The $Million Executive Content Strategy Every Leader Needs

When was the last time you read anything Google or Microsoft's LinkedIn company accounts had to say? Almost never. And yet we are reading what employees of Google and Microsoft have to say, right? What that tells you is brands are being built by individuals, and all you need is like a tribe of 1,000, 10,000 people to follow you. No matter who you are, there are 10,000 people out there that subscribe to your world.

Do you encourage your teams to also post? What mistakes do you see executives making? Can you talk about what you're seeing in the industry that's making the attention economy so important in today's market. In this episode of Executive Signal, I'm joined by Santosh Sairam.

3 out of 4 contents that I publish is only for growing my community. So when you post a content for the next 12 hours, you have this halo effect. You are like a micro-celebrity. Now you have this micro opportunity for an ask. Now 3 out of 4 times I have no ask. Now 1 out of 4, I do want to have an ask. Conversion rates on anything else is just so low, but conversion on this is super high.

I think you just shared a playbook That every executive can use. He was an executive at ZoomInfo where he joined when the company was around $10 million a year after 12 years. And then in the next 3 years, he helped grow inbound from about 300 leads a month to over 40,000 leads a month, which then grew the company to $100 million just in a few years. Then he went to Apollo where he helped it hit unicorn status in about 18 months. And then he joined Adam Robinson at RB2B and with a 3-person team, they had about 50,000 accounts in 8 months, now doing about $5 million in ARR in just 1 year. Pretty incredible growth. He's now building Xeer AI, which we'll talk about, and his LinkedIn posts get tens of thousands of views all the time, lots of engagement. And in this episode, he's going to share how executives can get noticed in today's attention economy to drive visibility, credibility, and pipeline. Santosh, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Raj. So thrilled to have this conversation. Looking forward to it.

Yeah, and when we were talking about this during our preparation for it, we talked about the attention economy and how this is really changing the game in terms of subsidizing CAC, cost to acquire a customer, and lots of other metrics. Can you talk about what you're seeing in the industry that's making the attention economy so important in today's market?

Absolutely. So there are two big vectors that we need to be aware of that leads to why attention economy is becoming so important. Number one, the CAC has been rising dramatically in the last 3 years. So there was this research from Winning by Design in Europe that looked at top 50 public SaaS companies, and they found that the CAC had risen about 60% in last 3 years. Now the question is, why is CAC rising? And that leads to the second vector. So with AI, the cost of building a product is going down to almost near zero. What that means is they're just going to be more and more new entrants in the market, and the TAM is not going— growing at the same rate new entrants are coming in the market. So then revenue has to be shared, and then this is kind of resulting in higher CAC. Now, back to attention economy. Now, if you are one of those vendors and you had a hard time competing with 30 competitors, get ready to compete with 300 in the next 12 months. Right? And everybody is going to look the same. You can no longer hide behind a superior product because AI is also creating product parity. Because if you put in 6 months and build 2 beautiful screens after doing a lot of product research and survey, guess what? Within next week, all your competitors are going to copy. If it's a good idea, AI is enabling it to move faster and faster. So All products are going to look the same. Number of product vendors are going to explode. And the challenge shifts on how you're going to differentiate, how you're going to capture your buyer's attention.

That leads to a great point is how do you do that? You know, we see some people like you, you're a very prolific poster online on LinkedIn. You hear some very deep thoughts. And I think a lot of executives look at themselves doing that and they just get stuck. You know, they freeze, they're not sure what to post. Maybe they feel like they don't have the time. And what I've heard as a counterargument to that is that you actually don't, it's, you better make the time because there's nothing better to do for growing your business, for your go-to-market strategy. So can you comment on that? Like, what do you say to an executive who hasn't actually posted? Who should start posting to actually drive that attention that differentiates their product.

