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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 (00:21)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Demand Geniuses podcast. I'm here today with Jamie Pagan. I've known Jamie for quite a while. I've been pretty excited for this episode, actually. So Jamie spent the last year or so as director of brand and marketing at Dealfront, where his content strategy is one of the most ambitious and exciting ones that I'm seeing. So Jamie, I'm pretty excited to get into that with you. Hello.
Jamie (00:45)
Yeah, high expectations of this conversation now with that introduction. No, it's good to be on the other end of a podcast. I think I do a lot of that myself, but always in your position asking the questions. So it's nice to actually just sit back and kind of be asked questions for once. So I'm looking forward to it.
Tom Rudnai (01:04)
It's harder on your side now. You have to actually do the work now. You don't just ask a question and sit back with your drink.
Jamie (01:09)
Well, if I don't know the answers to some of these questions, there's bigger problems. no, very, very good questions.
Tom Rudnai (01:13)
It's a good way to answer questions as well, aren't
you? what people don't know is that the last time we did this, I was on your podcast back when you were at Celigent. So it's nice to turn the tables.
Jamie (01:27)
Yeah, it's a it's, said I don't do it very often. I'd like to do more of it. So maybe this is the start of the start of many. But yeah, like I said, I'm looking forward to I'm looking forward to being asked questions for once rather than having to constantly look at things and try and keep it on time and on tracks and no pressure for you. But I'm looking forward to.
Tom Rudnai (01:48)
was going to say you can give me notes at the end. I think this is the most pressurised I've ever felt doing this.
Jamie (01:53)
Yeah, you'll
you start sweating from places you didn't know you could sweat just because of the intensity of the conversation. But is that why you're wearing black?
Tom Rudnai (01:59)
Already am I didn't want to admit it
That's why that exactly I've learned I do podcasts and grow t-shirts it's not good Anyway, let's get into it. So Jamie before we go go and I want to hear lots about what you're doing at Dealfront But I guess first you want to give me a little bit of an intro into into your background and what's kind of led you to this point
Jamie (02:07)
No, it does not work.
Okay, my background. So I've been in marketing since I graduated, which is a very, long time ago, back in 2014. a good, good, mean, what was that 11, 12 years, something like that. But SAS for the last three and a half, four years, which I think has probably been the most enjoyable, challenging, exciting roller coaster portion of the career. And that's where, that's where we first first met at SelleGence.
Tom Rudnai (02:49)
what is it that you particularly enjoy about what you're doing now?
and why have you kind of found your home?
Jamie (02:57)
I think the main draw for me with SAS is the pace and the pressure. I would describe it almost as a pressure cooker environment of if you enjoy the pressure and if you enjoy the slight baseline anxiety that comes with it. I think in the right amounts, it's very, very, very, very healthy and very, good for development and growth. there's actually
data to show that if you are stretched 10%, that is optimal for motivation and performance. I think it's called like the motivation performance bell curve or something like that. and I think SAS you are, the expectation is from SAS companies is that you are, you're always growing, not often with the same amount of money or less resources than maybe you, you need sometimes. So it's just a, an environment where you are able to
Tom Rudnai (03:31)
Yes.
Jamie (03:49)
learn, develop, be challenged and grow very, very quickly. So the four years that I've done in SAS, I've learned more than the whole eight years that came before that. And I'd like to continue that trajectory of learning because I think it's the best place for me to be long term in terms of becoming a developed marketer, let's say.
Tom Rudnai (04:09)
No, I'm with you. mean, that's why I fell in love with it a little bit. You're just forced constantly out of your comfort zone because you are almost by definition, you're scaling up rates that aren't natural, right? You're kind of doping as a way to do that. You typically rely on PE, VC funding or something like that. And that's what allows you to go. But it means that any processes, any plan is always gonna get strained to breaking point. And so it kind of relies on people who can thrive in that world.
Jamie (04:33)
Mm.
Doping
off that, you know, that's a very interesting way of putting it and it is quite a good metaphor for the VC or PE backing the injection of something to get you to a point that you can't reach naturally or organically. Very good metaphor. I've not heard that before, but that's yeah, it's very, true. I think, like I said, it's not for everyone. But if you can, if you do enjoy being slightly
out of your depth and you enjoy that sort of challenge, then it's the place for you.
Tom Rudnai (05:03)
Yeah.
