Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 370 Q & A with Jim Huffman

Summary

In this insightful episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, Matt Heinz and Jim Huffman talk about an Operating System for Growth Marketing

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “An Operating System for Growth Marketing“ and my guest is Jim Huffman, Founder & CEO at GrowthHit.

Tune in to learn about advanced growth marketing strategies and the importance of conversion rate optimization (CRO) in this evolving digital marketing landscape and:

• The necessity of identifying growth blockers
• Balancing quality and quantity in leads
• Fostering a culture of testing and failure
• The ongoing exploration of AI’s potential in marketing.

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW:

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody. Happy new year and welcome to the very first episode for 2025 of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz. Excited to have you here for another year of great content, great guests. Super excited to get this ball rolling. If you are joining us live on the middle of your workday, in the middle of your work week thank you so much for joining us.

If you are listening or watching on demand, thank you so much for downloading and subscribing every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio is always available past, present, and future at salespipelineradio.com. Today, very excited to kick off 2025 with my friend, Jim Huffman. He is the CEO and founder of GrowthHit and one of the smartest marketers I know.

Jim, thank you so much for joining us.

Jim: Matt, pumped to be here, man. That’s a great first week of the year to be here.

I’ve known you for a while. You did a workshop on digital marketing and helping to drive demand and pipeline in Seattle in front of the Entrepreneur Network we’re both a part of that, I think had one of the highest ratings of any workshop in recent memory, which is a very high bar to set, but I think also as indicative, not only of your expertise, but also the importance and

[00:01:12] Matt: and just how popular and on demand that content is. It seems like we’ve been talking about digital marketing for a long time. The playbook continues to change, right? And so I’m curious, maybe for those that don’t know who you are, talk a little bit about your background and then we can get into sort of the changing landscape of what the digital channels look like.

[00:01:31] Jim: Yeah, for sure. And yeah, your talk was pretty awesome. Adam Weiler and I were comparing notes on it. It’s fun to have some light bulb moments go off. I’ve GrowthHit, marketing agency. I started my career in finance looking at spreadsheets and then that didn’t take me too far.

So I got into marketing and we started this agency about eight years ago, just accidental. And I was obsessed with a couple things. One is, This idea of growth hacking at the time and growth marketing, which is essentially just full funnel marketing. And the second thing was conversion rate optimization, which I actually hate the phrase.

It’s just doing experiments, doing A B testing. And so when you’re doing A B testing, when you’re looking at full funnel marketing, you’re able to have a bigger impact on the business on a sales pipeline, on driving revenue. And so that’s been an obsession over the years for seeing like how you can come into a company and add those two mindsets to try and help them one, unblock growth because people want to grow, but it’s are you even ready?

And then second, something you talk about is how do you get to this Holy Grail of predictable revenue or predictable sales as opposed to you’re like, Holy smokes, something worked. What happened? Let me look at the Google analytics and how do I replicate that? So that’s something I’ve been really into.

[00:02:50] Matt: This concept of both growth hacking and CRO has been around for a while and I think in B2B, it’s a mixed bag historically, right? We know that a lot of our buyers are online. We know that there are journeys we can manage there. But oftentimes it’s complicated.

It’s a long sales cycle. There’s multiple people in the buying committee. So it’s not like a click conversion from search is going to close the seven figure deal. So how do you help clients put in context? The importance of continuing to leverage digital and conversion rate optimization and continuing to improve performance there with the complexity of that B2B journey?

[00:03:26] Jim: Yeah, that’s a good question. So the first thing I do is I have people ask themselves a question: Do you know what’s actually stopping you from growing? And it’s like a scalability assessment if we want to give it a fancy marketing headline. And I usually say it’s one of three things. So if you’re thinking of like your Q1 goals, why might you not be getting there?

Is it 1). Positioning? Are you in a sea of sameness and you’re not standing out? So before you start doing ads, before you start optimizing the funnel, it’s let’s get that dialed in. And so there’s a whole path we could go down there. The second is I like to start bottom of the funnel is conversion.

