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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:20)
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses podcast. I'm gonna get straight into it today. So I'm delighted to be joined by the one and only Brendan Hufford. He's the founder of Growth Brints, pretty awesome background across like a little bit of a who's who of SaaS, think. Adobe, Active Campaign, Spark Toro, Copy AI. Brendan, what have I forgotten? And hello.
Brendan Hufford (00:41)
Hey, I'm excited. This will be a lot of fun. I think the short version that I hope is helpful and inspiring for people is that I didn't grow up doing this. I was a teacher for the first 10 years of my adult life because we let 18 year olds decide what they want to do with their lives. And I decided at 18, I wanted to be in high school forever, apparently. So I was a teacher for 10 years. And looking back, that's absolutely why I'm good at this. I'm good at talking to you right now because I had to look 14 year olds in the face for a decade.
Tom Rudnai (00:53)
Thank
Brendan Hufford (01:09)
and be the show or else they were, you know, I was gonna, they're gonna eat my lunch. So I did that, but the problem is I tried climbing that ladder, right? I tried becoming an assistant principal. I have my master's degree in educational leadership. I just realized climbing that ladder that the ladder was leaned against the wrong wall. So I built a couple side projects. I worked at a couple different agencies. I was the SEO director at a web design agency for years and years. I then worked at a B2B SaaS agency, helped reposition that agency, helped
double our revenue, which is pretty significant. And then went in-house at Active Campaign. And since then, for the last three years, I've been running growth sprints, like you mentioned, working with really cool, amazing companies that have big names that everybody would know. And those are good, right? Like it's nice to have the, I call it the NASCAR slide or maybe the Formula One slide or something, where it's just, have all the logos on it that people know and like. But my favorite is actually working with the companies nobody's ever heard of in really niche industries or...
Tom Rudnai (02:04)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (02:06)
really specific segments of technical audiences. That's a lot of fun for me. So it's been a great ride and I'm hopeful in sharing that, that other people see themselves somewhere along that journey. And then what we're gonna talk about today I think will also be really helpful.
Tom Rudnai (02:21)
Nice, I love that. can see how that background translates to being really good at marketing and specifically content, right? It's can you translate often quite complex concepts and make it something that a 14 year old can literally understand, right? That's what we always say and you've spent time doing it. What's more, so you were explaining things to 14 year olds, now you're explaining things to VPs, to execs. Who's scarier and which are some more penetrating questions?
Brendan Hufford (02:44)
I love that. So I've never been punched in the face by an executive. So, and I have been punched in the face by a 14 year old. So I don't know if that answers the question, but I honestly, it's really a very similar process of relationship building. So I used to, I'll give you a quick story. I used to do this thing when I was a teacher where first day of school, kids would come in my class and I would say, Hey, I'm gonna learn your names.
Tom Rudnai (02:51)
yet.
you
Brendan Hufford (03:11)
and they'd all go around, they'd share names. And what I would do on my little sheet that has all their names on it, I would make little notes next to them of how to remember their names, right? Something quirky, something funny, like some way for me to remember them. God help if these kids ever saw my notes, cause it would be like funny. You know what I mean? It's like, there's Marquez. And I wrote next him like funny glasses, like don't, you know, don't show it to the kids. But, and then I would say to him,
Tom Rudnai (03:27)
was gonna say.
You
Brendan Hufford (03:36)
How many of your other teachers today told you they're bad with names, it's gonna take a while? And they're like, all of them. Every teacher said that to us today. And I'm like, cool, I'm not bad with names because I care about you. I'm really good with names and I'm gonna learn them by tomorrow. Tomorrow, you're gonna come in, without my notes, I'm gonna tell you every single one of your names because I care. And the next day I did that because names aren't hard, it's just.
It's hard to remember because we have a lot going on and we don't prioritize it. If you make it a priority, you can learn, you know, a hundred plus names in a day. And I did that and immediately buy in. They were bought in. I was their favorite teacher. They knew I cared about them because I was willing to invest that time upfront. Turns out same thing with marketing, right? Just simply caring, giving a shit goes so far.
Tom Rudnai (04:27)
Yeah, well, and so it links actually to something I was doing a bit of research before this, and I know one of the things you talk a lot about is your content IP, which I think is a really important thing for anyone to get their head around and learn how to define their own. And you said one thing in that that that just reminded me of, which is it's really important to name the problem that you solve. So for you, it's checkbox marketing, right? It's the exact same concept, right? naming something has an impact on how people receive you.
Brendan Hufford (04:46)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I was working in-house at ActiveCampaign and I kept seeing all these really great marketers that I look up to being like, B2B is boring, B2B is boring, it's so boring, it's so boring. And I was living it of like, I am busier than ever, I am producing a heroic amount of content, a ton of output, a ton of impact, and we're not really seeing the business results. And we had spent a lot of time at ActiveCampaign like naming our category.
customer experience automation. This is a time when everybody was trying to create a category, right? Like we saw Drift do it, we saw Gainsight do it, but we made the mistake of those two, Drift kind of made it happen, but Gainsight saw this wave of customer success becoming a thing, becoming a role within a company, right? And then they rode that wave. It was a wave already happening, they just rode it. You can't make the wave happen when you're naming your category. And I think customer experience automation ultimately led to a lot of people being really confused about what ActiveCampaign was.
Cause the real value prop of Active Campaign is enterprise grade email marketing and marketing automation, $11 a month or whatever it was at the time. And that you didn't like just, you didn't have to explain it. We were also the first ones with like a visual like flow builder and email marketing and everybody has those now. And it confused a lot of people. I'm like, I think B2B is boring because we're all out here, tech companies trying to name categories and name solutions. And we're just.
for doing what I now call checkbox marketing, doing our weekly blogs, our weekly webinars, our bi-weekly podcasts, our monthly news. It was just like date plus output type of content. And I realized that I just kind of looked around and I saw two things happening again, similar to riding a wave that I already saw happening. One is I was experiencing this on my own in my personal life in a B2C format. saw a company I love a lot called Beardbrand naming a problem.
