Creating and Communicating with Your Buyer Personas | S01 E14

Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido, and I'm the manager of acquisition and strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. We're also a top diamond tier partner with HubSpot, and we follow the inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. The goal of this podcast is to bring you stories of how people add value to their customers, their company, and the individuals around them. Today, I'm excited to have Nick Frigo join the podcast. You're a content creator, a Persona developer, and a growth accelerator at Newbreed, and you've been here for about eight months or so, and in that time, you've brought a ton of positive change here. But before we dive into that, I'd like to talk a little bit about your background. So you're from the New England area originally, but you were in Waco, Texas, before you started working on Newbreed, is that right?

Yes. So I'm from just outside of Boston, small town called Belmont. Worked and lived there until I was about 23, and then moved directly from Allston to Waco, Texas.

What brought you to Waco?

So my fiance got a very, very cool product buyer job at a company called Magnolia. So they run this TV show called Fixer Upper, which some of our listeners might be familiar with, but they were redesigning and opening a restaurant down there, so she got to do some of the product buying and design for that restaurant project.

That's pretty awesome.

Yeah, so we went down there for her, for her position. But it was a cool experience and, you know, cool. Cool to grow up in one area and, like, see a new part of the country and learn a whole different culture.

So I've never even been to Texas. I've heard good things from everyone I know who's either lived there or visited. But one day I need to make my way out there. It seems like a pretty cool spot.

It's very cool. So Waco is situated, like, halfway between Dallas and Austin, which are both really fun places to hang out, lots of places to, you know, eat seashores, walk around. And it's a cool. Texas is a cool hybrid because there's a lot of really interesting urban centers, but of course, it's Texas, so there's a lot of rural beauty and just a cool, cool, fun, interesting people down there.

So what brought you back up to the New England and specifically Vermont Area.

I think a few things we really liked a lot of the things about Texas. We liked the open space, we liked the natural beauty of Texas. You know, we liked being able to kind of disconnect, I think, from the modern world. I mean, she and I both spend a lot of time, you know, working in these digital environments and being super collaborative at work. So being able to like check out and kind of just slow down. Life outside of work is really something that we valued in the few places that we moved after Boston. So that's kind of like the through line between living in Waco and living up here in Vermont.

Vermont's a pretty cool spot. I lived in Pennsylvania before moving up here and even Pennsylvania, even though it's not considered like a busy area. Just the clearest illustration of the differences between Pennsylvania and Vermont I can describe through traffic. So in Pennsylvania, like traffic and getting to work was such a harder experience than it is here. No such thing as traffic in Vermont.

It's so true. Yeah. Well, actually I like to consider myself a pretty thick skinned driver. Just having grown up like in the Boston area and you know, we go back there probably every like month or two just to see family and both of our families are still, still right around Boston, so. And now I just like, my fuse is so short in traffic. Where like I used to be able to handle all the craziness, but now it's a lot worse. Yeah, it's a lot worse. Where in Pennsylvania are you from?

I lived in the Lehigh Valley. It's about an hour north of Philadelphia. It's a pretty nice spot because we're maybe about an hour or so from Philly and then about an hour and a half with no traffic to New York. So two cities pretty close by.

Oh, beautiful.

Yeah, it was a nice spot. I lived there for about 25 or 26 years before I moved up to Vermont for this job with New Breed.

Cool. So did you go directly from Lehigh Valley to Burlington?

Yeah.

Oh, that's so interesting.

Yeah, I was in literally the same 30 minute radius where I lived and grew up until I moved to Vermont. So I went from like that one small area to about six hours away.

Interesting. So that's kind of a similar experience that I had. Moving to Texas was really like growing up and working, living, studying in the same environment. And you get so fluent and so familiar with that place that like the next place you go, no matter where it is, it can feel really alien. And that can like really teach you a lot about. Oh yeah, it teaches you a lot about yourself and what you value is having any kind of relativity. Like, that is very helpful.

I feel like I've learned a ton just from the simple fact of moving from one place to another. Like, I've learned a ton in the job, and I've learned a ton from being here, but just from being in the Vermont area alone, it's been a pretty interesting experience.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

All right, so let's get into what you're doing now at New Breed. One of the first things that you and I worked on together, and I shouldn't even say worked on together, because I was kind of along for the ride while you worked on this, but I was involved to a certain extent. But you started working on redesigning our slide decks, and I thought that was so interesting and cool because it wasn't like anyone said, hey, Nick, go do this, or this is just a part of your job. You just recognize that this was something that needed to change, and you went ahead and you made it happen. So can you talk to me a little bit about what made you decide to start working on that and why we needed it?