Yeah. Yeah. So those days are gone when, um, teams built brand. When was the last time you read anything Google or Microsoft's LinkedIn company accounts had to say? Almost never. And yet we are reading what employees of Google and Microsoft are saying, right? What that tells you is brands are being built by individuals. So the prime role of execs are to build these brands in moving forward. They cannot be relying on the branding teams. They have to provide air cover to the rest of the company. Why executives? Because they have the stories, they have the experience, you know, arguably they are an executive because they have a strong sort of journey and a story to share. You can't expect, I mean, think about the last decade or two, the junior most employee in my organization, the SDR tries to connect with the senior most employee of my buying organization, the CEO, right? And that has no value to provide. Why should they earn the right to talk to like 20 minutes of CEO's time, right? That was an inefficient process. The right way to do is the CEO on one company connecting with the CEO or decision maker or exec on the other company, right? And that one-on-one, you can do it, but how do you do this at scale? And that's where I think a lot of the new playbooks are being built on how do you capture attention? How do you post content? So, Another advantage execs have is in the course of the business, they run into very interesting business problems or business solutions. And all execs do in, in their own vertical, in their own business. What I do, and this is my personal hack, it might work for others. I keep a notepad open throughout the week. And as I find something interesting, either a solution or a problem, I realize there are hundreds of people out there that may have the same problem or looking for the same solution. I keep a note and then over the weekend I block out like 2, 3 hours of time to go over that and turn them into a couple of posts for the week.

That's a great approach. And I've talked to other executives about it. I call it story banking where you're just, you have a lens on throughout the week. You're not going to be writing something throughout the week necessarily, but at least you're tuned in, you've got your radar up so that you can receive information that says, ooh, this is something that made me really think. Probably other people are experiencing the same thing and you make a note of it. That's great. I sometimes find that I do my best thinking when I go on walks and I just keep my phone and I will stop and I will just hit the record button, record my like 30-second idea and then just keep walking and makes for a lot easier content creation. And I think This ties into why Goldman Sachs is saying that we're in such a creator economy right now that in just the next couple of years, it's going to be a half a trillion dollar a year business just creating quality content. With all that noise, you've got to have a signal, which is why we call the podcast Executive Signals. How do you get that signal across? Let me ask you this. How do you recommend that executives start showing up publicly to build their personal brand? Because they may not feel like they want to share anything that feels, I don't know, vulnerable. Maybe they hesitate to click post because of a reaction they might get. And so, how do you overcome that fear?

No, that's a great question. I have undergone some of that myself. So for people that don't know this, 18 months ago, my LinkedIn had only 4,000, 5,000 followers. I never wrote. On LinkedIn. I was one of the first users on LinkedIn, but I never really invested time. But when we were thinking of doing our B2B, we realized that this was the most efficient way to connect with our users, build a market and co-create and work in public. So we intentionally and deliberately started this LinkedIn journey. Adam started before I did. But in the last year, year and a half that I've done this, I have seen the growth and the value and I could apply this community that I've built to any business that I do from moving forward.

Well, let me double-click on that. That's a really interesting point because I think some people might be thinking that it's just, okay, I'm building a network so that I can sell for this particular business. But you just shared that this is now your network, this is your community. So you're, you know, you've, you alluded to you're gonna have another business in you at some point. And so going forward, this is something you can take with you. And I think people may not always realize that. So totally, totally.

And I think the future sales reps will have each have their own community. The bigger community they have, the more influence and maybe, you know, more seniority they'll get. But then once they switch over to another company, they'll take the entire community and make them buy new products at the new company. So influencers are the best, are going to be one of the better sellers.

Yeah. That's a, if that's not a compelling reason to start posting online, I don't know what is. So you can take this network with you.

I'll answer part of the, one part of the question that you asked before. Before I forget, in attention economy. So you asked what kind of questions and the, should we say vulnerabilities or like everybody wants to just stay positive and not share. So it turns out if you think about attention, all attention is good, even if it's bad attention, even if it's good, it's like press release, right? So sometimes, so you find your own sort of formula to get attention. Now it turns out some on LinkedIn, if that's one of the primary B2B channel, everybody's just sharing success and, you know, good news and so on. So if you go there and share vulnerability, to the, that's still applicable, maybe related to B2B or if you do shitposting, but not go too negative, kind of manage those content actually do far better because now you're differentiating from many other. And Adam is actually really good at this. He's done a lot of shitposting and he shares a lot of vulnerability and he's He's done excellent capturing attention. So attention doesn't always have to be captured through the traditional innovation thought leadership route. It can be captured by sharing anything that's top of mind, as long as others can resonate. So here's the key. When people resonate with you, they buy from you.

