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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:19)
hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm gonna go straight into it and introduce today's guest who is Stefan Maritz. Well, actually, I'll just let Stefan introduce himself rather than do a bad job of it
Stefan Maritz (00:30)
There we go. Yeah, I'm Steven Maritz, currently head of marketing at CXL. I come from a branding background. Brand first, content second marketer. I believe that building strong brands create sustainable growth. And if you've got a brand that's top of mind and that means something to people, that you can basically amplify everything else and it gets easier.
your spend goes down, your cost of acquisition comes down, opportunities in the market go up. So yeah, pretty much been doing marketing all my life, focusing on B2B mostly. Very comfortable in the content and demand generation space because of that brand side. I believe modern demand generation is nothing but brand building. We can talk about that today, but yeah, that's pretty much me. So CXL currently B2B marketing training.
It's a very fun place to work because we just basically give what's working right now to the people.
Tom Rudnai (01:23)
That's awesome, there's loads in there that we'll get back into in a minute. I particularly like what you say about like, yeah, brand is the investment that should show up across the entire funnel or across the bow tie or however you wanna look at it, right? We tend to get so focused in on like single KPIs that we optimise for that and forget that there's actually investments you can make which just show up everywhere. But I guess before we get into that, let's get a bit more context on like what you're actually doing. And I suppose.
Talk to us a little bit about what you do at CXL and I suppose particularly from a marketing perspective for you, what's like uniquely challenging or a little bit different about marketing CXL versus other places you've been or your standard SaaS company.
Stefan Maritz (02:00)
Cool, so I lead the marketing department and the marketing operation. Obviously, as set of marketing, I think it's very interesting one because it's like almost a media brand. We serve both B2B and B2C. It's quite an interesting segment because we sell training and most people buy that training with personal development budgets. So even though you're appealing to the individual themselves on like that personal level.
you're still basically selling to a company because in many cases they have to get signed off on the budget to buy the training and whatnot. So it's a very cool mix of like appealing to the person but also selling to the brand. And then we've also got the team layer where we've got a bunch of big companies that buy our product for their team. So you get like 25 seats and the entire team can basically access all the training. And it's pretty much like Netflix for B2B marketing training. What's a bit different here is...
It's a very interesting time to be selling online education. AI is flipping the script, if we can quote directly from AI. At the moment, a lot of people are spending money on shiny tools and like the GPTs and the LLMs and training is taking a bit of a backseat. Like people are not buying courses the same way they were three years ago on COVID times. Like online training is just what can I do with AI right now? So if you're not like...
trying to sell AI programs, number one, or number two, if you're just something that someone is comparing with like spending their personal development budget on a tool that they could play with, it gets a bit tricky at the moment. So the entire industry is seeing a strange movement of just, know, people are a bit more reserved when buying training, number one, and number two, there's also personal development budgets are pulling back. So right now we're still just focusing on what we've always done and that is valuable content.
So our positioning is based on what's working right now in B2B because things change, obviously, it changes fast. And it's also like the time you make a, if you make a course this week on LinkedIn ads, in a month's time, the course is probably outdated already, or there's like actual, there's new features that haven't been covered by the course, which is a major challenge. like, how do we keep things up to date the whole time? And how do we continuously like prove that we are the most valuable resource in this industry? So.
Yeah, it's basically one big ongoing value push of high quality content like a media agency pretty much.
Tom Rudnai (04:21)
Yeah, well, and I suspect they aren't like the the cause of your problem is the same as solution, right? Which is is it's AI for others? That's how you keep up with the rate of change and you find ways to embed that into your process. One thing you said there, which I've not kind of really heard before, but it's very interesting is personal development budgets have been cut back a lot.
I guess makes sense in light of the fact that it's a slightly more difficult economic climate, but also as we're all adjusting to this massive shift of AI that a lot of people in the workforce don't know how to use very effectively, they don't understand what it does, what the risks are, what the benefits are, that seems really, really stupid. Right now seems like the time that a small investment in training an employee can have a massive, massive impact. Do you get visibility on why they've cut back?
Stefan Maritz (04:59)
Yeah, I mean you just nailed it. The economic circumstances at the moment are so you're on a company level. What's the first thing that gets cut that has like the lowest return on investment usually is training oftentimes because like, we're just spending thousands of euros on like everyone. It's that benefit that sits on like the bottom of a career page. Like you get a $2,000 budget and
Tom Rudnai (05:17)
Yeah.
Stefan Maritz (05:19)
you can use it and then all of a sudden that 2000 becomes a thousand and then the thousand like no one people get encouraged not to use it or it just doesn't get pushed as much but like the HR department and stuff so it's an easy place for a company to serve especially when people are buying this from them obviously so that's number one and then number two on your other side we run a survey I do this every quarter where I basically just reach out to like the managers because like your heads of directors, VPs of
marketing of like the companies we sell to pretty much because they usually sit with those budgets just to understand like what are the pains that they're feeling for this quarter and right now at the moment it's the same like budgets are getting lower that comes up every time like targets are raising but budgets are being cut so we're kind of being expected to do more with less that that's just echoes around the table every single time and then keeping the team up with AI but it's not a concrete thing like what is keeping up with AI because AI is so broad that like
AI for research and marketing is definitely not the same as using AI for content production and it's definitely not the same as using it for like cold outreach. It's definitely not the same for like identifying your ICP and it's like this big like strange area where there's so much hype at the moment and everyone and their mom's posting about it on LinkedIn but the moment you start asking a lot of people like can you do a course on that post you just made you just made a very bold claim of like your
your AI outreach agent that is making you millions of dollars and then silence. It's not that they don't want to share it, it's just they can't because it's this thing they just built with like Lovable and like no one's like really got a case yet to prove it. like we're obviously talking to a lot of people doing these things at the moment. yeah, marketing managers do want their teams to be up to date, but like what are you also investing in? There's a lot of crap out there at the moment and it's really hard to dissect like what's real and what's fake.
