#81: B2B Content Strategy with Devin Reed (Head of Content at Clari, Gong)

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All right, so Devin is here. I wanted to talk before the podcast, but I said I just want to hit record and actually chat with you on the record. The PR team at your company will be okay. This will be good for everybody, don't worry. But before we dive in and I ask, I ask a million questions as listeners know and I take lots of notes and go in a bunch of different directions. Like for people listening, can you introduce yourself? Name, quick bio, who you are, what do you do? Quick career summary and then I'm going to jump back and ask you a bunch of questions from there.

Yeah, absolutely. So currently director of content and Thought leadership over at Clary. The quick background is I spent the first six years of my career in sales. So I went from being a terrible sales rep to a decent one to a pretty good one, I would say. Right when I got pretty good at it and the money was coming in, I decided to move over into marketing. And so that was while I was at Gong. So I was the second sales rep at Gong in 2017 when there are about 40 employees, moved over to marketing. Was supposed to actually join Chris Orlob's team, if anyone knows or has heard of Chris Orlob. And so he was leading content. Right. As I joined his team he was like actually I'm going to get back into sales so you can just have my job basically. And so I became the one man band there when we were, I don't know, 150, 250 employees and then scaled the team to seven left when we're about 1,200 employees last year. And then yeah, as I mentioned, just joined Clary about nine months ago.

Awesome. Yeah, I feel like I just from following the story on the sideline. That's right. There was a little bit of a flip flop. I feel like that might be one of the secret ingredients into why the content at Gong was so good is that you were in the role of the customer that you were selling to. Right. You weren't, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but you weren't a 22 year old fresh grad or marketing associate trying to get inside the head of a salesperson. You're like, oh, I am this. I can talk about that. Was that a conscious move and what was exciting about content? Obviously you're making good money selling software. Gong is going great. I'm sure you were hitting all your numbers in the early days when the company's growing crazy like that there's lots of accelerators and lots of money to be made. Take me into that time.

Yeah, and this is, I'm not saying it to flatter you by any means, but I've known you for of you and we've met a couple times over the years and studying you and just other folks in the marketing space. I'm just trying to find the intangibles, right? Like why is this person successful? What is it about them that draws people to them? And that's in B2B and that's in just like life, right? I'm like always curious about that and by no means watering down your success to this day. But one thing where I was like, he's a marketer marketing to marketers, like, he's a dude marketing to himself. That has to be part of it. And so all of the imposter syndrome and kind of doubt I had of myself of like, hey, I'm going to go build a marketing team at a pretty, you know, at the time blossoming, you know, tech company. At least I know the audience. Like at the very least I know who I'm talking to and about. And so I kind of leaned on that really heavy. The reason for the transfer was like I mentioned, like I got good at sales. It took a really long time, but it never like felt like my calling. It kind of felt forced. And I didn't know that marketing was, you know, going to work out, but I just thought, hey, maybe there's this way where I can kind of, you know, play into some more creative skill set, some of my communication skill set and kind of just. And there's no disrespect to my friends in sales by any means, but you can easily become a cog. You're replaceable, you're a number and like you're only as good as your last month or quarter. I wanted to find a way that I can maybe be a little bit more indispensable and valuable and find other ways to bring value to the company. It just so happened to be content marketing.

Do you feel like now you're good enough with content and marketing and understanding content? Could you only do marketing to marketers or marketing to sales? Or do you feel like, I know the game now? You could hire me to run content at a cybersecurity company and I think I could be successful.

I humbly think I could be successful, but I openly don't want to do that. I think the learning curve.

I'm with you. I use that line all the time. I'm like, I would be no good in that world. I think it'd be a different playbook in that I would be more of like the curator behind the scenes and try to like, interview and tap into experts where, like, me being the face of doing a lot of content, like ad drift at that time worked really well in that market. The walking and talking LinkedIn videos is not going to work. You know, selling to like, DevOps or something like that. But I think that to me is what's fun about it, is like you get to create a different recipe and attack it in a different way.

Yes. I've said the almost exact same examples, which was like, would it have worked out, you know, from sales to like, what it's like GitLab or some like, developers? Like, no, probably not. And now that I've kind of found my niche, I'm just more valuable to a few handful of companies. Right. Who sell to the Persona I'm super familiar with. So I'd rather stay there, market to them, and keep a shorter learning curve than say, hey, I've got something to prove. I can be the head of marketing at a company that sells to developers. Watch me work like that just doesn't interest me.

Your niche is what? B2B SaaS.

B2B SaaS. If we go even further, I'd say sales, marketing, or if you want to go to market. I know that's like kind of broad, but yeah.

Can we talk about gong early content strategy stuff? Because, and I use this example a lot and I have worked with a lot of B2B SaaS companies, marketing teams. I think one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of companies are doing content. And we're. We got a blog, we got a podcast, we got LinkedIn, we got TikTok, we got YouTube, we got this, we got that. And none of it is great. And that's not even saying it as a knock, but we just kind of try to do it everywhere, which, like, I don't know if this was the actual strategy, but from the outside, what I felt like I saw gong and you guys doing was in some ways, like, less is more. Like, it felt to me like you did kind of like one or two, like, pillar pieces of content instead of just, like, cranking out blog posts about sales. You were like, like, hey, we're not going to publish anything for three weeks. We're going to use our own data and we're going to come out with, like, you know, here are the most common phrases that closers use or what? I'm making this up, right? And we're not going to do it across every channel. We know that our buyers are on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is a really busy and effective channel right now. We're just going to kind of focus on LinkedIn. Where I've been in the situation where it's like, well, you know, this person on the team has, like, an email subscriber goal, and this person on the team has, like, a blog traffic goal, and then this person has, like, a demo request goal. And, like, none of that's working. I thought from the outside, what you all did really well was like, nope, we're just going to kind of go all in on LinkedIn. That's where we believe our Persona is. And we're going to use LinkedIn to drive a ton of eyeballs to our content. Am I roughly in the ballpark of that?

