364: The 12 Hidden Marketing Beliefs Sabotaging Your Revenue Growth. Are You Falling for Them?

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In this episode, I'm calling out the 12 false beliefs that have held back most of the clients we've worked with over the last 15 years, beliefs that are costing you real revenue right now.

After helping companies generate well over $300M, here's what I've learned: the toughest part of what we fix isn't the tactics or the technology, it's the belief systems of founders, CEOs, and heads of marketing. 

I break down why "I need more leads" is usually the wrong diagnosis, why you can't just outsource your growth and disappear, and why waiting to figure out AI is a massive mistake in 2025. 

With everything changing at breakneck speed, ChatGPT's new browser, AI overviews transforming search, social media becoming interest media, you can't afford to let these false beliefs keep you stuck. 

This isn't motivational fluff; these are the exact mindset shifts that separate companies that scale from those that stagnate.

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No tactics. No trends. Just clear thinking on what actually works from three decades of working with $1M+ businesses that have outgrown tactics but need strategic clarity.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:04 False Belief 1: "If I just post more content, I'll get clients."
• 1:50 False Belief 2: "I need more leads."
• 2:44 False Belief 3: "Marketing is about tactics and channels."
• 3:31 False Belief 4: "I can outsource my growth and be done with it."
• 4:30 False Belief 5: "If my product is great, people will find me."
• 5:25 False Belief 6: "Marketing is an expense."
• 6:16 False Belief 7: "I need to fix my logo/website before I can market."
• 6:51 False Belief 8: "I can wait until later to figure out Al."
• 7:41 False Belief 9: "If I just hire a salesperson, they'll fix my revenue."
• 8:11 False Belief 10: "More traffic = more sales."
• 9:00 False Belief 11: "I don't have time for marketing."
• 9:30 False Belief 12: "Marketing doesn't work for my industry."
• 10:13 Conclusion

