Funnel Reboot – Details, episodes & analysis

The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I'm talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing.  Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The concepts they gave linguistic expression to are stitched into everything that comes out of our mouths. 

You'll hear a passionate discussion today by two guys who both did an undergrad in classics. But you won't need to know anything about this to get great marketing lessons from today's talk. Believe it or not, the ancients can teach us a fair bit about marketing!

Our guest's undergraduate courses taken at the University of Oxford in Classical Greek Language and Literature inspired him to write the book we're discussing today. 

He is a trainer, author, strategist, and lecturer who applies Storytelling, Behavioural Economics, and insight-driven thinking to brands and communications. Serving as a Course Director for several professional institutes, he also delivers TEDx talks and has spoken on stages around the world. His clients span organizations such as the BBC, Panasonic, Nokia, The Royal Albert Hall, and the UK National Health Service. An accomplished writer, he has published several award-winning books, including The Storytelling Book, which has sold 40,000 copies.

His seventh book, The Classical Marketing Book, is being released in North America at the start of 2026. Let's go to the UK to speak with Anthony 'Tas' Tasgal.

Chapters Timestamps

0:00:00 Introducing Tas Tasgal

0:02:48 How Ancient Cultures Inform Modern Marketing Today

0:06:29 Uncovering Marketing Power in Word Origins

0:10:26 Using Ancient Myths for Market Segmentation

0:13:33 Connecting Behavioral Economics with Storytelling Power

0:17:21 Strategies to Avoid Marketing's 'Junk Folder'

0:21:52 Crafting Persuasive Frames with Historical Stories

0:26:43 The Power and Peril of Condensed Language

0:30:53 Mastering Persuasion with Ethos, Logos, and Pathos

0:34:48 Satire and Timeless Human Patterns in Marketing

0:37:57 Tapping into Ancient Wisdom for Modern Marketing

 

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

 

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team.
If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments.
That's especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It's a live feedback loop marketers can't get anywhere else.
Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other's meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly.
Our guest today understands that better than most. He's a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He's known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach's tone to get them back on track. 
And he doesn't restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let's go talk with Karl Ortmanns.

Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths. 

In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane's entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they'd taken enemy fire and  either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel. 

Wald's team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed.

Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren't examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn't  make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn't sample could have  been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they'd been lucky! the returning planes weren't the rule, they were the exception. 

Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that's not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution. 

This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today's episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we'll get a bit more comfortable using them.

Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he's learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs.

Let's now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad.

Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

In this episode, I talked with Farhad Khan, an Ottawa-based expert on UX. He started out working as a software engineer for high tech companies and then formed a Web development agency called Grype Solutions in 2009. Listen for his description of how design impacts a site's marketing effectiveness, what jobs your website has, using your analytics tool to see how visitors flow through your site, making each page on your site interesting, and where sites are going when it comes to personalization.

For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-16-role-of-ux-in-a-sites-marketing-effectiveness/

This episode looks at the impact of fraudulent traffic on digital marketing. We'll talk about how big a problem it is for publishers, ad platforms and advertisers. We will step through what advertisers can do to make their campaigns less vulnerable to attacks by fraudsters, and give thoughts on how to give your non-marketing colleagues reasons why it's still good business to advertise, in spite of problems with ad fraud.

For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-15-ad-fraud-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

This episode takes us through the case of a company that seized the chance to market their product using content, tailored to each buyer's vertical and funnel stage. 

Hear how they:

• Implemented the email communications and marketing content into their Marketing Automation tool.
• What kind of marketing resources they needed to build and maintain the platform
• How to customize content for different audiences, without making too much work for yourself 
• How to present dashboard data such that management understands how you use the budget to create content and what business-related numbers that influence.

For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-14-the-role-of-content-throughout-the-funnel/

This is the fifth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. An experience is created with the content you write; but content alone does not an experience make. You can't just throw together a collection of words and expect it to do anything. Here I talk with a web copy expert on how to craft content that provides a positive experience for the user. In my interview with James Taylor of Samurai Marketing, you'll hear the 12 steps he follows for creating content that measurably improves the number of users who engage and become leads.

Show Notes: 

People/Things mentioned in the show.

• James Taylor, Samurai Marketing
• War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
• Ernest Hemingway
• WordPress SEO All-in-One Plugin
• Pixabay
• Apple Notes (similar to: Evernote, OneNote, Google Keep)

Episode Reboot: 

Here is James' 12-step checklist for Creating WebPage and Blog Post content

This is the fourth in our five-part series on Making the Whole Funnel Work. In this episode, we talk about traffic; not the automotive type but the web visitor type. This solocast talks about all the ways web analytics tools classify traffic to your site. Then I focus on four of those channels that you can affect for getting more traffic to your site.

For complete Show Notes, go to:
http://leadgeneering.com/episode-12-how-traffic-make-the-whole-funnel-work/

 

In this episode, we look at both sides of a website interaction. We discuss how visitors progress through a website and how marketers make conversion offers for the visitors to complete. Marketers make a critical choice when deciding the conversion actions they use, so we go through the most common actions used on leading-edge websites. Listen in for answers to these topics:

• Why do we have conversions?
• How to optimize your conversions
• How to choose what call-to-action to put on your webpage
• How to effectively use chatbots, contact form, call buttons, questionnaires, etc

For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://leadgeneering.com/episode-11-how-conversions-make-the-whole-funnel-work

This episode covers what needs to be in place to know everything about people's interactions with your website. We talk about how to track conversions in your analytics, how to add Tags, run A/B testing and more.

For all the links and the reboot mentioned in this episode, go to: http://funnelreboot.com/episode-10-how-a-tracking-infrastructure-makes-the-whole-funnel-work