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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.
Ugi Djuric (00:00)
Benny, tell me, so right now B2B market, software market is in like a very ⁓ fascinating territory right now because in almost every category there is dozens and dozens of Me Too's jumping in ⁓ right now.
⁓ So tell me what is Walnut doing right now to stand out and how are you like fighting to become the category leader in the next next year?
Benny Bridger (00:31)
Yeah, so for us, it's really about focusing on customer outcomes. I think the interactive, just collectively our space, right? There's a lot of competitors out there. But I think over time, what's really happened is there's been the enabler, the shine of the product itself has worn off a little bit. Because in many ways, the ability to showcase your product is something that I think we all want to do in some way, shape, or form, especially in the SaaS space.
But the notion that you're just out there to show your product is really not enough. And you have to prove that showing your product actually drives better customer outcomes and prospect outcomes for the business. And so what we really focus on is not just saying, hey, put demos on your website, but demos on your website drives higher conversion rates. And then on top of that, using demos earlier in your discovery process from a sales motion that actually gets folks
It brings a faster conversion rate from first call to second call, third call, and proceeding from there. There's also a post-sale component that we see. think a lot of training these days is, sorry, I bounced this thing. A lot of training these days, I think you're reading a lot. And I've even seen folks in training modules where they're literally recording a video. So if you actually want to learn what they're talking about, you have to stop the video, zoom in on what they're doing.
And it's not really the best interactive experience. so once again, engagement, product adoption, those are the metrics that we really focus on. So I'd say that's a big piece for us. But on the other side of things, and I don't want to be nauseating when I talk about AI, but one of the, I would say dirty secrets about the space overall is that historically speaking, while you can make a simple demo of your product, just, you know, in, in, in,
a couple of minutes on any one of the platforms. If you really want to make an immersive experience that showcases the best parts of your product, that demonstrates actual value, takes time, right? There's a process there. And so what we've done with our AI capability, what I call our AI demo engine is from the creation process, the editing process and the analysis process, we're speeding that up by leaps and bounds. I mean, some of our customers are seeing 90 % faster creation, they're editing,
with a simple [Gen.ai](http://gen.ai/) prompt in seconds versus going through each individual screen, clicking through, editing text. We are just really changing the way that demos are created because we want our customers and our prospects really to focus on storytelling, not on creating demos, not on editing demos. That's not really why they came to us. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I'd like to go build a demo today. Everyone wakes up in the morning and says, I have new outcomes. I want to drive. I want to drive more leads on my website.
I want to increase the sales conversion rate from first call. Those are the things that we want to get our customers to do and AI is the bridge to help them get to those outcomes faster versus focusing on building, right? If that makes sense.
Ugi Djuric (03:41)
Yep, makes sense. So basically, ⁓ if understood correctly, the core of your marketing and growth strategy is basically inside the product itself, right? Everything you do from the marketing standpoint is based on the product, right? ⁓ So tell me, ⁓ and I also think I...
Benny Bridger (03:54)
Yeah, for sure.
Ugi Djuric (04:08)
I saw that you are a very big advocate of using storytelling in product marketing, in demos, in that kind of thing. So if other B2B marketers are out there now and they're ready to embrace this product first marketing strategy, how should they think about the story behind
Benny Bridger (04:31)
Yeah, so the thing that I really like when it comes to storytelling is important because great marketers tell stories and stories are memorable. And it's easy enough to launch ad campaigns, but you need a really compelling story. And that can be in the ad copy itself. That can be within the product, right? So you're trying to give folks a sense of how it feels to be a customer.
And I really believe there's a great methodology out there. It's called Made to Stick. It's based on a book by Chip and Dan Heath. And they go through a couple of different principles that really help ensure that when you're telling a story that it sticks, right? That's why it's called Made to Stick. And so they emphasize a couple of different areas. Keep it simple. Give something that's unexpected. Make it concrete. Make the story credible. Use emotion. And again,
tell it as to frame it in terms of a story, in terms of a journey. And I think that that's so critical in making sure that whatever you're doing, whether it's a demo on your website or a demo within the sales process, or again, the post sale experience where you're trying to teach somebody how to use a piece of your product, you really need to make sure that there's recall, that they can imagine themselves what it feels like to
buy and achieve success with your product. And the story aspect of things is how it becomes memorable, right? That way it's not just product marketing language that you have written inside of a deck or a dock somewhere. And I think the mistake that a lot of marketers make is they look at persona and messaging and positioning documentation, and they believe that that alone translates into ad copy. That alone translates into the story you tell with your content. The truth is, that
that's really just the starting point. You have to mold that thing. Think of it as like the snow, but ultimately you want to mold it into a snowball, right? So you can throw it. It's a weird analogy. But my point is it's really critical to hone that story, hone that graph together. And when we think about how to showcase our product, like on our website, for example, one of the things that I realized was when I got here was that
We were really good at telling the how story. So how to use our product, right? How to capture, how to edit, whether it was with AI or not. We were really good at that part of the story. But the thing that we needed to do was put ourselves in the shoes of the buyer and think about the things that they would want to do and the experience that they would want to have. And so it's actually a walkthrough of how we use it in our marketing, in our marketing context, which is everything from embedded on the website, we use demos and ad campaigns.
