The Power Shift From Sellers to Buyers | Dave Gerhardt x02

I'm good. Cool.

So we'll get started. Hey, everyone. Great to have you on here. For anyone that doesn't know, this is the second event that Dave and I have done together. We did the first one maybe like a couple months ago and it got such a great response and both from the live people and the podcast afterwards. Dave posted on his, I posted on mine and people were like, whoa. So we're thinking about doing this on like a monthly basis. It's going to feed both of our podcasts, it's going to help a lot of you, we're going to try and cover a lot of different topics. And so where I want to get started here today, Dave, last time we went into a ton of tactical stuff, trends in marketing, influencer stuff like that. I'm trying to take a step back, at least for the beginning, and then we'll see where this takes us is just to think about how much different the buyer journey has changed over the past 10 years. And so I look at that, right? Everyone has seen, I'm just going to set the stage. Everyone's seen the stats, like buyers are 80% done when they want to talk to sales and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then when you actually go and look at how a B2B SaaS marketing strategy is executed and what the goals are, the goals are typically trying to convert leads when they're 10% of the way done and then pass them to sales. And it's just I find it terribly misaligned with how a B2B buyer wants to buy. And so just kind of wanted to get started with that and see what you think and then we'll get into innovation and how companies could adjust.

Yeah. So I love this topic and it's something that when I was working at Drift, actually we were selling. So I'm at Privy, which is E commerce small businesses. And so it's a different sales motion. But at Drift, it was really interesting because I was VP of marketing at a company that was selling marketing that was selling a SaaS product. And so I got to use almost my internal. So I was the buyer at a fast growing SaaS company. So I was getting sold to a lot and was able to like use that experience to help coach our sales and marketing efforts just by. And you know, the speech that I'd always give would be like, let me tell you, forget what you hear from everybody else. Let me tell you how I actually buy things. I know a friend who's using something and they tell me, you should go try this Thing Someone who I respect posted about it. I met up with someone at a conference and I saw, you know, Megan Eisenberg's talk about whatever. Okay, that's interesting. Never have I ever cold, like gone to something, downloaded something, then bought something. There's always been that, like, word of mouth, network touch. And I think that that's just. We don't like to talk about it because we'd like to talk about the things that we can perfectly quantify. The reason we're obsessed with talking about paid advertising is because it's one of the few channels that you can and you can argue whether it's measured right or not. Chris. Like, you know, it's one of the few channel. We like to be able to say, I spent $10,000 and I got this. We don't like to be able to say, well, what's the value of doing one of these things? What's the value of building a brand? And it's a little bit harder to quantify, but like, damn, if I don't like it still happens. I get text the other day. I'm good friends with Tom Wentworth. He's a CEO CMO at Recorded Future, like $150 million SaaS company. We literally text each other three, four times a week about new things. And that is how buying gets done. And I just like, you have to figure out. So like, the reason we talked about influencers is not because influencers some Instagram buzzword. All influencer means is who influences your customers. And so like, the best thing you could do is tap into those networks and try to work with those people and create word of mouth and associate them with their brand. That's why I just believe so much in that approach because I've seen first of how I buy. And I think that most people that are in that similar position, that's how they buy.

And when I did this, I did a study because I was trying to show executives about this in 2016 timeframe when I worked at a company, because all we were doing was cold calling people and trying to shove them into demos. And I was looking at the win rates and how bad they were and how much sales teams time was being wasted. And so I did a study with 600 of our buyers. And the study involved how people like to buy things and what their process is for doing it. And so we said, what is the first thing that you do when you're researching a new medical technology? Number one was, I research online. And then number two, the next thing that they do is they call somebody at a facility that they trust. And the third thing that they did was ask to talk to a sales rep and get a demo. And so when you think about those parts of the process that the buyer wants to do and in what order, and it was majority, like, it was very clear that that was how a majority of the people wanted to do stuff, that you can adjust your marketing and sales strategy to align with the steps that a buyer wants to take on the way through. The big thing for me, the one that, like, actually it was the one that was interesting in 2016, was that they really did always tend to vet with a different person at a different facility that they trust, which then started to get us, really. And then we started having, quote, unquote, influencers in 2016 go and speak at conferences about the product. We had a whole set of references for people. And so the first call from someone was not, hey, do you want to have a demo with our sales rep? It was, hey, do you want to see how this, you know, company across the street is doing is using our product to be successful and do X, Y and Z? And so you can just change little pieces and. But the first step is having empathy for your buyer, which typically comes at the expense of what's easy and what's practical for your company.

I think a lot of people can take this advice, though, as, like, okay, I gotta go and boost up our G2 profile and get more reviews. And that's part of it. Like, that. That's definitely a part of it. But I actually think, like, this is why I love the idea of, like, building a media company instead of a marketing team, because ultimately, well, and building.

A marketing team, but it creates the word of mouth.

It creates the word of mouth. You have the tools today as a brand to be able to do that instead of having to get featured in one of those medical technology journals or reviews or whatever. You can start the podcast about your niche, you can create the blog about your niche, you can have an event series about your niche, and that can be applicable to a huge audience or, hey, we only sell to Fortune 100. Like, you can create all those things. And the best way to do that, by the way, is. I think this is where people mess it up, though, is it feels like a branded effort, right? The real way to do is like, this is the demand. This is Demand Gen Live. And by the. Because you, Chris, you're doing. You're doing this in your world, right? This is like, this is Demand Gen Live by the. Hosted by Wink Wink Nod, Nod. The guy who runs a freaking agency that he would love you all to go and buy from. Like, and it's the same. The same is true in B2B. So it's like, if you're a B2B financial technology company, don't build something cool for a vendor in that space. Build like the community for people, for CFOs at Fortune 10,000 companies to hang out online. That's ultimately the goal.