You're in the ballpark and you're in the lower bleachers. You're in the right spot.

All right, well, pretend like I've never heard it before and tell me the, like, intentional decisions. Because I always say, now, if I were to go do something else or run marketing somewhere else, like, I. I just think that focus is the key. It's not about being on 20 channels. It's like being really good at one or two and just squeezing all the juice out of those channels. And it also helps so much with internal alignment and who's doing what versus, like, the team. So many marketing teams, everybody's doing lots of stuff and everybody's really busy, but we're not hitting our goals.

So the way I thought about it was, again, having been a sales rep, right? We've all heard the adage, you know, go where your customers are today. Go where your audience is today. And so I thought, well, what does a salesperson do when they log in? When they open their laptop? They go to three places, there's three tabs. They open Gmail, Salesforce and LinkedIn all day long. Those are the three things that are open. So I thought, okay, well, email, we can build an email list right when that's a great direct path to communicate with folks. Everyone's on LinkedIn, let's build on LinkedIn. And I can't build on Salesforce. There's nothing there. So I'll just take two of those three tabs and I'm gonna own those two or three tabs. So every time you see my name, Gong's name, it's going to be something what we can talk about what valuable means, but it has to be something valuable, highly engaging, every single time. And we will condition people and inevitably they'll share our content. And so I'm like, if I can just dominate, not play, not win. We are trying to dominate these two channels, LinkedIn specifically, then we can figure out if and how we scale. But I was all in that we can win and dominate those two places. We wouldn't really have to go much wider than that.

There's a great book on business strategy. I think it's called Playing to Win. And one of the basically core principles in the book is before you figure out how you're going to play, you have to figure out where you're going to play. And so I love that you already, in that first exercise, you've kind of narrowed it down to like, okay, we're going to focus on these two channels, which is going to be email and LinkedIn. But anybody can do that. Anybody can focus on those channels. Take me into, like, how you figured out the how and not just pumping out kind of average content. It seemed like you had a very specific bar for what you created.

I always give a shout to udi. I'm sure you know Udi well. He was, I mean, big brand guy, but really all about being different. And he always said, different is better than better. And so here I am, you know, I've got sleep. I don't know if you can see in the frame. I'm tattooed up, I speak very street level. And I'm on these, you know, videos on LinkedIn, giving sales advice, but using, like you said, the data. Right. And so I think one was the delivery of the content was something that I looked in the mirror and I'm like, I look different than most people in this space. And Udi hired me, so he knew what he was getting into. Right. He didn't ask me to wear a great business suit on videos and in front of audiences. So if that's kind of a differentiator is how I communicate in our tone at GONG as a whole. Let's lean into that. Right. And so the brand tone was something that was very different. The content itself was, yeah, we had this just, you know, treasure chest of all these different data points from the platform and everybody on LinkedIn at the time, which again, at the time not nearly as many LinkedIn creators and influencers was not a thing. I think Chris Orlob was like the first to have 30,000 followers in that space. And that was wild. Like people didn't even know that was a thing. And so it was like, hey, let's not just do opinion based stuff. I was on this one sales call and this is what happened. And therefore everyone and their mom should do it this way. It was, let's look at the data. There's always a difference as you, you know, you know, Dave from like behavioral psychology, the things we say we do and the things we actually do. And so if I was, could say, hey, let's take the opinions, the best practices, the things you learn in sales school, which, all the sales training, you know, when you, when you join a sales company, what if we take all of that, then we pair it with data and say, hey, here's what you've been told to do, here's what you think is right, but here's what actually works according to data. And that alone gave us a lot of credibility because it's data based, but it just jumped, it just pierced through the noise. No one was doing anything like that. And so when you take this and the way we were bringing insights and then the way we were delivering it with the tone, that's what was just like no one was doing anything like that and that's why we stood out. So I don't want to say easily, but so much in comparison to the landscape.

For me, it also comes back to for people that are looking for marketing jobs or let's say you want to be in, you want to do content marketing. I'm a partial believer. And I think David Ogilvie had this line that says, like, there are no boring products, only dull writers. And I think that's partially true. But I also think that when you're looking for jobs or looking for how you can be successful, like this wasn't vaporware. You had a great product with interesting data that like, oh man, this is a gold mine for marketers. And I think we had a similar thing in, at the time at Drift, which is like marketing to marketers. The CEO David was like, really smart to be like, hey, look, if we're selling marketing a marketing software product, like, hey, marketing team, like, you guys have to used to use our product. He made us cancel all of the other SaaS tools that we were using. And like, even if the drift product at the time couldn't do a certain thing, he's like, you got to do it because we're selling this product to the audience. Like, you're going to get better ideas, you're going to get better content, you're going to push the product team. And so I a big part of that was like, oh yeah, this is a perfect combination of like smart people who want to create interesting content. But we also have this like the right fit from a product standpoint where we can really work together to deliver interesting content as opposed to just having to write another, you know, 15 podcasts every sales rep should listen to type of article.

Yeah, absolutely. As a leader, it's kind of like a triangle that I think about it when I come to developing the team. And on each point, one is category, because that's kind of, you know, I've always done the category play. You call it point of view. The second one is audience and the third one is product. And so we had that at Gong for aforementioned reasons. Having, you know, I sold the product for a couple of years beforehand. But as I start to build and scale teams, I try to look for where are we strong and where are we weak on this kind of triangle with each hire. So I'm going to come in with product knowledge. Like right now at Clara, I have a sales engineer turned marketer nailing product right there. Right. So I kind of think of those three ways. And then as the leader on the team, it's my job to bring the category, you know, from the CEO, from Kyle, our cmo, down to the kind of more street level folks. So that's kind of the little way that I look at it.