Do you know how to activate people? Is your sales funnel about booking a call? Is it a demo? Is it product led growth? Do we need to drip them content authority before we go for the jugular or is it about speed and being able to take a call today because it’s a cybersecurity breach and it’s go time? Or the third thing is maybe you have a traffic problem.

And when I say traffic problem, do you have a lever you can pull to double traffic and double sales? Or are you a one trick pony and you can only get it one way and we can’t diversify? And so that’s like the first thing I’m doing is okay. Where is their high impact of those three things? And then from there I’m starting to assess okay, where can we have an impact?

And I’ll pause there cause there’s different ways we could go. But the first thing is like assessing where are we at? Like where do we need to have our lasers focus right now?

[00:04:56] Matt: Focus is the key to that, right? I see a lot of companies that are spending a lot of money on digital marketing, and they’re really just focused on volume and there isn’t enough precision around the right people.

And even in a B2B space, I find it’s sometimes a culture change, Jim, to be able to help people get away from the most clicks for the lowest possible cost and say, I’m okay with fewer clicks if they’re the right clicks. Yeah. So how do you help clients balance quantity and quality in a healthier, predictable, repeatable way?

[00:05:25] Jim: Oh my gosh. That’s such a good question. And you said this in one of your talks, you said a stat that has been living rent free in my head since we spoke, where it was like, 70 percent of the time someone makes a B2B purchase, they’re going with the first person they spoke, to the first person they heard of.

So what does that mean in relation to your question? And it’s, as we look at 2025 planning, we need to have a kumbaya as far as here’s our shekels to put towards marketing. How much is going to direct response, I can see ROI today, versus how much is going to stuff where we don’t know attribution. And by the way, If we do, it’s not going to happen for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months.

And that’s a huge culture shift. So that’s one thing is having that Kumbaya and by the way, reminding people. The second thing that I think marketers and salespeople, it can be really tough to create a culture of messing up, failing and testing. So the other thing I like to do is Hey, of our growth calendar that we’re going to do, what are the things where it’s okay to mess up?

It’s okay to learn? And maybe it’s 5% of our budget or time, or maybe it’s 25%. But knowing that we’re planting seeds, because right now we’re doing a lot of stuff with AI that could be viewed as tinkering and failing, but we’re planting seeds for that. So those are two things I like to try and get on the same page with the client or with the team. Cause if you do, you’re setting the foundation to really build a rockstar growth team that can test and learn. But if you don’t, oh man, you’re going to have some tough conversation in 90 days where it’s like, where’s the ROI? Why didn’t that campaign work?

[00:07:04] Matt: And that’s a tough environment to work in. I wrote down culture of messing up. I actually think that is really important when you move from saying, I want the most MQLs, the most leads possible to saying, I want the right leads. You are retraining the board. You’re returning the leadership team on what the marketing scorecard might look like.

And if you look at your marketing team, you might find someone on the team that knows how to do the most leads at the lowest possible cost that is focused on CRO purely to get higher yield. And now you’re asking them to focus on quality as well. That’s a different thing. Now– if you don’t address the elephant in the room, which is we don’t expect you to know how to do this right out of the gate.

Even though there are a bunch of companies you can learn from this company, this industry, this moment in time in our growth curve is unique, right? Back to the hard thing about hard things is no one has done what you’re doing before. So as a leader, how important is it to balance– we need to generate results with providing some grace and patience around the process to get there?

[00:08:07] Jim: I’m a big fan of a blog post turned to a book, Amp It Up by Frank Slootman, on how you can turn up the temperature to go faster, but also do it in a way where it’s a safe place to fail.

So what I like to do is the reverse dashboard, like an action tracker where it’s Hey guys, it is okay to mess up. We’re going to be tinkering. We’re testing AI and that is fine. However, where I’m going to hold the feet to the fire is the reverse dashboard. And for us, an example of that is how many experiments do we run in a quarter?

Whether that’s landing page experiments, email experiments, whatever that is. And that’s where I track. So for us, we say 12. I want to do one per week because I believe if I have the team that’s testing and learning, the input will result in the output that we want. And so that’s one way of trying to be like, okay, I’m giving grace.

