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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
[00:00:00] Jillian: We're willing to kill our marketing babies, like we are willing to do that because I'm not going to sit here just because it's a podcast that Mark and I literally made and we think it's cool or we thought it was cool when we made it. It's something that I will not just hold on to. And I was, I was glad to hear Mark say that because it was something that I was considering too of like, okay, I'm having the genuine thought of, should we keep this going?
[00:00:23] Jillian: So a couple of other proof points that kind of influenced the decision that, spoiler alert, we have decided to keep it going, but we have a couple of things that we're considering and tweaking and changing moving forward.
[00:00:36] Mark: Here's what go to market teams are missing. Proof. That's what I think of every morning when I fire up LinkedIn and scroll through boring manifestos and endless lukewarm takes.
[00:00:45] Mark: Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber, and this is The Proof Point. A show from user evidence that helps go to market teams find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in [00:01:00] B2B SaaS, to help find the proof points that I'm in search of.
[00:01:04] Mark: You'll learn from sales, marketing, and customer success leaders in the trenches, where I ask them, seriously, what actually works for you? On this week's episode of The Proof Point, it's actually a different one and it's kind of special because we have Jillian Hofer on for the first time and she actually had Both hands in the launch of the proof point behind the scenes.
[00:01:24] Mark: And now that she's here full time at User Evidence, we'll talk about how we're reflecting and pausing and rebooting the proof point and really giving you an inside look at what is going on behind the scenes.
[00:01:35] Jillian: We're live. This is real. We're doing it. I'm thrilled to be on the mic with you. As a User Evidence employee.
[00:01:42] Mark: You want to talk about just like the show itself and how we first originally met?
[00:01:46] Jillian: Yeah. So hilarious journey. So I joined User Evidence team a little over a month ago as the senior content marketing manager. So running content marketing here, joining a dream team. So exciting for that. But the big thing that is [00:02:00] cool for me is that I've worked with Mark previously.
[00:02:02] Jillian: So I worked at an agency called Share Your Genius, which Share Your Genius is the partner that helps, um, This podcast, I was working at Sherry Genius as one of their strategic leads, which is kind of like a consultant slash executive producer that works with marketing teams or marketers like Mark, to get a show off the ground, conceptualize it, and then go into ongoing production strategy for as long as we want the show to go on.
[00:02:27] Jillian: So, um, I was that point person for Mark. So basically he and I collaborated to bring the proof point to life. I just was not a user evidence employee yet. So when I saw that Mark posted the role, I was not, I told him I was not actively looking. I had moved on to something else pretty recently, but I was like, I literally texted him.
[00:02:43] Jillian: I was like, Hey, we need to catch up. Miss you. Also this role, like what would it be? Would it be chill if we talked about it? Because like, I'm, I'm interested in working with you.
[00:02:53] Mark: That was the best text, like work related text that I'd gotten in quite some time, because I was at a point in the [00:03:00] hiring process where like, you know, I thought we had some decent candidates in there that probably would have been pretty good, you know, no disrespect to them.
[00:03:08] Mark: But then once you threw your name in the hat, I think one, I knew that we all wanted to hire you and I definitely wanted to hire you and then just like the trust factor of being able to hire someone very quickly because we definitely expedited the process and then let them just run shit very early on wouldn't have happened unless we had worked together before in some capacity and I definitely trusted you so you've made my life a whole lot easier in a very short time frame with content at UserEvidence and I'm glad it all worked out.
[00:03:39] Jillian: Well, it's mutual for sure. And I think, especially as a content marketer, taking a content role can be risky because if you don't know the team, if you don't know their philosophy about what content does for the company and what it can do for the company and the tools like AI that you can use, and you should be using in certain ways for it.
[00:03:57] Jillian: Like there's just so much risk in that. Inherently, I [00:04:00] feel, especially with content right now in this AI boom that we're having in the year 2024, it was like the dream scenario. I just had so much peace coming in here being like. I know Mark, I've worked with him. I will never forget. I had over, gosh, I mean, I had probably over 50 clients that I worked with one on one at my time at Sherry Genius, like very closely, like getting their shows up and running all the things.
[00:04:21] Jillian: You said something to me that no of my 50 clients had ever said to me. And it always stuck with me is that on our first call, you said to me, I don't want to do anything that anyone else in B2B is doing. Like, let's figure out a way to do this together and we'll experiment together and we'll collaborate and we'll get it wrong, but then we'll figure it out together.
[00:04:40] Jillian: But I do not want to do what everyone else is doing. And I was like, this dude gets me.
[00:04:48] Mark: I love that. You hear that, Devin? We'll see if Devin listens to the Proofpoint. Ha ha ha!
[00:04:52] Jillian: Testing, testing. So this is, this is all a little bit meta because obviously I am now on this side of the podcast. And I know that [00:05:00] you just this week sent out the newsletter and we put the, you know, the LinkedIn post together for you about like, our downloads have plateaued.
[00:05:07] Jillian: Like, and we'll be the first to just be honest about that. Like our downloads have plateaued. So we've been having big conversations about, What do we do with this channel? What do we do with this show? Do we keep it? How do we optimize it? What do we do moving forward? So I will kind of drive the conversation.
[00:05:21] Jillian: Let's talk big picture really quickly. From season one so far, what do you think the wins have been for the proof point?