In the Gong example, what was the kind of cadence from a content perspective? Obviously you said no to lots of other different channels. I'm sure you all had a bunch of different ideas for we could do this on YouTube, we could do this, we do that, blah, blah, blah. But you focused on, you know, LinkedIn and kind of long form content. What was the cadence? Did the team say, like, we're going to do one meaty thing a month and that's what everyone's working on? Like, how did this come together behind.

The scenes in the early Days it was because it was me and a guy, Jonathan, that I hired. So it was just both of us. And so when we joined, it was like, hey, we're really doing like one thing a month. Keep doing that and then see if we can do like two things a month. Like that. That was like, can we double? I doubled headcount. Can you double output? The strategy really was the Gong Labs articles, which folks new to that there was the data backed articles, specifically 800 words or less, extremely, one big data point, a story with it, and then some actionable guidance and a lead magnet. So if it was like, hey, here's what was the example I think you shared, which was actually one. We did. These 10 words are what bestsellers do. Bestsellers say we might cover like five of them in the blog and then go, by the way, here's a cheat sheet with all 10. Download it and then I get your email address as well. We saw so much success with those when they popped off on LinkedIn that it was like worth rolling the dice. Like, we had the equation, we had the formula, we had the team. Let's just do one of those a month. We tried to get to two a month, but they're just pretty big lifts from a campaign and data standpoint. So we got to like 3ish weeks at best. But we just knew that we were getting, you know, when one of these popped off, we had, you know, over a thousand new followers on our page. We would get 500 to 1500 new email addresses. Those folks could mql. And what was most interesting though, and kind of going to like, how did you get away with that? How did you get away with like one big bet? And we did some other stuff too, that I'll talk about, but it wasn't about adding to the conversation. We were trying to own the conversation. I wanted everybody talking about that data point for 24 hours on LinkedIn. And what we ended up finding out would like, you know, a blog would go live on Tuesday. I'd get on a call with someone Thursday, Friday, maybe even of the next week, and they would start the call day with like, hey, Dev, just want to say real quick, saw that article from last week. Someone on my sales team slacked it to me. Someone on my sales team was in our sales chat. Like, I'm convinced, even though I'll never be able to prove it, that Slack was probably the third best channel for delivering that content because people were sharing it.

Yeah, I agree. I, I mean, I was just going to say, like, I think this is the other really important piece of this is like, yes, it was using your data but it was not self serving. It was like genuinely useful and interesting insights that like the VP of sales at Drift might send this around and be like, oh, let's look at our Gong call recordings and see how often these phrases are coming up. Or like, hey, like you were teaching or sharing something unique. That it was genuinely helpful. And I think that's what it takes to me to be good at content in a way that's going to drive measurable business results is like we sell to salespeople, forget that we're Gong or whoever. How do we make this piece of something so valuable that it's going to be the thing that they share and tell each other about and like, oh, check this out, I'm going to try this thing. From this article, to me that's what it means to build a brand, I think more than like logo and name and all that stuff. It's like, oh, Gong became this resource for salespeople and so if I'm a mid level like AE at some company, Gong becomes my kind of secret weapon to help me grow in my career. Because I'm now following your stuff. I'm reading this article. Oh cool. I'm going to try this out. Me as a marketer, early in my career, like that was HubSpot when they created like inbound marketing. I was one of the few marketers at a company that I was at at the time who was like going to their conference, going to their all their webinars, following them on social media. I felt like I had this like secret that nobody else had. And I think that's what makes it great. And so it's like about getting inside the head and then creating the level of content that's valuable. And you being from sales, you can kind of pass the sniff test yourself, right?

Absolutely. And it's funny you say about the being genuinely valuable. I had a no product rule, no pitch, no screenshots. This was no product allowed. And it worked really well. It was funny is there was other times where you know, you get the pull, won't say names or titles, but someone you know above, like, hey, why don't we, why don't we do this? There's this new product coming out. Why don't we really do this? And I was like, fine. I like, you know, after defending my position for months and you know, years, I'm like, let's do it. A third of the results, a third of the engagement. Because it fails the sniff test of like, oh, oh, we're being pitched to today. Got it. Let me click out of this. Because it's not this same and especially when you've built up this expectation and this reputation for what this is, you know what I'm going to get. And then you switch it up on people. It didn't work. And so I was like, okay, there's my, there's my line in the sand. Can we all go back to the playbook that works?

So I think people have a pretty good idea for like the types of content that you're creating. Also, I, I just love this as a strategy. Like, this is how you got to start. It's like, I think too many people obsess with like on Monday we're going to this and Wednesday we're going to do this.

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Try this like one long form piece of content. It worked. Let's go do it again. And maybe now try to get two in the rotation and see. But there's this very thin line where all of a sudden you kind of get diminishing returns. Because then I was like, oh, well, what if we did one of these every week? Well, then the audience wouldn't be that.

Big, which came up, by the way. Why don't we do this every week?

Of course it did. I have, look, my business is Exit 5 and we have sponsors. And I've thought a lot of times about, man, I could basically triple the revenue if I tripled the sponsors and we did a one webinar a week. Well, here's the issue, because we're only doing one webinar a month. Right now these webinars are getting a thousand people read registering for them. All of a sudden, if you do that every single week, then all of a sudden a 'Thousand becomes like 220, 186, you know, and you only have so many. Like, I just. And that's why I love the approach that you all took to marketing, which is like, use your ammo, like, wisely. And so when you post on LinkedIn, it's going to have a bigger result than if you did that every single day or every single week. It's going to have a worse result.