I mean, I think, like, the best, most organic projects or products or whatever, they start from a place usually of a person or a group, like, wanting to do something for themselves because they see a need that's so organically true to them and to their group that they. Only after that do they realize, like, this could probably be helpful for. For the public. So, to be perfectly honest with you, the first thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to experience nicer, looking more effective, better storytelling decks and presentations throughout my day here at New Breed. So, like, a lot of the content that we had within them was needed to be updated. I mean, we're always kind of rolling out new products and services, so there was a lot of just strict content in there that needed updating. But, you know, formatting wise, it's nice to. It's nice to have. It's nice to have decks that. That are easy to digest. Yeah, I found that just driving adoption of what we do at the company, being able to talk through things with our clients, whether it's like an engagement report or sort of like a strategy presentation, they come off a lot cleaner and I think a lot more cohesive when. When you can see the story really clearly.

Yeah, I. I think, like, one of the things that happened before was our decks were usable, but no one really loved them, so everyone made them their own. And then they. You just had, like, all of these different permutations. Of this deck.

Sure.

And it just grew and grew from there to the point where at. At a certain point, probably around the time that you joined, like two decks that originated from the same one looked completely different from each other. And now that we have something where the decks that everyone is using, everyone loves, they don't change them as much as a result of that. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I think the goal to get design adopted and sticky is not really to be hyper prescriptive. So if you are creating a format that you say to everybody they need to use or, or else, I mean, that might be effective to an extent, but. But the evolution of like doing things yourself is pretty natural. So more than just redesigning decks is being able to design like a format that people can actually use themselves and can create new decks out of. That's like the real value of the redesign of the. I think the decks that we've been able to do internally. So a big part of the project, you know, was focused on creating decks and like systems within the decks that we could use to, to produce new documents on the fly because, you know, things move 100 miles an hour here. So we need to have presentations that people can build from scratch. But the problem is I have a design background, but not everybody does. So building a presentation from scratch is like not something that everybody can just wake up and do really easily, which I think is part of the problem that we ran into with the older ones.

Yeah, and one of the, like, this is such a simple thing, but one of the things that kind of helps illustrate that, at least to me, was I remember you talking through like the fonts that we were going to be using in the deck. And you just made a comment that was like, all of these are available in Google Slides. And, and that just highlights why it's usable because people don't have to go someplace else. They don't have to do anything outside of what's available in the deck to make it work for them. And fonts is one thing, but the entire deck was designed that way so that you didn't need to go and look for anything else. Everything that you needed was right there for you. So it just made it super useful for our sales team. And I'm sure people that are listening have experienced the fact that every sales rep wants to make something completely unique every time because they feel like they need to completely tailor the experience to the person that they're selling it to. But you built it in a way where it was accommodating for all Those unique experiences.

Yeah, that's really the goal. The degree to which the design and the integration of your own ideas into the design is seamless is really like the number one point of creating something that is going to have long term success. And that's really true for any design. I think that's true for a lot of the tools we use. I mean, if you think about the way that, the way that HubSpot works in terms of like how sales teams use it, it's usually the most effective. Stickiest tools are not the ones that are completely overhauling the way that sales teams and marketing teams operate, but they're ones that like fold into the process really smoothly.

So, yeah, I don't know if you've ever used Marketo or Product or any other marketing automation tools, but the one thing that I'll typically tell people if they're deciding between a few of those is yes, Marketo can do this, Pardot can do that, and you might have to do things a little bit differently in HubSpot to do the same thing. But HubSpot hands down is going to be the easiest thing for you to use. To me, that's one of the biggest selling points of using any tool is how easily it is for me to get in there, figure out what I want to do and to make it happen, regardless of the functionality of it. Sometimes I might be able to get a little bit more out of a particular campaign or a particular initiative by having that feature, but if it's difficult to make it happen, I might not even spend the time working on it.

Yeah, yeah.