Tom Rudnai (07:02)
Yeah.
Stefan Maritz (07:06)
So yeah, we are trying to like now shift into that. So we just added like a layer of like live courses because of this, because if you do a course on onset engine optimization today, by next week it's different. Like if chat GPT for instance introduced ads next week, everything we know about AI changes, right? So we were trying to do that on like a faster basis. And this seems to like be working a little bit and we're getting like really reputable people to do this.
Tom Rudnai (07:19)
Mm-hmm.
Stefan Maritz (07:33)
But yeah, it's definitely an interesting time to be selling training to marketers.
Tom Rudnai (07:37)
Yeah, I like that switch to live and like an ongoing muscle of improvement on this stuff rather than doing it as one and done. There was something you said that kind of made me think about, like I said, you talked about it's hard. So on the one hand, we're all diverting, looking for AI tools that can magically solve our problems while we divert away from investing in the humans, right? And most AI at the moment is like a co-pilot. So actually invest in the pilot and you're to get more out of the co-pilot. ⁓ So that makes all the sense in the world to me, but I really feel that like.
Stefan Maritz (07:59)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (08:04)
It's very hard to trust tools that you're shown. I have a bit of a theory that like there's two waves of AI that we've seen so far. One was basically techies using AI to do commercial workflows really badly and it flooded markets and flooded every channel with really low quality content, outreach, all of that stuff and disrupted.
the communication landscape. What we've now moved into is non techies using AI to do technical workflows really badly. And it's having the exact same impact on the product landscape where now it's really hard to see the wood from the trees in terms of what's good product and what's not. And it's not until you get into it and dedicate hours to getting into it, like, okay, this is actually crap. It's not integrated with anything.
Stefan Maritz (08:33)
Mm-hmm.
I mean it's like someone makes a person say I just built this massive cool dashboard Just plug your Google Ads account into it. No, my credit card is linked to that Why would I do that? You built this with lovable like you're not a dev You don't watch the security standards behind us and if you actually talk to devs, they're like, please don't do not like the security breaches on this will be epic So it's it's a very weird space. And I mean, I've personally I'm a big nerd for these kind of things. So I've I've been working with AI since Jenny AI
writer that launched years ago already. I mean AI has been on the scene, think about it, like the note takers and meetings has always been there. Well it feels like always, it's like for years we've had this like Fireflies thing that just follows us around. It's like we've been doing like audio to transcript, we've been doing like audio to notes, we've been doing like a lot of things with AI and likewise with with Jenny. I actually don't know what they ran on back in that in the day but there was a like a writer and then like Semrash had a thing that they launched like if I remember correctly.
There was like uber suggest like a writer that could write blogs for you but like terrible but you could still like spawn a relatively decent like draft and then just like work on it and like you could work it into your work for them. I've been using this I think since like 2018 if I'm correct like that's that's first time I read a blog with AI.
Tom Rudnai (09:47)
Mm.
Stefan Maritz (10:04)
been working with it ever since. Now I'm at a point where I think it's an enabler. If you've got a very good trained GPT for the brand, you can actually get a bunch of writers to produce more on-brand content than ever. Because even if you've got a very good tone of voice framework for a brand, no two writers will write exactly the same. They will always have a dash for their own personality in there. And now if you equip them with a GPT, you can
everyone to more or less run on the same level but you still need that human that's a good writer to understand what is good versus what is bad. If you read through that and you see these patterns, I'm like that's very AI that no human will ever say that. You still need a human brain to dissect it to get like a great piece of content out the other side. But it definitely makes things faster. It definitely allows us to push good work faster but it also
Tom Rudnai (10:38)
Hmm.
Stefan Maritz (10:57)
takes the average person who doesn't know what they're doing and just like flood the internet with crap at the moment.
Tom Rudnai (11:03)
I remember working on it back in 2017, working at a company that was doing deep fake detection, right? And the quality of those deep fakes, raising back then. it's now is like, we're all searching for like the jump in video that takes us to what we were seeing some people put out there. It's got easier, the barriers got lower. But it's quite interesting to your point was like, everything stems from brand and it's like AI as a whole.
almost just got this complete rebrand in 2021 despite the fact that it wasn't actually that significant a shift. was a business model change really that occurred, not a technological shift. ⁓
Stefan Maritz (11:30)
Mm-hmm.
It's been
a curve, it's been going. Obviously, it's now like there's a lot of investment in it now, so it moves fast. But yeah, I completely agree with you. think when ShadGBT, what was it, V2 launched, everyone for the first time in their life heard about OpenAI, most of the normal people, if you're going to put it that way, not the heavy techies, that's when it's like, hell, AI is here, it's going to take all our jobs. Let me write posts on LinkedIn about this. And it's like, yeah, big rebrand. Interesting.
Tom Rudnai (11:53)
not the nerds.
Yeah, for sure. I wanna talk a little bit about content, because I think one thing you said when we first connected, was like, CXL is a content powerhouse, and I can absolutely see that.
talk to us about how your content creation processes have evolved over the last couple of years to keep up with the rate of output that you now need to put up while still having that focus on creating great content.