Absolutely. Yep. You're a hip hop guy, so I'll go deep reference. Do you remember, I don't know the year, man, I'm terrible. Like 2007, 8, 9, when Lil Wayne went on an absolute terror of like dropping a mixtape like every week or month for like two years. Do you remember that?

Of course. No ceilings.

It was no ceilings. Do you remember like, yeah, it was.

Probably like 2006 to 2009.

Yeah, yeah, it was in that ballpark. Yeah, right. And so remember, like, at first it was like, oh my. No ceilings was crazy. There's some really good ones. And then eventually there are so many coming out that like, you kind of just lost interest. At least I did. I remember being like, Wayne, I only got so much time in the day, man. Like, like. And they weren't getting better. Like, they got a little worse.

The drought. 9. You're like, no, I don't have time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm like, which drought are we on? I haven't even heard seven yet. And nine comes out tomorrow. And I always remembered that. I always remember that of like, leave people wanting more, Let people anticipate. Because it's going to help with your, your results. Like, to your point, if I can get Dave every week live in the webinar, it's not as interesting if I have to wait a month. Right? Or just for an example. And so I was big on that. And so what we did instead was, was just diversify the content format, which would say, okay, great, the blog did really well. People liked it. Let's turn it into short form. What's now called zero click content. It was zero click content before Amanda, you know, coined it. And it was put that out on LinkedIn. Hey, let's get Devin on video for two, three minutes and walk through it and put that on LinkedIn and webinars as well.

Can you explain zero click content for people that don't know?

Yeah, zero click content is effectively content that you're publishing. And I would say email too. I don't know if she only meant for social, but effectively it's link less. So there's no link. I'm not promoting a link. I'm just sharing the content in the feed or in the native channel. And the goal is just to get people to consume it there, build trust, grow your following, grow inbound. That's what we were doing. And so when I say we did one big thing a month, it was like one big new thing a month. And then we would repurpose reformat and you know, host webinars and all that good stuff. But the point was all that was easy because we knew we had gold. It was just repurposing it.

I also think of zero click content as in your example you mentioned that like you can consume it all. I also think there's a Right way to do it, where not only do you consume it all without clicking, but it's so good or so interesting that people are then going to go to your website or find it anyway. And so you and I are recording this on a Thursday. Yesterday, I announced the relaunch of Exit 5. And we're on a new platform and all this. And we drove hundreds of new signups on the first day. And I didn't actually link to Exit 5 website and there was no UTM. There was nothing. I made a loom video walking through the new community. I posted it on LinkedIn and I said, like, you can go and join right now if you go to exit5.com and I spelled out.com because I know that, well, it's a short, easy URL, exit5.com, but also like, LinkedIn doesn't like links because they don't want to send people off the platform. Now, if I was an advertiser, I'd be, well, how do. How do we track this? Well, I track this because on that day, there was 300 signups yesterday because I told people in the video, go to exit5.com, but there's no Google Analytics or any tags or anything that's going to show that. But the content matched the audience, and we built up enough demand and it was interesting to people. And I think back to the Gong stuff, it's like, do less stuff, build up more demand for it, do it better. And then when you have a hit, like, it's almost like for Gong, like, people are like, well, how did you promote the content? It's like, that's the easy part. Like, we posted it on LinkedIn and we had built an audience there. And so, like, everybody wanted to go and, like, download this piece of content that we created. We didn't have to think of 16 different ways to promote this piece of content.

Yep, totally agree. Congrats on the relaunch, by the way.

Thank you. Quick plug. I do my own marketing here.

A lot of times, even myself have to defend, right? Like, how do I know it worked? And so we would just look at the inbound numbers by day in Salesforce and you would always see a spike, obviously on these big days, like, obvious spike. But it's the halo effect, which is, look, I don't have a utm. I don't have anything. But one thing happened that day. We did an email campaign, we did a webinar, we did this Gong Labs. And you see a very clear uptick. And a lot of times, again, not always, but sometimes someone in digital. Oh, well, we did launch a new paid ad that week or that day.

It wasn't the ad.

And I said, okay, hey, if we don't agree that it was what we did, then we'll just stop doing it and we'll find something else to do. And then the loss aversion kicks in and people like, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like, you know, probably had something to do with it. And it's like, maybe it's correlation, I don't know, but it's pretty clear causation to me. If you did one thing, one thing on Wednesday and inbound went up Wednesday and Thursday, probably that thing.

Well, it also comes back to like having and building an audience. One of my least favorite types of content is when people write like, how Mr. Beast launched X Brand. I'm like, how did he launch it? Because he has a bazillion YouTube subscribers. This is a, hey, I have, I have a new thing. Go buy it.

Yes, exactly.

And so like, that's always gonna. Or like anything a Kardashian does. It's like, did they need creative promo? No, they have a huge audience and they say, like, hello, the store is now open. Go to it. And that's what you can do. Two things I wanna come back to. So you mentioned you'd create this content and you'd post it on LinkedIn, but most certainly you, you didn't just post it on LinkedIn and grow followers. Like, did you have a dedicated like LinkedIn company page strategy? Like, you know, you were posting, Chris was posting, Udi was posting, Amit, maybe that's been more recent. Like, my guess is you were also doing stuff to build the audiences on LinkedIn so that when you did have a piece of content, you had people there to go find it. Can you unpack some of that?