So speaking of out of our depth and being stressed, I'm pretty fascinated by what you're doing at Dealfront. I took one look at the website before this and there's the resources section. I think three things have new, one thing has coming soon. So I think it shows the rate that you guys are going at there. Talk me through a little bit, introduce us to what you're building as a director of branding content at Dealfront and why.
Jamie (05:31)
Okay. So I came into the business, um, just got out to a year ago now, which is what we talked about with SAS is absolutely flown by and I've learned a hell of a lot in that time. Um, but I was, I was brought into the business to really level up the content game, um, based on the agreed belief between myself and, uh, our VP Sam that content plays a huge part in the modern, um, buyer process, modern buying journey. Um, we run, um,
as of more recently, I guess, a demand generation approach, demand generation strategy. So we're aiming to build long-term trust or long-term brand awareness through trust rapport. And we want to educate the market. We're working on the 95.5. So we're targeting the 95%. So everything that I've done in the last, say, six to nine months, if you take out the onboarding part of joining Dealfront.
has been creating that content engine, which we switched on roughly December, January, with all the new initiatives that you've just touched on there. All of which are to support the long-term brand awareness, building trust, and targeting the 95 % of the market who don't currently know who we are or aren't currently in market. So that's like very, very top level. That's why you're seeing a lot of new things, new shiny things.
and that launched in the last two or three months.
Tom Rudnai (06:56)
Nice. then, so how big is the team that's working on this then? And talk us through what a couple of the different, the different kind of content initiatives that you've got going on.
Jamie (07:06)
So we have two halves to my team. We have the content sort of management half, which for most people I would describe as project management. They manage projects through the business, a project being a piece of content. And then we have the other half of my team, which is what I call at the studio.
treat that like a design agency or think of it like a design agency. So inside of the studio, we have a designer, Igor, we have a guy who focuses on video, Patrick, we have Becky, content writer, we've got a web manager starting next month, and we've got some web developers in there as well, external agency. They're our studio. They bring things to life. They bring content to life. The content managers are the ones who ideate, strategize,
manage, plan, get that piece of content through the pipeline to the point from ideation to release. So that's kind of like the structure of the team. We, we kind it's kind of run, if you think of it like an external agency. the content managers use the studio like an agency. Our content, content managers is like in the way that we brief things and the way we manage as if you were briefing an external agency.
which enables us to be very, very fluid, flexible and scalable. We're able to put out a lot of content on the topic of a lot of content. The two big ones that we touched on that launched recently, December we launched Playbooks, Plays Playbooks, which is essentially workflows, step-by-step guides on strategies and tactics that will help you in going to market in SaaS.
So it's basically, if you think about a sales reps or a marketing professionals day to day, a problem that they have to deal with every single day, we show them how they can overcome that problem with a little bit of product stuff in there as well. So we show you how to do it manually, and then we show you how you can do it with the Dealfront platform. So that's playbooks, step-by-step guides, we hand hold you through problems that you're trying to solve. And then stream, which is probably the more out the
box content is quite literally exactly what it says on the tin. It's a streaming platform. The best comparison I can give is Netflix and YouTube have a baby, you get stream, but it's for B2B content. So stream is our own bespoke streaming platform. You can go on there and you will see various series. You click into a series and you've got seasons and episodes. So we're producing Netflix style content.
for our audience with the aim of upskilling, educating, entertaining, like we want to make people laugh. And there's almost no product element in that stream platform whatsoever. It's all about added value rather than talking about products. So those are the two chunky bits, Playbooks and Stream as the two sort of big releases over the last two months, let's say.
Tom Rudnai (09:49)
Yeah, okay. And there's a load of stuff that I want to get into about that. I guess a good first question is like, did you say particularly stream, which I've not come across a lot of people wanting to do that before I've come across people talking about where we want to be a media company, right? Where we want our content team to operate as a media branch of this company. And it always seems to rationalize back to they just produce content. I've seen you guys have really stuck to that kind of concept of making an independent streaming platform. Like why did you decide to go down that
route and break away from the traditional playbook.
