Mailbag! Answering B2B Marketing Questions From The Community

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Exit, exit.

All right, I got a bunch of million questions. Breezy's here with me as my co host today because it's impossible to answer all these solos. So Breezy, can you just tell people what you do in marketing so they have context before you answer?

Yeah. So I run growth and marketing, which is like, you know, fluffy. Growth is sort of a confusing term, but basically I run all of our marketing efforts and then included in that is the SDR outbound team. So kind of like both sides. Right now I am at a Fairly small company, 20 something people, first marketing hire here built this company from the ground up. We have pretty solid awareness in the market today, so that's been exciting. Prior to that been a pretty scaled companies like elation in the data catalog space. So kind of seen both sides of the coin and kind of pluses and minuses a bit.

All right, perfect. So here we go. I'm going to let you take the first one. By the way, these questions are all from the Exit 5 community. If you're not in the Exit 5 community, go to exit5.com and you can find a way to join. It's really easy to expense to your company. That's what most people do. This question is from Jordy. You're joining a SaaS private product at founder level. It's you and the engineer and you need to build everything to do with brand marketing and lead generation. What are the first three tasks you work on? Which funnel is most important? Breezy, go.

Yeah. Before you should get started and do anything tactical, you should set the stage with the founding team and figure out what's important to them and also kind of direct them about what you're about to do in your next 30, 60, 90 days and what that's going to look like. Because people who don't have a strong understanding of marketing are going to expect. If you say, okay, we're going to start a podcast and we're going to revamp the website and whatever it might be and you just start to kick that off. They're like one week after you launch the new website going to wonder why we don't have, you know, 10x conversions than we had before. So I think first your job is to set the stage for everybody figure out, okay, here's kind of what my plan is. Here are the expected, like, outcomes, but here's how long it's going to take so that they have a realistic view of kind of like, how marketing works.

And that's great advice. And you said the most important thing, which I think, which is like, and I feel like this can be the answer to so many marketing questions is the very first thing that you said, which was, what's important to them, right? So often we just, like, kind of take something and just, like, go down this path and we just start doing stuff. And so when I read this question, like, you say you need to do everything to do with brand marketing and lead generation. I'm like, I'm not sure we know that yet. Like, are those the right things? And you saying it that way made me reminded me of this when I joined Drift. I joined Drift as the first marketer. Little bit different situation from a company standpoint because they were two founders who had already done something big before. And so they raised $15 million, like, right out of the gate. And so they weren't actively selling the product, but they had $15 million in the bank. When I got hired there, we clicked right away because David, the founder, was like, here's what I want to hire you to do. We're not ready to sell right now. I want to build an audience. He really believed in content, and so he really wanted in content. So the way that we measured success at first was like social platforms, podcasts, and email lists. And that was amazing because that gave me, okay, great. This is what this guy wants me to focus on. I can go and work towards that once we proved that out and we built an audience. Now fast forward six months later, we're getting ready to launch our product. We did the same thing again.

We came up with new goals, and.

This time we were about to launch a free version of our product. And so we said that the only goal for this quarter is to get 1,000 signups for our free product. And, like, that was so liberating from marketing standpoint because it's like, okay, well, I'm just gonna go do things that drive to this one goal. And so I think, you know, it's so easy to try to do 15 different things. So I would really push on that, everything that you said, plus pick, like, one or two very clear goals. And you don't have to make an annual plan right now. You're really going week to week, month to month. So make a monthly plan. And then readjust.

One quick feed off of that is that OKRs, which are generally thought of as like a big company thing, can be super handy at every stage of a company. Go in knowing that your OKRs are going to be kind of like trash. Like you're not going to get them right in the beginning because things change so quickly in a startup, but at least it guides you in the right direction and everyone's on the same page. So okrs, you write an objective. The KR is key result. So you like, okay, my objective is to drive brand awareness. The key result is going to be X number of website visits. The key result is going to be, you know, whatever it is, like running, like launching 12 ads or something like that. So you like kind of get these okrs going. That's a good way to get it down on paper.

Great idea. That's why I was a really shitty manager at first, is because I just would do stuff and not have clear goals. And I was the person that would like roll my eyes at the goals and the goal setting process. But that's very wise of you to suggest setting that. Even if it's just you and me working on something. Right? We can set clear goals together.

I didn't say I didn't learn that the hard way.