[00:05:27] Mark: I think like where my mind goes immediately is Just getting outside of this little customer marketing bubble that we had been living in for quite some time. And I think what we tried to do was get out of that little bubble and ultimately increase awareness in some of the roles that we care about.
[00:05:47] Mark: And I think for me, just knowing who he had on the proof point and how many big names that we had, I thought that was a huge success in my eyes and helping us increase awareness outside of the bubble, and then [00:06:00] also just being Punch above our weight class a little bit because there was some serious talent and people who I look up to on the season one.
[00:06:06] Jillian: We have 19 episodes with usually three guests for each episode, which is pretty unheard of. So 53 or 54 people who are like genuine thought leaders within our space. So I've been listening through some old episodes and kind of like calling through to see what we've done. And just even the amount of people, I haven't even said this to you yet, Mark, but the sheer amount of people who are in our space, in the industry, who are trusted, who have the audience that we're trying to go after, who have said the phrase customer evidence in context, that alone is worth its weight in gold.
[00:06:38] Mark: And I think it was amazing your first week, just for you to go back into a lot of those episodes and see how much unused. Stuff we have that we're sitting on right now, cause it's insane. It, it's like a first world marketing problem.
[00:06:53] Jillian: It's the best for first world marketing. It's the best. Um, another thing I want to touch on that comes to mind when I think of the launch, I [00:07:00] think you absolutely crushed the launch of the Proofpoint for a couple of reasons.
[00:07:05] Jillian: Number one, and I'm going to find the picture and we'll put it in here. I will never forget the text I got from you that day where you had to like go to the Apple store for something and you had changed, you were waiting the day it launched, you were waiting at the Apple store and you went and you changed every phone, iPhone on the display to go to the proof point on
[00:07:25] Mark: Apple Podcasts.
[00:07:25] Mark: I did. I did. That was so funny that I did that. People were probably looking at me and like, what is this little marketing dork doing? And I'm just trying to juice the numbers up a little bit.
[00:07:34] Jillian: Gorilla marketing. I love it. I didn't
[00:07:36] Mark: plan this.
[00:07:36] Jillian: You were thinking differently about it, which I think is a huge plus.
[00:07:40] Jillian: I'm like, my big thing right now with content is, unfortunately, if you build it, they won't come. Like, you need to make sure that you are telling the story and building the hype and telling people the what they're going to get out of it. So thinking differently, like obviously it was a little bit of a funny, like you probably didn't get any B2B marketers who happened to walk into that Apple store.
[00:07:59] Mark: If I did, that'd [00:08:00] be amazing.
[00:08:00] Jillian: Incredible. But it was a cool little, and it was a social moment because you posted it on LinkedIn and that got some good engagement. So that was awesome. Just like thinking differently overall. Second of all, you had, I think we had like I want to say three or four episodes in the bank when we launched, which means 12 guests, and they were kind of your cream of the crop guests because we wanted to come out strong.
[00:08:22] Jillian: All of them, I'm thinking of like, Devin Reed, Kyle Lacey, like all of these people with Good followings for us. You basically like got them on the hook for sharing when we launched, right?
[00:08:33] Mark: I had the podcast before at my last company, and it gave me a little experience of what to do and more importantly, what not to do.
[00:08:40] Mark: But I knew how important the launch was. So with all the episodes that we had banked, I was trying to reach out to like Big name marketers, and not just like people with large followings, but people with large followings that I truly look up to and trust and really take whatever they have to say and share [00:09:00] to heart.
[00:09:00] Mark: And then I knew a lot of those people personally, and there were a couple of names in there. I think we banked like 5, maybe 6 episodes, which was a crazy January and December. Uh, and then our marketing advisors as well. And I wanted to ask some of the people on the episodes or who I'd reached out to originally, you know, hey, I don't really know this person, but I think they would fit great on this topic.
[00:09:22] Mark: I think you know them. Would you be cool asking if they'd want to record with us? And everyone said yes, and it was awesome. So I think having that many big names for at the time, like a little series A startup with probably, I don't know, like 20, 30 people, Five ish employees, it was kind of unheard of. And then they were all super willing to just help on launch day and, uh, share about what they said on their episode.
[00:09:51] Mark: Uh, even though we hadn't published a lot of their episodes yet, because we had banked so many, uh, recordings, which was awesome.
[00:09:57] Jillian: Yes, and I remember that we did something who, [00:10:00] again, I had not, I took you very seriously. I had not done this for any of the other clients that I'd worked with in my time at Sherry Genius.
[00:10:06] Jillian: We put together miniature, like, launch kits. So, like, little Notion pages for every single one of those 12 guests. That you had already banked for their episodes. And like you said, the episodes hadn't come out yet, but we got ahead on production enough that we could clip. Matt Stauffer I totally forgot
[00:10:21] Mark: we did this.
[00:10:22] Jillian: Yes, well, and I remember it because it was like the engagement on LinkedIn. My whole feed that day was like proof point, proof point, proof point, proof point. And everyone was sharing their little personalized clips. So like, you know, like Jen, Alan Knuth had her little clip that she shared on hers. And Devin had his.
