Owning and learning from mistakes

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We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call at action

that it's just a matter of timing. Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything

Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use

technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast,

Benjamin Shapiro. I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Chris Golek,

the former founder of Demand Base and the current founder and CEO of Channel 99, a company that is

solving marketing attribution challenges by revealing the source of three times the website

visitors compared to your industry standards. And today, Chris is going to explain how to

illuminate the dark funnel problem that is costing you millions in misattributed revenue.

Time for a short break to hear from our sponsor, Scrunch. When was the last time you actually

visited a website to research something? For me, AI does all that work now. So if AI is doing

the discovery, research, and deciding who or what is your brand's website really for,

the rise of AI bots becoming as important as new visitors is a massive change in user behavior,

and that's what Scrunch is taking head on. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that

helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand

shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieve,

trusted, or recommended. It's not just visibility. Scrunch shows you the content gaps,

citation gaps, and how to fix the technical blockers that matter so your brand is found and chosen

in AI answers. Face it, your most important site visitor isn't human anymore. If the AI

deciding what gets surfaced, and for Martek podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website

diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps, and where you're

showing up versus your competition. To see how LLM's evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com slash

Martek. That's scrunch SCR-UNCH.com slash Martek. My next question, I'll talk about owning your

mistakes. What's the biggest mistake you made building a company culture at demand base,

and what are you doing differently at channel 99? So I would say that was one of the things we did

really well at demand base, but the mistake was underestimating how much you really have to

invest in it, to be successful at it. The reason I say that is over the years at demand base,

we became a top 20 place to work in San Francisco for like eight or nine years in a row.

But it didn't come easy. It's not about free snacks. You have to invest a lot in the people,

the training, how you recruit, how you pay people, how transparent you are. There's doing

philanthropic activity, so there's a lot that goes into it. I underestimated what that would

be, because I set out pretty early, like I want to be one of the best places to work so we can

hire and retain the greatest people available to us. What do you think makes a great place to work?

Well, it's a common theme and thread and the types of people that you hire.

For me, I'm more about collaborative type leadership style. We always did a lot of very transparent

meetings, so everybody knew what was going on. There wasn't anything hidden. In one of the secrets,

I think, for our cultures, what I discovered that brought us all together as a company was

instead of doing just team events, we'd always do a team event around something philanthropic,

and that really tied everybody together across department, different people, and so that was

thematically was always something really important to me, and actually everybody that worked at

the company. I had an occasional free snack every once in a while and never heard of it.

I'll get you a bag of chips, yes. And a special thanks to Scrunch for sponsoring this interview.

Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents

experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't and

what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended. And for Martek podcast

listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site,

where you have content gaps, and how you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLM's

evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com. That's scrunch s-e-r-u-n-c-h.com.

All right, that wraps up this episode of The Martek Podcast. Thanks to Chris Gholik, the CEO and

founder of Channel 99 for joining us. If you'd like to contact Chris, you could find a link to his

LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or on martekpod.com, or you could visit his company's website at

channel99.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and

technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app, and we'll

be back on your feed next week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to

just focus on keeping your customers happy.

Thanks for listening to The Martek Podcast.

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