Palantir's Best Marketing Strategy Is Not Talking About Palantir

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir. I don't know if you noticed this, but whenever he talks on CNBC or whenever he does these interviews, he never really talks about Palantir that much.

0:34Eric Siu:He talks about, he might talk about politics. In this case, now he's talking about AI sovereignty because it's the hottest topic.

0:40Neil Patel:No, it depends what interview you catch of his. Because I watch CNBC a lot. And he'll tell you, sometimes he'll be crazy. And he usually is crazy. And he talks about a lot of random stuff. But a decent chunk of the time, not majority, but a decent chunk of the time. Or let me rephrase. Majority of the time he talks about Palantir. almost on every single appearance. It's just not the majority of the talk track. And I think that's what you probably mean.

1:06Eric Siu:This is what I'm saying. So because he used the way he was doing media before was he talked about Palantir. He talked about the product and the service or whatever. That bores people, right? But when you start to talk about the latest topic, like right now it's AI sovereignty or like another case, it might be talking about, oh, you know, securing our defenses or whatever it is, right? So Mark Andreessen said this, my friend Mark Andreessen from Twitter. So he says, Alex Carve almost never talks about Palantir in interviews. So he might talk about a little bit, right? But he calls it the single best marketing strategy he has ever seen and then reveal the number that proves it works better than anything else in the history of investor communications, right?

1:39Eric Siu:So what he does is he talks about the future of the US military, which is what I just said. He talks about super intelligence. He talks about whatever is genuinely interesting to him about the world right now. And because he is CEO of Palantir, the company just sits there attached to all of it, right? And so it's like the Seinfeld way. You talk about something that's interesting that happened to you and you put your offer at the end. But it's also related. What he talks about is related to what Palantir does, even though he doesn't talk about it. So Mark Andreessen drops this number. So what percentage of Palantir investors have actually read the S1?

2:08Eric Siu:Practically zero. What percentage have seen CARP on YouTube or CNBC or whatever? Close to 100, right? so an Edelman B2B I don't know how much you can give credit to this but no shade on Edelman but Edelman B2B study found that thought leadership content drives purchasing consideration more than product marketing does by a factor of nearly three to one among enterprise buyers. Karp did not read that report he just built the playbook it described so here's the thing so sure even though the lawyer spent thousands of hours on the S1 he is able to kind of just be out there all the time and he occupies a little bit of mindshare because when I think about him I think about his crazy hair I think about how quick he talks I think he talks faster than me he talks really fast he's like this and then it's very expressive as well.

2:44Eric Siu:And so I'm like, yo, pound here. He's like kind of the crazy guy that's on CNBC. And super fit. Yeah, he is super fit.

2:50Neil Patel:I was thinking about that yesterday. Dude, the amount of skiing he does, outdoor stuff. I think someone ended up releasing what viral on X is like body scan. It's like 8 % body fat.

2:59Eric Siu:Well, here's the thing. He gets a lot of clips for the things that he said. That's why he had that clip that went viral, right? And then this reminds me, I look at my YouTube. It's like, you know, sure. Yeah, I can talk to finance people or dating people or whatever and get all the views in the world. but at least what he talks about is directly related to his business.

3:16Neil Patel:Yes, totally agree with that. And if you look at what you and I do, most of the time we talk about marketing stuff. We talk about what's happening in this street or strategy. We don't talk about specific tactics. But I've also seen it backfire. And a prime example of this is Snap. They lost a billion dollars in market cap from the launch of their Spectacles, which I believe is 2 ,400. Yeah, tell me what happened. So Evan Spiegel, right? I believe that's his name, Evan Spiegel. Showcase the Snap Spectacles and talked about the future of spectacles and where the industry is heading instead of breaking down why this product costs more than meta Ray-Bans by a lot, by magnitudes or multiples.

