And again, just intuitively understood

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that the point of SEO is not to force your message or force a certain way of thinking on the audience, but really to answer their questions. The point of any inquiry that someone types into Google is they are looking for an answer to question. And if you can provide the best possible answer, the answer that suits what they're searching for, the answers they're seeking, you are always going to do the best. Now, what does that do altogether? All of that together created a pipeline that netherlands girl number when I joined at the end of 2019 was 0, by the end of 2020, it was 18 million. Now you might ask, okay, that's great, you've supported the sales function, what does that allow you to do? By proving that you can tie your results to sales and therefore revenue, this is the number one skill for any marketer to do, you are allowed to get investment for some of the more exploratory areas. This is the key.

It's not that revenue is the only thing that is important, and certainly not for marketing. It is not the be all and end all of our function, but if you can show that you can care about the revenue of the business, you will be given grace, you'll be given flexibility when it comes to investing in more speculative areas, areas like B2B influencer marketing, areas like bringing new services to market, areas like a comprehensive video strategy, some of these areas that are really cool and exciting to do, but when you start them, you might not see immediate ROI. But you only get that permission from the rest of your company to do that, if you've proven that you can take care of the things that matter.




NICK: Yeah. No, I love the approach you took. Clearly it was very successful. If I can ask a little bit of a nitty gritty question about, what were the calls to action? Let's say you changed the messaging on PPC. You were probably driving a similar amount of traffic, but converting it better. How did you change the offer? How did you change the calls to action? And what were those calls to action when people initially found you? And similar question to SEO, you build up this thought leadership, you build up your organic traffic, your SERP, but then how did you convert that into leads and then pipeline?

PATRICK: Yep. So this is a really good question because the crux of the matter, as you're moving up market, ironically, is to make yourself more exclusive. So in the past, Rootstrap had sold one clear service offering, it was called Roadmapping. It was a three week engagement, it cost $15,000, and the idea of it was that you could go through this three week workshop or a series of workshops with us, and what you would get is you would produce a roadmap, you would produce a clickable prototype of your app idea, and you could then take it to investors, other VC and try and get the funding with the hope that you would then return to Rootstrap once you had the funding and build it from scratch. Everything in our messaging and every call to action we had was geared towards sign up for a Roadmapping session.