Yeah. So at the time, and if you've been on LinkedIn long enough, you know, every, what they've like 2ish years, they go through these big waves of features and functionality they want you to adopt. So like articles were a thing. Remember articles like, those were hot like six, seven years ago. Then it was video. And I don't know what it is now, but anyway, so I would just publish an article from my page because we knew one, people wanted to hear from a person, not a company. Two, I had the credibility as a previous salesperson. And three, it wasn't as mature at the time, but we were pretty damn sure profile pages were getting more views. So we said, hey, let's just do the obvious thing. That's easiest. So I would publish it at 8 in the morning via LinkedIn and then we would do what we call the Gongster activation or employee activation, which was hey, internally slack and email. This new article went live. Here's who it's for, here's what it's about. Like two sentences. Please go like and comment or share with your prospects if interested. There was no monitoring of that. If you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to. But a lot of people did because again, sales team had bought into the content and then yeah, of course, you know, UDI would reshare. A lot of the folks wanted to share because it was so much buying into the marketing and they also believed in the content and it was clear like I would put in their ps the more people that share more shares means more views, means more pipelines every single time. And so it was kind of like, okay, well if you care about pipeline, you should probably share this.

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Like, that huge. Absolutely. At the time, too, is like, you know, the first hour, you want to throttle the engagement as much as possible. So, you know, for those, you know, again, how long you've been on LinkedIn, there was the golden hour. It's still in effect now, but not like it used to be. Like, if you used to get 100 likes in an hour, you were going to go, like, a super viral sensation. Not so much anymore. But we also did email. We emailed the database and we sent them to that LinkedIn article, like, minutes after it was live. Like, we were trying to send everyone.

Which is, like, the digital team's nightmare. Like, we're not driving them to a property that we own. Like, what are you. What are you doing?

And it still worked. Like. And, you know, like, to your point, earlier, people saw it. You know, they go to my profile, they go to Gong's profile, they go to our website, and it worked. Like, you. I think people are smarter than we give them credit. In some examples, which is, like, to your point, on, like, not even pitching the product, it's like, oh, shit, I shouldn't be using slides in my discovery calls. I don't even know if we're doing that today. I bet Gong can help with that. Like, that's the simple train of thought. And then people go and get a demo. And, you know, fairly a lot of times, like, look, I don't actually know exactly what you guys do, but I like you and I saw your content. It's great, and I just want to learn more. And then we had a great sales team. I'm sure they still do. Obviously, I'm not there, but. And so it was like, cool, super warm lead. I just had to do some education, which we had to do anyway because no one was recording calls five years ago.

Yeah. So kind of just naturally, a bunch of people in the company start posting and start growing the following. Growing individual followings. And then you all are excited about what you're doing, interested in your field. And so then you're kind of like, on your LinkedIn, you're writing an insight of your own that has nothing to do with Gong, but you're like, hey, I was in a meeting today and this interesting thing happened.

And.

And Udi's doing the same thing, and Chris is doing the same thing. So each of your personal accounts starts to grow. Okay, makes sense. I also feel like you had an intentional strategy with the company page, too.

Yeah. And on the employee side, we held, like, LinkedIn trainings optional like lunch and learn type things like 15 minutes if you want to build your personal brand, how to post on LinkedIn. Because what we learned was a lot of people wanted to post, but they were just nervous. And so we did like non gong branded trainings real quick of just like 10, 30 minute trainings, completely optional. And that's what sparked a lot of people to start posting. So that's, you know, if you're listening, trying to get your folks more engaged, try that. We did. And it was going back to that thing for the company page, which was one insightful thing a day. If you see our post, it has to be so good that you want to go, you have to go follow. It's impossible not to follow us. That was what it was. And it was one post a day usually, you know, again at the beginning, just me looking at blogs, looking at stuff we've already published, repurposing it, finding new stories, you know, and then throwing the data piece in there. And when I hired, I think it was my third person, maybe it was Jonathan, maybe it was my second person. Then it was like, okay, let's go to two. Can we double? All right, cool. We're keeping engagement up. Can we go to three? Okay, we did that. Can we go to four? Oh, we're seeing diminishing returns. Okay, great. Three was the magic number. Played around with the timings because by then, and I'm going quickly over time, you know, we're going international, right? So we want to hit on different time zones. But the goal was always the same, which was to produce the most engaging sales content on the fucking planet. That was our motto internally. Like we said it all the time. Anyone on the team would know that's what we're here to do. And we protected that feed. Tough. Like chief people officer wants like candidate shout outs or stuff. You get one post a week. We finally budge and we're like, okay, we have to start helping other teams. Like, okay, recruiters, you get one post a week. Okay, this team, you get one post a week. And we like scattered it in and we still try to make it as fun and engaging as possible.

Congrats to Gong on being one of the San Jose Business Journal's 30 Fastest Growing Companies.

That's what we lost was the corporate, the corporate awards and stuff, which of course we wanted to share. I'm not trying to make it seem like we were all for ourselves or anything, but we just knew what worked on the feed and we're like, I don't want to post that stuff. Because it's not going to work. Like, you know, new CFO for sure. That's important. That has a little bit of, you know, gives you some credibility in the market. But like, we don't need 14, you know, shout outs for new job wrecks this week. No one's even clicking them. So like, let's not fool ourselves.

It also all adds up, right? And so like, I noticed with my own stuff there was a time when I would kind of just like every day talk about drift and promote drift. And like that didn't work as well as when I kind of stopped doing that. And I just kind of talked about like what I'm doing in marketing in general and I happen to work at drift. And then let's say one out of every five posts, then I'd be like, hey, next week we're doing this webinar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the link. That's when I start to notice like, wow, I just drove like hundreds of signups to our company webinar through my personal page. But again, back to what we said earlier. If I posted that type of stuff every day of the week, twice a day, it's going to be very small returns from that.

People are going to mentally unsubscribe. They know they're being sold to, they know they're being marketed to. Give them the zero click content, the valuable stuff four days a week, they'll happily take that fifth thing, the mental unsubscribe.

I have some more LinkedIn stuff, but I want to just kind of talk about this idea of a lead magnet that worked really well for you all at gong. There's a lot of chatter in the world today about, you know, people poo pooing this content generation strategy and lead magnet capture and gated content. And you know, that's not really MQLs. Do you have an opinion on that? Has your opinion changed? Did it work for GONG then? It might not work now. Just I want to hear your perspective on that.

