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This show is made for B2B marketers who are tired of the same old advice. Ugi Djuric, CEO of ContentMonk and B2B Vault, sits down with some of the best minds in B2B to talk about what’s really working, what’s broken, and what nobody tells you about growing a company. This is the show where people share their deepest insights and secret knowledge they wouldn't otherwise share on LinkedIn.
Market forces are market forces. It's basically like creative plus money equals sales. You're gonna post a job on LinkedIn and get 4,000 applicants in 48 hours. And you're gonna hire exactly none of them because you're gonna hire the person that was referred to you by somebody you know. We are a storytelling species. HubSpot ended up killing the inbound community because they couldn't figure out a way to justify the investment, the continued investment. Post hocus Generative AI for content marketing wasn't quite a thing. Running sales hacker. Don't acquire a media brand. Just don't do it because if I can talk you out of it, then it would have failed. Yeah, it's one of my favorite metrics. Most people don't seem to actually measure it, but it's super important. Offer a discount to the right person at the right time. Get the sale fast.
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Speaker 1
00:46
Why don't B2B marketers do that more?
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Speaker 2
00:54
Hello guys. I had the pleasure of speaking with Colin Campbell who is the head of content community at Pixies AI. What we talked about today is really interesting because Colin had an opportunity to work with Outreach in the past at the moment when Outreach acquired Sales Hacker and he has a ton of first hand experience on, I would say a dilemma that makes us think all the time which is should software companies become media brands? Should you build one or acquire one? How to build a media brand company and how to use content overall to get more brand awareness, to get more attention, to get more sales. And we also talked about how Colin and Pixies are using community and content to improve their awareness and to get more customers. So prepare because this is going to be one really great episode.
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Speaker 2
01:51
I really enjoyed recording this and it has a ton of unique information and insights that Colin generously shared with all of us. Enjoy. One thing that I'm very obsessed about is how can B2B software companies like escape that commodity trap Right now that I would say it's happening everywhere because of, you know, AI content became a commodity. There is a lot of noise fighting for attention as the time goes, it's harder and harder if you have the knowledge we have today. But we are doing marketing 20 years ago I have a feeling everything would be 10 times easier. From your experience. How can companies stand out today and earn that attention in such a loudy market?
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Speaker 1
02:53
I have two kind of weirdly opposing views on this and sum them up in this way like one is you can't. Market forces are market forces and I think for a long time SaaS has. B2B software has felt, for lack of a better term, sexy. Because most founders can imagine themselves at the very least and some of them actually are doing it can imagine like creating a new category or doing something genuinely novel from a product standpoint. Now that's no longer the case, it doesn't mean a business can't be viable. Like think about manufacturing. There are tons of enormous manufacturing companies that do a great job and almost all of them have, you know, products that are commoditized these days, right? They differentiate. They don't have to create a category, they don't have to be doing something novel from a product standpoint.
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Speaker 1
03:53
They just have to embrace the unsexiness of like rigorous operations, good financial management and like excellent leadership. And I think that B2B SaaS is facing a turning point where we can't just assume that good promote from like a marketing standpoint. There's four Ps, right? Product price, placement and promotion. Up until now. And basically since predictable revenue was written, there's this like, I don't know, what's that like 20, almost 20 year, 15 year period where you could almost assume that a product was good enough to sell and that all you needed was excellent promotion. I don't think that's the case anymore. And so like we're facing a business reality in B2B SaaS that the rest of the business world has been facing for a long time.
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Speaker 1
04:41
We just have to wake up and smell the roses and understand that maybe we aren't that different and that's okay. But we have to manage our companies and especially our finances as if we're not going to be the next salesforce. I don't know if there is going to be a next B2B software Salesforce. And so anyway, that's like one half of my answer is like you can't escape the commodification. Market forces are what it are what they are.
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Speaker 1
05:09
The other half of my answer is like if on the, when it comes to content and when it comes to standing out, if you do want to stand out, and that is an effective part of your strategy, which it doesn't have to be like you can have a great business without having super viral great content, then I think the answer is basically authority, like not brand authority, but authority in the shape and form of a human being. Somebody with like feelings and opinions and experiences and pulling from that, like your partners, your employees, your customers. Things that your competitors just can't, don't have. You know, you gotta rest on what is genuinely unique as an input to your content process.
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Speaker 2
05:55
How do you find that uniqueness?
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Speaker 1
05:58
Well, I've heard it said for a long time that a conversation is the atomic unit of a sale. And you being Lemlist for a while, probably, I can't remember. Do you remember who said that? No, no. I don't either. The last time I heard it was from Evan Dunn who is our former head of growth here at Pixis and he just went to run growth at Titan X. Great guy, but he got it from somewhere and he couldn't remember either. So anyway, a conversation is the atomic unit of a sale. I think conversation is also an atomic unit of content because we are a storytelling species. You know, the basis of storytelling is oral tradition. And there are still, there's a reason, like people turn to their peers for product recommendations and introductions to new hires.