[00:10:35] Jillian: We went out of our way to like, make it really custom. And then you sent them a very nice email of like, Hey. Thank you so much. We're going live again. We so appreciate your help. It was very, you just like brought a human element to the launch in a way that it paid off in space. And then you ran the same play for, um, the Evidence Gap Report, the original research that we launched, which again, that came out, I think it was like the week in between my [00:11:00] first conversation with you and my final interview for this role at User Evidence.
[00:11:03] Jillian: And I remember. Logging on to LinkedIn that day to be like, Oh, today's the day the report's coming out. I should see it and let me go see it on Mark's channel or whatever. My entire feed again was evidence gap, evidence gap, everyone was sharing it. So I, I think you have coined that just like influencer launch.
[00:11:20] Mark: No, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's cool. And I think it's something that I kind of take for granted a little bit. But when people have asked me, how do you do that? You know, I want to do something similar. It's not really an easy answer because all of those people are actual relationships that I've built over the years.
[00:11:37] Mark: Being myself and helping them out in return and, you know, just being a human so that the occasional time whenever I need some help or would like some help, there's so much more inclined to do it and to help, uh, versus, you know, if you don't have those relationships and you just go ask somebody to, you know, Hey, can you help promote this or launch this?
[00:11:57] Mark: One, it doesn't come across nearly as sincere, [00:12:00] uh, From whenever they're posting or talking about it. And then two, they're probably not going to want to do it or you got to pay them to do it. And, uh, we would have had to spend way more money, uh, to get all those people to promote the Proof Point and the Evidence Gap Report had we not had existing relationships with them.
[00:12:17] Jillian: Could you imagine? Yeah. I think, uh, frankly, you're, you'll be uncomfortable with me saying this on air, but I think that's the, that's the secret sauce of the Mark Cuber VP of it all. Like I think you are. So good at just surrounding yourself and building genuine relationships with people who are like, and this is no offense to you, you say it yourself, smarter than you.
[00:12:36] Jillian: They know more about these things. They're like, you are so good at that by just allowing yourself to be mentored and also just be a friend to people that it's like, Hey, wild thought. Relationships pay off. And then when people like you and you like them, they want to do things like that, even in this influencer world where a lot of those posts are paid now and they have to be, you got to pay to play.
[00:12:57] Mark: Yeah, crazy new concept. Uh, relationships, uh, [00:13:00] actually pay off significantly over time.
[00:13:02] Jillian: Insane. Insane confounding interest. Okay, so those are some of the big wins, I would say, from the podcast so far and the things that kind of we've seen and learned. What are some things that you feel like are big lessons that you're taking away from these first 19 episodes?
[00:13:17] Mark: Yeah, so the first two things that come to mind are, one, it was so hard logistically to coordinate and get three people who really bring a unique and relevant perspective to record at a specific date and time, and then hope that that slot works with everyone else's calendar as if they don't already have day jobs, uh, and all those people are plenty busy themselves.
[00:13:41] Mark: So I think I underestimated how much work. That part would take, that took so much work behind the scenes. And then I think the biggest thing, and we kind of alluded to it before, just distribution, like we were very shorthanded at the time. It was just myself. And then [00:14:00] Alex joined in March and we had Coop, uh, who was helping on social, but I really never went back to the well for each episode after we Promoted it once on the day that it came out.
[00:14:11] Mark: And I think for me, I just always forget that almost every single person who you think sees whatever you're posting or announcing on launch day, probably didn't see it. And then if you promote it a couple of weeks later, they're not going to remember, Oh, wait, I already saw Mark post about that. So I think for me, I just need to get more, I'd say structured in how we're promoting and repurposing a lot of that stuff.
[00:14:34] Mark: And then the third thing is, I thought the episodes. Really at the beginning where a lot of the people knew each other and had those relationships were probably the best episodes because you could just sense that in the recording that they were all giving each other a hard time, making jokes, making fun of each other in like a playful way.
[00:14:57] Mark: Like piling on, uh, adding on to each other's [00:15:00] comments, you name it. And it's not to say that the other episodes weren't good. It's just, you didn't really feel that in the recording and it's really hard to replicate that consistently. Uh, but I think my guess is once we started to approach that plateau, you kind of started to probably sense that a little bit in the recordings.
[00:15:18] Mark: And, uh, that was a, a big learning for me, I would say.
[00:15:21] Jillian: I think that relationship thing, you're right. There was a magic in those first few, especially episodes. And then like scattered throughout the mid and late season, depending on when you had people who kind of knew each other and had a semblance of relationship before, rather than meeting for the first time.
[00:15:36] Jillian: We see it in the metrics. So like our very first few episodes where those people had the existing relationships, they were stoked to get on together, they were stoked to riff on each other and kind of rip on each other because they had that relationship. Our downloads were much higher. So. To give you kind of a lay of the land.
[00:15:52] Jillian: So we averaged out at the end of the season with, you know, 19 episodes that we had right now. Our average download per episode. So a [00:16:00] download, just industry term for a listen. So anyone who listened for more than like five seconds. 225 downloads per episode. So we'll consider that just like an impression metric.
[00:16:07] Jillian: So it's not the like most telling of if the audience was engaged, they like the content, but it's just a good baseline to see how many people actually like the headline or like the people enough to click in. So. Average of 225 throughout the season. But like those first few episodes, we were around like 450 to 500 downloads.
