The Content Strategy Mistake Costing You Growth (with Brendan Hufford)

Speaker A: The next episode. Yo. I'm Devin Reed and I'm on a mission to build a bigger and more inspired career as a marketer, creator and entrepreneur. After 10 years in sales and marketing and leading content for $2 billion SaaS startups, I know one thing. Real growth takes more than basic tips and tricks. And learning from the best will help me reach my potential. Let's ride. So I'm traveling America for candid, street level conversations about creativity, marketing and playing your own rules. You'll get practical advice to grow your career confidence and income and have fun doing it. Are you ready? This is Read between the Lines. The show for people who want to achieve phenomenal results. Content is the most powerful way to grow your brand and business. But that requires creating high quality, differentiated content, which is hard to do. Uh, so today we're going to learn from one of the best. My guest today is Brendan Hufford, founder of Growth Sprints where he helps SaaS companies go from 10 to 100 million ARR with short focused content marketing sprints. I've learned a lot from him just from following on LinkedIn and I'm excited because this is the first time that we're going to sit down and go deep on content growth. We're going to cover the number one strategy mistake that prevents marketers from achieving massive results.

Speaker B: My go to framework for creating original content that wows your audience every single time.

Speaker A: And how to create irresistible marketing offers that resonate with your ideal buyers. Today we're going all in. Are you ready?

Speaker B: Let's ride.

Speaker A: Shout out to our sponsor, Goldcast. They are the B2B video content platform. They know that video is the most effective medium for engaging audiences and building long lasting brand relationships. And they do more than just host amazing digital events. They recently released Content Lab, which is an AI powered video tool that I use to turn long form content into branded clips in minutes, not hours. And it's cool because you can use your digital event footage or upload video files. To open your account, go to Goldcast IO or hit the link in the show notes. Now onto the show. Thanks for hanging out with me, man.

Speaker B: Yeah, dude, this is fun. I'm really excited.

Speaker A: I want to jump right into it. Into something you wrote in March 2024. Now I'm going to start there because I'd known about you for a while, but this was something that you wrote that turned me into a fan in one single post. And this was your checkbox marketing idea. And so I want to start with that because I truly believe it is the biggest problem in B2B marketing right now. And it's a mindset challenge. It's a mindset problem, in my opinion, not really a tactic problem or a skill problem. So can you help? Like, let's start with you. Like, walk me through what checkbox marketing is and then how you came up with it.

Speaker B: Okay. So to explain it, I kind of have to tell you a story. So I was a teacher for 10 years. High school teacher. I tried climbing that ladder. I was an assistant principal for a little bit. Not for me. Right. I loved it. But, like, being broke sucks. And I was, like, doing marketing on the side and a friend was like, hey, go work somewhere. So I worked at a couple agencies. I ended up going in house at activecampaign for a little bit because I wanted that experience. I get to work with a, uh, really great manager. His name is Benjamin Elias. He's back there now. And I went to do some new things there. So my job was literally, I just listed out a bunch of things in a spreadsheet when I was going to start it, when I think it would be done by. And I just went down the list that was in checkbox marketing. That was, like, things I needed to get done.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: I'll give you an example. We're an email marketing platform, Devin. We had no newsletter. Like, what? So I was like, all right, cool, we need a newsletter. So I went in there. Uh, we had a thing at the bottom of the blog that said, get updates. And me as a marketer was like, surely nobody gives a shit about get updates. Nobody wants that went to the team. It took. Of course, when you're in the bureaucracy, right, it takes two weeks to find out how many people are on an email list. Even though it should be a button click that we should all have access to. There was like 20,000 people.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Uh, who wanted updates? Devin, did we send them anything?

Speaker A: No updates. They're clicking get updates and they're getting nothing.

Speaker B: They're getting nothing. So I was like, all right, we can send this to people. And immediately they were like, we want to know how many trials this is going to generate. What's this? What's this? And I had to spreadsheet the shit out of it. And then they're like, we're going to need 27 meetings with design because they want to design it and product marketing wants it. And immediately no, immediately, no. Like, just let me do something.

Speaker A: Let me cook.

Speaker B: I looked at the list and I call this, uh, I can even share this with people. Call it the spreadsheet that made me quit my job, uh, because it was like a weekly blog, a weekly this, a daily this. And it was just going through and checking the boxes. And I noticed the more I talked to other people at other companies, the more I grew growth sprints and started consulting. We were all doing this. Like, we never. It's good to start with output when you don't know what the impact would be. Right. Like, I think them pushing me early to be like, how many trials is this newsletter going to generate? And I'm like, can I send the thing once?

Speaker A: Yeah. It's like, how. How do you set a goal without any benchmark data?

Speaker B: I would just be making it up. And they're like, cool, make it up. Well, if I crush it, I'm wrong.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And if I'm way under, I'm wrong. So again, why. Why not 20 webinars a month? Why not one? There's no reason for it. It's just, we're just going through and checking the boxes. And that's what, like, I was just heartbroken. And I kept hearing everybody go, B2B is boring. B2B is boring. B 2B is boring. And I was so dead set on figuring out why that when my brain just did that, like, magical connection, I was like, oh, it's because of exactly what I experienced when I was in house. We're just checking boxes except the one that matters, which is resonance and impact.

Speaker A: That's interesting. So I didn't know it came from, like, a personal experience in the spreadsheet that made you quit your job.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah. That was super rough. And I know that I'm not alone in that.

Speaker A: So it sounds like for, like, marketers listening right now, watching, you can probably, like, self diagnose that you're doing checkbox marketing. If what you're like, your. Your strategy or to do list every week is just kind of going through the motions and, like, output focused 100%.

Speaker B: I think most marketers, especially when you're in house, I think this is even true for you and me. We want two things, right? Like, we want what we do to have impact, obviously, but we also want to like it. We want to like the marketing materials we're creating.

Speaker A: You want to be proud of your work.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And you want to be able to share it with your peers and people be like, oh, that's really cool. Like, people compliment you. They're like, oh, that's cool. People with taste like this stuff, and when you share it with your peers, they're proud of you. You're proud of yourself. There's a lot of us that are not proud of the work we're doing every single week because we're being asked to like, check these boxes over and over and over.

Speaker A: So what's the cause of it in the B2B? Uh, let's just say B2B. I work in SaaS mostly. I'm guessing you probably do too.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, almost exclusively.

Speaker A: So you're working with like, maybe you're talking to a new prospect, right? And you're starting to see like, all right, they do checkbox marketing. What do you think is like the root cause? Because I don't think it's the like the doers, the individual contributors, the manager level, maybe some director levels that are like, I'm enjoying this and this is what I signed up for. I think we all get, uh, you know, you get courted right as you're interviewing and it's like, here's these things we're going to do, here's the impact you're going to have, right? And you're like, you get starry eyed and you're like, yeah, that sounds awesome. That's what I want to do. You do your onboarding, then you start doing the work. And I think it's at least for me, like, I think it's a slow, like you slip into it and you kind of almost don't even realize, like, oh, now I'm just going through the motions and I just have these output, like metrics, if you will. But like, where does it come from though? Because I don't think that's the source of it.

Speaker B: So this had happened to me when I was in house too, where I started and I was like pumped to write blogs and do things. Um, and then after six months of writing, you know, my 25th blog, you know, I'm looking at my wife and it's like, am I really on this planet to write a fucking blog a week for until I die?

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Like, that's. Yeah, I guess, right? It's my life, my life's purpose. And if that is your life's purpose, more power to you. I just don't think it's any of ours. So I think underneath a lot of that, I think is two things. One, it is this, like VC backed startups have like lent itself to a lot of that of like growth at all costs. Push the output to an insane level. Yeet. A million dollars a year into the sun in Google and Facebook ads. You know, it's just like throw more at it growth at all costs. I, I think now that we're seeing a lot more of what I would call like post VC marketing, where budgets aren't unlimited and we do have to think about impact more than output. Um, that's gonna change. And I think also it's hard to break out of. I think just as human nature, it's hard to break out of habits.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The. This is what we've all always done. Um, it's hard to.

Speaker A: There's a system in place at the company.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's what the expectation is. And you have to have an honest conversation with your boss or leadership or your team of like, how much output are we willing to sacrifice for the sake of maybe more impact?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that's a hard conversation to have because again, I think we've all just been turned into what I would call like spreadsheet marketers or spreadsheet engineers where like, everything has to be in the fucking spreadsheet. And it's like, it completely destroys creativity. There's a great book called Alchemy by Rory Sutherland where he talks about that. He's like, if you look at all the things that have had big impact, none of those came out of spreadsheets. None of those were like micro optimized into success. You know, you're not going to 0.01% increase your way into tripling revenue.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You have to take big swings. And we don't. In a lot of companies, you just don't have a framework of like, this percentage is for big swings. This is for safe bets. It's why a lot of like, my work now thinks and it's thinking in bets.