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Speaker 1
06:49
You're going to post a job on LinkedIn and get 4,000 applicants in 48 hours. And you're going to hire exactly none of them because you're going to hire the person that was referred to you by somebody, you know, like that is always going to carry more weight, the person to person interaction. And that's because that's where you get things you can't get elsewhere. And so what you can do is like just have conversations with your employees and ask them to tell you about what they worked on for their customers this week or ask your sellers, like why their customers aren't buying from them, you know, and you don't necessarily know what you're going to find. And that's kind of the point.
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Speaker 1
07:27
The point is to, if you as a creator, as someone running, you know, brand positioning or content marketing or product marketing, if you're learning, that means you have something to teach that is, you know, inimitable.
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Speaker 2
07:42
I want to go back to the first point that you just talked about, right. Although I partially agree with you.
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Speaker 3
07:51
Right.
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Speaker 2
07:52
And I mean, like, to be honest, like it's really hard to become a new salesforce or to build a new category. Many software companies, they're fighting in categories with a lot of other competitors, right? So let's take for example the sales outreach software, right? Something that's close to both of us, right? I would say like that 90% of sales outreach software out there, they would have like a very hard. They will have a lot of problems, you know, positioning themselves into the consideration set of their potential buyers. Because there is Lem List, there is outreach, there is, you know, a bunch of other category players out there who have been in that space for like the last 10, 15 or 20 years who are earning a lot of attention.
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Speaker 3
08:54
Right.
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Speaker 2
08:55
So my question is how can you use growing companies with a product market fit fight their way into the top three consideration set, like in the sales outreach space? Like it's a very competitive category for a very long time.
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Speaker 3
09:12
Right.
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Speaker 2
09:13
We had Lemlist seven, eight years back. Right. Basically like an outsider who came and took, I would say like a very decent market share and grew pretty quickly. Then you had like hundreds of other tools who didn't make it and then again like a few years later. Now we have like products such as instantly, for example, who are again competing in that very same crowded category that you would say, you know, it's pretty dominant but they kind of managed to position themselves, you know, on, in that consideration side.
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Speaker 1
09:52
Yeah. And to be honest, I don't know how. I don't, I actually don't know that brand. So I don't know how they did it. It's not something that I would do. Like there are a lot of problems to solve. I probably would pick a problem to solve that's not already being solved a hundred different ways by a thousand different competitors. And this is what I mean by like this is a fundamental truth of market competition. You think about, you could, let's talk about shoes. I'm not really a sneaker head or anything but like Adidas, Puma, Converse, Nike, these are the well established brands. Reebok, you know, New Balance. Together they probably own a large chunk of the footwear market for like both activity and athleisure. And then what like a decade ago, along comes Allbirds. And they didn't win by out promoting anybody.
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Speaker 1
10:48
They won by creating a different product. It's 100% wool, it's washable, it's resistant to odor, it's extremely comfortable. And you, and they use like a D2C motion with a bunch of like social advertising at the start. So like you have to do something different with your product. And that's what I say when I mean when I say like Mark, you got to get Back to like 4Ps marketing. You can't out promote Nike. They just have more media dollars to spend. You have to come up with something that's different from what Nike is offering. So you know, for software niche down, pick a vertical, maybe you know, offer some kind of extremely different pricing structure that would be advantageous to some businesses with, you know, somewhat unique or different use cases.
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Speaker 1
11:44
But like, I just don't think There's a path to, you know, content can't save a product that doesn't stand out on its own. I guess that's what I'm saying. It's like you can't take a product that is a nothing burger and like market it into success.
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Speaker 2
12:02
And now when you're saying that we can cross like the parallel between what you're saying and the examples I mentioned. Right. So when we go back, outreach, mailshake, you know, all the other like leaders, they were like pretty, you know, same right. Doing I would say similar stuff. Then Lemlist came and the reason why they, you know, got so popular is because they offered a different view at sales outreach and they had some kind of features that's really not existent in you know, other companies such as for example warm ups such as image personalization, video personalization, you know, that kind of stuff.
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Speaker 3
12:48
Right.
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Speaker 2
12:49
And then they managed to you know, change kind of a trends, I would say among the icp. And now when were talking about instantly like a five years later, their unique point of view was that they were not pricing you based on, you know, amount of email accounts that you have instead of, you know, emails that you send. And they made you know, basically did their interview was let's send as much emails as you possibly can and you have like an unlimited email account that you can now send. You can manage like 30, 40, 50, 100 email accounts each sending like you know, 300 emails a week or whatever is the case. So it's definitely doing something differently than the rest of the, of the market.
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Speaker 2
13:43
Tell me how big part of new user acquisition and outreach sales hacker had?
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Speaker 1
13:53
Oh, that's a great question. Because we never really measured it to be honest. There were a couple campaigns where we had measurement like I put together like a sort of a multi channel content plus events plus partnerships lead gen ads campaign that contributed half a million dollars of pipeline maybe when all was said and done. But truth be told, it was like an investment in media in good faith in the same way that like HubSpot started the inbound community way back in the day. And honestly I think the way that Salesforce started their trailblazers, Trailhead, at first it was an investment in good faith. It felt like something that was right to do and then they kind of justified it post hoc.
