Ken Marshall on Scaling with Substance in the Age of AI

Overview:

In this episode, Elijah Drown sits down with Ken Marshall, Chief Growth Officer at RevenueZen, to explore what it truly means to grow revenue with integrity in an AI-driven world. From the myth of “just write helpful content” to the power of unscalable moments, Ken unpacks his approach to building long-term visibility, trust, and pipeline. He dives into systems thinking for SEO, brand marketing without paid ads, and how startups can survive the hard seasons by focusing on meaningful traction over vanity metrics. Whether you're a founder, marketer, or RevOps leader, this episode will shift how you think about growth in 2025 and beyond.

Transcript:

Elijah Drown 0:00

Nobody in B to B, at least that I'm aware of, wants to have a one night stand client you want the long term I'm getting married sort of thing, right? The whatever you want to be poly or ligaments, I don't know, but so you're working on the B to B structure and that kind of, pardon the visualization, but you get it. You're laughing because you're like, that's true, man. I don't want to go through the time and effort to rinse and repeat all these clients, because I'm trying to get them in the door by snake oil. That's that's not the way to do it.

Ken Marshall 0:25

I can just see that as a headline, like the Elijah poly content strategy. There's something good.

Elijah Drown 0:29

I don't know if it's good, but it's definitely different. So behind every one-page ranking is someone wrangling five algos at once at Revenue Zen, that's Ken the magma Marshall as Cgo. He didn't just ride the C SEO wave. He rewrote the playbook with geo, turning scrappy SaaS brands into pipeline machines today on tee time, Ken breaks down. Why helpful content is the starting line just the starting line, and how systems think out racing one off tactics before the algorithm beat you to it. Ken, this is awesome. You're like the guru in the best sense. I don't usually like gurus, but you're like the goat of GEO. Thanks for hanging.

Ken Marshall 1:15

Elijah. You are prolific in your kindness and thoughtfulness. So I hate the word guru as well, but yeah, we've been having fun, experimenting and learning things. So happy to be here.

Elijah Drown 1:26

Right on. I love games. I like having fun. As a middle aged man, I'm internally 12, and I love to have fun. So if we could do a little Mad Libs marketing, that'd be cool. And I'll just give you a sentence in I'll do a it'll sound weird. But for example, in 2026 the biggest blank in B and B will or B to B will be blank, thanks to blank teams. Do you have any lines that would or words that would fit that line that would make it sound oh so sweet.

Ken Marshall 1:57

Yeah. So the biggest unlock in revenue per employee will explode, thanks to go-to-market engineering, the ability for people to use two AI tools and automation to augment their existing behavior in order to grow in unique and unusual ways will just sort of, you know, that's going to be 10x over the next few years. It already is starting. But I believe in.

Elijah Drown 2:19

Fastest way to lose a project is blank, blank that refuses to

Ken Marshall 2:26

The fastest way to lose a project to poorly send or to poorly research things about them before you send a LinkedIn. DM, everybody hates that.

Elijah Drown 2:39

If I had $10 million, I'd put every penny into this that can something at scale. Ooh, your hair, your mustache.

Ken Marshall 2:47

I'm gonna grow a more powerful mustache. No, I'd put it into a, um, a spectacularly unique opinion and like opinion set and personal brand that dictates everything you say and do publicly, something that is deep within you that you draw out slowly over time, that's going to pay dividends for every area of your life.

Elijah Drown 3:13

Maybe we talk again. We'll get into the Burt Reynolds mustache experience. But for now, I guess we should continue and one more at revenue Zen, the line between experiment and engine is what designed to something momentum. So at revenue Gen, revenue Zen, pardon me, the line between experiment and engine is what designed to something momentum.

Ken Marshall 3:36

Experiment and engine is mutually inclusive. They are one of the same then designed to what say it again, a verb momentum, designed to explode momentum. So experimentation needs to be a part of your ongoing system, and that's what the engine is built off of, or else it'll get rusty and stop working.