Stefan Maritz (12:23)
Cool, I'm gonna take two steps back just for context. first of all, I've just backed it that kind of, I come from a brand background. I'm a certified brand strategist by like study, if I can put it that way. And it's always been about like, what is a brand? Building a brand is shaping perceptions in the market, right? So that is, and we're not gonna talk about brand, but that is fundamentally what you're doing. Everything that you put out, whether you wanna call it performance marketing or content marketing or organic marketing, whatever you do, whatever you put out on the internet is actually building a brand. Like if you put anything
social media on a website that someone finds and they read you are actively building brand you're actively shaping perception to some sort of another way. You're doing a good job or a bad job that's it. So content has always been your primary vehicle to build brand out there. Like obviously you've got if you buy a product there's an experience attached to it which is you can't remove but before someone buys all you have is your content really you've got your ads but that's still one form of content at the end of the day. So content is according to me at least like one of the
drivers of any business growth like what you put out there, how you communicate your value proposition to your ICP, that is the primary vehicle of driving that perception in the market. So I treat content as like a very very very important business to like the whole thing and you've get bad content you get good content. What does good content look like? Good content is basically an absolute layman's terms it comes down to
knowing who you speak to, understanding their pain, and then through content, proving to them that you understand their pain and you understand how to solve their problem and you are the solution to that problem. And then the selling starts, obviously, like, goodbye, because we can solve your pain. But if you don't like communicate to them that you are a trusted source to solve their problem and you understand their problem, you're never going to sell to them. Now, that goes for BTC and BTP all the same, obviously different tactics and like this different knobs to twist on.
both sides but fundamentally the truth sits in the middle of that and if we look at the demand generation that is pretty much what demand generation is all about right it's it's telling your audience that you can solve their problem it's creating mental availability about the problem and say I'm telling that you're the solution to that problem really
So going on to that, get to like, how do you create good content? What is what is like the input of good content? And how do you build trust? Now to do that, you need someone that really understands the problem. And that's where we go to this like subject matter expert conversation that's also quite big in the B2B field at the moment. But it really comes down to like, what is your input? What do you put in on the one side? And whether that is a human writer, whether that is AI, the same principle counts, like what you put in is the same as what you get out. Now, if we look to like,
a little bit a few years ago, what would a human writer do? A human writer would do some research on the internet, download a few white papers, make a summary, talk to maybe someone on the team, then write a piece like a report and put it out. Weeks work of like a lot of things, a lot of links and like, know, SEO things that need to happen while I've got a piece of content. Now with AI you can obviously speed that up because you can still ask AI to either go search on the internet, find what you want, put that into a blender, spit out something else.
Or you can put in proprietary data. You can do a study yourself, get like a survey data from the market, thousands of data points that you want, or you can record this webinar, for instance, this podcast, you can take the transcript, you can shove that in as like the raw material and then talk to like your writer and your AI, which is now up there pretty much and something comes out on the other side. So just to kind of go back to your question, what then is good content is it really comes down to that subject matter expertise? Like, do you have some
that puts out, let's call it thought leadership, but thoughts that are in line with what the audience seems like a solution to their problem or trustworthy opinion on the matter and then turning that into content. Now at CXL, like you said, the content is the actual product because that's what we're selling. We are getting subject matter experts who's active practitioners in the field of what they're doing to teach that subject
Tom Rudnai (16:22)
Mm-hmm.
Stefan Maritz (16:22)
playbook, insights, we distill that into a certified course and we get them to do that on demand or in a live setting depending on the specific topic and then we push that. But it solves the entire content marketing problem in the middle because I've got the output which is like a great produced course on the right hand side and all the way through I've got like hours and hours and hours of like thought leadership, subject matter expert, transcripts that I can use as the input. So my team
doesn't necessarily have to be experts in ABM in the modern generation and content marketing and ACO and PPC and LinkedIn ads because we're working with the top 1 % in the market to actually explain that and then we take that insight and we just turn that into content. It's just now faster than ever because of AI because we can like build a butt on top of this. So we sit with across all our courses tens of thousands of hours of, okay maybe not tens of thousands of hours but thousands of hours of people speaking about their sub
and we turn that into content basically along with video and everything else.
Tom Rudnai (17:23)
Yeah, well, and that makes sense, right? And it's obviously an unfair advantage that you guys have as a company and that's something that you can leverage. I think what I always advise people to do is think about this concept of content IP, which I think if you're not this company that naturally it's thought leadership, it's really important to define, because as you say, it's very easy to churn out crap.
you need to think where do we have a unique perspective, whether it's from data, whether it's from the founder and their own kind of insight and vision, we're not that fortunate at Demand Genius, we need data. That's what you need to hone into. And then you replicate the input that you have and the big impact that AI has now is going from input to output, I think is what you're saying. That's a much easier step now and it's a much cheaper step. But the time needs to be spent at the start of that chain.
Stefan Maritz (18:01)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, 100%. I'll use a very, very simple example for you. Think of a plumber, right? Like, I've got a problem in my bathroom. I'm not a certified plumber. I don't know how to do it. So I've got options. can either phone a plumber to come give me advice. I can go to Google and try and find like a,
tutorial on YouTube I can now ask LLMs to like explain the steps to me and what to do but at the end of the day what's really the best is just to get a plumber to come look now if I can get that plumber to create content so say I put the plumber in front of a video and say just record what you just done explain the problem very clearly this is wrong this is wrong this is what I inspected this is how I like diagnosed the problem and this is how I found the issue and now I'm gonna go over to solving the problem and I'm gonna do XYZ and within two hours of work we're done these
Tom Rudnai (18:34)
Hmm.
