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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 5,000+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey, it's me, Dave. So this is a special episode. This was a session that we recorded live at drive, our first ever in person eventually, which was early September in Burlington, Vermont. It was incredible. We had 200 people there. The NPS after the event was 88. We're going to do it again this year.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:34]:
Don't worry. I know there's a lot of FOMO out there. For those of you that didn't make it, we're going to do it again September 2025. But we have all of the recordings right here for you on the Exit Five podcast. Now, this is just the audio if you want the full video and see the slides and everything that is available exclusively in our community. Not on YouTube, not on the Internet, nowhere else except inside of Exit Five in the community. Join 4400 members exit5.com and you can see all the content. Okay, let's get into this session from Drive last presentation.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:06]:
So Devin talked a bunch about Kyle, but I'm really excited for this one because, and I don't mean to, this isn't hyperbole, but I think, personally, I think AI is the most important thing that's happened to marketers in the last 20 years. And if I was in marketing right now, I know it's very easy to roll your eyes at like, you know, kind of crappy ChatGPT generated blog posts and say that AI is not the future. But personally, I find myself investing in these tools, trying to learn more because I feel like this is where marketing is going. Not to copy and paste a blog post, but because all the things that are possible now. As a marketer for me, I don't even know how to use Photoshop. Like, the learning curve on so many of these old traditional SaaS tools is so high. What's possible now with AI and video and design and copywriting, like, you need to be taking this stuff seriously. Everybody that I've seen that's performed at a high level in my career, they were all like a crazy early adopter.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:58]:
I'm not that I just wear cool sneakers, but I'm not an early adopter. But I've been trying to push myself to get more into AI because I really do believe this is where the future of marketing is going, especially in B2B. And our next speaker is going to talk a lot about this. His talk is about a zero CAC strategy using AI. He was the former CMO at clary. Now he's the CMO at a really cool company called Copy AI. Give it up for Kyle Coleman.
Kyle Coleman [00:02:37]:
All right. Thunderstruck. Okay. Devin swore like a thousand times.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:41]:
He did. It was a little much. I'm a big curse guy.
Kyle Coleman [00:02:44]:
But it was like, I'm going to try and keep it a bit more PG G Ray. We'll see. But my God, Devin, two daughters. Boom. Okay, so Dave introduced me. Very nice, very sweet. Love the man. $0 CAC strategy.
Kyle Coleman [00:03:01]:
I've been at Copy AI for eight months. In the eight months before I started, they spent 150,000 or so series. A small company, 150,000 on demand programs, generated about 5 million in pipeline. Pretty good. Since I've been there eight months, we have generated $17 million in pipeline and we have spent $12,000 on demand programs. And that's all driven by. Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:28]:
Are you looking for a job? Just ask. We'll talk about it later.
Kyle Coleman [00:03:33]:
One in, one out. And it's all driven by this. And it actually is a beautiful extension of what Devin just talked a lot about. We're going to hit on a lot of those principles. It also is an extension of what Ross was talking about yesterday. A lot of what everybody is saying is going to converge here. The difference, as Dave mentioned, is that I'm going to lean into AI a little bit more without hopefully making it a Copy AI infomercial, which would be very easy to do, but I will not do that, rest assured. So what we're going to talk about, we're not going to talk about AI first, because if all you do is just jump into AI and go to ChatGPT and say, Write me a blog post, it's going to suck.
Kyle Coleman [00:04:12]:
And that is, unfortunately, the experience that a lot of people have with AI. So we're going to talk about what is the role of content. Again, extending a lot of what Devin just talked through, talk about what's missing, give you a little bit of an action plan, and then leave a little time for Q and A here at the end. The first and I think most important insight that all of us, I think, share, this seems like this has come up over and over and over again is that the content inside your company is your marketing strategy. If you don't have a content engine that is really high performing, how can you run campaigns? How can you do pretty much anything else? The content is the strategy. But the problem is that most companies have poopy Devin content. Pg. Pg.
Kyle Coleman [00:05:00]:
Most companies have really bad content. They don't think about it. It's not super thoughtful. It's not valuable, it's not unique, as we were talking about yesterday. It's just content for the sake of content. Checking the box, that's a major problem because everything downstream of that sucks. And so we can't skip this. How do we make solid content? This is hard.
Kyle Coleman [00:05:23]:
If it was easy, this wouldn't be a problem. If this was easy, Devin wouldn't have a company. This is hard. So we're going to talk about how to create this virtuous cycle that starts with thinking, leans into that thinking to develop a truer operational approach to content creation, and then creates this flywheel which ultimately becomes that zero dollar CAC strategy. The most important thing for you to do as a marketer, as a content person, as a thinker is this. You want to force your audience to make a choice about their future. You do not want to invite a comparison to everything else that's out there on the market. This drives me crazy.
Kyle Coleman [00:06:10]:
And we'll talk about this a little bit more. I'm going to talk about how I interviewed at Copy AI and got the job. But it's for some reason a lot of people have this inclination to put these comparison pages on their website and like, what are you doing? If somebody has never heard of that competitor, now they have like, what is happening here? You don't want to be in this comparison set that muddies the waters. Now, of course, in a deal cycle, it's going to come up and you need to have some content probably that helps get over that objection. But you do not want to do that at the top of the funnel. What you want to do is you want to resist that comparison trap, the better trap. You want to have a vision for what is the future that you and your company are architecting and how are you going to pull those people to that new and better and different future from the current state that they're in. Which is painful for the reasons that you say it's painful to the future that is painless to the reasons that you say is painless.