[00:16:28] Jillian: And that was, like, on, within the first month of launch. So, you, I think people could sense that. And then also, frankly, as the season went on, and the guests didn't know each other as well, or maybe you had to put things together a little bit more, like, last minute, and pull from the, the well to just to make sure that we were getting enough people per episode.
[00:16:48] Jillian: The downloads went down. Like you can definitely see that towards the end, we were getting closer to like 125 to 150 downloads per episode on average. Um, so it's, it's [00:17:00] just, it's very interesting. At the end of the day, still with the season average of 225, we're still in the top 25 percent of all podcasts by downloads.
[00:17:08] Jillian: So it's, it's a good thing, but it is something that's making Mark and I pause to go like, okay, this is a good moment for us to visit the podcast as a channel and as a. Piece of content, like a pillar piece of content and go, is this worth our time and effort for our team? Is it worth the resources and the money, frankly, that we're paying for it?
[00:17:27] Jillian: And if it's not, then how can we tweak some things to make it worth it? Otherwise it's off the table.
[00:17:32] Mark: Yeah. And I think the, um, it's kind of funny. This happens, I don't know, sometime in the last couple of weeks. And I think you were. You know, as much as we knew each other going into this and you coming here full time, you probably were still a little apprehensive of, you know, this is Mark's podcast with his face on it and his name on it.
[00:17:49] Mark: He's probably a little more, you know, protective of it. And I told you straight up, I was like, if this isn't working as well as we want it to. I don't care that my name is on it and it's, [00:18:00] you know, my podcast. Let's figure out how to change this up to get it working again. And I think you were already, you know, coming up with ideas and it was probably pretty refreshing to hear me tell you that.
[00:18:13] Mark: Cause I think I saw the reaction on your face and you were so excited.
[00:18:17] Jillian: Big time. Because it was something, frankly, that like, I, we don't want to, Mark's going to kill me for saying this. Cause he said it on a meeting the other week and he got so embarrassed cause he thought it was so cringy, but now I can't stop saying it because he said it was a cringy.
[00:18:29] Jillian: We're willing to kill our marketing babies. Like we are willing to do that because I'm not going to sit here just because it's a podcast that Mark and I literally made and we think it's cool. Or we thought it was cool when we made it. It's something that I will not. Just hold on to. And I was, I was glad to hear Mark say that because it was something that I was considering too, of like, okay, I'm having the genuine thought of, should we keep this going?
[00:18:52] Jillian: So a couple of other proof points that kind of influenced the decision that, spoiler alert, we have decided to keep it going, but we have a couple of [00:19:00] things that we're considering and tweaking and changing moving forward. Impression metrics for a podcast or those downloads. So it's like, we know the people tuned in, but someone listening for five seconds and clicking out.
[00:19:09] Jillian: I don't, that's not a good thing. Measure of if they are engaged or not, or we can't tell that from a download. So a better way to see if people are engaged are, uh, it's a metric called consumption rate. So it's how, What percentage of the episode did they listen to? And that helps us understand like, Hey, is our content engaging?
[00:19:26] Jillian: Are people coming back to it and listening to it to the fullness, fullness of the episode? Are they dropping off 10 percent of the way every time because they come in, they click a title that could be clickbaity and then they go, Oh, I'm not actually getting what I want out of this. So the good news is our average consumption for the whole first season was 70%, which as a benchmark, I mean, at least at Sherry Genius for where we were producing hundreds of B2B podcasts, like that's That's a very good benchmark for us.
[00:19:51] Jillian: 70 percent is great. So at least we knew on the engagement side, like, the content that we're creating, even though the audience maybe isn't as big, it's resonating. Like, [00:20:00] people, you know, 150 people, even on a low episode, are tuning in. 70 percent of the time they're listening to most of it, which is really great, I think.
[00:20:10] Jillian: And then when we talk about conversions for the channel of podcasts, obviously people subscribing to us on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever they listen to. We had 350 subscribers. Most of those came at the beginning. Like we definitely shot out of the gate, which is how most shows go when they're new.
[00:20:25] Jillian: Yes. Minus
[00:20:26] Mark: the five that I subscribed at the. Michigan Avenue Apple Store.
[00:20:29] Jillian: So true. And you know what? So actually it was 345 subscribers. I should be more specific that are not Mark Huber at the Chicago Apple Store, but 350 subscribers. And like I said, we shot out of the gate with a lot of those. And then we've had steady growth of like month over month, 20 percent growth since then.
[00:20:49] Jillian: Which is good. It shows that we're still seeing engagement. We haven't totally plateaued there. It's a normal thing for something new, especially content wise. You see that with any Getty content. It comes out, huge spike in downloads [00:21:00] because it's new and everyone's promoting it, and then no surprise, based on our criticism of ourselves in this process, the less, the better.
[00:21:06] Jillian: We were intentional with the content and the less we were intentional with distributing it, the appetite for engaging and converting went down. So I think those are, it's a good kind of mix there for us to at least go like, okay, 350 people are getting a ping every single two weeks. Every single episode that comes out saying like, there's a Proofpoint episode.
[00:21:25] Jillian: We have 350 people at some point go, yeah, this is content that I want to opt into. So to me, I That's successful. Like that's good. And that's something that I'm like, that's why we don't want to kill the channel, you know?
[00:21:36] Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other big thing, yes, these are all the podcast specific metrics.
