Kristen Sweeney: Turning a Freelance Gig into a Thought Leadership Powerhouse

Business. Business. Business. Business. Ah, that sounds all right. Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce today Kristen Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Every Little Word. Kristen, how are you?

I'm doing well, thank you, Amy. I'm glad to be here.

Well, I'm so glad you're here too. Thank you. It is always so fun for me to interview another content person that's like just passionate about every little word. I, I love that our backgrounds are so similar, but could you first start off and tell us a little bit about your background and how you became the CEO and founder of Every Little Word.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I'll try and keep it short. It's kind of a winding journey to be where I am now. I did not get a degree in marketing or journalism. Most of my marketing and communications knowledge is, is self-trained over the course of the last 15 years. Comes from being honestly a really curious person and continuing to identify areas where I wasn't able to support my clients and wanted to grow into new areas of knowledge. I am a trained musical theater actor, so that's what I would just—

that's what is—

and if you know anything about those folks, you probably know that they usually have somewhere between like 1 and 7 day jobs going on at any point in time. So for me, freelance writing was one of those day jobs, and over time it started to grow and kind of become a bigger, a bigger part of what I was doing and certainly became my economic engine. So kind of fast forward to, I'd, I'd lived in New York for close to a decade. I had moved to Boston, gotten married, started a family, and you know, those tend to be really big pivot points. So I remember my first daughter was born. I was coming back from a maternity leave and I kind of said like, okay, this is the time to take stock and evaluate on everything I've got going on. Because at that point I was still, you know, woman of a thousand arms, like doing a bunch of different things. And I looked and I said, you know, content, which has only grown by word of mouth, which I haven't actively tried to grow as a business, is actually where I'm making most of my money. It's flexible in the way I want it to be flexible for having a young child. What would happen if I actually put my attention on just this one thing and decided to be more focused? So that's the genesis. By 2020, we'd formed a big channel partnership and I had to figure out how to hire, grow a team, lead a team, and, and, you know, pretty quickly went to having a real business at UL.

Amazing. I love it when it develops organically. My journey is very similar. I was a violinist and so also in the entertainment world like you.

Yes.

And one thing led to another and I wanted to go to college. I stayed home with my kids for a while and the kids gotta eat, right? So. You know, life kind of forces you back in, but I also thought content would be a great flexible job. It was something I was good at. I think that having an entertainment and musical theater background actually gives you a leg up on in terms of content sometimes because you know what resonates with people. And so I did the same thing with the marketing agency. I started a little at a time and grew organically. And before I knew it, I had hired people. I remember sitting on the couch. With my husband, so nervous about hiring my first full-time person. I was like, oh my gosh, I have to be successful now because somebody's depending on me.

Yes.

My— remember that? Remember that time? That was— I do.

I remember like paying my people through PayPal and being so anxious that, you know, if I screwed up or I didn't remember the right— like to, you know, send it on the right day. Like it's definitely not something I like to be in charge I like to, I like it to run like clockwork without me. And yeah, I remember those early days for sure.

But it just goes to show what a need there is for content and for thought leadership. But thought leadership has really, that term used to mean something. And a lot of people think that it means other things. Do you remember that line in Princess Bride where they said, I do not think it means what you think it means. That was one of my favorite shows growing up. But anyway, so tell me, what are your thoughts about thought leadership?

Yeah, so it's been an interesting journey because thought leadership is something that my agency has identified with for quite a long time and recently I've forced myself to get more specific as well and say, you know, we're kind of using it as this very broad umbrella term. So if I may, I'd love to start with like, I actually figured out for us at least what that umbrella term is. So we call the kind of bigger umbrella expert-led content. And expert-led content is content that where individuals, usually experts inside an organization, that could be a technical subject matter expert, it could be executives who are experts in their own right, is contributing information, knowledge, insights, experience, expertise. That can take all sorts of forms, and some of it is thought leadership. So, in my opinion, thought leadership, when you hear, you know, poor marketing folks are like, yeah, now we have to do thought leadership. And it's like, what does that even mean? And I think they're maybe not quite sure. It's just this kind of mandate that's come down from above. So to me, thought leaders are not necessarily companies. They are individuals who are representing their companies, right? So a company can have one or several thought leaders. Thought leadership is that type of expert-led content that is kind of authored. It's, it's got their byline on it, right? It's not the same as expert-led content. For example, it could show up in a white paper where we really This is what we do. We interview subject matter experts, but the end product, the end content asset doesn't have their name like slapped on it, right? It's, it's just contributing to the background and the really enriching the information being presented. Thought leadership is an authored byline. Thought leadership is a speaking engagement. Thought leadership is LinkedIn content on their personal profile. So that's one piece that I think is really important to, to me. Thought leadership is we're elevating a thought leader, which means one person at a time.