Elijah Drown 3:58

The beautiful thing about doing things in real time and organically is that it's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun. So next time, I'm going to send a PDF and make sure that you have them in front of you so you can just nail these. But you did great off the cuff. So thank you for playing along and kind of getting things rolling. Appreciate it.

Ken Marshall 4:17

My brain works really well once it knows what it's doing, but yeah, I My memory is terrible, and, you know, unapologetic about it.

Elijah Drown 4:24

There's some videos, yeah, I'm getting my point. I promise. There's some videos that were really cool, that talking about, like, I learned that you're self Pro, self professed coffee addict. You have a mini are Ozzy shepherd, and you proclaim that you're the four legged dad. Like heroes, of all heroes, and I'm just curious what micro ritual in the morning, whether it's matcha, it's puppy walk, it's journaling, what sharpens your strategic edge? Ken, is there anything? Or do you just kind of sit and do yoga for 45 minutes and you're lit up like a Christmas tree?

Ken Marshall 5:00

I have a lot of natural energy, a lot of enthusiasm for life, and I think temperamentally, yes, those things, I just wake up and I'm pumped in the morning. But like every great person that's come before me that I know, I do have a morning routine. It's changed over the years. It's had to. I didn't have a wife and a dog before, but it looks, you know, something like this. Usually I make myself an espresso. I have some pistachios and chocolate. I sit outside on my patio while the sun comes up, me and my puppy do our thing. I'll usually do took us time, which is hilarious if you speak Yiddish, but I just sit on my butt and look at the wall for 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes that's meditation. Sometimes it's journaling. Sometimes it's like reading scripture or praying, but something to get your soul right. Yeah, then we go outside, we run, we hike, we walk, me and Simba. And that's really just to get my body moving so that my brain can do what it needs to and drop the cortisol and all that. So yeah, I tend to do those types of things in the morning, and then when my wife wakes up a little bit later, we have our time and hang out to get me, and that's before I talk to anybody, do any work, open an email. The first two hours of my day, three hours of my day are mine.

Elijah Drown 6:14

I like you. I have a routine, but it's quite simple. I don't speak Yiddish, so I'm not I'm not really there, but I do understand what what Tucker says. So that's fun for me. It's a cup of coffee watching tech YouTubers. In the morning, I need 20 minutes to chug some coffee and watch some people that are kind of nerdy and express something before I even talk to people in a real way. Otherwise, I'm cranky as all sin. So that's no good either.

Ken Marshall 6:39

You need it, man. I'm not sure how people wake up and just get started with working I, I would not be a well-regulated human being.

Elijah Drown 6:47

It's not for everybody. This 5 am Go, go to the track or whatever for do, do 10 miles. I know ice baths. Some people do it, good for them. But me, I need, like, you espresso, three shots of coffee. But you weren't always in this mental state, which is kind of interesting. Before the wife and the dog in the early days back in Portland, you had a third date moment, and that was the proof point where your now wife said, I believe in you more than Ken believes in himself. How does that lesson echo in your leadership style today?

Ken Marshall 7:19

What a beautiful tee up of a question. Wow.

Elijah Drown 7:24

I'll get you thinking, even for a guy who does a tuck us in the morning.

Ken Marshall 7:29

Those dots I've never connected before. So this is an exclusive, but I would say that the most beautiful thing my wife has taught me related to my management and leadership style is that I used to see vulnerability as a weakness, and I used to think that leaderships the best thing a leader could do was to be to show invulnerability, to rally the troops. What I've learned since then is that strength blended together with the ability to be approachable and have empathy for what others you know, what others are experiencing, allows them to connect with you, and if they connect with you, they'll be more likely to follow you. And I think Kim is almost solely responsible for helping me see that and learn that lesson is there.

Elijah Drown 8:16

There was one moment where you said, I'm done with this world, right? You're close to that sort of dark state. Is there a particular moment that you're able to reach deep down and go? No, not today. I got more living to do.