I saw a another company naming problems, this company called warrior, which they do these like, it's like a very, it's a little bit like weird toxic masculinity. But like, was reading one of the books that they put out and it said, you know, I remember when my body used to feel like a weapon and that line, like I stopped, it stopped me in my tracks. I was like, as as a former athlete and as former combat athlete, like I do remember when my body used to feel like a weapon. And I never had words for that before, you know,
Tom Rudnai (07:11)
you
Brendan Hufford (07:12)
And I was like, this gave me words for the, like, I'll buy anything. don't, if you want to sell me a supplement, I'll buy it. You want to sell me coaching, I'll buy it. Like, I don't care what the solution is. You name the problem. I trust you to solve it. And I realized like, that's really the cure for checkbox marketing is starting by name, by identifying the problem. You'd be amazed how many companies, when we try to narrow down what problem they solve struggle. It's rough out there in the streets and
by identifying the problem and naming it, now we have a foundation for content going forward. Naming the problem, we now have our newsletter. Naming the problem, we have our podcasts. Naming the problem, we have our webinars and our emails and everything that we do. Our social media presence, everything starts with, are we helping people solve this problem? We live and breathe to help you solve this problem.
Tom Rudnai (08:00)
Yeah, I think where it's most powerful, what you described with your B2C example of what was it, Beardbrand, was it?
Brendan Hufford (08:05)
Yeah, Beardbrand had one called Scent Confusion, which they kind of made up. But I liked it because they were like, hey, think about it. Your cologne smells one way. Your beard product smells another way. What you put in your hair smells another way. And your deodorant smells a fourth way. And you have scent confusion. And I'm like, yeah, I do use four different brands. And they're like, well, just come by ours. It's a deodorant, a beard oil, hair products and deodorant or whatever. It's all the in cologne. They all smell the same. And I was like,
I sure will buy that. It's so dumb because it there's I don't love as an example because it kind of made a problem where there might have not been one. It might not be a real thing. I want to caution people on doing that. They try to like make up a problem to solve. Don't do that. Yeah, it's not a real thing, but it was really good. It's good copywriting and I think it probably did really well for them as a campaign.
Tom Rudnai (08:49)
And confusion is not scientifically proven. It is powerful.
Yeah, I mean nothing shows empathy more than being able to name that problem that you can't quite put your finger on, right? Which I think when you're going after a category creation type strategy rather than a grab within an existing category, then that's what you always have to do, right? People are vaguely problem aware or at different levels of problem awareness. You're trying to boil that down into something simple that they can understand they need to take action on and know how to do that.
Brendan Hufford (09:25)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the other thing you touched on, like problem aware. think a lot about those Eugene Schwartz levels of awareness, right? I'm like unaware. I don't even know there's an issue going on. I'm problem aware. I'm solution aware. I know there are solutions to this product. The next one is being product aware. I know that your solution solves this problem. And then most aware is just like, just show me the deal. Tell me the pricing, show me the product, give me a demo, or just put it on the website for Christ's sake. So
I think those things, like that's a lot of where I anchor a lot of my work is in those levels of awareness and speaking to those as opposed to speaking to channels and check boxes.
Tom Rudnai (10:02)
Yeah, okay. You said something a minute ago. since we're on the topic of category creation, you said you can't make the wave happen. So I guess to me, the idea of a category creation strategy is that to an extent, you can make the wave happen. Like how do you square those two things? And do you believe that you can, as a marketer, create a category?
Brendan Hufford (10:20)
The, so I think you can make something happen, but it is really hard for that to last. If you want to build something that lasts like Drift, they made chat bots feel interesting. Nobody was like, I would love to get some chat bots on my website. I want to buy chat bots or live chat. Like those already existed. People didn't like them and Drift made them cool. And they kind of, to some degree made that, you know, conversational marketing.
They named the solution, not the problem, but I will never sit in judgment of a company that was highly successful. And I still have all their books on my shelf. Like I bought, they did great marketing. They did like a hundred things right. They did a really good job. What I've observed is like, I think they still have customers, but you know, nobody talks about them anymore, right? Because they didn't ride a wave. They made it happen. And when that passed, when everybody adopted it and everybody started ignoring,
Tom Rudnai (11:16)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (11:16)
the chat
bots in the bottom right corner, because we all had the Drift chat bot, we had then HubSpot copied it and it was free in all our HubSpot accounts. And we're like, okay, I'll just put this on my website. All those things. Now the pendulum swung the other way where we want live chat. If I'm doing the chat bot, I don't want some automated journey to try to take me through a lead flow. I want to talk to somebody. And the real power in those now is having a account executive BDR, SDR, somebody on there where you can ask questions and get a real human answer right away.
People are trying to use AI for the chatbots now, and it's usually an awful experience, right? So I think you can make it happen. It's just not gonna last that long. And then it becomes a question of like, what do we do post category creation? How do we build a brand that lasts? How do we build a brand that's still somebody's favorite, even though they're kind of over what we do?
Tom Rudnai (12:07)
Why don't you think it lasts then? Because to me, the whole SAS model is built around there is a first mover advantage, right? If you're the first person there, then you raise the money, you have the customers, you have access to know what to build next. That iteration speed that you can achieve as a result of all those things becomes your moat. Yet so often, the person who names the category, who creates the wave, isn't the one who ends up capturing the value from it. I'm trying to think, are there examples you can think of for people who have done that really well that we can learn from?
if you do manage to do the first part.
Brendan Hufford (12:40)
So I think it's really important to caution people here. We get trapped in survivorship bias where we say like, these companies won, even though we don't really know. know, like monday.com gets thrown around as like a winning company a lot. And you don't realize that they blitz scaled, that they literally raised a round every single year for like four years. They raised like 25 million, 50 million, a hundred million and a quarter billion four years in a row. That world doesn't exist anymore. You can't, you can't.