We use them in email campaigns. It's just a better way for us to ⁓ showcase our product and tell a better story. But again, moving backwards, it's all in the guise of when we explain how to use our product, we're explaining it in terms of how we use it to drive success in our marketing. And this is also true on the sales side. We do the same thing. And so the path and the story of Walnut and what our product is, why you should buy it, the value that you get out of it,
It's all through the lens of how we actually use it. And that's kind of our storytelling. That's kind of our storytelling angle. And the last thing I'll say is when we educate our customers, so we ran a webinar specifically about this topic. When we educate our customers, the best way to build a demo, we always kind of build it in terms of a story. It's really like writing a book, right? You start with an outline. What are you trying to achieve? What's the
What are the bones of the story? How are you trying to tell it? You map the outline into a shell and then ultimately you build the demo based on that, right? So it's the same as writing a book. You don't just sit down with a pen, start writing things down in a piece of paper. You have to really start with that outline. It's the same way in our space. And that's the way that we think our customers achieve the most success. And we just believe that storytelling is the single most important thing.
for both demos and as well as me personally, the single most important thing to make your marketing stick and be memorable.
Ugi Djuric (08:50)
Are there any storytelling frameworks you found particularly more effective than the others?
Benny Bridger (08:57)
I think it really depends on what you're trying to do. ⁓ And again, I think using that methodology that I mentioned where you're trying to achieve a couple different things to make sure that the story is memorable. that's the kicker, is storytelling is truly an art and a science. And even if you have a great methodology for storytelling, you have a great summary process or a great outline process.
you still need to find those things that are going to make the story memorable. And so the thing that I think is usually really powerful is bringing in things that are unexpected, right? So catching people almost by surprise and bringing them into a different lens than they thought they would be. And I think in that book, for example, one of the ways that they ⁓ demonstrate unexpectedness or really catching people by surprise to get their attention, I think they used an example of a pilot who
in doing their kind of usual routine, right before you take off, they talk about, here's the flight path, here's how long it's gonna take, here's what the weather looks like. He went into some bizarre kind of talk track, and I can't remember the exact details behind it. But it was, again, it was so unexpected, and it kind of caught people by surprise, and it really got them to start listening, because usually, those talk tracks are fairly mundane, and you hear them, and they just kind of fade to background. And it's the same thing in advertising, right?
disruptive advertising is what gets people's attention. Ad blindness is a real thing. If your ad isn't standing out, if your ad isn't making people stop and say, that's different, it just becomes another thing that's scrolled past, another thing that isn't clicked, another dollar that's wasted. And so I really think that the unexpectedness ⁓ is something that I try to do in everything that I, whenever I'm presenting, whenever I'm bringing a perspective on something.
I try to bring a sense of unexpectedness to the table because I really want to captivate people's attention right away versus bringing them down the same old path of, it's just another marketing presentation or, ⁓ it's Benny talking about marketing again. It's, I really want to make sure that I captivate them from the beginning. That way I can hold their attention throughout.
Ugi Djuric (11:07)
It's really funny you say that because ⁓ we from Content Monk, right, like we are very big advocates that in order for companies like to win and become category leaders, they need to stand out, their content needs to stand out, right? And ⁓ actually yesterday I was writing like a mini report on how other companies are standing out and how other people can, what exactly means for the content to stand out?
And one of the things that I talked about was basically ⁓ exactly what you said. Once something, some particular design or a content format, whatever, gets used by many ⁓ people or many different companies, it becomes basically expected. I, as a user, when I go to LinkedIn, I expect to see ⁓
posts about how people should fire their sales team and hire AISDRs or something like that. Yeah, definitely. Whoever is listening, don't do that. But basically, question, and then when you see something that's unexpected, it naturally catches your attention. And basically, being unexpected is probably the best hook.
