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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 (00:20)
Okay, hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'll get straight to it and introduce today's guest. So I'm joined today by the CRO at Charlie HR, which is Timmy Elotu. So first of all, hello Timmy.
Timi (00:31)
Hey Tom, thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (00:33)
No worries. you for being here. guess first place to start, I want to talk a little bit about your kind of career journey, Timmy, for your context in terms of our audience. There's a lot of content marketers. I think your journey will be quite kind of inspiring for a lot of them, Copywriter, strategist, head of content, head of marketing, CRO, it's not a well trodden path. Tell me a little bit about kind of that journey and what steps you felt were most like, what were the formative steps along the way for you?
Timi (01:00)
Yeah, that's a good question. So it started even before the content marketing. I started as like a journalist, then copywriter, then everything that came after. I would say,
There's one sort of fundamental step, if you can call it that. It's one like continuous step, which has taken me on the meandering journey I've gone on, which is basically an intense curiosity about why my work matters. That's a question that sort of haunted me and led me down the sort of commercial path without me meaning to. And the reason why that was important to me is
You know, I came from a very idealistic place. If you had said to the 18 year old version of me that what I'd be doing is working in tech startups and companies and launching companies and side projects and owning revenue performance, I would have laughed. Like that's, that's not the mindset that I had. You know, I was studying English and writing poetry and my dissertation for my master's was
a novel. So I moved to London with a very romantic mindset. And so when I started working in businesses as a writer, I came in with a sort of presumption or need that, okay, if I'm writing, there's got to be a good reason for it. Because I had that when I was writing poetry and fiction, which I still do, but I had it at that point.
So, okay, it's like, all right, if that's gonna be my personal thing and I'm writing this for work, what's the reason why I'm doing all this writing? And that just led me down a rabbit hole of going, all right, you sent me a brief to create this stuff, why is this the right brief? someone else told you that we needed to solve this, okay, why is that the right problem? And I just kept following that thread because I have this...
I think maybe I can't remember if it was Bill Gates who described it as a sort of laziness, but I have this intense, intensely low tolerance for doing work that doesn't matter or make it like, doesn't help anyone. don't mean make a difference in a grand sense. Like I'm changing. I don't need to be changing the world, but has to be solving a problem that's that's meaningful to someone. So just pulling on that thread of like, okay, so we write copy in this way. Why do we write in this? Well, because it, it's more.
Why is it important for it to be more evocative? Because then we can influence buyers and get their attention and so on and so forth. And what ended up happening as I pulled that thread was just me arriving at a place of understanding the fundamental value exchange at the core of business, which is you solve a problem really well for me. You make me aware that there's a solution to my problem and I give you money in exchange for that.
So that curiosity about that fundamental nucleus or that core nucleus of value, I would say, is the step that has carried me through all those changes. That's made it feel like even though my job title has changed, what I'm trying to do as a professional has stayed the same from my perspective.
Tom Rudnai (04:15)
I think it's quite a different approach that you've just described there to your role than a lot of CROs would take, right? The majority of CROs come from a sales background, and I think they, without wanting to disparage, they probably think in a slightly less kind of theoretical, high-minded way about it.
Right, whereas you take a very first principles approach to the job that you're trying to do. Like how do you think that your background in content has influenced the type of CRO that you are now?
Timi (04:44)
Good question. would say there are a few things. I can't remember who said this, but someone said basically good writing is good thinking. And that's why good writing is hard. And I fully agree with that. Like you can't write well unless you think through things well. And so that gives you a sort of
a bias and a fundamental appreciation for the importance of thinking things through and the realization that unless you've thought through what you're doing, it won't land the way you want. No matter how hard you work, no matter how passionate that you feel, no matter how much you care, if the thought process is broken, the outcome will be broken unless you get lucky.
But luck is good luck in particular is very rare. would say bad luck is far, far more common. So that's one change. It just, it kind of made me, I think I'm like this anyway, but it made me further oriented towards thinking first than action. That doesn't mean, I think when people hear that there's a sort of anxiety and this is not a phase throughout my career. It's like one of the first things I have to correct when I join a company.
people hear thinking and they think rumination. They think, this is someone who's going to spend all their time, like just writing documents and theorizing and not actually doing anything or generating results. And that's a false dichotomy. So I just want to distinguish those things. Like thinking is very thinking well, I should say. It's very compatible with speed and effectiveness.
Tom Rudnai (06:03)
Mm-hmm.
Timi (06:27)
It's just, you have to differentiate between thinking and rumination. So that's one difference it made. And then the other thing I would say is like, really taught me the, the power of good communication because we tend to think about communication in terms of external communication. I find often, and especially as people get more senior,
We don't think carefully enough about how we're communicating with our teams. We just kind of think, all right, there's what I need to say, I'll just say it. And we don't reflect on, okay, what do they need to hear? How do they need to act? What do I need to hear from them? We're not thinking of the sort of communication layer as a valid domain of effective problem solving.