4:00Neil Patel:And he didn't really break down what it does. So people are like, so you're not going to even really break down what your product does and you're just going to talk about the future and you want$2 ,000 something dollars. Yeah. stock two thousand dollars two thousand plus dollars stock tank dude at least see that's where he should copy apple apple does a good job of explaining yes yeah and i i think what he should have done is broke down what it does and then or he could have started off actually breaking down why snap is making this investment and why this is going to be remarkable he can then break down what it's doing right now and what it's going to do in the future iterations and where they're going with the product.

4:43Neil Patel:He could have covered all three. Yeah. Yeah. So, doesn't mean the stock wouldn't tank. I think it was a bad job of marketing. What is their market cap now?

4:53Eric Siu:It's gone down a lot. Let's look at this. It's not that big. It's single digit billions. So, Neil forgot to bring his iPad, guys. So, let me do this for Neil. Neil, it's 8 billion. Yeah. 8 billion market cap. What's the stock price at? uh stock price is at five four four dollars 84 cents so year today it's down 40 and then if you look at max it's down 82 all time so it it shot up to like 75 bucks during the during 2021 um when everything was hot so neil there's a there's some shocking sales quota data i have for you here

5:30Neil Patel:so i'm curious to see what you're what you're seeing but okay jason lemkin tweets this sales

5:35Eric Siu:exec quotas are up in 2026. They sort of have to be since comp OTE is up too. So per Iconic Capital, their latest GTM survey, quotas at top quartile startups. Enterprise is$2.25 million. Okay, that's and then mid market 1.35 million. And then SMB is 750k. So again, these are the quotas, these are the targets they're aiming for. Three years ago, Enterprise was 1.8 million. That was considered aggressive now that it's considered medium so what he's saying here and we can we can react to this one deal economics have shifts the logos that were mid-market three years ago are now enterprise so the gtm bar has moved up quotas follow number two ai pipeline generation actually works i think we should talk a little bit about this too so companies embedding ai and marketing and sdrs are seeing 10 plus point conversion lifts at the top more pipeline because higher quote i think we should talk about loops as well number three hunter farmer model came back in 2026 65 of high performers have aes owning cross sell versus 49 of others um and then number four attainment at leaders is 85 to 90 that's not tight quotas that's a different operating model so uh basically i think he's saying a lot of ai enablement is happening and he's like if you're planning enterprise ae comp for 2026 2.25 million quota is a new baseline but you need to three to four x the pipeline behind it you need to have territory modeling you need to have rep quality bar high enough to sustain 85 % plus attainment and then comp that ties the expansion.

6:59Eric Siu:So 33 % NRR or 23 % net dollar retention.

7:03Neil Patel:So love to say a few things about this first is one, Jason Lemkin mainly deals with B2B and software as a service. Software as a service over time has moved more into all-in-one where it does more things for you than just a feature or a specific solution that's caused these companies to be willing to charge more. The next thing is, if you look at over time, we've seen, if you look at just the stock market and the value of companies and how much more money is being printed by a lot of these companies, it has continually gone up. And he did point that out. A lot of those mid-market companies are now enterprise companies, which means they have bigger budgets.

7:42Neil Patel:And we're also seeing in this new world where where it is actually more competitive than ever because of ai so companies have to do more they're willing to spend more and in because of that companies are also generating more income and they're being sold more things to help them do more um but i do believe a lot of it is not just because of efficiencies it's due to efficiencies companies growing and then willing them having to spend more to compete as well in today's world.

8:14Eric Siu:Yeah. And so, you know, the interesting thing is he shared a lot of stuff around their AI SDRs and how they help qualify and they help, you know, there's a lot of things you can build now, like trigger based agents, right? Where he's like, oh, you know, they raise funding, they're looking to hire like that, that those things are kind of becoming more stable, table stakes. I also think that we've talked about having a deal reviver, a stall deal reviver that can look through your pipeline and also look at lookalikes as well. These things are all very doable and should help with your pipeline piece, but you need to kind of have that piece.