Benny Bridger (12:14)
Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that.
Ugi Djuric (12:34)
that you can think about. So what would be your creative process of finding that ⁓ unexpected, let's say, factors in content, in ads, in marketing, in whatever it is? How do you approach that? How do you think outside the box? Let's call it like that.
Benny Bridger (12:58)
How do you think outside the box? It's an age old question. Here's what I would say. ⁓ And I think when we think about content and being unexpected, I think it has to root in, can you say things that nobody else can? Because if you're able to have a unique perspective, that allows you to bring unexpected ideas to the forefront.
And what I mean by that is for us, I really believe and it pains me to look at content marketing these days because content marketing has been to some degree shredded by AI. And AI is capitalizing on, I can't put a percentage on it, but so much content that historically speaking, you needed experts to write, you really needed to, again, assemble a team to create great content.
So much of that can be automated with AI with great prompts with automation. And what that's illuminated for me is that the importance of original data. And I think this is something that it's not necessarily a new concept. Companies have been doing surveys, surveying the market, using product data, writing reports. Companies have been doing this. It's not a new thing per se. But for me, it's one of the most
It's one of the best sources these today that has a mode around it. Meaning original data cannot be duplicated by AI. It cannot be written by chat, GPT. You're getting real opinions from real members of your ICP members of your market, whatever your market or ICP is for us marketing sales, rev ops. That's, that's kind of where we focus. That original data allows us, I think, to have unique perspectives and then tell unique stories that do stand out because otherwise I think
what happens is it's really just another ad campaign that's not necessarily rooted in a truth. And I think great ad campaigns are often rooted in humor and humor is often rooted in truth. And I think when you have a perspective that begins with an original data set, that is an unlock that helps you tell great stories in your advertising and great stories in your content. And that unlocks your ability to bring
unexpectedness into the things that you're doing. And that sounds broad, but I just, so, so dearly believe that if you're a marketer today, it's not just use AI. And if you're not using AI, you're falling behind. I think everyone has said that time and time again, but something that I've heard that I heard recently that I just think is so true is as a marketer, your job is to isolate things that isolate investments and areas of focus that AI cannot do. So that's everything from.
original data, events, real life experiences, doing things that again are not just run of the mill marketing, not just marketing that again has been deployed and rolled out and perfected and done by HubSpot and others for the past 10 years. Not to say it doesn't work, but I think you have to think outside the box there and say, here's what everyone else is doing. What isn't anyone else doing? And I think there's a boldness to it. You have to be fearless as a marketer. You can't be afraid to fail.
And not every campaign is going to be a runaway success. But when you roll something out there, like we do with certain like event strategies, for example, where we're trying different things at booths and we're trying different things from a conference perspective, you know, what we're doing is we're looking for things that stick. And if it doesn't work, that's OK. We move on to the next thing. But we have to be always thinking, don't do what everybody else is doing. What is everybody else not doing? That's the magic question. And it's easier said than done. But.
It's really critical, I think, as a marketer, and just as a human being, to give yourself the time and the space to think about that. So I spend a few minutes each morning, I'm a little bit of a morning person, I spend a few minutes each morning thinking about this in terms of like demand gen, for example. Like, what are the ad conventions that are out there? What do people typically do with LinkedIn sponsored content? And then what could we do differently? And how can I test that? How can I measure that?
These are the things that I try to give a few minutes to every morning because those kind of outside the box thinking moments are invaluable in many ways.
Ugi Djuric (17:24)
One of the biggest problems I would say in B2B SaaS companies is a very huge gap and unalignment between marketing department and the sales department. ⁓ If I'm not mistaken, ⁓ when you joined Walnut, one of the first things you did was basically routing all of the sales goals to you.
So you can get a better sense of you know who the customer are who the customers are what are their problems and so on So tell me for other companies out there from the perspective of CMO, how would you approach aligning? marketing and sales
Benny Bridger (18:10)
You're hitting me with so many age old questions. I love it. ⁓ And let me quickly touch on something you mentioned. And so I've done this at most companies I've joined where I really want to hear what the first calls feel and sound like, what prospects are actually asking today, because that gives me a really good backbone to understand what the buying process is actually like when I get there, right? Because it's fine to live through their experience. What questions are they asking?