How do you compare that with the general bucket term of expert-led content?

So expert-led content sits above it. Thought leadership is a type of expert-led content. Personal brand is also a type of expert-led content. And I think a lot of times, especially on LinkedIn, this can get murky for people too.

Yeah. Like I actually, I've never thought of this before cuz I always just thought of it as the same thing. Thing. So how, how would you differentiate between personal brand and expert-led con— or, and, uh, thought leadership?

Like, a story about your childhood that's really interesting and that engages people, I think, is more personal brand, right? Taking that story and then applying it in a long-form byline and talking about how it's influenced your decision-making in your company today maybe is more thought leadership. And I think In a lot of ways, when we're working to elevate an individual, there's a blend of both. But part of the reason I think it's important to, to differentiate is sometimes we see folks that kind of use LinkedIn in part. One, they think thought leadership is posting on LinkedIn, right? Which it's about the kind of content you're creating, the kind of ideas you're sharing, not necessarily where you're showing up. It can happen across many channels. But they also use it as like a place to kind of record what happened. So for example, posts that say, I went to this event, they have some value. They often get high engagement because you're bringing in, you know, other people from that community or tagging.

Oh, it's so great to be with you and you and you, and you put them on pictures.

And there's value in that.

There is.

But at the same time, Like a record of what happened isn't demonstrating like, how are you contributing to the conversation? Now I know you're showing up in the right places, but what do you actually have to say? And so it's reframing the idea that some of the ideas should be shared, not just showing like, I was here, I was here, I was here. There, there's a place for that, but that's not all thought leadership is.

Yeah. Yeah. I see what you're saying. Personal brand is more about who you are. Thought leadership is more about what you think and how you lead with that expert-led content. Okay, awesome. Is there anything else that you would bucket under expert-led content besides personal brand and thought leadership?

I think that's kind of it on the individual side. And then expert-led content again is an approach that you can use to create all sorts of content assets on the company side. So, you know, your blog posts, your infographics, your white papers, all of those things. It's always come very naturally to me that that should be informed by the experts. I've never worked well in a capacity where it's been like, well, here's a brief, here's a couple of keywords, now go and figure out what you wanna say. Because that's always seemed disjointed to me. Like, what's happening inside the organization? How, what's the perspective? Because if you bring a customer through the door, there's the people delivering the work. Are going to have an opinion about how it should be done.

Absolutely. Yes. That was one of the— in the early days of Simplus, about 10 years ago, we were Salesforce consulting partners and we needed a point of view, which is what you're talking about, I think, right? Where we were like, okay, well, so we're Salesforce partners. We can like fix anything. We can do anything on Salesforce, but that's not a good story. Right? Like, that's not something that we could lead with. And so we went very specific into the niche that we wanted to build that expertise and have that point of view in. And it was really interesting. I really enjoyed that. Now, that, that as from a services business is very interesting because we went super, super niche in order for us to have our point of view. Do you think that that's necessary or do you think that like points of view from a company perspective can be very broad. Like, how do you, how would you go about advising a company that way?

Yeah, so I think it can be both. When I think there are a lot of factors beyond just messaging that go into something like how specific your niche needs to be. There's a lot of market research and other components that need to go into sort of making those decisions and setting strategy around that. One of the things that we do though is we want to think about what is that company-level messaging. And in the instances where we are getting individual perspectives, like, where is their alignment and where is there not? Hopefully the, the kind of most difficult end case for this is that we— that gets figured out once you have a draft of something, and it's what I call comment wars, and people are kind of going back and forth, and it's like Well, there's something here about you all need to figure out what you believe about how this is done. And sometimes consultancies can be challenging because it's this kind of a little bit of these individual, like, fiefdoms, right? And people have their own approaches. So that's, I think, where it can be important. Expectation setting can be really important. Who is the group who's going to contribute to this? Who is the group who's going to review this? Ideally, it's the same group. We don't have a bunch of extra people. On the backend and trying to upfront identify where is that company kind of top-level messaging, and then where individuals have their own perspectives, where is their alignment? And probably we wanna focus more on those areas rather than sort of what's on the fringes, if that makes sense.

That totally makes sense. So if you were going to go into a company and start someone's expert-led content, what would be the first step you would do? How would you approach that? You've already got the job, everyone's on board, you don't have to get stakeholder alignment. I know that's really amazing. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna get rid of like 75% of your job and now we're just gonna focus on getting the content put together. What would you do first?