Ken Marshall 8:30

I've always had an enthusiasm for my life, but the darkness that you're referring to was, you know, I'm I have two clients at the time, I think maybe three, I did not have enough money to, like, buy groceries and pay my rent for that week. It was a short period of time, but it was really scary. And living in Portland in my first place by myself. And so the fear there was, or the, you know, the thoughts in my mind were, you should never have done this. You're not good enough. Why are you doing this? And no matter how hard you work, because you've been sacrificing and working so hard, this will never work out. This cannot work out. And the thing, I think, the two things I think that brought me back were, one is I have a lot of faith in our Creator, and not every everybody has their own spiritual flavor. So I'll leave you to, you know, the universe versus Flying Spaghetti Monster. Insert your but faith is important. And then the second thing was slowly but surely, getting outside, getting perspective, getting my coffee at my favorite coffee shop running again, and so rebuilding in habits that gave me perspective to start to rebuild externally.

Elijah Drown 9:41

How's it feel when somebody comes at you out of nowhere and says, I don't care. I want to be with you forever. Doesn't matter. Unconditional support there in the moment, unexpected just Yes, man, I got you. Does that. That obviously gives you the zest of life and says, I, I'm, I'm capable of anything. But. Do you do really take that as you know, a leader at Revenue Zen, and say, Hey, I'm going to pay this forward and treat my employees and staff in the same way, like I'm going to champion them, lift them up and and we're just going to hang and be cool.

Ken Marshall 10:11

I think it's fuel, I think that human beings crave to be seen and heard and understood, and like Kim, imparting that, that confidence that I didn't even have in myself, really, that is something that I see as my duty as a leader and a manager to impart on others. I mean, I am unrealistically jazzed every time somebody does something like Mike, our salesperson closed a deal today, and it's just like Steph Curry means shooting the three, high fiving. Because if it doesn't come from somebody else who you love and respect, you know, it's hard to come from yourself internally. Sometimes.

Elijah Drown 10:47

That's really cool. I think of NBA Jam. He's from downtown. He was on fire, or something like that. The cool stuff that you're probably shouting at each other because you're having a good time. So that's cool. Did it happen? Did you win the business? Did it work? Or do you okay? I didn't know if there was a cliffhanger from Ken here. You're gonna have to wait to hear the rest on my LinkedIn or something. I don't know.

Ken Marshall 11:08

He’s gonna get an upsell saying that guy, I have a lot of faith in, Mike. He's got a good gut, and he's a hard working dude.

Elijah Drown 11:14

So there's geo that you're big into the AI spin. You feel that it's maybe data-informed and not data-driven, because that's a different spin from everybody else. Everybody else is looking at KPIs, goals and understanding the metrics and the attribution and figuring Where the hell do I do a thing so I can get into the AI summary like yesterday, and you're going, No, you just got to be informed. So is there a first month where you can track and plan and kind of help us give the high-level inside the mind of Ken to kind of figure out how you set up for a new client, to get them closer to that space?

Ken Marshall 11:50

Sure. So shout out to Oz Rashid. I stole the term data-informed instead of data-driven from him, and that is to say that data if interpreted incorrectly and analyzed incorrectly, can mislead you. So I like to be informed rather than LED. I'm led by my own experience and wisdom. But with that in mind, yeah, generative engine optimization, also known as answer engine optimization, large language model optimization. For everyone out there, it's just you being visible inside of generative AI tools like chat, GPT versus Google Search, which is completely different in how it indexes stores and then retrieves information. The first thing I would do is just go to your Google Analytics, four account, go to your referrals and just see, are you getting inbound traffic? Are you getting conversions, because everyone wants to rush into starting to do all these tactics, and it might not even be right. You may not even be benefiting from it. And so the first thing is just gain some visibility. Sure, an easy way to know this, if you don't have any tracking software, is just to add a form to your site that says, How did you hear about us, and leave it unstructured. It'll surprise you what people say on their journeys, once you start to understand who's finding you and how they're finding you, a really simple thing to do is, if you don't have content about what you offer. So like we have solutions pages and services, pages about how revenues and does what it does, publishing more stuff about your way of thinking, original research, comparisons of like our site versus our competitor. This things that are unique to you is a great starting point. The most important thing you can do is inform those models. What's unique about yourself, and I think that's the thing that can't be gamed, is brand. So brand mentions across the internet, which are different from backlinks and SEO, are the number one most correlated factor with visibility. And how do you get that by doing dope stuff and being unique enough to talk about, right? So anyway, that's the first and foremost thing of like, start tracking it. Talk about yourself in unique and interesting ways about what you do, and then, in doing so, you will get mentioned, and those mentions end up correlating most highly with visibility. And there's tons of tactics, but like, that's an excellent starting point.

