I Love Marketing

The episode is 11 minutes of which a large portion is Joe Polish admitting he avoids CRMs entirely and recycling the platitude 'fortune is in the follow-up.' The one genuinely instructive segment - Dean's reverse mortgage outreach engineering example - is useful but brief and buried under extended rambling.

“one of the ways I absolutely make all technology and databases more fun is I avoid them completely”

“The way to make it fun is to make sales. The way to make it fun is to know that the fortune is in the follow up.”

The Publishers Clearing House reframe ('they're going to be thrilled that you called them') and the idea of engineering a call so you arrive with a buyer instead of asking for a favor are decent illustrations of value-first outreach, but the underlying principle is well-worn and nothing here challenges existing frameworks.

“What's fun is if you were thinking it would be fun to make calls if you were in charge of announcements for the publishers clearing house sweepstakes.”

“how can you get to the point where you really are giving them a blessing that it's almost like they're going to be so much better off”

Joe Polish and Dean Jackson are established marketing names, but Joe explicitly disqualifies himself on the topic ('I avoid them completely,' 'I never really learned much about going into CRMs'), undermining the episode's premise. Dean provides more practical value but neither is a deep CRM practitioner.

“one of the ways I absolutely make all technology and databases more fun is I avoid them completely. And my, you know, do my best to let my team do that.”

“I never really learned much about going into CRMs”

The reverse mortgage case study supplies some real numbers (1,000 leads, 190-something listings, 93 realtors, 50% down, named markets like Tucson and Poughkeepsie) but there are zero outcome metrics - no conversion rates, revenue, or before/after comparisons - limiting its evidential weight.

“we generated a thousand of those leads, communicating with them, sending them updates”

“There were 190-something listings represented by 93 different realtors, of which the loan officer in the area only knew three”

The format is a live Q&A with minimal host discipline: Joe's lengthy tangent about not using CRM goes unchallenged, there are no probing follow-ups, and Dean's pivot to his own example feels more like a rescue than a structured line of inquiry.

“If Joe, do you think, if I can tell this story in two minutes and 20 seconds, give me two minutes and 20 seconds to set up a perfect example of this.”

“So anyway, you know, Dean is continuously consults with people on how to leverage their database.”