In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews Chris Decker, the founder of SalesCast and a pioneer of "content‑led growth" for B2B companies. Decker opens with a personal narrative, recounting how he built the OC Tech networking group in Orange County, launched multiple startups, and served as CMO at a venture accelerator. He then describes a pivotal period in 2019 when, while working as head of sales for a high‑growth marketing agency, he battled addiction and found sobriety through a Christ‑centered 12‑step program. The experience taught him the power of authentic storytelling, prompting him to launch a podcast that interviewed business leaders and eventually grew into a 600‑podcaster community and a 13‑person team at SalesCast. Decker explains that podcasting is a vehicle for a broader framework he calls content‑led growth, and he outlines four core principles that B2B marketers can apply immediately to accelerate revenue. Throughout, he emphasizes community building, consistent storytelling, and leveraging content as a scalable growth engine.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
Today I'm going to share more about discovering the power of content-led growth. I've got my iPad here in my hand for some notes, so I'm just going to get started. My name is Chris, and I'd like to start off by sharing a story with you. In 2014, I made a leap of faith and launched a networking group here in Orange County called OC Tech. With fire in my heart, I bootstrapped the monthly meetings to over 300 attendees at a time. With a community of 8,000 people, I secured sponsorships with all the hottest tech companies, and we'd have speakers like Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory come hang out with us on any given night. My career was taking off, and I kept the entrepreneurial spirit alive. I founded and co-founded several companies which are alive today, and some that didn't make it. I served as a CMO at a venture accelerator and truly felt like I discovered the purpose of my life to make money. Now there's a lot to unpack there, but I'll save that particular therapy session for another time. Instead, I'd like to fast forward to 2019. In 2019, I was commuting from Irvine, California to Venice Beach in Los Angeles every day to work my job as head of sales for a pretty famous growth marketing agency. They had invented the style of LinkedIn post writing that has become mainstream in B2B marketing. Some say they broke the internet. Every day my calendar was full of calls with qualified prospects, literally every single day. You see, we'd proven ourselves because we gave away all of our best guides and content inside of our community. Cmos, founders, and professional marketers followed us like we were a religion. Why? Because the stuff that we shared worked well. So whenever I got on a call, most people were ready to buy within one to two meetings tops, with very light follow-up. The hardest part was keeping up with the demand on the fulfillment side of the house, but that's another talk. For another time. But I ended up leaving. Some of you may ask, why would I give up a dream job like that? I made great money. I got to go skateboarding in the middle of the day on the Venice Boardwalk and was working with arguably the brightest minds in B2B marketing at the time. But inside, a war was raging. I was battling with addiction and alcoholism. And after hitting my rock bottom in my marriage, I started attending a Christ-centered 12-step step group called Celebrate Recovery. Now, the rest of my talk is not a 12-step meeting. You don't have to leave immediately. We're not going to go there. But there's something very interesting that I learned in those circles that woke me up in a big way and led to some aha moments that created some of these founding principles of content-led growth. Inside these groups, I heard the stories of people from all walks of life and all ages. They struggled with the same things that I struggled with. They had broken free from their addictions and found true freedom. I was afraid that sharing my true self and true story would cause people to run away from me, but instead it brought them close, and I found freedom. So on March 18th, 2019, I found freedom and sobriety in a moment of clarity, and I've been sober ever since. It was the stories that had transformed my view of what was possible. I had made a deal with God that if I survived all of this, that I would dedicate my life to this kind of storytelling. So when I quit the agency job, it was more like a graduation ceremony than something that would be viewed as negative. I'd found a calling in life, and so with the founder's blessing, I moved on and went back home. With a few consulting clients and a big dream on my heart, I started my first podcast and started staring into a webcam and a microphone, speaking into an empty room and posting that on the internet. I interviewed people from my business network and uncovered their stories. And I discovered that this kind of storytelling led not just to myself and my guests discovering their purpose, but the people that followed the show online. More and more people started to enter my life, and they asked me to start producing shows for them like I'd created for myself. And that continued, and it continued. Today, several years later, I get to do the same thing here at SalesCast, just on a bigger business scale. I get to share the power of content-led growth with B2B companies, large and small. I have the privilege of serving a team of 13 incredible team members, a community of over 600 podcasters, and have learned a ton of lessons training hundreds of business content creators to connect with their story, Multiply that with community and experience the kind of groundbreaking growth that we've coined content-led growth. And today I want to share some of those lessons with you. Now, today is not just going to be me speaking at you. I want you to get way more out of this than that. There's going to be some work on your end too, but for now, let's get started. Some of you may be asking like, so you're gonna talk about podcasting? Yes and no. We're talking about content-led growth. Podcasting just happens to be a phenomenal vehicle for that. We're gonna cover 4 fundamental content-led growth principles you can apply today to grow your B2B marketing organization that you can apply insanely fast.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free, and it only takes like two seconds. And you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