I think, and I was gonna ask you this a little bit later in the podcast, but let's go there now. Getting the attention is one thing. Turning that attention into dollars is a completely different thing. And I think many people chase what we might call vanity metrics, number of likes, number of comments, things like that. Is there a way, is there another metric that you use to see how effective your posts are? Is there some direct line to revenue? Is there a roundabout line to revenue? And is it only just revenue? Is it something else too?

So strangely enough, this is almost a pattern that I've seen on my posts. The posts that don't do well tend to drive more revenue for me or more meetings for me than the posts that do well. And I've thought about that a lot and like, that's totally counterintuitive, right? And here's how I explain it. Maybe if you have a better explanation, if I write something that appeals to most people out there, the broader audience, turns out that's actually, I may get, let's say, 1,000 likes. And if I'm chasing likes, maybe those are the content I write and I get a high when I get 1,000, but then I get no valuable or less valuable meetings. Right? Versus I get only 50 likes for a post that would otherwise look like a failure and I get 10 meetings out of it. Now, let me explain. And that's the reason why you should not chase likes, right? If you are, so the reason is, say my meetings are generally with decision makers or execs and they are fewer in numbers anyways. So if I want to evoke a response from them, I cannot be chasing broad themes of content or that appeals to everybody. And certainly I'm not going to get a lot of likes from if I'm only focusing on VP and above, right? So that's one point. But here is how I bridge the gap between content and revenue. So 3 out of 4 contents that I publish is only for growing my community. Or engaging with my community, right? So when you post a content for the next 12 hours, you have this halo effect. You're like a micro celebrity because you have already provided some value. Now you have this micro opportunity for an ask. Now, 3 out of 4 times I have no ask. I just produce content and I try to genuinely help around the ICP and my content pillars. Now, 1 out of 4, I do want to have an ask. And what I do there is I carefully craft that piece of content for a certain ICP. And then I have this automation going on in the background that anybody that likes or engages with the content, I scrub their title and company against my ICP. And if they're above VP and above, or they could buy what I'm selling. I have this automation that drops in a LinkedIn message to them saying, hey, I'm building something. Do you want to check out? Or here's my calendar link, just a one-line, two-line message, which is big enough. Like a generic message. I send the same message no matter what I write. And then the calendar link, it turns out I get over 50%. I'm only sending that link to people that have already qualified and match my ICP.

So, but this is automated though, right?

Oh, this is 100% automated.

Yeah.

So now the beauty is my calendar starts filling up and this is the, this is how, uh, the magic of, uh, this, uh, thought leadership or content on social, it, the connections happen in bursts. It's not linear. It's nonlinear, right? Now, because these people have gotten value from me already, they're indebted. They want to do something and they want to connect and they want to talk to me. And I keep those calls very short, 15 to 20 minutes. Mike, every time I've done this, I've gotten like 50 to 100 meetings booked. Eventually I pull that link and I stop that automation because next 4 weeks of my calendar gets booked. And I can't take more meetings. Now I find, I've experimented, I've done this 10, 10 to 15 times now. I find that if I run the same play after 24 hours of doing the post or 48 hours, I get almost no response. So what that tells me is that, that, that celebrity effect goes away. They don't even remember who Santosh is. They don't know who I am. They just move on with other things in their life. But if they were impressed with your content and they're senior folks, try to get them within the next like 6 hours. Okay. And that's one of the most highly— everybody I've shared this with have benefited tremendously. Conversion rates on anything else is just so low, but conversion on this is super high.

Let's dive a little bit deeper into this because I think you just shared a playbook that every executive can use. Is there a tool that you used for this that's already out there, or did you build it through Vibe Coding?

So, no, I had somebody build it for me, but there are a lot of tools out there like Phantom Buster, Expandy, and so on. You could use— I, it's customized for me. So I just used APIs from one of these vendors.

Okay. So you've got that full automation going and within 6 hours, you time it so that they receive a note from you because otherwise they've already forgotten about you because they've—

Maybe 2 hours, 3 hours, if you can do it sooner, because they may not even read the message for another few hours.