So the first thing we do, one of our core values is be resourceful. And so the first thing I'm gonna wanna do is understand what they already have, because experts' time is incredibly valuable. And when we are speaking with experts, you know, most of them, marketing or communications is not in their job description. So they are carving out additional time to contribute to these efforts. So first thing is I'm going to talk to our content champion. That's what we call like our main point of contact in-house and ask for like everything I can get my hands on, right? I want their mission statement, I want their strategic planning, I want access to anything. Of course, what I can get from the website, but any webinars, internal process documents, scopes of work, all sorts of things. So we'll have a conversation about what's available that we might be able to have and review to give us the foundation to then go into some conversations and some strategy planning and things like that. But I don't want to have, get someone, you know, from the C-suite in front of me to rehash something I could have read myself in their documents. So, I think that's really critical. And every step along the way, we're looking for opportunities. I just had a call the other day and, you know, we were aligning with someone internally and they were saying, what's next? What's next? And, you know, it's always the same question. Is there any documentation around that? Will it be recorded? Is there something I can view now? Is there something I can view later so that we just kind of become this sponge that embeds and starts to align with understanding, well, what is the sort of available expertise to me? Now let's start like mining that and mapping it against a strategy to help the company meet their objectives.

That's awesome. I love that. What would you do for people who want to be thought leaders but don't know how to get started? Maybe they're not very good speakers, but they have a lot to contribute. Maybe they're not very good writers, but they have a lot to contribute. What, what would you recommend having them do aside from hiring us? Yeah, well, that was it. That was my easy in for you guys. So first of all, hire Every Little Word. And then also in preparation for the first call. Yeah.

So I think it's important for people to realize that in my opinion, and we, we didn't touch on this, Being a thought leader is predicated on being someone who thinks deeply about your work, about your industry, and that can happen alone in your remote office, right? So what we're really trying to do is kind of sharpen and articulate your ideas and align them with what you're trying to achieve and then get them out there, right? So we can't manufacture a thought leader for someone who just isn't invested and To be honest, not every person in an organization is like a budding thought leader, and that's okay. You can still be excellent at your job, you can be incredibly impactful in your organization, and you may not be the right figure to be sort of elevated personally as a representative of the brand. But for folks who feel like, I've got stuff to say, I don't know how to get started, the first thing is build yourself some kind of dead simple system for capturing your ideas. A note on your phone, if it's talk-to-text, like one kind of repository for capturing that information. And then I think figuring out what your— if you're going to go it alone, what your one avenue is going to be. Getting started and sticking with it consistently. Consistency is So such an underrated skill. I think in content there's a lot of talk about it's quality over quantity. And yes, that's true if you are pumping out 5 or 10 blog posts a week for, you know, SEO purposes. But it, it's not true if you are only posting on LinkedIn once a month, right?

So it doesn't matter how good your LinkedIn post is, you're not gonna get the eyeballs on it unless you're pretty consistent. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. And I think thinking about the medium that's really right for you. So for example, we kind of had a similar moment for this in my own business where we had focused a lot on my personal LinkedIn, but the truth is like, I'm a long-form gal at heart. I was like, one of our systems is kind of based on create a long-form content asset. It's so much easier to then repurpose into short form from there. And I wasn't following that for myself. So I started a Substack and I was like, this is a place where people expect long form, where long form is sort of embraced. And I'm someone who likes to, as you can probably tell, like include all the caveats and the nuances and the subtleties and all of that. I love complexity and unpacking big ideas and, and so that's feeling like the right platform for me. So that's the other thing I would say is like when you choose that channel, Yes, you wanna be where your audience is, but it also has to be something that's gonna resonate for you so that you can show up consistently.

This is so exciting for me to chat with you because I just feel like in some of the thought leadership, like you were a perfect example of what a thought leader should do. You, you came up, you knew exactly what you wanted to say. You were super clear in the way that you did it. It was, you provided very helpful, like, tips for everyone who's listening. So you are definitely a practitioner of your work, and I really appreciate you coming on.

Oh, thank you.

So interesting. I really enjoyed it. Okay, so my last question today is, clearly you're an expert, clear you're at the top of your game. What do you do to stay there? It could be you've mastered meditation and then you make your mind present. It could be your favorite soda. What do you do to, to stay at the top of your game?

Number one thing that makes a difference for me is sleep. And not always easy. I love a good TV show into the night. And, you know, I, I think a lot of parents probably experience this where like the kids go to bed and you're like, okay, I, I crave this me time and I kind of don't wanna cut short my adult time to go to sleep. But the fact is that most of the time the best thing I can do is get a really good night's sleep and that It's better for my mood. It's better for my focus, energy, all across the board. That's really an anchor for me.

I love that. It, that is an underrated, super, super important thing to do. So anyway, well, thank you so much, Kristen. I really appreciate it and hope you have a wonderful day and congratulations on all of your success.

Thank you so much, Amy. It was great being here.

It's that business, business. It's that business.