All right. So the Dex was one thing, and I mean, honestly, that's just like one small piece of the puzzle of what you've been working on here. But it was still hugely impactful. The other big thing that you've been working on is our growth acceleration workshops. So before we even start talking about what you've done to change them, do you mind just kind of giving your elevator pitch for the growth acceleration workshop?

Sure, sure, I'd love to. I mean, the workshop is really, it's a few things. So it helps us align marketing and sales service teams and leadership of our CL around what their goals are, what their challenges are, to get to their organizational, maybe even sales and marketing specific goals, and then focus on the buyer Personas that we develop that map to those goals. So basically every company has a sense and people within the company have a sense of the people they're selling to. But a how accurate and how verifiable are those Buyer Personas and B, how do those buyer Personas, the people that we are selling and targeting to map to what the organization wants to do. So that's really like the purpose of the workshop is to bring both of those facets together. You know, in addition to that, it's a great, it's a great step in our onboarding process. It allows our services team to really get to know the companies really in depth without all having to be there in a long introduction in the room. So, you know, post workshop, which they usually range from three to four hours, we synthesize a long report that kind of overviews the company's products, what their product market fit is in their industry, what their sort of industry trends are, company trends are, and then the buyer Personas, like I said, that kind of create those situations for them, create the growth for them. So that's really what the product is of the workshop.

And before you get started with the workshop, you try to do a lot of information intake leading up to it to prepare yourself. The company has Personas taking a look over that and taking a look over their goals. How would you describe most companies initial state prior to getting into the workshop, especially as it relates to goals and goal setting?

Oh, that's really, that's a really, really good question, Guido. That's hugely, hugely different. Obviously companies have very different performance goals that they're trying to hit depending on their size, their growth state, maybe their kind of level of maturity. I'd say the through line though is they really want to build awareness of their company. They really want to. Most of the people that we're talking to in the workshop are really trying to drive, drive leads and drive interest at the top of the funnel. That's where I think most of our growth acceleration workshop partners struggle is building a pipeline of people who have interest and people who are a good fit for the company at the top of the funnel. So that later on in their buying process, in their journey toward a solution, that they actually are aware that you as our client exists. I think that's like the number one issue. Those teams have some pretty savvy salespeople, so they really know how to sell and demonstrate the value of that product. And some salespeople, they can be funny to have in the workshop because to them, I think sometimes the Personas are, they come off as a little nebulous. Like they're not sure why the segmentation or the differences between them are so important because you know they're going to sell the value of their products kind of the same. But as you unpack that a little bit, you do tend to find out that like A, they're sold differently depending on what those roles are and B, what those salespeople want, like I said, is more folks that they're able to qualify. So that top of the funnel, early pipeline generation, I think is a common thread between the organizational goals.

And that actually leads me to another question. What type of roles do you typically like to see? In the workshop you mentioned sales and then you have some key stakeholders in the company, but like what other roles need to be involved in something like this?

I actually just had a conversation with another one of our growth acceleration workshop leads here at New Breed, Karen Kreischer, who she and I were talking about the need for. The need for people in the service delivery role, people in the operations role, to be in the workshop with us. And the reason for that is that I think there's an error in thinking that the workshop is really, you want to develop Persona so that you can market to them, so that you can sell to them. And then everything after that is sort of less important. But the truth is that the flywheel model of selling things requires the customers to be interested in engaging further and further with your solutions. And so if you're not continuing to market to your existing customers, then that model kind of breaks at stage three. Right. It never repeats itself as it's supposed to. So having service people in the room, it really helps to validate the Persona pain points. So what marketing and sales might think is something that a buyer Persona is really looking to be demonstrated value for in the process of like this is the feature or the benefit of this tool that's like really going to speak to somebody in this role, the service person on that team is probably going to be able to say, actually when it comes to us implementing this tool for them, what they're looking for is an X, it's actually Y. And so if you don't have that voice in the room, it can be hard to do more of a longer term customer marketing strategy with them.

And it's kind of like the difference between who you can sell to versus who you should sell to. Because there's. Most companies can sell to. Well, I shouldn't say most companies can sell to anyone, but there's typically a much wider audience that you could sell your product or service to. But if you do that, you're going to capture people who don't have a good experience with the product who end up churning from the company and might Even end up hurting the company long term because they're not becoming advocates. And you talked about the customer marketing piece of it, and I think that's extremely crucial. But one of the biggest pieces of that is that trust, Mark, that a customer can provide that your company can't. Like when a company is talking about themselves and marketing about themselves, it's all self serving and people recognize it and they see that a little bit. But when you hear from somebody else, when you see a review of that company online or you hear from your friend that they recommend this service, people trust that way more than what the company says about themselves.