Okay, this question's from Liam. I'd love to hear you talk, maybe even a full episode, about category creation. Building a point of view that drives the category ecosystem product is incredibly important. But what if your CEO doesn't know what that is or doesn't have a point of view? Do you hold their hand through it? Because obviously this product was built for a reason. And how do you, in today's marketing world, prime your market to now think about the category that you're building? Okay, so this is a challenging one. And this is a very common question about category creation. The hard part about category creation is there's not one sexy like one liner or like quick summary as to how to do it. When we did it at Drift, it was a very clear vision from the founders at the beginning of like, we're going to create this company and go create a category. I think that it's very. Maybe the short answer breezy, you're nodding along. Like, the short answer might be like, I think it's not possible. Because if it's not built in from the beginning, it's going to be very hard to do. You can do it. I think you could push the CEO to do it. But it has so much to do with the DNA. Of the company and where you sit in the market. And so if I were to push someone to do it, I would evaluate the market, see what gaps you think you can find, come up with a way to name what you're doing, show how it's different than the status quo, better than the old way of doing things, show people what's at stake if they don't do things your way, and come up with a name for it. Like, those are the basic steps. You can't simplify it into one little witty podcast answer. But it's a huge red flag for me that, like, is category creation going to be the right thing if this is not already on the CEO's radar?

Yeah. And I think kind of like piling on top of it is, like, we love to create a name for something, and then we get so attached to whatever that catchphrase is that we made for it. Whereas in reality, what we need to do is, sure, maybe we need to, like, kind of create a name and start to build something around it, but we also need to be, like, listening to the market and to the data out there. So I would probably pull up, like, once I have a good feel for kind of what we're building, building and this and that, probably, like, pull up Google keyword planner, like, search console, things like that, and get in there to try to figure out, okay, like, for correlated, specifically, like, we were like, okay, the category that we're building, we're going to call, like, product led revenue. So product led companies who are trying to find revenue opportunities. Product led revenue. Okay, great, makes sense. But people describe things in different ways. So you want to get into the conversations that exist already. You don't need to rebuild the conversations that are happening out there in communities and social and things like that. So by looking at the data, we're able to see, okay, product led growth seems to be kind of like the term that's sort of taking off. And we can, like, even in the minimal amounts that it was when we first started talking about it, now it's, like, blown up as a term, hopefully, like, from some of our influence there. But looking at some of those terms that are already out there that people are using and searching for, then start to, like, build kind of all the content and things around that. And that's how you can sort of, sort of start to, like, build a category, if that's going to be the way we phrase this, is that you build the content ecosystem around that subject, and then your category happens to be at the center of it.

All, yeah, great advice. The other thing is, like, category creation is probably not the. I think people are obsessed with that term where, like, what might be more important for most people, like, actual, like, practical advice is cover up those words and say, what do we want to be known for? I think we get in this world of like, what is a category, what isn't versus like, is product led revenue a category or not? That's a different debate than, like, you all are making a bet that it is strategically valuable for correlated to be known for product LED revenue. And then you're going to go create content around that and tell a story and build demand for that. That's like the simplest way to think about this from the start versus, like, I talked to some folks and like, we just get so caught up in category creation. And what does that mean? And does it mean that Gartner recognizes it as a quadrant or something where it's like, what do you want to be known for? Get out of B2B marketing tactics for a second and think about what do you want to be known for.

Yeah, that's great advice.

Okay, this one's for you. This is from Graham. At a young company. There are a ton of different routes, tactics to grow and build the brand, but they each require time, focus, and resources, which are limited. How are you evaluating where to put your. Your early resources to start gaining some momentum?

Everything you do at an early stage should be able to be repurposed in multiple ways. So if you are doing a webinar, then you should scrape the audio from that and that should be your podcast. And then you should, you know, take the slides from it and make that, you know, readily available on your website, belt as a page or that's your ebook or whatever it is. So whatever the content pieces that you're making, and you've got to kind of like repurpose it because your resource that you have the least of is going to be your time. And that doesn't mean you need to just spew out tons of content. Each one should be like, purposeful and as to, like, why you're kind of building it. But think about how you can scale it. So I'll give some examples like over here. So I correlated. We started to do these live events. Cough. Cough. It's a webinar, but nobody likes the word webinar. So we called it a live event. So we started to do these live events.

I actually think it's the other way. It's like they called it webinar. It's always Been live event, you know.