What answers do we have to those questions? That helps me identify gaps. And by the way, because we sell ⁓ to some degree to marketing, it was always a very easy conversation for me to have. The value prop from a walnut perspective is very obvious to me, even when I got here. And so those calls were just great kind of laboratory moments for me to just learn more about our business and more critically learn from the outside. Right. So we have the opinion of our business. We have our
collective beliefs. But what's, what's actually happening out there? What are prospects coming to these first calls thinking, whether they saw us on LinkedIn, whether they clicked through on a paid search ad, whether they met us in an event three years ago, like what are they coming to the table with? And again, what are our answers to those questions? Are they good enough? Is our deck hitting the mark? Is our, is the demo that we're presenting hitting the mark? You know, what questions are they asking? What questions are they not asking more so because they either don't know to ask them or because
We're simply just not getting them answered. ⁓ So I think that's such a useful and valuable exercise for any marketer to do, just to understand the state of the customer and the state of the prospect, quite honestly. And you do the same with customers, but prospects ⁓ I think is valuable also. When it comes to aligning marketing and sales, it really starts at the leadership level. I just think it's so hard to do this from a grassroots perspective. when I was a marketing manager many, many years ago, I heard a lot about sales and marketing line.
And I was like, this makes a lot of sense to me. And I don't think that we're quite there just yet. But what I learned was it was really hard to go talk to the AEs who sat behind me back when I actually worked at an office. It was really hard to go to the AEs who sat behind me and effectively say, hey, let's align better, right? That was just not how it works. What I found the ticket to success was, even then, was working with the VP of marketing that I had at the time.
making sure that we were collaborating then with his counterpart on the sales side to say, here's what we're trying to achieve from a marketing perspective. Here are the targets we're after. Here are the strategies that we're deploying, the campaigns that we're running and so on. That was where we needed to start. And the visibility alone, it's funny because something that I have to work on harder every day is visibility and communication. It's funny, you get...
as a marketer, you get so deep into your process and you get so deep inside of the world of marketing that you forget, curse of knowledge, that not everybody knows what you're up to and not everybody knows all of the details. so communicating about what the marketing plans are is a huge step in the right direction anyways. But when you're collaborating about those plans, about the strategy, so you go to plan the quarter ahead or the second half of the year ahead, it's just so critical to be on the same page.
in the planning process with sales, that way your plans are really a unified front. You're presenting a go-to-market plan. You're presenting a go-to-market framework. And I would say there's a segment from a customer success side as well to a lesser degree. But when it comes to marketing and sales, it's at the leadership level you have to be aligned. And in the planning and architecture process, you have to be aligned. That's where the unified front begins. And starting at that level, whether you're
whether you're at the executive level or not, that's what's critical.
Ugi Djuric (22:00)
Makes sense, makes sense. ⁓ I wanna touch base something that you mentioned. So right now in this AI era of marketing, ⁓ I would say it's a pretty obvious trend that human to human interactions are going to be more.
What I saw is that you basically are doing a lot of sponsored events, both online and ⁓ in real life, as we would say. So tell me, what results it brought to you so far? What can you see from that? What are the results? What worked? What didn't work for you? And so on.
Benny Bridger (22:51)
I'm going to have that in perspective you're talking about.
Ugi Djuric (22:53)
Yeah.
Benny Bridger (22:55)
Yeah, I think, and I think a lot of marketers have talked about this ad nauseum. So this is not an original Benny idea, but I think the return on investment from an event standpoint when it comes to the booth perspective and paying $17,000 for a booth, $800 for a chair and $2,400 for electricity.
I just think over the years that I found that the ROI there is just not as strong. And what happens is you walk away with a lead list and from a quantity perspective, you're like, this looks great. And even at times you have conversations that feel like they're going in the right direction and you have pipeline. So when you look in retrospect, you're saying, Hey, we got all these leads. We added more to our database. Not a bad thing.
And we got this pipeline, but I think historically what I found is the pipeline there is weaker than pipeline that you often see from other marketing sources. Just, and again, I'm not a big attribution person and there is a brand component to events. So I'm not dismissing that at all, but oftentimes the event push is for leads and pipeline, which is not a bad aspiration, but I think the higher ROI and the higher value, and this is especially true if you have higher ACVs.
you're trying to attract enterprise prospects, it's really in those kind more intimate, ⁓ smaller scale hosted events. And these are things that we are experimenting with and looking to flex more, especially when we can bring partners into the mix to kind of co-collaborate, share costs and so on. Because what's happening is we're actually developing relationships. And at the end of the day, enterprise sales especially, it's really all about the relationship and how much value we can deliver for our customers and for our prospects.