So it's just made me much more appreciative of the importance of the communication layer of problem solving, no matter the domain, whether it's with customers or with the exec team or with the team I manage or with the whole company. Like that has to be a very mindful process because problems can be created and solved through that process.
Tom Rudnai (07:41)
It's interesting there, because you said you've called out two things. One that I associate hugely with content marketers and one that I actually don't. I think is a skill that as a group could be developed more, right? So I think one thing that's always struck me in doing this podcast is talking to these people from the early days that I remember, like Katherine Aragon. People who have been in...
in content or journalism, like who in the habit of writing down their thoughts are able to explain themselves with incredible precision in a way that I can't and a lot of other people that I speak to can't because they've done a lot of structured thinking. And I think that's an element of what you would think to talk about in terms of the dichotomy between rumination and thinking, right? Writing forces you to put structure into the way you think, which then helps in the way that you communicate.
One thing that I don't think content marketers are very good at is communicating internally though. I think for people whose core skill set is creating, is storytelling, they do an awful job of telling that story internally. I've been screaming out, just point a little bit of that at the internal narrative around what you do and why it matters. you agree with that? And if so, how did you break out of it?
Timi (08:52)
Yeah, 100 % agree. part of why I learned this lesson is because I was terrible at it. So bad, so bad. I think it comes from a few things. One, I would say, is a kind of arrogance. I think writers in particular can develop this kind of self-important perspective on the work that we do.
because it's easy to romanticize, right? Like media and the world is full of romantic depictions of writing as a process, as a profession, as a vocation in a way that you don't see with, let's say, selling or cleaning or whatever, know, writing as that thing. So I think a lot of us come into it thinking, well, this is obviously...
a special, meaningful thing. Like it's beneath me to try and to have to explain to you. It's not conscious, I should say, but I would wager if most content marketers reflected on their orientation, their sort of psychological orientation towards the dynamic they have with the business. think most would find this is true. So there's that arrogance, like we don't even see it as something that should be on our
plates, like why should I need to like convey to you the importance of what I do? So I think that's one layer. I think the other layer is kind of comes from a good place, which is just an, I think, sort of all consuming passion for doing the outward communication. So we kind of consume our minds become consumed with how can I communicate with the customer? Can I generate cool ideas to bring?
you know, this thing to life that we don't leave enough space for. Well, there are people inside that I need to tell a story as well. And they're important. They're my customers in a sense. So I think that's part of it. And I think maybe the third thing I'll call out is to be fair, I don't think many businesses make it conducive for that kind of internal storytelling to happen because the lens through which
content is viewed, it can be reductive. So you have like two units that should be collaborating, existing at opposite poles. So you have the business that reduces content to, you published that blog post. How many opportunities came from it in a week? Like that's such a simplistic way to think about content.
Certainly when I was coming up in the profession, that was quite common. I don't know if it still is. So you had to have those kinds of conversations and that almost puts you on the back foot. And it's like, how can I begin to explain to you how broken your way of thinking about this is? But then on the other hand, you have the content marketers like me who are in this very romanticized position that are extra insulted that this is the way it's been spoken about. So I think there's a bit of a meeting in the middle that needs to happen where like businesses
Tom Rudnai (11:26)
Mm.
Timi (11:50)
And business leaders who are hiring content marketers should upgrade their thinking and their mental model of how content marketing solves business problems and creates commercial outcomes. but at the end of the day, this is maybe it's a bit brutal. This is the path that I ended up taking was like, at the end of the day, the business is paying me to do a job. They just have more leverage. It doesn't matter whether I think they're making a mistake.
they just have more leverage. Like if the CEO thinks like I'm doing a bad job, even if I'm doing a good job, they're the ones who can fire me. I can leave, but while I'm working there, they have more leverage. So the responsibility is on me to figure out how to make, how to build a bridge over that divide.
Tom Rudnai (12:38)
Yeah, and I guess that by getting into content marketing, you have accepted that you're entering a field of writing that is part art and part science, right? And you have to, to an extent, embrace the scientific element of you are now content marketing. You are not just a writer. But the thing that I've always been kind of...
hamming on is that content marketers need to proactively lead that conversation, right? It's rare that you get people come and really try and help you demonstrate your value. And I think it gets wrapped up in modesty a little bit, right? It's seen as particularly probably in the UK where we don't like self-promotion. It's seen as self-promotional to go internally and shout and create a narrative around what you're doing.
But the challenge is if you don't do that, then no one else will. And I think part of your job up to a certain level, right? And most content marketers still exist within the kind of head of, director of level of a company where your job is to be the evangelist for your function, right? It's a bit different once you're at C level, you kind of take on a broader responsibility, but you need to be the cheerleader for content and show internally what it can do for the company.
