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Everyone, welcome to another episode of the Sales DNA Podcast. Nick is on holiday in Croatia, so hopefully he's enjoying himself, laying out, relaxing by the pool, by the beach. And so instead, we have Jess here, who's our commercial lead on our team. And so she is really responsible for working with a lot of our clients on sort of a broader growth type of campaigns in order to do everything related to content marketing, outbound, etc. And so what we're going to be really talking about today is what we're seeing holistically around outbound in general and a lot of the shifts that have occurred, I would say, over the last couple of years. We're going to talk through a bit about what outbound historically has looked like and the trends and things that we're seeing that are leading to better response rates, actually breaking through the crowded inbox. And actually hopefully going to help you get some ideas around how you can generate some more opportunities through your outbound efforts. Great.

Well, first podcast with just the two of us.

It's probably going to be the best one because Nick's not here to pull out the balls.

I was going to say, you're wishing him well on his holiday. I hope he's having a terrible time on the beach whilst we're vlogging. But yeah, I think, I think with outbound, people go from We'll send emails and then we book meetings, and that is the only thing that outbound is meant to do for us, and that's the only thing we will try and do with it. And that might have been okay, like 5, 10 years ago when like less people were sending emails and everything sounded interesting 'cause it wasn't 10 of them in their inbox. But I feel like a lot of people are missing out on that big chunk of people in between the no, don't talk to me and the yes, I would like a meeting. And that's what we've been seeing a lot more.

Yeah, for sure. I think your point, the historical outbound method has been, hey, do you have this problem? Here's how we solve it. Wanna meet? Right? That's like generally the structure of a message. It's, I would say that would be a generally like a decent message. There are much worse messages out there, which is, hey, here's all the stuff that we do. Wanna buy my stuff? But that being said, I think that was like the the historical thought process of outbound was let's go ahead and get messages in front of people and then people will respond and want to book meetings with us. And where I think that's fallen down a lot lately is that there's a couple of like different things that are happening broadly. One, I think AI has made it a lot easier for one, for people to send stuff en masse. And so then a lot of this messaging is all looking the same if you're not, you know, doing something unique or different if you're using the same LLM that everybody's using without any sort of training or data backed on how to actually write that messaging. That's like component one. Then I think the other component's also related to AI, which is that, uh, people have the ability to learn a lot more very quickly about the industry, about solutions, about how to solve their particular problems. They could simply just go into an LLM and ask a question. Whereas before you had to know like what provider websites to go to, you had to know what providers to go find, what vendors were the right ones. You had to go poke around to their websites. And so you have to, you had to do this research. And part of that research was also getting on calls with those vendors. And I think nowadays there's all this information out there. It's so much easier to just go and do this self-research. It's like, ah, I got this problem. How do I solve it? Oh, cool. Like Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT told me like, here's the 3 things to go look at, or here's some different potential solutions, and then you can just move forward from there. So I think we're seeing that sort of like convergence. And then as well, there's just, everything's more crowded. Like every single person here probably gets way more emails than they did previously. They all probably sound the same. They all look the same. And so it just has this, like, there's all this noise around email. LinkedIn, et cetera. And so in order to really stand out, you have to be thinking about what are like novel, new, innovative things that we can do that we can put in front of people that I would say take them from this, I'm aware I have this problem and I want to, I'm already looking for a solution and I'm willing to meet with somebody. But then there's this whole other bucket of the rest of the market, which either They're either already problem aware, but they've decided it's not worth their time to try and solve right now. Maybe they already know what the solution could or probably should be, but again, it's not really a priority. Or maybe they just are unaware of this even being a big enough problem for them to try and solve, right? So you have this, what's the break, 5%, 95%, it's like 5% are potentially in market, the other 95% are not. So if your email's asking for a meeting, the only people you're ever going to capture who are willing to spend 30 to 60 minutes on a call with you are this 5% bucket, which leaves this rest of the 95% that are simply being overlooked. You're not providing value to them that's going to help them convert ultimately to a meeting.