Yeah, I learned after about two years in marketing. So again, going into it, I didn't know any of these phrases. I just called it like a gated piece of content. Like I was like, it's gated. I'm trying to collect email addresses because again, obviously it's like I'm trying to get direct line of communication to these people. I want them to expect my name. I remember you'd written one time, dave, it's not your subject line that they read first, it's your sender Name still true. That's what matters. Oh yeah, leave it completely. And so I'm like, we gotta come correct. They see Devin at Gong, Devin Reed at Gong Labs. We need to like, they need to be like, oh, hell yeah. And like rush to that email. That's what I was trying to build. I gotta get email addresses, right? And so I don't give a shit what people think about gated content or not. Like, if you hate it, it probably because you didn't do it right, or you got burned as a consumer of it. But the truth is, if you put good content out there, they're going to find your blog and subscribe or they'll happily give your email address for that piece of content. Right? And so there's really a trust trade that's happening. That's what you're doing. You're trading trust because your email address doesn't have a monetary value, right? It's not worth one or a thousand dollars. It's just worth trust. And so every time we wrote a landing page, we wanted to make it as compelling as possible, but we wanted to over deliver. When you got that piece of content again, it had to, wow, you had to be so great that wanted to share it with somebody. And so we were just delivering on that over and over and over again and collecting a huge email list. And so now we had a rent again, what we call now a rented audience and an owned audience. And that kind of built our moat a little bit. And so for me personally, I think it's crazy not to build an email list. Like, I'm sure you have one. I'm sure it's one of the most valuable things at Exit 5 is that email list. If your podcast burned down, you'd have your email list to go start a new one, right? If LinkedIn kicks you off the platform, you have an email list to start to keep communicating with them. So I'm doing it a little bit differently now at Clary, but I like my, the reader, my business. Like my email list is the most valuable thing aside from ip.

Yeah, I mean the email list is the print money button. Yesterday, When I relaunched Exit 5, the creative marketing strategy was tell, tell the email list about the new thing and give them a link to do it. And they did it. I think the disconnect on the gated content like lead capture is, you can't run that playbook and then be like, yeah, all these people who downloaded this Gong article about, you know, sales tips are not ready to buy Gong. You can't, you can't like say that those are MQLs or whatever they are or SQLs or whatever. However, if you just had a thousand people get your content about how to do a better discovery call and you sell a product that is a really good fit for those people, then you can say, hey, remember me, Devin, the guy that you got that great content from? Well actually we have something that you might be interested in. Do you want to try it? It's our free tool that can do XYZ and so I think it works is also you have to have the whole vision and picture mapped out of what the whole content strategy is going to be. Not just like yeah, these a thousand people downloaded this ebook, let's call them.

This is a great point because it's not intent to buy, it's intent to solve. There's a problem that you have. You wouldn't have downloaded the content if you didn't and you're trying to solve that problem. What we ended up doing, probably like the last year I was there, we went from one a month to two a month to one a week. It wasn't always a new thing, but it was some evergreen content every single week. And so what we started to do was create what we call a content pack which was a one page Google Doc, which was the 411 on what this piece of content was and what it means to your prospects. So if you're a BDR and you get a Salesforce link that you got 10 MQLs today, right? This VP of Sales just downloaded this discovery cheat sheet. The goal wasn't to pick up the phone and say hey, heard you want to buy Gong. It was, hey, you might have a discovery problem. Saw you downloaded this thing. That's actually kind of exactly what we do is help with discovery calls. Like would you be interested in learning more? If you call them within the first 24, 48 hours, they're still, you know, excited and you know, hopefully remember that piece of content. You're going to get a warmer call that's going to lead to a legitimate intro call and hopefully what would be an SQL or a true opportunity. So that's the way that we viewed it. We coached the teams appropriately. Yeah, we got a ton of MQLs. But going back to the halo effect, you would see a spike every single time we sent an email. Not one day a week, we sent one, sometimes two. But you always saw people came inbound as well. And so that's why I think it's worth it whether you know, however you Want to calculate it from MQLs, direct, inbound, direct traffic, whatever. I'm just in the camp of less. But high quality content is going to serve the business.

All right, I got a bunch of random follow ups. We're going to save them for maybe like the last five, ten minutes of this. We're eating up time, which I could talk to you for three hours about this and you could tell me everything, but I do want to spend a couple minutes on. Take me into as much as you're comfortable sharing without giving away secrets. But like, what is the content strategy at Clary now? How is it different than Gong? Like for me it was fun to change companies and get to do something again, but with different people, different ingredients, different market. And I bet you're having some of that even though there is some overlap in the market. So what's the content strategy today? How are you thinking about content? What's fun about your job right now?

Yeah, it's a good question. So a lot of it is the same and that we are selling to sales pros or, you know, Gong with sales very specifically. Like the VP of sales at Clary, it's revenue pros, so it's a little bit more at the executive level. Sales is like a part of that umbrella, but it's CS, it's CROs, it's finance to a degree, sales operations. So it is the same, but different also same is there's a category play, right? So Gong Revenue intelligence, clarity's a little bit longer. It's revenue collaboration and governance or RevCG. And so the first six to nine months was all about that thought leadership. So the nine months leading up to me joining, our year or so, they had launched their category. If anyone knows Chris Lockhead from Play Bigger, he's an advisor there. That was a big reason I wanted to join was to learn from him. And so it's hey, they've just launched this new category. They purchased a conversation intelligence tool in Wingman and now we need to go to market and really, you know, use content to go from 30,000 foot. What is this category to like, how do you actually, you know, think through it and act on it. And so that was kind of the first few parts and so we, you know, few different formats or channels, which is blog, social, podcast. And that's been really fun because we're doing it in a different way where at Gong we were kind of just living the pov, which was revenue intelligence is all about using. And Gong's point of view there was, you know, don't use your opinions and gut feel. Use data. So what does the content do? Attack opinions and show you data. So we were just living it at Clary. They're living it as well, but they're using languaging. They're introducing new phrases and new terminology to the market and getting folks to understand and to adopt that. Right. Like, no one knew what RevCG really was. What is a revenue critical employee? What is a revenue moment? Right. And starting to educate folks in that way. So it's been fun because it's like two people creating a category and two different groups of really intelligent people doing it, but going about it in different ways.