And having a great relationship there and being able to translate the value is just so critical. It's really hard to do that if you're living in digital all the time. If you're talking through email, you're talking through Zoom all the time. The real life experience of talking with prospects and talking with your ICP, your market, it's invaluable. And I've just found that the ROI on those, both from a near-term pipeline perspective, as well as pipeline quality and long-term.
⁓ development, including with existing customers, so much higher, so much more, ⁓ so much, a much better use of marketing budget. And I think you're seeing this shift happening, right? This is not something that necessarily is new, but at the same time, it's something that methodology wise, I just hear time and again, and every time I talk to marketers, I just, hear the same thing over and over, which is like, we love the leads, we love the lead lists. It makes everyone excited.
But it seems like not much falls out of the bottom of that. And what we really need to do is generate meaningful pipeline, not just pipeline for the sake of pipeline. And I'm a big believer in that. And pipeline quality is a real thing, right? Pipeline is not all created equal.
Ugi Djuric (25:58)
Where do you see marketing in the next few years?
Benny Bridger (26:02)
I think it's, you know, the easy answer is something related to AI. And here's kind of where my brain goes. I think that similar to what's happening with AI in a lot of spaces, the best marketers out there will be the ones that have the best control and best understanding of how to build collective AI systems that support marketing teams. And I've seen these like hybrid org charts before. It's really bizarre to see this where
It's an org chart that has people and then on the underlying layer, you actually have AI agents that are augmenting all of the things that marketers are doing. And I think that that's just the beginning. think great marketers who are building awesome content systems like you are, operational systems, collective systems between content, operations, outbound, ⁓ advertising.
Things that to some degree are running themselves, learning from the data and are in some degree, to some degree are autonomously ⁓ building things. That's where I think you're going to find the demand is for marketing talent. Folks who can build those systems. You're almost a, you know, the go-to-market engineer comes up a lot. You're almost a technical integrator of systems, really. That's what's actually happening. And I think it's going to come back to
not just the building of those systems and being able to structure and architect them together, but ideas, right? So as things get easier and easier to automate campaigns, content, operations, outbound, you still have to have ideas at the beginning of the day. Now, one day we may find that AI takes over the creative process and boy, we're all in trouble when that happens. But at the same time, you still need to have great ideas and you still need to feed that at the top of the stack to ultimately
test and validate things. so great marketers will have great ideas, but more so are able to build those systems to move faster, right? Building a piece of content today can take minutes, especially if you have original data, you can spin up these reports in minutes, right? I think we saw on the Exit 5 podcast, Jillian, I think is her name from user evidence, she basically stores the data from a report inside of a custom GPT, and then she can do a million and one things with it from a content perspective at the drop of a hat.
It's imagine that, but across the marketing stack. Again, I go to the content side, distribution of content. So the advertising side, it's only going to accelerate. so marketing is going to look very different. You're going to have masters of systems and master architects of systems. Those are going to be the marketing leaders in the future. It's not that people are going to be replaced. People are simply being augmented and being given the capability to move
more efficiently and effectively using these programs and platforms and structures. So a broad answer, but I really do believe that it's just not going to be the same marketing team or the same marketing leader that you've seen for the past, I don't know how many years.
Ugi Djuric (29:11)
Let's shift the roles a little bit right now. So you listened to me some time ago in Exit.
How are you using AI inside the Walnut for marketing and sales?
Benny Bridger (29:28)
I could tell you, but then I have to kill you. No, think it's similarly. ⁓ We're experimenting with a lot of different AI tools, something that I built the other day, for example. So we're we're actually bringing our own podcast to life starting next week. And one of the things that I wanted to do was I really wanted to source topics based on both current events as well as original as well as original content. So things that people are posting, notably
thought leaders who are posting topics that are generating more engagement, more comments, more likes, because what I want to do is surface those, because that really tells me what people are interested in, what people care about. But again, looking up on LinkedIn and just going to Dave Gerhart's profile, going to your profile, going to God knows whose profile and just looking at their last post, not an efficient use of time. So what I actually built and again, this was just me kind of in my spare time. This was like literally on a Saturday. I'm such a loser.