Elijah Drown 14:12

I was wondering if you ever played the reverse Uno card and used AI to be able to set up a process to get this engine running, or does it need a human touch?

Ken Marshall 14:22

There's a tremendous amount of automation that can be done to gain insights. So I don't think that you should create a strategy with any sort of tool. I think you, as a owner, a marketer, a fun person who's just experimenting with this stuff, should always set your North Star. You should always have a goal and an overarching strategy, but a really cool way to start to do some of this with tools like an easy thing that people can do is I took all of our CRM data recently from HubSpot, took the form submissions, and I just did a pretty basic like cluster analysis of take. Reform, put it into categories of what people's needs are, and then we added that information to our site. So when somebody is looking for a solution, here are the pain points that our ICP actually tells us. A lot of people will say, chat, GPT, tell me what my ICP wants instead of let's look at what they've actually told us, and then we can relate to them better on the site, which has the benefit of, you know, shorter sales cycles, improved conversion rates. So I would say, use the technology to accelerate an existing good strategy and a plan, versus letting it guide you from the beginning, because it just doesn't know things, and there's no way to inform it of where you want to end up in the future if that makes sense.

Elijah Drown 15:41

Absolutely, there's backlinks, there's all the magic tools internal and all that stuff going on. But is there anything particular, indirect or direct, that's a channel that really surprised you most with inbound leads, or do you just collect them everywhere that you go?

Ken Marshall 15:58

We're slowly but surely taking over the internet and trying to be everywhere. But, yeah.

Elijah Drown 16:02

You got to beat Google, because they're taking over the internet so revenues ends. Got to step on and make it happen. Yes.

Ken Marshall 16:09

it's true and and so we'll tie in this to other, you know, generative engine optimization tactics. So I think it's somewhat something around 27% of our source revenues from Alex Boyd, my business partner, is LinkedIn profile, or my LinkedIn profile, the combination of those two, and that's not insignificant, right of so this, this concept of like, founder led sales, founder brand, founder led content. It's not just that you're sharing your unique insights and people are, you know, seeing you, liking you, and then associating what your business does with liking you. That, in and of itself, cannot be understated. If you are an executive or a leader who has the time, you should find a way to get your thoughts onto platforms where your audience hangs out. But secondarily to that, there are platforms where these large language models pull in information from disproportionate to others. So Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, pulse, Quora, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia it pulls those in to learn about you and show you inside of like chat, GPT, and Gemini. So if not only should you do that from a thought leadership perspective and brand building perspective, but you can talk about yourself in a way that those platforms will then feed information to those models so that you can show up when people are searching for your products and services. And so that's just it's a simple way to not only get more traffic, quote, unquote. But you can sharpen your message, resonate with your target audience, and show up inside of generative AI tools more you know, more often. So it's a win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

Elijah Drown 17:50

Huge. Nobody talks about getting in the AI summary. So you just dropped all those sites that not a lot of people talk about. So clearly, you're doing something and figuring it out. So thank you, Ken, that's really cool. We try, yeah, yeah. What you're getting at with human engagement optimization or ATO, I think you kind of coined that engagement metric playing around. Is that, is that now a can trademark, or is that something you help describe how this, this machine works?