Speaker A: So I've actually experienced this before. I won't say, I won't say which company, but I started and we know

Speaker B: which company it is. Sorry.

Speaker A: Uh, and it was, um, the expectation was, we want, uh, two blogs every week. It was the classic. It sounds cliche. Probably sounds like I'm making this up for the sake of this conversation. But I think that's also why it felt like you were peering into my soul when you wrote about checkbox marketing. Because you put a name to this, like, terrible experience and almost like phenomena that like is happening. Right. Yeah. Ah. And so the expectation is too weak. And so I'm like, um, you know, I'm resistant. I'm like, no, like, why would we do that? That's not a strategy. And so I did some digging. You know, I'm like asking why, Asking why? And it was because the sales team wanted Them, the sales team believed marketing equaled blogs. And so when I got finally, it's like a head of BD or someone like, in charge of this ask, and it was like, well, we had these new verticals and I want people to hit the website and see we're legit.

Speaker B: Yeah, we want to see action.

Speaker A: And so I, I, there's two things. One I said, I can actually empathize with, with what I think you were trying to accomplish, which is, I call it a heat check or legit check. Like, do you know if you go to, like, thereader co and you're like, click the blog. If I'm talking about content marketing, there better be a pretty legit blog with at least some content there. So I get that. He's like, I want there to be something there. What I was trying to reframe is like, no one's doing that, though, for this SaaS company. People aren't like, looking for answers and content and going to this company's website dot com, clicking the corporate blog and like, sifting through things. Like, that's not how people find information. And so, um, I, I. The first quarter I, I did it, I said, fine. I found like, a writer because they didn't care. They chat. GBT hadn't like, come out yet. But I was like, if you don't really care and you just want a block something, I'll just get like, a sheep writer and we'll just pump it out. So I did that one quarter. The next quarter, like, the ask came back like, hey, how many blogs are we doing? Like, corporate blogs. Not SEO, mind you. Not, not with any thought of. Not with leadership. We're building a category. Not category content. Not thinking about distribution. Not SEO optimized. Just like, bland corporate blogs.

Speaker B: Like, we're proud to announce we're the G2 leader in these 97.

Speaker A: Not even that, dude. Like, what is a basic keyword that people, like, will, like, look for plus, like industry plus, like our company. You know what I mean? Just, like, the basics, the most basics. And so on the second quarter, I just didn't do it. And I just straight up didn't do it. And we had the biggest quarter of, uh, new pipeline sourced because we actually did safe bets or what I call bigger bets. Yeah. And I didn't say anything until the end of the quarter. And so we had this, you know, great numbers. Dashboards are looking better. We had, like, kind of started to turn the ship around, and it was like, you know, the marketing kind of recap. Quarterly meeting it was like, Devin, what did you guys do differently? And I said, I didn't write a single blog, but here's what we did instead. And it was we launched like an AI product and it was a big feature. Product marketing led it. They did a phenomenal job. We helped amplify it and that had the most single day demo requests in company history. And so I was like, you have to kind of like show that, you know, you have to kind of like meet them in the middle and say, fine, I'll kind of like concede a little bit and then show them, hey, there's actually another way to market and it's based on outcomes and impact. And it was one mini campaign or like a medium sized campaign. Not a million dollars, not billboards, nothing crazy flashy, just really intentional and methodical. High level execution.

Speaker B: You didn't put your logo on the outside of the sphere in Vegas?

Speaker A: No, the sphere wasn't open yet, I think.

Speaker B: So I think there's two ways to get around this. You did what I would call like downside risk where like, let's say shit went bad and then they're like, demo, what'd you do? And you're like, I didn't do any blogs. And they're like, well see, numbers are down. And you're like, yeah, it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that I did no blogs. You could also do like upside risk where it's like, okay, cool, you want two blogs a week for the next quarter? We're going to do for a week and if nothing changes, we know they didn't do anything. It kind of, I think a lot about that of like downside risk versus upside risk. So instead of not like I looked at my uh, my lead flow and pipeline compared to I just one to one overlapped it with like my LinkedIn impressions, which could uh, not be. You know, I think as marketers were like, that's not how this works.

Speaker A: But I was just, yeah, I believe it is correlated. And I have. We'll talk about that in a second. Go ahead.

Speaker B: But less correlated than like something like branded search where it's like how many people are googling our brand that's actually correlated. I'm seeing more and more data that like branded search is correlated one to one with revenue. It's just like a couple months before, like they actually look exactly the same. Um, but I looked at it and I'm like, well, these actually match up really close. You know, they're a little off because the impressions come before the Revenue. And, and I was like, well the downside risk would be if I really want to test the impact, don't post on LinkedIn anymore.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But the risk is if I'm correct and LinkedIn impressions do matter. Like my pipeline goes way down. Or I can do upside risk and I can post twice a day for the next quarter, which is what I'm doing. And that is, that sucks and is hard and has other risks associated with it. But I'm, I'd rather take the upside risk and report back than like the downside one.

Speaker A: I like that a lot. I like that that's how folks can basically escape checkbox marketing.

Speaker B: It's one of the ways.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So on the, the reason I conceded on that first quarter was like if he wants a legit check, I'll give him the legit check. You hit the page, there's blogs, there's content, you get what you wanted. The other thing I did to help escape this was bring data which was okay, you guys think that this is going to make a meaningful impact. We're all about revenue, we're all about pipeline. Gen. How many like people are seeing this? Like well, how many visits is this page getting? How many impressions? Didn't know the answer. Yep. So I went and got it. Less than 300 visits on every blog over like the last 90 days. And like 1, 2, 0.

Speaker B: Like all combined.

Speaker A: No. So like each page, each blog had less than 300. I think the highest was 336 and I remember that number cause I like this is the most traffic we're getting with what we're doing and the money we're spending. We're getting 333 people to see this. Half of it's probably the sales team clicking it to send it to people. And the conversions, Anyone Want to guess? 0 to 11 was the highest on conversion. Which means someone ah, I think one person likes signed up for a demo.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I'm like we just like look at this for a second and tell me this is gonna help reach that big aspirational, you know, investor pushed uh, goal for revenue.

Speaker B: Yeah. And even like correlation. Right. Like if I can look back and say hey, here's all of our close won. How many of those people were like hitting the blog or whatever else. Um, or how many we can do like a self reported attribution has its own flaws of course but I'm still a fan of it of like building out systems to gather that again and again. Like gathered in your form, gather it when they talk to sales gather after their close one and be like, hey, just again, like what? Was there any content that had an impact on you? Right. And I think a lot of people will talk about that stuff, but it's not always the stuff we think it is. Like a good example is gong, right? Like I would never be a gong customer, but God damn if I didn't download every single one of those things. That was like, if you say this word, uh, you're going to lose your sales. If you have this slide, your deck. You're like that, that Sorry, verbatim. Yeah, no, that was like, yeah, that was definitely the lead gen ad on LinkedIn. But I opted in for all of those because I was like this really helps me do my job better. And it tapped into the right piece of it. Now I'm sure you could see a stronger correlation there than like corporate blog. So where should we put our attention?

Speaker A: Yeah, you know, so how can B2B marketers escape checkbox marketing?

Speaker B: So the most important and easiest way is what I call content ip which is instead of defining a category, this is again something we did at ActiveCampaign where we tried to become customer experience automation. Like ActiveCampaign, the value prop is email enterprise grade email marketing and marketing automation. $11 a month. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. And instead you get to the homepage and you're like, welcome to the customer experience automation platform. And if you're selling to small businesses and you don't have a defined ICP on purpose, which they don't and that's on purpose, we can talk about that if you want. But like when you have that going on, you can't confuse the shit out of everybody who hits the homepage. So instead of that, why don't we work on solving a problem and when you become problem focused and you name the problem and all of your content exists to help your ICP solve that problem, all of a sudden the checkboxes go away and it becomes let's unify all of our marketing on solving this one problem or this set of problems or we'll solve this problem for this person in a buying. You know, if you have like a really complicated or like multi product platform, cool, just slow down, like eat your steak one bite at a time and just solve this problem for these people, this problem for these people and just go through. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, let's all agree, what's the best way to reach them? The best way to reach Them is this or that. We can do channels later, but the problem is we're really obsessed with the channels and getting all of our boxes checked.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And we're not. We've lost sight of the problem.

Speaker A: So I like the transition to content ip. Can you. Like, how do you define it for folks who maybe aren't familiar?