Kyle Coleman [00:07:07]:
And if you can architect that from to journey for people and if you can force them to think differently about the problems they're having, then you start to win. You start to dominate. This is shamelessly stolen from the category pirates. If you haven't heard of the category pirates, if you do not subscribe to the substack, if you haven't read Play Bigger, you go buy the book right now. Subscribe to the substack right now. It's truly, it's a different way of Thinking it's a different way of thinking about marketing. And in my opinion, it's essential. And it's not to say that you have to always create a new category.
Kyle Coleman [00:07:44]:
As Devin said, when we were at Clary, we were working with the guy who wrote a lot of this. His name is Christopher Lockhead. He's a maniac. He's a mad genius. And he thrust this category upon us called revenue, collaboration and governance. And we were like, oh, what? So the category wasn't necessarily the thing that was super compelling, but the problem that we defined was super compelling. And we invented this language called revenue leak, this problem that exists in the market, that's a trillion dollar problem. And we quantified it and we had BCG of all the insights and we started taking this big problem to market and we said, what if your problem isn't just like accurate forecasting or sales coaching? Like, fine, your problem is solving revenue leak and here's how to do it.
Kyle Coleman [00:08:25]:
Boom, boom, boom. And that was the point of view that started to really spark a lot of the interest, the conversation that what's happening behind closed doors type things with our customers, with our prospects. And this category, pirates, substack and books and all the rest, is a super valuable resource. So please invest in it. The other investment I highly suggest you make is a book that came out earlier this year. It's called Pattern breakers by a VC named Mike Maples. He does a podcast on the same title. So if you want to listen to the podcast, you get a lot of the same information that's in the book.
Kyle Coleman [00:08:55]:
I like to read and take notes, shout out to you, Danielle. But if you don't, if you prefer to listen, then cool, do it in the podcast form. The cool thing about this book is he talks through a framework of how to think about how is your company different. What is the inflection that your company is writing? For me at Copy AI, it's generative AI. That's the big inflection. Okay, cool. From that inflection point, what is the insight that you have? So the insight that we have about generative AI is that can fundamentally transform the way that go to market workflows operate. Okay, cool.
Kyle Coleman [00:09:27]:
What is the idea that you want to take to market? And the idea that we're taking to market is. We'll talk about it a little bit later, but inflection point insights and ideas, and it's a really nice framework to hash out what is our provocative point of view going to be. So between the architecture of the different future and the way that you can think about the macro trends that are affecting the industry, you're going to start to put together a point of view that's going to be pretty interesting to executives. And right now, with your marketing, when you're selling, you are marketing selling to executives. Even if your end user is intern, they're not going to get budget unless it comes from an executive. And so the point of view that you have, the story that you tell has to go high. And writing inflection points and being smart about the macro trends and telling a different story is going to be very helpful in that pursuit. Told you I was going to take you back to my interview at Copy AI.
Kyle Coleman [00:10:20]:
This is a slide from the deck that I created for my interview. Little interview tip, by the way. They didn't give me a prompt to respond to. I was like, this is what I'm going to present to Hunt.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:28]:
Also, I bet you didn't ask them to pay you for a project after either.
Kyle Coleman [00:10:34]:
No, I did not, sir. No, I did not. Yeah, so like, chart, write your own rules during interviews. I'm going to present on this, and here's why. Boom, boom, boom. That's what I did. So I brought this to them and I said, here are four screenshots of four competitors. If I took the logos off these, I don't think the execs at the company could tell me which one was theirs.
Kyle Coleman [00:10:57]:
Like, they're all the same. And not only are they all the same, they all suck. None of this is interesting. And so people see this and they're like, what? But not in the right way. Not the question. And then intrigue. It's question and then falling asleep. And so Devin was talking a lot about the one word that you have to define.
Kyle Coleman [00:11:20]:
It's actually very similar in this problem identification step that helps create the point of view that you end up going to market with. How do you identify the big problem that you solve? Because it's not the fastest way to get work done. That's not the problem that we solve. And so how do you do this? This was my first six weeks or so on the job, was interviewing customers, board members, employees. I probably talked to 50, maybe closer to 70 different people and asked them three of the most basic questions you could ever think about, but led to some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had. Question number one, what problem do we solve? I talked to 70 people. I got 70 different answers. Question number two, who do we solve that problem for? I didn't get as many different answers.
Kyle Coleman [00:12:04]:
On this one. But I got a lot of different answers. So what problem do we solve? Who do we solve it for? What is the impact of solving that problem? It's like a 30 minute conversation with those simple, three simple questions. But it was really rich. And I have this spreadsheet now that's like all of my quasi market research that's helping me understand what do different people think about what we do. And then I was able to take all that, sit with it for a little while, meditate on it, and come up with a different approach that I didn't see across anything else. So I should also say one step is the interviews. The other step is doing deeper dives on anybody else that you see in the space.