Yeah, and I think that like generally, and I think marketers particularly are like pretty aware that generating content to put in front of people is important. You want to have things on your website that are like stuff to show people. But I think when it comes to pairing that to like what you send people in outbound, so many people go with like the traditional route and get it wrong and be like, let's just put like a white paper in front of someone, or like, here's our like pitch deck that you would send to someone in a call. But that might work for someone who is like, I know what my problem is, I know what the solutions are, I wanna know exactly what the specs of your product are that tell me whether it ticks all my boxes. But you miss all of the people that are, one, don't even know that they have a problem. 1, what the impact of their problem is. 2, they don't know what the solution to that problem is. And 3, they don't know what the options are out there. And so trying to think of what can you put in front of someone that isn't just a random educational piece around the 5 different product specs that you have, I think is like the key to getting people to reply to those campaigns. So like, how do you add that value? How do you give them something that they don't already have? That helps them in that journey from, I don't need you right now to, oh, actually, 3 emails down the line, once you've sent them that interesting thing, let's now jump on a call.

Yeah, exactly. It's like you, you, most of the time you don't have as, you don't really have control over the priorities of what that person is doing internally, right? Typically goals get set at the company level. They trickle down to individual teams. That's their sets of priorities that they're focused on. And it's really hard as a vendor to influence and/or impact those priorities, especially when it comes to like cold outbound. So if you're only trying to capture the people who actively have a buying process for what it is that you're selling, one, if they're already in that state and they're already looking at options and they don't know who you are, you're too late to the party, right? Because they are already in the vendor selection or they're already looking and shopping around for different options. And typically There's other research that shows this where it's like you typically will end up— most people will typically work with the first vendor that they engage with because that's typically the first one that comes to mind. It's the one that they know, it's their— the one that they're used to working with. And so that is a challenge that you're up against if you are not already engaging with these people in a different way prior to them knowing that they have this, that this is now a priority that they need to solve. That you, you need to like build up that goodwill to where then when this does become a priority, you're the person or the group that they come and talk to.

And I think also comes down to like, what are you trying to get these people to do? Like, what is the aim of your, if you wanna call it a campaign, your messages to them, your emails to them, your putting stuff on a website to engage people, like If the aim is not to get meetings from everyone, even though you will still get the meeting from the people that are ready to go now, what do you want from them and how do you frame everything that you are doing around getting the thing that you want from them if it's not a meeting? And I think that comes down to what you wanna give them, what types of content you wanna put in front of them, and then building up that process of like, okay, each time they go through one of these steps, it signals to you, Actually, these people are going through that journey of now they understand what their problem is, now they understand what the solution is, and they're working their way up to getting to the point where like they want you as their solution to that problem. And we've done some interesting things content-wise recently, and I think it's all about giving people something that they don't currently have, whether that's something physical, whether that's something data-wise, whether that's something tailored towards like their own company, their pipeline, or like access to something. So webinars, events, in-person, something like that.

All education is all part of that, right? Yeah. Useful stuff, like things that they can love. I guess the test would be, is the thing that you are giving them valuable even if they don't become a customer? Like, can they get value from the thing that you're providing even if they don't buy your product, service, et cetera?

Yeah, exactly. And I think something that is very generic and doesn't— you've not really spent the time to think about, okay, who am I targeting and what should I target them with and where do I want them to go to? Doesn't give them something valuable after that conversation ends. Like, they don't care about that in their day-to-day lives. But I don't know, can you think of any, like, examples of different pieces of content or, like, tools or, like, offers, I guess, in emails that you think would would fit that really well.