What's the makeup of your. Of the content team at Clary?

It's a little bit different. It's shifted up a little bit. I have a customer marketing manager, actually, which is why I started with different, because customer evidence is content. So I adopted that after being there a couple months.

Customer evidence. I like that term.

Yeah, customer evidence. Well, it's not just case studies. I think people think case studies all the time. But there's. There's more to it than that.

I've had screenshots From Twitter and LinkedIn and board decks and email replies and like, that type of stuff. And somebody will reply to your content email. And I'll reply back like, hey, this was a great comment. Like, would you be okay if I use this on our website? And they're like, yeah, sure, go for it.

Yeah, I love. I. We do the same. I think the first piece of customer evidence I got was BP of Sales shared a CR that a CRO emailed him was like, we just ripped out Gong, bought Clary. It was the best thing ever. I was like, screenshot that put it on this landing page. Like. And I told the creative team, don't touch it, don't put any graphics on it, don't add our brand tone. Just make it look raw and organic and it'll work.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's real. Let's pause on that for a second. The reason why is because it's especially in B2B, it's like, we want to like, give that to the creative team. They turned it, like, let's say your colors are like a blue and white, right? They want to turn it into some like blue background white text, like big font. And like this goes all the way back to Gary Halbert Boron letters. A pile, B pile. Which is like when you go home and you take the mail out of the mailbox, you get a whole stack of mail. All the things that look like advertisements and catalogs and direct mail. Those go over here. But the handwritten note, that looks like it's from your aunt because she always sends you 10 bucks on your birthday. You're going to open that one first. And so that's why that screenshot of the email works better. Yes. And hear me out. Even in the enterprise, because you're still selling to people, that is always going to work. I love, love that play.

I wrote about that a couple weeks ago because I got got by some window salesman who sent something in the mail. It was not in an envelope. It was just a one pager, like just all crumpled up. And it was like a blue pen, handwriting with yellow highlighter. And of all the crap mail, I jumped to him like, oh, it looks like my wife Charlie looks like she had some sort of like quote, I guess a window broke. And then after like four seconds on this thing, I'm like, oh. I was like, look up to light. I'm like, damn, he got me. This is like printed. But that works. It really does work. So. And yeah, to your point on the enterprise, I don't care if you're CEO. I don't know, new in your career specialist level. Same psychological triggers, work on everybody.

Anything else on the team front? I can't remember if we covered everything there.

So I have a sales engineer turned production manager, so he helps with the podcast and video. I have customer, excuse me, content marketing lead, a manager, content manager who has two specialists. And then I have another editor who's on, who's on matleaf right now. So we've got a pretty deep bench.

And overall, how are you measuring content or what metrics are you responsible for?

Yeah, there's the heavy side for the list, like how deep do we want to go? So there's a few different things. So I'll just say like their social, which is like follower count, engagement mentions is a big one. We're also doing speaking of the category play, starting to measure how often is the market and the market not including Clary talking about. Clary talking about our category and so on. It's kind of like share voice a little bit. We're looking at MQLs, but we're actually not gating a lot of our content because we have a thought leadership site that we put up which is basically just a content hub without any gate. You can sign up for a newsletter. So that's our way. Hey, if we've earned the right, you can subscribe. So we look at traffic to that page. Are people subscribing we look at direct web traffic, we look at inbound. Like, honestly, like inbound to me is kind of the thing that I think if I'm doing my job right, we should just see more inbound. And then as we start to work on some of the attribution models, things like pipeline influence, pipeline sourced, I put like seven asterisks next to that when I report to it because there's like, you know, three attribution models and this, that could be this, this could be that, but overall those are some of the big ones.

I like the idea of using inbound and I also like that there wasn't just one perfect answer there because I think especially when you're selling more at market like you all are, it's not going to be direct response. It's not going to be we publish piece of content and X thing happens. It's like the combination of all those pieces over time are going to lead to improvements in more people knowing who we are. If more people know who we are, they're going to come to our website. It gets easier to measure as you go on. Okay, I got a bunch of things and we only have a couple minutes left, so I'm going to give you like a little rapid fire around, maybe like short answer, one or two sentences on each one of these. Just your kind of perspective, couple notes that I wrote down. What's your feeling on generative AI and Chat GPT as it relates to life of a content creator?

Don't let it replace your thinking, but it can help you write faster. I think it's good for answering. I don't think it's going to help you for thought leadership, because thought leadership's all about new ideas and ChatGPT is literally a bucket of old ideas.

What about. But what happens if you leave Devin? And what I mean by that is that's the common pushback that I've gotten over the years and I believe in this people first approach to content also. But there's always, you know, one out of every five people's like, yeah, but I know that's really risky. What happens if Devin Reed leaves Kong or Dave leaves Drift? What's your answer to that?

Do you mean it in kind of like being the face of a company or like being like the author of content and stuff like that?

Yeah, or like whether it's one person or two or three people as opposed to like the brand being the author.

Oh, I mean one, people want to hear from people, but two, it's like wouldn't you rather have bigger results while they're here and do your best to keep an A player than to not have them at all.