Kyle Coleman [00:12:44]:
Hopefully not to copycat, but hopefully to go the other way on even this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:48]:
Slide is just really good. Like, when was the last time you just made a slide and screenshotted the four competitors in your industry and then just looked at everyone saying the same thing? It's like we get so in the weeds of tactics and it's like, no, no, actually the opportunity is the story. How do we say something differently? It's a great slide.
Kyle Coleman [00:13:04]:
100%. 100%. It was interesting exercise. And so the question that I had thinking back to what I said earlier, who's going to fund a project? It's not going to be the individual contributor that's using the solution. It's going to be the executive that's using the solution. What is the problem right now in AI, there's this hype cycle that we are all in. CEO calls an emergency board meeting, says we need an AI strategy. You get ChatGPT and you get ChatGPT and everybody's like, what do I do now? And then the AI strategy sucks and we go from hype cycle crashing down into the trough of disillusionment.
Kyle Coleman [00:13:43]:
Yeah, somebody knows it. Yeah, you read Forrester reports and that's where a lot of people are right now. Okay? So we need to get executives out of this trough of disillusionment. You know what's not going to get executives out of the trough of disillusionment? The fastest way to do work with generative AI, who cares? So I was thinking about this as like, what is the real business value of AI? And then maybe what is the real problem that we solve? Again, collating all the answers I had to this question. The real problem that we solved is that companies, their financial profiles are completely upside down right now. We got addicted to bringing on tools and hiring specialists and spending money for basically any problem that exists across the go to market engine. And there are a lot of problems and tasks and to dos and jobs to be done. And that has created the biggest problem that executives need to solve in 2024.
Kyle Coleman [00:14:39]:
And that problem is go to market bloat. It is the accumulation of resources that you have made that are under delivering, underperforming. If you solve this problem, Mr. CEO, Mrs. CRO, Mr. CMO, you will flip the script. You will run an attractive company to public investors, to private investors. That is the from to journey.
Kyle Coleman [00:15:03]:
That copier is going to take you on. It's going to eliminate this problem of go to market bloat so that you can achieve real sustainable velocity and run your business as an enduring business for as long as you're there. This is a made up phrase. It's not real. I made it up. Came out of my brain. For better or for worse. People see this and you all saw this.
Kyle Coleman [00:15:25]:
And I saw some people, they were like, what? Ah, oh, okay. In meetings now when I'm talking about this, when I'm on DG's pod and I'm talking about this, people hear it and they're like what? And then by the end they're like, oh, I get this. And then they start searching it and when they search go to market bloat, what do you think they see? They see us. And then other companies start using this phrase and then when people search the term, what do they see? They see us. And so we get to change the conversation. And probably most important, when we're on live calls with prospects or customers and we're introducing this platform narrative, our provocative point of view, architecting this from to journey. By the end of the call, they are saying this back to us and we're like, ding, ding, ding. This is a winner.
Kyle Coleman [00:16:13]:
It's new, it's different. It's what the category pirates call languaging. Taking language and manipulating it to your benefit so that you can own a word or phrase and then double and triple down on that phrase. And then everything that we do is going to stem from this big concept of go to market bloat in one form or another. Okay, so I had more in my interview deck, but I'm not going to show it to you. So that's step one, provocative point of view. Got to do that. It's the hardest thing to do.
Kyle Coleman [00:16:43]:
It takes time and energy and effort to do. It is worth doing. So do it right. If and when you do it right, then you can move on to the number Step number two.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:53]:
I also just one thing, I'd like it because you named it with a regular, like you made up the word. I think people go through this exercise and they try to come up with the term that they think, like Gartner wants them to use or Forrester or whatever. It's like, who cares? Like, build the company that the analysts have so many people ask him about that they have to go talk to. Call it GTM bloat, because you want to call it that, because that's what your customers are saying, not because you're trying to do it for some analyst validation.
Kyle Coleman [00:17:20]:
That's exactly right. I was talking to Mark Huber yesterday. User evidence. Where are you? Mark spilled coffee and then was too ashamed of himself to come back. Yeah, and he was telling me the stat that they did this research and they said that 54% of people, their first step is to go to, like, analyst report to learn about new technology. I was like, what? Who the hell are those people? Like, the same people that go to Barnes and Noble and like, get up the Consumer Reports magazine to like, buy a microwave. Like, who? Who the hell are. I cannot believe that there is again another category pirates concept here.
Kyle Coleman [00:17:53]:
There is a pretty hard line in the sand between native analogs that grew up in an analog world and get research from your trusted sources like Gartner and Forrester. And then there are native digitals that grew up in a digital world and do what Devin said and what many other people have said on stage yesterday was call a friend and be like, hey, have you heard of this company? Cool, thanks. And I optimize for the latter. I optimize for word of mouth. I want to make the conversations as easy as possible for people to have. I want to use language that is familiar but recasted in a way that I get to define. So anyway, okay, step number two, content operations. The half of creating content, of creating basically anything inside of marketing, is unbelievably and unnecessarily complex.