Yeah, yeah, true. And so we're running these things and yes, the data turning around on it was that, yeah, they were really good. They drove people to sign up for it afterwards. We were having great conversations, but it was taking us a ton of time because we were putting together some slides, we were pulling in speakers, we were doing the promotion and it was just hard to kind of pull this off. In the meantime, while we're also running these webinars, we were doing these, what we like bi weekly calls. So every other week we were getting on a call with a bunch of product led revenue leaders in the space to talk about, okay, what are you working on? And just like a sheer conversation there. Well, lo and behold, like the kind of outcomes of both of those things was pretty much equal, but the amount of effort and work put into the live events was so much higher. So instead we decided to kind of like focus our efforts on these bi weekly calls. Take the audio from those, put it into a podcast, take the video, put that up on YouTube. We're looking at outsourcing someone who's going to write it up into a piece of content for us. So anyway, kind of long answer there, but what I'd say is just, first of all, you're not going to get everything right, so try to learn as quickly as you can. If you pushed to do an activity and you're learning, it's just not paying off. Be the first one to admit I don't think this is the best way forward. I thought it was. That was my hunch. Here's why I think I might be wrong. Now here's what I'm going to do about it. That will go a lot further than just continuing to push through an activity that's not working. And then also just as much as you can, try to squeeze everything out of each piece of content that you spend time on.

What you said in the beginning, the very first thing is what's important to the company versus we're not just doing all this stuff for the heck of it. One thing I see in addition to what you said that companies make mistakes at, and I've definitely been guilty of this too, is when it comes to, I think we kind of do a lot of things kind of half ass, or maybe not like half ass is not the word. Just like they're like, okay. And you know, the blog content is okay, the social content is okay, the live events are okay. And I think it's just very easy to kind of just do like a 6 out of 10 on all those channels. And they never really grow where, like, if you look at any of the brands that any of the companies that we see today that have made a really strong impact, it's usually because of one or two really focused channels. Like, I know for us at Drift, it was our podcast, Seeking wisdom was like, like the catalyst to building the brand. Or if you go look at Gong, I saw they posted Today, they cross 150,000 followers. And Devin posted all this stuff from them. They kind of focus all of their social media efforts on LinkedIn because that their bet was that salespeople were there. They didn't just take, like, what a lot of companies do is they kind of have an average idea and then they. There's, like, you know, YouTube and every YouTube video has 21 views and you got, you know, 40 people on your email list and no one's reading the blog or I look at an example that I think is great today is what Amanda is doing at SparkToro. Like, their content is very, very good. It's like 10x level content. It's not a shitty little blog post. It's like meaty with screenshots and call outs and arrows and it's very meaty. It's like, it reminds me of some, like, appsumo content that I used to really like. So she's doing an awesome job building the SparkToro brand because they're using. They're very focused on social media and written content. I would just much rather see you as a company, make a bet on one or two channels as opposed to just kind of like, start doing all the things. And this can be based on what you're naturally good at. And so, like, the reason we started a podcast at Drift was because I had experience doing a podcast before David wanted to do a podcast. We were like, shoot, should we do this? Nobody's really doing it. Let's go do that. Maybe you edit videos as a hobby and you could really quickly do something awesome with TikTok or YouTube. That's how I might think about prioritizing. Like, it's better to be focused on one or two channels and make those bets.

Yeah, I think too, like, that quality of content is so important. People get locked in. This idea of like, oh, putting out, you know, six blog posts a month would be sweet. Like, no, that means literally nothing. Putting out two really awesome ones would be good. That get a lot of traffic or that people find, like, super useful. So just being thoughtful about that. So, like, how are you coming up with topics of for the content that you're creating. Well, you should be out there in the market seeing what people want to learn about, then bringing that in and saying, okay, we've now heard X amount of times people asking about, okay, what's it like to go from sales to product. Whatever your topic is, you kind of bring that in and then you're thoughtful about each piece. So you're thoughtful about what you talked about in the first place and then about launching that content. So for the blogs, like do the extra three minutes to make it SEO optimized, it's definitely not going to hurt. You shouldn't spend four hours on it, but you can spend a couple of minutes just to add a little bit of optimization and things here and there. Put a little thing on the side to make it more readable so that people can kind of click through the content quickly and jump down a page to what's important to them. Like think about kind of those just.

I totally agree. And my experience has been like the content is the best when we were actually doing the least of it. It's like when it becomes a content factor, it's like we only have the bandwidth to do like one article a week right now. So like that one article a week is going to be amazing. And that's such a great mindset to have. Shout out Spindrift. Was that a spin drift?

That was a spindrift.

Love it. I need beverage, beverage sponsors.

So Spindrift or I'd get on the spin drip train. It's like my entire bridge right now is just filled with spindrift.

Do you think you can drink like many of them in a day? Like there's nothing in it?

No, I don't even usually drink them during the day. I like for my brain. It's my end of day drink. Usually to kind of break out. Like that's how I finish my work days with a spindrift. So we got it should be sponsored at this point.

So we got it a little bit early. So let's get you that like post on LinkedIn and help Breezy get sponsored by Spindrift. Okay, this next question is from Sam. Reading Founder brand at the minute. Very actionable. Thanks Sam. Also Sam, great name. My son's name. Fantastic name. Three letters, rule of three. Very memorable. Just joking. Regarding people will think that that's serious.