Yeah, it, and I think it also comes down to kind of tailoring it to where most of your buyers are. So if you are in a, I would say like a crowded space, so if you're in a space where it's very clear that there's typically a solution that people already are aware of, but people don't know that you have an option that's available, like your content or your information that you provide is really more about how are you like differentiated? How are you different? How are you better, more unique, et cetera, from the other options on the market. So like, it's important to think about your solution in your buyer's mind and how they will categorize you, not how you think you are valued, right? I think a lot of people we talk to think they have the coolest, most innovative thing, but it's not like, to your buyer, it, it may not be that interesting or they may not know how to categorize you amongst all the other solutions that exist. And so if you're trying to sell to somebody who is, say, unaware of the problem that they have, or you're trying to sell into like an innovative space, like then the sort of content stuff that you have to provide is probably a lot more educational, which is how should you be thinking about the problem that you have? Are there solutions to that problem that you haven't thought of before? I think one actually interesting example is we work with a number of companies that are like AI platforms, AI tools. And they are competing against the, like your Claudes, your ChatGPTs, your Copilots of the world. Because when a client, when most people think about AI, they think about the chatbot that they're used to. And so if you are going to reframe the, the problem that they might have, let's say you have a really unique agent that you can sell to them. You first have to educate them around what an agent is. Why is an agent important? How is this different from what they're already potentially using as like ChatGPT or Claude or whatever? And it could be related to the important context, the company information, being able to actually have a multiplayer mode, like being able to collaborate. You don't have to be like a prompt engineer to figure out how to get the most out of your chat tool. So there's like those types of components when you think about If you're selling something innovative, you have to also give the category of what it is that you're selling that makes sense to the buyer for them to understand where to place you in their mind, because it might be clear to you, but it's probably not clear to them.

Yeah. And I think that massively applies to the AI platforms, like anyone in a disruptive type of space when immediately buyers don't know how to categorize them in their heads. And I used to think that that was more, are you creating budget or are you trying to like displace budget from like someone else? Are you trying to like compete for it? And I actually think that the truth is that you're always trying to compete for budget because I don't really think budget creation really happens. Like either the money exists or it doesn't, they just move it around, right? But I think the problem that a lot of like particularly AI solutions have is everyone's putting it in the category of like the generic LLMs, but actually they should be putting it in a category of like almost integrating tools into their workflow, cuz it does such a different thing. But because of the way most of the time, to be honest, like their like marketing material, the stuff that they're sending out on email and LinkedIn and on their website seems to get their buyers to think of it and they, oh, this is just like a slightly more like biological or like scientific version of what I have, which is essentially almost free in a lot of cases compared to what their solution is. But actually it should be going into the budget category of like, how do we get more molecules to market quicker? And how do we like make sure our like target validation is like the best and most efficient use of our scientists' time? And I think that reframing around showing people different interesting content and getting them to be like, oh, this could be really useful for this thing and that thing, not just, oh, I type things into it and it gives me this answer for my day, is, yeah, I think a massive problem with anything new or techie, right now.

Yeah, and you know, since not everybody here sells AI software, there's also, the same could be applied for if you have an innovative way of how you deliver a service. So we have some clients who are disrupting like CRO markets, like the classic large CROs where slow-moving labor costs, and they're offsetting that a lot with like automation and whatnot. And so being able to show how you are innovating on the current problem set, which is maybe typically when you're working with a CRO, you're paying for a lot of labor costs that are associated. It's kind of a black box. How many hours is a certain assay going to take to be run? Where is the assay being run? Is it overseas? Is it here? And so you're, you have this like educational component of, hey, there's like this new way to do things. This is like a new way that you can be thinking about getting this work done through an outsourced partner. Sort of, so it's like another angle of way how you would be thinking about what sort of content or what sort of things match up with like getting people to align to like your thought process, your way of doing things, if that makes sense. Yeah.

And I think that kind of sits in like a weird place in between like solution-aware stage and like supplier-aware stage in the sense that people are actually quite aware that there are solutions out there. They're aware of suppliers that do those solutions. But when you have something that is like quite a novel solution that no one else is doing, you have to educate people on the fact that you are aware of this solution, but actually, these other solutions that we do that are actually a better alternative, um, like, so problem that you have and therefore, and then you take them down that journey of not even talking about your like product name with like the registered trademark on it, or like your type of service and how you frame it. But like, this is the science behind why this solution is different to what already exists. 'Cause they already know that they have that problem. They just think there is only one track to getting it solved. And then you take them down that journey of, oh, we also happen to do that science and that's why our solution is, is, is better. So yeah, it definitely applies. Kind of across the board. I'm thinking as well with you just saying, you know, not everyone sells AI platforms. Not everyone has like a super novel disruptive solution, right? Like we work with people and there's tons of companies across the space that, you know, it might be like certain cell models or they're doing reagents or they're doing like imaging products and they all have these different USPs. But when you're sat in that bucket of, I could Google this right now and 10 people would come up. And the science is roughly the same, but you know, there's, you know, here and there there's slight differences. How do you then stand out over email or over LinkedIn?

