Chris Decker, founder of SalesCast, explains content-led growth in B2B sales. He argues that remarkable, shareable content requires a clear identity and vision. A SaaS podcast he worked with saw massive audience growth, more demos booked, and net-new revenue within a year.
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Hey everyone, thanks for watching that video. I had a lot of fun putting that together, and I just wanted to share with you in that quick video that I made earlier this year a little bit more about myself and why I do what I do in a fun format. As I said, I did that 100% on my iPhone, and I like to say, so that's no excuse for not having the right equipment. You can literally get started with anything you have, even the phone in your pocket. We're going to cover 4 principles of content-led growth. Let's dive right in. I'm gonna ask a few questions. Have you ever wasted time on unqualified leads? Have you ever stressed out over the length of a sales cycle? Have you ever struggled to align sales and marketing? Have you ever been overwhelmed by too many options for getting started on this? You see, today in 2022, the sales world has shifted forever. The old way that I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with were like robotic LinkedIn DMs, really boring newsletters, kind of this whole thing around funnels that happened for a while, paid ads that just were not working, a lot of pressure cooker kind of stuff. The new way that we've shifted into and that we're shifting into is more authentic connections, story-driven product, brand values, developing people, delivering a huge amount of value, community-led growth, getting feedback faster, creating impactful content, a longer-term nurture. I know this, you know this, you don't need me to tell you, but I just wanted to put that into perspective a little bit. Who are we and why are we doing this? At SalesCast, we help teams, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs build an audience, drive revenue, and transform their businesses through impactful content. A little bit of a case study. You can see a content, a podcast for a SaaS company that you all know and love and probably use on a daily basis. They are product-led. They started working with us right here, and you can see literally after just 1 year of working with us, the kind of difference we made in the growth of their audience. This resulted in a massive audience growth. This accelerated signups. This accelerated demos booked. And a lot of net new revenue. I wanna share a little bit more about sales-focused content publishing. We're about 3 things. We're about relationships, relationships with your ICP or partners. We wanna help you deepen existing customer and client relationships. We're about content, full-length videos for YouTube, audio, short clips, punchy clips on a regular schedule across your social media channels. Sales, we're all about sales. Net positive experiences result in platform and audience growth. But they also kind of skip the trust funnel straight to a sale. We're gonna cover more of that in a little bit, but I wanna get straight to principle one, which is have something to say. The first principle of content-led growth is to have something to say. I'm sure a lot of you have seen something like this where it is the growth, kind of the way of growth. So on the bottom we have your total addressable market. And in this case, this is the entire podcast market if I were talking about that for myself. The impact on growth is on the left. It's pretty much impossible to hit the total addressable market. On top of that, acquisition is about a 1-to-1. It's really hard to do. And this is your guests and your earned audience. Moving up there is retention, which is pretty doable. It's easy to do, is to— how many people stick around? How can we get people to stick around? This has about a 50x impact on your growth. But what has the most impact on your growth by far is— Retention. How many people share or intentionally let others know about what you do? This is actually one of the easiest things to do, so we're gonna focus on that for just a minute. And this is principle 1. You see, referral is a function of shareability. Sharing the flame doesn't put out this match. There's an infinite amount of shareability. How do you make something shareable? Well, shareability is a function of remarkable content. Can you remark on it? Remarkable content knows what it is and who it's for. On the outside of this circle, this concentric circle that you'll see on the right, are your outcomes, which is what you want to happen, which is to, you know, make $5 million net new MRR this next coming year, to grow your LinkedIn following, to hire 10 new SDRs, whatever those outcomes are for your company. Inside of that circle are processes, which is in this sense in content-led growth, this is how you say things. So these are processes, these are sequences, these are methods of doing something. It's your style. But the thing that I wanna talk about today is identity and vision and the core of this, which is what you say. 'Cause what you say is going to lead to that remarkability, which leads to that shareability, Which leads to that referral. If someone understands who you are, what you stand for, they're much more likely to share that with someone else because of the clarity, versus if you just went out all day long telling people how much money you wanna make, they may not decide to share that with anybody else, or they may share it for the wrong reasons. And I know you've seen, you've probably met plenty of people like that. Today, I wanna focus here on what you say. Yeah. Here's what I say almost every chance I get in regards to SalesCast, and here'd be a good example. At SalesCast, we partner with visionary entrepreneurs and B2B sales leaders to produce a podcast that builds new relationships with your ideal clients, serves your community through impactful content, and drives more ethical sales in your business through your own platform. Now, if you're our ICP and you heard that, you might have kind of something in your mind that says, wow, you know, you totally get it. How do I get started with something like that? And that's what we want to evoke. This is what creates that shareability, is that clarity.
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 2 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.