Tom Rudnai (12:47)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (13:08)
do that. But survivorship bias will be like, well, look, they did. They made that enough market penetration that now they stuck around and blah, Cool. But for every monday.com, there's 10,000 companies that tried to do that and didn't. So we can't copy some of these playbooks or like HubSpot is a great example. They've built and rebuilt and reinvented themselves and added different pieces to their puzzle and do, you know, I just saw darn mash was announcing the marketplace that I've known about for a while that I think super interesting.
with their AI agents, like they're betting on that. Like that will be the future probably of what they offer. Super smart. Like really, I look up to some of the people there quite a bit. But I think to your question, it is really hard to identify these companies that are able to have that first mover advantage and then not just like.
pave the way, prove the category. then especially now where I don't, I don't believe a lot of like the LinkedIn, I call them think boys, who just like post thoughts and then don't actually care whether it's true or not. They're just posting for the likes and the memes basically, you know, where they're like, these AI agents are going to kill marketing in six months or something dumb. ⁓ yeah, those guys, right. Or they post things like
Tom Rudnai (14:17)
XYZ is dead. That's the classic one.
Brendan Hufford (14:23)
I don't understand why most companies aren't just vibe coding. This is to your the question like, you know, why don't we just vibe? We could vibe code this in a weekend. And I'm like, anybody who's tried vibe coding something in a weekend knows you can't build a successful company by vibe coding things like that's not how that works. Never just tell me you don't know anything about programming without telling me don't know anything about programming if you're to post that type of crap. But I do think we are in a like it is easier than ever to start.
a software company, right? And because of that, you have those first movers who are like, they're doing something really interesting. That's really cool. Within six months, you have four competitors. Within 12 months, you have 15 competitors. And it's like, does the world really need 26 companies in this category? Like, I don't think we do. I think we probably need one or two. So I think that's part of why it's like really hard to stick around because like people will come up, they'll have...
better marketing, they'll understand community better. They'll have a different structure to the company. Maybe you are three developers and a product person, and another company is two developers and two marketers and somebody who really understands partnerships on the sales side. And they're able to outgrow and outscale because they understand other things. They're not solving everything with product like you are because you don't have any marketing or sales skills, like those types of things. So I don't know. I think it's a complicated answer to your question.
But I do recognize that that is really, really true, that the category creators almost never, you if you think about, even think about whether it's search engines, the original search engines, not around anymore, right? Everybody talks about how Ford was like the first car. Ford was the eighth car. They were not the first mover. Somebody else proved the model. They were just, they were the winners, so they get to rewrite history and say the Model T was the first like popular car. And it was the first popular car.
Oldsmobile is older than them. There's a bunch of other car companies before them. So that happens quite often throughout history and across industries.
Tom Rudnai (16:25)
Yeah, I think you're exactly right to say something that how it worked before isn't how it's gonna work going forward as well. Like the disruption cycle for any technology now is so fast. I know hot businesses that are like seed series A, you would expect them to be just starting their growth journey. It's time to pour resources into that company, right? They're gonna be the winner. I know founders already trying to disrupt those companies because they're like, it's out of date. It's not as good as it could be. It's crazy, right? But it changes so many elements of how you build and market a startup.
It means that I think we have to learn to view product market fit as this much more dynamic thing. used to, traditionally we can ride product market fit to an exit because it lasts seven, 10 years if you get product market fit. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (16:59)
Yes.
because only one of those things had to change, right?
Like you just, the market is here and I have to get my product to match the market. And once I do success, but now the market is a moving target. So you have product market fit, but now the market's here and you have to move the product to chase the market constantly. We didn't have that for a weird five years, 10 years, like whatever, you know, the 20, the 2010s, we didn't really have that. And now the last five years, like,
Tom Rudnai (17:28)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (17:33)
That hasn't been even remotely true.
Tom Rudnai (17:36)
100 % is why I started Demand Genius, right? Like I think more than ever, so traditionally your workforce is your moat to a certain degree, right? If you have more people, you can build more product. I don't think that's true anymore, because the value add isn't the amount of code you can ship, it's your agility to respond to this, to kind of catch these ever-changing market dynamics. So actually, sales forces thousand people is no longer an advantage, it's an obstacle, because the bureaucracy slows them down. That's the bigger inhibitor than actually the ability to write code.
So I think I'm not quite as bullish on these people that are like five years time, we've got a billion dollar company with one person, but I think it's a very good time to be the upstart, right?
Brendan Hufford (18:16)
Yeah, I mean, we've seen that. I am a huge fan of Adobe. I use Adobe Express. I've also used Canva for a long time. But you would think a company of Adobe size would immediately duplicate Canva and have it be pixel perfect, copy, ready to roll, whatever, like Meta did with Stories on Instagram. Meta continually tries to buy a company. If they can't buy it, they just steal the features and build it. And it happens really fast.
Tom Rudnai (18:27)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (18:43)
You would think that Adobe would do that with Adobe express where it would be an exact copy of Canva. And it's not like it's hard to build that product in a big company to get like there's layers and layers and layers of decisions, bureaucracy, turnover in team, loss of knowledge, like all of these sorts of things. So I think some of those that stuff, like I'm always in awe when you go to those, super old churches and stuff and, predominantly.
you know, not here, obviously not in the United States, because we're not that old as a country. But like you see some of these churches and stuff when they're like, this took 600 years to build. I'm like, dude, I can't project manage something for six months. How did they project manage it for 600 years and not have it fall down like that? That's mind boggling. These are the things I think about. Like, that's mind boggling to me. I'm like, they didn't have they didn't have JIRA. Like there were no tickets being like logged.
Tom Rudnai (19:20)
you
Hahaha
Brendan Hufford (19:37)
How did they keep track of who was doing what and that nobody screwed up? I have no idea. But that's like, we've been doing this stuff for a long time, but it is hard to do all of those things within a big company, right? There's so much going on and also like priorities change and stock, like, the stock is dipped. So now we got to ship these AI features to look like we're ahead of the game and we're going to abandon this stuff that everybody said they wanted. We know it's going to sell well. We got to do shareholder value for two quarters. Like that's real.
Tom Rudnai (20:07)
No, for sure. Let's talk a little bit about content, right? So we like all of these changes are happening.
Brendan Hufford (20:11)
You don't want to talk about
old churches for another 30 minutes. Yeah, sorry.
Tom Rudnai (20:15)
Let's get back to that at the end.
Hey man, I'm in London, old churches are our thing. We don't do many things well, but we do old churches. Yeah, like all of these changes happening in the market, right? Huge challenge for content team. How do you keep up with that? The way that we build products is changing this quickly. The way that we message everything is going to change almost faster,
Brendan Hufford (20:21)
Yes!
Yes, you do.