I think this even, this ties with something that Salesloft found years ago when they studied The, the, if you, if you have a demo request that if you respond back just within minutes, right, you actually have a, like, I think a 21 times dish. Yeah. Huge, huge change in, in your ability to connect with that person. Even just waiting an hour, you've lost them.

Exactly. I see a similar phenomenon on LinkedIn Engagers. That's a complete untapped opportunity. People engage with LinkedIn, but then the authors are not asking for anything in return.

So now another thing I've heard from many executives is, well, that would be fine and good if I had people engaging. Like the content that I post doesn't even get people to engage. I might get like a few likes on it and that's it. So, and by the way, I also have experienced the same thing where the posts that have the least amount of engagement, few comments, few likes. I mean, I just was in a meeting just yesterday where Somebody saw a post a month ago, scheduled lunch with me. He has never clicked like, never clicked a comment, right? Yet he's opening and he's reading and it's registering, right?

That's true. So that's the way attribution is difficult and likes are not the right attribution. Likes and impressions.

Yeah.

But imagine if you get one meeting. Now, if you're getting zero attention, then maybe there's something wrong with the content or ICP or So one anecdote, I love AI and the impact of AI on future of work. My background is in engineering and so on, so I can get very technical with AI, but my community has been built around go-to-market sales and marketing. So from time to time when I share about AI, nobody wants to engage with it. I suddenly go from like 400 likes on average on a post to like 20 likes. And it's very disheartening. And so I, for whatever it, because it, your, your success creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? It just keeps becoming bigger and bigger of the same thing. It becomes a bit of an echo chamber of people, right? So I want to play on that rather than bring in new ICP, which, so that's something to keep in mind. If somebody is getting no engagement, Despite being an exec, despite sharing, maybe their audience is not aligned with what they're writing.

Mm-hmm. Right.

So, but once they align everything, there's no reason why, uh, they should be knowing it.

What, what mistakes do you see executives making that just reduces their engagement or even the quality of their posts? Do you see something happening?

One mistake I've seen execs, well, a few, a few different. I think they use borrowed ideas because if somebody has written a post that became successful, if I rewrite or write something on the same topic, that's chasing somebody else's— and then having someone else write the post completely is also— so I write my own posts. I think it's better to have somebody clean it up, right? But then the idea itself, the genesis, They should, the narrative, they should totally control and let someone else. So that way people are busy. They're only going to look, spend a few seconds in the post and they can see through it whether it's genuine. And ChatGPT, I think sometimes does a good job, sometimes doesn't. Overreliance could be tricky. And the last thing, not paying enough attention to the hook. Because hook is the key reason why posts do well. So finding a way to make it entertaining, not just education, which is dry, but entertaining education is really what people are looking for.

I totally agree with you on the hook, and I've seen things that I've tested where the more emotion I can put into that hook, the stronger the response. But then again, that doesn't always correlate to revenue. So it really depends on the purpose of a particular post. And to your point, you said you spend like a portion of your writing creating things to build your audience and then the other portion to educate your audience, which is what actually drives the business. Or is there like another mix in there?

Not necessarily educate. So whenever I need meetings and I, so maybe I should share, how, um, where I use this in my workflows. So certainly if I have to sell something, like in RB2B, I wanted new users and customers, I could drop a post and get hundreds of meetings in my calendar for the next several weeks, right? And each of those meetings is— so we didn't have a sales rep at that time, so, or a marketing team or a sales team. So, uh, I was just using it to drive demand. But at Xeer, I've been using it to validate or do market research or validate some of our product assumptions. So then I write a post about, say, the general topic I'm building a product on, and then people that engage, I again scrub their titles to see who of them are relevant. So for instance, I wanted to get some Feedback from sellers one time and buyers another time. So I spoke to about 150 sellers and 150 buyers through 2 or 3 of these posts.

Interesting. Is there a post that you did that just completely surprised you with, oh, and from both directions, one, oh, I thought this was going to do well and it flopped. Which many of us have had, I think. And then on the flip side, that you just posted something and actually generated way better of a response than you thought. And if so, what were the characteristics of that?