Speaker B: Content IP is simply giving words or phrases to the problems people have. We all know that this sells really well, right? If I. If I've had a problem for years, I'll give you an example. Not B2B. Right. Um, I was reading a book about, like, uh. I don't even know what it is, like, fatherhood and, like, just, like, guy stuff. And there was this one throwaway sentence where he said, I remember when my body used to feel like a weapon. Holy shit. I have felt that way. I didn't have every former dad athlete, right. Uh, knows a time when they felt that way. And we would always. It's a very common thing of like, oh, I used to be in shape, or I used to be able to do this or that or whatever. We feel like we've kind of lost a step. But I remember when my body used to feel like a weapon. Uh, I don't know what you're selling at this point, but I will buy all of it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I don't care if it's a supplement or a training program or life coaching. I'm buying it. Like, I'm in.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Right. When you define that problem, when you give them a word or phrase to define that problem, all of a sudden they just trust you more than anybody else. And that's really what we want, especially in B2B, especially in SaaS, is just to be in the consideration set or the default one that people think of when they think about this problem.

Speaker A: Well, that's the difference between attention and mindshare. Attention can be fleeting, but mindshare is. You said something that resonated with me so deeply that later days, months, years, when that problem arises, I think of that phrase and I think of Brennan, for example, like, checkbox marketing. I feel like that's. Is that your version of that? Like, is that your.

Speaker B: That's my ip.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it's weird that I'm like, solving. I'm doing, but it's. I have to be meta about it. Right. I like to be very circular.

Speaker A: I'm constantly fighting off dad bod. That's what I tell people. Like, they're like, what's. Like. Do you do, like, strength training? I'm like, I'm just fighting dad bod. Like that's what I'm trying to. Trying to do.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Um, okay, so content ip. I, I agree part of it is naming it, but I think it's also the content that you create to help battle it. So for example, your uh, checkbox marketing is like the villain, if you will. Right. And your content IP listing for frameworks, templates, guides the show potentially. But we'll talk about that actually in a second. Is like also part of your content ip. Mhm. Right. So it starts with labeling the problem. You have to understand your audience so deeply that like, that's why I said earlier, like felt you like peered into my soul. That's what it does. Right? That, that weapon line or the checkbox,

Speaker B: I call it like the snapping point where Pete, you say it and they're like that. Oh that, like that's what that is. And you're like, that's what that's called. And they're like, cool, thanks.

Speaker A: And that's what like I know, it's like full circle. It's like that's what was with you. Like I'd heard of you, people talked about you. We never met, but I saw that post and was like that, that's it. And all of a sudden I'm like, I got to meet this guy. I want to like, I want to learn more.

Speaker B: Yeah. You sent me a DM right away. And you're like, this is really good.

Speaker A: I was like, this is really, really good. Okay, so now let's talk about. Okay, so we're going to move from going through the motions.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: We're going to, going to understand the problem and coin a new term for it. Yep. Because you have to have a new term because you can't define old things with new. Old, uh, tech. Uh, excuse me, new things with old language.

Speaker B: Well, the other I'll say this. A lot of times we like try to make fetch happen, especially in sas. So again with the category stuff. So people will try to like give names to things that already have names.

Speaker A: Can you give me example by chance? I know I'm putting on the spot.

Speaker B: Like, can I. You can make fun of like inbound, led, outbound, or like something dumb like when my eyes roll so hard they fall back into my head. Like, yeah, you know, we're just trying to like name a marketing motion or something. And everybody's like, dude, that's not. Because again, we're trying to forced. We're trying to name a solution.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We're trying to name the thing we do instead of, like, naming the problem.

Speaker A: You know who did a good job is Mark. Uh, used to be at Outreach. I, uh, can always mess up his name, but he did. He named the problem his company. His new company's called Operator, but the problem calls it the Great Ignore.

Speaker B: So this is my action type.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's really. I think that's great.

Speaker B: His whole homepage is a manifesto.

Speaker A: It is, too. I have notes on the homepage.

Speaker B: But I love the. I love the commitment. And when he went to market with that of like, hey, this is the Great Ignore, we did this to ourselves.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And all of a sudden you're like, we really are in that. And to be honest, I took this just to give credit where it's due. There's a guy named Kurt Woodward who is, like, my sensei for a lot of this stuff. He runs content at ZoomInfo. He's super smart. He has a journalism background. And when I first started talking about content ip, he was like, oh, those are conceptual scoops. In journalism, conceptual scoops are. Instead of a scoop of, like, I'm doing this, like, digging behind the scenes or whatever. This investigative journalism. I'm noticing a larger trend happening.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And I'm naming it now. We saw this with Quiet. Uh, Quitting is a conceptual scoop. We all saw it happening, but all of a sudden, we had words for it, and it took off.

Speaker A: Took off.

Speaker B: The Great Resignation conceptual scoop. We all saw it happening. Nobody had words for it.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: And let's be really clear, like, Quiet Quitting and the Great Resignation are like, a plus plus copywriting. Like, they're so good. I'm, uh, not saying we have to be at that level, but you can see how valuable it is. So even if you've never. If you for some reason are, uh, listening to this, watching this, you don't work in marketing or, like, you need a larger connection. We've seen it rampant. It works on everybody. Right. So when we name this problem, like, all of a sudden, we can take it forward. And I think Operator did that really well with the Great Ignore, which is not different than the Great Resignation, but, like, that is a thing that everybody's been talking about. Like, is Outbound debt is this channel that. Is that channel that, like, it's. Because it's just. Everything is highly ignorable now.

Speaker A: And if you look at the. The, like, uh, I always break this down, like, phonetically or, like, what did they do to make that stick? Like, the Great Depression was the original one. I think then it's like the great blank. Like, but, you know, you have to build into it. Which. Which Mark did really well. Like the great ignore. Right. That's a. That's like a framework or a template like we're used to. And we recognize quiet quitting. We are suckers for alliteration as human beings.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Like, we'll hear things like I've heard things that, like, oh, that sounds pretty slick. And then I like, wait, hold on a second. That's just alliteration making me think that's a little smarter than what it is. Not in this example, but I'm just

Speaker B: saying mouth feel matters. Like how you say it and hear it matters.

Speaker A: I feel like mouth feels like almost one of those phrases. Um, one. It's not a. It's not the problem. But one that I coined in the same thing it's reminded me of, like was work style content, which M is there's lifestyle content, which is just about your life. But I had noticed and I had Heike on the show and, uh, Nehal Tanani does this really well, which is this Vin. Uh, Matana does really well, which is like it's their life but with the work overlap. So it's like behind the scenes. So I was like, hey, there's this thing happening called. It's like work style content. And it's booming right now. And the thing that I noticed that it started to work like it's on the right trail and everything you just mentioned, those examples are. I posted about it once on LinkedIn, part of a larger post, and people in the comments repeated it back. And that is how you know you're

Speaker B: can I get that on a T shirt? And you're like, ooh, I've had that in the Yes. I screenshot. Anytime somebody says anything nice about checkbox marketing, I screenshot it and save it.

Speaker A: You should.

Speaker B: And I love that my laptop now, when I search for things, it can search the images for text.

Speaker A: Yes. Yes.

Speaker B: I don't know when that update happened, but that blows my mind. Super. Like, what a great use of the. The technology. But I think even too like I've seen this from. Uh, Kyle Coleman did this really well and he gave a talk when we were in Vermont together about.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. At Drive.

Speaker B: Yeah. And he talked about revenue leak was the problem that Clary solved. Right. And go to market bloat is what they're trying to solve at copy. Like those sorts of things. And I remember he even said like, they tried to do category design or you tried to do category design collectively at Clary and uh, the category was weird, but had a really good problem in there.

Speaker A: So the name of the category was not uh, good.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It was Revenue, collaboration and Governance, which you had to shorten to Rev CG for short. Which when I ask people what does revcg mean? They're like, I don't know, the chat. So that didn't stick. But the revenue leak, the problem, coining the problem, Christopher Lockhead, shout out to him category pirates I thought was brilliant. It was really well the best part of that work and it took a little bit of time but it did start to catch on and it did start like people started repeating revenue leak. But it does take time to do that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: I kind of cut you off there. But I agree, I want to agree. Like that was so good. But I agree with you. It's like don't focus, I think is where maybe we're going. So forgive me if I'm jumping ahead but like don't focus on the category name so much, focus on the problem because that's what's going to earn mind share. No one. Like even dude, I love conversation intelligence.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Even that's like a mouthful, you know what I mean? And like now uh, it is a category and people think, yeah, we do need that tool, which is cool. But I think in casual conversation it's still like call recording.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think also like the. If you think about how much money and time it takes to make a category happen, the real category creators are not necessarily creating. Like this is one thing I learned from like studying Gainsight was they said really loudly like, we didn't create this. We saw the wave happening. Like conceptual scoop. We saw this wave of customer success happening and we just rode the wave.

Speaker A: Such good job.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So like that, that's the thing about category creation is you have to see a wave happening. We're just trying to see a problem happening. This is way easier. You can test 30 of them. Like you can try things and fail versus like category creation is like a real full company commitment. There's analysts and all this bullshit. Like just start naming the problem and all of us, like you'll be able to find out really quickly with almost no budget. Like start using it in your email subject lines and all of a sudden you'll see like what resonates, you know.

