Evaluating Marketing Wins Beyond Vanity Metrics | Scott Desgrosseilliers | WR | Bonus Episode

Scott Desgrosseilliers is the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, a leading first-party marketing attribution platform for high-growth eCommerce brands. With over a decade of experience analyzing billions in ad spend, Scott helps marketers cut through the noise to find what’s really driving ROI. 

He’s the creator of the 5 Forces System, a proven framework that turns messy marketing data into clear, confident decisions. Before Wicked Reports, Scott led and consulted on database and process management applications at Motorola, Quest Diagnostics, Breck Shampoo, Ovaltine, the Hong Kong 911 department, and Apartments.com. 

When not leading Wicked Reports, Scott can be found in Marblehead Massachusetts playing pickleball, meditating, or on the boat with the family. 

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

• [00:00] Intro
• [02:37] Questioning attribution in marketing
• [06:44] The truth about “more is better” marketing 
• [07:36] Choosing channels for first campaigns
• [09:34] Starting funnels with small spend
• [11:16] Debunking marketing ROI lies
• [14:24] Navigating attribution for customer journeys
• [16:51] Distinguishing case studies from reality
• [19:07] Exploring the Five Forces framework
• [27:24] Seeing emotional spending on paid ads
• [27:50] Recording client interaction for accountability 
• [28:53] Highlighting effective AI campaign analysis 
• [31:21] Streamlining insights for effective decisions

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Multitouch marketing attribution software www.wickedreports.com/ 
• Follow Scott Desgrosseilliers www.linkedin.com/in/scottd71/ 

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

Transcript

Chase Clymer

Their insight was, if you spend more money, you'll make more money. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

On brand especially. Oh, you're not capturing all your brand. Like, yeah I am. 

Chase Clymer

It's like, well, they know my brand name. I don't need to spend on that. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. How come I have all this direct and Google Analytics? Which although actually that's usually because it's crap, not stitching together a good journey. But I have all this direct. Why do I need to pay for the direct I'm already getting? 

Chase Clymer

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start and scale an online business today.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, we've got an awesome bonus episode for you. Today, I'm welcoming Scott Desgrosseilliers, the founder and CEO of Wicked Reports, the marketing attribution platform for Ecommerce brands from $3 to $30 million in revenue doing full funnel marketing. Scott, welcome to the show. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers

Thanks for having me, Chase. I like being considered a bonus anywhere I go. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. I love anything that's free, I guess. Is that what bonus stands for? I don't know.

So just quickly, let's set the stage here. Obviously, you're the CEO of an amazing SaaS company. But what gives you the right to call yourself an expert in this marketing, ecommerce world? Give me your backstory. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers

A couple things. Let's see. I almost got a patent in first party data attribution. Although no one called it that when I did it. It was, let's use real leads in sales and start from there.

And then getting a patent is something challenging to do and a lot of money and time. So be careful if you think you might get one. I've been doing it for 25,000 hours, probably more. I don't recommend that. 

But if it takes 10,000 hours, I'm like a double expert or I'm just a slow learner and one or the other. And, you know, I mean, we've tracked, I don't know, about 10 billion in ad spend at this point, over 20 billion in revs. So, I mean, we've seen a lot. Being in the trenches for a decade. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to get into it. Now, I guess first and foremost, today, what do we want to discuss? What are we going to dive into? What are we going to pull the curtain back on? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Sure. guess, there's common mistakes made in marketing attribution. That's why it's often considered frustrating for people. And so I hope to unlock why it's frustrating. More importantly, the solution, not just dig the pain points.

A framework you can use for data decision making in general and particularly around marketing attribution data. Advance AI has how AI has helped make things faster and easier. You can start there. Attribution models to use and ones to avoid. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. I do want to get into it. But here's the first question. This is actually a question I was asked yesterday. And it was basically like, do you trust attribution? They asked me this. And I was just like, as much as the next guy, I don't know. It is kind of just... Since it's a black box, it's smoke and mirrors. So maybe could you help me just distill that a bit more? Should I trust attribution? Or how can I get a better sense of my attribution? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Well, yeah. It depends on your source. And if you can't transparently verify the data, you probably shouldn't trust it.