Stefan Maritz (18:54)
are the tools you're gonna need. If you have that you've got subject matter expert. Now whether that is cyber security or whether it is I don't know your service agency or an accountant someone there knows their craft someone I spend their 10,000 hours
Solving that problem now oftentimes those people don't necessarily like creating content and that's often where you get with like founders and like once you start talking about thought leadership It's like you do have the solution to the problem of your ICP You're actually just not making an effort to get that information across right like yes the moment you get into a consultation call or the moment someone starts paying you start working on the account you're giving it but you do sit with a lot of insight that you can actually just like dump
into like a marketer's like mine that they can be turning into something that speaks to your audience on a different level when it's not yet a personal conversation. And that is really where good content comes in. Like it's almost like
giving your advice and your insight away for free because there is someone in the market that is struggling with the problem before they're going to phone someone. I might try and go to Google to solve my plumbing issue before I get the plumber in, because that's just how we are as humans. Sometimes you just try and fix something and then spend money on it. That's really what it comes down to. If you think of that analogy, it's that what happens from the moment I become problem aware and I'm looking for a solution to actually
the call, content fills that entire gap. What do you put in there? Is it just a blog that you'd made out of 10 other blogs about plumbing? Or is it actually speaking to a plumber that just analyzes the problem, gives a solution and the walkthrough and then turn that into a blog? Which one is better? The second.
Tom Rudnai (20:33)
you need to understand the conditions you're operating in as well, right? So to take your example, plumbers broadly operate in a problem aware market, right? So I know when I have a plumbing problem, because my tap doesn't, like I don't need content to make me problem aware, my tap's gonna make me aware. We might be stretching the analogy here, but stay with me. A lot of SaaS, and some SaaS companies will sit within that bucket as well.
Stefan Maritz (20:47)
Yeah, 100%.
Tom Rudnai (20:55)
A lot of SaaS companies, you have the job of making people problem aware. Now that's always going to be a lot more expensive, right? So I tend to think you build from the bottom up in these things, right? You say, okay, where can I find people who are already problem aware and convert them? And then over time, as we raise more capital and our budgets increase, we can start focusing on moving people through that.
And I always get people ask me very simplistically like, should we be doing ABM or DemandGen and that kind of thing, right? And I think this is quite important to that. Cause if you're in a problem aware market, then it is really about ABM. It's about how do you touch the right people at the right moment so that you can get your solution in front of them. DemandGen is a lot more about creating that problem awareness and priming them for the solution. And then they'll raise their hand. I guess I'm winding my way to a question here. How do you assess?
whether your audience is problem aware or not, and how do you find potentially pockets of them where they are?
Stefan Maritz (21:49)
Well, once again, I'm to take a step back. I've got a love-hate relationship with the B2B market on this because this is a statistic
thrown around on the internet of like, 5 % of your market is buying or like 3 % or 2%, whatever someone's making up on LinkedIn. Now, anyway, it comes down to you look at this pie chart and this little small piece is like active buyers and solutions seeking. And then someone goes and says, that's the demand you have to capture. And then there's this big part of the pie that says, these are the people you have to do the margin on because they are not actively seeking, but you need to build mental awareness, 100%. Like in theory, that makes a lot of sense. And like, it's a very easy
way to describe it but what's not true is that it's not black or white. If you look at the spectrum there's
I've got a personal funnel that is not anything official but I tend to look at it at like the pie chart has more like slices to it where at the bottom of the funnel on the far right you've got the active buyer someone that's you know they're sitting with like contracts on their desk right now like or like three proposals and they're gonna decide who we're signing like that's like the bottom of the barrel like you already made it and then right at the top is someone that's like call them inactive
might not be, it's not that they're not problem aware, it's just that they're actually not, it's not their problem right now. Like for instance, I'm going to use a car buyer, someone is purchasing a new car as an example, you're not a me to be example because it explains it very nicely. So if you just bought a car yesterday, if you just work through the cycle and you just sign, you got your car, you got your keys, you drove out, tomorrow you are not
in the active market.
It's still you can still buy a car in the future and you likely will but you're back to like step one which is dormant because You're just actually happy now unless you're shopping for a second car, which is the obvious the average human being doesn't do that But now you're dormant by it doesn't mean that I don't have to market you for your future purchase And that's the same thing that happens in B2B, but in the middle there's a lot of other things So five years pass I start thinking about hmm Maybe it's time to upgrade my car or maybe I need a new CRM I start a new job and I'm like I see this
problem, I'm not necessarily going to throw my entire existence at it yet, but it's there. So now you become problem aware. It's like, okay, cool, this is coming up, I might want to solve it at some point. From there, problem aware person is not necessarily someone that's going to buy within like the first or the next year or three years even. So then it goes over to like solution curious, solution seeking, and then only active buying. Because it's only you go through these hoops of like finding information to make
your case and to actually spend money and like everything your demand generation happens all the way from dormant straight through to like when someone is actually solution seeking because that's like cool what's my problem how am I gonna solve this who's got the answer to my problem who's the vendors I want to include in my consideration set and then only when you get to the consideration set that's when you start capturing demand obviously so whether it's ABM or whether it's like the more kind of you know
funnel push of like building awareness. They all fit into different pieces of that funnel and that mental spectrum of like making an actual purchase. Whether it's a call, whether it's a new software for a business edition. And the mind generation is really about making sure that your brand is in the consideration set when that person gets to the point when they actually want to make or decide I might make a purchase. These are likely the three I'm going to look at.
Tom Rudnai (25:23)
So that makes all the sense in the world, right? And the analogy is very useful. I guess what I'm really interested though, at some point you need to translate that to, okay, we have limited resources and a content strategy and a target. what that presumably requires, because there's different content that you're gonna create for every step in that, is the ability to some extent to assess within your market, what the split is like in terms of distribution across that funnel.
Like maybe use the example of a CXL. Like when you first come in, how do you go about assessing that so that you can say, okay, this is where we're going to place our chips from a content perspective.