Timi (13:39)
100 % agree. I like to think in terms of occupational hazards, which is maybe a bit morbid, but I think is useful because we understand that concept in relation to physical jobs. Like there are occupational hazards if you work with radioactive material or if you work on high rises. And as is often the case, once you move from
the physical to the metaphysical from the material to the abstract, we sort of forget that the same fundamental dynamics exist. So my job as a content markets marketer has hazards that I have to manage as well. My workplace has some responsibility, but as you said, if you're the head of content or whatever, there are opportunities, but there are also hazards with that.
that you must be aware of and manage. And the same is true if you're the content marketer earlier in their career.
Tom Rudnai (14:38)
It gets really interesting posing it in that frame though, because you, every job has hazards, as you say, if that hazard was physical, you would engage with it in a very different way, right? You would accept when I go to work, there is a process that I have to do or things that I have to do as part of my day that I don't enjoy, but they are part of mitigating the risks of those hazards that I don't want something heavy to land on my head, so I put on my hat. When it's a more subtle, a metaphysical threat.
Your brain doesn't engage with it in that way. It creates a lot more stress and a lot more anxiety. We're so much worse at dealing with anything that isn't a physical threat.
Timi (15:12)
Yeah, agreed. Because I think there's much more room for magical thinking, which is also in the context of content marketers is a sort of hazard because
Content marketers tend to be imaginative people. People that are drawn to content marketers tend to be people who, you know, there's no shortage of daydreamers and storytellers and fantasists and all of that. And if we're not careful, part of what can happen is that we take that aptitude and we can call it that or that attribute and we misapply it or we apply it in a context where it's not helpful.
such as in relation to your employment. So you can end up in a situation where you romanticize your work context or environment in a way that is much harder to do it with a physical work on. Like if you're like, I don't know, 40 stories up in the air and you're dangling, like there's your senses are too overloaded with information that
the ground is really far away. If you're not careful, like, or if you're working with heavy materials and you don't wear your hard hat and your steel toe boots and all of that, like there's much more signal that this can go wrong. But when it's metaphysical, when it's like, Ooh, the person who just to make it really crass, it's usually not this crass, but just to make it really crass, the person who can decide to pay you doesn't understand the work you're doing because
there's too big a gap between how you think about it and how they think about it because they're not a specialist. It's much easier to ignore that and to tell yourself a story, for example, that which again, I really want people to understand that a lot of these insights come from mistakes that I've made. So you could tell yourself, they're just like short sighted or greedy. They're just greedy capitalists. don't they don't think.
I think that's a thought process that I fell prey to. They don't care about doing good work and it's like, is that the case? And you can cast yourself as, I'm the only person who actually cares about making sure customers understand what we need and actually like our advertising isn't just noise, it's compare, you could fill your head with all these stories, but.
There may be some truth there, but it's rarely, if ever, the full truth or even sort of the majority of the truth. So we have to keep that sort of attitude in check and be really, and that's one of the benefits I've gotten from my career journey, actually, I'd say it's allowed me to really engage with my analytical side and to think about to separate.
moments where it's useful for me to tell a story from moments where it's useful for me to understand what is reality and Therefore what kind of story should I be telling to what end am I telling a story?
Tom Rudnai (18:01)
Hmm.
Yeah, no, it's really interesting. gone down a very kind of thoughtful, interesting way, but I'm going bring it back to the practical a little bit because you, so Timmy, you are now the greedy capitalist, right? You're now the big bad boss who's asking people what the ROI is on XYZ and things like that. Like, let's do the question from the other angle. So how has being a CRO changed the way that you think about good content?
Timi (18:36)
That is a good question. The answer is a bit weird because essentially part of how and why I became a CRO is the evolution of my view of content. So by the time I got here, the view I now hold is what got me here, if that makes sense. But what I can say is what's changed is some things that have changed. Earlier in my career, I thought my job
was to demonstrate how good of a content writer, or even sometimes how good of a writer I am. Now I think the important question, the key imperative is how effective am I at solving problems using my writing? Which sounds like a subtle difference, but they actually diverge quite significantly because let's say for example, if I'm writing,
an article about use cases for our product. If my orientation is, right, I need to show how good of a writer I am, I'll make decisions to, let's say, deploy highly sophisticated metaphors or create incredibly rich analogies
I might make those kinds of decisions that really show how skilled I am, but maybe my target audience is not very literary. So maybe what I need to do is actually use the simplest possible analogy or no analogies at all. Maybe what I need to do is just speak as simplistically as possible. And that's the skill.