Jamie (10:22)
I think when we actually were, when I briefed in this sub brand, like we call it a sub brand because when you click into stream, it's a different look, it's a different feel, it's a different logo. It's stream by deal front. That is kind of the logo. The reason we wanted that is because stream, sort of in its, in its own right is a standalone thing where we wanted people in our ICP or our target market.
to just come for great content. We didn't want them to come because it's Dealfront's content or we didn't want them to come to go onto Dealfront's website and then click on a demo and find out more. The primary goal for Stream was just brand awareness through education, entertainment, insights, tactics, just good.
content. wanted to be known for good content and we didn't feel that that needed to be tied to the brand so heavily because I think then it has, it just has that air of like trying to drip feed product throughout and that's not what we wanted to do. So it was a very conscious decision for it to be a sub brand almost. Yes, there are little nods to deal front on there. There are, you know, we have a similar button style, a similar font, things like that, but
the colors are completely different, the logo is different. So it feels like you are on a bespoke streaming platform. In terms of, I guess, rationalizing that in the business, it was making sure that stream was part of a bigger picture. if we were just doing stream, you could argue that we're not really thinking about the full funnel. Like we're thinking about brand awareness and great people will look at.
for content but where does that sit in a broader strategy? So we do have things like playbooks and guides and the blog and we have the academy for people who are already customers so we've got content that sort of fits all areas of the funnel. Stream just happens to be this new shiny thing that sits at the top of it is typically one of the first things that people come across which was its primary goal.
Tom Rudnai (12:24)
Yeah, okay. And by the way, one thing you're going to learn about me posting podcasts is I'm awful at sticking to like a structure plan. But one thing that's really interesting about that, it's, what you're saying makes perfect sense, right? Cause you've said explicitly you're going after the 95%. And so there's no point talking about your product because it's not what they're thinking about in that, in that moment. Where, how have you gone about building hooks or have you within stream? what are those kinds of points that you try and transition people?
over into the more conventional funnel.
Jamie (12:56)
I guess for those listening, it depends how well-read you are on a demand generation strategy. So in terms of a demand generation strategy, we want to make people aware, but we're not going to force them further down the funnel until they're ready. I think the 95 % of people who aren't ready to buy, we can try as hard as we want to force them.
further down the funnel in the next two weeks. But if they're not ready to buy, they're not ready to buy. So our demand generation approach is just that we have content that's always on being served to our target market at all times. When they are ready to buy, when they are thinking about a new solution that we may or may not offer, they know who we are and they think,
Yeah, think they do sales intelligence actually, like I've been watching that sales stoic. Why don't I go and check out and see what they do? And we let them come to us in their own time. So in terms of how we try and I guess nurture people through further down the funnel, it's all just a series of considered internal links. So when they're on stream, we try and get them to sign up to newsletter for streams that we can repromote that.
We then try and get them to sign up to, I get like we have a general newsletter. We have a newsletter for playbooks. So if you only want to consume certain content, you can register for that. we distribute across like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, all of those channels. So we're trying to speak to people and we're trying to reach people wherever they're already comfortable. And if you do that for long enough, you know, you think about Darren Brown, I think when he did that, he did those experiments or
magic tricks where he subtly put the same number on t-shirts and billboards throughout someone's day and then when he asked him to think of a number it was that number it's kind of that methodology of like if you provide good content for six to nine months and it's just wherever people are and they're consuming it naturally you kind of they kind of naturally go down that funnel i'm not a huge believer in
Admittedly in the traditional funnel like a vertical funnel. I think it's more of a cycle now and we're just trying to Target people or attract people wherever they are in that in that cycle
Tom Rudnai (15:13)
And so we've kind of mentioned it, it's a pretty ambitious project that you've kind of ramped up to. From a team perspective, you said you've got, think it was four five different people on your studio team, a couple of strategists.
How did you get to the point where you are now, where you're able to produce always on content across different formats? Was it a gradual buildup? It sounds like it was more of a, turned it on one day, but.
Jamie (15:35)
Mmm.
No, no God, I wish. No. So when I joined the team, my team was basically formed from multiple two or three different teams. When I joined, it was merged into the content team. It was previously design. was previously like marketing communications, I think was the job titles they had or structure. So as of Q2 last year, it was completely new team. So there were no processes. There was nothing.
Tom Rudnai (15:57)
Yeah.
Jamie (16:06)
Now we had a sauna at the time, but it wasn't being used. I'm a huge advocate for workflow management tools. We use a sauna, so I live and breathe the sauna. But it was very, very much a gradual build. So full transparency, think. Q2, we didn't set any OKRs. Q3, I set the team's first OKRs, which didn't go to plan.