On Saturday, I literally put together, I used a tool called Phantom Buster, I think it was called, and I used that to effectively scrape posts from LinkedIn thought leaders that I thought were valuable, so I just effectively uploaded the list of URLs, and afterwards I was like, I could probably use this tool to generate the thought leadership list, so I need to expand it a little bit there. But getting those posts aggregated, and then using a webhook to send them to a program called
pipe dream, think it is, and ultimately parsing the data because it's a lot of raw data, right? Cause it's, it's dozens and dozens and dozens of posts, right? And I'm trying to organize them by the most valuable, the most engaged posts. And basically it has to parse the data. So inside of pipe dream, it's using GPT to parse the data, to put it into a repeatable format. And then it's then sending it to the next GPT in the stack, which is effectively extracting
podcast angles, podcast topics, podcast perspectives that we can then use as a backboard to prep for our episodes. And so I'm building this because I wanna make sure that we're automating this process so that we're not waking up in the morning, so to speak, or waking up on August 6th and saying, hey, we're recording a podcast in two weeks. What are we gonna write then? And then part of it is, well, a lot can happen in two weeks. There might be a really interesting topic that we don't know much about.
somebody's going to write about it and we're going to have to, it's going to be in our best interest to have a perspective on that. This system is going to allow us to effectively have a fresh view on topics and again, not have to raise, not have to go through feeds and effectively scan lists of things. It's, it's populating this automatically. And what I'll say is all of that data that we're generating from, again, from the original tool that's scraping, parsing, and then
⁓ crafting into topics, we're then dumping them into a Google Doc. That's kind of how we're approaching it for now. I think that there's so much more we could do with this approach. I want to bring in other data sources. ⁓ I want to have the ability to scrape new thought leaders without, again, me just looking at who I think is most valuable and most interesting. I think the data tells the story with engagement there. So I'm looking for avenues to bring in more people that I may not know about.
that have useful perspectives that we could use as a backboard for our conversations. So that's something that I just, literally built like last Saturday. It's my son was sleeping and I was like one hour build something awesome with AI. And that was kind of where I came up with, ⁓ that was what I came up with. But I am just scratching the surface. I think as we all are from a marketing perspective and unlocking capabilities like this, you've built some stuff that I can't even imagine built.
Ugi Djuric (33:19)
No, it's really not that complicated. Everyone thinks it is, but in reality it's not. So basically like what you just said, it's very similar to what I talked about, but instead of like monitoring different websites, you're monitoring different Lingling profiles, right?
Benny Bridger (33:36)
Say that again, you cut out for a minute.
Ugi Djuric (33:38)
I said basically ⁓ what you talked about right now is very similar to what I talked about ⁓ a few weeks back, but instead of like monitoring websites, you are monitoring the LinkedIn profiles, right?
Benny Bridger (33:49)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, people. ⁓ I think that there's a lot of amazing thought leaders out there and people that write great posts and have great perspectives. I'm always looking for, like we talked about outside the box earlier, I'm always looking for people that think differently and aren't afraid to say things out loud that other people might disagree with. ⁓ I think Chris Walker is out there, he's been doing this for a long time.
⁓ Not everybody agrees with what he has to say and he's very opinionated about his perspectives. But in most cases he's spot on with the things that he discusses. And so I just find people like him, there's another guy, forget his name, it's escaping me now. I find that those folks are the most compelling because they're thinking a step ahead. And that's kind of where my brain always is. It's similar to the conversation we were having earlier. What are people doing today?
what are people going to be doing tomorrow? Which look, if I had the answer to that, I'd be a multi-bazillionaire, right? We all would. But I think that that's where I go to people, right? The people within our space, within our ICP, who have really interesting perspectives and ideas. I just, respect their craft so much and I want to learn from them. And most notably learn from the folks who are trying to think differently. You know, they're trying to think.
a year ahead about where marketing is going. They're trying to build things that marketers today will be doing in two, three, four years almost ⁓ without question, right? Things that will just become normal. I really like people that are doing cutting edge things and thinking from a cutting edge perspective.
Ugi Djuric (35:35)
me if you can share share with me of course ⁓ what's on walnuts marketing roadmap for for the future like are there some specific things that you're trying to test besides the podcast are there any other new place that you're going to introduce like how are you planning to grow in the future
Benny Bridger (35:57)
Yeah, so I think when it comes to I'll just talk about content marketing because we were talking about this earlier. I brought on a great content marketer recently, Marcella Ross, and she's fantastic. content for me fills the demand. Content for me is demand, Jen fuel in many ways. I mean, we're on this podcast here, right? I assume that this is part of your demand, Jen strategy to some degree. You know, I don't I don't want to call you out, but hey, we're we're doing this for a reason. Right. And I love talking to you, but.