Sure.

So bringing those people in the door that have the potential to become advocates is such a better experience long term for your company and for them than doing anything else.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. And so talk. Exactly. Talking to people in the service role is what leads you to find people who are full evangelists of your company like that. And just talking to people in the sales and marketing role, you kind of only get 2/3 of the way there. But that, but that other, the sort of dark side of the moon of like what happens once you're serving them as a client, I think is actually more important than how you're maybe talking to them in your, in your brand assets or in your creative.

We. I don't even know if you were here for this, but we at one point ended up identifying a negative Persona for us where we could sell all day to this particular type of company, but whenever we did, they turned out to be pretty poor fits for us. They were pretty poor clients, they were difficult to work with and they ended up churning as a result. And at one point we told the sales team, if you sell to these people anymore, you're not going to get credit for it. Like that's how we had to end this because it was getting that drastic. And since we did that, I remember taking a look at the numbers at one point, but I remember our win rates, our average deal size, our close, our sales cycle all improved afterward because we also found out after recognizing that they turned out to be poor customers, that we also spent way more time selling to them. Even though we could close them, it just took longer. There was a lot more sales calories involved in it.

So the ROI on the sale was not only bad because they churned, but it was actually taking more time net than other Persona sales.

Exactly.

Yeah. I'm glad you figured that out.

Yeah, yeah, we figured it out before you got here. So yeah, you didn't have to worry.

About it what was the trigger for you to find out that that Persona was not ideal to sell to finance?

The first thing that came up with them was not necessarily that they were unhappy, it was that they stopped paying or they didn't pay as consistently as some of our other Personas did. So you were talking about the service side and I was going to mention that your finance team is another component that can be helpful in that. So they were actually the ones that started seeing it first and then they started talking to the rest of the team about it and then it became a whole thing where we had to stop selling to them.

So the first light shown on it was a finance issue, not a service delivery issue. Oh, that's interesting. Well, that's a key example then, Guido. That's perfect. So having somebody, if you're doing a new development of buyer Personas, if you have that finance role, that CFO accountant in the room who's actually gonna like speak up when, when you're developing Personas, think about all the headache you can avoid just by having a stakeholder like that there. Exactly.

And they might not need to be involved in the entire process. Maybe it's even just doing a quick short interview with them to bring that information to the workshop for everyone else to be involved in. Because if you're. You talked about a three to four hour workshop like that can be a really expensive meeting.

It is, yeah. And it's also. We put a lot of, I'm super proud of our team. We put a ton of front end and back end labor into the workshop before that three, three or four hour meeting. I mean getting four hours of company stakeholder time when they're all free simultaneously to meet is very challenging, obviously, even for, even for me. And that's my, that's my primary responsibility is those workshop. It's hard for me to get that blocked off. So doing as much work as you can to really drive value in that session is. Is something that we do a good job of. So that's a good example. If someone from the finance leadership role can't attend the workshop, then there are some questions that myself or other workshop leads are going to have for the finance role like that. Do you have a sense of what the ROI is on this Persona overall over the last 12, 18, 24 months? Right. That's an intake question that we're going to want to know before the workshop itself. If that person can't attend.

Exactly. So after you go through the workshop, one of the main outputs that we've been talking about is Personas. How would you recommend a company go about validating those Personas, like, a few months down the road to make sure that what was discussed and what we agreed upon is actually turning out to be the case?