So, I mean, we start with order ID. Pulling from your orders and looking back in time against everything we have to figure out who and what and when they clicked on things and which clicks are important or not. But I mean, Facebook and Google, it's the fox watching the hen house. 

Their goal, I mean, they want you to make money only because you're going to spend more, but they're not going to ever. The first time they tell you, hey, stop spending with us and go spend somewhere else. That will be the first time I've heard it. You can't trust the attribution data unless it's actually told you to spend less on something. 

That's because not everything... I mean, it's 80-20 rule, really. 20 % of your campaigns, what drives the winner. So if something's always telling you to spend more or just do more work and never to just stop spending on something, you shouldn't trust that. 

Chase Clymer

Now I'm just going to jump right to the sales... Is that something that Wicked Reports does? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah, we transparently show everything. We timestamped everything.

Chase Clymer

I'm just saying like you say, don't spend as much on this campaign. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Oh, yeah. 

Chase Clymer

And vice versa, maybe spend more on this campaign. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

So we classify it now, which is new. Scale, kill, chill. Scale, spend more. Kill means better fix something or else kill it, which we try to deduce with the data and tell you whether it's what's saveable or not. And then chill is kind of nice because everyone's busy as a marketer. Chill means you keep spending the same amount. 

You're not killing it. But you're making enough money in your range that you define that you can worry about other stuff today. 

Chase ClymerChase Clymer

I think that's a good metric. It's spend more or kill it. It's like, no, it's fine. Just let it be. Things can be fine in business. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. Well, I found with traditional goal setting applied to marketing, if you just set a goal like, to acquire customers at $50, you always have to think it's either, oh, it's below $50. Oh, let me go see if I should spend more or scale it. And if it's like $55, like, oh crap. Does that mean I have to stop because I'm running out of money because I told 50 was the goal? And really there's a range in the trend involved that helps determine whether you can just chill or not. 

So that's how I came about it. Because it's kind of like, you don't want to have to think every time you go open up your analytics tool and there's a value and then like, oh crap, what does that mean? So I wanted it to really be like what time range and then what zone of numbers means that I don't have one less thing to worry about on my to-do list. 

Chase Clymer

It was an unlock for me. And I hope this is maybe something that you hadn't heard either before, but you were right. These platforms themselves, the Meta, the Googles, etc. They will not tell you to stop spending money. And that is almost inherently a value prop for a third party attribution tool such as Wicked Reports. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Correct. We architected a Google conversion upload tool with them five years ago, six years ago. And we had this thing where you could spend more based on how much impression share. So if you have a search keyword and you're doing well and you want to spend more, if there's more impressions you're not showing for, theoretically, you could just spend more or make more money. 

And then I said, then I had a dragger to the left there where you could lower the span. They’ll be like, “Oh, can you get rid of that?” 

And we're like, “Well, I go, well, what if you want to spend less? Because it's not doing well.” Then they’ll be, “Oh, we don't like to do that.”

And I was like, “Well I have to allow people to lower the ad spend or we can't do this with you." So it was real. They were like, not even being like... Trying to be sneaky about it. Just didn't even compute with them. What do you mean you'd spend less? Like, is it worth it? 

Chase Clymer

That's the thing is, man, this is giving me nightmares back when we did ads. It was like, you'd get a call and an email and a text message from your new Meta or Facebook Rap of the Week. They're like, hey, and always their insight was, if you spend more money, you'll make more money. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

On brand especially. Oh, you're not capturing all your brand. Yeah I am. 

Chase Clymer

I was like, well, they know my brand name. I don't need to spend on that. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. How come I have all this directly in Google Analytics? Which although actually, that's usually because it's crap, not stitching together a good journey. But I have all this direct. Why do I need to pay for the direct I'm already getting?

They'd always want you to scale more brands every time. That was the first thing they would recommend. I was like, I'm not telling anyone this. I will lose all my credibility if I say scale brand first.