Tom Rudnai (20:35)
Like it's gonna be a very broad question, but I guess give me a little bit on just like, how do you think the content playbook is changing? I know you've got some thoughts on this.
Brendan Hufford (20:43)
So I think, God, where to start? So I think the first thing is you kind of alluded to this, but I want to give this to people is marketing. We don't realize this when we're in marketing, but marketing is historically, especially in tech companies and B2B SaaS, which is a lot of my world. They were the farthest from the customer. Product is closer to the customer than us. Customer support closer to the customer, customer success, sales. Every team talks to customers except marketing.
And I've been in companies, both as a consultant and in-house, where I've tried to talk to customers and they're like, we emailed them too much already. We already asked too much of them. They don't want to hear from us anymore, right? They're afraid that they're going to churn their customers if you talk to them too much or care too much, which is a wild take to me. But marketing has this job to become the customer whisperer. If you want a defensible career within your company, you listening to this, watching this, you must become the customer whisperer.
You must, and what that means is you become the person that everybody at the company comes to when they have a question about your ICP, your ideal customer. When they have a question about that, they come to you because you're closer than everybody else. And what that usually means is talking to them a lot, building a community where they talk to each other, observing conversations, being a part of that community, right? Not using community as marketing, but using it as like we're building a cool dinner party. Everybody's invited and I'm just the host. I'm just here to hang out and connect people.
Tom Rudnai (21:54)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (22:08)
That's step one, becoming close to them. And you can do that a lot of ways. You can take your sales calls and take all the transcripts that you're generating from Fathom and zap those into chat GPT, pull out the pain points and zap that into Slack. So every single day you've got a full feed of here's what everybody's saying. Here's the alternatives they're considering. Here's a lot of, know, here's the things they're struggling with, right? Great, I've got this feed now in Slack of all this cool stuff. There's ways to do these types of things and be better informed.
That has to be the foundation. On top of that, we already talked about content IP, like naming the problem we solve and existing to help solve that problem. Then on top of that, I have this, I've seen it to be true in a few rare companies, but I think a lot of us are still, we all still have like channels in our title. I'm the SEO manager, I'm the email marketing coordinator, I'm the social media marketer, I'm the product marketer and whatever. And I think what we'll see,
with winning companies going forward is either pods or people, groups of people or individuals owning stages of awareness and then being given, you know, they have a, I call a deep generalist skillset. Sorry, I know I'm throwing a lot of vocabulary out here. Deep generalist means like a lot of people are familiar with like a T-shaped market or where I know something, everything kind of well, but I go really deep on one thing. SEO people were like this for a long time. They're like, kind of dabble across the board, but I'm really good at SEO.
I think those days are gone. think the days of the deep generalist are here. The liberal arts degree of marketing where it's like, I can write your nurture sequence. I can do life cycle marketing. I can also hop on a sales call and sell the crap out of this. I also know SEO and I know how to win on LinkedIn, but I'm also really good at like I'm channel agnostic good at this, right? I think I have that skill set. probably like a lot of people have this skill set. I'm just giving it words, right? This deep generalist skill set where I'm able to own product unaware.
Tom Rudnai (23:52)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (24:02)
I'm able to own solution aware in my job at solution aware is to do everything in my power, any channel I can get my hands on to take people from, know that there's solutions like this exist to our solution exists. And that's my job, right? And it's bringing people down, but owning these levels of awareness instead of being like, all right, how does SEO play in all these different levels of awareness? Usually it doesn't happen. Usually it's just a keyword export from Hrefs or something or SEMrush and like,
actually owning these things. I think that's the future of what content teams look like. At least ones that are able to win and not, especially in a, hate saying this, like a do more with less era. In that type of era, we're just asking people to be able to do, not do more with less, but even if it's do more with more, we're just asking people to have a broader skillset than they had historically.
Tom Rudnai (24:55)
Hmm, I absolutely love that. I'd like to say I've got this way of thinking of it, which is I think of content. It traditionally has always been seen in itself as a channel, right? That's not very effective. In fact, content is the foundation of everything you do, not actually just in marketing, but across go to market, right? People aren't talking to sales reps nearly as much as they have, which means this idea that content and marketing ends up MQL or even SQL is ridiculous, right? You have to be giving a lot more support after that.
Brendan Hufford (25:06)
Mmm.
Yeah, I would. That's a really good. I want to put a pin in that really quick. That's a great point because I think a lot of times, like you said, we're like, all right, marketing's job is done. Now it's sales job. And then you talk to them and they're like, we have a nine month sales cycle. And I'm like, you're not marketing to those people. You think you're not marketing while those people are in their sales cycle for nine months. You marketed to them for, I don't know, probably two or three years. You didn't know it because we can't really identify a lot of the stuff without a platform, like a dream data or something.
Tom Rudnai (25:24)
But it exists.
Brendan Hufford (25:53)
but like you've been marketing them for two or three years and then you think suddenly they, they've talked to a sales rep. They don't need to be marketed to anymore. Wrong. It's actually more important. Like you just said, I think that's a great point.
Tom Rudnai (26:05)
because traditionally it's all built on as a sales rep, you talk to your champion every two weeks or something like that, right through until it closes. But now you've got so many different stakeholders, so many different people, that's way too much to ask of a champion. So marketing has to take a much bigger role in how do we stay front of mind during nine months of this looping complex sales process, right? It's not realistic to ask of a sales rep who people don't wanna talk to anymore.
Brendan Hufford (26:17)
Yeah, we all read.
Well, we all read predictable
revenue and we're like, okay, cool. It's this linear SDR to AE. Some people, just like I would joke, like a lot of people are still running a 2015 marketing playbook and a lot of companies are still running a 2015 sales playbook and they're not up with like how people are actually buying. How it's, isn't it, is it not a universal bad experience when you book a demo and then the next, have to wait a week to talk to an SDR.
for them to qualify you. And then you gotta wait a week to see, to talk to an AE to get the information so they can customize a demo. Then you have to wait another week to see the demo that they've customized for you. I just, makes me want to throw up in my mouth. It is the worst handoff, the worst experience. It's not how people want to buy and it hasn't been for a while, but we're still running that predictable revenue playbook. And it just doesn't work anymore. It's not, well, it's not that it doesn't work.