I’m] making it okay to mess up, but I’m going to be pretty hard on- we need to have that input. But candidly, with GrowthHit, our agency right now, we put a lot into stuff where it is immediate ROI results. And I’m even having to like drink my own Kool Aid as we invest more in content marketing and things where I’m basically like, I don’t care to see any ROI on that in the short term, but it’s something that we had to get buy in and it starts with the top.

[00:09:26] Matt: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Jim Huffman. He is the founder, CEO of GrowthHit talking about conversion rate optimization, talking about improving digital performance, but doing it in a way that drives the right traffic, the right pipeline and repeatable, sustainable way. You mentioned earlier the stat and I’m going to get the numbers slightly wrong.

I’m going to ballpark it. Shout out, Kerry Cunningham, who did this research in the early Fall. But your buyers don’t want to talk to you until well into the buying process, like 70, 73 percent of the buying process is done when they’re willing to talk to sellers. They don’t want to talk to you before then, but like you said, Jim, they will work with the first company they hear from,

they’re more likely to buy from the first company they know. Those are counter to each other. They don’t want a demo early on. They don’t want a sales call early on, but they will learn from you early on. You’re the ability for you to educate, to teach, to challenge the status quo, to be a trusted advisor is enormous, but here’s the rub.

If we’re following that data and believe that data, those early engagements are not going to immediately convert into pipeline. They’re not going to immediately convert into form fills. They’re not going to immediately convert even into leads. And so now I have a problem justifying this behavior inside an organization that is measuring me based on leads and pipeline.

How do we balance that? How do we try to have a better conversation internally that respects the buying journey, but also respects the work that has to go into the eventual pipeline building?

[00:10:56] Jim: It’s so much around expectation management with the voices in the room, right? Because if they just think you have this big green growth button that you smash, and then you’re drowning in leads, that’s super dangerous, right?

And so it’s getting alignment there. And one thing that I like to do with these experiments is, what persona are we going after? Because we were so good at going after bottom of the funnel searches. I need a CRO agency today. We crushed that, but guess what? That’s quite easy.

And so it’s okay, this is X amount of resources are going to that, but we’re down with looking at a more top of funnel metrics, page views, email signups, and knowing that will pay dividends. But two kind of tips to think through there is what’s your seasonality of your business?

When is it demand capture time versus demand creation time? So what that means is we see a lot of demand going into Q4, so it’s not about doing a white paper to talk about growth strategy. It is time to close, but then there’s other seasons where it’s a little bit slower, where I absolutely want to lean into that.

But you also want to be oversharing these insights and data with your board, with your team to get their buy in. So they really see the big picture. Cause if all of a sudden it’s February and leads drop and they don’t understand that, those are some awkward and hard conversations to talk about as you’re looking in the rearview mirror.

Expectation management showing the big picture. We call it The 12 Month Growth Calendar so people really understand that the recipe you’re putting forth.

[00:12:28] Matt: Increasingly, thankfully, we’re seeing companies that have been the early adopters of this effort and are seeing the manifestation of the metrics we talked about, right?

Where they have greater advantage. If someone’s going to buy something and there’s three vendors, you don’t have a 33 percent chance. You have a 65 percent chance of getting the business because you were there up front. And so that investment earlier increases conversion rates and that’s how they then justify that early work.

There’s math there that CFOs increasingly are saying, yeah, I buy into that. I want to see more of that. But, that takes [00:13:00] a leap of faith and courage and discipline to lean into. We’re 14 minutes into this conversation, Jim. We haven’t talked about AI at all.

And I think, obviously search is one of multiple components of a demand strategy and leveraging the digital landscape.

What are you seeing now? And what do you expect over the next 12-ish months? I realized how fast things are going and how hard that is to predict, but as so many marketers are trying to figure out how to manage their digital marketing in 2025, what’s your perspective?