[00:21:41] Mark: It's so much ammo that we can then use on social, on the company page, on my own profile, repurposing in other ways. And like, there's a lot of untapped, you know, content that we didn't really repurpose yet, but there was a minute where that was the thing in our. Like content engine, if you will, that we were [00:22:00] just trying to get started.
[00:22:01] Mark: And I thought it was the most resourceful way to just get that moving to a decent enough state before I could bring on a professional like yourself.
[00:22:09] Jillian: I think that is such a good point to make, because I feel like serialized content, so something that is like this, that it's going to just hum no matter what, like you have committed to, Hey, every two weeks we have a new podcast coming out, so I bet.
[00:22:19] Jillian: Better get my ass on the mic and better get three people there with me. Like that is the best way for a solo marketer to just make sure content is happening. And like you said, I think there is a, uh, kind of a secondary issue there of like, how do you make sure that the distribution is actually happening and the repurposing is actually happening when you're a team of one, but I think setting it as a baseline and then now it's like, look, none of that is irrelevant.
[00:22:46] Jillian: None of that content is irrelevant from a year ago. We have so much that we can use now, which is awesome. I do want to dig in a little bit there. Cause I do think it's interesting. And some, I think some people listening will find it interesting. How did that conversation go with Evan and Ray, our founders to get [00:23:00] buy in for the podcast?
[00:23:01] Jillian: Like, what do you think was the thing that made them go like, all right. Yep. This is worth it for us.
[00:23:04] Mark: Cause I think one, just trying to get outside of the customer marketing bubble, uh, was one way that I had pitched this to them. And then the fact that I had experienced. With running a podcast for like 60, I think it was 64, 65 episodes of my last company and just showing that, Hey, for a lean marketing team at the time, this can just help get us out there and help show more than we probably have from a content perspective.
[00:23:32] Mark: And I think they responded well to that. I think what was also a little surprising to me, and this is something that I wouldn't have known when I pitched it to them. They, and I will call out Ray specifically, like Ray listens to every episode, I'm pretty sure. And I know in the early days he was, and it was a huge educational tool for him, for Evan, for the rest of the company, from a lot of people who just didn't really have a ton of B2B SaaS and B2B SaaS [00:24:00] marketing experience.
[00:24:01] Mark: So getting people to listen to those episodes and hear A little bit more about the topics and what, you know, particular personas are thinking about on a day and week and month and quarter. That was like a, an unreal benefit that I didn't even think of when pitching it originally.
[00:24:19] Jillian: Yes, 100%. And I think it's interesting because so rarely people think of it as an internal tool as well, like an enablement and engagement tool for internal teams.
[00:24:31] Jillian: I think so many people. Even at Sherry Genius, the clients I was working with thought it had to be made for, like, okay, we have to do a podcast that is made for internal enablement, or it's made for our external audience. And I'm like, no, half the content that we put out now at User Evidence that I've seen, I send to our sales team and I say, hey, You guys should read this because it will help teach you X, Y, and Z of how to speak to our POV in the marketplace, how to tell this customer story better, how to use user evidence better when you're out there doing [00:25:00] like prospecting and deals and all the things.
[00:25:01] Jillian: So I think that it's cool that podcasts are such an accessible way for, especially people to do that on the go while they're on a walk during the day, while they're folding a load of laundry, like it's just such a cool tool for internal, and I'm glad you brought that up because people think of it so siloed, I think most of the time.
[00:25:19] Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And I had never even thought of that.
[00:25:22] Jillian: Yeah. Okay. So I'll just ask you point blank and I want to hear just kind of your musings on it. What will make this worth your time moving forward? Because you are at a point now where like, I see your calendar. I know we're growing. Your team is growing.
[00:25:40] Jillian: You now have two people to manage with. Probably one more coming pretty soon because we're hiring. What is going to make this podcast worth your time in this moment that we're in right now?
[00:25:50] Mark: Yeah, I think one, having really good conversations that probably aren't so hot take oriented and, and surface level.
[00:25:59] Mark: And, you know, we got into [00:26:00] it in some of the episodes and went a little deeper, but I think, Getting to that next level of conversation. And it's a whole lot easier to do that when it's just myself and maybe one person that I'm talking with, maybe two. That's one thing. And then I think the other big thing is just talking to the market more.
[00:26:18] Mark: Like a lot of the people that we were having on the Proofpoint, I Respect them. I trust them. I look up to them, but they're not really who we are selling to at the end of the day. And I think getting to talk to the market and marketing leaders and customer marketers and product marketers, and really who we're marketing to at the end of the day, to have really good conversations with them and take learnings and apply it to, you know, how we market user evidence or maybe something that we're doing the wrong way with User evidence, either selling it, marketing it, you know, servicing customers, whatever it may be, and almost using it more as like a feedback loop versus what it was before, which was just fun, entertaining conversations with people [00:27:00] who, you know, have been there, done that before.
[00:27:02] Mark: And it's not to say that this won't be a fun format moving forward. I just think it needs to kind of come back to reality a little bit more and like the proof. And I think we strayed, uh, away from that. So the, the, uh, The sooner that we can bring it back to kind of proof points and what we originally set out to do will definitely be worth my time.