That's a good question. I mean, it all starts in your database of contacts. I think that when it comes to the assessment and validation of Personas, I do think there is a kind of quantifiable assessment of those Personas, meaning the folks that are coming into your contact database, at what sort of level of correctness are they the Personas that you expected them to be? So that's something that you can. You can get hard data into that. I think, from the marketing perspective, though, not just like an automation or marketing tool perspective that gives you the quantifiable info, But I think that you can get. Get a sense of whether the qualitative information that you're actually using to speak to the Personas. So if you think that your Personas have these pain points and you're trying to validate it by talking to them in a certain way, by nurturing them in a certain way, by positioning your language in a certain way, if you find that that's not resonating, if you find that folks in the marketing sales process are being qualified and that's, like, not how they want to be talked to, it's a little hard to figure out how. It's a little hard to measure whether or not they want to be spoken to that way. But if you ever get the sense that that's true, then turning back to some quantifiable ways to. To validate that is good. But I do think it's important to think about, like, messaging and more of quality, like a qualitative way of validating that and then a quantifiable way within your contact database. So where the intersection of those two things is. Can be hard to. It can be kind of hard to locate that intersection. Yeah, But I think HubSpot does a good job of that of, like, telling you what the database is looking like on a very, very regular basis, reporting on that, and then, you know, doing any number of, like, sort of, whether it's a b testing or just like, reworking language to. To make sure that you're moving in the right direction. From a qualitative perspective.

Yeah. Well, I mean, at a certain point, it's really about making sure that you're capturing all the information that you need to about that person to get that quantitative side nailed down. And that can take a lot of Work on the operational side of things, like what questions you're asking on your forms, what information are you collecting on the contacts that are coming in? Because if you're using stuff like company size and annual revenue and industry to group people into particular Personas and you're not capturing that information on a consistent basis with the contacts that are coming in, validation is impossible at that point. Right.

And when you think about it, that form is being filled out because somebody either wants to talk to somebody in sales, somebody wants to download. Download a really valuable resource. Right. So if that valuable resource has a title that doesn't resonate with that Persona, then you're not even going to get any of that quantitative information in the first place. So that's what I mean is like the sort of intersection between qualitative and quantitative. So that messaging, whether you test it to make sure that you're moving it in the right direction or whether you switch gears entirely, is like, that's kind of the other side to that quantitative information. Because the form strategy is key. But nobody's going to. You're not going to get any information from that form if the thing behind it isn't speaking really, really accurately to those challenges of that Persona.

Exactly. Yeah. Those two things always need to be aligned. And you usually have people from different ends of the spectrum working on them, too. You have the operational team thinking about what questions we need out in the forum, and then the content strategy team may be coming up with what the actual piece is going to look like and what the key message is around it. But both those teams can be working in sync to make sure that you're going to be capturing and sending this to the right type of people. So once you get your Personas dialed in and put together, you're starting to validate them. You also work a little bit on the content creation side, too, at New Breed.

Yes, quite a bit.

So how do you leverage Personas when you do that?

We start. It's not so much leveraging. Personas is. Personas are the concrete foundation of the entire strategy of content. So when we're doing kind of an ongoing cadence of content development for one of our clients, or even I think you guys do it internally too. You're really starting the content strategy based on who the Persona is. So there's a few things you want to. You want to map toward. One of them is what the buyer Persona is that you're talking about. Another one might be keyword development that you're trying to rank for. Another one might just be More general thought leadership. This is an area that we want to be seen as experts in. Right. But all of that has to come from a point of who are the people that we're talking to? Which is why the synthesis of what their pain points are and what that Persona's challenges are. Also, more specifically, what their triggers are for when they feel like they need a solution for something, when they need to take something from in house to outsource, when they need to change one of their platforms, knowing really specifically what those are, documenting them through the Growth Acceleration Workshop, that helps us on the content development side, because we can refer to that report and say, these are the pain points that they have. These might even be the triggers that they have. This is language that we can really fundamentally base our content on for this Persona.

One of the things I've started telling the internal marketing team at Newbreed is before we create any piece of content, we need to ask ourselves, how does this address one of our Persona's pain points? How are they searching for solutions to that today? Or how are they thinking about this problem today? Because that helps us come up with the keywords that we want to target when we're creating the piece of content. And then the last thing, which I think sometimes people forget about is, is this interesting at all? Like, would someone be willing to click on this? Would someone be willing to read this, and would they find it to be valuable to them?

Yeah.

If we can confidently answer those three questions and it all maps back to our Personas and our content strategy, then like, 99% of the time, it's going to be something that's worth writing and it's going to be successful for us.

Definitely. How do you. How do you build out those data points strategically before you write?