Like what's the acronym stand for?

S a smart ass motherfucker. I hope so. Reading Founder brand at the minute. Very actionable regarding building A podcast for your niche. What are some good ways you've seen brands differentiate from the standard founder and expert customer friend chat for an hour format? Breezy, this question is not for you, but I would love to hear you answer this. As a podcast consumer, what do you do?

Yes, actually, well. And I do have my own podcast. So this is shout out to your podcast. I can kind of do it on product led revenue. It's kind of like a deep dive with high level revenue leaders at product led companies.

Awesome.

Yeah, I mean, I think to differentiate, like I kind of say with all of my answers is like, get feedback from the market. So after you get a couple little episodes out, people will message me on LinkedIn, say, Hey, I just listened to this on while I was walking my dog. I really enjoyed it. Like, that's great. I love the positive feedback. But I'd actually be really curious too, if there's things that you wish you had heard on it or questions I didn't answer, things like that. And getting those sorts of questions in there has been a great way to, like, reincorporate. First of all, then the listeners are stoked because you listen to them and you put what they wanted in the podcast. But also it helps you get a little more nitty gritty. So I'd say that's one thing also, just like talking back. That's kind of a simple thing about being a podcast host, but people just.

Like, drives me nuts.

Dagger question.

Future guests. Future guests, listen, listen up. Let's have a conversation. Makes it way better, right? You ever interview somebody and you're like, it makes some people uncomfortable. One of the reasons I rush into, like, record when we get on the zoom is because people, like, they make this thing. It's like the person you were talking to before. And then like, we start the podcast and it's like, yes, Breezy, thank you for this great question. Next question. And it's like, no, I want this. Like, I want, like, if we were hanging out in person talking about this topic, I want that. It's hard to replicate that, but that's what the goal is.

I think the first, like four seconds of every recording are me going, okay, I just clicked that big scary red button. So we're already recording. So you don't have to, you know, perk up in your chair. You're good to go.

Yeah. Next time, I guess you have to tell people. Okay. So I had the benefit of, while you were giving really good answers, I was scribbling down some notes to help me formulate Some thoughts on this.

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My perspective on this one is, number one, you can still do that same format that and be better. That is still an option. Because I think that, let's say, okay, you're saying, like, I don't want to do the standard founder and customer chat for an hour podcast. I hear you, and lots of people do them. However, it doesn't mean that it can't work for you because I think with podcasting, so much of it comes down to the host and the reason to listen. And I think of basically every podcast that I listen to, I listen because of the host. Obviously there's a guest that's the main draw, but the host is interesting, has something to say, is funny or smarter, and so don't limit that as an option. Like maybe all the founders that are doing this in your space are super dry and boring. Do you have an opportunity to be the real version of you and you get customers to open up more than anybody else? Right. You could do something like that. Like, people listen to this podcast. This isn't the biggest podcast in the world, but people tell me that they listen to this one despite others because they say, like, oh, I appreciate the way you, like, ask questions and try to get at answers. And so, like, there's definitely lots of ways to stand out. Another one is you could go the other route. I've always wanted to do this, but I've never done it. And do like a narrative, you know, more storytelling podcast where like, it's much more produced and you interview a bunch of people. Maybe you maybe takes 10 Zoom calls to make one episode, but you stitch them together in a way that makes it much more narrative. That could be really interesting. You could also do that with just one interview. Doesn't have to be 10 hours. You could also try something shorter or longer. Right. So at Privy, the podcast that we did, there was 10 minutes. Ben, the founder, did it almost every day and it was eight to 10 minutes max. And he gave like one very specific tactical tip. And that worked really well because nobody else was really doing it. That in the space. Or another example is just like, rethink the format. Alex Lieberman, he's the co founder of Morning Brew. I follow him on Twitter, I guess, but I've been seeing all these little 60. He does these little TikTok videos that are called 60 Second Startup. And he basically interviews founders on a park bench in New York city, and in 60 seconds they have to pitch what they do. And that's a cool format. Right. It's different. So I think there's definitely lots of ways to innovate on the format. Be a consumer, think about what stuff you like and like base your, your podcast idea not because everyone does interview show, but like, what do you like and what do you want to place a bet on that that you can go and build an audience around?

Yeah. I think also don't be afraid to break out of whatever mold you've created. So let's say you've got your podcast rolling now, you've been doing it for a few months or whatever. There's probably some sort of setup you have for it where, okay, you like, intro this way and you do this and you do that. But let's say like on some other conversation that happened to be recorded, you had a really good conversation with someone. We'll toss that up on the podcast. You can give a quick intro like, hey, this is a little different than our normal podcast setup. Here's what we're about to talk about.