Which leads me to the next point, because a lot of the things that you mentioned kind of go against the grain of what a lot of companies, especially at the executive level, think and what they're being told. Right? So the executives at companies, what I find is that they get a lot of their strategy through consulting firms or analyst firms or Martech vendors that sponsor conferences. Martech vendors push money through all of those systems anyway. And so it ends up being a Martech driven strategy. And so how do we get executives to think about other. No, no wonder no companies want to do a podcast. Nobody's telling them to do it because there's no vested interest in them doing it for Martech. Firms don't get any benefit out of that. You know what I mean? And so I'm just trying to understand, like, what do you think? How do you set it up? Like, not for. Not. You gave the example on the last talk about how you did it with dc. But how does, like, how practically can we get executives on board to thinking about some of these things differently?

Oh, okay. So I would pitch it like, I think it needs to be pitched as, as the whole. Needs to be pitched as your marketing strategy. And so I would say, like, here's. Hey, we're selling to financial technology professionals, okay? We're going to have the demand gen, we're going to have the website set up, we're going to be doing outbound, we're going to be doing advertising, we're doing conversion. Like that stuff has to happen. But also a big part of our strategy for 2021 is to become a brand that is trusted and well known in this industry. And the way that we're going to do that is by launching a podcast called Financial Pros Today or something like that. Right? And the way we're going to measure that is by growth of the audience in the first six months. We're going to commit to doing it every week. And by the way, also, we're gonna use all the content of that to fuel all of our other efforts. So we're gonna take all the expert interviews and Use that for our blog and maybe we'll source some good speakers for our events, or maybe we'll do some, we could do some of them live and do them as webinars. I think like when you can show how you're baking it into the whole thing and you have clear metrics around, I think people make the mistake of like, we're only doing a podcast and then you go in and then you're asked to justify it. Like a lot of times in marketing if you don't, you need to tell your boss, your manager, whoever, the executive, you need to tell them what the goals are for your, for your idea or else they're going to come up with the goals for you. And so we say, hey, we're, we're doing all this demand gen stuff. We're building out this brand channel because we want to be perceived as experts in this channel. And then even to even tie it closer back to sales. I think the ultimate play that I haven't seen that many people do is I would run it like abm. I would say, I would go to the sales team and say, hey, give me a list of the top 100 accounts that you want to sell to. And I'm going to go to try to get their CFO on our podcast this year. And then at the end of the year, if you can go back to your team and say, hey, we had 50 of the CFOs at our top 100 accounts on our podcast this year. No one's going to argue about whether that was valuable or not, whether, whether any of those people have bought yet or not. You've now positioned your brand as an expert. This is, I think there's a great book about a Hollywood agent, Jerry Weintraub, and I think he was the early manager of like Frank Sinatra. And he used to talk about how he would bring new artists around Sinatra because they would then be like, huh, who's that person? Right? And it would create this FOMO effect. Like you want to know who that person is? I think you can do that as a brand, which is like if you want to sell to these fortune, whatever CFOs, all of a sudden you have a podcast where all these good sounding CFOs are spending their time. You've already boosted the credibility of your brand. So there's literally 15 different reasons why you should build a content strategy that goes hand in hand with this demand piece. It just gets screwed up when the metrics are, when the goal. Marketing is very simple. If you have the Goal first. And when you don't have clarity around the goal of doing in the beginning, that it gets way harder. You asked to quantify it in a different way later.

And then I hear this a lot from a lot of people that I interact with. Oh, like we're too late on a podcast. There's already 90 podcasts for CFOs already. And what you don't understand, what you need to understand is that the best content wins. You don't need to be first in these. Chant first gives you an advantage. It helps, but you don't need to be first. You need to be the best. And when you're.

I hate that take. I hate that take so much because. Okay, so should nobody go start a YouTube? Like, does that mean you can't be successful on YouTube?

It also means, if you follow, that you wouldn't do SEO, because everyone's doing SEO, right?

Like, new, new YouTube creators are gonna come out next week that will probably make, you know, $500,000 next year. Like, it's not about. To me, that's a sign that the channel exists, that there's, like, people there. And so you have to figure out what the right mix is. And your goal doesn't have to be to have a podcast about financial technology that gets a million downloads. It has to be relevant for the subset of people that you're going after.

And to be honest, I find it to be more of an excuse than anything. Excuse or fear as a reason to just keep doing the same stuff. Right? So if you're a marketer. I've actually said that to myself. I'm not talking out of both sides of my mouth here. I've said that before. I said that on LinkedIn. I was like, Dave Gerhardt's already on LinkedIn. Nobody, you know, there's a bunch of marketers, nobody wants to hear what I have to say. Like, it's not, It's. Everyone goes through it, right? And so take a look at yourself and, and, and see whether what you're saying is actually true or if you're trying to find an excuse to stay sort of like in your comfort zone. Where I found all of my most successful projects is when I move outside of my comfort zone and start doing things that, that I was potentially either scared or made excuses of doing.

I also think, like, I don't want people to take this, like, forget the channel. Actually, I think even beyond the channel, the number one thing you could do is just to have, is to have a very strong opinion as a company and so, like, even more than tactics to push your CEO to have a strong, like that strong strategic narrative, that strong angle as a company sets up your whole marketing position, right? Because if you don't have anything interesting to say, then you can't just have a podcast and a blog. But like, if you're the company that's out to change the way whatever is done for forever, right? Like. So, like, this is like my favorite. My favorite line is from Andy Raskin is story is like story is strategy. And I know you talk a lot about there's not enough marketing strategists out there. But, like, I think that positioning is so important. I think the tactics are table stakes. Anybody can figure out how if you. Somebody listens to your podcast enough, they can figure out how to, you know, execute on some of these tactics. But it's like, where are you playing in the market? What is your angle? What is your hook? What is your story? Then that's then the context that I can go create an amazing marketing strategy around. Like, hey, this is. This company's trying to kill email forever, right? Or, like, I don't know, come up with a better angle. But like, you know, when you have that strong point of view from a founder, from a CEO, then that's where marketing gold becomes. Forget about podcasts, YouTube, whatever.