That's a hard one. It happens all the time. All the time. Like sometimes I'm so proud of a post and it like turns out to be a dud. And then I feel like it's going to be average and then it turns out to be a zinger. So, happens all the time. If I knew, I could— I can't claim to know exactly why. My writing tends to be not that emotionally charged. I found that Adam's writing— I compare because Adam and I both were doing it at the same time. He, at least his personality as well, he loves storytelling and he engages better. I tend to do more thought leadership type content, more investigative research type content, which by definition, so I found if, like you said earlier, if you can add more emotion, more drama, more use words that are more bombastic, you tend to do better than if you are Because people are looking for, like I said, a little bit of entertainment, but also education.

I think what you said about the different styles between what he's posting, what you're posting is, is so important because you're both being authentic. And like, and so for you to, to post something that may be more emotionally charged, it wouldn't feel natural for you. Right? And then people would kind of see through that. And I see some executives, I call it outsourcing your voice to ChatGPT. And that's getting, just tossing in a quick idea in your prompt and getting something and copying and pasting. And I jokingly say that there are people I know who are not very articulate in real life who look like poets on LinkedIn. And you can see right through it. And so, you know, it makes you, You made a really good point.

So my recommendation to execs would be, don't even try to figure out what works. Try to express genuinely who you really are. And the world is so big. It's so big. There are like hundreds of millions of people on LinkedIn, right? And there are all kinds of people out there. Some like lots of drama, some like shitposts, some like, well, You know, there are all kinds of people out there, right? And all you need is like a very small, like if you want a tribe of 1,000, 10,000 people to follow you, that's a ridiculously, no matter who you are, there are 10,000 people out there that subscribe to your worldview, right? Just find a way to genuinely, consistently, and with a lot of credibility and trust, keep saying the same thing again. So in the beginning, it may be slow, but once people latch on, I think the key is genuine trust and credibility. This is what can go wrong if you start copying other people's idea rather than focus on who you really are.

Yeah, I think that those are such wise words. And I, like you, would encourage a lot of other executives listening to this to do that. When you first started posting, did you go all in and say, okay, I'm going to do this 5 days a week? How did you get started with that? And how often do you post now?

So when I first started, I was doing maybe 2 times a week. I picked it up doing RB2B. So I, I changed my frequency based on business need because it does take time. So I'm not, this is not like an Instagram or a Twitter. This is LinkedIn. Eventually I look at, am I getting enough returns on my effort? So when the need of the business was I post more, I was doing about 3 times a week. Right now we are still building product. We are not ready to sell. So I'm kind of slowed down. So I'm doing about one time a week, but in the next 3 months, as we go back to the market to start selling, I'm going to go back to doing it 3 times a week.

Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to share. Do you encourage your teams to also post?

I do. I haven't had a lot of success because I feel like what I do works for, say, engineers or other parts of the org as well, because everybody's looking for, you know, solutions, new playbooks, and every company has something to share that others can benefit from, right? Where else are we going to share when we don't know the email address of everybody in the world? And it has to be on a forum like LinkedIn, right? But honestly, I haven't had a lot of success getting a larger organization into it, but I do think execs, and if not everybody in the exec team, it should be a few. Having one person is actually not as good as having at least two or three. The reason is when you have two or three people, you are not just increasing your footprint But you are helping each other be successful because you start building brand. Like Adam, in my case, we always reposted each other's content. So right from the back, we both had significant following, so we could get a boost. So all our posts did very well. And if you had, say, multiple people, so having 2 or 3, almost starts to guarantee success rather having one.

Let me tie back to the main theme of this particular episode, which is the attention economy. Now, back in your ZoomInfo days, going from 300 leads a month inbound to 40,000, you did that through programmatic SEO, and you found that when you were at Apollo, it worked, but not the same, to the same degree. Is this something, is this a technique that still works to get a company's signal out there and create that awareness? Or is programmatic SEO on its way out because of LLMs?

Right, right. It's partially on its way out, but it might still work to some extent. So the foundations, so every company is sitting on a bunch of data and data companies certainly are sitting on a lot of data. Right? So if you publish that data online, so at ZoomInfo, we created maybe 100 million pages. Now think about which are the companies that are popular on search engines like CNN or Time Warner, because they do have 100 million genuine distinct valuable pages. The people search for something, your CNN shows up, and that's why they are authoritative source, right?

Correct.

So I realized that as a data company, we had hundreds of millions of records. Why not publish, make a page for every person, every company, and put it on Google or Microsoft?

