How Long It Really Takes To Win A Deal in 2025, Why You Have To Diversify Your Marketing, The 'One-Click' Future of Marketing, Is Black Hat Seo Back for AI?, Is GEO actually different from SEO?

0:05So Eric and I were just talking, I got back from Web Summit Rio and I was asking him about his conference sales cycle. Do you know your conference sales cycle roughly? I don't like it. Maybe if you talk and I think about it, maybe that will work. Go. All right. So we do something that's, I wouldn't say that's that unique, but I would consider it somewhat unique in which when I give a speech, we have a QR code on my slides where people scan and then we collect leads from that. Then I typically, depending on the event, because I only try to speak at events that have our ideal customer, typically one or two people from the organization will also be there.

0:44And then we do that to collect leads as well. So then we map it out all in a CRM and we see how long it takes to close the lead from it. On average, if we go to a conference, I'm going to break it down for both immediate deals and enterprise. Okay. Immediate deals are usually smaller because typically if you're a large organization, you have a large sales cycle. I'm assuming you see this with care all the time, right? Yep. You just can't do a deal that quickly. No. How long does it take with care? Like the moment lead comes in. Call it anywhere. It's like enterprises, like it could be a couple months.

1:20Yeah. At least. And that's for software. At least. But usually we're talking nine to 12 months if it's like agency. Yeah. So what we're finding is anyone who's interested in working with us right then and there, whether it's a big company or enterprise, I mean, a big company, which is enterprise or SMB, it tends to be more of the SMB that actually converts because they're more flexible with their budgets while the enterprise usually have budgets and then they've already allocated before the year starts, procurement, and all this kind of stuff. So typically from an event, if we collect a lead, even if it's an SMB, you're looking at three months at the earliest for a close, five months at the latest.

2:00And if it doesn't close in five months, usually we're not going to close that SMB. We pretty much just consider it dead. We still do follow up, but we consider it dead. enterprise, even if they want to work with us, or they scan a QR code from our presentation, fill it out. They're not, they may say they want to work with us. We usually get a lead from them. No joke. Like when I say lead, because to clarify on this, when someone scans a QR code, fills out a form field, we then follow up and they can say they're interested in working with us, or they may even tick a box, but we're typically not able to close them because of their sales cycle.

2:35But usually when I give a speech a month, I mean, a year and four months later, we'll get a lead and a little bit less than two years, we'll close the lead. So our sales cycle is actually on that is closer to a year and 10 months. That's why the fortune is in the follow-up. Yes. But that's a long sales cycle. So it's just like, we're going to all these events because we're mapping out how many RFPs we're getting and enterprise leads. And we map out exactly where they first touched us in the CRM, how they got to know us, et cetera. And what we're finding is, no joke, it takes roughly a year and 10 months from me speaking to getting someone who's actually working with us.

3:18But it's worth it because you're actually applying, you're gonna be speaking at more events now. Now that you've ramped it down, you're gonna ramp it back up. And so you're gonna have a lot more of these. And so we were just talking about how we're gonna be speaking at the HubSpot Inbound Conference and we're figuring out logistics there. and um how many let's say you have um a hundred scans right how many people are in the audience it's roughly 18 okay so you know if i have 100 people in the audience five call 500 yeah 18 will end up scanning it so 18 times 5 is 90 so i'd have 90 scans if there's 500 people that's my average is around 18 and that's from all industries conferences throughout the world we average around 18%.

4:02That's pretty good. That's a lot of scans. And so what happens on the scan? They're on your email list. They're on the email list, but we collect all their information, employee size, revenue, or employee count, revenue, all the stuff we need to qualify if it's a lead and see if they're interested in working with us. But going back to the fortune is in the follow-up. So John Maxwell said this, right? So the way you think about it is they're on your email list and you're constantly not asking them to buy, but you're constantly following up with content. You're constantly following up with more value over time.

4:30and it's funny because after I did this this global marketing summit I actually got shit from someone for so I shared the presenter slides right and then at the end of it I copied my friend who shared his slides it says um you can follow me on LinkedIn or on x and then by the way you subscribe to my newsletter here for free and this person called me out this person called me out and said I was soliciting for a business really and then and I was like what the hell and then I ran that through chat chp I was like hey chp was I soliciting here as I chat no you're not um but my point is you try to get people onto your list because you can constantly add more value over time.

5:02That's the whole idea. I'm not trying to get them to buy because I know they won't buy immediately. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, yeah. The interesting thing when you talk about follow-up, the biggest trend that we've seen in our growth is a person moving from company to company. Great example of this is I gave a talk at LinkedIn at one of their offices in Latin America. So they brought in a lot of their top advertisers. We also invited people to the event. It was a free event, but it was invite only. there was this lady, an amazing marketer. She worked at Deezer at the time. We weren't able to work with her at Deezer.