Kyle Coleman [00:18:43]:
I was talking to a head of marketing at some company and she was showing me her Monday.com or Asana, I can't remember. And it was the steps to create a blog post was 27 steps to create one blog post. And I was like, what the hell is this? Isn't it like, write, edit, publish, like, how did we get to 27? But if you look across and there's reasons for it, you've got design, you've got these copywriters, you got the promo emails to send, and you've Got all this other stuff. The point of it is, look at all of these processes and you as a leader, you as a person that is creating content, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your team to beat the friction out of that process. Every single gate that you see that slows something down, every hurdle that exists that you can remove, saves time, saves energy, saves cost, saves your team's time. And that's what burnout is, man. When people feel like they're doing the same thing and getting stuck and waiting three days for somebody to decide if the title should be ultimate versus Complete Guide, they're like, what is happening here? And so you have to beat the friction out of that process and move with more speed. That allows you to plan your attack and then attack the plan.
Kyle Coleman [00:19:56]:
And too often content teams in particular become entirely service oriented, super reactive, and they can't actually fulfill a plan because they don't actually have a plan to fulfill in the first place. It's this sort of chicken and egg situation. So if you can beat the friction out, that gives you the time, energy and bandwidth to create the plan and then you can go fulfill that plan. The goal here is to automate as much as you can, outsource as much as you can, and we'll talk about the AI impact here. But you cannot automate if you don't strategize first. If you don't have a great idea of what your provocative point of view is, if you don't have a great idea of what exceptional end piece output looks like, you can't automate stuff. You're skipping steps and you're going to end up with garbage. So you need that top line strategy.
Kyle Coleman [00:20:47]:
You need a really good idea of what is good SEO pillar content. What does a great customer story look like? What is good thought leadership? What's the format of that thought leadership? You need to have that meta structure in mind so that you can automate as much as possible, specifically with AI and then have it repeatable. So that's the content operations like really, truly have a plan and do whatever you can to ruthlessly attack that plan. It's similar to how salespeople, the best salespeople, approach their day. If you're just randomly doing random acts of marketing, you will fail. If you are intentionally doing intentional acts of marketing, you will succeed. That's what content operations is. And now we get to the $0 cac the flywheel component of this.
Kyle Coleman [00:21:30]:
There is a demand flywheel that you can create that is powered by everything that we just talked about. Every single thing that you do should be interwoven and interconnected and actually related to one another so that you can make it as easy for yourselves as possible to fulfill all the content you want to create. And more important, you create a consistent experience for your buyers. I don't know how many of you in here have purchased software like been on the purchasing side. Quite a few. Okay, I've purchased more than I care to admit. The experience that I almost always have is I see a thing that's compelling. I go to an event or read a piece of content or whatever it is, request a demo.
Kyle Coleman [00:22:11]:
The first conversation I have with the SDR or the AE is completely siloed off from that piece of content that I was in, the event I went to or something like that. And then the first call that I have with the account executive is like the first call with the SDR never happened. I'm like, what is going on here? Like, they don't know how I came in, they don't know what I care about, they don't know how to sell to me. And I end up having to do this like dog and pony show, jumping through hoops just to get a demo. It doesn't make any sense. And so we need, we as marketing go to market leaders need to optimize for the buyer. We need to create a consistent buying experience and this really helps do that. So let's start in the top at noon here with the content that we create.
Kyle Coleman [00:22:50]:
All right, we just talked about that. We have our provocative point of view. We have our content operations plan. Awesome that the goal of content, one of the goals is to generate web traffic. That was one of the metrics on Devin's slide. If part of our content plan is organic social, which it should be, that should influence organic traffic. When we get people to our site, our site has to be optimized for conversion. You need to build in these conversion points that hopefully, hopefully if you're doing this well, are related to the reason that they're on your site to begin with.
Kyle Coleman [00:23:21]:
So if somebody sees a LinkedIn post that I do and it's about automated contact creation using AI versus using a zoom info or something like that, then they come to my website, they damn well better see something that has that operational use case in mind and there should be a conversion point for them that is an on demand event or some sort of high value content or something like that that extends or double clicks on the use case they saw on LinkedIn. This is hard to do. It is Worth doing. If you do that well, that is how you'll get inbound leads. That is how you'll get people raising their hand saying this makes sense. I am interested. You are telling me in depth of what I care about and I want to learn more. That then creates demos on that demo.
Kyle Coleman [00:24:03]:
You better talk to them about the reason that they are there. They came through this contact creation use case. We need to demo them the contact creation use case. And I know that sounds super simple, I promise you it doesn't happen most of the time. So you need to make sure that the information, the reason that the person is here, the info that you get on them is handed off to the sales team so that on the demo they're getting the information that they came to you for. If you do that well, you will have a solutions person on that call presenting that use case. The solutions people have the content in their heads that I've never figured out how to get out of their heads and onto paper until now. The solutions people know your product, know your solution, know the use cases better than pretty much anybody inside of your company.
Kyle Coleman [00:24:49]:
And yet getting them to write a blog post is impossible. They don't have time, they're too busy. But all the calls that they do create transcripts, if you don't have a call recording software, they're like a dollar get one. It's like they're so cheap you don't have to go the gong route and pay the premiums and all the rest. I think gong is the best. But nevertheless get a call recording software so that you have the transcript now of how the solutions person presented that use case. That transcript then becomes content and the flywheel is self reinforcing and the flywheel spins. Especially if this content creation step is AI generated, AI powered I should say.
