Chris Decker outlines four principles for building a personal narrative: have something to say, start imperfectly, iterate across channels like podcasting, and revisit your voice as it evolves. Record 30 minutes weekly, use Riverside FM to repurpose content across platforms, and own your audience data instead of relying on LinkedIn alone.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
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.
How will you keep your people around? Will you build an email list? Will you run some online events? Will you create your own community? Whatever it is, I would encourage you to think of the lifetime follow-up sequence. How are you going to stay connected to these new relationships? It's really tempting to think that, oh, I'll just continue to post on LinkedIn. But I'd like to kind of urge you that that's not the best strategy because you can't reach your entire connection base with your content on LinkedIn, nor can you reach them with DMs alone. There needs to be an added layer now where you own that data, where they are sitting in your Rolodex. So I'd like to keep the question in your mind, how will you keep people around? Principle 3 is just get started. I think the principle speaks for itself. We adopt the lean mindset, lean startup methodology here. We're very iterative with our content creation, and I want to share more with you right now. Some wise words from what I consider to be the number one business podcast of all time, the Tim Ferriss Show. Tim Ferriss, wise words about getting started: Conditions are never perfect. Someday is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it eventually, just do it and course correct along the way. And you might be thinking, well, I need to get approval for this. I need to— it's at a I know, I know it's not gonna be perfect. The perfectionists in the room like myself, this is making you want— this is making you really uncomfortable. But if you're not embarrassed of your first episode or your first piece of content, you've waited way too long to get it out. So how can a founder bootstrap their story and apply the Lean Startup model to their content? How can that content fuel product and how can that product fuel revenue? Well, number one, iterative storytelling through podcasting is long-form content. As you continue to do this activity and continue to speak over and over and over again, you're gonna get better at it. Number 2, omnichannel distribution solves for audience and community building. Your email list builds itself if you embrace this community model. It works. Number 3, repetition of communication and vision strengthens resolve over time. This makes you more confident in sales or as a founder or whatever your role is. Whether that be fundraising, selling, company development. This is a hockey stick in growth if you stick with it. It's not instant, it takes a little bit of time, but once you do start taking off, it really does take off. So practically speaking, it looks like hit record, publish, and then repeat over and over and over again. Do not focus on perfection, get it out. I had some content around finding your why, and I might be able to make these slides available. Later, but in this video, Simon Sinek goes over a really interesting example of how to find your why, which is to go to one of your closest friends and ask them, "Why are we friends?" Eventually, you'll get to a real answer of the value that you provide others, and it's not necessarily the business value you provide; it's the value you as a human being give to others. It's an innate value. It's an innate drive. It's an innate something. It might be that you make me feel inspired. Why are we friends? It might be that. that you help me feel seen and heard. So whatever yours is, that's gonna be a little bit of the reason why that's gonna fuel the growth and development of your content. So I encourage you to go look up some of this content around what's your why from Simon Sinek. Principle 4 is to go back to principle 1, have something to say. Once you reach a certain point in your content development, let's say you're 6 months down the line, you've had some success and some luck and some growth, You need to go back to principle 1 and you need to go through this exercise again with your soundtracks. What you say has evolved, what you do has evolved, you know, these things have evolved. So now you need to— now that you're starting to find your voice, you need to constantly go back and look at this with intention. So that is the 4th principle, is basically to go back to number 1 and rinse and repeat. Our growth philosophy here is you just need one person to listen, get your message, and pass it along to someone else, and you've effectively doubled your audience. You do this enough times with consistency, it will grow. Authentic storytelling times community equals growth every single time. It's not even an opinion. What is something practical that you can do? You can commit to recording 30 minutes per week. I recommend using a platform called Riverside FM for high-quality video and audio. And inside of Riverside, you have easy tools like formatting for Instagram for your short video clips. You can add your logo. It records high quality on both ends. You have some, you know, that cross-platform repurposing. You can export to Anchor FM, so that goes straight to Spotify. There's a lot of cool tools inside of Riverside FM for content recording. I highly recommend checking it out. Finally, how you can get started today with SalesCast. You can decide to schedule your first content recording session. And you can send it to us and we'll edit it. We'll create a content package for you for being a part of RevCon. You can join our community for free at salescast.community. Yes, that's salescast.community. You just drop that right in the, in your address bar and you'll be able to join our free community that way. That will help you with accountability. And then if you'd like to schedule 15 minutes with me to go over any of these things, if you have an idea, I would love to help you. Love to help you shape your content, whether you've been doing this for years and are just kind of stuck and want to get over that roadblock, or you're just getting started. Go to salescast.link/coffee, and that will book a link directly with me on my calendar. It has been an absolute honor being here today at RevCon. I had to do this pre-recorded. I am While this talk is going on, I'm in the hospital with my wife. We are delivering our second child, our baby daughter. We have a little boy, he's 2 and a half years old, and now our daughter Leah has entered the world. So I couldn't be here in person today, but Edward on our team is here to field any Q&A. And I look forward to seeing whoever would like to take me up on this offer of help with their content, salescast.link/content, whether you're an individual creator, Whether you're representing a huge company or a small company or anywhere in between, would love to meet you.
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.