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Speaker 1
14:42
I mean HubSpot ended up killing the inbound community because they couldn't figure out a way to justify the investment, the continued investment post hoc. And now they're kind of trying to bring back community in different ways with acquiring, what was it, Morning Brew or the Hustle that they acquired?
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Speaker 2
14:57
Hustle.
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Speaker 1
14:58
The Hustle, Yeah. And they have a couple other little community initiatives going. So we never really measured it our. But we gave ourselves permission to not measure it by making sure that Sales Hacker paid for itself. So it kind of didn't matter exactly how much were contributing because we knew that if were contributing even like $10 of pipeline, that was $10 we didn't have before at zero cost. What I mean by that was like Sales Hacker costs were my head count, a little bit of ad spend, like some small tech budget for, you know, operations and tools and marketing ops and stuff. And we had sponsorships that paid for all of that. All of it. So like the net cost to operate Sales Hacker as a media brand in a community for outreach was zero. After acquisition.
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Speaker 1
15:52
Yeah, after. After they acquired the brand.
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Speaker 2
15:55
And basically everything extra that you got in terms of like the outreach customers was. Was extra, right?
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Speaker 1
16:02
Yeah, it was just gravy. So. Yeah, we don't have like numbers. I wish I did. It would have been a really cool story to tell if we had figured out a way to measure it.
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Speaker 2
16:11
But can you run me like true. The operations that you use, like how does ops look like for Sales Hacker or like any other, you know, similar kind of a project that you worked on later on? Like what would be like the biggest learnings? How did you manage to, you know, run. Run Sales Hacker on your own?
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Speaker 4
16:34
Hey guys, just a real quick sorry for interrupting the episode. Did you ever feel overwhelmed with the amount of low quality and crappy content that you find on Google and LinkedIn? Well, B2B Vault, the producers of this episode solved that problem. B2B Vault is a database of hundreds and hundreds of expert level insights and articles written by 300/B2B marketing experts. And B2B Vault monitors hundreds of websites every single week to uncover new trends and new articles. So you are the first to learn the new trends, insights and playbooks from the best B2B marketing minds. And every Monday morning we send out a newsletter with a few most important reads. Every B2B marketeer should read at the start of their week to make sure that you hit your quota and get more deals in the pipeline.
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Speaker 4
17:29
So just very quickly, if you're interested in this, go to the B2B World.com Newsletter and join thousands of other B2B marketeers in our Monday newsletter. See you there.
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Speaker 1
17:43
Some of it was boring stuff like we had, you know, managing budget. I just used a spreadsheet. Luckily I was able to use Outreach's HR and finance and accounting departments to help me like manage sponsorship payments and payroll and benefits and stuff like that. We all counted as outreach employees, so I didn't have that overhead. But you know, month to month I had different partnership goals that I would set for the team. And it depended a little bit on seasonality, a little bit on like events we had planned. You know, some months were pulling in, I don't know, a quarter million dollars of sponsorship revenue. Other months it was like 80,000. And we even things out.
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Speaker 1
18:24
By the end of the year I'm, you know, spending less than I have brought in sponsorship payments, but from like actually operating it as a media brand. Almost all of my effort in like managing the team. I can tell you about the team too. So I had a full time headcount managing our webinars program and they were doing two webinars a week, two brand new live webinars a week. Some of them sponsored, some of them not. And they're doing like content coaching, all of the promotion, production. And were getting like, I don't know, sometimes up to a thousand registrants per webinar, but usually like 4 or 500. I had an agency running our podcast, I had an editor running our blog and producing some other longer form content.
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Speaker 1
19:18
I had an agency helping with some video series, a full time headcount on social media and a full time marketing operations headcount. And towards the end I had a community manager too because we had the, we added a forum to the website. So that was like the way that team was shaped. But like from an operational standpoint, everything revolved around sourcing really cool ideas and opinions. So it was all about trying to just like stay really present on LinkedIn and keep in really close touch with our network of contributors to figure out when they had something new or interesting to say and make it easy for them to contribute that content.
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Speaker 1
19:58
And once we had like a voice memo or a really crappy outline or a transcript from a phone conversation that I had with them, a lot of the content operations and promotions flowed from there. So we would take it and turn it into a blog article, like Ghost Write it kind of for that. Some contributors like to do their own writing, but we did a lot, we helped a lot. Depending on how meaty the idea was or their content was, we could turn it into a webinar and then that goes into A promotion machine that grows our newsletter list, send the newsletter to promote the content and you know, the circle turns. I should say that at the time too because, you know, generative AI for content marketing wasn't quite a thing when I was running Sales Hacker SEO was huge too.
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Speaker 1
20:49
So there was kind of a like a background process we run outside of sourcing new content where we would go back and look at any content that had a little bit of a foothold in search page rankings and go back and re optimize and rewrite and tweak and do some link building. So it was like largely an organic traffic acquisition play for Sales Hacker, collect those, you know, collect leads in the form of like newsletter subscriptions both through news, actually grow our list both through newsletter subscriptions and through webinar registrations and then use the list to attract partners. And then there was a lot of like, introducing partners to outreach, sharing customers sharing lead lists, co promotion, finding ways to like let outreach kind of play in that media space, almost as if it were a sponsor.