Kyle Coleman [00:25:29]:
So how do you actually do this? How do you put this mindset? Assuming that you buy into at least some of this, how do you put this into practice? There are way more content types than this. Of course in my mind there are a couple or a few that are non negotiable. You have to be doing thought leadership for all the reasons that Devin just talked about and he was talking about organic, social, of course. But the same thing applies to your website and what you're pitching to outlets and all the rest. You have to be thought leaders. If you are not thought leaders, you are a commodity. You do not want to be a commodity. If you are a commodity, you play the race to the bottom from a pricing standpoint and that is no fun.
Kyle Coleman [00:26:06]:
So thought leadership is critical. Critical, non negotiable. Number two, product use cases. Believe it or not, people care about your product and its features. And I know that we as marketers hate talking about features, but people want to learn about what your product actually does. Bringing to life all the different use cases of your product is non negotiable. Especially as we just talked about, if you're leveraging your solutions, teams and their brains to bring that to life in an always on sort of way. Number three, SEO.
Kyle Coleman [00:26:36]:
SEO is not dead. My friends from Web Mechanics are here. We've talked about this. SEO is far from dead. Everybody is going to be searching things. The way that people search for stuff changes. Of course it evolves. But you need to have the content that's going to meet people where they are based on what they're searching for.
Kyle Coleman [00:26:52]:
And so non negotiable. You have to have SEO optimized content. We'll talk about a little spin on SEO here in a second. I got to keep moving though. Okay, so real thoughts from real subject matter experts. I talked about how to make this flywheel spin and going from the content creation all the way through web traffic and conversions and all the rest demos to do this in a a more programmatic way. It's very similar to what Devin mentioned where you're setting up an interview with a subject matter expert every week, twice a week, however much bandwidth you have. Now, the important thing here is that you want to always start with your point of view.
Kyle Coleman [00:27:32]:
When you're writing this content and you have this thought leadership, you want to bring that point of view to life. When I'm interviewing my CEO about what he's seeing and hearing and talking to customers about and going to events on, we are always, always talking about go to market AI. That's a category that we are creating. Go to market bloat, that's a problem we're solving. And go to market velocity, which is the future that we're architecting. So those three little phrases are always peppered in to the questions that I'm asking and to his responses. The beauty of this is this is like PR training. Internally, I'm getting to work with Paul, my CEO.
Kyle Coleman [00:28:07]:
I'm teaching him how to answer and how to speak to our category, vision and all the rest. So start with your pov. Identify the people inside your company that you want to be thought leaders. Some of them are your executives. Some of them may be just the power users of your product. Our product that does a lot of things. One of the main things is content creation. Our head of content strategy is a very important SME for thought leadership because his workflows are the workflows that we sell.
Kyle Coleman [00:28:32]:
So your thought leaders don't always need to be C level execs. Create this cadence for your interviews. Do not do Mondays. Do not do Mondays like Garfield. Record those interviews. Don't just take notes, record them. Because AI will create transcripts. So again, like use whatever fireflies or whatever fathom.
Kyle Coleman [00:28:53]:
They're all super cheap. Choose one of them. Record the interview. Now I'll show you what an AI. What I mean by AI workflow, AI workflow does not mean copy paste into ChatGPT and say write me a blog post because that will suck. What an AI workflow is is a codification of your process. What would you do to turn that transcript into the written word? And you can use AI for the multi step way of thinking about that so that you can do that with a click of a button. You define the process once and you reuse it over and over and over again.
Kyle Coleman [00:29:23]:
That is the power of AI. That is how you can solve this problem of like not knowing how to use, how to prompt. You don't need to be a prompting expert, you need to be a process expert, a domain expert. And you need to codify that process using AI. We'll talk about that a little bit more. That creates the long form content, that creates the promotional content. And then you can maintain the speaker's voice because you can train the AI to sound like the speaker, to maintain direct quotes, to analyze their speaking voice, to learn about it. The AI doesn't have its own voice.
Kyle Coleman [00:29:51]:
It's easier to train than a human. Like an external writer would be. This process, by the way, you know Dave mentioned like PR agencies that you have on a 20k a month retainer, this is the process that they would do that a PR agency would do if they're creating content to pitch. The process though with a PR agency is like, okay, we're going to interview the CEO for an hour and then the first draft will come back in two weeks and then the CEO is going to take two weeks to review it. And then six weeks later we might have something that we can go pitch to agent. This takes 60 seconds to run through the workflow and then you get your first draft. That's the value here. When we talk about velocity, that's velocity.
Kyle Coleman [00:30:26]:
When we talk about go to market bloat, we're talking about the 20k a month. You don't need to spend on a PR agency for this use case. Okay, use cases, same sort of thing. I'm not going to beat this one to death because I only have a minute here. We want to make sure that the use cases that we're architecting are supporting the from to journey that we promised our audience. What is the pain that they're experiencing now? What is the future that we're going to architect for them? We want to know who these SMEs are that have a deep understanding of our use cases. As I said, often that's your solutions team. Get the transcripts from sales calls.
Kyle Coleman [00:30:57]:
You don't have to pin these people down for interviews. They're on interviews every day called sales meetings. So get the transcripts from those meetings. Use that. You can run those transcripts through a different set of AI workflows in order to get all the content that you need for your blog post, for social, for whatever it is. Now this is where we start to think more in a flywheel sort of way, because this is more direct. It's going to have more overlap with the messaging that's on your website and that you're doing events around things like that. Analyze the content that is getting hits on LinkedIn, that's ranking for social, that's driving traffic to your site, whatever it is, and then do live events on those topics.
