% down to 8%.
- increased retention from 3 months to 18 months
Second, we re-invented the “linear” marketing model. That meant we had to invent some really cool technology to track user session path. (ok, we hacked the browser but that doesn’t sound as cool.)
That’s where we tested my “non-linear conversion model” I dreamt up in 2007. Back then, “tabs” were a new thing (yes, we were cavemen with a single browser window). I had a guess that when someone “tabbed” out, their brain would get hijacked. To prevent this, we had to…
- Modify our sales copy to rely on proprietary terms
- Use aggressive SEO to drive those terms to the top of SERPS
- Tie-in retargeting (or pre-targeting) to populate available ad space where possible
We called it the “conversational canvass.” And it worked really, really well. We were able to maintain our sales volume with slightly higher CPAs (instead of crushingly high CPAs).
Good morning, you just lost $3,000,000
Remember that deep, deep hole I had to dig out of in 2012? If you go back to 2011, you’ll find something called the ZMOT study. Google and a few big CPG companies (think P&G and Johnson & Johnson) wanted to find out how the internet influenced the “moment of truth.”
Remember, humans are humans. If you need toothpaste, you’re probably thinking about it when you are cranking like a beast to get the last drop out of the tube. You’ll take a few days to search, then go buy. But, if you’re looking for some cool new tech (more risky) you’re searching months before you go buy.
Rather than try to convert opt-ins in the same way, I decided to see which search “bubble” they were in: the “research” bubble or the “buying” bubble.
True to my namesake (my name means “to mace or hammer”), I bombarded people with email for the first 10 days. We started with 3, then 4, then 5, then 10 per day. (don’t panic, this wasn’t the whole list just a segment of opt-ins.)
People in the “research bubble” would click through on nearly every email. It was… a little nuts. But they wouldn’t buy! People in “no man’s land” (between bubbles)… clicked through the first but rarely past the 3rd email in a day. “Buyer bubble” people would click more often and buy within the first 3 days.
That meant we could shuttle people out of the “blitz” campaign and into “nurture” mode to lower unsubscribes and spam complaints. After all, if people are pre-disposed to buy around specific actions or habits, are we so arrogant to think we can make them buy when we want? Hardly.
The “no man’s land” people went into specific retargeting campaigns that would update depending on actions. Click an ad, great. But did you also click on an email? CTA? Get to a landing page? Add product? Cart view? No? Back in the retargeting box.
To get all of that done, I needed to be hands-on with the entire dev team. We tore things down to how the platters spun on the database servers. Does that mean I can be your database expert? No. But you wouldn’t want that. I’m the guy that needs to be able to understand that “seek time” means something when you’re making 3,000 read/write requests per second.
It also helps to know that there used to be a limit to the number of simultaneous requests for a single file under Apache. With the now ubiquitous cloud storage and SSDs, seek time and file limits are nearly meaningless but you want someone with those little details packed into his brain.
More than that, I’m not convinced I know “what works.” Sure, I’m a strong proponent of methodology. But that’s more like being strategic than married to a particular tactic… like sending cold FAXes to lawyers to get business. (which used to work, by the way)
I also do stuff in the “real world”
This is from a project I was hired to scale. I got to attend a black-tie affair for Dr. Oz’s HealthCorps — the Garden Gala:
Dr. Oz: We had a chance to attend a black-tie for his HealthCorps. It’s called the Garden Gala, truly a black-tie event with all the trimmings. They’ve had wellness influencers, celebrities, medical practitioners, and philanthropists from all over the world come together to raise funds to support HealthCorps’ mission in schools across America.
My marketing method/strategy not only got Michael on the show, it got him personal invites to Dr. Oz’ home for the next three years.
We ran a lot of ads, too. One version of my biggest winner — for Wholetones 2Sleep — pulled 2.2M views (and 31K likes). Guess how many we paid for? About 785,000. The best version of the ad had over 5M views and we only paid for 580,000 or so on that one.
The Real Dose turnaround
Up next is a project I worked on for a company called Real Dose. They sell weight loss supplements. When I came on, the three partners were at each other’s throats and there was no leadership amongst the teams. This project was 6 months overdue and horribly complicated and totally un-optimizable.
I wound up getting that project completed and running in three weeks, got the team focused and united, and helped one of the three partners step up into his role as CEO. I’d call that a win!
That’s an example of my baseline thinking with tracking tags and events — I map everything (I’m a fan of Lucidchart for it). I can identify constraints and bottlenecks, and develop a single document that not only maps growth but makes hiring (new or internal) straightforward and obvious — getting the job description exactly right. Defining strategy through product launch, all on one page.
Working remote? Not a problem.
I’ve worked remote for over 20 years (before all the cool kids decided to do it). Here are a few different ways I’ve come to use asynchronous communication via Loom:
- Long form feedback (10 minutes) — watch
- Short form feedback (3 minutes) — watch
- Short form training (3 minutes, 30 seconds) — watch
I can do Agile. I’m a fan of SCRUM implementation too.
At the end of the day…
Everything is about solving real problems for real people. So I’d love to dig into who you serve and who they serve. I’d want to go to industry events and hang out in hallways to talk about what they’re pissed about, afraid of, fed up with, and generally emotional about. I’d look for big pockets of customers owned by service providers and figure out how to tailor a solution that helps them succeed (tied to annual contracts, of course).
But that’s why you need someone like me. A guy who has a wide background, a love for physics, the samurai, anime, is a legit Wolverine fan, who has kids that read Nietzsche at 14, who reads up on cross-platform tracking for fun, who can actually have a reasonable discussion about UI/UX, that knows when to use CBO and bid cap, and one with a huge spreadsheet of ‘blacklist’ websites so campaigns don’t waste money on display campaigns, etc. etc.
I’ve spent the better part of the last 25 years in professions that require an unvarnished understanding of human decision-making. And, I think I have a modicum of skill in harnessing that decision-making power. That’s a power that should be used for good — which is why I stopped working for rapacious capitalists on Wall Street.
I want a challenge. To grow. But I also know to stay in my lane. Let’s find out if we’re a good fit for each other!
Sincerely,
Maceo Jourdan
+1 602-510-9800 · me@maceojourdan.com