Chase Clymer

I'm gonna ask you a curveball hard question. No, it's not that hard. I'm sure you're gonna. If you're an Ecommerce brand and you're just getting into paid and you do have, you got some budget allocated. 

Maybe I'll ask you about what types of budgets we should be allocating. But ecommerce, Shopify, direct consumer type world, what channel would you get started with? Or does it depend on the type of product? And then also, what budgets should people be expecting to spend 2025 now? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Well, the channel depends heavily on the strategy you're going to try to use first. So if you're going to be an influencer, that's TikTok all the way with some Facebook, Instagram. If you have something that has a low consideration cycle, then search. Because you got to be able to win at search. 

And if you're going to do more full funnel strategy, then you're going to want to use Meta plus Google plus email. All of them should have email SMS because that's the free channel that you can win on. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Hold on. Let me just really drill that in for some people. If you're going to pay money to send a stranger to your website and not get their email or SMS, then talk to them again forever for basically free. You've just wasted that $7, $8, $28 that you paid to get them to your website. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

It's puzzling because you say, we're hearing this less. But sales report back. Oh, yeah. Well, they're pure ecoms. So I go, yeah. So they don't capture emails? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Hold on. What does pure ecom mean? So many brands. Yeah.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

It was more common too. Yeah, it was more common than people wouldn't have anything. And then they're like, “Oh, opt-in capture? Yeah, we have a game on the site or something.” Yeah, whatever. Call it what you want. Capturing the email. Leadgen. 

“Oh, no, we don't do leadgen on PUR.com.” I'm like, No, just... Are you capturing leads? It's good to change our goals. 

Chase Clymer

That's goofy. Alright. So uh that was a fantastic answer. Now what would you say is a realistic budget that a brand would need to get started? Or what would they need to spend over 96 months to get things actually rolling to test the waters to figure it out? Because it's not like the first ad is going to be profitable. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

I feel like 10 grand a month. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, that's where my head's always been with suggesting to people.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Do a couple grand, you could maybe do one funnel. You can maybe do a hundred bucks a day and then send them to some lead capture where they're going to opt into some special deal, founder, whatever your angle is. And then just redirect them to a URL that already had the deal and then just email the deal they already have. That’s a basic thing that got Wicked Reports going. We tracked it was, I was in Wicked Reports. It was Scott helping a friend.

He wasn't working on ads and he did a Facebook ad to a landing page that redirected to the offer that he already had on the site. Then his emails were so good, he closed people throughout the, you know, over the next three to six months. And then we just keep upping the value of that mapping it back to the spend and find that he made a really great return as long as he wasn't trying to get a same day profitability. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

And now that's even harder because the clicks are too expensive. 

Chase  Clymer

Yeah. I think that's something that I would like to talk about, maybe highlight is like I am on Reddit way too often. And I find myself in the Ecommerce and Shopify forums. I see a lot of people like, “I have to have a 5x ROI.” 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Good luck. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. It's what people are saying. They're just straight up lies. What are some of the lies you're seeing out there around marketing, about returns, about advertising, about attribution?

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

The biggest thing I see is that people are trying to make a massive profit on the first sale. And really, you got to make the money on the second sale. The more you can lose or break even upfront, the more you can bid and the more than you can win. Because if you look at like a 90 day value of a customer, you can't say lifetime value, oh, they're worth five grand. Yeah, over five years and you can't bid on that.

Chase Clymer

But your business is a year old and you're saying the lifetime. It's like you're just making stuff up. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

But you got to try to say, what's a realistic 90-day value I'm going to get? And I want to make money in 90 days, then what do I have to do in the first 2 to 4 weeks of my customer experience? That's one way where people throw around a lot of terms not based on a lot of real data. They got to have it. If you don't have it in your new brand, you got to just wait.

That's one I see. A lot of people around will post their amazing results. And it's really including Facebook view through tracking, which means Facebook shows they're getting like a $50 customer. Really that's including their repeat buyers that bought on email and Facebook happened to have a view that scroll through the ad and didn't even click on it. And it was within 30 days. That's a big lie out there.