Transcript

There are 12 false beliefs that have held most of the clients back that we've worked with and even the ones that we didn't work with. Over the last 14 and a half, almost 15 years, we've helped companies generate well over 300 million. And in that time period, most of what we've had to fix, at least the toughest part of what we had to fix was the belief systems of the founders or the CEOs, and in some cases the heads of marketing. The one thing about what I'm going to share with you in this video is I've got 12 false beliefs or things about the mindset of marketing that need to be changed. Especially if you're thinking about growing into this new coming year. Let me tell you why this is so important. Right now. Things are changing extremely fast.
ChatGPT just launched. ChatGPT Atlas brand new browser Perplexity just launched Comet brand new browser. AI overviews are changing the way search is showing up on Google and they already of course have the number one browser still to this day at Chrome. Social media isn't really social media anymore. It's more like interest media. So much is changing. So if you don't get these false beliefs corrected, and I'm not suggesting all 12 of these are affecting you, but I want you to stick around, I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to go through all 12 really quick and then I'll come back and unpack each one really quick.
I don't have much time, so I'll go really fast. False belief number one, if we just post more, we'll get more clients or customers posting more meaning on social media. Number two, False belief. I need more leads. Doesn't mean you don't need leads, but sometimes they think that the lead flow or the volume is the problem. False belief number three, Marketing's about these tactics or channels. Oh, if we only do this or that, I'll come back to that in just a moment. False belief number four, I can outsource my growth growth and be done with it.
Number five, if my product is great, people will find me. False belief number six, Marketing is an expense. False belief number seven, I need to fix my logo or website first before we can start marketing properly. False belief number eight, I can wait until later to figure out what's going on with AI. Let everybody else figure it out first and I'll catch up later. False belief number eight. Number nine, Excuse me if I just hire more salespeople, they'll fix our revenue problems. False belief number 10, more traffic equals more sales.
False belief number 11, I don't have time for marketing. False belief number 12, marketing doesn't work with my industry. Now I'm going to start at the end and I'm gonna walk back to number one. So starting back with number 12 and I've got some notes in front of me just so I can get this out of my head really quick. Cause I do have to get to a meeting. The challenge with believing that marketing doesn't work in your industry doesn't is not really what they mean when a CEO tells me that. What they're saying really is that we've built our business a different way and we really don't understand how to effectively do it online. I just had a meeting with a multiple, multiple eight figure company and they've done it the old traditional way.
They've been in business 20 something years. What they're really saying is they don't know what to do. And there's a way, there's a reason, there's a, there's a resource and there's a way to figure that out. Okay, every industry has a buyer's journey that starts online. The goal is to figure out the psychology of what they're doing today that they may not have been doing back in the day. Doesn't mean your offline strategies don't work. Okay, let's go into fossil false belief number 11. That is you don't have time for marketing.
Listen, I have seen for the how many founders, owners, CEOs, they just put marketing on the back burner because they built a sales engine. Maybe they've got a frontline sales team team. Maybe they're still pounding the pavement, knocking doors, cold calling, doing drop buys, whatever that may be. But listen, if you don't prioritize digital marketing today, you're going to end up stagnating and then declining. And by the time you, you start to think about taking it seriously, it could be too late. False belief number 10, backing in. More traffic equals more sales. Listen, Almost everyone, probably 80% of the people that reach out to our agency the last 14, 15 years almost always are asking us to drive more traffic.
Back in those days it was SEO. They wanted to be on the first page of Google, they wanted to rank for these keywords, et cetera, et cetera. The reality is just ranking or just getting more traffic today, whether that's through paid media or organic, isn't necessarily going to drive more business. The reason why is that you don't understand the basis of how people search the Internet, there's essentially four different reasons why they search it. One is for information, one is for commercial intent, one is for navigation, and one is for transaction. But a lot of times you're saying you just want to rank on the first page of Google for transaction. It's not going to necessarily work if you don't have the right message at the right time for the right person. False belief number nine.
If we just hire more salespeople or a salesperson, they will fix our revenue problem. So listen, at the end of the day, salespeople are great at converting demand, not generating demand. Some people are able to go out and build a relationship, do the marketing, and then carry it all the way through to the finish line. But if you know your business, most salespeople are good at converting demand. That's where marketing and sales must work together. And we spent a lot of time working on marketing and sales alignment and our work. False belief number eight. I can wait until later to figure out AI.
Listen, I'm going to say that I even said this in a meeting the other day. AI and the change right now, it is moving at a speed of unreal. It's moving at a speed of unbelievable. The pace of change today is obnoxious. But we can't put our head in the sand and underestimate the power of what AI can bring to the table. When we went all in, and I mean all in, we started using AI in 2021, something like that. But when ChatGPT came out and we went all in in 2023, we've seen just unbelievable input, productivity, streamlining, cut costs, all of that. You've got to learn where to integrate AI right now.
And I get it, you need someone to help you with that. And sometimes it can feel overwhelming. And you all, you also got to make sure it's, it's not in a silo. Okay, backing into false belief number seven. I need to fix my logo or my website before we can market. Listen, branding is important, don't get me wrong, but it actually delays your growth and keeps you stuck. One of the mind shifts we bring to people is that the biggest thing you can spend time working on is your offer and your customer acquisition journey. Not so much the color, the pixel, the website.
We oftentimes will punt a website redesign down the road for six to 12 months so we can prove that the offer, buyer's journey, and the conversion model works. It'll save you tens of thousands of dollars. If not, I saw in one case $100,000 for one of our clients. Number six, false belief. Number six, backing in marketing is an expense. You know, I can't tell you how often I talk to marketers and they are proud that they only spent a certain little bit of money in marketing. They will tell me that they either had to cut marketing because things got tough, or they let their marketer go because things changed in the economy. The very interesting part about that is, is if marketing is done right, it's a growth engine.