It works just fine. But that's thing, it's fine. It's not bad enough that we want to change that much, which is actually the most dangerous spot. We want to change.
Tom Rudnai (27:29)
it was
I mean, I think the need to change is just starting to happen, right? You can look at go-to-market efficiency metrics across all of SASS So for every one pound of ARR we're getting or one dollar of ARR, we're spending two pounds 51, which is just not sustainable, right? And that's been getting progressively and progressively worse.
So I think as VC money dries up, which is what was keeping that model alive, right? Cause we knew that we could just pump cash into that inefficient model. ⁓
Brendan Hufford (27:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, then we just IPO and we just
hand it off, hand all the debt off to the public. Cool.
Tom Rudnai (28:04)
Yeah. But coming back to the way the content structure, I love that. I love that visual of it existing horizontally across all of go to market. And then you've got the jobs to be done and that's how you structure yourself. And it probably requires specialisms, right? So at the top of the funnel, there's going to be, if you're owning problem awareness, there's going to be particular channels which you need to specialize in, you need to major in, right? But you need an awareness of all of them. I guess what I'm interested in, so
Brendan Hufford (28:08)
Yes, you said everything is content. Yeah, sorry.
Tom Rudnai (28:32)
How do you go about creating this change? So you specialize at Growth Sprints in the 10 to 100 million range of development, right? So you're probably coming in where there's a structure in place, and I'll bet it's not that. How do you go about taking people on a journey to get to a place where they're structured in the way that you're suggesting, from a people perspective?
Brendan Hufford (28:51)
Okay. So can I give everybody like a sneaky positioning lesson really quick? My public positioning of I help companies go from 10 to a hundred million is actually code for if you are a solo founder and you don't even have an internal marketing team, but you want to hire me, you're too small. You can't, you can't tell me I've had a lot of well-meaning founders hop on and they're like, I'm going to write the blogs. And I'm like, we're not a good fit. You're too small. But if you're over a hundred million dollars in revenue, you're probably
Tom Rudnai (28:55)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (29:21)
a pain in the butt to work with. Because legal wants to review the blogs before they go out. There's too much, you know, I'm gonna have to spend two weeks filling out security things and all this stuff just to be an approved vendor. And I don't wanna deal with that. So my public positioning is not only here's where I get the best results, but it is also if you're too big, I don't wanna deal with you, or you're too small, I'm not the right investment for you right now.
So there's a lot anyways, just like I said, it's a sneaky positioning lesson. In terms of how do I get teams in the right place? I'm very fortunate that I've been working at this for a long time. So I don't work with teams that aren't already in the right place, but I also work with teams. I was just telling somebody that on this, in a sales call the other day, it's kind of flipped. Like my, clients I work with have flipped from maybe two thirds big teams to now two thirds small teams. Sometimes even solo marketers where they're like, Hey, I actually
don't just need help with strategy. I also need somebody who's gonna do this. You you get on sales calls enough and you hear people say, so do you actually do the work or do you just do strategy? And it's like, I disagree at a core level with that statement in question, right? Like strategy is nothing, which is just an insane take, but I also get where they're coming from. They're sitting in the seat and they're like, if you just give me a pile of resources and 300 Google docs, that doesn't help me. I get that.
So I've actually helped like a lot of my work, maybe over the last six months has been translating the stuff that I used to give to big teams to figuring out like what's the most efficient model? How do we roll this out? What does a phased approach look like? I call it again, the teaching background. I used to call this in teaching a gradual release of responsibility. I called it an I do, we do, you do. I'm gonna do the first one. The second one we're gonna do together. The third one you're gonna do it and I'm just gonna watch. And then you should be good to keep running with it as a program.
And that's really important to me. I'm not just giving you a bunch of ideas, a bunch of tactics or an overarching strategy. I'm giving you marketing programs that you can keep running. You want to build, like we decide leveraging a founder brand on LinkedIn is really important. Cool. What does that look like as a program that you can run sustainably by yourself or with a small team? Okay, cool. Now we're going to run. There's an SEO play to be done here. Cool. What does that really look like? You don't need, I, you don't need to be on an SEO retainer. You're not big enough. It's not a core channel for you.
here's what we're gonna do. You're only gonna mess with SEO two or three times a year at most. That's what Airbnb did. Most people don't know that. SEO giant for a long time. They actually didn't have an SEO team. They had a growth team and they would just touch. You can actually see it in their organic traffic chart historically, like when they focused on it. There's like these huge upticks. ⁓ I talked to their team and asked like, hey, what's up with this? And that's what they told me. So like, depending on what it is, there are ways to phase in. It's just about prioritization. It's about what do we do first? And then what order do we...
Tom Rudnai (32:03)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (32:14)
upkeep certain things and what can we build that compounds? Like you see a lot of those like atomization of content type of things where it's like take one asset and turn it into 40 of these and 20 of these and seven of those. And I'm like, that's just checkbox marketing on steroids because like imagine you produce a podcast, right? And it's like you're, have the mandate. Every podcast, got to get seven clips from it. Why? Why not six? Why not 30?
Like that's just a made up number because you're like, need seven cause there's seven days and I want to put out a clip every day. Well, what if the podcast, like what if this podcast we're doing right now? I don't think it is. I think we're doing a great job, but what if it sucks and there's only really three clips, we're to force four more and put out a bunch of bad stuff that doesn't resonate. Cause like, shit, I got to like fill the days. I don't think so. So I think a lot of what you see. So the question is then like, how do we build it into a program that prioritizes impact? Like I post every day on LinkedIn.
My good friend, Devin Reed, I think he posts like two or three times a week, maybe. And he has bigger impact than me. Who's doing it right? I don't know, right? So I think stuff like that where it's like, hey, let's be like more thoughtful about this. And then like I said, building those programs. But everything I do now is built where a big team can scale it really big and a small team can run it sustainably.
Tom Rudnai (33:16)
Hmm.
Well, it's like systems thinking. And one of the things that I really have a problem with is marketers thinking in terms of campaigns. I just think it's really outdated in terms of the end user experience that it creates, because it means that at each stage of the funnel or the life cycle, whatever you're seeing these kind of disconnected one-off campaigns. But it also leads to exactly the approach you think of is you're not thinking about how can we build a system that we can maintain, remove ourselves from so that we can progressively improve it.