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Speaker 2
21:42
But should other companies, you know, looking to acquire media brands, what should they be looking for, what should they do and what should like they do not do at all costs.
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Speaker 1
21:54
Like my advice is always don't do it. Why don't acquire a media brand? Just don't do it. Because if I can talk you out of it, then it would have failed. Like if I can tell you not to do it and you listen to me, then it would have failed if you did it. If I can't talk you out of it, then you'll probably be successful. The reason to buy a media brand is that you believe it's going to work. And if you really believe it's going to work without any real rationalization, then it probably will. And it sounds so woo. But that really is the truth of at least what I saw. Sales Hacker worked until market conditions changed and Outreach needed to change its growth philosophy from like market domination to very efficient growth.
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Speaker 1
22:43
And even though it wasn't a huge line item, Sales Hacker was more or less paying for itself. It got cut because it didn't fit the new vision for growth. So it was powered entirely by belief and the fact that it paid for itself helped. But I've never seen a media company get acquired that was successful when it was held to like some kind of like measurable spreadsheetified ROI standard. It really is a long term like brand investment. And it's the kind of thing where you go like, yeah, maybe we can kind of tell here's another way of putting it. Right after I took this role running Sales Hacker, you remember, I was signing on to run a media company. Right? Now, all of a sudden, I'm running a media company that's owned by a software company.
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Speaker 1
23:34
And one of my first weeks on the job, Manny Medina, former CEO of Outreach, I think he's now the chairman of the board, was in Boston, where I live, for an event, and I pulled him aside and I said, hey, why did you acquire Sales Hacker? And he basically said, it felt right, but you should figure out a better reason than that. So cut to a few months later, I'm at another event, and it was a lean data event, I think. And I was talking to Matt Hines and a couple other, like, marketing leaders that I really respect. And I asked them, hey, how would you measure the success of this investment? And all of them basically said, if revenue is going up for the software business, then it was probably a good acquisition.
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Speaker 1
24:21
Like, there is no, like, you could do an attributed pipeline thing. But I wouldn't want to use Sales Hacker that way if I was Manny. Because if you start using Sales Hacker as pipegen, it chokes off the lifeblood of Sales hacker, which is that it is like, expectations, free value for B2B sellers and sales leaders.
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Speaker 2
24:46
Cool.
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Speaker 1
24:47
Are you seeing any? I actually haven't been paying attention. Have you seen any media companies get acquired by software companies recently?
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Speaker 2
24:55
Well, I would say, like, the biggest acquisitions in that space, I always see, or they're like, just the loudest, are the ones that are coming from HubSpot. So they are investing, like, quite a lot there. I mean, starting with the hustle. But it's like, you know, all the other smaller newsletters, podcasts, like they have, they. They acquired a lot of podcasts. And to be honest with you, like, I kind of still can't figure out how does deal work. Like, you know, in most cases, like, they keep the team, they keep the creators, right? So either, like, they move them to salary and then get, you know, just. I mean, I find that pretty fascinating.
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Speaker 3
25:50
Right?
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Speaker 2
25:51
And it's kind of still. It's something that we are also, personally, for ourselves, thinking about in the long run, like a year and a half, two years from now, like, acquiring smaller media brands that are doing pretty well, finding really great creators, keeping them on board if they want.
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Speaker 3
26:14
Right.
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Speaker 2
26:14
And giving them our internal resources to do their work, you know, way better, giving more subscribers to us and still kind of, you know, figuring out how that kind of a revenue share would make the most sense for us and for the, you know, original founders of these kind of companies. When I say companies I mean like you know, solo newsletter, solo podcasts, you know, or some smaller publications or something like that.
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Speaker 1
26:44
I do know that I've seen acquisitions of like solo newsletters or like small sort of personal brand led media companies get acquired and like usually when that happens, the personal like the power behind it, the force of personality behind it, that person has achieved their goal and even if they still have an incentive on paper to continue to lean in, they kind of mentally check out like the fire isn't there anymore. The passion burns out. My guess, and again total guess. But my guess is that HubSpot, you know now because they have multiple platforms and they also have like a scale, they have a ton of scale that they're probably doing this as like a. Well, I'm sure there's a couple different things.
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Speaker 1
27:39
I'm sure they're looking at like attributed revenue, I am sure they're looking at rev share from sponsorships as a way of like paying off these investments. But I also imagine they're doing some like brand lift testing as if they were investing in paid media for any other channel. It's just that they own it. So the calculus ends up being just slightly different. It's my guess. I, I, I want, that's something I want to learn more about like brand lift testing with like holdouts, you know, it's a sort of experimentation that I've never really done. I worked with some big B2C brands early on in my career but I never got like in depth training on how that works.
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Speaker 1
28:24
And I have a sense that with the ground crumbling beneath our feet potentially from an SEO standpoint we're going to want to like come up with some better like maybe statistical modeling ways of seeing how our presence and awareness as brands on all these different channels affects. Like you said, do we get into the consideration set? Like are we making an impression, are we remembered? Do people know what we do, that kind of thing. Have you ever done any testing like that?