And, and just for everybody listening, the idea behind that would be you type someone's name into Google, and because ZoomInfo had data on that person, you would see a portion of that on a page, right? Right. Yes.

And then Google would naturally rank you higher, and then suddenly ZoomInfo started showing on the first page.

First page. Yes.

For any, for a lot of search queries. So yes, our, as soon as we turned this play on, we went to like 40,000 or tens of thousands of leads a month. And then we had to hire a whole inbound SDR team to qualify those leads. Now we did the same thing. Again at Apollo and again at ContactOut. But what I saw is increasingly you got less and less returns on the same play because Google got smarter because they saw that, okay, if I run the search first, I would only get ZoomInfo, but now I'm getting ZoomInfo, Apollo, Lusha, like 10 other results on the same person, right?

And they're all centaurshipped behind it, right?

Yeah, no, I like, uh, intellectually I find it very interesting when, uh, the same thing doesn't work, uh, same playbook to on competitors. And I mean, this was Google's was involved, but there are other similar, uh, strategies that didn't work even though nothing to do with Google. But you're right, in the days of LLM, uh, Search, there's massive disruptions going on, on SEO and programmatic SEO, certainly. So I think where we are going in the next 12 months, so there's short-term and long-term. Short-term, AI answers are taking over, right? So then that is decreasing inventory for ads. Right. But long term, and by long term I mean 2 to 3 years, not like 5 to 10. What's going to happen is the search itself will be done by agents. So then there are no humans to even consume. So that changes the very definition of SEO. So now the question is, how will the world evolve? So I think there will be SEO. But right now it's keyword-based SEO, but it'll be conversational AI SEO. So because users would be in the middle of some conversation to buy something. Right now users are just running a query and they're transactional. They run— each query is disparate against each other and we just match with a keyword, right? But in future, especially when agents are matching or users are they will know, uh, LLMs will know which stage the conversation is at. Very early stage or they're getting closer to buying and they will pass that. And so the bids are going to happen not just on keyword, but on the stage of the conversation and whether it's agent on the other end or it's human on the other end. Yeah.

This has, this has a lot of implications because right now enterprises when they want to narrow down a tech stack that they need to get, they will just go buy a Gartner report. They've already done all the thinking and the research and the analysis and say, okay, these are the top 10 companies you need to be talking to, their magic quadrants. And then they just say, okay, just let's start talking to these companies and getting quotes. If I hear you correctly, what you're saying is this conversation will now level the playing field to smaller companies being able to figure out what they need and then get very specialized vendors inside that conversation. So that has implications for even these large research companies too and their existence.

Oh, I think research companies are in trouble. Any business that had a moat because of like a premium moat were able to charge more because of market inefficiencies. So premium branding is also a form of market inefficiency in a way, right? Because people can't get access to information transparently. So they just delegate or rely on a brand that they keep hearing about, companies that are investing more on marketing and look at that as a cue that their product must be better. The search cost is lower because you can't find all the 10 other companies in that space. So you go with the one That is spending so much in marketing that your search cost is minimal, right? Those are marketing inefficiencies that are going away with AI.

Now, all this has dramatic impact on go-to-market strategy, and that's what you saw that led you to form Zier.ai. Could you talk about that and how you're looking to flip the entire GTM conversation? Sure.

