In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews Chris Decker about the importance of retention in a content‑led growth strategy. Decker introduces the concept of “soundtracks,” three core messages—relationships, content, sales—that he repeats to clarify his value proposition. He explains that retention hinges on connection and repetition, urging listeners to pick a single content lane (podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.) and focus on building relationships with ideal clients, partners, or influencers. Decker shares a personal anecdote about keeping a physical Rolodex, illustrating how consistent outreach creates repeat business. He presents data from top B2B podcasts showing solo episodes achieve 91%+ completion rates versus 67% for interview formats, emphasizing the need for the host’s voice to retain listeners. To operationalize retention, Decker describes building a Slack community for podcast guests and listeners, allowing scalable communication, activity tracking, and peer interaction—an approach he contrasts with traditional CRM. He notes that RevGenius’s 600‑plus podcaster community generates net‑new business, reinforcing the principle that keeping people around through repeated, meaningful engagement drives growth.
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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.
I want to introduce you to soundtracks. And what are your soundtracks? Much like this previous statement, these are 3 soundtracks that I repeat over and over and over again here at SalesCast. It's relationships, community, sales. Relationships, content, sales. Relationships, content, sales. Relationships, content, sales. I repeat it over and over and over and over and over again. Build new relationships with their ideal clients. There's so many different ways to talk about building new relationships. Serving your community through impactful content. There's infinite amounts of ways to talk about creating community through content. Driving more ethical sales in your business through your own platform. I talk about owning your data and the way that marketing is shifting and the way that we have a responsibility in sales to make sure that we're facilitating the right kind of connections and transactions. Okay, so what are your soundtracks? What are 2 to 3 things that you could say over and over and over again that communicate with clarity what you do, what your business does, what you stand for in the marketplace, etc.? If you can nail this, you've started to nail principle 1, which is always coming back to— I'll just recap— have something to say. All right. Principle 2 is keep people around. This is that retention that I showed you on the growth chart. Part of keeping people around is understanding who you want to be around. So I want you to pick your path. You can have a combination of some of these, but usually getting started in this new kind of content-led growth philosophy is you wanna stick with one of these lanes, at least in the beginning for your first season, whether you're creating a podcast, a YouTube channel, writing LinkedIn content for the first time, I want you to focus in. So building relationships with people your clients follow, whether that's influencers, speakers, authors, coaches, content creators, gurus, experts, authorities, or literally your exact ideal clients. So we're talking about demographics, psychographics, or on the right, partnerships, affiliate partners, people that have the same ideal client, referral partners, people that will share content with their audience, complementary services. Choose one path in the beginning. If you're mixing all 3 at the same time, it can get kind of confusing. Trust me on that. It'll save you a lot of time and frustration. Okay, retention is a function of connection and repetition, or stickiness. I keep a physical Rolodex on my desk. It's a weird habit, but I do it because when I was a kid— over here, this is my great-grandmother. In Italian, she's— her name is Nonna. Nonna. She was in real estate and she had a Rolodex too. And she had, she had a phone that looked just like this. And on Sunday afternoons, she would open up her Rolodex and call her past clients, check in on them saying, hey, how's it going? You know, how's the house I sold you? How are the kids? You know, whatever it was. And she would continue to work that list over and over and over again. It would, and it resulted in so many new sales. And repeat customers over the years. She just kept working the list and this was her relationships. People were— she was getting people to stick around. She was showing she was consistent. Why would anybody go to anyone different at this point? And so, what I want you to start thinking about is as you build this content pipeline, as you build these net new relationships, focus on keeping them around. What can you do that's going to allow you to consistently communicate with them, to connect and communicate? Now, there's a couple of interesting things when it comes to podcasting specifically. So this is some data we got across 60 of the top 10% B2B podcasts. And this has to do with completion rates of new episodes on the podcast feed. So a typical interview podcast has about a 67% average completion rate if you're a great show. So this is the host and the guest, whereas a solo episode where it's just the host has a 91%+ average completion rate. If people are sticking around longer, they're developing a relationship with the host. What we've also found is by having guest recordings, this develops new audience. People are coming into your audience because of them, but they're sticking around because of you. Do not ignore having your voice in your podcast or your content and whatever you're doing. If it's only about other people, there, you're gonna have a little bit of a retention problem. But if you're making sure that your own voice is in there, you are giving yourself a much better chance of success with retention. They're gonna come for the guest, stick around for you. And what do you do with them? Well, what we've done is we have a Slack community. We have a simple signup form. Anybody that's come on, you know, one of our shows, a podcaster, etc., they come in and they join our community. And now I have a lot of valuable actionable data. I can send community Communication at scale. I can see who is the most active. We've chosen to we've chosen to build our list inside of a community, and this is way different than some of the traditional CRM thinking. This is about engaging people over and over and over again, getting them talking to each other. And if all of you are members of RevGenius, you know intimately what community is like because you experience this every day. Now we're over 600 podcasters in our community and it continues to grow every day. We see new people joining and the list continues to grow and we continue to connect with that list and it has resulted in net new business for us. And so this principle really, really works is keeping people around.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.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.