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Speaker 2
28:58
Not no. I mean what we are usually like when working with clients. Our main metric of course is like the attributable number of SQLs in the pipeline and we always go with that kind of open ended attribution like where did you hear about us? Is it LinkedIn? You know, letting users tell by themselves. That way we can kind of, you know, get a closer look at whether our off site activities that we are working for clients work or not work. Right and at the end of the day, like I would say like one of the best, you know, measures of brand power is just kind of monitoring branded search terms and. Branded.
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Speaker 1
29:55
Yeah, I thought you were going to say that.
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Speaker 2
29:56
Yeah, branded.
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Speaker 1
29:57
My favorite metrics. Most people don't seem to actually measure it, but it's super important I think maybe because it's a lag metric and it's hard to directly affect, but at least I think so. Yeah, I mean like we found a.
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Speaker 2
30:09
Way to like that's like literally the most, you know, I would say like precise way to see how many people are thinking about us. You know, I mean he goes out to Google, he types your brand name and you know he's thinking about you. He wants to learn more about you.
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Speaker 3
30:27
Right.
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Speaker 2
30:28
Now of course there are a lot of things happening in communities on social networks.
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Speaker 3
30:36
Right.
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Speaker 2
30:37
So we kind of are always.
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Speaker 3
30:40
Have.
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Speaker 2
30:41
A close watch on what's happening in the clients communities or in the communities for us, whether people are mentioning us or they're not mentioning us and so on. I would say that's also like a direct impact of all the branding efforts that you're doing across the board. But that's still something that's kind of hunch, right? I mean there is no a clear way you can automatically measure that.
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Speaker 1
31:12
You know, that's why I need to learn more about how B2C brands do it because I know they do it. Yeah. And maybe they can do it just because they have such like they spend, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, some of them on like awareness ads that because of their tam they can do. Like almost anybody can buy shoes. Yeah. Not almost anybody can buy Lemlist or wants or needs it. So maybe there's just like a scale thing there. But I do want to learn more about like Lyft experiments.
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Speaker 2
31:42
Yeah, I mean like that's B2B. B2C like comparison. It's like very interesting to me. Also something I've been thinking a lot lately because like when you go to like any B2C marketing department, it's like heaven and earth, you know, with how we do things at B2B.
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Speaker 3
32:03
Right.
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Speaker 2
32:04
They are more creative, they test more, you know, they are funnier.
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Speaker 3
32:12
Right.
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Speaker 2
32:13
You know, at one moment in my career after, you know, selling my first agency, I decided, okay, now let's do the same thing, but in the B2C space. Right. Let's work with E Commerce D2C companies because they are kind of a funnier and direct impact of content is seen much quicker than in B2B.
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Speaker 3
32:38
Right.
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Speaker 2
32:40
But that kind of didn't went quite well because, you know, I'm a total outsider in the industry. I know nothing about that. No one wants to listen to me. And after like, you know, literally a few months without any interaction, you know, I quit that and return to the B2B space. But what I want to say is like, B2C marketeers are much funnier than B2B and they create kind of a much better social content than B2B. And just something I saw recently on LinkedIn, I think even this morning was like. And now driving a correlation between these two things. The main reason why B2B companies are not that creative is because of fear. You know, fear of looking stupid, fear of losing customers, fear of, you know, your CEO or cmo, whatever, you know, telling you that's crap or whatever it is.
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Speaker 2
33:47
You know, and we hold ourselves, you know, in this box while the B2C teams, like, they do not have that many fear than we do maybe.
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Speaker 1
34:01
I think there's definitely an aspect of that there's a. Culturally, there is a different culture of expectation about. And you know, I have to imagine that fear exists because there is a grain of truth at the center of it. Because the way people buy a product for a business that they happen to work for is fundamentally different than the way they buy something extremely personal like a hat that they're going to wear. Yeah. But I do think that there are some, like, real fundamental marketing reasons as well. Like I think those creative teams at large B2C brands are often more creative, sometimes funnier, because they've embraced the commodity. The fact that their products are essentially a commodity, like even watches say I want. I. I had a. One of my clients when I was in an agency was Casio.
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Speaker 1
35:01
So I got to go to their North American headquarters, was really cool. And they talk a lot about how their products are differentiated. They have, you know, a brand legacy and some heritage. In like certain brands like G Shock, they have some genuinely proprietary, like, ways of delivering unique value in the form of their product. But once that gets to the marketing team, it's the marketing team's job to just sell the things, right. And they have a few levers to pull. They have media spend, they have like bid and budget optimization, channel selection, campaign structures. But like, that stuff is kind of on par with everybody else. It's more. More just like, can you be operationally efficient with your media spend?
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Speaker 1
35:50
They have creative and they have like A little bit of like PR influencery type stuff, but it's basically like creative plus money equals sale. They also, the other thing they have is like almost everybody has wrists and needs to know the time and their CAC needs to be low because their LTV is low, at least in comparison to like a salesforce. So I think there are like some marketing fundamentals about the economics and like unit economics of acquiring a B2C buyer. That means it's just a better fit for them to be silly sometimes. And I think when B2B brands do it's honestly more of a PR stunt than it is an effective awareness tool. And I'll say this. When B2C, when B2B brand marketers talk about learning from B2C and like trying to be funny and doing like creative, silly content and stuff.