Speaker A: Could we do something, uh, on the spot? Yeah dude, can I put you on spot now?

Speaker B: We'll find out. Roll the dice.

Speaker A: So when I saw Checkbox Marketing, I've never said this aloud. I was so Jealous. I was like, God damn it, we made it, Mom. I. I loved it, to be clear, you know, Like, I loved it and I was like, so happy for you, but also hated you because I was like, I want that to be mine.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So the first thing I thought was like, I'm going to start saying it. And I'm like in my head kind of joking. Like, how often, like how many times do I have to cite Brendan before I can just say it, not steal it?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Say it. And part of me is like, I think that actually puts it in like, um, our like, common lexicon. Like we all just like, let's. Like, I'm like, it will help Brendan to say it. And I'm like, I'm going to give him credit because I do. I, you know, hate when people steal shit. But I was like, there will be a time where people just say it and they don't credit you.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: But the people, which is the goal, will know that, like, it's you, you know, like, people will be talking and be like, like, if someone's like, oh, category design, I'd be like, oh, like Chris Lockhead. Yeah, he's the godfather of that, him and his team. So that was the first thing. I'm just going to give you some flowers.

Speaker B: Like, appreciate it.

Speaker A: Very jealous of you and that one. So then I was like, okay, I bring it on my show and I want to help people figure out their problem. Mhm. What would you say, like, could you help me figure out what I would call my problem so that I solve

Speaker B: reader before we do that, I want to go. The goal is for people to take it. You can tell I've already cited like six people since we've been talking.

Speaker A: For sure.

Speaker B: I do the same thing too. Sometimes it feels name droppy and shitty and like, oh, you're just trying to seem cool. But I'm just like rampantly insecure and just want to make sure people know where my sources are. Uh, or where things I get things from. So I think with your problem, this is hard because the way that I walk clients through this is very much like we start talking through, like, what's wrong, what's broken? Why do you think that is? What's underlying that very much, almost. It's like you kind of saw my stuff that I do with clients. Like what you walked me through just now. Like, cool, cool, but what's under that? Cool, cool, but what's under that? Why M. Is that what's systemic about this? What are we like, all of Those sorts of things. So we really have to talk about like the things. It has to come from a place of like what pisses you off. And it has to come from a place of like personal experience where like you have that felt pain. And I understand if you're marketers and you're working at like a DevOps company, like you probably haven't viscerally experience the pain that your customers are feeling. But then it just means like talking to the people that you have. Right. I think the problem you help people solve is this is outside looking in.

Speaker A: Uh, there's no wrong answer here. I just thought it'd be fun to like kind of live workshop it to even help people. Like what, even what components do I need? Even if we don't get to an answer right now, it's just like, okay, how can I start thinking about it? Because you, you, you sparked this in me. I was like, okay, what's my thing then? And I was like, well, it's checkbox marketing, but that's taken. So I'm like, and it's probably a little bit different, you know what I mean? But for mine, it's tough because it's like bad content. You can like, oh, so you like help like bad content? I'm like, yeah, but that's like pretty surface level. Most people don't have a documented content strategy. Maybe I'll give you some pieces and if this helps. Yeah. So like when I talk to CMOs and VPs, they're like, we don't have a documented content strategy.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: But the real thing they say first is like, our content isn't helping fuel growth for the business. There's a disconnect there. Okay, cool. Why is that? You know why? In different ways I asked that. And it comes down to we don't even have a documented content strategy.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And then so it's like, oh, you're kind of doing random acts of marketing. You can almost agree that's like commonly understood. One we all kind of have experienced.

Speaker B: It's a good problem.

Speaker A: I'm like, okay, cool. And then so it's like, okay, let me kind of break. So I get deeper and deeper and it's a, it's a mix of there's no documented strategy and then there's missing pieces of the strategy which is like you don't really know exactly who your primary audience is or you don't really know exactly what your channel strategy is and you actually don't have like priority. You know, I mean like there's just Missing a plan and you don't have a metric. So it's like you're missing like the whole thing and you have some of the pieces and I'm going to come in and help you kind of like glue it up, like find supplement with the right pieces, make the pieces you think you have, like refine them and then glue it all together into like one cohesive strategy. And I call it content strategy design.

Speaker B: So that's your solution?

Speaker A: Exactly. I have that. I don't have the like. Oh, you're struggling with, uh, what is uh, shin splints. I don't have the shin splints.

Speaker B: So like I, I remember I was talking to the team at, at Path Factory about this and we both know them, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. Shout uh, out Path Factory.

Speaker B: Very much. Like they uh, we talked a lot about this. Like faith based marketing.

Speaker A: That's what I tell them. A leap of faith, Right?

Speaker B: So it's faith based marketing. Right. And we even attach like publish and pray to it, which is what most people do with content. Right? You just publish it and just like that's good. Pray to the content gods. Um, so silly.

Speaker A: But I pray to them every day to be clear.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Uh, but like publish and pray and faith based marketing go really well together because it is a problem that they specifically their product helps solve and they can dig into that and make everything about that.

Speaker A: It's funny because I know Pete and I work with them and I told them and we get along really well, uh, for a lot of reasons. One is like, you guys sell the software to my services.

Speaker B: Mm.

Speaker A: It's a very similar figuring out like what's really broken and yeah, they help answer what really matters. But I cut you off again because you got me all excited.

Speaker B: I think it's hard to say without like spending a lot more time on this. But that's your deliverable. If we peel back a layer, two questions. What does a documented content strategy solve and why don't they have one?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Can you answer both of those for me?

Speaker A: So what does it solve? It gives you confidence that you know what to create, why you're creating it and how to publish it for maximum results. Right. And it's cohesive. The reason you don't have it is because you don't have the in house expertise or skill. Right. So people either like we have, we have one content marketer and we don't have anyone like in charge of content strategy. Sometimes like a director. So like no one has been designated the owner of having one Mm mhm. And uh, that could be because they don't have the resources, they don't have the person, or they don't have the experience, or they don't have the time where they're like, I've had CMOs where I'm like, you know, way more than me about marketing. You know, she's been doing it for years and they still hired me. And at the end of delivering this, she's like, this was so valuable because we just haven't sat down and done the critical thinking required to put a plan together. We're just go, you know, investor LED growth. Go, go, go, faster, faster, faster. And so what I've realized I deliver is not just the deck with a lot of answers, but is decision confidence that you now wake up knowing I am doing. My team has the right direction and every day we're doing the right things. That gives me confidence that we're going to hit these goals. That's going to move the business forward, that's going to make me look good, that's going to help us all make more money.

Speaker B: So I think content confidence is really cool. Uh, that still solution side.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But keep that like, yeah, ah, content confidence is really cool. I think like digging more. So my process very much is to do a workshop like this. Right. And then go back into the lab, I guess, AKA my desk in my office and just start wordsmithing the crap out of it. Trying to find things that rhyme. Two or three word phrases. It's very rare that I come up with something like on the spot.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: But I think you're starting to get to the thing you actually help people solve. And like this is like you said, it's a confidence issue, it's a mindset issue, it's an organizational issue. They know inherently that content fuels everything they do. Right. It's all of the marketing.

Speaker A: No one's calling me unless they have that realization or belief that like content will help grow the business.

Speaker B: They just, it feels to me like there's a such a big disconnect of like how. And then also you're bridging that. Uh, which is another good example of ip, but it's in media of like that taste gap.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Where I know what I like, what we're making. This is the number one thing I talk to people when they come to me is like, do you like what you're making right now? Like what are you proud of? And it's almost always between you and me and everybody else watching and the thousands of People listening to that, uh, they're like, no, not really. They're like, it might be working, but they don't love it. They're not like, psyched about it. Um, I think that's. There's another piece of this too. Of like buy in that you also help solve. Of like people inside your organization are going to get excited about this.

Speaker A: Yeah. That has come up and CEO buy in.

Speaker B: So I'll take three, three different problems and start like mapping out and just brainstorming tons and tons of words. The next phase is like, let's look at all of these dumb phrases I've made. And I'm waiting for like the snap in point where they're like, ooh, I like that. Or oh, I like that. Okay, cool. And then we roll out and test, right? And you create content around like the problem, the roadblock to the problem. Give them a template to solve it, a customer that solved it. And then like a high level, like non customer, like somebody they've heard of that solved it. Right. That's super tactical. But I don't think it's like a, like I give it to you and then you're like, oh, I got it. It's magic.

Speaker A: You got to workshop, uh, it.

Speaker B: You workshop it and you test it a bunch and you let people say it back. Yeah. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's actually, I thought it was this. I thought it was checkbox marketing or faith based marketing or whatever. Uh, and it's really this other thing. There's a layer. That's why I keep trying to get underneath. You almost get into like systemic societal issues of like, oh, okay, cool. Like at a corporate level, women's opinions aren't valued. Like, you get into like really deep structural things in society, but it's important to get there because then you can kind of like build back up out of it. And this is very like hand wavy and kind of woo woo.