Chase Clymer

I could almost distill that down to like, “Mark, sometimes your attribution on the platform, aka on meta or on Google, they are saying they did more than they did.” 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

It reminds me of like, I play fantasy football, fantasy hockey. I go to those same sites all the time. And they've got ads all over the place. But I'm blind to them because I'm just in there managing my lineup on my team.

But then they're there. And then I bought something within. I don't even know what I did last week. And like, tell me 30 days ago an ad that I scrolled by and didn't see was the reason I bought today. That's ridiculous. Just no way. 

Chase Clymer

I like to... And this is probably just because I'm in this game. I like to proudly be like, you know what? I'm going to buy this eventually. I was gonna buy it right now. I'll give you guys some better numbers.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

The beneficial ad click.

Chase Clymer

Yeah. It's like, you know, I'm gonna fall for this eventually. I'll just do it. I'm gonna write it off anyway. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. See, I try to help the pay people by not clicking on the brand ads because I don't want to charge them $2. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, no. I never click on the top results on Google. That is... 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

I don't want to hurt the brand that I'm supporting by charging. 

Chase Clymer

You know what's funny? I even take that to the next. When people do it in front of me. I see someone click on the branded search result in front of me, I die a little inside. I'll even tell [them] no, it's like the... Not that one. It's the third result. And sometimes it's the same as this one. I'm just like, just click the third one. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Just help a small brand out. Save them $2. Or more maybe. 

Chase Clymer

Alright. So when does this attribution really start to matter? I'm assuming if you're just really running one channel, you can do some tests without a platform to really figure out what's happening. So is it like once you start getting into multi-platform stuff, that's when it really starts to get a little more wild and you might need a…

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

It's a couple things. It's multi-channel. So more than one paid. Or if you have more of a consideration cycle. 

Chase Clymer

Well, yeah. Explain consideration cycle for the listeners. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

The consideration cycle means… there are multiple touch points. Because of either your price point being like, you know, or it's a subscription that you have more commitment either in dollars or in well, the subscription be dollars as well. Or if it's something where people got to learn about or research, they're just not going to click and buy because of one fantastic ad you wrote. The more complexity to the user customer journey, that's when you need attribution. 

So let's say you're selling something that's a hundred bucks. Well, you know, that's not mega expensive, but hundred bucks people aren't necessarily going to click and buy the first time they see the ad, they're going to have to get warmed up. 

And then if you find something like when you send an email, then sales come in from the email, like right away, which usually that will happen. The more sales you're getting on email, the more like you need attribution because people had to get on that list somehow. And then you have your first funnel. I'm doing something on paid to get or organically, however. To get someone in on my list and then I'm sending them emails and that means there's usually a lag in time there. 

And so that's when attribution will stitch together and give value ideally to the things that got them aware of the brand. Because the top of the funnel is the hardest thing to do. It's the hardest thing to track, the hardest thing to succeed in. 

And moving to this more AI world where Meta's Advantage Plus and Google's PMAX they're much better at, you know retarget, getting people hot in the market. But they got to be aware of your brand initially and get there. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, exactly. 

Scott  Desgrosseilliers 

And so you need to get the traffic to keep flowing, to keep filling the top of the funnel so that then those bottom of the funnel ads are going to work. So any type of full funnel strategy, we got different messaging top and bottom, which you should have. People react differently when they're getting used to a brand versus once they're returning.

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week. So don't miss out. Now back to the interview. 

And I want to just highlight something. You said the basic funnel is, at the top, email them and they buy. That's the funnel. Now they have purchased it. There's two touch points there. But I'm just gonna distill. There should be more touch points. They should get on your list from that ad and then you should have an amazing welcome series that educates them about the brand, the benefits, the values, the differentiation, your positioning, the offer, right? 