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Speaker 3
36:52
They.
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Speaker 1
36:53
They pick and choose the tactics that they're learning from. One of the things B2C marketers do extremely well is direct response. Offer a discount to the right person at the right time, get the sale fast. Why don't B2B marketers do that more? Why do they just want to make silly skits and post them on LinkedIn? Again, I'm not saying it's wrong to not offer discounts, but I'm. I'm saying, like, I think it's a little. Sometimes it's a little hand wavy to be like, oh, we should be more, like, we should be more humorous like B2C. So anyway, I agree with you. I think there's some fear keeping us back from like embracing more creativity.
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Speaker 1
37:32
And this is why I said at the start, you need to find the things that are unique to you, like a point of view, have a belief, be willing to be wrong, at least in the eyes of some small portion of your market audience.
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Speaker 2
37:45
I don't know a lot of B2B companies that have a really strong, genuine story behind a brand, right? I mean, when you take a look at B2C, you know, for example, watches, Rolex has a story, Aston Martin has a story, right? If you take a look at the cars, there is dozens of car manufacturers out there. But you exactly know, like, okay, Volvo, it's for safety, right? Mercedes, it's for luxury or whatever, or, I don't know, like a Porsche, it's for speed, for looking good, for using it as a bait for girls or whatever it is, right? But in B2B, we don't have that quite often, right? And actually I was talking with David Gerhard last night on the pod and I opened the interview with the question, in all these changes, market shifts, etc.
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Speaker 2
38:50
What are the timeless marketing principles that were true 100 years ago and that are going to be true in 100 years, 200 years and so on? And he basically said, it's the story, right? Great marketing has a story. Which brings us back. Like, how do you create that story for something so boring? Such as, for example, I don't know, like a sales outreach software or something like that.
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Speaker 1
39:18
Well, you have to have the person creating the story is not allowed to believe it's boring. That's number one.
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Speaker 2
39:27
Yeah.
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Speaker 1
39:28
So if you're a marketer and you're wondering, how do I turn my boring product into a compelling story, then either you need to lean in and get curious about your buyers and learn about their real. Like, it affects people's livelihoods. Whatever you're selling, if it does the job that it says it does on the tin, then it really matters to someone and you either aren't curious enough about that person or it's just not for you, which is also fine. But you should probably go find some, like, a product to market that you can be passionate about because the story isn't meant to be exciting to everybody. I don't care about Nike's racing heritage or the fact that they, like, invented the sneaker or whatever. I have not read Phil Knight's book. I don't care.
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Speaker 1
40:27
I need a shoe that feels comfortable. Some people really care and it gives them a leg to stand on when it comes to, like, putting their logo on a Super bowl ad. But anyway, there is a, like a really great framework that I like that I didn't come up with. I think his name is Dave. I'm going to get the name wrong. David Miller, building a story brand. Basically steal it from Star Wars. So if your customer, you're. First of all, you're not the hero. Your customer is Luke Skywalker. They're the hero. They do need your help. And they have two battles to fight. They're going to fight the dark side, which is like the way that they live.
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Speaker 1
41:11
They can either choose to live in a noble, good way or they can live and work, like, do whatever job they're trying to do in sort of like a hacky black hat way. And that exists for whatever product you're trying to sell. And they also have, like, a specific thing that they're trying to achieve. They need to blow up the Death Star. That's a very tangible outcome they need to achieve. They need Two things for that. Number one, they need someone to Show them the way. They need someone to teach them to use the Force. That's not the dark side. And so you have to have some kind of, like, knowledge, set of beliefs, tenets, a framework, tips, onboarding. Like, it could be pretty pragmatic, but you have to have something to offer them that's like a. Here's how you do it.
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Speaker 1
41:59
And you need to sell them a lightsaber and, like, teach them to use the lightsaber. So you need to give them more than just your tool. And you're. The lightsaber does not blow up the Death Star. Right. The fact that Luke learns to use the Force, blows up the Death Star. And he does it. He gets help along the way. And in the analogy, your brand is like Yoda or Obi Wan. So you're like, a helpful advisor who gives tools and knowledge. I think once you kind of, like, if you rewrote Star wars, like, literally just rip off the plot and rewrite it with your own tools, your own how tos and a description of your, you know, hero, your customer and the big baddie.
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Speaker 1
42:43
They're fighting the Darth Vader that the, like, intangible dark side that they need to defeat in the tangible Death Star, they need to blow up. That's a start. You can do that with chat GPT in, like, an hour if you go back and forth a little bit. But you shouldn't do it in a vacuum. You should definitely do it like. So I've done some of this. I've crafted a couple, like, manifestos that are basically this, like, put a stake in the ground, have some strong opinions, shape the narrative, position the company as part of a battle to win, like, a larger fight about good and evil, to make it extra dramatic.
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Speaker 1
43:17
And the way that you do it is you talk to your heroes, talk to your customers, talk to your partners, talk to the people who are like, the mayor of your company, whoever is in your company that is, like, extra excited about the product all the time and, like, way too helpful. You probably want to involve them.
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Speaker 3
43:33
Y.