Stefan Maritz (26:00)
Yeah, sorry. So you did ask the question of like, how do you pocket those? I just skipped that. Sorry, my brain got carried away. yeah, basically, it's another way to think of it is like one too few and one too many. Like, what do the people who's just back to like the funnel of like, if they go over from Dolman to like solution curious, right? What type of content do you want to show them? That's your typical thought leadership that can be your your brand awareness plays your your standard ad push for us. That would be just making sure that people see our tips and tricks.
Tom Rudnai (26:05)
That was fun.
Stefan Maritz (26:28)
videos on TikTok for instance. We're not actually pushing by, we're just saying here's free snippets of our courses just so you can see there's this brand that is pushing our thought leadership content. I'm not asking you to buy whatsoever. And then as they move through, they might go and say, now I've got a personal development budget or there's a new year coming up and I need to like spend my next thousand dollars or something next year. Where am I going to spend this? And I might start thinking about like, this maybe goes to Udemy or maybe I should go to CXA.
and I'm still just thinking because that purchase is only coming up in two months time but my manager said start thinking about the sale long for your next quarter or week-long for the year. That goes different and that's where someone might sign up for the newsletter obviously and we still just more or less it's still like a value push of free content. We're just establishing
that the quality of our content is super high. You're not going to find this anywhere else. And when you do compare that with anything else in the market, you're not going to find the same depth. You're not going to find the same level of expertise that is actually presenting that content. So that is the job really there. It's just the positioning. And then at some point it obviously goes over to, now I'm looking for a solution. I might want to see what are the costs of the content, like the courses out there. What are the packages that I can buy?
That's where we start with like the ads and you know come here this is it. Buy now. It's better to take the subscription than it is to take the individual course because it's worth more for your money.
Maybe then we go over to the promotion because there's still like a DTC element to it. So once I know you're in there, you're looking at SEO courses. I'm obviously going to push an SEO course to you and say, hey, you can buy this at, you know, maybe a special today. Maybe I'll give you a free course to just come check it out and then try to convert you. So just back to like the broader scheme and not not CXL specific. It's kind of like what is the content that a person needs to see if you're talking to 10,000 of them versus what is the content that
person needs to see if they're on a like a one-to-one conversation basis. On the big scheme to the big market you're not pushing, hey for a
For a SaaS company, almost exactly like yours, we did X, Y, Z and the results were 200 % increase in whatever metric. It's different. You're talking about the big problem, you're positioning yourselves as a thought leader. And then when you got that person on the table and they're like, hey, we need to send this to the CFO for sign off.
I really like your company, but there's also three others that we'd like considering. Why you when that question comes up, how do you answer that? That should really direct your content, like whether it's a case study on that level or a webinar in the middle, that's way more solution specific and there's 50 people showing up for that webinar. Or it's just like, hey, here's a newsletter or a blog article that is just talking about the problem in general and positioning us as like a credible, trustworthy source of information on that.
Tom Rudnai (29:20)
And what I'm hearing here a little bit is that the framing of my question actually isn't very helpful because what I'm saying is, okay, we have vertically stacked five different stages of the funnel. I'm saying, okay, limited resources. How do I prioritise where I put my resource? But I think what I'm hearing, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is like, you can't. You have to spread your resources across all of those five stages, which means that the only way that you can...
account for limited resources is you scale back horizontally. So you hone in on covering that for a tighter and tighter group of people by focusing on less channels, whatever it is your way of narrowing the audience, but still making sure that you cover all of those different stages.
Stefan Maritz (29:57)
obviously
In a lot of cases, this is marketing as a unique problem, where the moment someone spends money on marketing, they expect a return on investment. It's fair because same with sales, it's a growth engine, it's supposed to be. You have to start at the bottom. there's demand to capture and it's readily available, if you are not trying to grab your piece of the pie, you won't get it. That's like the...
the simple idea there, but you can't only focus there because especially if like depends on the market, if there's like big players you're up against, like how does the competition work? You can only get so much from that segment. Like think back to that 595 rule, like that segment is really small. So you have to focus there, but you can't focus all your resources there. And then you just start working backwards on that because focusing at the right of the top, if someone's completely dormant, it's also super expensive because to take someone all the way from dormant
to buying, you can't do that like in, and sometimes it will take like two to three years. So you can't realistically focus on the top only as well and then expect demand to be generated and someone to come buy and like, you know, six months time. So you almost like gradually work your way back from like actively buying, solution seeking, solution curious, problem aware, and then dormant like it's almost like the last one. You can obviously move some of the content that you might use in the middle phase will also help for like the dormant phase.
But I would I personally like working my way back so for instance if you're launching a brand the first place you start is like In our case if someone's on Google searching for B2B marketing courses. I want to be there How do I answer that question like yes? It's SEO and they say is SEO is getting harder now with the AI stuff So what do we have to do we have to make sure that the LLMs are mentioning us number one and number two Let's just run ads to make sure those people get on our website, so we didn't miss that actual like
that segment in the market and that goes for anything, whether I'm selling.
Dishwashing liquid or like a sauce product if someone's actually looking and you're not there you can't compete for that sale and Then obviously moving it back You have to like build that mental awareness after the mental availability You have to build the trust like the relationship is still important like that's when the founder content comes in and you just start building your blocks all the way up to the top and then you Hopefully get to a point. We're like hey guys. We've got the entire funnel sorted. Let's also just start like focusing on the dormant
market because what does it matter?
Tom Rudnai (32:20)
Yeah, and I think it's a fundamental mistake a lot of people make is that we need to get people as early as possible so that we build a relationship, whether when they come to buy, then they're going to choose us. But it's a bit of a misunderstanding of like, there's this whole thing, like all of B2C is basically offer optimization, right? And that is a huge driver in the decision. So going early is great for getting yourself in the door, making sure you're one of the three on the short list, all that good stuff. But there is still a job to do to convert. So you can't, it's a big mistake to think, okay, we're going do awareness and that'll pay dividends later. Not if you're not doing the fundamentals at the bottom.