Well, I think a lot of people, a lot of the content out there in a lot of those cases is like, I don't know, here's what our capabilities are, or here's what we offer. You're putting the burden of like understanding on and figuring out where you sit onto the buyer, right? Versus like, how can you provide something unique, valuable, interesting to them that they can objectively get value from? So that way they use that thing. And then when they have the problem that comes up and it becomes a priority, they like come to you for that thing. Because unless they're in that active buying window and they're like, a lot of people don't want to switch vendors because the, render switching costs is a lot more than just price, right? It's like the changing your SOPs, training your internal team, whatever, like downstream validation that might have to occur simply by a reagent swap as an example. So I think in those cases, it's actually like more prudent that you have to do unique, interesting things. And like, that could be creating like web-based tools that are useful to scientists that they come to on a regular basis that they can associate with your brand. Webinars where you're actually providing unique, interesting insights, not just, hey, here's what our product does and here's its capabilities. I think the barrier, the bar that you have for your content has to be even higher because you have to displace existing vendors. You have to break through, through the noise even more. If you have something innovative, people may be more willing to just learn and be educated about that new thing. Whereas if you're in that sort of like red ocean where there's a lot of competition, it's even more important that you do stuff that's different, innovative. And if you follow the same playbook that everybody does, trying to ask for meetings or sharing app notes or posters, you're probably just going to fall into that same trap in the same sea of sameness that everybody else is in.

And I think those type of vendors as well tend to have like much larger, like, addressable markets, right? Like, a lot of the time it's like basically any scientist working in a particular area could be a buyer. And so you start to have to figure out, okay, who are these people are actually interested in buying right now? And I think when you're putting those different types of content in front of them, like you're inviting them to webinars, you might be giving them like some sort of price calculator, you might be giving them like open access to your actual pricing so they can compare easier and kind cut that time. When you start to get those responses to that outreach where they're like, cool, yeah, I wanna engage with that, you start to narrow down, okay, these people aren't actually gonna place an order tomorrow, but these are now my group of people that I need to continue to follow up with because they've been interested enough to engage with what I'm giving them, even if they're not ready to buy.

Yeah, it's like the, there's like the decision before the meeting, right? It's like if you're thinking about it from a buyer's perspective, a buyer, by the time they've made a decision to take a meeting, they've already decided that it's worth their time, which means it's already something that's hot internal topic. There's a decision before that, which is, is this worth my time? Should I even be thinking about this? Is this a priority? Is this something that if I take this to my boss or something that I start to evaluate is going to be a waste of my time or a waste of their time? You have to win that decision first. Which is this is something I should prioritize. And that's what you want to be like optimizing your content, your campaigns around, which is like, how do you get somebody to go from this isn't a priority or this isn't something I'm actively thinking about to something I should be actively thinking about, right? So like you could come up with ways to make the problem hurt more, if that makes sense. So it's like the cost of inaction. So if you keep doing the stuff the way you've always done, these are the consequences that you might face. If these are things that you're worried about, like, we are probably, like, a potential solution for you. So, again, that's a bit of an educational type of approach that you kind of have to take there because you have to teach them that there are, like, these downstream consequences if they continue to do stuff the same way. You could approach it from a, I'm going to de-risk this for you, like, something along the lines of, oh, send us samples, we'll run the samples for you and send you back the data. Some people try and say they don't, maybe they sell a product and they're not willing to do services or to run those types of things. And I think that could be a mistake if you're trying to get into a, a tough market. Like, how do you displace somebody? The best way to do it is to objectively prove with their data that your product or your service is better. You need like an innovative way to go and make that happen. So. Where that might not be like a piece of content, it's still like a thing that you can provide. It's like a, a piece of value that you can give them, which is we will run these samples for you. We will give you that data for free. And maybe it's like super cheap or something if you really have to charge for it. But how do you get somebody to take that as an offer first is again, the first step before they would even decide, do we actually want to switch a vendor over?