It's interesting. There's a few ways. I don't do it necessarily for every piece of content individually. I do it in bulk. So I'll think about, okay, what pieces of content do we have today and how well is that working for our Personas and our contacts? And then I'll use that as a way to identify what gaps we have. And then I'll backfill that with the search terms and stuff that people are searching for around those gaps. And then we also ask a question on most of our forums, which is, what's your biggest challenge right now? Which we can then map back to those Personas. And if we're seeing that people aren't selecting a particular pain point very often, but we know that we solve for that pain point, then we can create more content to bring those people into the door. Because that's what that's telling me essentially, is that this pain point exists. We know it exists because we hear our customers talk about it. But if people aren't telling us that in the marketing process, then that means that we're not creating content that speaks to those people early enough on in the process.

Right. Very flexible product marketing then, because you're like, you're not just finding the topics that people are really interested in and doubling down on them. Obviously, you're doing some of that, but you're also finding the gaps of. This is a solution that, A, we have B, we know it's really valuable. So the reason that people are probably not expressing interest in that quite as much as we think they should is because we're not publishing enough SEO authority content on that. So let's go. So that mean that's a long game of content. Yeah.

Yeah. The way I started thinking about our content strategy at the end of last year was we've created content around, let's say, these five core topics so far, and we've created a ton of content around them. That number might be a little bit different, but it was something around that. And at a certain point, there is a peak of how much people are searching for those terms today. So when I was thinking about growing our website traffic, it was okay. If we want to really bring more people into the door, we need to start creating content that speaks to other challenges and other things that we haven't written about today, because there's essentially like a total addressable market of search terms that we can go after. So I use that as a way to figure out what else we need to work on in order to bring those other people into the door. And we've been creating content at a lot faster pace this year, and it's been interesting to see how that's influenced the types of people that we're bringing to the door. So we've seen a lot more new visitors come into the website, and we're seeing a lot more contacts come in too, because of that. So it's pretty cool to watch it kind of come to fruition over time. But that's the. While it's interesting, it's also sometimes frustrating because the one thing about SEO and about content strategy is it's typically a long game.

It is.

So we started this, like I said, I was working on it at the end of last year, and it's taken months to really be able to see all of the work that we did back then start to pay off. But we were patient. I had to be really patient sometimes and I got super frustrated certain times.

But it's, it's a stone building, it's not a concrete building. They last and they have the staying power long term, but the creation of it, it takes way, way longer to build a long term content strategy. So I feel your pain.

Yeah, that's like. I started off in paid. And paid advertising is great because you make a change and you see the results that instant. And then I went to that, to doing our content strategy, our content marketing. It's completely different.

It's a little more meditative, I guess. Yeah, that's funny.

But yeah, so identifying those gaps was huge for us and it's really helped us out a lot. The next thing I want to get into is how often you feel like it's worth going through this whole exercise of the workshop that we do because we, we do it to onboard clients and then it seems like we do it sometimes down the road. But do you think that's kind of just an organic thing that ends up happening or should you set a date to do it again at a certain point?

That's a great question. It's like cleaning your house. So you should clean your house on a regular basis. Right. You shouldn't need a catalyst to clean your house, but if you have people coming over, you should definitely clean your house. Because that kind of, that trigger to do it could be trying to grow into a new industry, trying to expand into a new territory, launching a new product. Right. These are all reasons that you would need to redevelop buyer Personas. You'd need to revisit the ones that you have currently. You might need to develop new ones, but you should still have like systemic review of the ones that you have currently. The ones that are sort of your bread and butter, vanilla ones that work ongoing. So I think it's both of those things. Yeah, I think that the more systemic, the more regular, the more rhythmic you can be with developing and really validating your buyer Personas. I mean, you know, we produce a whole lot of content here for ourselves and for our clients. And so it's actually, I think it's. People see it as maybe like just a challenging exercise. We have to do this again. But the reality is if you develop buyer Personas, you find new color and texture to add to their pain points. You find, oh man, there are these new triggers that we found that a lot of people that are a lot of our qualified leads are coming in and saying that this is why they're coming to us. That's great. Great ammo for really good content that you can write. So I think it's not so much of, like a bummer of an exercise that you have to do, but it can really rejuvenate the way that you write, the way that you talk about your value. So I think it should be done regularly. I think it's advantageous, not just because they're more accurate, but it's actually. It's just more fun. I mean, if you write for six, seven, eight hours a day, then, you know, the more stuff that you have to kind of base that off of, the more interesting it is for everybody.