Ken Marshall 18:17

Yeah, that was what, two years ago. Now, I stole that from a HubSpot executive who said that maybe five or six years ago, but I think they understood where machine learning and AI was headed, and so, yeah, we're gone. Are the days where you can put some keywords in a div and get people to show up to your site by tricking them into doing business with you. Gen Z doesn't like F around with that, you know what I mean. And so the getting people, the traffic declining. People have a higher bar for trust. Less traffic is going to everybody's sites, from Google search, but once they get there, even from chat, GPT or Gemini, it is your job to engage, delight and show them the next step and encourage them to take it. And so I think that's what I was getting at, which is there's a commodity of production and distribution now. So the game is not more and more and more traffic, bigger and faster. It's how can we narrow our focus and sharpen to the people who need to hear what we have to say and help them take every step of whether it's buying journey or just audience, consumption, delight journey in our own unique way. And that's the engagement I was talking about. That's the, I think, the unlock to how folks can grow these days.

Elijah Drown 19:36

On the other side, people are trying to cheat this, cheat the system with different H tags right, heading two, three, and all that sort of thing. They're like, yeah, crawlers are looking for it. I'm going to put my pillar page up. We're going to do h2, h3 AI is going to love it. We're going to get the summary. Going to go, I don't know we're going to make it rain next quarter, but is there a balance between the structure with this creative brand strategy and the human element? Say you're talking about or you just kind of say YOLO, and we'll figure it out.

Ken Marshall 20:03

I think folks should find the sweet spot between tactics that sometimes feel like gaming the system, right? You need to structure your content and your site in a way where it shows up. You can't just post, you know, a piece of content that doesn't get indexed. It doesn't matter how good it is, if it doesn't matter how good it is, if it doesn't get indexed, it's not going to be shown. So a great example of this is you've probably seen sites like g2 and cap Terra or plots, where it shows you different vendors who offer services. So a really good tactic is publishing content where you compare yourself to competitors, or, you know, the best podcasting creative services firms right in 2025 but the difference is, even if you have the highest ranking piece of content about those podcast creative services, once somebody lands, if you're bad mouthing your competitors, you're not being honest about your strengths and weaknesses, your point of failure is either going to be a losing their trust once they read and they're going to bounce, or, let's say you even convert them, they're going to notice the difference in your services offered and what you talked about in your promotional materials, and they're not going to be a long term client. So the reason why I harp on these fundamentals and why I say, you know, lead with integrity, even if you have to use those same tactics, is because I'd much rather have 10 people find my piece of content, and eight of them convert into a long term customer than 1000 visits, and none of them convert, or they bounce after month one. You tell me what's worth the effort?

Elijah Drown 21:36

Nobody in B to B, at least that I'm aware of. Wants to have a one night stand client. You want the long term, I'm getting married sort of thing, right? The whatever you want to be poly or ligaments, I don't know, but so you're working on the beauty structure and that kind of part in the visualization. But you get it. You're laughing because you're like, that's true, man. I don't want to go through the time and effort to rinse and repeat all these clients because I'm trying to get them in the door by snake oil. That's that's not the way to do it.

Ken Marshall 22:00

I could just see that as a headline, like the Elijah poly content strategy. There's something good there.

Elijah Drown 22:05

I don't know if it's good, but it's definitely different. That's for sure. I'll take it to the not the hub and spoke, yeah, I'll maybe have to consult to yourself, like the idea machines, like Alex and yourself to say, is this a good idea for podcasting? And you can go off the record, probably not, but we'll have to flesh that out later. That's funny. Please don't let me forget. Just amuse you next Friday, when you're having a bad week, what was that thing, ridiculous thing that you talked about? And then we get to the giggle town, it'd be good. Yes, is there a particular tech stack that you use for AI work? Or is there, even if you don't want to divulge your secret sauce, maybe there's a couple that folks get getting into this game, can use to kind of get more acquainted with the IMS that's going on.