Yeah, I think it's those type of things as well that particularly when you are targeting people that are the end users, but not actually the people that hold the budget. If it gives them something to be like, look boss, they've done this cool thing for me, or look at how cool this data is. Or like, I've got this like one-pager that basically addresses all the things we're thinking about right now. And they can take that to them and then the boss go, wow, okay, we should, let's set up a call. But you know, you're not necessarily contacting that person that has the ability to jump on a call. And if they do, then your salespeople are sat there going, this person is kind of useless to me until they can get that.

You know what's interesting that you say that? It's, I think a lot of people when they also think about outbound, they think about how do I contact the budget holder? And a lot of companies, the budget holder per se is not really the decision maker. Oh, we want to target the VPs of AstraZeneca or Pfizer. It's like, cool, that would be great., but like most of the time, I bet you based off of your product service offering, the decision is being made much lower and they are then making the business case internally for making that switch. So like this type of content that we're talking about, this sort of like educational type of content that is going to be super valuable to those people making the actual decision on what gets used in the lab, what processes, tools, et cetera, exist. Like that is stuff that can arm them to better make that business case internally. And like scientists are scientists, like they're not really like salespeople. So if you give them these tools to help them sell internally, that's going to be valuable to you.

Yeah, because there's so many, like there's so many high-level people, pharma, biotech, who they run their teams the way that teams should be run. It's like, I'm going to make, you know, the top-level decisions and I know what's going on from like a program level, but I want my scientists to go out and like figure out what's out there. You know it best, you go and choose it. But if you don't give them the thing that tells them what you do and like adds value to their day, then they can't go and ask for the budget. Because I wouldn't— you wouldn't feel comfortable yourself going internally and being like, oh, I vaguely know what these product specs are, but I don't really understand the value of it and why it solves our problems yet. But I think it's also a shift on the, like, the sales side, right? I think if you're going to optimize your outreach around a different goal that isn't, we must book meetings, then you also have to understand as like a sales leader that you can't measure that as like your only metric that counts. Like whether your, if your reps are going out there and sending that type of outreach, you have to consider it from a broader perspective other than just like, how many meetings have we got on the calendar? How many pros have we sent out this week? Because it's building up over time. More of a consistent pipeline that will benefit you, but you might not see that immediate kind of like—

Yeah, that's always a tough one, right? Because they are getting pressure from the execs, from the board, wherever, that like, those are the metrics that matter. I think the, the thing that we're actually advocating for here is in order to get those things to go up, in order to get more meetings, is you have to actually do this other type of outreach that is more value-add. Like, what is the, Give somebody a reason to interact with or respond to the message you're sending, like before you go and ask for a meeting is, I guess, what this comes down to. It's like, yeah, that will ultimately lead to more responses, ultimately lead to more meetings because you are engaging that other 95% of the market that's there. So it's like, you still have to use meetings ultimately as like the output and pipeline is the output because otherwise the chef's not going to care. Oh cool. Like we got 3 people to use this like free tool or whatever that we put out there. But that, or say we got 500 people that use this free tool that we put out there, but it's not turning into anything. Well, like there's a disconnect there as well. Right. Um, and I think maybe what a way that you can almost start to think about outbound as well is let, like, I think historically it's been like a direct conversion channel. So it's, you think of outbound as I send an email, I get a response, that response turns to a meeting and then like it becomes this like conversion funnel of if I send this many emails, I get this many responses that turn into this many meetings. Right. And I think that funnel is breaking because of how low overall general reply rates are to email and cold outbound. And so if you think about the funnel differently of if we put this valuable, if you almost think about outbound is call it like a marketing channel. I don't want to call it a marketing channel because like that then gets conflated with like pretty marketing emails that are all fluffy. Like that's not what we're talking about here. But if you think of it as a channel to like put the right type of content and information and value in front of your ideal customers through cold mechanisms and channels, that is what you're kind of— that's how we're thinking about this. It's like, how do you distribute the thing that you want your buyers to do and the decisions that you want them to make and how do you distribute it directly to them? And there's probably no better way to do that than cold email, LinkedIn sort of outreach. Because if you think about ads are targetable by an audience, but you can't directly know that this is the VP of Discovery at AstraZeneca, but I can get you the email for the VP of Discovery at AstraZeneca and you can put this exact thing in front of them, right? And so it's like, if you think about it more from that perspective, your targeting is so much better. The problem that you're probably facing is that person doesn't want to meet with you. They don't want to jump on a call. They're not interested in talking to a salesperson who they probably feel is not going to provide value to them. They're just going to throw up and show up or throw up, show up and throw up their pitch deck with all these slides about what it is that they do. So if you go first and you say, hey, here's something super valuable to you that you're going to take, like you're going to get value from whether you talk to me, work with us or whatever, you're creating that goodwill that then when that problem becomes urgent internally that you solve, you become one of the people that they want to talk to.