I got an interesting question over LinkedIn DM that I'm going to kind of just like talk through and then I'd really like your opinion. And the question was, you know, we just raised money. We're getting more marketers in here. We have Salesforce and Marketo. But what are all of the other technology tools that we. That we should buy? I got that last night and my response was, you don't need any of those tools right now. What you need to do is you need to figure out what things that work and then figure out what tech you need to make those things work better next, like strategy success, like quantified success. Nobody to make it go better.

Yeah, you rarely ever need to add. You're. You're rarely is like adding tech, that's the solution.

It's most likely a distraction.

Like the tech. The tech is important, don't get me wrong. But I feel like it's the, it's the like, very good. It's like, that should only be allowed if you're like a level two team. Like, if you're. If you have the fundamentals nailed, you know, like, if everything is great and you have a good system, then go and go and add more tools and Technology, but like, especially with how good some of the technology is. Like you can do so much if you just had HubSpot. You can do so much if you just had Marketo, you know, like you could do so much if you just had freaking Google Analytics. I think the first, probably honest to God, the first year at Drift, I think our website was on Squarespace and that was solely because it was easy to just update. It was a splat. It was like two pages and the first, you know, however many million dollars in pipeline came from that. It just, it's never, it just people love to get caught up in it and it takes time and it makes you look like you're busy because you're working on the big tech, not, you know, the big project. And it takes six months. It's just like, it's a whole lot of excuses to get, to get caught up in. And you know, we hear new, we hear new tools all the time. And so it's like, oh, let me go try that, right? We're all humans, we're all consumers. Oh, I got to try the new, the new headphones, the new AirPods, the new phone. It's the same is true in our marketing jobs, no different.

So getting back onto the innovation, looking for a couple other pillars you had mentioned the things that I have obviously opinion or story. We had clear expectations on what the goals are and what the plan is to executives. What are some of the other ingredients for success in doing something like a podcast, an event series, things like that, where you might be struggling to get buy in from at the executive level.

I think, I think you have to be able to tell this. Like you have to pitch it, like, you have to be the like TV exec. Because I could stand up in front of a room of a thousand executives and right now pitch you the value of doing a podcast and not once mention the word download or sales. And so I think you have to be able to like, you have to be able to articulate the marketing strategy of why you're doing it and like to give people examples. And so it's like, hey, I want to increase our brand perception. I want to do all, you know, I want to create content, I want to have this Trojan horse for all this other content that we want to create. At the end of the year we're going to have a hundred episodes. All those hundred episodes are going to be turned in a block. Like this is where, I don't know how we give this a definition, but it's like to be able to Articulate the marketing strategy behind any of these channels. It doesn't just mean roi, it means like, where do you see this? How do you see this fitting? Like, you have, you have to have conviction. I think you'll get sniffed out pretty quickly if you just have like, hey, we're gonna launch a podcast and it's going to be about financial technology and it launches next week. We're like, the way I'm going to present that to the executive team is I'm going to say, here's the challenge right now, this isn't happening. This like, you know, same way you're. Same way. Like, it's like, I think the marketing leader job or anything is like, you're almost like you have this portfolio of things and your job is to be the pitch person for those things. So I have an opinion on why we're going to do this event beyond pipeline. I have opinion about why we should have a blog beyond Pipeline. Like, those are the things that you have to be able to communicate as a marketer.

One of the things that I did, I'm going to riff on your ability to take data and tell stories. I think it's a really big piece as a marketer, whether you're trying to get something going or as you're going and you're kind of like in the place where people don't really know whether or not it's working. And then even afterwards to continue to go and get more, budget, more buy in different things like that. One thing that I did in 2016 is on every Saturday morning I would write like almost like a new. It was like a news article recap email that included the CEO and everyone down. This is at a 400, 500 person company and I was a marketing manager, but I was running at that point. I was basically leading demand gen with a marketing manager title. And they would get this email and it would include. This is what happened this week. We generated 17 opportunities for this much pipeline. This much closed a little news recap. All the metrics underneath, total revenue, year to date, the projects that are active, what things are working the best and what's blocking me. And I would, the CEO would get copied on that email so that he knew those different things. And so something to consider here is just how do you wrap your entire, all of your work together in a story tied back into business outcomes and give it to people in a way that's really digestible? I think is incredibly interesting. And I would, I would specifically send it on Saturday mornings because I knew that A lot of people would read it. Cause they weren't getting a lot of other emails.

Yeah, I've seen. I think it's so funny you mentioned. I've seen internal companies, like, everybody sends out their updates on Friday. And like, nope. Then. Then, like, okay, I'm gonna not read your 16. I'm not gonna read all the teams updates on Friday. It's like, you got to be smart about it. I like what you said about wrapping. Wrapping it into the other stuff. Because I also think when I've had success with those channels, it's been like, the VP of sales wasn't like, look at these idiots. They're only doing a podcast. Like, where's my pipeline going to come from? Like, like, like, they've been involved in. They've been super involved in, in the, in the planning process. And so, like, it's like, here's all the things we're doing, and the podcast is one of them. And when you, when you feel like you're getting the team wins. In other channels, I also have had, like, the VP of sales be like, the biggest. This guy was the biggest advocate of the podcast. Like, sharing every episode to the point where it was, like, embarrassing. I'm like, it's. No, you're sharing it wrong. Nobody wants you to share the Apple podcast link straight to LinkedIn. But, you know, he loves every episode. And I think that that becomes, like, when you're. When you're in sync, you know, it's like, it all comes back to, like, it's like the test of a relationship. Right. The little. Like, when you're not getting along with somebody, little things that are really meaningless bug you. The way she just crumpled that paper. Like. But if that's your person, then it doesn't matter. And I think, I think so if you have a good relations and you're clear about the role of marketing. And I've been lucky to work at companies with CEOs who they're like, you better be spending time building up our brand. And so it just. It hasn't been an issue because, you know, I believe so much in the. Like, we believe in the power of building brand and building word of mouth, and we know that these are the channels. And it also is different. You know, you're much more of a data data guy than I am. Spoiler alert.