It's not something that is just. You just decide to cut when you want to cut it. I think it was Henry Ford that gets credit for it. I can't say that he said it because I wasn't back sitting at the table when I heard it, but I think he said the person who stops marketing and advertising to save money is like the person who stops their watch or their clock to save time. Right. I can't prove that that's what he said, but that's what I heard. It is so true that if you don't have a consistent line item for marketing, whether it's working or not, it tells me you're not invested to grow market. False belief.
Number five, backing in. Here goes. These aren't, by the way, in order of top five to top 12. I'm just put them in order because I wrote them down. If my product is great, people will find me. Listen, you already know the, the old adage, if you build it, they will come. You know it's not true. I can't tell you how many companies I've seen and, and it's just unbelievable how many great products or services I've seen.
Restaurants. You know, this is maybe not your business, but I had a restaurant I was living in in this apartment complex decades ago, and it was a soul food restaurant. It was just over the wall from my apartment complex. I mean, I could be from my apartment to that to that restaurant in probably two and a half minutes tops. And that's if I got stuck climbing over the wall. And I didn't know they were there until they were going out of business. And then I ended up going in there and the food was phenomenal. The problem is we don't market to the people that we are trying to get become aware.
If we don't have a model for making sure people know who we are, what we do, why we do it when they can find it and get it when they're ready, then it doesn't matter how good your product is. Okay, number four, I can outsource my growth and be done with it. This comes from the many times I've sat in a strategy session or in our sprint process and the CEO or founder will tell me how they wrote a check for or they signed an agreement for and they went off and did their thing. Whether that was their technical thing, if they practice law, it could have been that they specialize in a different area of the business, maybe operations, but somewhere along the line they wrote the check, signed the credit card agreement, signed the contract and he disappeared. And here's what I want to say. You don't have to understand everything that's going on in marketing. What you do have to do is you can't abdicate leadership to even the best of people, including our agency. When we come in and partner with you, we must have a captain of the ship.
Captain of the ship on your team working with us. Now if you don't want to be that captain, then you got to find someone on your team to do that. But you can't just disappear. Now when we have companies where the CEO founder is just too busy, we have a cadence and a rhythm to make sure that you're kept informed of every single decision that we're making. But you can't just write the check and disappear. False belief number four. Number three, marketing is about tactics and channels. You know, today it's really easy to see something going well on TikTok or you see this YouTube channel doing a certain kind of thing that you're not doing or you're seeing someone post a certain kind of way on Instagram and threads or Blue sky or whatever the platform is today.
But the truth of the matter is you, you definitely have to have a strategy and a messaging framework that's right for your brand. And the key is you've got to be on the channel or two that make the most sense. There's no way even some of the biggest brands are should be spending time on all 7, 8, 9 platforms that are available today. The goal is narrow it down to one or two in mind shift. We say that complexity is the enemy of progress. And, and if you are trying to do too much too fast, it's going to slow things down. False belief number two, we're bringing it home. I need more leads.
I need more leads. I can't tell you how many times I hear that they think generally it's a volume problem and most of the time when we uncover it, it's a conversion or follow up problem. The vast majority of the prospects, or excuse me, repeat that the vast Majority of the clients we work with, it isn't that they couldn't use more leads to grow their business and scale. That's true, but we can't start with just filling the funnel with more leads. If you have a conversion problem, if you have a CRM full of old leads that you haven't converted, if you have a database of. I think one of our clients had 30,000 customers of which they should have had repurchases at a certain rate every six months and they weren't doing that. We believe in a bottom up optimization approach, which means start from the bottom, which is who do we already have as an existing customer? Have they bought recently? If not, why? If they haven't bought and they don't have a need to buy, have they referred us and we work our way back up leads go all the way back to the top of the funnel, we'll get there, but we want to optimize from the bottom. Last but not least, and I'll let you go, is that if we just post more content, we'll get more clients.
Listen, today, especially in an AI world with ChatGPT, Claude Gemini. It's all amazing stuff, you guys, you know that. But listen, outputs don't equal outcomes. And what's happening right now is a lot of business owners are sending their, they're marketing to people who are just cool with the technology, who are using it to do outputs, but they're not getting outcomes. Here's the shift that we talk about making in our agency and for our clients. And that is you must think about packaging your offers, your content, your funnels, your campaigns with the help of AI that matches all three parts of the buyer's journey and that is the awareness, consideration and decision stage. At the very least, these are the 12 that hit me after I was having this conversation. Mind shifts, if you will.
We call them false beliefs that we have to help shift their mind. Because in our world, before we start doing a lot of things with our clients, we want to make sure we're all aligned with the right mindset. And I know that can sound woo woo to some, but I've been in enough meetings and our team's been enough meetings for 15 years to know that we are fighting the mindset more than it is the tactics and the strategy. We've got enough to deal with with all the changes going on with Google, Perplexity, Claude Gemini, fake Facebook, meta, Instagram, Blue sky, you name it, Twitter X. There's enough going on on the platforms we don't own. We better be aligned on these topics in our room when we're building strategies to execute and plan to partner together. So whether you're working with us or not, it doesn't matter. I want you to I wonder which One of these 12 might be dealing with you, or what you might be resonating with.
Let me know in the comments below if you need some help with that. Ask a question down below. I'll pop back in and answer that as soon as I get a minute. And if there's another video that you want to watch, it would pop up right here is what I would recommend next. I'll see you next time. Take care.