Trust me, I believe that content is just the fuel that's needed. And when it comes to that, I'll double back on what I said, which was original data and reports. And so we're putting a huge emphasis on that because I want us to be at the forefront of perspectives and insight when it comes to the market, what our audience is thinking about topics A, B or C, whether that's an AI topic in sales, whether that's an AI topic in content marketing, which we just wrote about recently. ⁓
That's gonna be a huge lever for us because it unlocks so many opportunities from a residual content perspective. We can take some of the findings and use them as podcast topics. We can distill them into blog posts that are ultimately rooted in SEO, but actually have original data points to back them up, which from my understanding, think I probably get an email once a day from someone who has claimed to unlock GEO and can tell me how to rank on ChatGPT. I mean, it's unbelievable. And yet no one really knows.
Everyone has a sense of what works based on the data that they pull. People have done really good studies on this, but it's still a little bit of a moving target. But one of the things that I've heard time and time again is that the LLMs really like data and they really like it when you have original perspectives. And I don't know if they can tell the difference between data you're making up, which we would never do, but for me,
If we're saying SEO is a key focus for us and we're gonna automate it and we're gonna bring on ⁓ a series of writers to make sure that we're filling that side of the house, I want it to always have ⁓ kind of a unique angle that we can work off of. So if a survey has 10 questions, that's 10 blog posts that we can write and we can make sure that they're rooted with an underlying focus on SEO. So we're killing two birds with one stone there. ⁓ There's also a creative aspect of it, right?
the data points can be used as ad creative, right? Because we're showing a number, we're showing data, we're showing a percentage, we're showing a perspective that's rooted in actual audiences. I just think that it's a foundational kind of cornerstone that can fill so many of our other demand gen buckets. And it makes us sound smart. And I think we're really smart. I think we've got really smart people. I we've got a really sharp product. And I think our customers are doing really awesome things.
I want us to be at the forefront of data. I want us to be at the forefront of perspective. And yes, we need great ideas, but great ideas are always better when you're rooting them in data that no one else has. Boy, that is where we want to be.
Ugi Djuric (39:07)
Love it, love it. We're thinking the same. So yeah, good luck with that. Tell me, Benny, besides Made to Stick, ⁓ what are some other marketing books that really influenced your career?
Benny Bridger (39:21)
It's funny you ask, I have at least one right here. ⁓ So this one, and there's actually a newer version of this, and it's like backwards, right? Don't make me think. So I've always had a soft spot for UX and web design and UI when it comes to websites anyways. ⁓ Don't make me think, common sense approach to web and mobile usability. I am just such a believer that when you think about websites, when you think about
conversion rates when you think about getting people to understand what you do, what outcomes you drive and why. Simplicity ⁓ is almost always the best answer. think marketing can get very academic where you're writing things that sound really good and you're reading through the sentences and you're like, man, that is straight out of the business school marketing textbook for how to describe our product. And then oftentimes that goes onto the website. And what
What ends up happening is people scan, they don't read ultimately on websites. And you really have to get people's attention by being as crystal clear as possible. And from a navigation perspective, giving them very obvious places to find what they need, whether it's information about your product, the different markets you serve, the problems that you solve. your folks, your prospects are coming to your website with different objectives.
And I think you want to reverse engineer those objectives to ultimately build your website so that it helps them answer the questions that they have. The more you're answering their questions, the more likely they are to convert on your book of demo CTA or free trial CTA, right? So I'm just, I think that book is ⁓ irreplaceable. The other one I would say that comes to mind is Predictably Irrational. ⁓ It's by Dan Ariely. And I think, again, this should be like on every marketers desk. ⁓
It is a book that just puts to shame so many common beliefs that people have about what works and what doesn't work and showing that human beings are actually kind of a unique species in that we do things that are very odd, even when you think you know what we're going to do, which is why it's called predictably irrational. We make decisions on things that don't make sense sometimes. And one of the things that I know that his book really talked about that's always stuck with me is the power of the word free.
Free is one of the most powerful words on the planet Earth. I mean, it really is. one of the studies or experiments that he did was measure how much free converts versus something like one cent. Or like when Amazon rolled out Prime in Europe, if I remember right, ⁓ in some places they used a very small fee and in other places they used basically free shipping. And it was just like night and day in terms of the performance.