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, people focus on a lot of how to get more inbound and they put stuff on the website and they put ads out there. But what you said about actually getting to it to them directly is almost like guaranteeing more of the inbound later on by doing the outbound now. And I think you can measure that. But it's more of a long-term measurement of like, if you start doing this now and you commit to this type of approach, you should see that go up. If you're doing it well, the pipeline that you have will increase, the inbound that you have will increase, but you should also see the responses increase, whether they're not, whether they're, I want a meeting now is not the case. It's gonna be, this is cool, this is interesting, thanks for sending this over. I think even a response that's not negative tells you that you're getting the message to the right person and they're engaging with it, even if they're not kind of ready right now. But I think on the sort of logistics of distributing content, 'cause I feel very strongly about this and you also have very strong opinions. How do we feel about gating content, particularly content that you are sending out via like outbound channels?

Yeah. Okay. And for those who are unaware, gating content is like, I send you a link to an asset and you then have to give us 18 things about you and your Social Security number in order to get access to it. So my thought is that if it is valuable, ungate it. If it is truly something that's valuable where if somebody goes to that thing and they get value from it and it's interesting and useful to them, that is going to take them further down their like decision process internally, then ungate it because you're going to get more people to see it. If you gate it, you are going to limit the people that are seeing that thing that is super valuable. That, that's the thing I don't understand really with gating. If you want to gate something like a protocol, that's not that interesting maybe, or it's just like you want to gate something because you want to capture somebody's email on something that's not that valuable, like fine, do what you will with it so then you can follow up with them later. But if the thing that in the asset or the piece of content that you're creating is so valuable, which is what you should be thinking about, then you want to get that thing into as many people's hands as possible. You want them to use that thing. You want them to interact with it. You want them to consume that information. And by you gating it, you are limiting that. And then people will say, but then how do I get my MQL number up? Just forget about it because that's not important. Would you rather have a large number of MQLs or would you rather have people that are like consuming the content that you want? Because people that give their email on a form, they know they're going to get bombarded from salespeople, from marketing, and they're just going to be, fuck, more emails I'm going to have to delete in my inbox.

They're not gonna do it. Well, they're gonna give you like a fake email or they're gonna give you their colleague's email. Like Nick likes to do.

Yeah. Anytime Nick gets on free wifi, he puts Jess's email in. So Jess gets spammed with everything.

So like, yeah, the chances of you getting good quality data from that anyway, and I, I've had this conversation so many times cuz we've been doing more and more content and like cool tools for clients and then I was like, yeah, but should we gate it? And I'm like, But we already have their emails because we're sending it to them as part of outbound. So why would we need their information? Would you not rather put it in front of them, they click on it, and then we send like, you know, a follow-up sequence that is like, cool, like wanna know your thoughts on this, or did you find this interesting? Or like, oh, I'd love to talk more about this. I think this part of this was, you know, the most interesting to your role right now. And I think that gating content, if you are gonna be super lazy with it and you are gonna create your piece of content, you're gonna put it on your website and then you're gonna walk away. And never send that to anyone. Just, if you wanna gate it, gate it. 'Cause like, it might be the only way you ever get any sort of leads. Also, you piss so many marketers off by being like, ooh, MQLs, doesn't matter.

