Joshua Oakes - Performance marketing and using data well

What is performance marketing, and how do you incorporate data into your marketing? What are the jobs of marketing and sales? What’s it like to enter the workforce during an economic downturn? These are some of the questions we ask Joshua Oakes, Creator and Founder of the Who First Framework, an audience understanding, product development, and customer acquisition process for executives, investors and entrepreneurs.

Joshua Oakes, twenty years veteran of client services, product management, and marketing talks with Tom about the Who First framework and how it helps businesses create and sell products effectively. Josh believes understanding your customer is always the most important thing. Who First is a structured methodology for getting verifiable data about who your audience is, what they care about, and what they think about you. Josh shows Tom what a customer interview is like using Who First and how he's working to turn his professional service into a more scalable product. Josh also talks about creating business metrics that reflect who your business is trying to serve and why he hates marketing personas. Tom and Josh then go on a run about how getting past personas is like a post-racial world, how the reality of why buyer's make purchases is often different from the demographic theory, and why Simon Sinek's Start with Why might be wrong that having a higher purpose for your business translates into measurable results.