Ken Marshall 22:51

I have no secrets. I love to speak openly about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So I have the obvious ones, like, I have a custom GPT Ken bought. I talked to him 1000s of times per day. And, like, that's, it's not an exaggeration, like, it's always up for me to for my thought partnership. And that's just fun, because it's like, all, you know, all the good training on, like, my text messages and conversations with my wife, and that's like, takeaways from my therapy sessions. So it's pretty on point. But the things that I think are interesting, that folks might not have used are, one is a tool called cursor, or lovable but basically, just like people talk to ChatGPT, it's a natural language chat bot that helps you build and ship code. And so for people that so I have a coding background, I mean, I built applications just like on JavaScript and HTML and CSS and PHP back in the day. But for people who don't understand code structure, you can just literally fire up your mic and say, I'm thinking about building an ROI calculator for healthcare companies who want to use my podcasting services. What are the inputs that might be useful? And how can I build a forecasting framework to build a tool on my website? And after a few, you know, a few days of back and forth, it'll tell you, step by step on how to ship that. And to me, that is that is powerful for anybody who may not consider themselves technical, but as really good ideas, is really industrious and knows they can help people if the world had that particular tool. So that is first and foremost, like, get very comfortable with that. The next one is Nan, and this is a bit nerdier. It's like if Zapier met Claude or chat GPT, which it's an automation tool, but it's, it's a through AI workflows. So you can do things like, I'm going to give you a sales transcript. I want you to go search the internet and see what content has never been spoken about. Insert my transcript as part of the conversation. Then go pull 10 of our competitors, build a narrative as far as like. What we should talk about, and then write me a piece of content, a YouTube video script, and 10 tweet threads, and then go publish them for me. That's something that you can do just through, again, a natural language interface. And then it'll go execute those tasks for you. So that's thing number two. And then my third that I would say is more of a geo focused tool set which it's called Brand AI, brand visibility monitoring software. It's a class of tools similar to rank tracking softwares. They basically just deploy a bunch of prompts across time, across IP addresses, and they start to give you a picture of how your brand shows up inside of generative AI environments like chat, GPT perplexity, and that's the beginning of a well-executed plan, is those data points of how you're showing.

Elijah Drown 25:48

That's super cool. So brand visibility monitoring that you're talking about with that suite of tools, it gives you a lot of noise. Sometimes, if you're not quite at Ken level, if you're not the Ken bot, and you don't have a Barbie or whatever the acronym analogy is to help you with the other tools. Yeah, of course, I had to. I had to. How do you mix the operation side of things into content priorities? You take the content, you have the insights, and then, is it just experience that helps you unleash those priorities, or is there a secret sauce behind the scenes?

Ken Marshall 26:24

Yeah, I'll answer this, I guess, in two ways, if you're if you're starting out and that's overwhelming to you, of like, I need to track my brand's visibility, reverse engineer the factors that led the people ahead of me to winning, and then deploy that as my own set of tactics, like I would actually tell that person just to stop and take a step back and do what I call startup content strategy in a box. So before you can reverse engineer a content strategy show up in like, AI, you know, environments do you have the following? This is the type of person I want to help. You know your ICP. I do a customer profile. Here's what I uniquely do to help them. Here are the pain points that are solves, and then this is the benefit to them. Great. You have that now. At every stage of their decision making, you can use top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, problem aware, solution where it doesn't matter. Let's just call it three steps not ready to buy learning on understanding their solution, and then you are the solution. Do I have a piece of content on my site, or at least one representative of all those solutions on my site, or on LinkedIn or another platform? And if you don't have a piece of content that describes the problem, describes the solution and describes how you solve it. Go create those assets first. That is, that is, that is so much more beneficial to your success than trying to create the next best piece of content that's going to land you in chat. GPT, because if you don't have that stuff, again, brand mentions are the number one factor. You're not going to show up anyway, even if you did make those changes. And so I would offer that to that person. The second thing is, I think that there is a pressure, usually from CEOs who just got back from a conference who want to eliminate their workforce, magically, with AI and incorrectly, by the way, that's a logical fallacy. Go look it up on the Revenue Zen Website of why that's a silly thing.