[00:27:21] Jillian: So I had, I had kind of an aha moment the other day when I was listening to the episode with Alison Havner from a few weeks ago, and you guys were discussing, they had recently done some original research of their own. We had recently done the Evidence Gap, our original research report, so you guys had a conversation where you just kind of like, we actually, oddly enough, the research had kind of similar theses, so it was kind of fun for you guys to go back and forth with the different proof points from the reports, and then have a genuinely good conversation from there, just from a marketing leadership standpoint of like, how you are working that proof Into your own processes and your leadership and your teams and your, you know, product, whatever [00:28:00] I was like that.
[00:28:00] Jillian: This is, this is the proof point. Like, this is a really cool platform that I think we can also start lifting up teams and marketers. Who are putting proof at the center of their strategies and it doesn't mean that they're not willing to take risks, but it means they're willing to take calculated risks and they can pull up the receipts for like, hey, we did this thing and here's why it worked or why it didn't work.
[00:28:23] Jillian: And here's this big bet we're making now. And here's the proof from the past that we're using to, like, fuel this big bet to me. And just as a marketer too. I'll listen to that because I think
[00:28:34] Mark: that's what people want. And they're just not able to find right now.
[00:28:37] Jillian: I feel it. And I don't, maybe this is like, I don't know if this is counterintuitive to like, cause so much of my job in the content marketer seat is.
[00:28:46] Jillian: Promoting and supporting creation of thought leadership content for our thought leaders within user evidence. But I'm like, the hot takes, man, they're all on LinkedIn now. And it's like, do people have an appetite to still listen to those in podcasts? [00:29:00] Or are they getting those hits as they scroll LinkedIn for, you know, their 30 minutes to an hour a day?
[00:29:05] Jillian: Like, I don't know. So I think it'll be interesting to see, like, is this, if we flip the script and make this less about hot takes and more about actual proof, I think we will reach an audience that is hungry for it.
[00:29:18] Mark: That's my guess too. And I think what you just pointed out is 2000 percent true on LinkedIn in November 21st of 2024.
[00:29:29] Mark: I don't know if it was as true, like, you know, three years ago, four years ago, and definitely not five or six years ago. So the hot takes kind of stood out a little bit more. And I think now in the echo chamber, it's just whatever is dead or I talked to Leaders at X billion dollar companies. And here are the three things that I found.
[00:29:46] Mark: It's just, it's so formulaic and just. And like, I get annoyed by it at this point and I kind of tune it out. So my hope is that by bringing the proof and the transparency and the trust, like this is what people kind of have [00:30:00] been, you know, looking for and hoping for and desire right now, and just don't really have a platform to find.
[00:30:05] Mark: So we'll see how much people are willing to share.
[00:30:07] Jillian: Totally. And I think that for us, like our proof point for this bet that we're making is that when I joined the team, I did a little, I'll call it a shallow deep dive, a snorkel, if you will, of the blog analytics of just like behavioral data from our website, just to see, hey, which blogs are people actually hitting the pages of?
[00:30:28] Jillian: How much time are they spending on the page? What are they doing? And by and large, on our content hub, The pieces that we have the most engagement, longest time on page, most page hits, most conversions into doing either a form fill or a demo request are tactical pieces. Like people literally just want the proof and the tactic for how to do the thing.
[00:30:48] Jillian: And I'm like, okay, if that's what we're seeing for the rest of our content, like we're hitting, you know, our audience is clearly coming and seeing our stuff from the content hub. So why wouldn't we mirror that in the content that we're creating for [00:31:00] The proof point, I think I'll be quite honest and say a fear of mine is that if we shake up the format and say, hey, it is just one person per episode for the most part.
[00:31:10] Jillian: Like, I don't want to deal in absolutes all the time, but like, if we're saying, we're giving yourself the freedom to say, hey, it is, it is an interview. It is just Mark and one person and they are talking about maybe original research or a play, a tactic that they tried and these things, how do we prevent that from just becoming like every other B2B one on one interview show?
[00:31:29] Jillian: That's my big fear right now.
[00:31:31] Mark: I mean, I think it's a totally valid fear. I think the trick in at least what I want to do, and this is funny, that this is the first time that we're talking about this on the podcast, so I love it, is like the, the elements that originally inspired my vision for the proof point.
[00:31:46] Mark: So new heights and the. Banter back and forth between the Kelsey brothers and the skits and how hysterical I think that they are. And then some of the best things about, you know, the shop and how unfiltered and raw and authentic that it was. I think as [00:32:00] long as we take those elements and make sure that we're still recording episodes with one person and bringing those elements through, like, I think that's the, the secret sauce.
[00:32:09] Mark: Now we'll see if it works, but that's my goal.
[00:32:11] Jillian: I completely agree. And I think something that you have been. Doing separate from the podcast, but kind of had an aha moment that like, wait, it's the same thing. And we could do the same play for the podcast is that you've been tacking interviews on to events that you're already attending for user evidence.
[00:32:27] Jillian: And you're just identifying people who are there who would make a great interview, or you genuinely just want to talk to, or you're excited to catch up with. And you've been doing. Video interview series, which live on our YouTube channel from Exit 5 Drive event, and then the Winter's Spring event this past year, being in person has a different vibe and also, also proof point, we just did a, uh, with our social, uh, freelancer, Katie Cooper, who's amazing.