Love that.

Now you gotta.

That's real advice too. Okay, this question's from Taylor. I'm the marketing manager at a Seed Stage startup. I have one junior level marketer on my team and a designer that I share with product. Ooh, I feel for you. Also, I have 6k per month budget for contractors. How should I split my time between sharpening my own skills as a marketer and learning to manage my current slash future team?

I mean, is this just me or is that like a pretty generous marketing setup for Seed Stage? Because I think that's like a pretty solid thing to work with. I mean, I worked at like a bootstrapped company. There's definitely no 6K and a resource on your team going around.

I totally agree with you, but I also think you have to know how to spend it. Because I worked at a company that had lots of money and I didn't always have lots of budget. But like, at that stage it'd be reasonable for me to spend 6 to 10k a month. It takes a while to know who to hire because you know the amount of times I've spent 10k a month on a content thing that ended up being shitty. Like, there's definitely like, you have to know what to do with that. By the way, I thought this question was going to be like, what should I do with that 6k on contractors, but it's actually about career. So, like, I'll ask this back to you. So Taylor seems like somebody who got a lot of shit to do day to day, but Also wants to level up. How do you balance those things? How have you done that?

Between executing on all the stuff that she's trying to execute on, but then also become like the executive that it's kind of like knocking someone in hired above her.

Yeah. Or it's like making a little bit of space for yourself, you know, to like, what do I want? How do I make sure I'm growing as a leader? Because it's easy to just get sucked into the day to day. I'm curious to hear what you say. I have a very specific answer to this, but I want you to go first.

Oh, nice. Okay. I would say that as much as possible at that stage, you were probably the first one at the company and then you hired someone else to sort of support what you had going on the team. So it kind of sometimes can be this. If you've ever read the article, like letting your Legos go or giving away your Legos, I think that's really important here. So I mean, the concept is you built this great Lego thing, you need to give a chunk of it away and give your. It's like a little kid trying to give their Legos away. So as much as you can, I would say get things off your plate, Whatever's taking the most time on your plate is where you should be getting things off. Because what you should be doing is starting to focus your time more on, okay, what should we be looking at in the next, you know, 3, 6, 9, 12 months? What should we be planning that's not even remotely like on our radar today? Because you need to be that leader. You're not just there to execute marketing. You're there to be a leader and lead the company and create the market that you're trying to sell to. So I'd say try to give yourself that space so that you have the ability to do that. And the only way to give yourself that space is to let go of your Legos and all the things that you love doing, you have to pass off to others and encourage them and be a great manager and let them do it.

It. I think that this is one of those obstacle is the way scenarios I'm a big believer in like the doing. As somebody who I grew my career in marketing, not because I got an MBA in marketing or like because I studied marketing and I learned through the doing. And I think and at this stage of the company and it seems like you might not be like a 10, 15 year marketing exec. I think one of the ways is to become obsessed with the worst. And like, you're trying to figure out marketing. Because I think when you can do that and you're doing this now, right, with your company, like, when you're figuring that out, you're not just learning on your own, but when you're helping the company grow, like, lots of other opportunities keep coming. And so I went into Drift, not even thinking about being VP of marketing. One day. I was decent at content and social media and podcasting. It was using those skills to like, build the first year of Drift. And then, holy cow, the company exploded. Now I happen to be the one who did marketing for the last year. Who's in the best position to take on more? Was like, Dave, you've built this audience. You've done an awesome job marketing. Like, now the next step is like, do you want to do more? Yeah, I did. CEO was like, congrats, you can have one person to hire. I remember the conversation, we went on a long walk and it was like, do you want this? I was like, yeah, I do. Okay, well, you can hire one person. I was like, not three. He's like, no, one. Because how can you hire three if you had only hire one yet? And so I think those levels, those things will continue to unlock. I think maybe find time in your own brain to find a resource. Let's say your company is in the product led world. You listen to Breezy's product led revenue podcast. Pick one resource that your maybe peer group, maybe it's this podcast. I remember really listening to a lot of the early Saster podcasts and that got me to learn a lot about what was happening in that world. And they often had other CMOs on there. And so I would hear a CMO talk about like, you know, how she hired and how she structured her team. And I got a lot of my ideas from that. And so like you could listen to a podcast and be like, whoa. Breezy said that like, she likes to have demand gen structured this way. It's about then, like hearing that and then now you have a place to go and test that and so you're going to bring it into work. And so I don't think it means you need to necessarily find like people that you're going to have coffee and lunch with regularly. Although that is nice. I think you can do that through YouTube and podcasts. And it seems like oversimplified advice, but I think finding an industry of like, industry podcasts or resource like that can be hugely beneficial for me even earlier in my career. Like the HubSpot Blog was that for me? Like I don't know how to put together a budget and like, oh sweet HubSpot put out this like budget template, like guess what, I'm cloning that, putting my name on it and we're going to ship that. I think that's one way you can do it.