And whether or not I'm remembering this correctly, I couldn't tell you. ⁓ My wife would agree. My reading comprehension is suspect at times and recall, which I'm sure there's things around the house that I forgot to do. ⁓ Long story short, though, that book is just, it's so eye-opening. Like every chapter is like, all right, I know what's gonna happen. I know what this study is gonna show me. And then by the end of the chapter, you're like, I can't believe it. You're almost sitting there dumbfounded. I can't believe this was the decision.
that the human being wound up making. ⁓ And I think it helps inform decision-making from a marketing perspective. And it really emphasizes the need to test things because you just don't know how it's going to turn out. And I can't tell you how many times in my career where I had a hypothesis and it rolled out a test and I was like, I know this is going to work or vice versa. I don't know if this is going to work. I'm pretty skeptical. And for some reason it works or for some reason it doesn't work. Right. And so
It just validates, in many ways it always validates for me the need for proper testing and something that, you know, I always have to, I always feel like I need to do a better job of thinking through that mindset, both here at Walnut and just again, as a marketer, I'm not perfect, right? And so I'd like to think that that's something that I can instill more in what I do on a daily basis from a demand gen and a content. And again, a team leadership perspective, it's a mindset that I think we all need to have.
It's too bad because I know some people have ⁓ the big bookshelf back there so they could be like, yeah, here's a good book and here's a good one to take off the shelf. I just happen to have made to stick because I refer to it all the time. ⁓ There's definitely a bunch of others that I think are super valuable. Always stay hungry. The only other thing I'll say is I've always found that ⁓ learning from sales books and sales methodologies is useful as a marketer because it helps me put myself in the shoes of the sales leader.
of the AE, of the BDR. ⁓ And so, you know, the Jolt methodology, the Challenger sale, those ones, again, just one approach to sales. It's not the only one, you know, works for some companies, doesn't work for others. But just putting yourself in the shoes of the other side of the house, if you will. We talked about sales and marketing alignment, just understanding how they want to think and how you can adapt some of that, some of those methodologies into the things that you do in marketing.
Stuff I'm always trying to do. So that's what I would say.
Ugi Djuric (44:39)
Perfect, perfect. I know what are the next two books I'm going to read. ⁓ So Benny, ⁓ I could talk with you for hours, but unfortunately, we need to wrap up. You probably have ⁓ other important work to do. So tell me, before we wrap up, let me ask you one question that has nothing to do with marketing. ⁓ How are you winning at the game called Life?
Benny Bridger (45:10)
I hope I'm winning at the game called life. You know, so I have a one year old son and he is the light of my wife and I's lives and he brings so much joy and we're building our family and it's a new experience being a father is just like, I've never done this before. So it's bizarre at times, cause I'm like, this is my first time. You know, I walked my son into daycare the other day because now he's walking and walking all over the place by the way, it's terrifying.
I walked him into daycare and I was like, that's the first time I've done this and I'm going to walk, I'm going to hold his hand and walk him and walk with him all kinds of places for forever. Right. For, for, you know, again, as, as, uh, as long as he wants to actually hold my hand when crossing the street, which maybe there's a time limit on that. Maybe it's, you know, five, 10 years, but needless to say, um, it's, that is what makes me when I wake up in the morning and I love my job. There's no question. I love what we do at Walnut, but that's what
That's what makes things feel so holistic and feel so well-rounded. And so I couldn't be happier to have a loving son, loving wife, and building a family. It's just, it's the root of our existence in many ways. mean, biologically, this is one of the main things on the list, if not the only thing in many ways, ⁓ build and raise a family. ⁓ And I just so firmly believe that it's a blessing. And I think that one day,
looking at my family as, again, an older adult, you know, the old and gray, more so than now. Looking at my family and seeing them raised and older and, you know, again, ⁓ doing their things and building their own lives. Like, that's just going to make me so happy. mean, it gets me, ⁓ it gives me a fuzzy feeling even just talking about it. So that's how I'm winning. But shit, I take a lot of L's out there, man. It's not all W's, you know, it's a long season like baseball.
Ugi Djuric (47:07)
Yep, yep.
If I may add my two sons, a very big paradox about parenting is that when they are young, right, you always tell yourself in some situation like, God, I just wish he is a little bit older so he can understand what I'm telling him, right? But when they are older, ⁓ you sometimes wish and say like, man, it was so easier when he was like a one-year-old or six months old or...
or whatever, so enjoy every moment of it. Penny, thank you very much for being on the pod. You rock, man.
Benny Bridger (47:46)
Thanks man, talk soon.