I need to deploy, but all of that is predicated on the level of customer insight I have, right? Because for some audiences, maybe those rich analogies are exactly what will bring the product to life and kind of land the value proposition. For some audiences, maybe it's the opposite. So you become almost more chameleonic when you shift that perspective. And it's like, my writing prowess is a tool. It's not the outcome.
So that's like one big shift. And then the other thing I would say is my perspective on measuring content and the impact of content. I used to think that measuring stuff like devalued it, but I actually don't think that's the case. I think what happens is I come or what happened with me is I conflated
misuse of what I was measuring with the act of measuring itself. So if I measure views or if I measure leads and then in the business it becomes, like the most impactful thing the content does is it generates views. So then there's a push, it's generate as much views as possible. The problem with that isn't the measurement. To go back to the storytelling point, the problem with that is I haven't
established or there doesn't exist a sophisticated or constructive enough story around what we measure, why we measure, how we use the things we measure in the business. So they're prone to being misused. So I think now my orientation is measure as much as you can usefully measure. No one measure is like the magical thing, but then you have to take on the responsibility as well of
owning the narrative around those metrics that you measure and how they're ingested and metabolized in the organization. So I'd say those are the two big differences.
Tom Rudnai (22:09)
How have the metrics that you do look at changed? What role would you say when you go to analyze content performance, traditional content metrics have at the moment, engagement, traffic, that kind of thing? Is that still a component of the analysis?
Timi (22:24)
Yeah,
I don't do deep analysis anymore because thankfully I have a great team that does that work. But the two things I do look at from time to time are essentially the very top and the very bottom. So I look at our, I go into Google search console and I look at what's happening with our branded search volume, the click through rates, the number of queries, the average position, all that stuff.
And then I also go and look at marketing influence pipeline, either created or influence. So at the bottom, what's happening? Is it turning into more deals? Is it turning to a higher value of pipeline? Is it turning to a larger pipeline from a value perspective? Are the deals moving faster? That kind of stuff. So I just top and tail it. And I think about it in terms of
mental and physical availability basically. Are we showing up more in people's minds? I like this description of the mind as the first search engine. If people can't even retrieve you from their memories, they're not gonna find you online in a search engine. And then are we doing a good job of turning that interest into revenue or at least revenue potential from a purely marketing perspective?
Tom Rudnai (23:45)
interesting so I like the yeah are we capturing pure topical awareness the people know who we are and then later on is that translating through to what we ultimately need to see it I guess what was what interest me about that is I reckon what a lot of content marketers probably do is they report in the middle of those two things because they're trying to move as close to revenue as they possibly can but they're not very well set up to do that and so they end up not reporting on either of the two things that you would care about
Timi (24:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a real challenge. I think with Charlie, we've gone on a journey and I'm really grateful for the team we have just in terms of the mindset they have and how...
open they've been to some of the challenges I've thrown at them. But I think you're absolutely right. A lot of teams get lost in that noisy middle and there's a temptation. There's a certain, and I'm like this because I think certainly my academic background is much more creative, artistic. That's kind of, that's kind of the bucket you would put me in.
Tom Rudnai (24:32)
Hmm.
Timi (24:47)
but like my personality, the way my brain works is also super analytical. And before I kind of combined the two, what I did is I flip-flopped between extremes of both. And one of the things that happened is there was a period in my sort of content marketing career where I realized the relationship between my work when writing and the numbers associated with them. And I took full control and I'm manager at the time.
helped me, went on an analytics course and then my analytical sort of orientation went into overdrive and I just went more and more and more granular, more and more and more. And you think if a segment by every possible permutation, then I will get to the answer. And it's not to say that's a bad thing. Again, none of these things are binary, but what it means is we have to be very thoughtful.
about what type of analysis we're performing and why and for whom. So for example, for me as a CRO, if a content marketer did that to me, it would not be helpful. Not because I can't understand it, because in my case, I literally did that, but I don't want to. Like it's not, it's not, I don't, I don't need to go to that level. What I need to know is what are the broad trends?
Tom Rudnai (26:01)
He
Timi (26:10)
And do you know why they appear as they do? Is, for example, is our mental availability going up and more people becoming aware of our name and searching for it? Can you explain the things you're doing that could be contributing to that? Great. And similar thing for the pipeline. Where it could be useful to get more and more granular is if, for example,
you've noticed a very specific high level trend and you want to understand granularly why it's happening. So I almost split it into for diagnostic purposes, going as granular as possible is useful. And that should usually be a pretty sort of contained exercise. So the content markets are in a few people who are invested. So it's like, want to understand why this is happening. Go deep. But from
a prescriptive or descriptive perspective. So I want to tell the team or the CRO what's happening and what we're going to do about it. Actually zooming out and telling a broader, maybe multi-year story of some high level metrics is much more compelling and much more useful, partly because those bigger timelines and those larger data sets.
are associated with higher leverage and that's what people care about. I care about a lever that if we pull it, it can give us 20 % growth in new business, not a lever that if we pull it, would give us 5 % growth in leads. And also it's more strategic because that's an easier sort of level of data for me to plug into.