8:43Eric Siu:I think he said, what, you need to have 3 to 4x more pipeline behind it. So you need to have these things to support the pipeline generation if you want to hit this 85%, 90 % attainment. And yeah, Neil is right. There's more all-in-one happening. I mean, you look at, let's use HubSpot as an example for fun. They have an AEO tool. They have all these other tools that I never use. I just use it for my system of record. I don't know how you use it. Probably same thing. right for your HubSpot and Salesforce? You pay for both, right?

9:11Neil Patel:We pay for so many different solutions. I don't know how we specifically use our CRMs because I haven't logged into our CRMs in a long time.

9:23Eric Siu:Nor should you be logging. You should be headless and asking your Slack all the time. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening?

9:28Neil Patel:I don't even have to do that. I get a report every single day. From human beings. Yes, but they're using technology. It just gets forward to me because I don't want to pay per seat. But you're in a chat, right?

9:40Eric Siu:When they send you that, you're in a chat. No, I'm not in my corporate chat. No, no, no, no. Your text message, they text you in a group chat, right? My team? Yeah.

9:49Neil Patel:The reports. It depends what division, not sales.

9:53Eric Siu:We don't have a group chat for sales. How do you get the sales reports? Email. Email. Okay, got it. Yeah. The reason why I'm asking Neil this right now is like if he's getting these reports i'm just imagining if it's like in a slack channel or even an imessage channel then you have an ambient bot sitting in there and then neil can ask follow-up questions because neil always has follow-up questions right and neil's gonna needle you need it it's it's usually email or text we have slack and we have teams i don't use either either really unless i had to put a

10:18Neil Patel:refund request into slack see neil's a boomer already yeah um bank balance financial updates i get monday through friday i don't get saturday and sunday banks are also close saturday or sunday I get Monday through Friday. Every Thursday, I get global balances. But Monday through Friday, I get U.S. ones. Thursday, I get U.S. combined with every single country. And it's done currency basis. And I get comparisons of week over week and day over day. So I can see what changed and has notes on why everything's changed. Because they know I'm going to ask both questions.

10:54Eric Siu:Yeah. So should you, okay, why don't you tell everyone which reports you find to be the most helpful? Because you get a lot of reports, right? No, no, no. I don't get too many reports. So which reports do you find the most helpful? And tailored as stewards may be someone that is starting their business or earlier in their business career so more people can get value from it. the bank balance one is very important especially if you're starting off you have to live and die

11:18Neil Patel:by your cash and you need to understand why things are going up and down and where there's wastage and when you see things on a daily basis and you really look at the numbers and i get a i don't just get a number on a daily basis of the bank house it's by division and i can see which one's going up or down and it has notes on why it fluctuated up a lot or down a lot if it's just a little bit here there there's no notes and i don't expect the notes for that but this is important because it also helps you find if there's something that went wrong and you can avoid making that again the other number that i tend to end up getting is rfp counts so that is more of a spreadsheet of how many rfps we're getting per region and all the countries keep track of it.

12:08Neil Patel:It then gets aggregated. They put it in a spreadsheet for me because I just like looking at it and then charts are automatically created from it. And the reason we have to end up doing that is a lot of people speak different languages, different CRM solutions based, you know, they may not be compatible with language or they may not be cost prohibited for certain countries, right? Depending on their currency exchange. And with the RFP count, I like seeing patterns over all the years what's going up what's going down and i get notified when it's uh new ones have come in and when we've lost them or when we've won them or when they go silent or when they've been sitting there too long because i know that hey i should be bugging some of these people hey dude this deal is dead or why is it not moved or whatnot so i know who to push especially for the big logos and they have pricing in there on what they think it's going to roughly be so that way I know who to really spend my time with to push him to try to win the bigger accounts.

13:11Neil Patel:Another report that I get is, what is it called? Any big potential customer that we're talking to and where they're actually based. So I just get notified of that through email. So that way I know because I travel a lot or I could be willing to travel a lot. To meet them. To meet them, to try to build a deeper relationship and try to close them. or to try to see if I should go to that city and meet up with multiple tighter people and cultivate that relationship. The other report that I get, and this one's over WhatsApp, I get notifications anytime a new product is launched and what it do and a summary of that feature and how to test it out.