[00:32:55] Jillian: LinkedIn performance. For the past year, user [00:33:00] evidence content, the podcast videos, the shorts that we've been posting of the podcast that were done virtually were not performing very well. As far as engagement goes, they were paling in comparison to the in person interview shorts. So, same type of content, same people, frankly, like Devon Reed is on both of them.
[00:33:20] Jillian: The in person stuff, just shorts wise, is performing better. And like, we also have to recognize that the podcast is about so much more than just the long form podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's about the short content. And like, frankly, as a content marketer right now, that's what I care most about.
[00:33:36] Jillian: Is like, we are trying to build our owned audience and our following. Or are following on LinkedIn so we can get them in our owned audience, like the shorts are where people are coming. So people are more engaged by the in person stuff. So I, I'm like, wanting us to latch on to events more this year and plan a little bit more intentionally around like, hey, could we pull off doing almost all of our podcast interviews?
[00:33:58] Jillian: In person, this year. [00:34:00] Without having to spend extra budget on you flying somewhere to someone and setting up a set and all the things, a la Read Between the Lines, which is badass, but like, we just don't have that bandwidth right now.
[00:34:11] Mark: Yeah, well, Devin's a boss and he pulled this move, but he made everyone come to him for season two in San Diego.
[00:34:17] Mark: So
[00:34:17] Jillian: true! Someday! Some day, they'll all come to Chicago.
[00:34:21] Mark: He's, I'm going to tear him down privately, uh, cause we've been gassing him up way too much on this episode. But yeah, I would say there was a thought that I had recently and. Like what we're doing is we're rebooting the proof point for this upcoming season.
[00:34:35] Mark: And I think you were surprised when I brought this up to you, because you, I think we're thinking in a very similar way. I get that podcasts can be, you know, a great channel for a lot of companies, but with the market, you know, we are marketing too. There's so many podcasts out there and the format. of, you know, you take the recording from whatever platform you're using and then you cut it up into [00:35:00] clips and then you post it on LinkedIn.
[00:35:02] Mark: I don't care how good the creative is really, like it's still a Riverside recording at the end of the day with some, you know, flashy stuff around it. Whereas the in person stuff, to your point, it just performs so much better and there's so many cooler things that you can do with, uh, like an editing and production.
[00:35:19] Mark: Uh, perspective, uh, when you're in person, so who knows, like there could be a world where we try this out for another, you know, three months, six months, and we're like, this isn't what is working right now, and we could double down on the video interviews and go that route, which I think personally would be badass because no one else is doing it.
[00:35:39] Jillian: I think it's, it brings me back. It's interesting. So when I was at Terminus in another one of my Jill evolutions in my career, um, we did a, so the, the thing, I like won an award for this at Terminus. It was one of the Finney like B2B content award things for a video series. They're called the roof. And so this was peak COVID times, like late 2020, [00:36:00] early 2021, all working from home.
[00:36:02] Jillian: Everything is virtual and people are like trying to do more Zoom. It was when like Zoom boomed and everyone had to figure out how to use it and video content all of a sudden from brands was just Zoom recordings with like a frame around them. And that's what everyone was doing because that's all you literally could do.
[00:36:17] Jillian: And we did a video series because I saw that and I was like, dude, the only way we'll stop people is if they see In person, something in person, safely, safely, all the things. But like, so we went up on, we had this really cool in downtown Indianapolis. We had the roof of our office look down on Circle, the Circle Monument, which is this like cool iconic, you see it during all the basketball games.
[00:36:38] Jillian: They always show like Oh, I'm familiar.
[00:36:40] Mark: I won't tell you. Yeah,
[00:36:41] Jillian: you're a Midwest guy. You get it. But so we went up on the roof and recorded outside. So we were all like masked up a distance and all the things, but like, we just did these quick little hot take videos that were 60 seconds long. And the reason they performed so well, they went like viral.
[00:36:54] Jillian: The reason they did was because no one was used to seeing high quality video in person. [00:37:00] And the hot take thing wasn't a thing at that point. Like we'd caught it right at the moment. And so I feel like right now, and the interesting thing is that when you started the podcast, when we were having conversations about this literally a year ago, about starting the podcast, I don't think that short, virtually recorded video was commoditized.
[00:37:20] Jillian: Now it is LinkedIn. It's all you see. And the reason we're talking about LinkedIn so much is because it's one of our big focus channels for this quarter, but like it changes that quickly. So my, my stubborn little rebel inside of me is going, if everyone's doing it, I don't want to be doing it anymore. So I, there's something to the event thing.
[00:37:39] Jillian: I think you will, we'll see if we can pull that off.
[00:37:41] Mark: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think like anything in the B2B marketing world, when something is found to be working, everybody just. Copies it and uses it and over abuses it. I don't know. Well, I have a good gut feeling that this reboot is going to work well, but if it doesn't, it's not the [00:38:00] end of the world.
[00:38:00] Mark: And we have a really solid plan of how we're going to pivot again and where we're going to double down on from a content perspective.
[00:38:08] Jillian: All right, real talk really quickly before we had a couple Q and A's from your LinkedIn post. We asked people if they had any questions for us. My last little question, what are, is there anything that you're afraid of going into this kind of reboot?
[00:38:22] Mark: A year ago or like two years ago, I think I would have been afraid of, Hey, you tried something for a while and you're kind of admitting that it's not really working anymore. I'm not afraid of that at all. So if this doesn't work in the reboot, like, so what? Like, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because we have other ideas.