Yeah, I think that's the first thing is like you said, so you get all those resources and you kind of just do the job. You learn as you go. The thing to know just for yourself so that there's no imposter syndrome here is that everyone's figuring out as they go that no one has it figured out fully. Even that 10 year, 15 year marketing exec is nervous looking at you and how successful that you're being and like driving this company up and growth really fast. So it's actually a two way street that everybody's got this funny imposter syndrome going on. So I think like first things first is you got to prove yourself, improve that marketing and things that you're able to do. But I think a good exercise, like if you're at that stage now where you're like, okay, like you know, I've put out some really solid marketing, like the company's doing well, we're seeing the revenue pipeline numbers and things like that and you're sort of like at this stage of doing a self reflection, like how am I doing? And you're trying to kind of figure that out. Especially in early stage it can be hard to get that feedback. So what I would do is as much as you can kind of like get these pieces of information from people around you, like if your boss was probably the CEO is like if I was gone and you were to hire my, my position, what would you be looking for in a hire? And that's a good way to figure out what they like about what you're doing today. And then also, and you can even just ask yourself this, but like if they were to hire your boss, so if you want that VP but you're not there yet, or you want that CMO role and you're not there yet, think about what are the things that you would write on a piece of paper that they'd look for if they were going to hire your boss and then like, and the answer doesn't always have to be that you want to move up, but looking at that list is that things that you want to grow into.

And like, well I think asking that question is somebody who wants to do that also. I think one lesson I wish I learned is exactly what you said. I wish my first kind of year or two, I wasn't, I guess, wise enough to do things proactively before we needed them. And so it'd be like, like the end of the year, and the CEO would be like, where's the marketing plan? And then I have to go do it. And it's a much different position to be operating in than versus, like, the next year round. Like, you're the CEO. Hey, Breezy, like, I've been really starting to think about marketing. Actually. There's different levels of this. Like, level one is like, hey, Breezy, I've been really thinking about marketing. We don't have a plan for next year. Okay, that's level one. Level two is, hey, we don't have a plan for next year. Can we set up some time to talk about. About it? And I think level three, where you want to be at is, hey, we don't have a plan for next year. I have some ideas based on what we should be doing. This is even, like, before you're in a leadership position, you can do this. I have some ideas. Can I put an hour on your calendar two weeks from now? Because I want to walk you through a plan and some suggestions. Like, that's the dream as a manager of people. That's the dream to have that person on your team who's pushing you. And I feel like I made the most progress personally when I learned how to manage up, and I was like, oh, yeah, he's not gonna tell me. Like, the CEOs, he's got a hundred dollars in things. He's not gonna tell me what he thinks the marketing budget should be. He's, like, waiting for me to, like, to do that. And so I wish I knew some of those things to do them more proactively. Like in the early days, totally a hundred percent. But then again, like, there's value in learning, and it's much easier to have the perspective later. Okay. This question is from Brendan Hall. Hi, Brendan. Are people generally fatigued from virtual events? Is there a way to roll out a content series with a live component that buoys everything else? In other words, we're doing a live AMA with big name at such and such time. Get your questions in and then check all the rest out after. I think it's a great idea. I think it's one of many ideas you could use. I think that would work. I think you're smart to think that because you're like, first of all, you're addressing that maybe people are fatigued on this channel. And so we're going to switch it up because when I first saw this question, my answer was going to be, are people generally fatigued from virtual events? I think people are generally fatigued from. From boring virtual events or from virtual events where there's nothing in it for me. Right. Versus, like, if a virtual event came across my inbox that was like, hey, Dave, tomorrow we have a peer group of 10 other solo entrepreneurs who quit their jobs as CMOs and are now running your own business. We'd like to invite you to 10. I'd be like, hell, yeah. That's exactly who I am and that's exactly what I want to go to. And so it always comes back to the content and the offer. What's your reaction to that? That breezy?