Speaker A: But no, it's a thing that'll make it stick. That's what makes it stick though, because it has to hit that, the emotional level.

Speaker B: In the era of. Let me check about the conversion rate in my meta ads and like all of this spreadsheet shit. I want to see the pendulum swing back a little bit to some of this. And I come from a world of keyword research and keyword, like everything in your content strategy is decide, uh, like decided by something coming out of like fucking semrush or hrefs. Like that is awful. Right? That's a distribution channel. It's not what decides your content strategy, but for a long time it did because we had access to all of this data and we got excited about it because we didn't have it before. It was like the Mad Men era of people, uh, watching how many cars went by a billboard every day. So when we had access to all this data, we were like, okay, cool. Database decision making. And then eventually over time, we're like, that data doesn't actually fucking mean anything. And if we look at where it came from, like, a lot of it's kind of made up and bad guesses. So we kind of have to get back to a more like, hand to hand, uh, type of not to use like fighting analogies, but like a hand to hand combat kind of method of, uh, getting to these answers. I feel like I failed you, though. I feel like I want to. I'm gonna not just. So I'm just thinking about this for

Speaker A: the next three weeks, not expecting a full answer. I wanted to get in your head of how you think about it. Yeah. Because critical thinking is more important right now for marketers than it's ever been. Because how to content and like tactical stuff is like on ChatGPT. Right. So I wanted to get your mindset. Let's do this. Let's do, uh, I would love for you to work on. I'll hire you. I'm gonna hire you to do this. We'll workshop it and let's record that and we'll share with people what we come up with.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: That'll be a cool process. Okay.

Speaker B: I love it.

Speaker A: Let's imagine people got their checkbox. Uh, marketing villain ip.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Now let's go like the solution land. Now, not, not talking about the product, but content ip. So you just helped the reader, for example. Right. We'll call it faith based marketing. I think it's funny. I love. You know, I grew up in the Christian church. I'm sure it's going to upset and make a lot of people laugh.

Speaker B: Uh, I mean, my whole arm is filled with Christianity.

Speaker A: I've got a bunch too. As if I need to prove it. No, uh, is what comes next though. So, like. Okay, right. So people like, I got it. Oh, what was the one that Chris, uh, Walker and them did? The dark. He's, uh, dark social.

Speaker B: So here's the problem with that. He coined two good ones.

Speaker A: What were the dark social?

Speaker B: Dark social and the attribution mirage.

Speaker A: Oh, I didn't hear that one.

Speaker B: Attribution mirage was perfect because we were just like, we think we have all this data about what's working and then you're like, oh, it's first touch or last touch, which is just utter bullshit in what we sell.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You know, nobody's buying $1 million a year in software because they clicked a Google Ad first. Like, that was not.

Speaker A: It wasn't the thing that sparked the click.

Speaker B: It wasn't. It wasn't the thing that sparked the click. But it also was not the thing that took it all the way. I mean, you were in sales. Like, can you imagine? Like from first click all the way to close one, we're going to give credit, credit to a Google Ad.

Speaker A: Like, I've lost a lot of attribution. Uh, call it battles or wars where I'm like, I'm seeing all these content touch points that I help distribute and create. And then someone at the beginning or someone at the end gets like 50 of the weighted credit.

Speaker B: And using like W attribute, it's just

Speaker A: like ABM delivered this landing page at this time in the sales process. I'm like, I wrote the content on the landing page. Like, what do you mean? It's going to the ABM team. And like, we just believe not even credit. Just like we're saying that's gets half the credit. That that was half the decision making. Was that one thing. Yeah.

Speaker B: Or like somebody had been outbounding them and was ignored for three years. Yeah, but because outbound had the first touch point three years ago, we're gonna. It's. So there's this mirage around attribution and it causes really bad spend. We deploy our resources really poorly when we think, okay, we have to do a million dollars a year in Google Ads or we have to like most VC money just it's like a pipeline, right. To Google and meta, basically. Um, but we don't try other creative things. The problem was refine labs at the time was I got this question all the time in my community. Uh, I have a community for SaaS and software marketers. They were like, what do they do? Like nobody knew what they did and what they did. They were an advertising agency.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And if you're an advertising agency, great

Speaker A: one by the way, we use them. And they did a really good job.

Speaker B: And I've heard like, yeah, but they didn't solve the attribution mirage or dark social M. So they had two pieces of IP that were correct and great. But I think that's a good. So to bring this full circle. That's what Chris does a lot. Now, as I understand it, not to speak for him at ah, Passetto, he helps companies, he goes in, they audit all of their attribution, all of their spend. They let them know that's the right connection between the iPad and that he also is an investor, I think in Hatch or part owner. They do like dark social content. So the solution is at least tied to the IP that they've created.

Speaker A: Otherwise you get probably like confused inbound, where people are coming inbound to solve one of those two things. And then like, oh, well, we do something, we're gonna run some Reddit ads for you.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Huh, huh. Yeah.

Speaker B: So I think you have to like stay. You don't have to keep all your eggs in one basket, but like the baskets have to stay in the same room. I like that you have to allow it. Uh, so you have to like be thoughtful about these things. Because we could uh, run off naming problems. Be like, these are all the problems content marketers deal with. Or all the company SaaS. Or all the problems SaaS companies deal with. We name all that shit. And people like, that's so smart. And you're like, cool attention, but not convert it. Yeah, but it can't convert to revenue.

Speaker A: So let's talk about that. What kind? No, so solution aside, not the software or my services or your services, but like, I'm guessing content, ip, like templates, frameworks, guides. That has to be part of this as well, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. So the way I think about it is channel agnostic. These can be delivered webinar, blog, social, it does not matter what channel we do. But I think sticking to a really simple framework can keep us focused. I try to keep it all in like five, the five buckets. And I kind of mentioned them briefly, but just more naming the problem, calling out the problem over and over. And I will never shut the fuck up about checkbox marketing. I will keep talking about that even when I'm Devin. I'm sure you feel this way too. Like, I'm so sick of my own crap most of the, like my content. I'm so over it most of the day, but I know that it's other people are seeing it for the first time or it's like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. Thank you for the remind. Like, it's not every. We're all thinking about ourselves.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Right. So I'm going to get sick of my stuff first. You have to keep pushing past that. And I focus a lot on like talk about the problem, the solution to the problem. Uh, that's fine. But then the first roadblock, you're going to run into, hey, we both agree we have to solve checkbox marketing. When you try to solve it within your company, you're going to hit these three things. You're going to run into these three barriers. I hit them. This other company hit them. We talk about that roadblock, people are like, oh, thank God. Because now I'm Obi Wan Kenobi. Now. Yeah, now I'm Yoda. I'm the guide in the hero's journey. Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey. That's going to walk you through this, which is the position we should all be in. We're not the hero, we're not Luke or whoever. Um, we're the guide. So we take them through that. And the Roadblock content really helps them with that.

Speaker A: I like that a lot.

Speaker B: The third piece is a template. It doesn't always have to be an actual template. We're not looking for like some mad lib like you. You do a lot of work with LinkedIn. The template is not like, Here's 20 post templates where you fill in your own details and then post it. Right. Like that can work. Like, I think we all did that. I posted an epic amount of like, Justin Welsh templates for a long time. Cuz they were good. It was good copy training for me

Speaker A: and I have it right now. The, the, the, like, I call it a bribe. I know the bribe is not the best phrase, but I don't care. Like the, the bonus gift on. If you go to my newsletter and you sign up, there's five LinkedIn templates.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: But it's also a guide to like, why, like, I do a breakdown why it works. And I've had people respond and be like on calls months later and they'll be like, getting like on a, you know, a prospecting call. And they'll be like, oh, by the way, use one of those templates in your, uh, guide. And I got like one of the like, best performing posts ever. And I'm like, oh, that's awesome. But it's just one little stepping stone to help them get better. You know what I mean? It's like training wheels, 100%.

Speaker B: But the templates can go. Like, I was selling SEO primarily for a long time and now that's a piece of my offer, but it's not the whole thing. And I noticed that people really struggled to explain SEO to their CEO.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So I was like, well, why don't I just give him a template? So I created the I am SEO framework Intent, asset and medium. Right. It's Intent. What do they want? How are we going to give that to them? What is the asset we're going to provide and medium. Where are we going to provide it? We have to optimize those three things. And all of a sudden a. Whether it's Google SEO or YouTube or Pinterest or whatever channel has a search function, now a CEO is like, oh, cool. It's just, I am. It's. I am intent, asset, medium. Now I understand SEO.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I gave them that framework to explain their job that they had been brought in to do to the person paying them. Because I think that's something we all deal with as marketers. Right. We all have to like, read, justify our jobs over and over.