So there are two broad themes of what we are building and how we are solving go-to-market. So one, I found that about 50% of spend in go-to-market teams are spent on top of the funnel, lead gen and conversation. This leads to all kinds of, uh, conversation that sales is involved in that doesn't lead to any outcome because they have to send 10,000 emails to talk to 100 people to get only 10 that are in market. So there's so much inefficiency and investments built into this and hence the cost of CAC is just perpetually rising. So what we are doing, so two themes. One, we are solving this top of the funnel problem where we want everybody that signs up to a platform gets an agent. So we have a seller agent and we'll also have a buyer agent and these agents talk to each other. So at the beginning they talk to humans, but internally we are already seeing conversation between two agents. They talk to each other and they do a match. So say a buyer is in market to buy a CRM. Right now they only have time to check 2 or 3 CRM. But the agent will comprehensively look at 40 of them, maybe even talk to agents or human sellers from many of them, right? So, and then bring back and score the 40 of them and say, here are the 2 that I think that are most relevant based on what's important for you, right? And then schedules call between the seller and the buyer. And those calls are very high Engaged, high-intent calls. So that is one theme of what we are building. The second big unlock we are doing is around research. You mentioned research earlier. So the way it works is everybody that signs up on our platform, our bio-led go-to-market platform, uh, we give them an agent like I shared earlier, but we also ask them, what is top of mind for you today? What problem are you trying to solve in your business? And we capture that. And as soon as we capture, we send our agents to find solutions for those problems. So let's say you say you're getting churned or you want to get into this account, but you don't know how to penetrate, right? So you can just keep dropping problems with us. Now our AI researcher or agent finds you solution to this problem, but also shares your problem with other agencies and vendors that have already said they are experts in this space. And the agents goes to them saying, hey, you solve churn, here is this company. And if it's a fit for what you are looking for, then why don't you add some playbook in addition to what AI has already found? So this agency goes and adds a playbook, and then if the buyer likes it, Now that soft intent is turning into a hard intent. They might even end up hiring the agency to solve the problem, right? I find this is a much better way to do go-to-market where both buyer and sellers are solving problems rather than sellers sending 10,000 emails fully knowing that 9,990 are going to consider it a spam. Yeah.

Yeah. Now this, if I'm understanding this one correctly, this implies that there's a dramatic need for like a big uptick in quality content that's going to enable these agents to talk to each other, that one is gonna ask for something and it's gonna need to know from the other that it has that. So for example, if someone's selling a CRM tool and you specialize in CRM tools for managing a musician's fan base, right? So that's a, I mean, you're not gonna buy Salesforce for that. You're gonna need something very special for something like that. So, so the content that everyone's gonna need to create really has to, has to have a lot of depth to it that, that touches on not just the keywords, but the thoughts behind what you're trying to communicate. And so how do, how do, how will people address something like that, creating that much content?

Right. So we thought about, so you're absolutely right. The future of AI is linked to content. And if you allow me to go a little bit deeper into this, because this is what we are doing. We've gone, we've thought about that a lot.

Yeah. So just for the audience to know, these are two nerds about to nerd out. Okay. Go ahead. Both of us are engineers.

Go ahead. Last 10 or 20 years, 20 years, when a marketer created content, they were thinking about how to create generic content so it could answer more questions that could do better SEO. So have a lot of keywords, right? So if you think about a curve, like an 80/20 rule, there's this 20% content that could answer 80% of the answers, right? But then there is on Google, there's this long tail of 80% content that barely answers anybody's questions.

Yes.

Right. So nobody wants to be there. Nobody wants to be the long tail of SEO. Everybody wants to be the part of the dominant, but the nature of that content is where you always end up writing generic topics, not niche topics. But AI performs very bad with generic. AI needs very niche topics. Specific. Yes. Right. So, so when we started Xeer, we said, ah, Maybe we encourage people to write content or go into their email Slack or find content to load it up and train. But eventually what we found is training. So we obviously take whatever content we get publicly and so on to get started on individual agents. But we found that every time an agent responds to a question to another agent or human, it already knows how much confidence it has on that response. So if it has a low confidence, we are escalating it to the human that represents the agent, right? And then the human looks at the response and says, ah, I could do better. And here is what you should have said, right? So in our agent, we find that the first week or first few days, every day there are like 10 or 12 such questions escalating. Next week, there are only like 6, because every time you respond, the AI is so good at replicating the response, right? So then you don't need to, it never comes back to you to ask the same question. So learning on demand based on live questions, uh, we found was far more effective than learning ahead of time. No. That's, yeah.

Okay. That, that's, that's also really interesting. And I love what you said about the long tail effect because for those who may be familiar with sending out your corporate signal to draw inbound leads, the long tail is where the money is. That's where you've got this really nuanced content. And I remember talking to one of my, our clients who was creating content for small businesses because that was their market. And I said, well, give me an example of what kinds of small businesses. And they said, oh, well, we do work with accountants, with lawyers. And I said, now shift your content. Don't say you're reaching small businesses. Write an article just for accountants. They're like, but I reach small businesses. I reach other types too. I said, well, you're not writing just one piece of content. And I think that's the big mind shift that people have to make to your point about getting the content so that it really addresses the needs that that person typing in a detailed prompt is looking for. I am an accounting company with 25 employees and I need to find a CRM solution so that I don't get fired because my boss hates Salesforce. That's a prompt. And so people need to go after articles like what to do if Salesforce isn't meeting your needs as an accounting CRM, and that's what's going to get found, right?