Elijah Drown 28:20

But get the link, and we'll drop in the description so people can check it.

Ken Marshall 28:24

It's on our YouTube channel too of just the common for misconceptions and logical fallacies that executives make about this stuff. But anyway, um, this person really just needs to, instead of a fear-based and maybe reactive approach to using tools out of fear of missing out, I would instead offer pick one use case that is really painful to you. So for us, for the geo stuff it might be, my boss says that I need to know how our brand is showing up. So go pick a tool and learn one thing about it each month. So I offer to people that feel overwhelmed or don't know how to use something, just pick one use case, one tool per month, and get good at it and solve a real problem that you're actually having, versus playing with the tool trying to go deep for no reason, because your motivation will fizzle out. You're going to move on to the next thing so but solving tangible problems, one baby, one at a time, even with this, you know, visibility monitoring software, that's the way to go. Master one feature that solves a real problem that you have today, and spend a month on it. That's my advice to that person.

Elijah Drown 29:37

You talk about FOMO, so I can't help but ask about panic branding. You get into conferences. You're an RSA for cybersecurity. Is Black Hat coming up. People are probably going to do a two-week plan. Be like, Ah, it's a conference. I need to do something. But for I guess, identifying what matters is there a single goal, a, KPI, a, stat, a, some. Thing that should be really the biggest heavy hitter, because we're talking about one thing at one time to take that focus into the event. Is there something that the B2B company needs to look at before even booking the booth at the event? That you can think of?

Ken Marshall 30:15

I think I would ask our salesperson, or whoever was leading the event team, how many, how many hand raisers did we have? How many, we call them qualified opportunities in our CRM? But it wouldn't be how many business cards I got. It wouldn't be how many conferences we attended. It wouldn't be, you know, things that are activity related. It would be something that maps to this X, Y and Z business outcome. And usually that's hand raisers, like we call it again, qualified opportunities, but it could be somebody who booked a meeting after the conference to learn more. So I think folks get caught up in KPIs far too often. They're useful. But again, we're not data driven. We're data informed. And so there's this funny concept called the crocodile right now with Google search, clicks are going down while impressions are going up, so it forms like a little crocodile mouth. But if your clicks are going down, but you look at your organic search sales or your ARR for the year, and it's going up, what's the problem? There is none, because you looked at the business metrics. So that's why I say anchor yourself with business outcome metrics. But KPIs are still useful as lead indicators along the way.

Elijah Drown 31:26

Focus on something else, but use the data to tell the story. Don't focus on that thing as the thing, and then you'll be the

Ken Marshall 31:34

Data isn't the story. It tells the story exactly. You're wining.

Elijah Drown 31:37

Like, yeah, easy and Elijah, yeah, I can win too, no problem, especially if we get into weird things like that. That one night stand analogy, I'm going for the podcast, one night stand analogy all in that'll be fun marketing play. We'll see how it goes.

Ken Marshall 31:53

I dig that. I think people would be into like the poly podcast, but it's actually about marketing taxes.

Elijah Drown 31:58

They have no idea it's I'm just fooling everybody. It's magic. I'll need a gold chain too. That'll be good.

Ken Marshall 32:04

Okay, I'll send you to where I got this.

Elijah Drown 32:07

You built, sold and rebuilt weathered covid and downturns, so you've been through all that fun time. What's the one belief from those personal peaks and valleys, that every growth seeker should adapt so your pain somebody else's gain.