It's a huge opportunity cost to not doing that. And so you mentioned those high intent bottom of funnel ICO keywords, things like that. What are some other things that you would say if I'm not doing, I'm almost certainly just leaving money on the table?
think Brian is an important moat. It's something missed by a lot of of CMOs, but it has to come later. ⁓
Stefan Maritz (33:08)
Yeah,
just a thought on that. It's like, think there's a misconception like what the brand play is at the end of the day. Like a lot of people think you have to like, it's that campaign that runs and it's just like, hey, we're here. It's not necessarily everything else also builds brand. It's not that if you don't run ads and do a play at the top of the funnel that you're not building brand because essentially your biggest brand building happens the moment you onboard someone like
I saw you for the solution, I trusted you with my money, you're on board, did you solve my problem? And the case that comes out of that, like the referrals, the word of mouth, the affiliate, like everything that comes with that experience is your biggest brand play. And that's what people often don't understand is like, they remove like the experience from like the brand awareness ad. your brand is always built Like if you put your phone on the front line and you have input like decent videos on LinkedIn solving the problem in the
that's also building brand, it's also building trust, it's also like jumping through the hoops of building something more meaningful than just a product at the end of the day.
Tom Rudnai (34:10)
No, that makes all the sense in the world. If you think of Brown as like almost your business's personality, When does your personality as a human come across? Is it in the little jokes that you share as you pass someone on the street? That's the equivalent of the top funnel, right? No, it comes in the actually important moments where you need to build trust and you're having an important conversation. That's when your personality most is shaped and understood by other people. So you're doing it constantly. I wanna move on a little bit, cause you touched on one thing and this is something that I've kind of flagged before just from looking through your...
your LinkedIn is kind of GEO, AIEO, whatever the hell people want to call it. It would be nice if we could all just agree. ⁓ So one thing you said is you successfully got CXL pretty quickly to the top of that. I think that's something people are constantly talking about at the moment. Tell us how and how do you measure it is the other interesting part.
Stefan Maritz (34:46)
So yeah.
Yeah, so sorry, I need to like stick to your question. So how do I measure it? First of all, that's the easy part. That's the easy one to answer because two ways like Google Analytics is actually fairly good at showing you where your traffic comes from if it comes from like that referral link. So you can just set up for instance, I've got a Looker studio where I just have like all the big LLMs and then I just do like a scan once in a while because they are new ones. So like for instance,
Tom Rudnai (35:02)
Yeah.
Stefan Maritz (35:21)
What's a new one like Mangus API like a lot of my store the other day I heard of and I just went to check and I was like there is traffic coming but it's like super low numbers so it doesn't matter but anyway if you've got like Chat GPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude
Deep-seek all of these and like you pull them out as referral traffic You'll see the trend very nicely because if the link is included in the LLM on since someone does click directly through it Obviously, it doesn't give a full picture because if someone reads about you and LLM and then goes to like directed to your website You miss that and then we've got like the full back, which is just the moment someone purchased We asked them when did you first hear about us? And now we including like LLM and I've also got Google AI snippet as like a separate one because I do tend to split them up because people
kind of moving back to Google a lot more with the AI answers now and it's coming up quite a bit. I can go as far as say like almost 20 % of our sales year-to-date has been attributed directly to AI sources which is great. So that's the how do you measure it. It's really just set up the digital tracking as far as you possibly can and then ask people and they will tell you and then it gets quite interesting if you speak to those people what did you actually go search for. In our case we kind of realized like a lot of people are like I'm today a growth manager.
a company or I'm a demand generation manager, how do I move from you to like this thing I've got money to spend on personal development budget, what courses do you recommend? So they actually have that conversation with an LLM. Now naturally I want to be as the brand recommended by this because if we look at like human psychology now
If you ask your neighbor for a plumber back to the plumber thing if your toilet breaks and your neighbors like hey I had that problem last week I use this kind of sorted it out You're not gonna go to the internet and find different ones You're kind of just gonna like trust your neighbor and go with that person now an LLM answers way closer to that than it is to blue promoted links on Google like as humans We just kind of trust it like we shouldn't because it still makes up shit the whole time. So But it's like this intuition that we have like we're having a conversation
Tom Rudnai (37:13)
Yeah.
Stefan Maritz (37:16)
I gave you my entire case. didn't just search for like b2b marketing courses online and then everyone and their mom tries to like sell it to me so that's that's why it's an important play for me because we we had a very very powerful blog and like as the
These graphs you do see of a lot of the big brands on LinkedIn, we also took a hit because a lot of our content can now be answered by AI. Like experimentation frameworks or this or that, people go search in a different place. We're not seeing that traffic. What we are seeing is we've almost doubled our impressions now on Google because the Google AI snippets are really, really good for us. And this is where it gets interesting. So twofold. One is we're lucky because we're an old brand and we're a big brand.