Kyle Coleman [00:31:36]:
It's not rocket science here, but this is what you want to do. People are interested in this use case. Bring it to life for them. Why brute force 1 to 1 demos when you can do 1 to 100 demos in the form of a webinar. And then guess what happens? You run that event, that event creates a transcript, that transcript then becomes more content and the flywheel continues to turn. Last thing here is for SEO, there are keywords that you have to rank for. You need to understand what those keywords are. This is the SEO strategy that you cannot outsource to AI.
Kyle Coleman [00:32:08]:
You need to be thoughtful about this. You need to know the keywords that matter so that we can create those briefs around AI. Now, the thing we're going to do a little bit differently here is we're going to do what's called damning the demand. That's dam without an n, that's dam like a beaver. And what this means is if people are searching, as an example for content creation, AI content creation, that's a keyword I want to rank for. But when they come to and click through that content, you know we're for page one, Google searches and all the rest. They're going to come to our website and basically we're going to say you thought you wanted AI for content creation, but what you really want is go to market AI and here's why. And so the content that we have is going to rank really well for AI for content creation.
Kyle Coleman [00:32:53]:
But we're recasting it through our point of view on our value prop. And that is damning the demand. It's taking demand that already exists and it's redirecting it for your solution and your point of view. SEO is perfect vehicle to do this. Perfect vehicle. Same sort of thing here. Architect those conversion points, analyze what's getting traffic, what's converting, turn that into events, turn it into additional content. And the flywheel is virtuous.
Kyle Coleman [00:33:19]:
It fulfills. There are a lot of con. I've talked a lot about conversion points. I don't want to be too hand wavy about that. It's hard to do. Again, if this stuff were easy, everybody would be doing it already. It's not easy. It is hard.
Kyle Coleman [00:33:29]:
But some things that you can think about for how to capture that demand on your website. When you go to copy AI, you will always, always see some little banner that is promoting an event, either upcoming or on demand that is relevant to you. Where, you know, we got the experimentation software running in the background. We do Persona matching and all the rest. And then we offer up an event that you might find interesting. People sign up for that stuff. People watch on demand events. Product tours are really important.
Kyle Coleman [00:34:01]:
If you're showing this use case around your product, you have to bring it to life with a product tour. Seeing is believing. In many cases, product tours really help. They really help. You don't always need to like have it totally gated. Give some technology people product people are kind of paranoid about that. They're like, oh, I don't want people to see our UI. Like what? Come on.
Kyle Coleman [00:34:21]:
Like it's 2024. Let people see it, let them click through. We want to make sure that website experience are personalized. Subscribe to blog Most blogs do not have a subscribe option. I can't understand why, like if you're driving high value traffic to the blog, make sure that there's a subscription point. And then finally, one of the calls to action that we always want to have is follow our subject matter experts on LinkedIn because they're post. If you like this content, you're going to like the content that they're posting. All of these things can be always on.
Kyle Coleman [00:34:48]:
They take elbow grease to set up like any good process it takes time to set up initially. If you set that up once, you can run it in perpetuity. That's the beauty of this kind of way of thinking. So I've talked a lot about workflows. I'm three minutes over. Dave is really staring at me. I wanted to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:04]:
It was on my phone. I'm literally texting our team because it's like, this is the leverage that you create. I mean, we. No joke, like, this event is basically the flywheel of what you talked about. Powered by AI, Right? I talked about it yesterday. The reason the content has been good at this event is because we vetted you all not by having you practice your slides, but each one of you was on the podcast at some point in the last year. We know which topics people like. Each one of those podcasts, we get a transcript.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:27]:
Danielle takes those transcripts and turns them into great newsletters with her own voice. Right. All that stuff can become social content. The top of the funnel is driven by, like, what we write on LinkedIn. Gives us signals. Oh, we know. When we write about abm, that blows up. We should do a webinar about abm.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:41]:
It's the whole thing. And I just love this topic. And I've been texting about it this whole time.
Kyle Coleman [00:35:45]:
Beautiful. All right, love to hear that. Okay, so a couple different things here for you. This little link will take you to a workflow that takes a SEO keyword, takes a value prop of yours, and then creates a long form piece of content. It's out of the box. It needs customization, it needs your best practices on how to write good SEO content. But just to kind of prove to you that this isn't just smoke and mirrors, you can check this out. You can use this.
Kyle Coleman [00:36:07]:
Let me know. We're all consumption based. If you end up signing up for an account and you want some credits to play around with, just message me on LinkedIn. I'll hook you up. So that's number one. Number two, what I think is much higher value workflow is this one that takes a transcript and turns it into a 800-1200 word use case that starts with a problem definition and then brainstorm some pain points. Benefits of solving that solution, writes the article and then just for fun, translates it into Spanish and French. Because, like, why not? This is generative AI.
Kyle Coleman [00:36:38]:
It's cool. So this one's pretty cool too. If you have any questions, if I can be helpful to you in any way, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:47]:
We got a couple minutes for Questions? I'm all about the meta lessons. How many people work in B2B?
Kyle Coleman [00:36:57]:
All right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:57]:
Obviously. How many people work in like B2B SaaS? B2B Tech. Okay. Software.