Yeah, I mean, as long as I think whatever the mold is, break it. So if you see people doing, you know, conferences and here's the agenda and all that stuff, and that's your little, like, gut feeling is telling you that's what people are fatigued of, then don't do that. Make it something different. Make it cool. Make it. Whether it's cool and flashy and this and that, whether it's making them have like, some jealousy that, like their competitors or the others in their space, who. The people who are kind of like, like they're shadowing or looking up to or doing something. You can do that if it's super personalized. Like the example that Dave gave. Do that. What people don't want is boring. So, like, even on our, like the bi weekly call that I have, like, I'm like, hey, like, you can bring your lunch if you want, if you have a dog, if you want to bring your baby or your other kids are kind of screaming around, that's fine. Do your thing. It's informal. People are like, on a walk outside. There's like trees in the background on this talk. And it's like, this is. This is exactly what we wanted. We just wanted a normal conversation with, like, smart people.

Yeah, break the mold. That's good advice. Look at what's happening. And I think some of this is. Is a game of tension. It's like you could have an interesting thing, but it's just in this pattern repetition where everyone else is blind to it because it looks and feels just like everything else.

Yeah. Was it Chili Piper, I'm guessing, who did the hot chip thing and then interviewed people?

I don't, I don't know if it was, but, oh, no, you know, it was Guy Daniel Rodriguez, when he was at Alice, I. Maybe it was a different thing, but I did that stuff like that.

Like that's.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean that one's a little extra out there, but it just is an example of doing something.

Yeah. It doesn't have to be that. If that's not like on brand for you or your company, it doesn't have to be that you can like invent, you know, iterate on the format. Like you see that 60 second startup pitch thing that I mentioned earlier, like, oh cool, there's a. Maybe there's a one minute version. We could do that. We sell to hr. We're gonna, instead of doing a podcast, we're gonna build a TikTok page where every week we publish three one minute interview Chief Human resource officers at companies to hear like what they're going through today. That could be something.

It's all based on the psyche and interests of your Persona. So the people that I sell to, they're happy to be on camera and be talkative and they're like forward thinking. They all want to share ideas. So that format makes a ton of sense for us. Other people don't want to be on camera. They would actually rather type in a live format of chatting in the background while something else is happening on camera. So like whatever. The preferred format for your audience is cater to that but just in like a fun way that actually makes sense.

Okay, Brendan, got another one in here and we're going to answer it. Re influencers and content partnerships. Any tips on keeping edgy ones on track to borrow? Any tips on keeping edgy ones on the track to borrow a music analogy? We want a Meg White and we keep getting batshit Ginger Baker. I have no idea. I know who Meg White is. I don't know who batshit Ginger Baker is. Here's the thing with influencers, it's very hard to be good at it unless you know who those people are. I think it's very hard to go to a marketplace or somewhere else and be like, hey, who are the really edgy people in X niche? Like it's gonna work best if you know, you have to be in that world to know that. And I think it's tough. So I would go and revisit and just be like, do we have a deep enough understanding of this audience? And you gotta be able to make that list for yourself.

Yeah, that's a tricky spot. I think the things that don't scale in marketing are always the best ones. So like the most, well, influencer is probably not your best person to even have on your side. It's going to be the one who has a really core, highly engaged audience anyways to kind of work with. So I think that's good advice though on people that you kind of know already, that you've been following, that you find interesting or that you hear from like your prospects is interesting. That's a good way to do it. Actually at elation, that's what we did. We just pulled our, our current customers and others and asked kind of how, where and how they consume information and then ended up partnering with those folks to create content. So you can always ask your customers too.

This question is from Iona. What are realistic estimates for getting stuff done? Messaging, positioning, sales decks, revamps, life cycle, automations, cold outreach, assets, created case studies, et cetera. I tried to think of a better answer. This one. Like I saw this and it punched me right in the gut and I even wrote a response. I'm not write it angry response. It's not angry, but I said 30 days max. There's always a V1. My bias is go fast, learn, iterate. Anything that will take longer than 30 days really scares me and usually ends up being a time suck, slash sunk cost. I know that's not always realistic, but it helps as a guiding principle.

Yeah, don't let great and get in the way of good. Is that the saying?

And just like most of the people that are listening to us are not at humongous, humongous companies where there is so much like risk or internal process, like we just make these really slow estimates or don't think about what the V1 is. And, and I'm not the right person to answer this because my bias is speed and it's very rare. And I know that because I've burnt out many people that I've worked with in the past and I think it's a competitive advantage, but it's also a flaw. But the advantage you get from going fast. I've had many conversations with creative directors and other creators out there that I respect who will push and say yes, but if you want something great, and we talked about content earlier, if you want something great. So I think a lot of it depends on the stage of the company. But if it's early stage startup, you gotta go fast because you need to learn, you need to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. And so I think the faster you can ship like a V1 and you're not Apple, like nobody cares if the V1 of the thing that you Ship is not perfectly beautiful. You're gonna learn and you're gonna get feedback.