Amen. And oftentimes the people asking that are much more conservative in the sense of like, well, you're never going to get X result if you take that approach anyway. So, like, would you trade? Would GONG have traded? Like, should you have never gone to Gong and they and never publish things under your own gnome? No, they would take that trade all day, every day. And I know the same thing is true for Drift. I think it's a growth mindset versus or growth scarcity or abundance, whatever that is. Okay, I kind of led you in there because I want to just put that on the record because I feel like we have the same opinion on that for sure. You've mentioned this term of build your personal brand. A lot of people like to eye.

Roll and poo poo that look personal brand. I get the phrase it makes me my eye roll too, but I don't have a better one. For me, the way I think about it is it's your reputation, it's your digital reputation. And if you build a personal brand online, it's going to open up doors of opportunity before you even reach for the handle. That's it. Straight up. I'm not on this podcast if I don't have a personal brand. You know what I mean? If I'm not out here publishing ideas, helping people, all that stuff.

But you also didn't get out of bed five years ago and say, you know what I'm going to start to do? I'm going to start to build my personal brand. You're like, no, I, I like sales. I'm interested in this field. I'm going to start talking about this publicly and see what happens.

Exactly. You know it when you see it. The cringy stuff is like, and no offense, if people are doing selfies, like, I'm not trying to knock, but it's like a selfie. And it's like this, like really crappy, you know, not so veiled thing about themselves. Even though it's like, wow, marketing is about this, but really it's about that. But also like, my life is perfect and I only work four hours a week. And why aren't you two. It's like, dude, that's for nobody but you. So I think that's the problem. If it's about you, it shouldn't be about you. It should be about your audience.

Talk about LinkedIn today. You're still very active there. You Post a lot of content there, but platform has changed. What works on LinkedIn today? What's changed? How do you be successful on LinkedIn?

Man, it's hard because we both have pretty large followings. So when you start to complain that the algorithms change and this, that, and the other, I feel like the old hip hop guards. Like, man, that's not rap. This is rap. And so I have to kind of check myself a little bit. But. But look, the early stage of, you know, the early adopter phase is over. Like, people get it. You can make money on LinkedIn, you can build brands on LinkedIn. It's a cash cow if you know how to use it. So you're starting to see a lot of the content reflect that. A little bit shallower, I'll say personally, but don't focus on engagement so much. Focus on the quality, focus on the relationships, focus on who you're helping. And the other thing too is you get a lot of results that aren't shown on screen. Which I was just talking to this gal on my newsletter and she responded and she said, hey. Cause I actually posted about this, Dave. I said, hey, I posted this thing about 10 lessons and the engagement was fine, but DG reached out and offered me to be on his podcast. That's the win. And so when you're posting, don't just think about likes and comments. You're opening doors for other opportunities. And she responded and she said she had like five gals at like, some, like, retreat, and she said two of them saw her content but never liked it, never clicked anything, but went and gave her a bunch of money and signed up for her retreat. So, like, but also say it's worth doing and investing in, even if the algorithm seems a little messed up, even if you're not getting the engagement you want, if you just invest over time, it compounds for real.

I love that. And it also changes. That's a perfect reason why you need to think about how you measure the effectiveness of that channel. Yes, followers and engagement are good metrics to kind of just look at every now and then, but there's huge intangible and harder to measure benefits. Same reason for doing this podcast. As an example, this is not the biggest podcast in the world, but it has a pretty good following and a pretty good niche. And I get lots of inbound opportunities that come from doing this where, like, if I just showed you the download numbers, you'd be like, oh, this isn't that impressive. But if I could show you what has come as a result of that, and I think that's why you have to be able to talk about content in a holistic way and be able to screenshot those replies and be able to show like, yeah, we booked a meeting with a million dollar client off of this LinkedIn post that had six comments on it.

Yep, dude, 100%. There's a correlation on my site, the better and the more, the more I post on LinkedIn, the more inbound requests I get. Or the more newsletter subscribers you get. And the more newsletter subscribers you get, the better sponsors you get. Like, it's all connected. But yeah, to your point, people get tunnel vision on the, on the vanity stuff, the engagement.

Last question. Why go to Clary and take an in house job when you clearly could have built your own company and done your own thing?

Kids. No, I'm kidding. I had to throw that out there. I got two under two. No, the real answer, man. And I thought about it a lot, kids. I mean, I won't lie, that's always a factor. Kids are always a factor. But yes, look, I was ahead of content at a really successful company and I wanted to kind of prove two things. One, I wanted to prove to myself I could do it again and be successful. And it was also a different challenge, right? Like Gong was you're the guy, like you're the guys and the only person on the team scale it with the company. Clary is 10 years old, you know, 800 employees, established marketing team. Can you kind of turn it around? I wanted that dual experience. So when I do go solo and I do more consulting, I can say, hey, I've done the fast paced startup from zilch and I've done the, you know, a little bit more mid market, larger company enterprise play. Turn that around as well. I think that's going to make me more valuable. So I was like, hey, let me invest a couple more years here, get a bunch of experience, learn from some great people, Julian, Kyle, Andy, Chris, and have fun doing it. And then I'll say, all right, cool, I'll hang my hat up and I'll go solo.

Awesome. This was a great, great, great, great episode. I can't wait to post it. I'm not just saying that. If you don't know by now, this is how I do these. I take a thousand notes while I write them and figure out what I'm going to ask you. Devin Reed, thank you for doing this. We will plug all of your stuff in, the notes and everything. But the ultimate measure of this podc me is not CTA exit 5 it's go to Devin Reed on LinkedIn, connect with him, send him a message and say I loved your interview on the Exit 5 podcast and maybe we'll do this again next quarter. Okay, my friend.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me, man.

All right. Thank you, man. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got our articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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