Speaker A: The weirdest thing, by the way, that there's an open job wreck like the executive, uh, mostly CMO or whoever's had a marketing was like, yes, we need a headcount. Yes, we need it for this role. Then someone writes that role, they publish it, they interview people, they hire someone, they bring them in, and then at some point that person's like, oh, I have to explain and justify my existence here over and over, over and over.

Speaker B: It's.

Speaker A: It's bizarre. It's absolutely insane. And I think that's one thing I've luckily been really good at. Uh, I think a lot of the success I've had in my career is because I know how to do that. And that's because I was in sales for a long time.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I know how to like, bridge, like, okay, what do you care about? What am I trying to do? Bridge that gap. But it's something I love. That's why I love what you've made. Because so many marketers are like, okay, great, how do I take what we just built or what I'm trying to do and go get my CMO or CEO to see the value in it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that was the unexpected ask. When I, when I created the content strategy design thing, was a CMO going, great, I love all this. Now the last step, the final boss, is we're going to go to the CEO and explain why we did all this and like, get his buy in. And I was like, oh, that wasn't even. Ironically wasn't part of my offering, but it is now. Right? And it's that last step of like, great. That's the last bit, uh, of confidence and enablement. I needed to be successful as a CMO here and get like a good feeling about all the work and investment I just did with Brendan, Devin, etc.

Speaker B: So talk about the problem. Talk about a roadblock. Give them a template. Again, it doesn't have to be like an actual, like, template. Like, in marketing, we think template templates. Sometimes it's just like, hey, here's a, a way to think about this. A way to almost like, uh, you know, I help a lot of clients with community now. They've seen me build multiple communities. They're like, hey, we have one, or we're thinking of growing one. Can you help us? Right? It's content and community. So I give them a framework of, like, here's four questions to ask yourself before you think about starting at your own community. Right? Simple, helpful framework. So then it's a time you've helped a client or customer solve that problem. We have to tie it back to whatever product marketing, whatever function owns that, but we have to tie your IP to an actual customer. Here's how I helped Sendoso beat, uh, checkbox marketing. Here's how, you know, whatever, uh, and then it's zoom out and do some journalism and say, like, hey, here's how HubSpot beat checkbox marketing. Or, here's how, whoever. And it's just me. Or like, maybe people are like, well, HubSpot is like the epitome of checkbox marketing. It's just a thousand marketing drones, like, checking their. No insult. Like, but, you know, like, some people might feel that way. Um, but it's like, hey, did you know when HubSpot started out, they did no checkbox marketing so early on. And I listened to a podcast with Kieran Flanagan where he talked about 10 things they did 10 years ago. And I just make that a LinkedIn post, right? About, like, how they used to be anti checkbox marketing. You're just trying to create some content about. Here's how a name. Like, when I was doing SEO stuff, I figured out, uh, I talked to Airbnb and I got a hold of a growth. A designer on the growth team. And I was just like, hey, when I look at your chart in the SEO tools, it's like, up, flat, up, flat up, and it looks like a stair step. And I was like, what are those three things? Yeah, uh, and he kind of like, looked in and he's like, oh, those dates match up to. He said, we don't have an SEO team at Airbnb. We have a growth team. And those are the three times the growth team focused on SEO. When we focus on it, it goes up and then we let it chill for a while and it kind of levels out. And then we focus again. We do a new initiative, grows a ton and then it chills for a while. And I was like, I'm gonna tell everybody about this. Here's how Airbnb, like, so just some sort of like, for your ip. Here's exactly, like how it aligns with your problem.

Speaker A: It aligns with your point of view. I love that. Okay, I've got a question for you.

Speaker B: Yeah?

Speaker A: Yeah. What is the difference between content IP and content marketing or just content?

Speaker B: So content IP is a maniacal focus on the problem. And it really is that like two or three word phrase, and then everything comes out of that two or three word phrase versus content marketing could be like, the origin of that is God knows what. It's shit coming out of an SEO tool. It's coming from this other thing. There's a lot of great places to get content inspiration. The problem is we can, with our resources we have now, especially in the world of generative AI and things like all these different tools around video and everything like that, we can do everything. And I'm a big believer of just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: And this keeps us focused. And that's a silly thing that so many companies, especially ones, uh, doing between 10 and 100 million in revenue, which is the people I work with primarily, they struggle with that. They're in every channel, they're trying to dabble in everything. And there's no focus there. It's just, here's our latest partner webinar. And here's this, and here's that. And there's no, like, single, uh. I remember Jenny Koop, uh, who was one of the VPs at activecampaign. She pushed us so hard to make sure marketing was always. She called it singing from the same sheet of music. M. Content IP gets you to sing from the same sheet of music. No matter what channel you own or what your function is, or whether you have one marketer or a hundred marketers, if you're all focused on the same piece of ip, you all sing from the same sheet of music.

Speaker A: Yeah, we did that really well at Gong, I think. We didn't have. We didn't name it. Which I always, I look back at now and I'm like, it's wild that they were as successful as they were. And we didn't have a name for the problem.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But we did have the. It's opinions over reality. Like, if you like, like anyone in marketing, like, it was clear. Like that was, that was like the problem, but without wording.

Speaker B: It.

Speaker A: Or like the, the, the point of view without having.

Speaker B: Yeah, you had like, welcome to reality or like things.

Speaker A: That's a, that's a slogan, though. Yeah, it was, it was the reality platform for a little bit. That was like a fun phase, finding ourselves. But the. To your point of seeing from the same, uh, sheet, uh, of music was. Everyone knew it was opinion. Uh, it was reality over opinions. Like, opinions have to go. Reality is what matters. And so all the content reflected that.

Speaker B: Yeah, you couldn't do like, thought leadership of like, hey, here's how we think you should run sales calls. Like, it couldn't just be like, whoever, uh, on the team spouting off how to content. And this was again, what, like years ago, before we were even more drowning in how to content. But, like, you were really focused on the problem. You had the problem locked in. You didn't give it a clever, pithy name.

Speaker A: I regret we did it though, but

Speaker B: it turns out you actually don't have to.

Speaker A: And that example, though, and I know looking back, being like the exception to everything we've been talking about, and there's always an exception to it, but I look back and go, maybe it would have been better if we had just figured out that.

Speaker B: I think it would have been better. But I think the fact that you were all on the same problem, focused on it, and every bit of content tracked back to that problem. You didn't let it sway where it was like, oh, we're gonna interview thought leaders and then share out their best practices. It just came back to the. And it probably, I would guess also for people that don't understand this outside looking in, it's hard as shit to get the data that you guys were pulling out of your platform.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That is not an easy thing. It is not an easy ask. So if that, like, focus on the problem wasn't in your DNA, never would have happened. Like, if you could imagine me in activecampaign, we had a wealth of information about what subject lines work best, how many words should be in a subject line. We could have done the gong play. Go for email.

Speaker A: I was, I've. I was wondering two days ago, why hasn't someone in marketing cracked that code and been like, here's the ideal length for landing pages. Here's the ideal subject line length. Here's the right, like, um, like pronounced use, like you or I or we are like all that sort of stuff. Like, how come people haven't done that? Now I know the first barrier is it's super hard to get that Data. But these are companies with tens and hundreds of million dollars of funding and revenue. It's like, how come people haven't just done that?

Speaker B: It has to come from the top down. This is like an Andy Raskin thing with his strategic narrative, which I've also I like a lot of.

Speaker A: Yeah, he helped it gone. I mean, and we had it top down again. That's why we had the data. The CEO used to be a cmo.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So he got marketing. Mhm. Udi ledgergore was the CMO and he was like all about the problem. Best content wins or the most different content wins, not the best content. Mhm. And that's how we got it. And I tell this to people because I get it all the time. We want to be the gong of, you know, finance or we want to be the gong data of this. And I go, if your CEO's not bought in and if you don't have like the head of engineering or product, whoever owns that data set and that person pulling it, it will never work. Like you have to solve that first. Building the strategy and the plan, all that is pointless until you get that solved.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's just no way to make it happen. It is such a big ask. Like I said, even when I was in activecampaign, I was like, how many people have signed up for get updates? And it took me like six days to get a reply. If that is how data is shared and stuff within the company, it gets really hard.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But I think a lot of times and you could call this like product led marketing or product led growth or whatever people have content led growth something. Well, no, no, no. I just mean like taking the data out of your product and like that. Yeah, content.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We could dress it up. But I mean, Devin, like I ask every single person that I do a discovery call with, like, what do you like, what's your favorite content? And I get probably 50% of them. Mention one of two companies. One is gong. Uh, can you guess the other one?

Speaker A: I have also asked and I would say I get like HubSpot a lot, but that's kind of a fading answer.

Speaker B: I feel like HubSpot is the answer when you can't think of anything else. Ah, yeah. I think it's like, it's IBM. It's safe.