Tom Rudnai (27:41)
Mm-hmm.
Timi (27:50)
data from other parts of the business like sales or product or whatever.
Tom Rudnai (27:56)
Yeah, well what you've just to me, it's storytelling, right? And being able to tell a story with data, but adapt that story to who you're talking to, right? So you're gonna need one story for your CRO, probably another story for your sales rep, so you're desperately trying to get to use content in the way that you've always asked them to. There's a story that needs to be told to them in order to explain to them why and how to do that and make it easy for them. You've got other stakeholders in marketing, right? If content is the engine that feeds...
pretty much everything across revenue, then you need to adapt that story as needed. I think one challenge that you've just described there is that they're different frames of mind sometimes. And I think it's very difficult asking someone to be deeply analytical, incredibly kind of thoughtful and free with how they think. Like what's your take and what have you done at Charlie HR? Who should own this stuff? Should it be on the content marketer to do this or should it be something that sits more with marketing operations and is done for them?
with them.
Timi (28:52)
Very good question. I think it depends on the team structure. I will start by saying if you're the only content marketer, it is extremely in your interest to do this, even though no one will pay you upfront to do it or tell you to do it. What I can tell you is if you do it, I'm pretty confident your career trajectory will change in a positive way.
And I don't even mean in terms of changing roles, but even if you stay as a content marketer, you will be forever grateful that you learned how to exercise the skill, especially in the world of AI. So if either you're the only content marketer or you're the most senior content marketer or something like that, where essentially there is no one who cares about content marketing as much as you do, it's in your interest to do it. If it's a bigger team.
So I've worked in some teams that are larger, where there's a rev ops team, maybe even there's a content ops team. I don't know if they call it that especially. Then yes, I think it should sit at a more sort of managerial strategic level. It's something for whomever sort of is the ultimate decision maker for that org to decide. But I think...
In that context, it does help to take that burden off the actual content marketers and just let them see that it's happening and see what it looks like when it's done well. And then maybe a rev ops team can do it or rev ops lead or a marketing manager or someone like that.
Tom Rudnai (30:29)
No, that makes sense. And I think the key point is what you said at first, which is at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if it's not getting done without you at a point, you have to just kind of roll your sleeves up and say, I'm gonna take responsibility for doing this, even if it's not your core skill set. No, really interesting. I wanna talk as well about, so there's another adjustment that you would have had to make.
which is you're coming from this background, but obviously as a CRO sitting under your remit is also all of the sales side, right? And I think there's a lot of content marketers that, and marketers in general actually, the lines between those two skill sets are blurring, right? If you're a sales rep, the best sales reps actually increasingly have some familiarity with marketing and can build up a personal brand on LinkedIn and leverage that to their effect. And equally the marketers I think increasingly have to be on customer calls a lot more. How did you go about,
getting to grips with that side of your role and all the different mindsets and theory that you had to learn to be a good sales leader as well.
Timi (31:25)
It's a very good question. feel like your questions are sort of taking me to a place of reflecting on some of the most immature phases of my career. One of which is this. So when I got into content marketing for a while, I was so mentally, discreetly condescending about sales. So it's not like I would go to the sales team and be like, you you guys are...
useless or whatever. But I had this simplistic understanding of what they were doing. That, you know, the typical wheeler dealer, or you're just, you know, smashing and grabbing and that's what sales is. And so one of the things I did is I quit my job once very early in my career. Once I got enough confidence to, and I set up an agency.
It was basically just me and I roped in one or two people when I needed to for certain things. And I remember one particular sales meeting that I went to and that was the first time I had to do proper sales because it was a cold outreach. I put out the website, spoke to this woman via email and she was like, she sounded so dead keen. And I was like, got this in the bag.
And then I arrived at the meeting and she was so difficult throwing from my perspective. I'm sure from her perspective, she was just representing her concerns and needs. And she was saying all this stuff she didn't say via email. I was like, do you even want to do this? And essentially that was just like objections. And also her communication wasn't great.
And I remember leaving that meeting and I'm grateful till this day that I at least had the humility to recognize what was going on. And I remember leaving that meeting and just going, I am so out of my depth. was just so clearly, I was just like, I did not know how to handle that woman. And of course I had other sort of interactions. In the end, I didn't win that deal. And I just...
Went back to the drawing board, I read some books and I just thought, I have so much to learn. don't, I don't know sales. I don't understand what I'm doing. So I went back to work and that was my first SaaS job, but now with a very specific goal of understanding sales and marketing and how they fit together. And I launched other products and side projects that I had to sell.