Brendan Hufford (33:51)
Hmm.
Tom Rudnai (34:01)
You're just thinking about turning out campaigns and we've got room for five this month, four next month, but there's no holistic strategy behind it.
Brendan Hufford (34:10)
I've seen it so many times where it's like, hey, we actually can't start working with you, Brendan, because we have to finish this campaign. And I'm like, well, what comes next? They're like, another campaign. And I think that works. Like I said, I didn't come up in the traditional marketing path. I didn't come up in big brand campaigns where it's like, Nike launched this campaign and whoever.
Tom Rudnai (34:21)
you
Brendan Hufford (34:36)
Ralph Lauren just launched a really well done campaign. I think there is a place for campaigns in it, but they sit at a different layer than like foundational pieces. Like what I would say most of the time is the job of content, right? Especially in SaaS and software and in B2B.
Tom Rudnai (34:55)
You touched on a minute ago, SEO. obviously a lot of talk about SEO at the moment, what from your perspective is the role that SEO plays within like a modern content strategy?
Brendan Hufford (35:00)
Mm-hmm.
SEO used to be a core strategy that you could build a whole company on. We saw so many companies where they were, and they could raise a ton of money off that too. Like look at our organic growth chart, we own this. So it felt like a defensible moat. And now what almost every single company, I don't know if anybody's looked at their Google search console lately, but go check it. I guarantee your chart is what I call an alligator chart. I heard some, I should go back and find out and give credit where it's due. I didn't come up with that, but somebody said it in my comments.
Cause I posted a bunch of them where you see it's like a tight line and then they break out impressions are going up and clicks are going down and they all kind of look like different, alligators opening their mouths at the end. And that alligator chart is what almost every company is seeing right now. And it sucks because year over year used to be like, Hey, we're up a year over a year or we're up month over month or quarter over quarter. Everybody's down year over year. And it's like, well, does that mean we did a bad job? No.
because if we did a bad job, we would be down 90%. We're only down 15%. And that's the state of the world. The Google search channel is maturing. Nobody abandoned LinkedIn when the reach went way down not too long ago. I mean, Facebook is still a highly effective platform. I would argue both organic and paid, paid especially, but also organic. People didn't stop posting on Instagram when the reach went way down. These channels mature, right?
Tom Rudnai (36:29)
Hmm.
Brendan Hufford (36:30)
And that's kind of how a lot of these discovery and social channels and everything have worked where it's like, we got to get you in. And eventually we figure out how we can needle down on stuff, raising more, like getting more money for us, less value for you. And we got to find that perfect balance where you'll still use it. We're not going to churn out users. So a lot of this stuff is kind of figuring that out, but nobody abandoned those, right? Nobody abandoned it. So I don't think people should abandon search despite what all the LinkedIn think boys will tell you SEO is dead. It's dead.
Okay, cool. Don't, don't do it anymore. Please go all in on some other dumb thing. Go all in on Reddit, I guess, which is still also awesome in a place I play in. But what I'm seeing is it can't be the foundational channel for you anymore. It's still what I do. It's still what I'm really good at. The problem is a lot of companies used to do what I would call like spreadsheet SEO, checkbox SEO, where they would get their keyword export for all their keywords and all the thousands of variations.
and then Tom, would sort for like highest volume and lowest keyword difficulty. And then that was the content strategy that we're to do this keyword. then this one, this one, highest volume, lowest difficulty, most traffic, easiest to rank for. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom down the list. That doesn't work anymore. Now we have to talk all the things I talked about earlier, how to get really close to your customer. Let's find out the stuff they're Googling now that the SEO tools don't even show.
Tom Rudnai (37:32)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (37:52)
because the SEO tools all use clickstream data. In case people don't know this, your SEO tools, the way they get their traffic data is they bought, like all of your Chrome extensions are tracking all your clicks. You all consented to it, so did I, it's fine, right? Like they're tracking everything. Chrome is tracking, like everything is tracking you on your browser for the most part, unless you're really conscious of that. Then they use that to aggregate how many people are Googling things, what people are searching for. The problem is that data's three, six, sometimes 12 months behind.
If you look in the search terms, it'll say people are still Googling like 2023 keywords. They're using like, no, they're not. It's just old data. So the problem is they can't keep current events. You're gonna find those opportunities. I remember when the CARES Act came out, I think in 2020, I was working with a 401k company in B2B and we ranked for like, hey, how does the CARES Act affect your 401k?
Tom Rudnai (38:27)
Mm.
Brendan Hufford (38:47)
And I think we had like 20,000 people on that blog the next month. And all the SEO tools were like, nobody's Googling this. We knew they were Googling it. We knew, because we were close to the customer, right? I worked with a software supply chain management company. Essentially, if people aren't familiar with that, when you're coding and you're pulling all of this stuff from different places, from this resource, that, from your patch working, you don't know what's secure and what's not. So you actually need to know what part of your code
has the vulnerabilities in it. Otherwise you're just getting slammed with like error messages and everybody ignores them because you get 50 a day. But what about if you're vibe coding, Tom? If I'm vibe coding, I have no idea where that code came from. Sometimes I don't even know what the code is. So how do I know if that's secure? How would I, like, do I want to roll that out to customers if there's a vulnerability, if I can have a database breach, somebody could hack in really easily because I didn't know where this came from?
So we looked up, we started ranking for everything Vibe coding that we knew customers cared about. All the SEO tools said don't, nobody's Googling Vibe coding. Yes, they are. And in six months, you're gonna tell us 10,000 people a month are Googling it, but today it's zero. That's not true. So we got ahead of it, right? Vibe coding security tools, Vibe coding software supply chain, like all of these different articles about different variations on that that we knew they would be searching for. That's what I think the future of SEO is.
Let's start bottom of funnel, not top. And let's look at where the puck's going, not where it is right now, to use a Wayne Gretzky quote.