I'm a lot of a qualitative feel guy, too. I just like to put them together. Yeah.

So. So, like, I joke about that, but, like, one of my favorite things to bring into executive presentations is screenshots.

I love that.

Comments on LinkedIn. I've screenshotted podcast reviews. And so, like, I've been in a executive level, like, you know, quarterly breakdown, and I'm like, Look at these 15 reviews we got for the podcast saying, this is the best. This has helped me so much. Like, sometimes people just need to see that and feel it and be like, yes, we should go do more of this stuff.

One of the things that I've seen as very interesting over the past five to seven years, because I believed this seven years ago, and a lot of sales leaders that I worked with did not. And it's been interesting to see watch sales leaders change. And I see it a lot now, and we're gonna have several on the podcast to talk about it, is that a lot of sales leaders now believe that marketing is more important than sales, which is incredibly fascinating. It matches what we talked about at the beginning, right? You need both. This is not a knock on salespeople. It's not marketing so great. It's just based on how buyers have changed and what needs to have the weight and what needs to be successful to really, really grow a company right now, which gives a massive opportunity for everybody on this zoom. I've been talking about this for years. Like, the glory. The glory days of B2B marketing. We're in it right now. What do you think about that in terms of, like, the sales comment?

Yeah, I love it, but I think people are gonna. People are gonna take it the wrong way, which is like, you're not. I don't. I don't think people like to argue about that topic because they think that what you're saying is marketing people are greater than salespeople, which is not true. That's not true. But nobody would argue, like, hold on. Of course marketing is more important than sales. Of course it is, because marketing is brand marketing is perception market. Like. Like put a Kardashian on a phone case, like. And that's the reason that marketing is more powerful than sale. Like, a tweet from a Kardashian can. Could make your brand an E. Comm. That's why Mark. That is literally his marketing. A tweet from Dave Gerharden that doesn't move the needle, right? A tweet from. From. From. You know, Kylie Jenner is gonna. Is gonna send you a billions to the bank. And so, like, that's what it means. It's like marketing. And I don't think there's a sales leader in the world who could make the argument that Having a better brand would make their job any worse.

Mm.

You know, like, if you're. If you're at a company, if you're at a Zoom or a Shopify right now, you know, you think those sales teams don't. Don't believe in the value of those companies, brands and their marketing? Of course, that's the whole. That's the whole, like, that's the rub.

You got any things you want to chat about? You want to go to? Questions? I'm down. We got a lot of people on here.

Yes, questions.

Let's do that.

See? Okay, so let's say I'm a VP of marketing and I want to do brand, a podcast, etc. What does the profile of the marketer or the marketing team that you hire for that look like?

I got a good one to this, but I might. If you want to go first, go ahead.

You go. You go.

Stop. Don't think about the team. Do it yourself first and then figure it out. And then you'll know much better who you need.

Yeah. Love you for that. Exactly. That's. I. That's. That's the slippery slope mindset. That's where you get in trouble. That's where you get in trouble with the CEO, because all of a sudden you have a new. A new. We're gonna do a podcast, and I want you to meet Angelica. We're gonna hire her, we're gonna pay her 90 grand, and she's gonna run the podcast. And you're like, ooh, that's when you get the ROI conversation right out of the gate. But if you. I'm gonna test this. I'm gonna launch this. I. I just. I just did this. I did. When I joined Privy, I launched. I launched our. I relaunched our podcast. Me personally launched it, and now it's passed off and the team runs it. But that was instrumental in, like, shaping the show, figuring out how it works, figuring out how we could think about it. And it's so easy to do that. Like, anybody who says differently, like, this is how to produce a podcast. One on one, record it over zoom. You got the audio right here. Use a hosting service. I use transistor. I don't know what we use.

We use anchor.

Anchor. Grab the audio file. You could do no editing, upload it right there. They give you a one click button to, like, connect it to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, email it to your customers. Congratulations, you've launched. You've launched your first podcast. You could also go to Fiverr and, you know, have somebody do graphics like such a low bar. Chris, your point is spot on. To do that.

Yeah. I think it's incredibly important. And it depends on the stage of the company. It depends where you are, it depends how people are already on your team. I tend to work with companies that are less than 500 employees and so on the lower end of that, like, I believe as a, at a VP level, you should try and understand at least a level of detail so you know whether or not things are working and whether or not things are being done correctly and different things. All of the functions that you're responsible for. That's my belief.

Yeah. Every, every. Every mistake I've made in hiring has been because I didn't taste the, Taste the role a little bit first. And some. Or like, if not me personally, the team, like we've been like so and so. Has been doing it as their job. Now let's go hire that person.

Because you don't necessarily know what the core skills are and therefore. And you don't know how to do it. And therefore you don't know how to judge whether or not the person you're interviewing can actually do it.

Yeah. And also, like, if it's a new channel, you got to be the one that's like the voice of that. You got to be the one that's like the champion of that. Like, here's the idea. We're going to launch this new channel. I'm going to tell us how we should think about it, how we should measure it, how we're going to do it.

Love that. That was a great question. I think it helped a lot of people.

We got a few more. So how do you balance your own duties and functions with trying to take on these additional projects? Pure integration. Something else.

For me, usually that means that I'm not scaling in the right way. And so I haven't done my. I have. I either don't have enough faith in the team or I haven't set up the right processes to have a team. And like, maybe if you have a team of two people, it's different, but I think like in that case, then you just gotta trim the list and you gotta, you gotta make time for it. I think that's the only secret, which is like, we, we like to spend. One of the most useful exercises is stop, start, continue. Just to do it for yourself every now and then, like, make a list of all the things you're working on right now. What are you going to start doing? What do you need to start doing? What do you need to Stop doing. What do you need to continue doing? I don't think that, like, I get in this habit all the time, personally and professionally. I got a list of 15 things that I'm doing. Really only one or two of those things is going to move the needle. So I think, like, ruthlessly prioritizing. But for me, in marketing specifically, whenever I get in that situation, it's a really. Actually a deeper tell that I don't have enough faith in the person that I should be asking. I haven't trained well enough. The person might not be the right fit. You know, like, if you're the marketing leader, like, your job might be to come up with the idea and set the goals for it, but, like, you know, you got to figure out how to. How to get the team to do it.

