🙅🏻‍♀️ "Lead Gen" Doesn't Work Anymore

The average company stays with a lead-gen service for only 2 months. Why? Because every lead-gen service stops at the opt-in. We don’t.

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The Truth: Only 2% of your market is ready to buy at any given time. You need something in place to nurture all those you leads have ever & will ever generate.

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🚀 This Week's Growth Hack:

💰 Your Brand’s Trust Bank

There’s a lesser-known quote from Steve Jobs that I was chewing on all week.

I couldn’t find the exact words, but the meaning stuck (parahprased):

“I think of apple’s brand like a bank account. Every single thing you do is either making a deposit or a withdrawal.”

He said a smart person continues to put money in the bank and takes out less than they have and really smart person rarely takes anything out.

Here’s how I think about this in practiclaity:

• Every ad you run is like tossing a quarter into your brand’s trust account.

• Every organic social post is a dollar bill.

• Every email is a $50 bill.

• Every podcast episode, long-form YouTube video, or influencer shoutout? That’s a fat $100 bill going into your brand’s bank vault.

The problem?

Most brands are stuck at the ATM... withdrawing all day, every day.

Constantly asking their target audience to buy their product.

Let’s get real with some examples.

The Withdrawal Addicts

Look at Spirit Airlines. Their whole brand screams “withdrawal.” Fees for everything. Bare-bones customer service. Emails that read like late-night used car ads. Now, to be fair, that’s their business model. But ask anyone how they feel about Spirit, and you’ll get a trust score in the negatives.

Steve Jobs might say: They’ve maxed out their credit card with the customer.

Or take Wish.com. A firehose of ads and promotions, promising the moon for $2. The problem? Every interaction feels like a withdrawal… click here, buy now, 70% off. Very few people have positive stories of buying from Wish. They haven't made many deposits. Just a flood of overdrafts.

Even big names can fall into this. Peloton, for example, spent years depositing trust with high-quality content, aspirational messaging, and a devoted community. But during the pandemic boom, they hit the gas on withdrawing… price hikes, aggressive sales, and a recall debacle that felt tone-deaf. It led to a real dent in their brand bank account.

The Deposit Kings

Now let’s look at the brands that build trust like compounding interest.

Take Nike. They’ve mastered the deposit game. Yes, they advertise like crazy (those quarters stack up), but their Instagram is a dollar machine… highlighting athletes’ journeys, social movements, and inspirational stories. Their “You Can’t Stop Us” campaign? That was a $100 bill, trust-wise. No product in sight. Just vibes and values.

Or how about Apple? No one is better at withholding the ask. They drop million-dollar $50 bills every time they email you about a new feature you didn’t even know you needed. They run an entire podcast-length keynote every year that is 90% storytelling and 10% product. The result? When they do ask for $1,000 for a phone, people happily oblige. Because they’ve been depositing for years.

Even small brands get this right. Glossier built a cult following not by shouting “buy now” every five minutes, but by letting customers be part of the brand. Their community posts are $1 bills. Their founder's blog was a steady drip of $50s. And their packaging unboxing experience? That’s $100 right there.

Another solid example? MarketingMax! I don’t have the ego to say this brand is even close to the trust that Nike or Apple has. But this simple weekly newsletter builds trust with 117,000 people every week. So that when one of the 117,000 readers (maybe you) wakes up and realizes, man, we gotta try something different to generate leads & fill our pipeline, you come to my team for that. All because I’ve been sending emails for 3 years now aka depositing hundred-dollar bills into my brand’s trust account.

What This Means for You

Make a list of all of your marketing efforts. Every ad, social post, email, and more… Then ask yourself:

• Is this a deposit or a withdrawal?

• Am I building trust or asking for a favor?

And be real about the currency you’re using.

• That ad with a discount code? Cool. It’s a quarter. Stack 'em.

• That behind-the-scenes TikTok about your product journey? That’s a dollar.

• That email breaking down why you built your product the way you did? $50.

• That podcast where a customer tells their transformation story? That’s a $100 bill, baby.

The biggest mistake I see founders and marketers make is trying to make withdrawals from an empty account.

You can't withdraw $1,000 worth of trust with your next product launch if you’ve only deposited $7.25.

So here’s your challenge this week:

Make deposits. Lots of them.

Because when the time comes to make a withdrawal… ask for a signup, close a sale, launch something new… you want to have so much built-up trust in the bank that they say "yes" before you even finish the sentence.

Here’s to stakcing your bank account high as can be 🍻

– MarketingMax

💕 Looking for more?

1. 🙏🏼 Need more leads? I’m currently helping 30+ B2B brands generate dozens of qualified leads a week thanks to my unique lead gen funnel that writes you a weekly newsletter, grows your list, & uses my secret sauces to turn your new subscribers into leads/customers. See if you are a fit here →

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That’s it for this week!

Talk soon,
Marketing Max
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