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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 0:00
How did you get to the point where you are now, where you're able to produce always on content across different formats? Was it a gradual build up? Sounds like it was more of a, you turned it on one day, but
Jamie Pagan 0:10
no, no, God, I wish, no. So, when I joined the team, my team was basically formed from multiple, two or three different teams. When I joined, it was merged into the content team. It was previously design, it was previously marketing communications, I think was the job titles they had, or structure. So, as of Q last year, it was a completely new team, so there were no processes, there was nothing. Now, we had Asana at the time, but it wasn't being used. I'm a huge advocate for workflow management tools. We use Asana, so I live and breathe Asana, but it was very, very much a gradual build. So, full transparency, I think Q we didn't set any OKRs. Q, I set the team's first OKRs, which didn't go to plan. When I say they didn't go to plan, we, there was nothing wrong with the way in which we chose them, the process, the structure. We just set too many key results, so we were, we had, we were thinking about too much at the same time. So we got to the end of Q, and we had started thinking about playbooks, and we had started thinking about stream, but we hadn't really done as much as I was hoping we had done. We wanted to get things launched for launched in Q, so the original plan was by end of year. In reality, we got to Q and we're like, right, we've got a quarter to build all of this out. So the team was sort of structured, restructured into those two halves, you've got the content side and the studio side. On the content side, at the time, it was split into two what I call pods, a pod just being a segmentation of a larger team into two smaller teams. Pods, now each of those pods owned 50% of the content engine, it was a, we split it at the time, traditional marketing and sort of multimedia, traditional being blog, SEO, success stories, written stuff, emails, more of the traditional old school stuff, and then content pop number two focused on the multimedia, so stream podcasts, all that sort of stuff, so they had an equal split of work across those two pods, and then we started building out templates in Asana. So I'm a sucker for a to-do list. I love a to-do list in all aspects of life, business and personal. So to give a little bit of context, a playbook takes around 45 separate sub tasks to get it from the point of ideation to the point of distribution, fully distributed and scheduled, but that is everything from create Google Drive folder, draft brief, brief copywriter, every single individual task is a separate task, you have 45 to 50 of them, you will end up with a playbook. So we built all of that structure out in q3 and q4 which got us the point in January, or on january 1 for stream, when we switched it on. So an outsider's perspective, it looked like we switched it on on january 1. Look at this brand new streaming platform with four series on for launch. Each of those series had multiple episodes, but there was a lot of work that went into it in Q and Q in readiness for 2025 and the goal was to have the tap switched on in December, January, ready for the ready for the year, so we had a full year of in 2025 to build, basically.
Tom Rudnai 3:44
Yeah, okay. Well, and that was going to be one of my questions, right? Is how do you manage the kind of overwhelm of a team when you're trying to build something like this out from scratch? But it sounds like the building, like constructing it in a playbook way, is pretty important if you're going to repeatably produce things, because it means that you can very predictably break down how long these things are. Yeah, 80
Jamie Pagan 4:03
degrees. Yeah, so every single one of our of our content types as an individual Asana board. I call it a board, I think Asana actually call them projects, but a board is just a blog or playbook, that's a board in my eyes. So each one of our content types is a different board. We structure that in a Kanban style, left to right, backlog in progress, complete, stuck. Each of those boards has a series of templates based on whatever is produced in that board. Let's take playbooks as the example. You would click like add item, there's already a template there saying new playbook. You add that, we get as many of these ideas into the pipeline as possible into the backlog, and then we just start prioritizing this. We go, which is the most important, start working on it, and we get ticking. We just move it into the in progress column, and we get ticking. Same for stream, albeit it's a different structure, because it's a series rather than a single playbook. A series will have 10 episodes, in which, in their own right, is basically a. Playbook, because each episode has clips that are scheduled on 5678 different channels, so you can see how the scale of a series is a lot bigger than playbooks. I think for the sales Stoic, which is our hero series that launched on january 1 with Jack and Zach from We Have a Meeting over the course of 2025 that war to produce it will take 8600 sub tasks, so 8600 individual tasks that someone has to do over the course of 2025 to launch 366 episodes in one season. It's a year long season, so 8600 tasks. It shows like in terms of scalability, how do you manage that? And it literally is just every single time you do something on a task or a project, you tick a box, and then everyone else knows exactly where you are, so it's building blocks, it's structure, it's adhering to the structure, it's over communicate everything. Yes, you are spending a lot of your time logging how you're spending your time, but it's very, very scalable in terms of switching on that that content engine, like turning on the tap, we're able to produce, I think, playbooks, we've launched, I think we're going to launch our 10th next week since what in January and February we'll have done 10 playbooks stream series, we're launching daily episodes for the state sales stoic, and we've now got five, six, or seven series on the platform already, and each of those has five to 10 episodes in. It's very, very quickly scalable when you have this building block template rules sort of set up in Asana, and that's that's my bread and butter, that's like from a structure and a management point of view, everything is templates, everything is SOPs, like a standard operating procedure. Everything is there's a template document in Google that you make a copy of, because you've done it 10 times before. So it's just down to those building blocks, the prep work that we did in Q and Q, that's meant we can keep up with the pace in 2025
Tom Rudnai 7:02
Have you noticed a kind of, is there almost a measurable uplift that you've seen in the efficiency with which you can go and tick off all of these tasks? Because you said you've done it all before, have you noticed the time for each one shrinking?