[00:13:30] Jim: Yeah, it’s so fun. There was a talk, I went to– the book, AI First– Andy Sack was a part of it and talks about being this AI-first company and what is the foundation of that? What’s your tech stack? What are your guardrails building an AI council to start playing with it? So we’ve started doing that and here’s some of the things we’re seeing. It’s we’re basically looking on a client by client basis and understanding from a scale perspective, where’s the biggest impact, right? Obviously it’s great with copywriting– from ads to landing pages to email. That’s quite simple, right? The other thing, some clients with imagery using Midjourney, it’s been really interesting to accelerate the work there and with some of the video work that’s still been a little spotty. But honestly, where I’m getting really intrigued is starting to build databases and get, really smart with how we can approach those.

So for example we are looking at location based services where we create a scraper through Google Maps, where we can scrape all the locations. We can then use a screen grab tool where we pull every webpage. Then we bring in AI to basically do an assessment of those pages. We’re then funneling in Google reviews to then do a AI based voice of customer search component of that.

The next question is, what do we do with that? I don’t know. We’re trying to figure that out. But it’s like we’re tinkering and we’re playing with looking at what we’re doing and how AI can make us like 10 X better. And the last thing that I’ll say on this is for me, I found it be a really good thought partner.

Whenever I can be in a conversation, we use read AI. to take notes from it. We import all of our notes to like a custom GPT, but then I’ll basically take the role of this amazing growth hacker that understands product led growth or ABM. And before you come with the strategy, ask me five questions to give you more context before you give the recommendations.

I think Jeff Wolf’s book AI Driven Leader inspired that. So those are things that have been really helpful. But again, I’m dancing around this question a little bit. I would say we’re still in tinkering mode. We’re building custom GPTs for clients and it’s interesting, but I’m not sitting here Nailed it. Here we go.

[00:15:43] Matt: I sense a frustration amongst some marketers and go to market leaders that say we’ve been tinkering for a while. Why don’t we have something that’s scalable? I’m like this is all moving really fast. The rules change on a regular basis.

Some people have figured some things out and quite frankly, aren’t willing to share it because it becomes their like special sauce to do things that no one else knows how to do and they don’t want their competitors doing it. But as frustrating as it is, I think. It is still tinker time, right?

And I think that, even as you identify things that can be done relative to the copy world, the editing world, data analysis, or even product marketing analysis, every new release unlocks something new that can be done. And there’s going to be tinkering happening for quite a long time.

[00:16:22] Jim: Totally. And sometimes I worry we have a solution looking for a problem. And I’ve been guilty of that. And I’m trying to think of the end goal of Okay. What’s the problem I want to solve and how can this do it faster or better? Cause like we would do these demos Oh, look at this cool thing.

It can do. Okay, awesome. But what are we doing with it again? What’s the application? So that’s something we’re trying to stay honest on.

[00:16:43] Matt: Yeah. I know some folks that spend a lot of time doing that tinkering and saying, here’s what I can do. Here’s what we can do.

And they will admit I don’t always have the application, but what I want to do is surface the capability. And the more people do that, the more we watch and listen to them. Some of us are going to be able to say, Oh, that solves a problem over here that is the last puzzle piece to be able to do X, Y, Z.

So I think It’s mud season, right? We’re all tinkering and it’s not perfect, but we need that innovation. We need people that are tinkering without outcomes, right? I think that the problem without a solution is a good thing, because if we talk to each other about it, we’re going to figure a lot of things out more quickly.

Jim, for people that like what they’re hearing and want to learn more from you, about you. Where should they go?

[00:17:26] Jim: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, Jim Huffman. Website is, just GrowthHit.Com. And I’m jim@growthhit.com. I respond to email way too fast.

It’s unhealthy. So I’m around.

[00:17:38] Matt: Email Jim. He’ll get back to you within 15 seconds is what I heard 24/7, any time of the day, Jim you’re the best. Thank you so much for joining us today.

[00:17:45] Jim: Awesome. Thanks, Matt. Great to see you, man.

[00:17:47] Matt: Thanks everyone for listening and watching today. Happy New year again. We got a great lineup of topics and speakers and featured guests over the next couple of weeks, so stick with us.

We’ll see you next week, next Thursday on another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Until then, take care. We’ll see you then.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.