Multiple emails to within one of the emails they purchase. If you're going to add one email and get a purchase, I want to invest. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. I mean, that just doesn't happen. I don't think so. I mean, in any case that does, they went viral right away. It was unbelievably creative or there's always special circumstances. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Because you see some of those case studies. And it's not a case study that someone can emulate quickly or cheaply. “Oh, we went viral.” Like, you know, some like solo stoves. It's like, well, or Yeti. Why would you have met a conference in a Yeti was up on stage on how great Facebook was like, everyone knows Yeti. Everyone already knows that's like.

Chase Clymer

That's one I love going to conferences. I love meeting people in real life. Half of the podcast guests now are people that I've met at conferences. But it does always leave. It just leaves something to be desired when it's just like, here is a F50 brand talking about how great their ads are. And it's like, well, of course, your campaigns are great. Everyone is born and they know who they are. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah, I went to one at Google one and it was Macy's, a bunch of samples. Yeah, they were, they had like bots that had to create them, they have so many products, so many skews, no human can even keep track of it all. 

This is, I mean, I'm sure that's its own challenge and everything and they have skilled people, but like it doesn't relate to the econ brand that's doing 100K a month or 200K a month or whatever. You know, that's a lot harder work. Well, it's different work too.

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. To pivot a little bit, you mentioned earlier, we were going to talk about frameworks today. And you've got here, 5 forces frameworks. I love frameworks. They're fun to wrap your head around. How do we get into that? How do we unpack that a little bit? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Sure. Well, it was actually based on a spiritual teaching I learned that I somehow applied to marketing. So I have a meditation class. And the idea around reality creation is you have an intention. You have expectations behind it, which you may or may not realize. You take action. There's a consequence of the action. Then there's your reaction to the consequences. 

Chase Clymer

That's also based upon the ABCs of therapy. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. And so it just came to me, I don't even know how. Because I've been doing data analysis for a long time, and then I've been training my team up. But I hated the whole concept that we had to come in and just magically figure it out for the people like it should have been easier to use. So it was easy for us. And I was like, oh, we got this great spreadsheet, our online spreadsheet is better than the other guys. 

But it's like, there's gotta be a way to make life easier so they're not in there, have to be grinding through the numbers all the time. So the Framework 5 forces came about as a result of that, which was in the pain point for you know, that was also which attribution model should I use? And how long should I measure until I do something? 

People struggle with that because everyone tries to find the magic one attribution model that's gonna weigh all the touch points perfectly. And then they're going to go in after a couple days and look and see their Rosetta Stone of how to be rich. And that's just not how online marketing works in general. 

So that's what I set out to solve. So how it works is first, do you have an intention? What are you trying to do with the campaign? It could acquire new customers. It could be cold traffic that later converts, or it could be I want people to buy my stuff right away. And based on the intention of that campaign, that tells us how to measure it. It gives us a scoreboard.

Just think about a sport. You could say, ‘Oh, I don't know what sport you like.’ 

Chase Clymer

Oh, I mean, the only sport I watch is Ohio State football. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Oh. Okay. Ohio State football. So let's say the game. Well, like Ohio State football, the coach could have a great record. But if he didn't beat Michigan and he wasn't in the title game... 

Chase Clymer

His job is on the line every year. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

His job is on the line. And then if I'm working at a beast Boston College down the road, if we go 9-3, their going to erect a statue for the guy. So it's all relative. The scoreboard is relative, but also like in the game, if you win, but it's like 10 to seven, it's like, okay, well we won and our defense was great. But if you're measuring from an offense perspective, the offense was terrible. 

Maybe the quarterback, you know, just like tons of incomplete passes. So all the different stats in the game depend on how you're evaluating it. So for intention, we're trying to get the right scoreboard to begin with.

For example, acquire new customers. That means from an attribution perspective, we only need to look at the things that drove a first purchase, because that attracted the new customers. Which then is going to make all your stats look worse, because it's new people, which are harder to get. So we get to set a different goal. 

Then with the intention, it sets the primary metric. Because we get almost 200 data points if you count all the trends. And that's too much. And it can lead you to all these red herrings. So it gives us our North Star of what we should be optimizing on if we had to pick one number. New customer acquisition would be new customer acquisition costs. 

Then the second. So any question that's step one of five? Anything there for you? Still clear? 