[00:38:41] Mark: So I think if there's anything I'm truly afraid of. I think it's trying the reboot for too long before pivoting. Like, we just got to look for the right leading indicators to see, hey, is this reboot working versus being stubborn, which I can definitely be at times, and just trying to make it work by doing [00:39:00] it, you know, longer, uh, and staying committed to it.
[00:39:02] Mark: So I'm afraid of, you know, not pulling the plug, uh, early when, you know, we see this maybe not working.
[00:39:10] Jillian: Yep. I love it. I feel the same way. Okay. Couple questions from LinkedIn. Chris from RingCentral. He said, Mark, what were your top concerns going into creating the podcast?
[00:39:21] Mark: Top concerns. I would say the amount of work as a one person marketing team with Basically some agency help and a couple of freelancers.
[00:39:30] Mark: And it was a lot of work. I would say I knew from the podcast at the last company, the really good episodes usually come from really good prep and that kind of feeds into how much work a lot of that takes. So I wanted to make sure that I was prepping a lot, uh, for each episode. And again, there were, I'm not a full time podcaster and wasn't then.
[00:39:50] Mark: So I think that was a concern. And then I was a little. I'd be nervous when we launched it. I just didn't know if the format was going to work well because I hadn't seen it [00:40:00] before and the launch went great. And I think the, the first, uh, period ish of running the proof point worked really well and it kind of started to plateau at the end, but those are the three things that come to mind.
[00:40:11] Jillian: Okay, great lead in to Jeff from Vitality, I think. Jeff said, I've loved the format. It's great that the majority of the episodes are roundtables rather than one on one conversations. So that was his little anecdotal. But then he said, Now you bring up an interesting point about what has made the other podcasts interesting.
[00:40:30] Jillian: I've been curious about it myself from a B2B perspective. Do we need to be having more human conversations? One that focused less on business and our roles and more on the people? Like, how are we balancing work and life? What are we deciding to grow in ourselves? Or is there any plan to do anything like that with The Proof Point?
[00:40:44] Mark: I think that's an amazing idea to do. I think where it gets really hard is to then justify that to leadership. And I think you have to earn the right to be able to launch a show to do that. So if we [00:41:00] continue to hit our, you know, pipeline number every quarter and kind of earn a little bit more slack, then I think Maybe we pitched that idea, but it's really hard to do that.
[00:41:11] Mark: If you know, we're doing everything we can to just meet the number right now. And I don't think we're at that point yet.
[00:41:16] Jillian: Tim from 530. com said, the podcast to short form content thing is something that I'm super interested in. Uh, looking forward to see how you guys distribute everything going forward, any ideas so far?
[00:41:27] Mark: Yeah, I think it's more of the investing more time and finding the right things to share. And then I think. Doing what we had been doing, which is just turning those clips into lightly branded social shares is not really what's going to stand out. Like, I think you have to up the short form editing and production and effects that you see in those clips to get people to stop the scroll.
[00:41:54] Mark: Because I mean, I look at LinkedIn a lot over the course of my day and nine [00:42:00] times out of ten, if I see one of those clips, I pretty much just ignore it. So that might be my answer in itself.
[00:42:06] Jillian: Totally. No. And I think that's a very good answer. And that would be partially mine too. I'm thinking of distribution in two different ways, I think with this question.
[00:42:13] Jillian: Number one, I'm thinking about kind of the repurposing and like, what do we do with the actual content we have? But then secondly, I'm thinking of the distribution in the sense of like, how do we get in front of different audiences? Because I also don't want to get caught in the very easiest to get caught in trap Forgetting that there's places outside of LinkedIn that we can share these things.
[00:42:30] Jillian: So in my mind, I'm thinking about like, okay, customer marketing association, how can we partner with them better? Cause we're a sponsor for them. How can we partner better that we can do a roundup of the best takeaways that we have from customer marketers over the course of the past quarter, or how can we partner with another company that has a relevant audience to us or.
[00:42:47] Jillian: Whatever that we can put together a article or a compilation video of like the best takes from the proof point in 2024. Like here's what the best marketing leaders said in 2024 in regards to customer [00:43:00] evidence. So how can we use the content in a way that's more than just clip, clip, clip, share, clip, share.
[00:43:07] Jillian: And then how do we get it into places that our audience already is hanging out? I'm very, very interested in like trying some of that stuff soon. So. Maybe that's where you'll see it, Tim. You're part of Customer Marketing Association. Okay. Those are all of our questions.
[00:43:23] Mark: This was fun. We should do this more often.
[00:43:24] Jillian: I know. Maybe we should just record our one on ones.
[00:43:28] Mark: Which we have to get to right now.
[00:43:29] Jillian: All right. Got to go. Bye.
[00:43:35] Mark: Thanks for listening to The Proof Point. If you'd like what you heard during this conversation, you'll probably like Evidently, my bi weekly newsletter, where I share my biggest hits and get honest about my misses VP of marketing. You can subscribe using the link in the show notes below. The Proof Point is brought to you by User Evidence.
[00:43:54] Mark: If you want to learn more about how our customer evidence platform can help you build trust and close more [00:44:00] deals, check out userevidence.
com.