Ken Marshall 32:23

Yeah, wow. Like I'm remembering sitting in my chair in Portland with my books, because I didn't have a stand up desk yet or a proper desk set up. So books my laptop were on books. And I remember thinking after I lost one of my clients, I kept doing the services for them for two months. And so I think if anything stands out to me, it's that you can't you have to think about your well-being, like Maslow's hierarchy, before you can serve others. But the thing that stands out to me is that a focus on helping folks achieve disproportionate outcomes to how much they were paying me through the hardest time of their lives, and mine allowed me to weather that storm and come out even, you know, even better, even more fortified. There was a temporary dip in revenue, but because I kept those relationships alive and actually formed new ones, because of how I showed up in that hard environment, I was able, I think, to come out of it even more fortified and resilient than before. So give more than you think is needed, and do it with an excellent attitude whenever possible. And that seems a little squishy, but, um, that's a value system that I have, and I think it served me the most during those times.

Elijah Drown 33:38

I mean, you went from one place in your life to smiling, being relaxed, having a ukulele in your room with a bunch of books. I mean, it's its seriousness, it's a long way and a lot of hard work to put in there. Yeah, so I'm curious then, now that you're in an excellent headspace, you're super confident, and you're succeeding beyond marketing. What gives you joy in your life? Ken, wow. Like, just besides being I know, I know that's enough joy.

Ken Marshall 34:08

Yeah, I was gonna for not talking about being on a podcast with Elijah and chopping it up, man, I love being near I love being in water at the beach. That's how we moved to San Louis Obispo. The first thing I thought of was just sitting on the beach. My legs kicked up. I got a beer. My dog's running around. I got a book. I'm taking a nap. I'm in and out of just enjoying things. So the beach is definitely my happy place. I love camping and hiking, doing Jiu-Jitsu. I haven't done that in a few months, but I'm a pretty rowdy dude, so

Elijah Drown 34:40

The shop board with your Ozzie, or is that too dangerous of a play?

Ken Marshall 34:44

No, we have stand up paddle boards, and mine is actually like a daddy one. It's carbon fiber, which I know is kind of bougie, but like it can hold me, my wife and my dog without a problem. I mean, it's just it's solid.

Elijah Drown 34:56

Like the modern version of those 70s station wagons, where. You sit in the back the trunk. That's what it feels like. Everybody's along for the ride, having fun, crank the tunes, Bluetooth headsets, or whatever they are.

Ken Marshall 35:06

You have, that's the vibe. That's exactly right. We have our speaker in the back as we're riding out on that. There are a few different like, there's a lake and we can do it in the ocean, but, yeah, man, just being with people that I love, having a good drink and being outside. You know, I don't need anything else.

Elijah Drown 35:21

But tease the heck out of what you do, Ken. But if you could look into this camera, please and thank you, and tell our listeners where they can follow your geo wizardry and everything you're building at Revenue Zen, so we can help share, spread the word about your magic.

Ken Marshall 35:33

Heck yeah. So Ken Magna Marshall, you can type that into your browser on LinkedIn. I'm always posting stuff, thoughts and big brain insights, and then get in touch with me. I'm a normal human being, super simple. I love to workshop and solve problems in real time, and I'm always available.

Elijah Drown 35:49

Sweet. You always make time for me, and I appreciate it, including this conversation, which is super dope, and all the unleashing that you did today, because there's a lot of secrets here that you've don't have, but you shared, which is even better. So from that, uh, secrets, I'd like to add a few more conversations to queue up. If you're wanting to binge the tea time episodes, feel free. There's a sophisticated yet scrappy marketing that actually drives growth. There's a lady, Christy, Chrissy Camacho. She shows startups how to pair enterprise-level strategy with some go-kart strapiness and get into like her Formula One habits, have some fun, and do a spin leaning into budgets and real pipeline. And then there's our pain, Babylon. She's in Threat Connect, and she walks people through reverse waterfall tracking and sales alignment tactics to make every marketing dollar count. Kind of cool, especially as a global, global demand gen leader. It's pretty neat, but I wanted to let you know, Ken, that Tea Time with Tech Marketing leaders is powered by MKG Marketing, the slogan we manage the details you capture the market. Hopefully, that resonates with you as a marketer. It doesn't sound like spin, and I'm Elijah. I'm way too sexy for this microphone, and I'll talk to you soon.