5:34She wasn't able to get us in. She wanted to work with us though. She then moved to Oracle and then she got us an RFP from Oracle. We didn't win the RFP, but she wanted to work with us. And now she's the CMO of a company where I think the founder is worth 20 to 50 billion. I know he's worth less than 50 billion. I'm pretty sure he's worth more than 20 billion. You know, of course he's on the Forbes list and we were able to get a contract from the newest venture that she's part of. And they have tons of divisions. And then from there you just land and expand. But it was quite interesting in which if you follow up with people, we see it being really rewarding, not for them just being at that company.

6:15It's whatever company they move to, you're continually building a relationship with them. So there's actually two parts here. One, you want to continue to be helpful over time and it requires you to be consistent with content and it requires you to be on top of things if you're going to be consistent yeah but the second thing is you also have to be kind too if you're kind and consistent over a long period of time people will remember you and that's how these things are people will generally like eventually they'll they'll figure something out where they'll work with you but even if they like you've seen this happen they'll follow you from company to company to company and then you're then the business grows right but i've also seen it at times where they follow you from company to company and then the if you put the b team in there the b team screws it up and then they will never follow you again so you have to be very consistently good over a long period of time yes you have to be really consistently good over a long period of time and i think you nailed it and this is what i'm going to mention it again you got to be helpful and you got to keep adding value without worrying about pitching 24 7.

7:07yep and so you talked about diversifying on marketing and i think this is a good one because i actually just got off the phone with um with jim you from bright edge and he was just i was like so what interesting data do you have and we kind of know this already but we're seeing a world now where ai overviews i don't know you're probably looking at your traffic maybe not but impressions are skyrocketing and then clicks are going out so it's going in like this like this jaw this direction like this right the grass going like yeah because people are searching more frequently now because yeah and so like you you have to earn the click more but impressions are becoming like our hot commodity right now so um you do have to diversify your marketing and we've we've constantly talked about this so where do you want to start with this one Well, let's first go back to BrightEdge.

7:50What is BrightEdge doing? They've been around for ages now. So I actually asked him, and I don't know if Jim will kill me for saying this. I was like, so how are things going right now with all this AI overviews, confusion, and all this AI stuff? Are you guys still growing right now? Or are you guys starting to sense a little wobbliness out of your customers? He's like, no, we're still growing right now. And he's been doing this for a long time. So I just caught up with him. I showed him kind of what we're doing with Carrot. And then I just, you know, I asked him some questions. What's interesting about BrightEdge, so they are an enterprise SEO product, whereas Ahrefs and SEMrush are more SMB, same with your product, Ubersuggest.

8:24And they've always committed to that. The one thing I've learned from him is like, you can't really do both. You have to just commit to one. You know, there are educations like a HubSpot, for example. But the one thing that he said stuck with me today was, I was like, how long did it take you to get to product market fit? 18 months, which is what I usually hear, 12 to 18 months. And he's like, another 12 months to figure out the customer lifecycle. So it seems like they're doing well right now, but it's very much sales-led. And let me give you one more thing before we move on. He had a CEO and he's back as the CEO.

8:53I was like, isn't that funny how it works, Jim? Isn't that funny how it works? I've tried this thing a bunch of times and it's just like, you just have to be involved. I'm not saying don't hire a CEO, but you have to be involved. And he's like, yep, I learned it the hard way. So they've raised a lot of money,$61 million today. I just looked it up. Their last round was in 2013, 40-ish million dollars, 42.8. That means they must be profitable if he's gone 12 years without raising any money. They've done well. And, you know, when you have a Taiwanese guy running things, you know, he's a good steward of capital.

9:25I'm Taiwanese, I'm saying that, yeah. So he's seeing the SERP data more looking like a jaw in which impressions are going up, clicks are going down percentage-wise. Did he talk about what he's seeing total clicks? He's going to give me data that I'm going to share in our next recording. So I didn't get it yet before this one. It was right before this, right? Because I think Datos, was it called Datos, the SEMR company? They talked about or ran fish and talked about how searches are going up. We're seeing a little bit of that as well. But I'm curious on what BrightEdge is seeing. And the reason I ask that is if you look at like Ubersuggest or Datos or BrightEdge, the reality is even if we have millions of data points or billions of data points, it's actually not a large sample size because Google itself has 13.8, 13.6, or 13.8 billion searches a day on average.