Yeah, just sort of reiterating. But I'll add a couple of things. The number one thing, I interact with hundreds of companies every month. The number one opportunity is to stop doing things that are not as effective as they need to be in order to keep doing them. So just go and audit the list. And you're going to find, if you look at whether it's data, whether it's qualitative, whatever you need, you're going to be able to find four or five things that you can stop spending money on, stop spending time on, stop having your team work on whatever, move those out, which creates a lot of space for new things. And then the next thing that I would add is if you remove those and you have these five things and you're looking to scale them up, you should be able to, if you don't have enough resources, put together a business case for your CFO and your CEO that says, look, this is what we're doing right now. We have five people. We're running these three programs. I want to make these two work better. When I'm going to do these two, I'm going to need these three things. We're already generating this much pipeline and this much revenue. The customer acquisition cost is this. It's better than the other things that we're doing. Can I have $250,000 more dollars to hire these people and do this program? I think one of the things for marketers that I learned early on is how to build a business case to convince executives to move forward with things and present it based on real, like, real business opportunities.

Yeah, that's good. Even. Even, like, on a smaller context, I've found that, like, the CEO and whoever are more likely to compromise and help you get to decisions than you might think. When you can lay out the whole scenario. If you're like, I want to launch a podcast, but I don't have time to do it, I would put this, I would try to put the decision on the CEO, unless it's all stuff that you've made up for yourself, which is like, that's your own problem then. Which is like, if you got a list of 15 things and you can't get out of your own way to prioritize the podcast, then that's on you. But if you. A lot of times in this role, we feel like, Dave, I want to do the podcast, but I can't because my ce, the CEO has us doing all these things. It's still, your job is still to own the marketing piece and your job is to still manage up and be proactive. And so what I would do is if I really want to do the podcast, I would lay it out and do what Chris said and make that, make the case and say, hey, can we sit down for 30 minutes next week? I want to take you, I want to take you through my list of things that I think we're going to do this quarter, but I also want to get your agreement on the things we're going to say no to and lay them out together and ask for that clarity. And then you can walk out of that meeting with like, huh, she really doesn't want to do a podcast because. Because of this reason. Okay, then, then move it off your list. Right? Or you're most likely, you're going to walk out of that meeting and realize like, you just got the okay to nix the four things that you thought were important and that, that's usually had been my experience. When you can get to that level with the CEO.

Let'S keep rolling with questions. I think this is super valuable.

I saw one about. There was one, there was a short one about podcasts that I saw. What? Where the heck did that one go? It's like nobody asked questions and then there's a hundred of them. This is.

I know, there's so many. What about this one? We just launched a podcast this week. The team wants to release episodes. Three weeks?

Yeah.

How would you pitch a more frequent cadence to them and show the value of that?

I would say that unless, unless you're super famous and have a huge audience or a well known brand, you're not going to be able to show up. Imagine you only showed up every three weeks. Like, I think after the first week, like you're gonna launch the first week people might be talking about it, then they're gonna go away for two weeks and they're gonna be like, they're gonna totally forget about you. Frequency matters so much, especially when you're launching something like a podcast. I think at a bare minimum, it's gotta be every week. You could get away with every other week. If you are communicating that and you're saying twice, you know, new episodes, every, you know, new episodes every other Wednesday. And then like, you could also tease out if you give people the schedule, like that could also change. So here's a. I'm answering my own question a different way, which is another opportunity, another alternative could be it's okay to launch every three weeks if you're telling the audience what they can expect. So like on April 1st, we got Chris on April, you know, 21st we got Angelica on May 5th. Like, I think they have to know it's all about setting expectations. I would never launch something, go away for three weeks, put out episode two, and then expect something good is going to happen.

But it truly comes down to focus and prioritization. My belief is that if you want the podcast to really work, you need to publish as much as possible. We've been able to take a podcast or the state of demand gen podcast from literally not even existing 12 months ago to be in a top 25 marketing podcast in the country. And so, and the reason.

How many downloads? Tell me, how many downloads did you get a month?

I don't know. Angelica knows those numbers.

That's bullshit. You don't know. You know, It's a top 25 podcast subscribers. How many downloads?

I know subscribe. We're, we're well over 10,000 subscribers. And then they gave us Spotify data, but I don't track. Angelica does that stuff. But anyway, the, the point here is that if you want something, if you're really going after it, you need to move quickly because the more that you do it, the better it gets. The more that you do it, the better guests you get. The more that you do it, the more clear your story is, the more you do it, more people will come back. And so the people that are already subscribed on Apple listen to more episodes because they go in there for a podcast and ours is at the top because we publish more frequently than anybody else. And so those are some really interesting things to think about is to think about how your level of commitment. We're trying to get to five. Like, I'm pushing Angelica hard to figure out how to get us to Five episodes a week because we, we know how much it's working and so I'm a, I'm a huge. Whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's podcast, I'm a huge prioritize and then go for, for volume and quality at the same time.

People don't want to hear that though it's hard to do it every three weeks is because it's, it's the easiest amount of work. Once a month I'll do an episode.

It's true. Keep them coming Angelica. We're going to try get through all of these. I think more coming they're coming in faster than we're answering them.

So we're as many as we can.

What you should do. Here's your angelic Angelica, you should. This is, this should be your podcast strategies. Like you should just trim out, trim out some of these Q and A's and make them. You can have, you could put out a new five minute episode, a five minute segment of these one questions and you can tell Chris there you got your daily podcast.

That's a great idea. I take that. Okay, so you guys talk about being a media company often. So someone asked what do the internal systems for a media marketing team look like? Share from the company account or pick a figurehead. Build an incentive system for employees sharing content. And this is in regards to LinkedIn Organic.