Kyle Coleman [00:37:01]:
Okay.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:02]:
One of the biggest gaps I think I see so many companies in the main, the only call to action they ever have is sign up for our product for free or get a demo.
Q&A [00:37:09]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:10]:
What Kyle just showed you is like this middle of the funnel tool where he's giving you something away for free, but it's really valuable for you. And I think this is where a lot of companies struggle. This is like, how do we grow demos? How do we drive demos? It's like it's not just about sending more ads to demos. Nobody's going to go from a LinkedIn ad to a demo. But you can build these middle of the funnel tools, like whether you're, you know, SEO or whatever your tool is. Hey, go to our website, try your thing for free. You know, HubSpot was the OG of this with like website grader.
Kyle Coleman [00:37:35]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:36]:
I would be thinking about how can you build these middle of the funnel tools. I think it's a great marketing strategy. Anyway, any questions for Kyle before we get into break? Yeah, Will. Oh, the human copywriter versus the AI copywriter. Well, this is one of the best B2B SaaS copywriters, by the way. Don't all hire him at once, but.
Kyle Coleman [00:37:52]:
Thank you, Dave.
Q&A [00:37:53]:
Well, first of all, when you put up the slide with the four websites that sounded exactly the same, I was like, boom, I'm going to love this presentation. It was awesome. I wanted to ask you, when you arrived at gtmbloat, getting to those ideas is great, but you also then need buy in for those ideas. Right. To reorient the messaging, everything around it. What steps did you take to get that buy in?
Kyle Coleman [00:38:15]:
That was part of the interview process. Will. I wasn't going to join a company that didn't believe in the power of provocative point of view and category creation. And that was why I architected the exercise in the interview to be about category creation. So I was like, this is what I would do for you and if you like it, great. And if not, I would rather know now than after I sign. So they were bought in before I started.
Q&A [00:38:38]:
Hey, Kyle, what's up? Hey, quick question for you. It's a little weird. It's okay if you can't answer it. What if you're doing like a two sided marketplace with like the terminology and the stuff you're using? It's still B2B but my GTM votes, I thought I was like, oh, that's really good. How would you do something like that if you're doing it two sided?
Kyle Coleman [00:38:56]:
It's a good question, Frank. I've never worked at a two sided marketplace before, but I think the exercise is the same, which is like, what are the problems that we solve for both sides? And try and really understand those three questions that I asked, the problems we solve for whom and the impact. And if you can understand that, then hopefully you can find some means of connecting the dots for everybody and having some problem definition. Probably two different problems on each side. I don't know. That's a good question.
Q&A [00:39:19]:
Okay, cool. Thank you.
Kyle Coleman [00:39:20]:
Yeah, sorry.
Q&A [00:39:20]:
Yeah, that's okay. Hey Kyle.
Kyle Coleman [00:39:22]:
Hey.
Q&A [00:39:23]:
Category. Is that something that everyone typically agrees marketing owns? Because sometimes I found that there are executives that feel like that goes beyond marketing or it's really more of a GDM strategy thing. Who are we selling to or what position are we in the market? Or are we leaving a certain category to create our own that has ramifications that sometimes reaches far beyond marketing. And if it is mainly marketing, how do you kind of steer that conversation where it needs to go?
Kyle Coleman [00:39:54]:
It's a really good question. Category creation is a company level initiative. It has to have product buy in. It has to have leadership buy in. It has to have company strategy buy in. Without those legs of the triangle, the category can't work. But you might notice in this presentation, I did not talk about category creation. I talked about the provocative point of view.
Kyle Coleman [00:40:12]:
Because no matter what the buy in is of the category, whether we create a new one or whether the analysts create it for us, or whether the ecosystem will create it, like, fine, but at the very least, we need to own our point of view. We need to own that thinking. And if a new category falls out of that, cool, let's attack it together. But if not, at the very least we have differentiated messaging and that is fully owned by marketing.
Q&A [00:40:34]:
Chris AT Sales Message. So we're going through a rebrand process currently, like changing the name and getting sort of this vertical alignment. So taking going from a rebrand, right, and how you guys went like I took a look at your website and just it seems to be very structured in this new approach. Like what was your process to go through going from sort of that new vision for it and then making it real from sort of a content structure that you know, is obviously live on the site now.
Kyle Coleman [00:41:07]:
Yeah, great question. So there's a. I think I have like 30 different pages of notion Docs that are outlining all of this content strategy, like it's what you see on the website is 2% of all of the thinking that has gone into this. And so it's a distillation exercise. But there's a. The name, is it storybrand? Yeah, Donald Miller. Storybrand was really influential because it creates a really good structure for how you think about kind of category creation through a different lens. He doesn't call it that, but it's like, what's the hero journey? What's the villain? How are you the guide? And he talks about Star wars and how you can make that.
Kyle Coleman [00:41:41]:
So anyway, there's a lot of different ways that you can architect the story that you bring to life. Once you land on the language, like the pillars of the language, I've been rattling them off the go to market AI, go to market bloat, go to market velocity. Once you have those pillars, it starts to make sense from a web structure like sitemap kind of standpoint where you're like, oh, here's how we need to bring this to life in this product stream and there are use cases stream. Here's how we need to bring it to life here. And so it just starts to fall into place. But it takes a ton of time and effort and energy and there's no shortcut.