10:18So we all make up such a small percentage where the data can still be really skewed. I'll give you one more thing. So I had talked to a handful of these SEO softwares, right? And everyone's moving into this one-click future. And what I've been saying, and maybe this is something I'll sit on for a little bit, but I think a lot of the marketing in the future is gonna be one-click, the one-click future of marketing, meaning that, so you might have a tool tell you, okay, these are the changes you should make on your site. This is like an SEO audit, right? But what if it just says, let me just do it all for you.

10:48Boom, one click, it just does it all, right? Same thing with creative. I think we're going to see that. Same thing with landing pages. Same thing. I think we're going to get to a point where offers are even going to be one click as well. So you see suggestions and then do you just want us to do it for you? And then you can one click do it all or you can select what you want and just one click do it. And then you can evaluate if the changes are good or not. I think that's where the future of this is going because we want it to move. We want to move into a future of a lot more done for you marketing.

11:12I also think the future of marketing is going to be more in platform marketing where you market and you try to get people to take that action and that conversion in one click without leaving. And most people think of social shopping, but I don't really see it as social shopping because this has been going on for a while with Facebook. What is it called? In forms, Facebook, in forms, infield. What is it called? Dude, I'm blanking on the name. I just got off a 16 hour flight, though. uh you just got back i just got back literally right now oh wow yeah even when i came down for this recording i was like you're here at the wrong time oh wow yeah i'm really off right now yeah uh and jet lag's not bad because it's only four hour time difference but i'm just off um but either way if you look at facebook you can run an ad and you can collect a lead within facebook it keeps them on the platform it's just facebook forums yeah but it's way cheaper yeah then sending them to your website and getting the conversion because it benefits Facebook.

12:13They're still on the platform, but you know, this everyone who's run Facebook ads know this. I guarantee you for every lead that you get on a Facebook form field, the conversion rate, when you average it out through thousands of conversions, when you sell them on trying to close, whatever you're trying to close the conversion rate on the landing page on your website is much better as in it costs more for a lead when you're sending them to your quality is better, but the quality is better. That's a better way to put it. And then you just got to run the numbers on does a conversion difference make up for the cost difference for the quality?

12:46And then you can figure out what works for you. But they've been doing this for a long time. And there's other players that have tested things within app, right? Google's ran ad experiments for mortgages and other verticals where it could just be within Google. And they're already doing that with social shopping. You're seeing that on TikTok. You're you're going to start seeing that for other things like being able to purchase a service or food all within Google. And if Google doesn't do it, chat GBT will, and eventually Google will have no choice but to copy. Yeah. People just, it's always been like this since the beginning of not even the internet, but to get the beginning of everything, technology just makes things easier at the end of the day.

13:29So what did farming do? It made, it made consuming food easier, made getting good food to you easier, right? What did the industrial age do? It made building products and services a lot faster, right? And then now you have AI, you have synthetic intelligence, which allows you to do things a lot faster and more efficiently. And we're just going to continue to see that. So the one click future of marketing is coming. But before I move into something else, it looks like you searched for something. What do you have? It's called Facebook lead forms. Oh, yeah. Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Yeah. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast.

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16:18So Black Hat SEO, the question is, is Black Hat SEO back for AI? So I found this post over here and it says this guy's name is Zach Notes. So his last name is Notes. So here's their pitch. LLM Optimization Agency. For 15 grand a month, they will get you ranked. They'll keep you ranked for one keyword in chat. If you don't rank, you don't pay and so for example you might want to rank for like what's the best crm yeah and so 15 grand for that and basically they win rankings by manipulating llm's reinforcement learning nature giving feedback to the llm's to change their output so you know how you can give a thumbs up and down so basically gaming that right and so whenever there's a new channel if it really starts to take off people will figure out how to game it and that's actually what led google to become successful because they figured out a way where it's very it was more difficult to game Eventually people figured it out for a little bit.

17:10And now it's still more difficult to game. You just have to be ahead of these people. So if Chatsubbd can't figure out how to block these people and stay ahead of them, eventually they're going to lose to someone that figures out how to block them. I totally agree. This reminds me of like the SEOs that hit me up. Every once in a while I get a few of these a year. I probably get more than a few, but my team probably ignores most of them. There was a guy recently, I won't say his last name, but his name's Andrew. and he's just like, man, I got this better way of ranking and this hack will rank you at the top of Google for any keyword.

17:45And then he's breaking down and he's trying to explain this complex thing. And then what he pretty much says at the very end is he has tons of IP addresses that look like humans with Gmail accounts. And they're just doing a search and clicking through to make sure your listing has a higher click-through rate. And I'm like, this is nothing new and novel. And he's like, it'll work. Give me a client. I'll rank them at the top of it. I'm like, no, I'm not going to do this. and two, even if it's working for you, eventually it'll stop working for you and you just spent all this time and resources doing something short-sighted instead of just focusing on long-term providing value.