Oh boy. I don't like the, I like the concept of the employee sharing stuff, but I think it doesn't often achieve the result that you want because like when you do the incentivized sharing stuff you just get a. You get like 15 people inside of the company sharing the same like click to tweet like generic link that's like read our new blog post about 21 sales stats and it's like that doesn't feel authentic. Where like I'd rather have. My approach is like I treat the company LinkedIn page like the kind of news ticker for the brand. And Honestly the company LinkedIn page is more of a like employer brand like recruiting thing. And like then typically use one or two profiles including the founders from a social profile from social perspective. And like they're the voices on social. And I think a lot of companies have this. There's kind of like there's always that one marketing person who's willing to do it who's kind of already active on social. There's that one product manager who is and like you can usually get two or three people in addition to CEO using them as the thought, as the Thought leaders or like ideally, forget thought leaders. One or two subject matter experts inside of your company that you can also get active on Twitter on. On Twitter and LinkedIn. But beyond just like tweeting, I think you need some type of anchor as a brand and that's like your, that's the pie. That's why I like the podcast for example, which is like the goal is to be interesting on social media. The goal is like be interesting on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you're interesting on Twitter and LinkedIn, the right people will follow you because you're tweeting about a particular topic. That should all drive to eventually get them to listen to your podcast. Now they're listening to your podcast. You might drive them back to your newsletter. You might have like an upsell which is like, hey, join our the podcast CTA like to join our newsletter. Now you've kind of connected those channels. But I always like the people first approach. Especially in B2B considered purchase, you need to be shown as the expert. If you can have two or three people and I've seen this multiple times now, if you can have two or three people that are public figures in that domain, I think it just, it makes you, makes you super valuable. And by the way, public figures doesn't mean anybody has to know you. It just means like someone could send someone your Twitter profile and you're like, oh, that person looks really smart about sales ops. Cool.

Yeah, I think at its core it's just subject matter expertise and the things that your buyers care about that may ideally involves things that also do not revolve directly around your product. I talk a lot about a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with what we sell at Refine Labs. I'm sure Dave does the same thing. And so that's one thing. So you kind of, you need that person and then you need whatever infrastructure is required to produce the all of this different stuff. Cause the subject matter experts probably not going to be the one that's editing the intro for your podcast. And so have the people that are going to create it and then have the infrastructure underneath. And you can start with bare bones infrastructure and then build it up as it goes. Right. So you can start the quality is not okay and doesn't need to be super on point. A lot of companies get tripped up there because they're trying to go for like, you know, ABC News style like quality content when they're a 2 million ARR SaaS company with one marketer. And so but it's, it's rooted in deeply understanding your customers and having people that are subject matter experts that can communicate with them. I also clearly lean into the personal profile route, but we, and we do the same thing. Employer brand news ticker on our company LinkedIn page. Lastly, you can use paid media in a different way that's non conversion based to deliver information to people as well. And so that's a, that's a different way on other channels is to use paid in that way.

I would start, but like to your point, start with the expert first, which is like before you figure out what you're going to, where you're going to, you know, talk, who, who are the experts going to be and like, you know, all of us that are in B2B. There's, there's, there's a reason for that. Oh, the founder started the, started this company because before this he ran a video conferencing startup and you know, there's always some type of story.

I'm going through here.

Carl asked an interesting question. He said, we have lined up several prospects over the next several weeks on our show. How would you conduct that interview? I'm the host. But allowing our sales rep to lead.

The interview, oh boy, that sounds like it could be a disaster because like it's not an infomercial. Like, I don't know, I think that I would struggle with like having sales. This is where we blur the lines of like, what's the goal of the podcast? Like, is it like really a selling opportunity? Like, you're gonna have the sales rep, why not have the, why don't you have a podcast host interview them? Look, the right way to do a podcast is to not sell at all. So have your prospect be the guest on the podcast and make it all about the same thing. What's their story? What are you trying to get out of it? And don't even the next day, don't email them the next day and be like, hey, thanks for coming on our podcast. Do you want a demo now? How about a week later? I wouldn't even touch it for a week. A week later, podcast episode goes out. Then the sales rep reaches out and is like, hey, Chris, I've been a big fan of your stuff for a long time. Was great to hear you on our podcast this week pitch. That might be the only way that I would try to sell from a podcast. What do you think about that, Chris?

And to be honest, if I was a guest and this has happened to me before, if I was a guest on a podcast and received a Cold pitch. A week later I would be like, screw you because the intent is wrong. I know that you had me on your podcast so that you could give me that sales pitch, not because you wanted me on the podcast. I would stay far away from that stuff. I think a lot of companies miss it because they have the wrong intent. They run their ABM podcast strategy with all of their top accounts and then try and settle them right after. I really think that it's disingenuous and can and can turn buyers off.

I saw Carl's. I saw Carl's comment back, which is like, it's not the episode's allowing the prospect to showcase their best practice. And I think that's great. That could be a great type of podcast where you have. You're good, you know, you have your ICP ish customers sharing their best practices. But I wouldn't have the sales rep. You're just. Because then you just had like you're gonna have rotating sales reps and in every week and either make the sales rep a podcast host and call them a podcast host, not a sales rep and have them actually be good at it. And by the way, that's the Trojan horse for the podcast, which is like this person's actually a sales rep. But I think the PI. I would. The reason the podcast can work for sales down the road is because it's a great way to build a relationship and credibility and trust with a brand that you might want to sell to, period. I think it's tough to do it the other way. Let us know if it works. But that's my opinion at least.

I'm scrolling through here. There's a couple that I want to pick off. Angelica. So I'm going to mispronounce your name. I think it's Gargi, but Gargi, how do you balance marketing ops tasks, database management, creating landing pages, nurture emails with executing and managing demand gen Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, webinars, creative ad creation. I'm going to jump in on this one. The answer is to keep it simple. I watch so many people overcomplicate things that look like huge massive trees with their HubSpot workflows with segmentations and turns and twists that make no impact on the buyer. It's just like. It's just I watch a lot of marketing ops and. Or marketing people tell their marketing ops people to do things that are entirely overcomplicated. And so whenever I look at a large workflow that looks like that, I immediately say, how do we make this more Simple. And I think that's the answer because.