Training data includes a lot of our content. So fundamentally, CXL was seen as one of the trustworthy sources. Now, you can't fake this and there's no way to fast track that, unfortunately. I've least not seen someone do that. But what we have realized is because of this, we've got a lot of power and every change we almost make on our site and if we look at the things that are like...
proposed in the market, like run your comparison pages, put your FAQs up, make sure the website tells who you're for, you're not for. All of these things, we actually start shaping these answers in real time and we're like actually impacting the answers that Google is giving and that the LLMs are giving way faster than a smaller brand, but for instance. So we are actively doing it. Yes, we've got the big win from like the legacy brand and the legacy content on the website, but we're actively like pushing. So for instance, if you go ask
one of our big competitors versus CXL for instance right now to get a summary it would directly pull the pages that we've recently posted on the topic because we've got a page that outlines it and it's not to bash them it's just because we actually don't want exactly the same customer that they have like why Udemy versus CXL for instance it's a completely different investment the one is 99 and the one
one and a half thousand dollars for like the full money so when do want to spend 99 who is that for and who's the $1,500 for if you want the full like the annual subscription on CXL and why would you pick them so we just basically went and told all the LLMs to like summarize this for us and now if you get back to like a person asking like I want to go down this route which courses should I do
we basically provide that information for the LLM to give a decent answer so it doesn't have to like pull that from somewhere else. So we're actively investing in that because we are seeing significant amount of sales and it's just super fun to like watch and play with. That said, I do want to say like on my consultation side, on my personal side, we've also managed to get like very, very small agencies.
like ranking for very specific search terms like for instance I'm working with a
Accounting firm that focuses on like modern tech stack for like product-based businesses and they really go after this like since 7 implementation and we've managed within like a month to get them if you know go ask for like since 7 experts or since 7 implementation experts because it's a common thing to like if you get to a certain point with like a product-based business you like need that inventory management system that they come up as like one of the recommendations like the top three and We've just like been pushing out that content pushing out the comparison making sure that like on every single public
listing where this is that is mentioned on LinkedIn that their customer reviews are putting that into G2. Their customers are leaving reviews for SIN7 on G2 but also mentioning their name. So it's a different dynamic. It's not like I think there's opportunity for brands because you don't have to rely on the slow SEO game as much anymore. Obviously it's still a fraction of the traffic but where this is heading is it's growing. So you do need to spend that
time to make sure that your brand is actually mentioned because back to the your neighbor tells you about a plumber analogy that plays a big role so if LLM puts you forward as the recommendation you will likely end up winning.
Tom Rudnai (41:12)
Yeah, okay, that's really interesting. It rewards specificity in terms of how you can as a more of a challenger brand, go and find carve out your place where you can get benefit from the LLMs is if you're super specific on what you're doing, right? You're not a plumber, you're a plumber in Burman.
Stefan Maritz (41:29)
Yeah, and I only work when this pipe bursts.
Tom Rudnai (41:32)
Yeah, exactly. And then
someone can say my that pipe is bursting. I'm in Bermondsey, which, is interesting because it's such a change in the way that you think of like a traditional more brandy activity, which is you cast a wide net. It's like, no, you have to focus, but there's huge benefits down the chain of that for the business because it creates so much more repeatability and efficiency then and how you can deliver a service, particularly if it's software, because you can be super focused on how do I optimize our process to solve that problem.
Stefan Maritz (41:59)
Yeah, so just to like, so for instance, you can assume in like the SaaS and the B2B space, like what people are doing is they're going and saying, hey, we're a company with 52 employees in this market, in this sector. This is my budget. This is my exact problem. I'm looking for a solution for that problem. Now, whoever sits with the answer to that question and the fan out questions that come from it, like what does that conversation look like with like the LLM? If you can answer everything into like great depth for that person,
and you can almost like predict those questions, but you don't get the same way you get keywords, then naturally it will start like pushing you for that. So that's almost the play at the moment. I think it's cool because it's not the technical SEO isn't important anymore. It's just like your brand being mentioned and getting really specific about the problems you solve online is now like almost.
like it's like the new like currency on there like just having your brand mentioned by more people saying the same thing like them for specific problem is way worth worth way more than like a high value backlink at the moment.
Tom Rudnai (42:58)
This is a thought experiment, and this might be a really short question in which case we'll just cut it out. But what...
So you mentioned that for you guys, you're very focused on, you know exactly your spot, right? It's 1500 quid and that has an impact on who should come to us and who should go to you to me. So we're leverage our, the fact that we're a legacy brand with authority and we're just gonna call that out and therefore make sure that the people we want come to us. What do you think would happen if you got greedy and you started trying to pretend that you are what you're not? Do you think that would harm your overall reputation or do you think you would be able to extract a benefit from that greed?
Stefan Maritz (43:31)
I think both sides really because so what we also recently went through is we recently rebranded to
Legacy was very focused on like CRO and analytics and then kind of became like marketing for everyone with like we'll have Ecommerce courses and we'll have b2b courses and it kind of got impossible to really deliver like high quality courses for every vertical for every marketer at every like like level of that It's physically impossible. You can only put out so many courses and market so many courses in a year's time. So We were like we really actually have to focus. So we recently went through this where we said we're only b2b So we changed the entire website. We changed the entire
positioning and this was actually based on like a lot of research and everything we've done. So we really went through and said we're B2B only. So we went out with this mission a few months ago and said now we have to change the entire internet's like positioning of CXL.
How do we make the LLM say that if someone asks for the best B2B marketing training that we're at the top, that Google AI snippet says that, that if you Google it, that we're at the top of that list? No ads, completely organic. We've managed to shift that, like in totality, we've turned it around. So to answer your question, I think if we now did the same thing and say, let's double up, make like a different version and just do e-commerce, it's highly possible that you can probably like grab the...
the traffic that comes through like the intent. But I think that's not where you again fall back into that like, okay, who are you actually for? You can't be everything to everyone. So it's possible to add like a sister brand for instance and go do it and I'm 100 % sure you can benefit from it. But like, can you like confidently tell that story on two levels?