Chase Clymer

No, not for me. But I'm sure the listeners out there are going to have questions and I'm just going to tell them which website to go to later on. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

So then the second step is expectations because you have to set the expectations. So like for a football game, like you're installing a new offense, it could take a month until you think you can start running the new plays in the game. Depends on you got that incredible receiver there, that young guy. Jjust throwing bombs to that guy until you figure it out. 

Well, in attribution and marketing expectations is how are we going to measure it and how long until we can make a decision? Because if you do a new customer acquisition, [you] got to get on board with the person that holds the budget. Hey, it's going to take 30 days or what depends on the timeframe. Because otherwise, you launch it, you get all excited about this work in, spend 5 days like we're losing our shirt on this campaign. 

Like, well, we normally take 30 days to acquire a customer. We didn't suddenly crack the nut and make it in 5 days. We need 30 days to measure it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

And you set a scale chill kill zone. You say at what value, what new customer acquisition costs range? Does it mean we're going to leave the budget as is? And that's where it's math and emotional math. You got to talk to the person with the budget and confirm like, the math says we can do this and get them on record. You got to log it so that then the budget people get finicky. 

You say, “Hey, we have a contract here. Instead, this is a good number and that I have 30 days and this is how we're going to measure it.” Because otherwise they're going to go into Google Analytics 4. They're going to look at meta. They're going to look in Shopify.

Chase Clymer

3 days after the campaign launches, see they're paying $78 to acquire a new customer where $60 was the max. 3 days is nothing. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah, exactly. So we got talk tracks behind this stuff and everything so you can manage them. But really, it's about logging the decision and then reviewing it in the status call. We agreed it's going to take 30. So you always have it up front. There's a risk of embarrassment if they start going back on their name. You're always going to use leverage. 

The third step is the outcome. It's taking the measurement the way you agreed to do it in the tool with the North star metric and then plotting it on the scale chill kill zone to determine, “Do we have some work we have to do.” 

And then after that, we're going to look at the optimization. So based on where it plots, that's where you might have work to do. Scale's a fun one, spend more money. Chill's like, okay, I don't have to do anything unless I have time on my hands, which is unlikely. And then kill is where the work comes in.

So,kill is then we then look at the five different strategic areas of. Is it a traffic issue? Is it a creative or offer? Often it's one of those two. It could be a budget thing where the AI is just spending it all on one ad set or on two creatives and these other great ideas aren't getting any money spent because that happens. 

They do that quickly. Like, “Oh my God, I had all these great ideas. How come this is tanking?” Like, “Oh my God, they got like $12 ad spend.” No one even saw it. 

It could be a customer quality issue because you're sending them to the page and your mass all based on a $200 AOV and they're buying in at a hundred bucks. They're buying some down sell or, you know, they're clicking around something on the site and it's crushing your unit economics. 

Or it could be product, could be you're offering a skew that's great with people on your email list. It's not good for a new customer. And so all these things get taken into consideration in a methodical framework. So then you can take action. It shrinks down all the things you have to worry about. That data help guide you to the decision. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Was that all five or do we miss one? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

So intention, expectation…

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Yeah. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Expectation, action. Oh, action. I glossed over the action. You take the action, then you measure the outcome. And you optimize, then you take more action. So you reflect. And when you take the action, you do a decision log. Because you log the decisions you make because then you learn over time. Or you log the decisions that you don't take.

So if you're supposed to scale but the budget person isn't letting you pick on the budget people, mean, they're smart enough to earn the budget to have it. But they also sabotage. We see them sabotage their own success, or they don't give the agency or the media buyer the freedom to do their job a lot of time. A lot of emotional things play out in the budget. 

Chase Clymer

That's why we do not do paid ads anymore. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Just a ringer. 

Chase Clymer

A lot of emotion-based decisions. This could just be turned into a soap opera. There is something just intrinsically weird about the relationship between a media buyer and the founder, whoever holds the purse strings. It's the most finicky client we ever had in the history of the agency. The most emotional and also at times just would call people liars. And I was just like, this isn't the game we want to be in. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. So really, that expectation phase is you're trying to get alignment. Alignment on the scoreboard in the duration of the game. 