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Speaker 1
43:34
They can kind of be your mascot. So, yeah, anyway, that's kind of how I've done it before. A good example of this is Mac Redden. He runs com and has been doing so for years. And it is doing a fantastic job, just hitting the story again and again and again, being consistent about it. He has a. A domain set up for it called communityled.com and it's a short manifesto that is like, look here's what I believe. And I found some other people who believe the same thing, and they all signed on and it's got logos and names and it looks great. And it's just like a, you know, that website, that domain alone doesn't do the job on it by itself, but it is a part of the supporting pillar of the story.
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Speaker 2
44:16
I love this. I love this. And honestly, I think this is one of the most practical conversations I had on B2B storytelling that I had recently. Thanks for that. Tell me, before we jump off, I have a few more questions for you. How are you currently approaching content at Pixies?
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Speaker 1
44:45
How is anybody. I don't know if anybody knows what good looks like anymore. True, it's. It's chaotic. We're trying a lot of things. I will say that, like, the. I feel like every day is an experiment where I used to feel like I had a playbook that I ran every day. Now it's like, I wonder what's going to happen. I do have a couple things that I find myself returning to that help me keep a. Like a tenuous grasp on my. On my sanity. But basically I scrape our GONG calls and I drop them in clay, and then I have a couple AI agent columns in clay that help extract interesting opinions statements, comments about, like, metrics and results and examples, things like that, and questions. And so I just, I don't.
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Speaker 1
45:38
I, like, I could have automated those into Slack, I guess, but I just log into clay and sift through that table and kind of look for things that stand out. I'm trying to because, like, the mechanics of how content gets created, the process is like it's level ground now. Everybody can do it. Everybody. You could go create a hundred blog articles about what Pixis does using ChatGPT in like 10 minutes if you really wanted to. The most important thing is having inputs to the process that other people can't get. So for me, that's, like I said, coming back to conversations. And I grab those from GONG and slip them in clay to, like, filter that out and find things. I've got a couple Slack channels where I do the same thing. I'm not exporting.
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Speaker 1
46:21
I could, but I just, you know, flick through, find interesting things, tap a person on the shoulder. And a lot of my colleagues work in other parts of the world. So one of the ways. Where are you, by the way? Bulgaria.
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Speaker 2
46:35
Serbia.
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Speaker 1
46:36
Serbia. I knew it was down there somewhere. Crazy about afternoon. Yeah.
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Speaker 2
46:42
Yeah. It's up to.
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Speaker 1
46:43
I could tell. I could tell. So I have a 11 Labs AI interviewer link that I send them. And I've trained it to ask good questions, but it's not like magic. It's not great. It just does the basic job. They talk at it asks a couple clarifying questions, they hang up whenever they're done. And I get the transcript that I use as like a. It just gives me something different. And you can't be. The content can't better if it's not different. So that's really what I'm looking for when I execute content at Pixis. I'm just trying to figure out what can I do that is even different from everything else that already exists. Because I'm not writing about topics that nobody else has talked about before. They've talked about them all the time.
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Speaker 1
47:23
But I just need to figure out what we think or how we approach those topics in a different way. So those are the places I look for that.
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Speaker 2
47:32
Where do you see marketing going in the next few years? What are your predictions?
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Speaker 1
47:38
There's a great book called what if We're Wrong that is basically about how humans are absolute trash at making predictions. Even though our brains are essentially like extrapolation and categorization machines, we almost never predict anything correctly. So, like, all I can say is that throughout history, when something looks like it's changing a lot, it usually only changes a little bit. Like in the dot com era, when E commerce started to be a thing, people thought stores will never be a thing ever again. Like, we're just never going to shop at stores again. That's not the case. There are still stores everywhere. I have a lot of empty malls around me or like, maybe less busy malls, but they still exist. It's just that you go to those stores for different reasons now. Like, you don't go to the store to get a good deal.
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Speaker 1
48:34
You go to the store because it's part of an experience. So I think you could say the same thing about marketing. Everybody's gonna still have a job. AI is not taking any jobs. If it took a bunch of jobs, who's gonna buy the stuff that the people are using AI to sell? Nobody. So we're gonna find reasons to stay busy and work as marketers. I can tell you AI is not replacing anything I do. In fact, I think AI up until recently, frankly, I was being asked to use AI to do more bad stuff. You know what I mean? It wasn't doing the thing where it's like, oh, let AI do all the boring stuff so you can focus on higher quality and I finally had a conversation with Jason where I was like, hey, let's walk the walk here.
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Speaker 1
49:15
And he was totally on board. So now we're doing fewer pieces of content and trying to use AI to make them better. Anyway, this is all to say that I don't think I or anybody else should be predicting. And if you hear predictions, dear listener, about what the future is going to look like, ignore them. They're all wrong. Maybe fun to think about, but like, don't decide how to act today based on what some pundit like me says on a podcast about the future.
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Speaker 2
49:46
Tell me, Colin, what fascinates you the most these days? Like, what's on top of your mind these days?