They really don't, if we're being honest.

They don't. Unless they let you do something with them or they're like, you know, they're actually—

Yeah, I think you're hitting on something that's really interesting here, which is like a sublayer to this whole conversation, which is that if, let's say you gate it and like then people put in their email. Then the expectation is that sales is going to follow up on those people. And like the salespeople, salespeople don't want to follow up on like MQLs, let's be honest, unless the person says they're ready to like have a conversation. Salespeople really don't want to do that follow-up. And so that's how you end up in this battle of we generated like 1,000 leads and sales has only followed up with 100 of them. And it's probably because those 900 aren't worth their time because they are in this like other 95% bucket of people who aren't ready to buy or do anything, or they're the wrong type of buyer. But if you just simply put the valuable shit in front of people and like you give them access to it, then they will come inbound when the timing is right. And then the salespeople will be like, oh shit, marketing sends me sick leads because like these people are coming through our contact sales form wanting to talk to us. Not, oh, I downloaded this white paper and like now sales rep is expected to follow up with them 7 times over the next 30 days, which is like a waste of time.

Yeah. And I think that some people have some strict rules internally that are probably based off no logic at all, which is like, we have to gate some of our content. If you're gonna do that, like, have some sort of automated follow-up sequence in place such that someone downloads that piece of content, you have the information about them, you follow up with them about something that gives them additional value. Not here is like a spreadsheet of stuff that sales is never gonna touch and sits on their computer and no one does anything with because then you may as well have not gained your content in the first place.

The other interesting thing that you mentioned too, like subtly, is that like you can get emails and LinkedIn profiles pretty much anybody nowadays. Like the data is available. So if that's what you're trying to capture is an email, like that is like 1990s type shit where it's like the only way to contact somebody is when we get their email and they give it to us. You probably, if you get somebody's email, like you can't like then put them into your marketing nurture flows or whatever, right? Because they haven't opted in to receive marketing communications. But like, you can still reach out to them via direct outbound, targeted outbound for business purposes, right? I think it's like a flip in the mindset of like, this is historically how everything has been done. And you have to be thinking about literally everything has changed from like a data and access perspective, especially with AI and stuff. It's like, there's so much open source, so much available data out there. Use that to help you.

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing with AI. Just before though, if you are looking for emails, shameless plug, we do have an email finding tool, which you can find on our tools section on our website. But going on to like AI and like open source stuff, I think if you are still not sold on gating content, AI cannot read your gated content. So you're putting stuff out there that you want people to find when they're going to their AI chatbot or they're Googling stuff and it gives them that little AI summary. They're not going to find it because you've gated it. And so you wanna have it out there as much as possible such that when those people that have access to all the possible AI tools now and they search for you, those pieces of your content that's relevant to them that come, like it will appear for them if it's not gated and they can find you more easily and then you get more inbound. And if you still have to gate your content, then I think you have to go down the route of, okay, how do you then repurpose that big long, you know, 5, 6 pager document that you wanna put out there that's really valuable into much more manageable snippets. Like how do you create like a couple of minute video out of it? How do you create a LinkedIn carousel? Or like, do you wanna do like a short, a one pager on it that actually is ungated that then AI can read? 'Cause you've got it on your different channels, so you can kind of separate both there. But you also then have all this content. 'Cause I think when people approach this, they're like, oh no, this is gonna take us ages. Like they have to go through different marketing channels to like make sure they have this one piece of content. But I think people get to that first stage and go, we are gonna do a video for this, or we are gonna do a white paper for this, and whatever it might be. And then they stop there and don't think of how do I make this into 10 things that my whole team can post and share and send to people in different formats for the next month. And then you get more value out of it. You spend less time having to create 10 more pieces over the next weeks. And I think one of the questions I get asked as well is like, you know, who responds differently to what type of content. I think the general brackets are you're always gonna get scientists that will probably be more willing to read longer things because they're used to reading papers more on a regular basis. You get leadership who is, give it me in 2 minutes.

