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3 MARKETING LESSONS I LEARNED FROM THE BEST ENTREPRENEURS OF OUR ERA
Signal Vs Noise, Commitment Ladders, and more...
Niall Ratcliffe
November 09, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
I am knackered. We hit November, and it feels like we are sprinting to get everything over the line before Christmas.
We’ve got our final campaign of the year, 3 big client campaigns, and I’m speaking on the main stage at B2B Marketing Live in November. As I type this, it’s 18:01 on Saturday and I’ve just spent the entire day finishing my slides and refining my script… So yes, safe to say things are a little hectic this end.
That being said, while I’ve been writing my script and putting together my slides, I’ve been making a list of some of the biggest lessons I learned from all of the amazing people I’ve met on this crazy journey building a business.
So today, I thought I’d share 3 of the most impactful with you. These are lessons that truly changed how I think about marketing, and I hope they can have the same impact on you.
Let’s get into them!
THE ESSAY
The longer I’ve been in marketing, the more I realise that what really moves the needle in my marketing skillset wasn’t how many books I read, or what university I went to. Instead, it came from absorbing a few key fundamental lessons from people 10-20 steps ahead of me.
There are probably 5-10 stories I could tell you that not only stick with me, but that I reference regularly to new team members and in team meetings.
These are stories that didn’t just impact how I approach marketing, but completely revolutionised it. Yet quite ironically, they’re all pretty basic fundamental lessons - and I think there’s a lesson in that itself.
Anyway, here are 3 of the most important marketing lessons I’ve ever learned from some of the best entrepreneurs of our era:
Lesson 1: Signal Vs Noise
A few weeks back, I met Steve Bartlett for the first time at a friend’s birthday party. Most people know Steve nowadays for his podcast Diary Of A CEO, but I’ve always admired Steve for his marketing ability. One thing he understands better than nearly anyone is distribution.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from Steve was this idea of Signal Vs Noise.
As marketers, we often fall into the trap of thinking that digital markets operate in the same fashion as traditional markets. As if there’s a big sea of customers walking by us, and our job is just to get our name out there and make sure they see us. But that’s not how marketing works nowadays.
We aren’t in a shopfront targeting foot traffic, we’re in the digital world. And in that digital world, everyone has their own “hangout spots”.
Some people hang out on LinkedIn
Some hang out on Instagram or TikTok
Others hang out at conferences, expos, or events
As a marketer, your job isn’t just to get attention. Instead, it’s to find the lowest noise place that your ICP hangs out at.
For example, if you’re targeting me as the CEO of a marketing agency, there are a few places I hang out.
I read newsletters in my inbox
I spend time on LinkedIn
I also scroll on Twitter (or X)
And I’m in the office 3 days per week
Now, if you look at those channels, it’s going to be incredibly tough to get my attention on Twitter or in my inbox. I’m constantly targeted on those channels - they’re very noisy.
But I also spend 3 days per week in the office and receive ~1 piece of mail per month (very low noise)
So if you send a piece of direct mail to our office, there’s a very high likelihood I'll see it.
It’s a low noise channel + it’s a high signal method because I can clearly see the effort you put into preparing and sending it.
I now have the graph above ingrained into my head and think about it every time we’re launching a new campaign.
Lesson 2: Flipping The Funnel
In 2024, we got approached by a very high-profile CEO to work with him on a new project. His name was Jeremy Schwartz.
Now, Jeremy has one of the best CVs of anyone I’ve ever met.
Former CEO of Pandora
CEO of The Body Shop
Marketing Director at Coca-Cola
Brand Marketing Director at Sainsburys
Marketing Director at L’Oreal.
He has truly done it all.
On our first onboarding call with him, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to learn a few lessons from a man miles ahead of me in his career. So, as we got close to the end of the call, I asked him a simple question…
“Jeremy, when you take on a role like the CEO of Pandora, there are obviously huge amounts at stake, billions of pounds and hundreds of millions of customers. So when you take on a role like that, what is the first thing you do?”
I expect him to respond with something bureaucratic, maybe “Understand key stakeholders” or “Analyse budgets and make adjustments”.