So yeah, absolutely. So here's another hack, if it's helpful for anyone. All content has to be written for LLMs now. So earlier we wrote all contents for humans, so we made it easy. We gave like a long elaboratory, like pretext and suffix and all that to kind of make it easy for somebody to make it readable, right? LLMs don't care about all that. And bulk of the content in future I would even say 80% of the content, the very utility of the content is going to be LLM, not humans, right? Because an agent will talk to agents and decide what is important for all of us. So what that means, so here is what my research is showing. Make the content questions and answers, just knowledge concepts. So like FAQ, here's a question and here's the best answer. Here's another question and here's the best answer. And if you really want to go after LLMs, anticipate like variants of the same questions and give answers. It may be a bit jarring for humans, but I think those people talk about how do we do SEO for LLM? This is how you do SEO for LLM is create massive FAQs and put it on your website.

I think one of the strategies that's worked for us, because our tool Make Media helps people create this really rich content just by having a conversation, and it interviews you and helps you connect the dots with all of your insights and experience to create this deep content, is at the bottom of your article, you can just stick in an FAQ. And so you can have your fully optimized article, and I think people may be overlooking the importance of article structure. I mean, schema has become so important because that's what enables LLMs to just find you very quickly and get your information inside. So when someone searches, there it is.

Right, right. So the shift, since we are talking about shift of search, the shift, mindset shift on content earlier was how do I get found? So then keywords and like, how do I just get found? That was the goal. Where we are shifting now is I don't need to be found. How do I get differentiated? Because everything is looking the same. How can I stand out? And when somebody says, which tool do I buy? How can we arm the LLM to say this guy is better or our company is better and here's why. Everybody else will have the same text and LLM will have a hard time saying who's better and why, except one company that creates the right content. Right. So, right. Being found or discovered to being differentiated.

Yes. And I think this is where we start to see a blend of content that's on your website that talks about these things and you as an executive posting about these things. And you may have seen it too when you do a search on Google right now, they're not just returning back people's website pages, they're returning back high-quality LinkedIn posts as well. And so that's showing up too. So I think that's, uh, we're starting to see a blend of content being search everywhere optimization, right? It's, it's, you really gotta be everywhere. So, yeah. What are some, uh, final thoughts you would have? For an executive who's looking to make that leap and all kinds of executives could be listening here. So it could be somebody at a large company or it could be an executive, maybe is a COO looking to get a promotion to a CEO level and they need to be producing content. What are the couple of quick tips that you might have to get people started and off of the lurker bench and into the actual content creator bench?

Make this content journey a way to discover yourself and express yourself, learn more about yourself, stop copying others or stop connecting it to how do I get success. Success is a byproduct of being who you truly are. All of us perform best when we are in our own zone, when we are comfortable with our identity, when we are, we know exactly who we are and we play the game by our strength, not by other people's weakness.

Yes.

Right. So this is a great excuse to know, identify. And if you don't do it, who will? Those days are gone. This is the very reason you exist. If you're an exec, you have no more excuse to have somebody else do it. Now you can't have your SDRs go out and create or your reps. They are not supposed to be doing this. They're, they're junior. They don't have stories or experience. If you're an exec, it's your responsibility. It's like telling your 6-year-old kid to take decision when you should be taking decisions.

That's right. That's right. I think the more authentic you are in your conversations, the better your content will perform. Asanthosh, thank you very much for a very insightful conversation. We covered a lot of ground today and I love the playbooks that you shared. How can people reach you if they wanted to reach out?

Yeah, so LinkedIn is still one of the best channels for me. Find me on LinkedIn, connect, send me an email. My email is santosh@zeer.ai if you want to write directly.

Very good. Thank you so much for sharing all those tips and we'll see you next time on Executives Talk.

Thanks, Art. This was a wonderful conversation.

Thank you.