Speaker A: It's like the textbook.

Speaker B: Does anybody really like, is anybody really?

Speaker A: I don't know. I don't know. I could. I mean sometimes it depends on who you're talking to. And uh, at this point I'd be Giving, like, random answers.

Speaker B: Sure. So it's gong specifically. And this isn't any shade. I get the answer is just fact. I get the answer. Old Gong. A lot respect. Uh, um, which is true. Uh, and also Red Bull.

Speaker A: Oh, wow.

Speaker B: Uh, about half the time people say old gong or gong or Red Bull. And I think that's really interesting. Like, there's something there in understanding, like, what people who have taste like and things like that. So it's a. It's a piece of it.

Speaker A: All right, uh, last question on content ip.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And there's no wrong answer. I take no offense. Is this show read between the lines content IP or just content marketing?

Speaker B: It's not. I would never say it's just content marketing.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: It's fucking apex of what we can and should be doing.

Speaker A: Was not hunting for a compliment especially, but flattery will take you far on the show.

Speaker B: But I posted this. I mean, even before we were friends, like, I put something, I was like, here's a view of my office. I love, like, maximalist offices. This space does everything for me. Like, I want every inch of the walls covered with stuff. I love that. But in the middle of it, I have a giant tv. And in the background of my work, I. The photo I shared on LinkedIn was just your show.

Speaker A: I really appreciate that. That was cool. That meant a lot to me.

Speaker B: Right. But thank you for making it because I think we're drowning in the world of, like, bullshit B2B interview podcasts and, like, having something with production quality and with all of this stuff and well researched questions and all of these. Like, you put a lot into this and everybody can tell. Um, so it is not just content marketing.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: But is this content ip? No, because it's not a focus. Like, every single interview would have to be focused on solving one specific problem. And I think right now, like, you pull really good stuff out of everybody. But it's not like, hey, I'm gonna ask every single person the same question or the same kind of question, because we're all focused on solving this one problem, so. And that's not to say it's not

Speaker A: content ip, to be clear. Like, if I answered the question to myself, writing these out, and I was like, well, the answer is probably obvious.

Speaker B: Making you rethink your life. Just sit in prep. No, no.

Speaker A: Well, I'm like, I like to be very honest with myself. Like, if someone says something that it kind of hurts. Like, you know, it's critique. And like, before I get defensive, I go, is it based in Truth.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And I was like, My first answer was like, no, this is not content ip. How do I know? Because I don't talk about content IP too much. I've done it. But I didn't design the show going, here's my faith, you know, faith based marketing problem. And I'm building a show to help with that.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: I'm building a show that I want to be entertaining and educational or edutainment and I want to inspire people. Like, it has a focus. Yeah, it's worked, but it's not on. It's works on. Thanks man. It's catching on. Uh, but it's not content ip. Like that would have been my thing. So I was curious though. I wanted to hear you break down like why it is or isn't. Because I think people will do the same thing where they look at their marketing strategy and go, okay, look at their content. Like, is this content IP or is it not? Uh, and why. So that's why I wanted to get your take on it.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think when you have that problem and then it's like, okay, this problem. Our webinar series is all about that. Our podcast is all about that. The email sends our nurture sequence for cold leads, our win back campaigns, our every single thing kind of like, like a hub and spoke model has to be focused on that problem. And again, like you, all of these are also like, it's a two way street. Right. If we envision like a hub and spoke, like they're feeding out from the problem, but they're also feeding back into it. We're refining. Yeah. How do we talk about this? Is this even the right name for it? You know, you might try a bunch of stuff and then be like, well, that's not. I've. I, to be fair, I've probably tried four or five different things.

Speaker A: Oh, really?

Speaker B: Just didn't. They just didn't resonate or like I wasn't super clear or whatever else.

Speaker A: Do you remember what they were like, your throwaways or the ones that just didn't work out? They're not really throwaways. I guess they just want to say failed ones. Because I love that you tried. I feel like you. It puts so much pressure. And I think this is what kind of dissuaded me was like, it puts a lot of pressure to like get it right and perfect on the first try. And this is such a hard, like I would put this at expert level marketing to be able to say I understand my audience deep enough, go through all the exercise you talk about and be like, here's the sticky coined term for the problem.

Speaker B: So one of the problems that I haven't coined, but I've talked about a lot is like the problem with retainers, especially in marketing. Like uh, the incentives for a lot of companies run completely wrong. Great for the agency, really shitty for their clients. Like especially in SEO where like I noticed everybody did all the work in the first two months and then coasted, coasted, coasted and then did a bunch of reporting in the middle and then at renewal time they like ramped the work back up.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Like being in those machines multiple times and then being on the receiving end. When I was at a SaaS company hiring SEO agencies, same, um, or cutting them.

Speaker A: In my case, adopting and cutting.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Because I caught them in that, that low level plateau.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I look at the, you know, you know how it is.

Speaker B: You join up for 12 months, what the fuck are you going to do in month six? And they can't tell you. Yeah, uh, we'll figure it out. Well then we will figure out paying you if we want to cut the contract. Like so I like, I push back against SEO retainers a lot. Like there's no. Just because you, like I say a lot of times, just because you play the long game, you don't have to pay the, the long game. And like again, that's like a slogan. It's not bad, but like it's not IP work. We're working on it. Uh, the. But like that sort of thing. I push back on these problems. I don't have names for them all yet because I also, you can test different things and test different problems to see what resonates. But there's also two different pieces here. I call them like a business offer and a marketing offer. So there's other sides to this where like the retainer thing is a business problem, the business model is broken, that structure is broken, has nothing to do with the marketing. And yes, my business can solve it because I work in sprints. You don't have to work with me for 12 or whatever months. Um, I don't know. I test a lot of different things, but I've also tested like really pushing back on, which is something I'm also equally passionate about. Of like people let like keyword research and it's like sort for like biggest keyword volume and lowest keyword difficulty. We sort those two columns on the spreadsheet and people are like, there's your content strategy. And there are still a lot of companies doing that and a lot of really, you know, SEO agencies are the really good salespeople selling that. And like, I'm the person that they hire after those engagements where they're like, we paid somebody $40,000 a month for a year. And then, oh, it's ask. It's, ugh, breaks my heart. And then I come in after them and they're like, oh, we could pay you, uh, 5% of that and you also cover us for a year. Yeah, probably. But like, I also like my. I. We can talk about.

Speaker A: I don't even know how much you charge.

Speaker B: I'm just saying I also put on the form. I'm also very public about pricing. Like the. Anyways, the. So that sort of thing, like, I've pushed back down a lot of different problems. But the keyword research thing, checkbox marketing. As soon as I, uh, posted it, I think, um, I'm going to forget who said it. I think Mack Redden, uh, replied like, can I get that on a T shirt? I'm m like, done, done. And now I have so many. Like, every time I talk about it, people are like, oh, I love that. Thank you. Like, it's just like that's. The resonance is so much higher.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I don't want to confuse the market with like, here's like 20 problems I solve.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Because that takes the. Again, the whole benefit of content IP is we for once focus. And if I'm bringing a lot of ip, then like that ruins the focus for sure. And the best companies, to the point, like Clary Gong, like all these companies you talked about Kyle's again doing it copy or operator, they have one problem they solve and they solve it maybe a lot of different ways, but it's still the one problem.

Speaker A: 100%. Yeah. So another thing I wanted to talk to you about is what I would consider a incredibly powerful skill but underrated for marketing, which is designing offers. So this is something you wanted to talk about. So I'm curious about this. So we can talk about it however you want. Like, it could be a content offer, like one of these guides templates, like how you designing it, or it could be like a services offer. But I just want to hand it to you and go like, got my notepad. What up with the offers?

Speaker B: So a lot of us came up in digital marketing. Like I would guess you came up in digital marketing. Proper, adult, professional digital marketing. I did not.

Speaker A: I don't know about proper.

Speaker B: I don't know.

Speaker A: Many people would look at me and say proper.

Speaker B: I came up in online Marketing, which is a lot of webinars about how to do webinars to sell personal development products. A lot of those like YouTube pre roll gurus and you know, uh, it was a lot of passive income type of stuff. Like I came up in like the what's his name, like Tai Lopez world of that sort of thing, the grant Cardone type of everything. And those people are masters of like offers and offer stacks and how to blend all of these things. I came up in the click funnels world.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And there's a reason that clickfunnels, now that I live in the software world, there's a reason that ClickFunnels is uh, three times the size of the second place landing page company. And it sure shit is not because ClickFunnels has good looking landing pages.

Speaker A: They are, they actually don't.