18:15The one thing we've learned, you and I over the years is that the black hat, the gray hat stuff, it might work for a little bit, but it never ever works long-term. And I think the worst part about it is it forces you to think short-term and it doesn't cause you to think more like an investor that thinks about the long-term, right? And so you're actually better off thinking long-term and think about providing value. Because that forces your mindset into a better place anyway. And you come from a place of not trying to manipulate something for your will, but you come from a place of giving. And that sounds maybe cheesy, but that just is the way it is.

18:46And while we're on the topic of SEO, so Kevin Indig, remember Kevin Indig? No. Shopify SEO? Yeah. Yeah. So he wrote a memo over here. He has a newsletter called Growth Memo. But basically, it's how is Answer Engine Optimization, AEO, how is it different from SEO? and the high level is he pulled a bunch of data from similar web and he basically reviewed organic search traffic versus ai chatbots across credit cards earbuds crm handbags so finance tech software and fashion and he basically here's here's the key takeaway we can just talk about this because i'm not going to read all these graphs over here um i'm looking at this credit cards graph over here so you can see credit cards right chase.com reddit capital one city bank whatever and then this is by chat tbd visibility it's actually google paypal american express visa chase.com um so it doesn't actually show the like a chase which should be number one arguably actually no i didn't even know it should be number one but you see how it's different wait so credit cards top five brand new searches this is by google this the black graph is google over here okay And they're saying Chase is number one.

19:58I get why Chase is number one. Reddit, I see what they're pulling in there. They're probably putting in reviews of everyone. A lot of UGC, yeah. Capital One, Citibank. Okay, that makes sense. Citibank makes sense. I don't know what community. I don't know what that is. It's probably a review site. It's a.NET. Yeah. So, okay, GEO and SEO were the same. The same sites are getting organic traffic, would also get the same citations, mentions, and LLMs. That's only true in a few cases, but not for the overall picture. now when we see the chat gpt visibility number one is i guess google is getting cited i don't know how the heck they're citing google for that they shouldn't be that doesn't make sense yeah i don't know but it says google and then paypal and then american express and then visa then chase so i i the chat gpt one isn't bad i just don't think google should be at the top yeah it's interesting because then you look at handbags and we're not going to go through all of this but reddit's number one for handbags because of ugc like uh reviews youtube youtube is more reviews Amazon reviews.

20:53Nordstrom is like, okay. And then coach.com. Yeah. They get all of those. Okay. Now for chat GPD for handbags, you have target Instagram, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Amazon. Is that interesting? If you look at both of the chat GPT and this is only two queries, the first result for both of them don't make sense to me for both of them. Right. Because for chat GPT, the credit cards one was Google at the top, which wouldn't make sense. Target is not a place known for selling handbags. No. So I don't see why that would be number one for ChatGPT. Go down one more. You want, okay, earbuds. So Reddit's number one, YouTube's number two.

21:30This is for Google, by the way. This is Google, yep. CNET's number three, Amazon's number four, and then Bose is five. That all makes sense. And then, okay, so ChatGPT for earbuds, you have Apple number one, Amazon two, Bose three, wired.com, and then Google.com. They all make sense to me other than number five. Yeah, Google. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't understand. I mean, because Google is kind of their competitor too, but maybe they just, that's the data that they pull from. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't, I just think like my key takeaway here and I'll pass it back to you is I think a lot of this stuff is just too early right now.

22:02Optimizing for any AEO or like doing black hat for this stuff, it's going to change very rapidly. So I'd rather just sit back and wait. And this, this goes back to our analogy again. You're the one that flies in on plane later. I might be the fourth or fifth wave, but we're not the first wave right now. No. So, and I have two things to really comment on this. the reason I say it doesn't make sense for me that they're listing Google because Google in most cases is scraping the web, getting data, and then showing it on Google. So chat GPT in this case is showcasing Google. Google doesn't have tons of articles on earbuds.

22:35I'm taking a guess here. I haven't searched, but I'm pretty sure because they're a search engine. They're scraping the web. Instead, chat GPT should be pulling from the sources. the second thing is is if people are really thinking about black hat techniques for geo or a or whatever you want or whatever oh yeah it's just like doing seo back in the day if you do black hat stuff and you do some dodgy stuff it may hurt you in the future where your domain and brand is tainted and it's just too hard to rank in the future so don't do it think long term because it is a channel that's here to stay you don't want to screw up your chance of succeeding in the future by being short-sighted.

23:12Anyway, that's it for today guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.