13:53Neil Patel:So that way I can just go and check it out. I also got a weekly report of, and this actual individual sends this to me. His name is Colin. He sends me the stats of the emails, how many leads are generated, how many emails do we send, open rates, click rates. And then he also sends me the next week's emails before they're scheduled so I can review every single email, at least the English ones. And then I can modify what I want modified in all of the emails. I still go through my emails every single week ahead of time.

14:30Eric Siu:I think the point to call out for everyone, the reason I asked Neil this question is so you all can see that it's not just reports, it's very specific things that he can take action on. Yes. It's to move the ball forward every day. It's not just to have this like dashboard-itis where it's like you have all this stuff that you're looking at that make you feel like you're doing something. Yeah. People have a problem with dashboard-itis.

14:51Neil Patel:Yeah. And I don't like dashboards. I really don't. I want really specific things that can help me improve the business. so dude i was talking to my team and some of them were complaining how leads are down and i was like okay leads are down so then a few of them were just like i'm like what are we going to do about it exactly right that sucks what are you going to do about it yeah so then someone's like well it's not in our budget and i'm like who comes up with the budget and they're telling me you know how they create the budgets because i'm not in any budget meetings like genuinely my teams meet up multiple times a year in person by divisions to go over future budgets.

15:32Neil Patel:I don't go to any of those meetings. So then they tell me what they want to end up doing. And I'm like, so it's not in budget. You're losing leads from, let's say, top of funnel from informational queries, because that's happening to a lot of businesses, because we had really aggressive capture intents to generate revenue from our informational queries like exit pop-ups and quizzes and stuff like that which worked really well but those aren't as effective because ai answers a lot of the questions for people so i was like all right i'm like for your country how much have you optimized for llms and actually turn rank i'm like are you getting good leads from like yeah the leads are amazing i'm like of course they are have you done more in-person events no it's not a budget that It costs travel and costs all this kind of stuff.

16:20Neil Patel:I was like, all right. I'm like, so I'll go to the regions that'll complain. I'm like, I'll make a deal with you. They're like, well, I'm like, we don't have a money problem. You have a budget problem. Those are two very different things. If we have money in an account and you're not spending it. And I did the same exact framework with Brazil when I was in Brazil for Web Summit, Rio. You're telling me it's harder. We're going more upstream. You want more of them, but conferences are more expensive. Brazil, you get tax on revenue. If I bring the money to the US, I face another tax, right? Because they don't have a tax treaty and it just sucks.

16:59Neil Patel:I was like, all right, why don't you do a few more events? It's not in my budget. Approved. If you generate revenue for it, I'm going to count the expense against your budget. So you better pick the right ones. And even though I don't count it against your budget, in future years, I'm going to solely expense this to your future years revenue. Not from an accounting perspective, but it has to make them responsible based on bonuses and things like that.

17:25Eric Siu:And they're incentivized on this.

17:26Neil Patel:Yes, and they're incentivized on this. And then I'm like, cool. You want to do more press, help with GEO, hire a PR company, do way more digital PR? They're like, yes. But again, it's not our budget. I'm like, cool. I'll give you a lump sum budget. What do you want? 50 grand, 100 grand. They're like, whoa. You have to keep in mind currency. I'm like, whatever. And your currency. because everything is cheaper. I was like, figure out what you want to spend, go hard. Over time, you're going to have to pay for that expense. You don't have to pay for any of it this year. So you better make wise decisions.

17:56Neil Patel:But a lot of these problems are solvable. And the key is you want data to figure out where there's blockage or where there's political issues. I'm not talking about political issues like Trump or Biden or anything. I'm talking about internally as an organization grows, there's always excuses. and the reason I started asking for some of these reports is I listened to an interview I think it was a deal book interview with Jamie Dimon and I don't know what their profit is you can look up JP Morgan's annual profit it's large and he was just like one of the worst things that he hates hearing is oh we can't do this we don't have the money or the budget and when you look at jp morgan i think it's a 600 ish billion dollar company from a market cap