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Speaker 1
49:57
You heard this coming through a little bit. But I'm thinking a lot about how legacy industries have already. SaaS is facing some turning points that we've talked about. Commodification, AI, blah. We are now, I think, in a swirl a little bit, trying to invent wheels that have already been invented in other industries. I think there are like quality management systems and systems for scale and efficiency of production and capital management that have been worked out for decades. I mean, one thing that I have been really obsessing about recently is the quality versus quantity debate. Was it used to be more of a thing in content marketing. I think in like 2011-2015 maybe. I haven't heard people talk about it that much anymore and I think it's because AI makes quantity so easy.
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Speaker 1
50:53
But, you know, I think it can feel like a kind of tricky problem to solve. How do I know how much content to produce and whether to think about producing less in favor of quality? I could try to come up with a framework or some kind of approach or philosophy or mindset that works. Or I could just go, there are already dozens to choose from. Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Kaizen, Lean Agile. There are ways. And so this is the thing I end up thinking about a lot is like, why does software think it's so special? Makes a product, sells a product, so does everybody else. And guess what? A lot of other industries are better at it. So we have something unique in that our product makes it easy to get recurring revenue. Everything else we should be learning from other industries more.
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Speaker 1
51:51
So I've been reading a lot of like Eli Goldratt and Ed Deming and Peter Drucker and talking like I set up a GPT to act like a, an amalgamation of those three guys to give me advice just to try to keep me honest and like not reinventing wheels. Oh, we could do a whole nother podcast on this because I literally can't stop thinking about it.
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Speaker 2
52:11
I would love that. Would love that. I'm also fascinated recently with, I would say something similar.
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Speaker 1
52:19
Really?
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Speaker 2
52:20
Yeah. I mean, except the fact that I was looking more at particular companies, type of companies, which is more like a legacy media companies.
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Speaker 3
52:30
Right.
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Speaker 2
52:31
Why legacy media? Because they kind of are there for like hundred plus years.
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Speaker 3
52:38
Right.
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Speaker 2
52:39
Which is something not a lot of companies today can say. They earn the most attention than anyone else.
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Speaker 3
52:46
Right.
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Speaker 2
52:47
And they went through many market changes, Internet being the first, which is something, you know, that almost killed 99% of them.
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Speaker 3
52:58
Right.
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Speaker 2
52:59
And yet they survived and they adapted. So, yeah, basically quite recently started studying legacy media companies, like, you know, Forbes, economist, New York Times, you know, all that kind of stuff, even the television ones, and trying to see like, what are these kind of patterns that they have. What are those lessons that we can take from them and implement in our own companies, you know, today? So, yeah, pretty fascinating you say that.
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Speaker 1
53:38
It's funny, I made a voice note with ChatGPT last night about Disney and Netflix because I was trying to think about this quantity versus quality thing and I was like, I wonder how those two media brands specifically measure quality these days and how that's changed. And because Netflix is relatively open about its management practices and Disney is so old, I think there's gotta be some interviews out there, like studies done about how they do that. I haven't dug in quite a bit yet, but it is fascinating.
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Speaker 3
54:12
Yep.
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Speaker 1
54:13
We think we're so special and innovative in software and you know, most of us are running unprofitable companies. It's not, it's not special. It's just that we're floating on the privilege of losing money on behalf of investors. Definitely.
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Speaker 2
54:32
Colin, before we wrap up, just to find final question I have for you. How are you winning at the game called life and what does that winning mean for you?
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Speaker 1
54:46
So I'm optimizing for being a great dad. I've got a two and a half year old and another on the way in January. And my life goal, you've probably heard that like people on their DeathBed, their number one regret is working too much. My life goal is to on my deathbed wish that I had worked just a little bit more. Like I'm trying to find that diminishing, that point of diminishing return and stop right before it. I'm gonna spend as much time with my kids as possible and just be a great dad. So like spending time mountain biking, playing with trucks, walking around in the woods. Yeah.
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Speaker 2
55:26
Love that. Colin, thank you very much for being on the Show. I had so much fun.
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Speaker 4
55:33
Okay guys, that's a wrap. What an amazing episode that was. Before you go, just let me ask you a very quick question. Do you know that your B2B company might be in a great danger of AI commoditization? And if your company out there is not standing out, if you're not fighting for the attention which is the most important currency right now, then you are slowly becoming a commodity. And when you're a commodity, no one is going to buy from you organically on their own. So Content Monk, the agency that I run is a full funnel content marketing agency that works with fast growing B2B software companies and helps them become category leaders, the main winners in the field with regional content that stands out.
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Speaker 4
56:21
So reports lead magnets articles AI Content optimization for LLM search, massive content distribution and the another thing that you're doing is we are monitoring different intent social signals across social networks to see what people are engaging with your content all the time and who online is a sales ready lead for you. But they just didn't subscribe yet. So that's how we help fast growing.
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Speaker 2
56:49
B2B software companies grow.
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Speaker 4
56:51
We offer a free consultation for everyone. So don't hesitate to go to contentmonk io and book a free strategy session.
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Speaker 2
57:01
With us where you will get a.
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Speaker 4
57:03
Free strategy and a battle plan without hard strings attached. See you there and see you in.
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Speaker 2
57:10
The next episode as well.
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Speaker 4
57:11
Have the great rest of the day.