That's that's where it really gets hard from like the brand side like I can't really position us as a b2b training company and Really position us as an e-commerce company at the same time because it falls flat like do I make two different newsletters? Do I now start like two different LinkedIn pages like like how do I mix this up? Because that's exactly what we stepped away from to like niche down and make sure that we can add as much value as possible to one segment and when you do that, you're naturally gonna like dilute your your value in the market and your position so to answer the question
very specifically, I think yes you can but I think it's not necessarily the best brand play. If someone is looking for B2B training and they get on the website and it's like are you e-commerce or B2B? It's already like cool let me rather go to Reforge because they're only B2B.
Tom Rudnai (45:56)
we've got a couple of minutes
so we've got a few quick fair questions that we always like to do at the end. So first one, an AI use case or tool or something like that that you absolutely love, the most game changing thing you've seen.
Stefan Maritz (46:06)
The most game-changing thing like to be to be dead honest is the most impact I've seen is Like I mentioned earlier is like if you've got a very well-trained custom GBT on brand You can actually put out very high quality content across the board much better than previously without it. That's just my opinion
because oftentimes your salespeople would write their own stuff, your paid media people would write their own stuff, your social media, but your content writers, it's very hard to do that governance. And if you've got a really good brand GPT and you give it to everyone, your content comes out at 75 % correct and your QA is just easy and your room for error comes down. And I've seen multiple writers now post things that are way more on brand than they ever used to be before.
Super impactful, speeds up content delivery so so so much and you still get like good content if you don't just like random prompt copy paste.
Tom Rudnai (47:02)
Yeah, yeah, if you
know how to use it. Nice, I like that. That's a good one. think people overlook, everyone's looking for someone else to build the tool that will have an impact and people overlook the power. Just, yeah, good.
Stefan Maritz (47:12)
Anyone can do this in an hour. It's not complicated. That's the magic thing about it. I've playing with it quite a bit. I've built auto outreach agents. I've built scraper tools. I've built a thing that will scan B2B websites to check if it runs like an R-B2B or a lead tracker and then pings a visit from me because I know there's a market on the other side and I know they're gonna come check out CXL. So I've done a lot of...
these wild odd cases of doing things.
Tom Rudnai (47:42)
Nice,
I love that R-B2B thing, that's really funny, that's clever.
Stefan Maritz (47:45)
Yeah, don't know to do. It worked like a boss.
It just ran locally and it just killed my machine because it actually uses the actual laptop to run. But it's amazing. said scan, scrapes, identified, ping visit from CXL, next one, scan, visit. And I gave it a contact list out of Apollo. So it just went through our account list.
Tom Rudnai (48:07)
Does it mean is your phone just lighting up for the next week with calls from SDRs now? ⁓
Stefan Maritz (48:13)
I hit my personality, it's
not me, you can set like a synthetic visit from the company but not the person. So my logic was someone will see it, they will check out CXL to see if I'm a customer and if you're a marketer I want you on my website. yeah, was there anything good that came out of it? Not really, like I couldn't see like my rate of success there was like will I see a spike in like direct visits? No. So it failed but like I've built a lot of things that I try to like test the impact on that stuff.
of the point. yeah and really the biggest thing is like research, competitive research, market research and then like building that custom brand bot really is like the mega thing for me at the moment.
Tom Rudnai (48:55)
Nice, next question, so what's for you personally now, like what skill or trait do you think has been the biggest like needle mover in your career?
Stefan Maritz (49:03)
Knowing how to make good content. 100%. Like I said, I think it's the foundation of everything. If you know how to make good content and you understand the strategy behind good content, like really understanding your audience, like serving their pain and solution, or like the solution to their pain, and you can produce good content, you know what good content looks like, and you're not just resulting to copy-pasting random crap onto LinkedIn.
needle mover in every sense, every client, every brand I work on, that seems to be the driver at the moment. think it's one of the most valuable skills to have right now.
Tom Rudnai (49:34)
And then very last question before I let you go. One recommendation that you have for everyone listening, like a book, a podcast, a thought leader that you think they should check out.
Stefan Maritz (49:44)
Never mind that, just stay on top of AI. That's the big advice I think I have at the moment is there's a lot of shiny tools that don't fall for all the hype right now. A lot of people are just making posts for clickbait if you really dissect it and I think that's the other nice thing about being at CXL because we engage with a lot of these people to ask if they want to do courses with us and a lot of the cases are just...
Tom Rudnai (49:47)
Let's.
Stefan Maritz (50:06)
interestingly not that interesting because people don't like they don't have the case to back up what they're saying online so be careful not to like just go down the rabbit hole and like I'm so behind but do play like do you see how you can work it into your operations do you see what you can optimize where you can cut out two hours without like compromising on the quality of your work I think it's yeah it's invaluable at the moment we did a
just like an additional point there. I recently did a bit of a study after like exit five released the salary benchmark thing. I actually went looking at like what are like what are these jobs looking for for those salaries is like a follow up on that. And when you analyze the job descriptions out there at the moment, it's like nine out of 10 will mention AI operations is like a thing. And like do not underestimate that because it's the person who has
played with AI is ahead of the person that hasn't played with AI.
Tom Rudnai (50:58)
and I
the fundamentals of it a little bit. think people so often get dragged into I need to understand what the current tools are. That stuff's gonna come and go. That doesn't matter. What you need to understand a little bit is how they operate, how to prompt them, to get stuff out of them and let the tools all blow by you a little bit. That's less important.
Stefan Maritz (51:13)
Yeah, because a lot of things are just wrappers at the end.
Tom Rudnai (51:15)
Exactly,
rappers, but we tell the VCs that they're AI agents. Anyway, I'm going to let you go because we've gone a little bit over. And same for the audience, if you're still listening, thank you for staying with us for this long. yeah, Stefan, it's been really interesting. Thank you.