I mean, you're gonna swap it in like a month, two months.

Yeah, we change the website every two weeks. Yeah, that's okay. And I also think, like, when you go fast, it gives you the freedom to like, not push out shitty stuff. But like, yeah, we're going to ship this website. We know this is not perfect. This is the V1 and we're going to iterate on this next one. No more. Bias for speed is huge. That's something that I got from the founders at Drift and it rubbed off on me a hundred percent.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think even, like, it's a balance and you got to understand, like, where to place time and where to, like, not let your, you know, want to have it perfect and get out of the way. So, like, for instance, when I was saying earlier on, on writing a blog content, giving it that little sweep of SEO, quick sweep. Add alt tags on the images, get your H tags in order, call it a day and like hyperlink a couple things. Call it a day. No more than that. Doesn't need to be super in depth. Get it out there and get it done.

Like, give yourself a deadline. That's the problem with time is like, oh, the agency says three months. So it's three months versus like, I even know personally for myself, if I'm like, shoot, I have one hour of free time right now. Like, I have to get these three things done and I'm going to ship them no matter what. Today I sent out my newsletter before doing our podcast and I was like, I have from 2:30 to 3 open. I'm writing and shipping and sending this newsletter during that time. And I think sometimes that stuff can be such a helpful constraint. So like, yeah, to your point, we want to write really good content. We want to do all the SEO stuff that you mentioned, Breezy, but we're going to take max one week to put out an article. Okay, great. Okay, last one. This one's for you. And we'll wrap up and we'll get out of here. Mikkel says, what are your top tips for launching and getting listeners for a new podcast? I'd love to hear what your experience Brizzy has been with product LED revenue. And you know how you've grown that so far.

Yeah. Whoever I'm bringing on the podcast, get them really involved in the process and get them excited about sharing it. I mean. Cause then you're as much as you can, you know, spread out who's helping to promote something great. We also have our entire team share each podcast episode internally. That is the one piece of content that across the entire team is shared. So that's something that we've been able to, you know, everyone who's on the team, their network gets to see it as well. So sharing it out, those are a couple things. Also getting it onto multiple platforms. So like we have it on YouTube, we have. And then we use Buzzsprout or, yeah, Buzzsprout, fly it out to all the different, like Spotify and Apple podcasts and blah, blah, blah, blah. Then the other thing is just like, we also happen to have a founding team who really enjoys building content on LinkedIn. So I think we also did, to be honest, have that a little just in our favor. But that being said, I think that's a good way to do it and make it easy for people to share. So if you want those people to share, you're not just going to send them the podcast link and say, like, can you share this? You're going to write the post for them quickly. Hey, don't spend so much time quickly. Couple lines on what the voice might make sense from their point of view. Send that over, make it easy for them to share it.

Podcasting is not a get rich quick scheme. So, like, if you're looking for results really quickly, it's not. I think the biggest impact comes from consistency over time. And one of the best ways to promote it is like, the way I promote my podcast now is just kind of like in an evergreen way. Like, I send out a newsletter every week in a section of the newsletter. I always try to talk about, hey, this week on the podcast, I dabble. I have social media clips that are always going, trying to put out useful interviews and, and help people tell their friends. But I think it takes consistency over time. Unless you have some, like, secret, like, viral way to do it. Like, you know, you book Obama for a zoom call and like, that's your podcast. But I think that's not realistic.

So, yeah, I think if you've run nurture campaigns over email in the past, you can like think of a podcast in that way. Like, your job is just to nurture them. Like, will some of those people convert out? Yeah, maybe. But in general, you're kind of just, just like keeping it going and keeping people interested. And that's sort of what your podcast is. Definitely not a just like top of funnel, huge driver, this and that. Does it drive those things? Yes, it gives you good brand awareness. Gives you good message in the market, gives you good voice, blah blah blah. But it's not just okay, look at here's our list of all of our inbound that came from the podcast this month. It's just one channel of very many.

Okay, Breezy Beaumont, thank you for doing this. Thank you for hanging out with me and answering all these questions. I need to refill my water and need to take care of the baby over here. So quick plug for you and company and wherever people can find you if they want to connect with you after this. As we probably let the awesome Exit 5 intro music take us out of here for sure.

I'm on LinkedIn if people want to connect there. I'm also in the exit 5 group so come find me over there.

Oh, shout out to exit 5. Love that place.

Place. That place is amazing. Correlated is getcorrelated.com but it's only fitting for some of you.

So all right, awesome. Thank you so much. Good to see you. More to connect soon. Having me all from LinkedIn DMS, that's the best way to do it. So see you later.

All righty bye bye bye.

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 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 got to 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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