And so the combination of those things and Pat's nap was a very key moment for me in that, because I was very involved in sales. went to, even though was head of content, I went to sales meetings, I pitched the product, I wrote enablement. And so that process took me on a journey of understanding what selling is about when you do it well, which is actually a much more strategic and analytical process than it appears
on the surface. So that was kind of my journey to understanding appreciating sales. I like underappreciated it, tried to do it, realized I sucked and then just started doing more and more of it with people who were good at it and then experimenting with my own side projects.
Tom Rudnai (34:42)
It seems, yeah, you mentioned the kind of condescending about sales, which I think is the way a lot of, on both sides, I've got a kind of foot in both camps these days, right? And you get the same thing going in the opposite direction. I it makes me think back to what you said earlier about the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of the way that you think about content when you're in content, right? You have this idealism about what you're doing and that drives a lot of behaviours. I think there's a completely different social stigma around sales.
which drives a lot of behaviors and also a lot of how you're presented, right? Because content marketers suffer for their stigma as well as kind of being something that embodies them, right? They're always put, oh, you just want to write, you don't care about the actual business outcomes, things like that. As a salesman, so one of the things I was most grateful for when I started my career is an SDR, but I landed somewhere where they had a very deeply thoughtful and they took pride in the kind of discovery and the theory of how to be.
good at selling rather than kind of smile and dial, 100 touch points a day, please, Tom. So it made me kind of fall in love with sales from the art of it a little bit more. Don't really know if there's a question coming here. just thought that was what was in my brain.
Timi (35:48)
⁓ gotcha.
I think
that's like, that's amazing that you had that experience, especially so early on. Like, I feel like that's a big part of what I got at Pat's Nap. Pat's Nap is probably the place where I worked with like the highest density of the best salespeople I've worked with, like in a company.
It was just, that's because the one of the co-founders was a salesperson. was very instrumental in the strategic evolution of the company and he understood the importance of sales. So I realized, actually, when I first of all joined, there was a lot of tension between me and some of the sales team, but we became so close very quickly within a few months because we realized we developed a mutual appreciation for what
each of us did and we understood how it helped. So they would start to come to me and be like, oh man, that asset you created really landed on the sales school. And I've been having this conversation. Can we think about something in relation to this? They could see how it could affect their win rates. And I could see how my work going back to that first motivation I mentioned was helping not just the sales team, but also the customers. So that kind of process of
exposure and mutual curiosity, I think is important. But to tie it back to the point you made, I think it needs that foundation of good craft. So part of the reason why it happened at Pat Snap is that when I looked at their sales process and how they approach sales, like, man, there's some real skill going on here. There's some real thought going on here, both at individual and collective levels.
And so I think when you look closely, if the content marketing team is in disarray or the sales team is in disarray, then you get the impression, Ooh, maybe it is all just bullshit. But when you look closely and you're like, wow, this is amazing. It helps you learn. And it sounds like that's what you got from that role.
Tom Rudnai (37:53)
Yeah, you kind of see behind the veil a little bit. think it's probably the best low hanging fruit for any marketer out there is to just go and get hold of Gong, find out like a young sales rep would do, find out who the couple of best performing sales reps are and go and watch their calls. And you gain an appreciation for their ability to stay cool under pressure, to pitch and then kind of pivot into question mode.
And also from your perspective, you get a much, much better sense of how all of this messaging, like how the product is actually sold on the ground, not how all of your positioning is. And you see where there's a gap, if I've positioned it in this way, they ignore that. And they normally have a point, there's a reason why they're doing it.
Timi (38:36)
Could not agree more. Could not agree more. I think that's something a lot of content marketers need to get out of their heads. If you're doing positioning stuff and messaging, et cetera, and the sales team isn't using it, there's a good reason why. It's not just because they're being difficult. 99 % of the time, I'm not gonna say every time, but 99 % of the time, there's a good reason why.
Tom Rudnai (39:01)
Yeah, I mean, when it was me, I was just being difficult, but I'm kind of like that. Yeah, I'm the one percent. It also shows me you've landed in a very perfect place for this skill set with Charlie HR. Right. So.
Timi (39:06)
You're the 1%.
Tom Rudnai (39:14)
When we first met, you kind of told me about the conditions at HR and for people maybe in the US who don't know Charlie HR so well. HR platform, I used them when we were at Zephyr. Every time I was ill or pretending to be ill, I was in there.