Jamie Pagan 7:15
Yeah, so in the same way that a blog and organic search is compounding returns in terms of impressions and clicks in Google, you have compounding returns in the more that you produce a piece of content, the more efficient it gets. So, we, the first play took way, way longer to produce than the last play, and every time we do a play, we think about how we can better optimize it. So, we have a process weekly called Kaizen, which is a Japanese methodology of continuous improvement. It's basically each week come to the table with one single idea that could improve the way we do something, and it could be anything from change the way we name folders in Google Drive to I think we should change the recording software we use, so we're recording on Riverside. That's a very optimal piece of software to use. If you record on Google, you then have to do a lot of editing in something like Premiere Pro or Descript. Riverside, you can record, you can change the layout, you can reduce the gaps between speaking, you can speed it up, you can do AI voice overs very, very quickly. So that would be a Kaizen is moving from an old tool to a new tool, so we do that on a weekly basis. We have quarterly lessons learned sort of processes, so every week and every quarter we're continuously optimizing the production process to the point where the first month of the stream in the sales stoic, like producing the first batch of that for launch on january 1 was a slog, like an absolute slog. No one in the business had ever operated in that way before, in terms of producing a daily release across 10 different channels, you know, in multiple different formats in length, different languages, but after the first couple of months, it's now like you can kind of sit back and it kind of runs itself, because it's just so ingrained in the team of how they produce each different series. A new series now, I, we put a new partner series on stream yesterday, which is basically if we have any partners, like company level partners, Deal Front, and another company, and they've got a series that we think would add value to our target market. We will put their series on stream as like an added value series that you can consume on stream. We could upload a whole series, 10 episodes in about four hours, and that's just because we've got to the point where we know exactly how it works and where we need to get things from and the most efficient ways of doing things, so yeah, it gets quicker the more you do it,
Tom Rudnai 9:44
yeah. But you preempted my question, because I was gonna say one of the challenges of that level of structure that is very easy for it to kind of get stale and become like you go through the motions a little bit, so I guess that's something, just as the, as a leader, you have to be quite out
Jamie Pagan 9:58
top, yeah, so this. The it's almost it feels like I've spoken about this with my therapist, like in terms of structure is great, but structure, if you have too much structure in a relationship, there's no spontaneity. It's exactly the same if you have too much structuring content marketing, it can create complacency, it can, there'll be like a element of complacency that comes in, of like, oh, I, I did exactly same last week, I know I'm doing here, we have churn, churn, churn,
Tom Rudnai 10:26
so you need to keep it fresh,
Jamie Pagan 10:28
yeah, so that's why, with what's great about Stream is that every series is a completely different thing, so it's not 14 different series on one single marketing topic from different points of view, it is. We've got a series called the Sales Stoic, which is sales philosophy, and how you can apply it to modern day sales. We've got a series called Revenue Career Ladder, which is interviewing people about their career journeys over the past 15 to 20 years. We've got a series called Next Level Vitrib, which is our first German series, which talks about how you can go to market in Germany. How you can succeed in the German market for sales. We've got a series in the pipeline where we're actually going to do Asana for marketers. We're going to show you how to build out Asana for a marketing team. So every single series is a completely different topic, theme, idea, which means it keeps it like you've got some spice, like you've got some color, and like our idea backlog. Everyone submits ideas, and we just prioritize based on what segment we need to go after, or what topic we're a bit light on, but that keeps it, that keeps it varied, at least.
Tom Rudnai 11:37
Yeah, and that sounds quite important to kind of direct the structure towards the right things, and it allows you to channel all the creativity in the directions that that is to go in, as well. You kind of take the workload out of the mundane elements.
Jamie Pagan 11:51
Yeah, if you, if you structure the production, and then you structure the ideation process, that's what structures for, like. So, if you, as long as you structure, okay, quarterly, we're going to do lessons learned, and what could we do better, that's going to help you be more creative. If you structure weekly workshops, we have a weekly session where we actually have, like, a segment, which is like we call it workshop, and it's like, bring ideas to the table, and we just discuss how we could make it happen, or the pros, the cons, so we have a structure of here's a time allotted every week to bring ideas, but that's where the structure, as far as it goes, in terms of like messing with the creativity of stuff, because like one of the reasons why I love marketing is because it's that weird synergy, or amazing synergy hybrid between maths and creativity, it's stats, its data, and then creativity, so it's just making sure that that the balance between stats, data, and creativity doesn't skew too heavily towards the data or too heavily towards the creativity without thinking about the ROI or attribution of what our series is going to give you,
Unknown Speaker 12:55
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