At a certain point, coming up with new ideas around the Personas that you've been using for years potentially gets that much more difficult as those Personas stay constant. Right. So everything you were just talking about, about refreshing everything and bringing new ideas to light is so helpful when it comes to building out your next round of content strategy. And one of the reasons I brought that up is because we're about to do a growth acceleration workshop for New Breed. I'm so excited for it.

Me too. Yeah.

And we're trying to bring in every one of those roles that we talked about. So we have finance, we have people from the service delivery side, we have marketing and sales. Hoping that's going to turn out really well. I have no reason to believe it's not going to. But you're going to be one of the people running it. Karen's going to be joining as well, ideally. What are you looking forward to learning when we do it?

I think that being a part of the company here at New Breed, I have a very good sense of what our organizational challenges are because I'm part of the organization. I also have a good sense of what our organizational goals are. That's something that we focus on a lot. The leadership here is very. There's a really good, flexible relationship between team leads and senior members here and the leadership between. What direction do we want to go? How can we serve our clients better? There's definitely two ears, one mouth situation to developing those plans. So what I'm looking forward to is being able to convert all that great information that a. Some of which I already know, and then having that leadership team in the room and being able to learn in more detail what that is, how to map that on to our buyer Personas. So if we're launching new products, if we have new growth goals, how can our buyer Personas that have maybe worked for us from, you know, 2017 to now, how can we adapt those, maybe scrap them and build new ones, build on top of them to map to those goals that we have going forward. And that's an exercise that, I mean, we have to walk the walk if we're going to continue to serve our clients that way. Which is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to doing that so much. It's just such a valuable exercise to do. And, you know, we're growing very fast. Our product roadmap is pretty, pretty exciting and aggressive. So looking forward to getting the buyer Personas really up to speed with those things.

Yeah, I've. I've been in our growth acceleration workshops before, but it was when I first started at New Breed and from what I understand, I haven't been in one since you've started doing them, but from what I understand, they're much different and much better than what they used to be like. So I'm really excited just to see what's changed or what's new about that. But in addition to that, I've got some plans for Q4 and beyond that, I'm really excited to start to use those Personas for. I don't know if I've talked to too many other people at New Breed about this yet, but I'm really hoping to redesign our website starting in 2020. And if we have these Personas to work with, it's going to make things so much better. Our content right now, I think works out really well and it's served us well for the past about two years or so, but it's in need of some love and it's in need of a bit of a change. And I think this is going to help out a lot with that.

Yeah, it is an industry, you know, marketing, sales, consulting as an industry more specifically, but just creative in general. It shifts so quickly. It's so mercurial in terms of what people are looking for, what people value, whether it's short term trends or more long term kind of platform and technology driven trends. Like it just changes so much. And so redesigning the website, redeveloping workshop Personas is really something that like people should basically have one foot in that territory all the time. It shouldn't be something that. And I know you know, this, which is why we're doing this whole engagement with the site and with the, with the Personas is really. It should just not be something that you kind of pick up every nine or 12 months and think about, for the first time, it should just always be in your pocket. You should always be walking around with it.

Yeah. I'm so excited to get working on this. So one of the last questions I have for you is what is your favorite part about what you do?

Oh, man, I love being flexible. So, you know, I think balancing the breadth of clients that we have and being able to speak basically, you know, Greek for one second and then Cantonese the other second, so to speak, because when we, you know, we serve clients in so many different industries is one of my favorite things to do also. I just get to learn so much. The B2B SaaS and software world is there's so many fascinating technologies and solutions out there that otherwise I would have no idea what they do, how they function. And you really just get this kind of back end view into how that world works and how the technology solves for those things.

And.

You know, that's. I just, I just find that really, really interesting. There's a. There's a great culture here at New Breed of working quickly but taking the time to learn about those things because they're interesting and they help you enjoy your day, but they really, that's how you fundamentally add value to the way we serve clients is by really understanding who they are. It helps us partner with them when you can get on the phone with somebody like that, talk through a content piece and truly speak the technology language and the industry language that they have. So that's my, I mean, that's my favorite thing.

That's awesome.

And the cold brew is great.

Any final thoughts you want to leave people with?

No, I think, I think I'm really, really excited to be able to do what I do and to work with people like you who are not just interested in it, but who are eager to move the needle, move things forward, and continue to evolve the industry. So I love it.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed getting the chance to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining today. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for our other great resources. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.

SA.