Chase Clymer

I kind of like what you said earlier. Get it on record. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. You get it on record and then you just log things. It's not cutting edge, but people don't do it a lot. Yeah. And we deal with a couple hundred agencies. So we see like one brand will jump to another one and they're doing. It's a lot of alignment issues. 

Chase Clymer

These days, if you're not recording your client calls, you can do it for free with Fathom or any other tool. If you're not recording every client interaction, you're just signing up for headaches. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. Yeah. Fathom does a great job of summarizing them. We don't use that but I think it's killer. Yeah. So that creates not just an audit trail but also continually reinforces. Because the founders or the brand with the money is, they're doing 1,000 things every week. Maybe they get in, they had a bad week or they're feeling pressure about the job and then they see, wait a minute, why is the CAC $70? Why are we still doing this?

And just bringing them back to reality is helpful for everyone. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now Scott, we could talk for another hour. But we'll save that for a future episode. Now if I'm, and if I'm curious about the Five Forces. I just quickly want to talk about that before I pivot back to Wicked Reports because I know you guys have some awesome stuff coming out here soon. That will probably be, itt had just launched by the time this episode airs. 

But if I'm curious to learn more about the Five Forces, you have fiveforces.com. Obviously, they can head there. Anything else that you want to tell them about the Five Forces website? 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

fiveforces.com is the place to go. Or on LinkedIn, you can find me there. Wicked Reports, Scott. We can do a deal for your listeners. We can do an honest code. Take $700 off the course. We'll run that through the end of the year. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome. Yeah. Check that out. Now, pivoting back to Wicked Reports. So this is the reporting software marketing attribution platform that you are the CEO of. You guys are launching some cool stuff here soon. Let's just shout out and assign a spotlight on what you're doing with the software.

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Sure, there's three big things we're launching uh and then we'll always iterate, but this is kind of like our end game in terms of we feel like we've created the attribution easy button and we're really excited about it. The first piece is that we have AI trained up on the five forces that will auto analyze your account and give you very specific tactical advice per campaign. And show the data as evidence is no black box. 

Just like we're transparent with our attribution, transparent with the AI has been months of vetting and tuning so that it will tell you what to do with your budget and what trends or key metrics or whatever are supporting the decision. And it's based on your intention you set for the campaign and your scale kill chill zone that you set based on the key metric for that intention.

So it runs the framework for you. And it does a great job. It does better than a human now. It has been for months. It's been in beta. It'll be wide-released come September. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And then you're adding in some new channels as well. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Yeah. Right now, we have paid channels of Meta, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, PIN and Snap. And then we're adding in email, SMS and organic as well. And then we'll move on to creative analysis from there. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing, Scott. Again, you can go to fiveforces.com, wigadereports.com. You can search for Scott on LinkedIn. Anywhere else you want me to point them towards. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

No, that's good. I would say the other thing with our AI is we're trying to save time but also information overload. We could have done 65 bots and all these different little ones. So we could have overwhelmed the people with all the insights we could tell them. So we spent months making it digestible and quick and to the point.

The point is, based on what you're trying to do, we want you to be able to get to where you're scaling that spend. And so we just specialized on that one specific goal in mind. Scale, we choose to scale, chill or kill. 

Chase Clymer

I feel like that half [of] my conversations with AI are just telling it to shut. I don't need... Just... You're too verbose. Just answer the question, please. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

We didn't want to do a chatbot. We didn't want to do a ton of agents. Nothing wrong with that. Cool technical stuff. But we purposely avoided that because I heard this infobesity, I heard someone say. We're getting fat from too much information. Instead of info, I call it? Infobesity. was like, huh? 

The person said it like three times. I was like, oh, I kind of like that. Yeah. We're trying to keep you info-thin. 

Chase Clymer

I love that. Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing all these amazing insights. 

Scott Desgrosseilliers 

Thanks for having me, Chase. It was fun.