Tom Rudnai (40:21)
Yeah, no, think that makes it like what I'm hearing then, like I think content and SEO used to be synonymous, right? SEO was how you did content. Yeah, and that's not the case anymore. It's kind of gone down to one of the many distribution channels in your arsenal and you need to be using multiple of them and you need to be kind of de-risked across them. But the way that you excel within SEO is you don't, it's not sit there with a laptop and SEMrush or Hrefs or, you know, other options are available. And kind of... ⁓
Brendan Hufford (40:26)
Yeah, like your blog was the content play.
Mm-hmm.
Can we list them all?
Tom Rudnai (40:50)
And look at the data, it's, again, get close to the customer. Does it change the way that you have to operate as an external? Because I guess it's a little bit harder for you to be close to a client's customer than it is for someone who's in-house. Is that true and is that a challenge for you?
Brendan Hufford (41:06)
Of course it is. I always joke with people. like, I want to, talk about the three S teams. talk about three S content a lot, sales, success and support. want to talk to those teams. And I always joke with people. I'll even talk to customers. If you'll let me, that's not always possible, right? They're not going to have an outside vendor talk to one of their customers, but those sales success and support teams. I remember I found out the, um, what was the very super famous Ogilvy ad, like something at like 60 kilometers an hour. The, the loudest thing you'll hear is the clock.
And that became like the core piece of copywriting that drove that brand for a long time. And Ogilvy was like, I found it after two weeks of reading through their technical manuals. And I'm like, okay, I'm not a psycho for wanting to read all their white papers, all their sales decks, listen to all their sales. I'm onboarding a client today. I've already listened to six sales, six demo presentations that their reps have done. Like I'm obsessed with this stuff. I love it. And like, that's where I find a lot of value is, okay, cool.
with all the recording happening now, I wanna look at all your support tickets, I wanna look at these, I wanna talk to those teams if I can, I wanna talk to your sales reps, your sales leaders, everything. I find a lot of value in that. That's the closest I can get to the customers by talking to the exact people that talk to customers every single day. And the companies who give me the most access to that are usually the most successful.
Tom Rudnai (42:28)
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. One other question that I wanted to ask when you're talking a minute ago, and then we'll get into some quick fires. I'd imagine one thing, so a lot of people who listen to this will be in that like one to 10 phase, there's maybe a little bit before you come in, right, if you're more the scale up. What are the things when you take on a new client that you always wish they'd thought about more before they came to you, before they got there,
Brendan Hufford (42:38)
Mm-hmm.
The, I think the core thing we already covered, right? Like having a problem, trying to name the problem. Hey, we've tried all these different names. That's the thing with content IP is everybody thinks like you get one and you nail it. Y'all the funny thing is like, nobody remembers all the bad dumb names. Cause that's how that works. Nobody, if they didn't work, nobody remembered them. And then I say checkbox marketing.
And Devin DMs me right away and is like, I'm so mad that you just coined that. That's a really good one. And I have two people that comment, give me that on a t-shirt. And I'm like, great, we're good. Or Sendoso, I was working with them and we kind of coined digital fatigue, which we're all feeling. We're naming a thing that is felt. Digital fatigue is very real. We are tired of the Zooms and the retargeting ads and everything is just digital, digital, digital, just shoving it into our eyeballs and our ear holes all the time.
We're exhausted and what we really crave is some real world connection, some non-digital marketing, maybe gifting, maybe direct mail. Turns out that's what their solution is to that. But man, when I posted about, I put it as a throwaway line in the middle of a post and that post went super viral and half the comments were like, my God, the digital fatigue thing is so real. You're just looking for signal. So I wish that's what brands were doing before I worked with them, right? Like, yeah, that's what I help with. But I love it when...
I get on a call and they're like, I love April Dunford, I love Andy Raskin, I understand strategic narrative and old game, new game. They already have this core level of education. They're already believers in how I believe this all works successfully. The other thing is already having the pieces in place to, like we talked about team earlier, I mean, we've kind of covered a good bit of this, the team in place to execute on things effectively, having that type of buy-in from leadership already.
I think beyond that, what I love is like coming in where there isn't a lot of content debt, where there isn't a lot of like sunk cost. I remember when I was in house, we had, called it the great traffic panic of 2021. because traffic went down to our top pages. the top pages at the company I was at was company slogans. What is an SDR, how to become a life coach and like quotes from famous marketers or something.
None of those drove any customers. Like you could argue, it's brand awareness. Okay, sure. But nobody's buying email marketing because they read how to become a life coach, no matter how much we try to connect it. And when traffic went down, everybody freaked out. And I was like, we're still ranking number one for this. I pulled up Google trends. like, it's just going, like less people care about this every year. And we see the same thing right now with the alligator charts, right? Where...
I had a client, were ranking number one organically and they had the number one spot in the AI overview, traffic's down 40%. I don't know what to tell you. anybody, all I can tell you is anybody who trusts Google for a quick answer and doesn't want an expert opinion, not your ICP. Like that's fine. And people argue like, oh, well, they never wanted to go to a website any way, either way, they just wanted an answer. I disagree. think we've trained people to, Google's trained people to not.
necessarily want to go to a website by serving them, by forcing us to write 3,000 word essays for like, what is an SDR? If you make me write a 9,000, you know what mean? We've all, if you were trying to look up a recipe lately, like that's like 19 paragraphs about their like Nona and the old country.
Tom Rudnai (46:06)
Yeah.
It's
that thing if you, and I want to make beans on toast. It's like the history of beans on toast. Who invented?
Brendan Hufford (46:14)
Oh my God. then, but then, but then they
leave out something crucial. They're like, they don't tell you what beans it's like, or how much they're like, Oh, it's just, you just put the beans on. You're like, is it a quarter cup, a half cup, an eighth of a cup? I don't know how much they leave out these crucial details because they're so worried about the S. Anyways, we've trained people to distrust and to not want to click and everything versus giving them actual things. So I think that like, because we're already seeing that happen across the board that
Tom Rudnai (46:20)
Yeah.
Brendan Hufford (46:43)
having somebody who sees that the world that way and being like, right, cool. To your point earlier, like we need to diversify. We need to be thoughtful. They already believe in like a zero click content type of world of like, Hey, your company newsletter can't be three blogs in a trench coat where it's like, Hey, here's our three latest blogs and our latest webinar. And I call it like a corporate commodity newsletter. nobody wants those. Nobody reads them. Give them zero click, put all the value in the email. Done. That's how people want to consume it. So if you're
when we're already bought in on that and we're already doing that type of stuff, like that's an ideal place for me to come in.