Speaker B: Awful. Yeah, they're horrendous. But they work because they focus on copy and a couple other things and they really, really work because of the whole system of like stacking landing pages and offers and stuff. The thing that's really cool about that is ClickFunnels became a master in offer design. And that's what I feel like. I got my PhD in offer design just by like being a consumer of their stuff and then studying it. And don't get me wrong, Devin, there is so much I don't like about how they do things and about the company and the people that work there. We could talk about that if you want. But like the offers that they put out, whether it's books or trainings or scripts or video courses or the conference, uh, there's like 30 of them of all these cool innovative things. And the other thing that Nobody does in SaaS other than them is they sell them. You buy those from them, you pay for their books, you pay for. And a lot of times it's just at a break even cost for them. But now all their marketing is free.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: So their marketing budget can in theory be zero because we're doing the marketing for them and all of it is immediate ROI back in. So there's no question about like attribution or any of that bullshit because like, oh, they're paying for courses from us, it's paying for us to market more courses. And now we have 20,000 people in our courses, right? And we built that list of 20,000 people who are perfect to buy our software at zero cost. That's where things get really interesting for me. And I think in software we always think that like the software is the offer. So Everything's pushed to like get a demo, get a demo, get a demo, start a trial, start a trial.

Speaker A: I call it Demo Obsession. That's not really a great idea.

Speaker B: I called it the uh, this is another silly piece. I called it the Demo Deluge. When you go to a website like up in the. It is, it is. But if you picture like a giant wave coming at you of like just like a tsunami wave of demo because you get the like bottom slider and then it's in the sidebar and it's in the footer but it's also in the header.

Speaker A: It's shaking in the corner. You try to scroll away from it.

Speaker B: The exit intent pop up is like get a demo.

Speaker A: And I see you trying to leave the website. Did you mean schedule demo?

Speaker B: Right? I saw you were not interested anymore. Did you maybe want to spend a shit ton of money and talk to sales?

Speaker A: So well, so how can SaaS marketers create irresistible offers?

Speaker B: So this is another thing if people haven't read again, feelings notwithstanding about people, processes, companies. I think $100 million offers from Alex Hormozi, uh, was one of the easiest ways I've ever explained this Alex Hermosi clickfunnels guy, he wrote a, he had a thing called Gym Launch. I found him, I have it in my bag at my hotel right now and I'm reading it. He, he sold a book called Gym Launch which was his whole program in a book. Same thing Russell Brunson did. It was even made by the same people. It feels the same, it reads the same and it is similar Alex Hermosi type of stuff where it is every single sentence is value over and over. And it's this thick book of how to do marketing, how to do sales. It's his whole program in a book. And I've been following him since Jim launched. So when he rolled out a hundred million dollar offers in acquisition.com I was like, oh shit. He's going to like talk about the behind the scenes of this stuff. And $100 million offers is great.

Speaker A: Like I haven't, I haven't read it yet.

Speaker B: So in terms of offer design, he just kind of uh, you can take the whole book and be like, it's this fraction of like how do we increase value, decrease risk, increase the like percentage likelihood, uh, that they'll do this and then like reduce the cost almost to zero. Like at least their perception of it. So there's that piece of offer design, but I think it's also having secondary. Like I said, there's the business offer which is like here's how much our software costs.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And then there's marketing offers.

Speaker A: That's what I'm talking about.

Speaker B: And the problem with marketing offers and the reason if we want to dig underneath this of why don't companies have marketing offers is because most companies are top of funnel heavy and bottom of funnel heavy. If we look at it over the course of like a buyer journey, like there's a lot of shit at the beginning, almost nothing in the middle. We're like oh, we can't track them when they're in their consideration phase. Like it's you know and every, all the software say you can like whatever, but you can't because you don't know when people want to buy. Like things happen outside of your control. You kind of can't beat uh, them into buying. Maybe sometimes if I would opinion on, I would argue if you can. They probably already wanted. It's hard to manufacture a need when there it doesn't exist.

Speaker A: I would argue that if there's no need then you don't have a company. Yeah but if I think you can introduce a problem that people knew they had but you can reprioritize it so it's a new top priority. It's hard to do and I'm not saying go to market is that your number one way of doing it. But there's like um. It kind of pissed me off. I'm going to tangent kind of pissed me off. The tangent's not pissing me off but I've been saying for years that no one gives a shit about your product yet. And then the reason I get pissed off is the B2B. I think it was the B2B institute or marketing Institute, something like that. Someone fancier than the reader said the new 95.5rule. Have you heard about this? 95 of your market is not in 5% is in market. So you need to um, you know that's your like balance act. So when I say no one gives a about your product, I'm saying 95% of people who you could sell to don't care right now.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: So that's why that was my kind of philosophy for why invest in top of funnel five years ago when most people where most companies weren't. And so the reason I uh, get pissed like now they just have a number to the thing. I probably should have came up with the 95.5 rule even if I didn't have the data. But hey, I'm learning to coin things today. So but what I believe you can do is like so one earn mind share with the 95.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: That's a lot of things we've been talking about today. And all of the reader content, then the 5% is like your bottom funnel. That's high intent keywords on uh, SEO, that's bottom funnel content. How HubSpot, you know, did such and such with our company. Right. All that kind of stuff. I think that's more like final de risking. Right. And I also think that you can move the 95 to the 5 and that is something that I think people can start to do, but they kind of view it as like, oh, so it's like ground and pound with like SDRs and it's just like beat them up with like value prop messaging. And it's usually all about us. Hey, us, us. Uh, look what we did, look what we did. Look what we can do instead of like, hey, we know you. Here's this checkbox marketing problem. Here's these barriers you're probably running into. We've solved it. I think that's how you can move someone from 95 to 5 with an existing problem that's just maybe lower on their priority list or a problem they didn't know existed.

Speaker B: And I think, well, I think most companies just don't know they have a middle of funnel problem. So it's just constantly get a demo, come to a webinar, sign up for our emails. And as channels get more and more saturated, I would argue like different is better than better. I think that's always been true.

Speaker A: It's been one of my philosophies. UDI gave me that one and I've, I've just. That's like ingrained. It's tattooed on the inside of my head.

Speaker B: It's so good. Well, if none of your competitors have a book, why don't you have a book? Thought Dave did this great. I bought all the, I'm pretty sure I paid for all the Drift books. Like they had a hypergrowth book and all these things, um, that they put out probably like five or six books at Drift. And I remember I even got pissed at them because I tried to buy one. It was a picture of a book. And of course they just email you the PDF. And I'm like, I want the book in the picture. They're like, oh, we don't make that. I'm like, don't show me a physical book in the picture and then send me an email with a PDF, because I will buy the book. I want it on my bookshelf. I want a virtue signal that I have all the drift books behind me in the recording on my zoom calls like that. There's all these other. Like a physical book. Like, we don't even have to go down this tangent. But a physical book is so powerful.

Speaker A: 100 being able to handle credibility signal.

Speaker B: Right. Like, I think I've probably. When I mentioned Eddie's book. Right. Very good.

Speaker A: Shout out to Eddie Schlanger.

Speaker B: That book does so much more. He has a huge email list, a huge following on LinkedIn, but everybody having that book and that book being an immediate. Like, as soon as you see that I'm holding the book, we sit at the same lunch table.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: We just became best friends just from that. So there's all of these middle of funnel offers that I'm obsessed with. And I think that more and more when companies start rolling these out, they'll find that that middle of funnel starts to fill up and they become the bottom of funnel becomes really, really easy. Easy.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, the cliche thing to say is I could talk to you all day. Um, but I can say that's not true with you. Uh, no, I'm.

Speaker B: We are talking all day. I've seen the schedule.

Speaker A: I want to go. We're, uh, going to continue. So this is usually where I say, you know, we wrap up, but real quick, I want. We're new, something different. So first tell folks where to find you.

Speaker B: So the easiest place to find me is LinkedIn, but you could also Google me, misspell Brendan Hufford as much as you want. It'll still Google will take you to the right places. Run an agency called Growth sprints. Um, but LinkedIn is where I share almost everything that I'm learning day to day, and that'll send you to everything else. If I'm doing my job, if I'm good at this, which I think I AM, I agree. LinkedIn is definitely the best place.

Speaker A: Fantastic. And usually I say, man, it's nice talking to you, and we, you know, shake hands and part ways, but we're actually going to go sneaker shopping right now. So for folks who are listening, if you want to go, jump over to the Reader YouTube page and you can watch me and Brendan go sneaker shopping. I appreciate you, man. Thanks for dropping Wisdom today.

Speaker B: Thanks.

Speaker A: That's a wrap for today. And if you're still listening, you must really crave growth, and I respect that. Here are three ways I can help you grow your content right now. First, subscribe to the reader newsletter you'll get actionable writing and marketing advice delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday morning. 2. Make sure you hit subscribe on YouTube so you get access to new episodes and new videos when they drop. And three if you want to sponsor or hire the Reader, you can send me an email at uh yo at the reader co. That's y o@ the Reader Co. And if you're enjoying the show, make sure to drop us a five star review. It helps us get new sponsors and grow. I'll see you next time.