There'S nothing wrong with all the things that you listed. If you have a team of X number of people, you should do all those. A good marketing team should do all those activities. For sure. If you have a team and you have people, if it's just one person, then you got to prioritize the right stuff. And like, maybe that means, to Chris's point, don't have 15 automation. Like, you know, okay, hey, you gotta be okay. I think, I think a lot of us are not okay with just having things that are okay or good or like, hey, we're not getting to that right now. That's totally okay. You can't be great at everything. Like, we are doing this and we know for a while. Yeah. Like the amount of messages I've gotten in my career of like, hey, this page sucks. Yep, totally agree. But we're not focusing on it right now. You got to have that skin to be able to prioritize like what's important right now.

That was hilarious. Cool. Angelica, it's back to you.

Cool. Let's see. How would you decide where to first invest your paid dollars if you've been focused solely on organic to this point?

Come on, Chris, this is wheelhouse for you.

Depends who you're selling to, depends how much your product cost, depends how long your sales cycle is, depends who's involved in that process, depends whether it's what your sales motion is, if it's a sales LED motion, if it's a product LED motion, if it's E commerce, like there's too many variables in there for me to answer that question. Give you good advice.

Okay, let's do another one then.

I'm just hanging out. What are you talking about?

If you went back in time and we're leading privy through when it was around 10 million ARR, what would your team structure have looked like and why?

Well, that's roughly where we are today. So I don't know.

It's about the same as it probably is right now then.

Yeah, but we're between 10 and 20 today.

You could.

So I've changed my. I used to think there was an ideal team structure and that was before I really started thinking for myself. I think what I would do is optimize first. It would be like, I think you probably need. I've talked a bunch of this, like I could be contradict myself. Shocker. But I think, I think you need some type of like funnel demand, gender, get. Get leads, get stuff going marketer, you need someone who can tell stories and write content. And I think if you have those two, you can really start. I think like if I really boiled it down like you need a brand person and a demand person if you wanted to split them out that way. I also think like very early on you need a, you need a full time designer or a design, a design resource that you have access to full time in house or not, that doesn't matter. But I think like, you know, you can do a lot of damage with a good demand gen type person, a good product marketing person and a designer because each one of those two roles has to be an athlete in a sense of like yeah, product marketing might actually be your best first content person. And I think if you go look at a lot of, you know, series A startups, you go read their blogs, you read the, like the, all the blog content is really about their product and cool stuff you can do. And that's typically written by product marketing. But I think ultimately even before all that, it starts with having a philosophy on what you're trying to achieve as a marketing team and that should dictate then the team that you build. And so okay, we're a high volume SaaS business with a free trial model. Okay, that early team is going to look different than we're selling six figure plus ACV deals and it's going to be 100% ABM. That's different. And so I think being clear about like how you're going to do marketing and then you can figure out the pieces but I think you got to be able to have like content, demand gen and creative and I, and I would have demand gen own the initial marketing ops piece of that.

Nothing to add.

Oh, this is a good one. What is Chris versus Dave's definition of a demand gen marketer?

I imagine that we're not aligned here, but go ahead.

I don't know, I don't have a definition. Like I think it's a person. I think I would call it something different. I think it's a tight, I think it's a function. I think I actually have lately been really liking. I think it was Bill Macytis who he was on my podcast, the CMO Slack he talks about they don't even have demand gen. They have campaigns and I kind of like that. Which is like what if you match up product marketing with campaigns and then you also have marketing ops? I think demand gen. The only reason I don't like demand gen is like it's too, there's too much. It's really everything and every demand gen team and people that I've worked with, everybody feels like they're always doing all of the work, responsible for all of the results because it's all revenue related. And so like I would love to try to find a way to like to crack it out into a little bit smaller piece.

So I see if you look at the definition of demand gen, I'm just looking at this person is responsible for creating demand in the market. Desire for people to want to purchase our product. That's as simple as that. That's their mandate or objective. And then their job I find is to pull stuff from all of the other functions. This is probably semantics, right? Because this is probably a campaign person. I'm going to pull stuff from product market, I'm going to get stuff from creative, I'm going to get stuff from marketing ops to set up what I need and then I'm going to execute on all of that to drive the outcome that I want. And so that's sort of like the way that I, the way that I see it there. And I think one of the missing pieces of a lot of demand marketers is that they miss the customer understanding part of it which makes it difficult to put all that stuff together. Maybe folding it into campaigns would give you that piece of it.

The challenge is like the challenge with using the word demand is like there's, there's like 15 weight, there's like demand is, is all of marketing. You could demand for what? Demand for your podcast, demand for your email list, demand for customer existing customer expansion, revenue, demand for new revenue, demand for referrals. Like it's really, it's real ebook demand. It's, it's, it's hard. And so I think, I think, I don't know, that's maybe serious decisions has a good definition for who knows.

It's a weird one. Another thing to think about is MQL demand. Do you think that I've been starting to think recently that and I know that we're sort of like in a rabbit hole now but that like it's weird where you draw this distinction between like brand and demand. Like where do you, where do you draw the line? I feel like though, like they all do, they all drive demand. If you do a lot of good brand stuff, you probably don't need a lot of, you know, you don't need a ton of demand.

Yeah, it's different. Like here's an example. Superhuman when they launched super like just as a different business model superhuman email, they had 75,000 people on the waiting list before they launch. And so they weren't like, we need to hire a demand gen marketer. Like, they were probably more focused on product marketing or, or conversion. What was your initial. What was the initial part of that? I had something good to say.

I was reading this question. I lost my train of thought.

Whatever. Oh, brand. Oh, brand versus demand. Yeah, I think of it. I almost think of it as like, brand is in. They are. Brand is like almost like an agency in that like the goal, they should be separate because, like the way to be good at brand is to completely separate.