2 minutes.

Way too long.

Don't give me books.

They're way too long. But then I think it just comes down to, it's so easy to repurpose content now, like with the LLMs that we have and being able to like chop and change that and the tools that are available to make content look good. That actually do them all, try them all, post them on different channels, send them to different types of people like you would test different messaging variants. And then you start to get this picture of what works for who. And then the next time you do a set content, go off that basis, send the videos to the VPs, send like the white papers to the scientists, like whatever it might be. Learn from that the same way you would learn from this type of messaging work or that type of messaging work.

We're about, about up on time. So I think if we were to give somebody like a framework for how they should think about this, I think the first step that you want to do is you want to think about the 95% of the market that's not actively buying. So these are the people who, they may be problem aware, they may be solution aware, but it's just something that they haven't made the, they may be unaware of a problem as well, but they are, they are they have not made this a priority internally, right? It's not one of the 57 things on their list, or if it is on their list, it's down at number 10 or 11, and there's so many other things that have to get done ahead of time. So first think about that bucket of people, then think about what is the most important type of decision that they would make or need to make in order to is this worth making a priority? Not worth taking a meeting, but is this worth making a priority? So thinking about it from, an example internally for us might be we were trying to decide on if we were, say, running into issues with how high bounce rates or something, right? And that's something we're like, ah, it's lower on our list. It's not lower on our list to think about, but if let's assume it was, then what we might want to do is think about, okay, what are the, the asset that we might look at is a tool that can validate emails for us. And so an email validation tool would then be like, cool, this is something that would help us reduce those bounce rates. And if you make it easy for me to access, or you make it easy for me to get in test or figure out how this is useful to me, then I would be more willing to be like, okay, we're going to make this a priority. We're going to plug this into our pipeline and all of the different tools that we use. And now then we're going to train the team on how to use it, et cetera, or figure out how it's going to integrate nicely into everything. And so you want to think about what is the, how do you identify what that, that problem is to start making it urgent? What is that like decision point that says, cool, this is the thing that's going to make me understand that this is something that we have to solve. That's like that type of asset that you want to create. And then when you go and start to use that type of asset in campaigns, that is going to be where you're going to then want to be testing, like, what is the type of messaging that is going to get the best, like, response, or maybe not even responsive, but interactive rate, right? Where they're going to then get that message and then go to that asset that you've created in order to then interact with it. And so I'd say, like, it flips the, like, outbound campaign process on its head. Whereas historically it was like, our ICP is this, build a list of these people, then we write a message to these people, then we send a message to those people, then we send that message to them. And so like, what we're advocating for here is first figure out what's the thing that, what's that pre-decision to make them say, how do I go from low priority thing to a high priority thing where I want to actually solve this? What is that? Create something of high value for them, whether that be a whether that be a free tool on the website, something, right? Come up with something that's interesting that's so— that hits on that point. And then you think about, okay, who's going to care most about this thing? That starts to fill down to the list that you would then build. And then you write that message, which you would test a couple different variations to figure out how do we then drive people to this thing. So it's flipping like where you start, whereas like your CTA is typically the last thing that you put into your message today because it's like, oh, Oh yeah, I wanna book a meeting with me. It's an afterthought.

Yeah. You flip it to like, what is the action we want them to take to make the decision that we need them to make to want them to engage with us as like a company, right? Like how do we leave them with something that gives them value walking away from that interaction, even if they don't buy from you? And I think if you do that, you will get more people interested. You will get more people to that decision point and more people onto those newsletters.

That's a good one. Well, that's fun. I think it was a good first podcast for us. We'll have to do another one.

Yeah.

Yeah. We should do it all the time. Nick's no longer our co-host. Yeah.

He's too busy on the beach anyway.

All right. We'll see y'all in the next one.