Relatively so like the conditions are in now relatively low ACV still a sales led process which puts an awful lot of pressure on the Efficiency of her go-to-market motion right because you need a salesperson But you can't have that dragging over into six twelve month cycles with loads of calls because it just isn't it doesn't justify that like Is that an intentional move that you found a place where everything that you've just described is exactly the role
Timi (39:50)
Yeah, that's a good question. would say yes, but most of the credit for that, I would say goes to our CEO. Some of it goes to me. So the reason why I say most of it goes to him is that he was the one who looked at the shape of the business and went, need to level up commercially. But the person we bring in to do that needs to
understand the kind of engine we have because it's so content driven and everything that comes with that and some of the dynamics you mentioned that he was like, if we, if for example, you went and you got, I was hired as director of revenue, the director of revenue had spent their whole career at SAP and, you know, heavy enterprise selling cold call outbound. I don't want to say they can't learn because I think we overindex on this, like, sort of.
Playbook hiring mindset like are they done the playbook like I think Smart curious committed people can figure stuff out and they can do it relatively quickly so I'm not gonna say they can't do it, but he understood that there was an advantage, let's say if he could find someone who already was you could say indoctrinated in the mechanisms of
the engine that Charlie has. So he went looking specifically for someone who was now in a commercial role, but had a content background, which now when I say back, I'm like, that's, that's not a very common combo. No, but also when I spoke to him, because I wasn't, he reached out to me, I recognized the opportunity. was like, hmm, this is, this is a, cause at the time I was a rain bird, which is very sort of.
Tom Rudnai (41:14)
It's not a lot, no.
Timi (41:30)
heavy enterprise and I enjoyed it because it was an AI product and we were building the content engine for that kind of motion where the sales cycle is 18 months and the deal sizes are huge. Okay, how does content plug in there? But I was like, there's a sort of.
the content engine at Charlie was much more mature than what we were building at Rainbird because we're building it. So I was like, ooh, that's an interesting opportunity. yeah, that played a part in me moving.
Tom Rudnai (42:02)
Yeah, and do you...
How does that environment that you have to operate in change the way that you build out your revenue? Are there specific things that you do or don't do that reflect the imperative of go-to-market efficiency?
Timi (42:17)
everything. It's quite interesting. I'm still discovering new layers. I would say something stayed the same. Everything is an exaggeration, but it's in the minutia. It's like the devil's in the details. So down to the kind of professional you hire across sales and marketing, the...
the way you set up your analytics because you need. So for example, a rain bird, I could go super deep on a few deals because I needed to, right? And I had much more space and the content team had much more space to like think about what insights they draw because you're looking for a few super high leverage insights that will turn, you know,
three deals into six. With Charlie, the throughput is so high that we need to be able to get signal very quickly on some level. So what you measure, how you measure, what you report, that stuff changes a bit. The pace and nature of experimentation changes because, and this is one of the things I like the most actually, because you have much more volume. So for example,
at Rainbird, we have, I don't know, 20 deals or something moving through our pipeline a quarter, unless we hit a really rich vein of form, which we did sometimes. So if you're going to experiment, it's going to take a while. Charlie, we have hundreds. So we can run a test that we get a signal about in weeks.
So changes the types of experiments. So those are just three things off the top of my head.
Tom Rudnai (44:04)
Yeah, super interesting for us. mean, I'm someone who comes from a much more of a sales led enterprise background, but at Demand Genius, we've kind of gone down this pilot led growth where we have this great free audit tool that you can use in two minutes And I'm really excited about being able to learn about growth experimentation. And I feel like there's this whole discipline that is open to me that just has never been a part of everything before, where it's all about going all in on one thing, which I
from a personal perspective, I think super unhealthy because it creates this obsessive feeling towards a single outcome that is not in your control. But anyway, I digress. But this has been fantastic. We've got five minutes left. So I wanna go to a couple of quick fire questions if we can. So first one, what is an AI tool or use case for AI that has just blown your mind?
Timi (44:49)
It's very topical. I've been experimenting with a tool called Replet, which you can build apps through sort of link.
Tom Rudnai (44:58)
the vibe coding tool,
Timi (44:59)
what's the word is completely escaping, which is ironic given you can talk to it in natural language. It looks like a code. I don't know if you've ever done a coding course, et cetera, where you write the code and on the panel, you see the visual output, but instead of writing in SQL or Java, you're writing in English. And I've built a couple of things that way. And I think is, is mind blowing. When I launched my last app, it took me like a month to go from
Tom Rudnai (45:05)
Some people can.
Yeah.
Timi (45:27)
idea to MVP. Like I've built an MVP in a day, fully function. And I think it's easy to think about entrepreneurs in relation to that, but I think teams in-house that you want a bit of software to do a very specific thing for you. There's a lot of bandwidth there. There's a lot of mileage there to just like build bespoke in-house tools. And I think a lot of big tech companies know that. Like when I was at Facebook,
So many of the tools we used were built in-house by the engineering team. But now you can do that even if you're in a startup.