Instead, he said something that really stuck with me, “Well, when I got the job at Pandora, the first thing I did was open my phone, go to Instagram and search for #Pandora.”
“I then found customers who had posted about our products more than once and asked them a single question: what makes you buy Pandora products?”
I was a tad confused, “Why did you make that your first step?”
“Well, the most important thing you can do in a role like that is deeply understand why your best customers buy your product,” he replied.
This is what I now call ‘Flipping the funnel’.
I call it flipping the funnel because you start your marketing campaigns by deeply understanding the people who matter most - the people right at the bottom of the traditional funnel. The buyers.
In the traditional funnel, the first step is to focus on awareness. But when you optimise for awareness, you’re naturally inclined to talk to a broader audience. If you aim for more eyes, more people, more demographics. You end up with wider messaging, broader marketing and usually minimal impact on each person you have a touchpoint with - not good.
What you need is the exact opposite. You want impact over everything. That’s why your campaigns need to start with an intolerant first step. A step where you only focus on 1 ICP and build everything for them. You’re not aiming for mass awareness, you’re just looking to deeply understand 1 ICP, 1 person - just like Jeremy did with Pandora.
Lesson 3: Build A Commitment Ladder
In 2023, one of our clients was hosting a scaling summit in Belfast called the ‘Scale X Summit’, and Daniel Priestley happened to be the headline speaker at the event.
At that point, I’d never met him in person. I’d just read his books and seen him on podcasts. But after the conference, we all ended up getting dinner. Me, Morgan, our client, Daniel, and a few other speakers.
In between courses, we got talking about how we use Daniel’s software tool - ScoreApp - for a lot of our campaigns. I was telling Daniel that we’d had 750+ leads go through it in just a few months. I pulled out my phone and showed him how many leads we’d driven just while we were sitting at dinner.
(Looking back, it was a bit of a silly flex, really. But I wanted to compliment him on his product and also showcase just how good we were at getting leads.)
Daniel had a look, smiled, then asked, “What’s your conversion rate on those leads?”
“Just under 5% right now”, I said.
“Oof”, he said, with an almost disappointed look on his face, “What are you offering them?” he asked.
“Oh, we’re offering them our b2b marketing servi…”
*He interrupted me*
“No, what’s the offer you built for them?” he asked
“Oh, we don’t have one”
Daniel shook his head at me and then introduced me to a concept that completely changed our business. It’s an idea that we now call a ‘Commitment Ladder’.
Now imagine the 2 ladders above.
The left is a typical marketing funnel. It starts with a simple commitment, usually to click an ad or respond to a cold email - often with the intention of booking a call. Then boom, there’s this massive commitment to spend £10,000s or even £100,000s with you.
It’s a huge jump.
This is where a commitment ladder comes in.
Where, rather than having huge steps up in commitment, you have more, smaller commitments that build up to your main offer.
Daniel’s current commitment ladder looks something like this:
Commitment 1: You click his ad
Commitment 2: You attend the 90-minute free workshop offered in the ad
Commitment 3: You read the free copy of his book that he sends after the webinar
Commitment 4: You take a scorecard assessment that rates you
Commitment 5: You buy his accelerator programme
What Daniel was saying to us in Belfast is that we’re taking people from a sales asset (which was an assessment at the time) to then asking to spend £10,000s with us (a massive leap in terms of commitment).
Instead, we needed an entry-level no-brainer offer. A smaller commitment to separate the gap between taking our assessment and buying our full package.
Now we offer B2B Marketing audits for a 1-time fee of £2k-5k. It’s a much lower commitment than signing up for 12 months of our service and has massively increased our conversion rates from adding it.
Like I said at the start, it’s quite ironic how fundamentally simple all 3 of these lessons are. Yet that’s what I notice more and more nowadays. The best, most impactful lessons I get taught always happen to be the simplest ones.
Hopefully you learned something here, and if you did, do hit reply and let me know what resonated :)
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
P.S. Take a second to rate the essay below. Takes 2 seconds, but it helps me know what to write next week :)
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