Tom Rudnai (47:18)
So that's a bit to some where some basic experimentation already around the positioning, naming the problem. That's what LinkedIn is great for that. Right. You said that that's you came up with yours. Just do some posts.
Brendan Hufford (47:25)
my God, the best. Super cheap thought leadership ads too.
Like get your founder to post 20 different things and then just put some money behind it. Show it. If you sell to CTOs, show those posts to CTOs and see what's, see what's getting the most engagement. interesting. They might not all comment, right? Especially technical audiences, but, posts do some, become a member of a Reddit community, sub Reddit that you know, you're going spark Toro, see what sub Reddits your audience is a part of.
be involved there, be a real community, be a homie for a while, not a marketer, and just hang out and then seed some posts of like, hey, are you all struggling with digital? You know, in my case, like if I was in a marketing subreddit, dude, this digital fatigue thing is killing me. And just see what people say, just start a discussion. Instead of being like, what do I have to, I saw Sophie Miller from, I think that's her name, from Pretty Little Marketer posted about this, like instead of saying, what do I want to say, say, what conversation do I want to start? It's a better frame for creating content.
that sort of thing. I think that, yeah, like that experimentation with the thought leadership ads, and then sorry, Tom, I keep cutting you off. I'm like very excitable about this stuff. I think that's definitely the start.
Tom Rudnai (48:30)
No, no, no, it's good.
My measure of the quality of a podcast is always like how much my head is spinning by the end of it. And I can confirm that I am very, very confused right now. So I've got loads of shit that I'm gonna go in.
Brendan Hufford (48:39)
No, I've the opposite.
I hope everybody listening is not confused. I'm hoping they, to your point, have some action steps of like, hey, let's start naming some problems. Let's create some content IP and try some stuff out. Let's move more towards zero click content. Let's create a newsletter that people actually want and is interesting. Even if we're starting from scratch, let's start implementing some of this stuff. just, especially if you're a small team or you're a solo marketer,
You got to pick one thing at a time. You can't run the old playbook of like, we're going to do webinars and blogs and emails. And this other thing or think that AI is going to enable you to just spew out like, look at, I did 97 activities this month. Aren't I so great? And then the sales team is like, yo, these leads still freaking suck. And we don't like them. Like, you know what I mean? Like you're just, what are we doing? And that's not marketers faults. Like that is oftentimes I'll say this too.
I do nothing but empathize with marketers because it's a hard spot to be in because a lot of bosses, like if you report to the CEO, very few CEOs are going to be like, sure, you can cut output 90 % on the bet that we get more impact. Cause what if it's two months of less output and we don't see impact? What if it's three user evidence, just put a thing out where they said, Hey, we made a heavy bet on content. And if you look at their pipeline, is flat for six months. And then it explodes. Huh?
It's almost as if we know the sales cycle exists. It's almost as if Tom, there's a marketing cycle. Weird. Who would have thought that marketing might take 200 to 300 plus days. This is what dream data saw. Chili Piper put out cool data around this where they're like, yeah, we see from first touch point ever all the way through 300 plus days. Got it. Well, if you say like, we're going to produce less and have bigger impact. The thing you do today, July 29th,
Tom Rudnai (50:13)
You
Brendan Hufford (50:34)
isn't going to have impact maybe until December, January. That's when we'll see the real uptick. But does your executive leadership team trust you enough and have the patience for you to reduce output, to have more impact? That's the hard spot a lot of marketers are in.
Tom Rudnai (50:51)
Yeah, and that's about communication, right? Look, we've got to let you go now. So I'm going ask you for one recommendation before we go, and then I'll let you go. What's podcast, a thought leader, a book or something like that that every listener should go and check out?
Brendan Hufford (51:05)
One is definitely anything by Ryan Holiday. You can read his old marketing books. A lot of people know Ryan Holiday writes a lot about stoicism. He was actually the head of marketing for American Apparel. He has a book called Trust Me I'm Lying, Confessions of a Media Manipulator. He was in on this stuff 30 years before everybody else. It's still a brilliant book of how to get press coverage in media.
And it is a lot of what we're seeing now, like with the Sydney Sweeney ad campaign, where it's just like, let's rage bait people. We know this is going to be polarizing and bad and toxic, but we think that that is a good thing. Some people still do. It gives you the playbook of how you can use this in a nefarious way, but also in a good way. So I would say I think that's really good. I also love his books on stoicism. I have the phrases from them tattooed on the inside of my forearms. I think that's a good place to start. I think I'm trying to think of.
What else I'm really excited about? Here's what I'm really excited about that I think people should pre-order when it's available is Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad at Spark Toro are writing a book about zero click content, zero click marketing. I can't wait for that to come out. I'm super, super excited for that. Otherwise, mean, this is such a mistake. There's so many, also I'm thinking about potty.
Like I love Devin Reed's podcast, Read Between the Lines. I think that's amazing. I follow so many people. Here's what I'll do. Over the next, can I give you a good one? Here, Tom, this is perfect. Sorry for the rambling answer. I think, so there's a person I follow on LinkedIn named Winter Mendelson, and Winter doesn't have a ton of followers, but is one of the best. It is the...
newsletter that I continue to get the most about. It's called Creative Commerce. It's a lot of like B2C marketing, but all of it is applicable to B2B. Like I keep DMing like CEOs. like, look at this. This is what we got to do. This is so cool. Blah, blah, blah. It's just brilliant stuff. And Winter breaks it down really, really well, both on their Instagram and on LinkedIn and in the newsletter. if you're not following, if you Google Creative Commerce or Winter Mendelson, it's spelled how it sounds. You can probably even misspell it. Google figure it out.
They're amazing. Follow them.
Tom Rudnai (53:16)
Awesome, I love that, a bit of a more niche one and Winter, if you're listening, then I think you owe Brendan a pint for the shout out and the boost that he's about to give you. Look, I've got to let you go now, but it's been truly awesome to speak to you. Thank you for joining the podcast and everyone listening at home. Yeah, thank you. See you next week.
Brendan Hufford (53:32)
Thanks everybody.