Stop selling. Yeah.

And. And they are content creators, designers, videographers, copywriters that are the badass team of creatives that are on the brand team that demand uses to power their campaigns. And when you have two great teams, like, they work, they can work really well together. The demand gen team is like, I actually have good creative and good copy and good offers and good ideas to work with. This is a superpower for us. And then on the other side, the brand team feels like, hey, I actually know that the stuff that I'm doing is being used because they want to feel like, hey, that that new video that we made for Facebook ads brought in more revenue than anything we've ever done. That video person is going to be like, I love demand gen. Right. Whereas, like, you know that that's how you create that relationship together. I like, I like when they're. There's. They're separate.

A couple more. Angelica, we can get. We can get two. We can squeeze two more in here.

Okay, any tips for a new marketer or creator who is way too qualitative, emotion and value based?

I mean, you know, the things that you are. That's part number one. You're too quiet.

Well, can you say qualitative, emotional and value based?

Yeah, I know. Those are all like their own thing. They're not all. Those are not all connect. They're all different. You're too value based. So you. Okay, that's good. You care about the results. I don't know. That's too philosophical for me.

So my recommendation, I'm not really entirely sure that I understand the question, so I'll just answer it in the way that I understand it is that you should just lean into those things. If you're too qualitative, then just go spend more time collecting qualitative information and then just make sure that there's somebody else on your team or whatever. You're having a business. Get a business partner. That's the quantitative business. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. I would just lean into your strengths and fill the gaps.

If you're too quantitative, listen to three calls a week and you'll get a nice little balance.

Mm.

Cool. What are the best practices you've developed for systematically collecting qualitative feedback from prospects and customers?

I got. I got this one. So, number one, social media. You can have all of your Twitter mentions piped into Slack or something. Have an intern or a marketing manager, whoever, do it yourself if you're following. If you are. Most of us as marketers are on the company branded accounts. And so v1 of this. I've done this for a very long time, and there is no system. It's literally me copying and pasting them and putting them in a spreadsheet to keep. Because you should be seeing that stuff. And so you gotta have your finger on the pulse of. So when you have your finger on the pulse of where conversations are happening, whether that's podcast reviews, Twitter, LinkedIn, social media, G2, you're kind of always browsing through that stuff. And so I've just kind of always made it a thing. And personally, very early days of drift for me, I had a Evernote notebook called Drift Love, and I would just be sharing, like, screenshots of customers of things people said. And that way I always had this kind of, like, library full of social proof and then eventually went on to have the person that was managing social media would be responsible for keeping a spreadsheet of, like, good social love and stuff that we've seen. Because of the other stuff, you can go to anytime and grab it. So like, I even have. We do this all the time. Even. Even for, like, my side thing, even for dgmg. I have somebody who helps me out with dgmg. She has a spreadsheet and she's just filling it up with, like, good things people have said about it. So then we can pull from that well on demand. I think it's. It's worth, like having a bucket where you're gonna. You're gonna deposit stuff.

Mm. I'm so, so passionate about having a video podcast for this reason, because it's all recorded. And, like, I had this. This idea back in the day, like, to interview. Our sales reps were not clinicians at that time, and they were talking to people that had gone to school and doing things for 12 to 16 years to figure out how to practice medicine. And we have sales reps that were selling copiers three months ago. And now we're selling medical devices, right? And so my idea was, what if we just start interviewing all of the best physicians in the country, put it on a podcast, and then all of our sales reps, when they're driving across the state to go to their next meeting, they can listen to the best physician in their territory, talk about the things that they need to know in order to get better. And so I think that a great. Dave mentioned my kind of logging it. I was just thinking through in my head, like, collecting that stuff, capturing in a spreadsheet. Would people, other people in your company actually even consume that? Trying to figure out a way where you can actually share those insights with other people, I think are super important because usually, and I've been guilty about this as well, you go out and do a ton of qualitative research, you understand your customers well, you put it into a buyer Persona, and nobody reads it or, you know, stuff like that. So trying to.

Yeah, I was trying to screenshot this, but I can't. But I got a great. I just signed up for zencastr because zencastr video is way better than Zoom. Chris, all the people I've said plug for Zencaster for podcasting. And a week after signing up and being a customer, I got this email. I got an email asking them to fill out, like a quick online. A quick form telling me about my business, what I'm doing, and to give a quick testimonial. Like, I bet that doesn't get everybody. But that's kind of a system now where, like, it's an automated email that goes out. There's probably a Google form that someone in their marketing team now is getting a couple, like, good customer stories and testimonials a couple times a week, just by kind of putting it in that existing nurture flow and asking for it.

And we've started to build paid social campaigns based on that feedback. Scouring G2 or some feedback like this about what people are saying, why they decided to switch, why they decided to use it, how their life has changed. And you can literally take your customer's words based on those and then build paid or some to other type, whatever campaign you want. I like using paid for those reasons for that type stuff. And use your customer's words, not words that you made up in a boardroom.

Totally. And people relate to that. When you show those screenshots in meetings and whatever, it's like.

Cool, man. All right, round two is complete. Appreciate all of you. Appreciate all of you attending. Dave, we always love having you here. Love your insights. I like the Q A format. I thought that was great. Anyone in the audience that liked the Q and A, give me a thumbs up so we can think about next time. Whether do a full agenda, thumbs down or thumbs up? Full agenda or we'll go. Okay, looks like thumbs up. So we'll lean more into the Q and A next time. People love that stuff.

Um, how will you measure this, Chris? How will you know?

We got the thumbs up, we got the recording, we're good. Um, so we're, you know, we'll coordinate a date for the next one. I would plan on probably like a month from now. So anyone that wants to drop it in their calendar when it's ready, Angelica and I will. We'll get it out to you so you can get signed up. Maybe we'll take questions in advance next time so we can kind of prep for that, but. Yeah. Dave, you got anything to close us out?

No. See you. See you. See you. Next time we'll do more together. Bye. Bye.

Yeah, see everyone. Appreciate you being here. Bye.