Q&A [00:42:11]:
Like last question is choosing category. It seems to be very difficult and.
Kyle Coleman [00:42:18]:
It may not work out.
Q&A [00:42:19]:
Yeah, so why choose like category creation versus existing space.
Kyle Coleman [00:42:25]:
Yeah, so why choose category creation? Was the question. I was shocked that the category of go to market AI didn't exist. Shocked because it will exist whether we create it or not. Like right now everybody is so point solution focused. I couldn't believe it. It's like a no brainer to me that if we have a platform that solves sales and marketing and ops and CS and account management, use cases like why not go bigger and define the AI strategy as solving everything for go to market. So for me it was somewhat obvious because it was such a missing piece of the market and the organic demand that we get from that keyword search in particular is off the charts. So like somewhat substantiated so far.
Kyle Coleman [00:43:03]:
And the Google searches of that term go to market AI have been increasing month over month for the last eight months, which is like also pretty encouraging. So for me it was a pretty clear gap. Nobody had claimed it. There was a podcast called it that qualified runs. That was it.
Q&A [00:43:17]:
How do you stay the course when you're making that decision to create a category versus leaning into what Your customers are already saying about you at seven ships. One of the things that we did is we tried to develop work site conversational AI. So very similar. We tried to develop workforce management platform. It didn't land and then we ended up right back to restaurant scheduling software, which is how people were searching for us and finding us. We serviced SMB, so we're not talking to marketers who like talk about things and then create a conversation. Yeah, so like we abandoned it frankly, like, and we went back to like what was profitable and working. Was there a point when you were developing gdmbload and just it wasn't clicking and you were starting to like, maybe try to go back to a more traditional approach or like, how would you advise to stay the course? I guess is my question.
Kyle Coleman [00:43:58]:
Yeah, so thankfully that hasn't, that hasn't started happening at Copy yet. So we'll see. Maybe we'll have some reservations about what we've decided to do, but this is why the point of view is more important than the category name, in my opinion. So if you are really intentional about what that point of view is and the language that you're using to architect the problem and architect the solution, like, that's what matters most. The name of the category is like, it's not as relevant. It's not as relevant as everybody thinks it is. So you can still have that product that and call the product whatever you want. You can still have the SEO and all the rest.
Kyle Coleman [00:44:31]:
We right now at copy AI are in this adolescence going from this PLG app that has 17 million users to being a B2B enterprise, top down like platform. So we still want to keep that traffic on for the people that are coming to us for copywriting stuff, but we want to divert their attention to a bigger story, which is, hey, this isn't just for copywriting, this is for something bigger.
Q&A [00:44:54]:
Hey, Kyle Dmitri, big process guy. So slightly different question from the rest. How do you deal with people who are like allergic to process? How do you get them on board?
Kyle Coleman [00:45:04]:
Yeah, what's who inside the company are we talking about?
Q&A [00:45:08]:
I don't know.
Q&A [00:45:09]:
In my own business, I deal with a lot of people. Like I help instill processes and build systems and automate and do a lot of what you're talking about. So this was super helpful and super relevant. But like I found a lot of smaller B2B is just like, no, we just want to run, we just want to go and we want to break things. And then they realize they're the ones that are Getting in their own way.
Kyle Coleman [00:45:26]:
Yeah, well, it's understandable because it seems easier to just run. But the problem is if you're doing that, you're running, you're sprinting, and like toddlers in just, like, whatever direction you happen to be facing, like, that's not actually useful. And so you want to, like, if you can tell the story of, hey, the purpose of spending an hour or two getting this process down is so that we can run with velocity in the right direction. And so you just have to, I think, like many things when you're overcoming those sorts of objections, you just have to kind of do it yourself and prove it. Like, hey, we processitized this stream and we're creating five times as much content, and it's generating this many more impressions and results and leads and all the rest. What if we did this for all these other streams? Easier said than done. Hey, Kyle, Max here. I love the talk.
Kyle Coleman [00:46:11]:
I'm wondering, now that you're sort of going bigger or trying to go bigger with the whole proposition, will you also change the name? Good question. We, as somebody was Amrita. Where is she? She was asking me the same question last night. So copy AI we're marketers, so when we think about copy, we think about copywriting. We marketers are not normal. Most people think about copy as, like, replicate the actual definition of copy. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to lean into, like, more of that. Like, replicate your top performers, replicate your best practices, all of those sorts of things.
Kyle Coleman [00:46:43]:
So, like, hasn't been too much of an issue so far. We'll see. We'll see. I think, again, like, if people know us for the problem that we solve, that's what matters most. Like, and the example that I'll give, and my cheekier answer to that is, like, Salesforce doesn't just do sales stuff, and they got away with it. So, like, I think the problem that you solve is way more important.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:05]:
That's kind of a gangster move. You just change what the company means. No, we help you copy all of the.
Kyle Coleman [00:47:10]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:11]:
Give it up for Kyle. That was great, man. Great job.
Q&A [00:47:13]:
Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:14]:
Really good.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:21]:
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:24]:
You know what?
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:25]:
I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review, because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five. And you can go and check that out instead of leaving a rating or review. Go check it out right now on our website exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing and there's no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:10]:
It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.