Tom Rudnai (46:04)
Yeah, well, I mean, that's what drove the SaaS model, right? It's building technology was expensive, so it made sense to all pool resources and have that model. As we bring down the cost of technology, I think it will swing back for simpler use cases to people building in-house. I mean, all of these tools that are just kind of a chat GPT wrapper, increasingly is going to be a very easy thing to do and get bespoke to your needs. Particularly, it's like for us, I think of vibe coding as something that's good for prototyping.
and for internal tools where UI imperfections are tolerated.
Timi (46:37)
Exactly. And also your use case is too niche. So no entrepreneur is going to go after it because there's like a hundred of you. But for that hundred, it's super important. So you can just build it for yourself.
Tom Rudnai (46:44)
Yeah.
Nice, sounds so simple. I was to approve your Plan A budget request tomorrow, and the way I describe this is like the one that your CEO would never be stupid enough to sign off, what would you do?
Timi (47:00)
So like what's one activity that I would add on top of?
Tom Rudnai (47:04)
Yeah, one big bet or campaign or just like the cool idea that you can't quite justify, but would be good.
Timi (47:07)
Yeah.
Yeah, easy. TV advertising.
Tom Rudnai (47:13)
you're the second person to say that in the last couple of weeks. Why?
Timi (47:16)
Because I think it's underrated, I think in the world of digital fast feedback loops, granular analytics, we've come to imagine the things that are hard to measure must be low in impact.
market level data is underutilized and under understood in a lot of marketing teams. So we tend to think of things like, TV advertising, can't measure it. There's no data, that kind of stuff, but it's not true. It's one of the most empirically validated channels. When you look at the level of like academic studies, which
People think it's just theory, but it's not. It's based on analyzing real businesses on a large scale. It's just that you don't have the resources as an individual business to do that kind of study. So if you kind of look at the level of empirical validation for different channels, it's not even close. TV is dominant. It's just very hard to convince people of that because the language and the data are so esoteric.
Like it's all academic day, unless you read papers, it's going to sound weird to you. And that's a real challenge.
Tom Rudnai (48:35)
Yeah, the theory behind why it works is difficult.
Timi (48:38)
Yes. And how could I forget also the timeframe in which it works is long. It's like the problem that people point out between democracy and autocracy is, you know, democracies, if you know you need to get elected and you know you're going to get, you have a four year term to get reelected, you're going to think in four year time horizons. Whereas if you're an autocrat, you can think 10, 15 years, because no one's pushing you out.
which is horrible in that sense, but the dynamic is real. So if you're a marketing leader, think, I got a show in six months.
Tom Rudnai (49:11)
I could go off on a tangent on that. I think that four-year term is the source of most of our problems. We're now in a world where all of our problems are global and they're all so meaty that you can't solve them over four years. So we just flip-flop and make them worse. Four years doing this, four years doing this. Anyway, that's another podcast I would have to do. Final question before I let you go is just a recommendation that you have for everyone, whether it's a book, a thought leader that you love.
What's for people to check out?
Timi (49:37)
Yeah, the one I want to say I think has gotten a lot of popularity now. So maybe it's not as useful, but I was going to suggest, buy and shop how brands grow. but in lieu of that, if many of you have already read that, it's not to say you have to agree with everything in there, but it's by far the most evidence-based and
orienting marketing book I've read. But if you've already read that, I would just say if you're a senior marketer or if you're a content marketer looking to become a senior marketer, read more marketing studies. I know it's dull or it's perceived to be dull. don't get most of your diet about marketing from LinkedIn posts and,
influencer hot takes, go and read what the evidence and data suggest. It will save you a lot of stress and make you far more effective.
Tom Rudnai (50:34)
I like that one thing I resonate very strongly with is when you get too into you have to use LinkedIn or something I do for my job these days. It means you get so much advice and so much noise and it's all telling you you're doing something wrong and passing through that is a fucking nightmare. So yeah, think finding your sources and going deeper on less is a pretty good bit of advice. And then finally, just anything you want to plug that you're doing. Give you a quick moment if you'd like to.
Timi (50:41)
Yes.
Yes.
I have my own entrepreneurial background and I like working with entrepreneurs as part of why I took the initial call with you. So,
If I have the time, I'm very happy to chat with entrepreneurs that are building interesting things. One, because it feels nice to help. Secondly, because I can learn in the process as well. And when I do whatever my next thing is, hopefully it can be a better version of me doing it. So that's my plug. You can reach out if you want.
Tom Rudnai (51:28)
Well that is an incredibly generous offer that hopefully people take you up on. I can say from my experience, Timmy's been a great help to me. So look, cool, I've already kept you a couple of minutes too long, so Timmy, thank you very much for joining. One of my goals for this podcast is that it helps marketers and content marketers take the transition that you've been on. So I think this is really cool.
Timi (51:44)
Thank you, Tom. My pleasure. And it's been great chatting with you as well.
Tom Rudnai (51:48)
Great, thanks everyone.