When I say they didn't go to plan, there was nothing wrong with the way in which we chose them, the process, the structure. We just set too many key results. So we were thinking about too much at the same time. So we got to the end of Q3 and we had started thinking about playbooks and we had started thinking about stream, but we hadn't really done as much as I was hoping we had done. We wanted to get things launched in Q4. So the original plan was by end of the year.
In reality, we got to Q4 and we're like, right, we've got a quarter to build all of this out. the team was sort of structured, restructured into those two halves. You've got the content side and the studio side. On the content side, at the time it was split into two, what I call pods, a pod just being a segmentation of a larger team into two smaller teams pods. Now each of those pods owned 50 % of the content engine.
Tom Rudnai (17:19)
it.
Jamie (17:24)
it was a, we split it at the time, traditional marketing and, sort of multimedia traditional being blog SEO success stories, written stuff, emails, more of the traditional old school stuff. And then content pod number two, focused on the multimedia. So stream podcasts, all that sort of stuff. So they had an equal split of work across those two pods. and then we started building out templates in Asana.
So I'm a sucker for a to-do list. I love a to-do list in all aspects of life, business and personal. So to give a little bit of context, a playbook takes around 45 separate subtasks to get it from the point of ideation to the point of distribution, fully distributed and scheduled. But that is everything from create Google Drive folder, draft, brief, brief, copywriter. Every single individual task is a separate task.
you have 45 to 50 of them, you will end up with a playbook. So we built all of that structure out in Q3 and Q4, which got us to the point in January or on January 1st for stream when we switched it on. an outsider's perspective, looked like we switched it on on January 1st. Look at this brand new streaming platform with four series on for launch. Each of those series had multiple episodes, but there was a lot of work that went into it in Q3 and Q4.
in readiness for 2025. And the goal was to have the tap switched on in December, January, ready for the year. So we had a full year in 2025 to build basically.
Tom Rudnai (19:00)
Yeah, okay. Well, and that was going to be one of my questions, Is how do you manage the kind of overwhelm of a team when you're trying to build something like this out from scratch? But it sounds like the building, like constructing it in a playbook way is pretty important if you're going to repeatably produce things, because it means that you can very predictably break down how long these things are going to take you to create.
Jamie (19:19)
Yeah. Yeah. So
every single one of our, of our content types as an individual Asana board, I call it a board. think Asana actually call them projects, but a board is just a blog or playbook. That's a board in my, in my eyes. So each one of our content types has a different board. We structure that in a Kanban style, left to right backlog in progress, complete stuck. Each of those boards has a series of templates based on whatever is produced in that board. Let's take playbooks as the example.
You would click plot, like add item. There's already a template there saying new playbook. You add that we get as many of these ideas into the pipeline as possible into the backlog. And then we just start prioritizing. So we go, which is the most important start working on it. And we get ticking. We just move it into the in progress column and we get ticking same for stream, albeit it's a different structure because it's a series rather than a single playbook. A series will have 10 episodes in which in their own right is basically a playbook because
Each episode has clips that are scheduled on five, six, seven, eight different channels. So you can see how the scale of a series is a lot bigger than playbooks. I think for the sales stoic, which is our hero series that launched on January 1st with Jack and Zach from We Have a Meeting. Over the course of 2025, that war to produce it will take 8,600 subtasks. So 8,600 individual tasks that someone has to do over the course of 2025.
to launch 366 episodes in one season. It's a year long season. So 8,600 tasks. shows like in terms of scalability, how do you manage that? And it literally is just every single time you do something on a task or a project, you tick a box and then everyone else knows exactly where you are. it's building blocks, it's structure, it's adhering to the structure, it's over communicate everything. Yes, you are spending a lot of your time logging.
how you're spending your time, but it's very, very scalable in terms of switching on that content engine, like turning on the tap, we're able to produce, think playbooks we've launched. I think we're gonna launch our 10th next week since, in January and February we'll have done 10 playbooks, stream series, we're launching daily episodes for the sale stoic, and we've now got...
five, six or seven series on the platform already. And each of those has five to 10 episodes in. It's very, very quickly scalable when you have this building block template rules sort of set up in Asana. And that's, that's my bread and butter. That's like from a structure and a management point of view. Everything is templates. Everything is SOPs, like a standard operating procedure. Everything is, there's a template document in Google that you make a copy of.
because you've done it 10 times before. it's just down to those building blocks, the prep work that we did in Q3 and Q4 that's meant we can keep up with the pace in 2025.
Tom Rudnai (22:12)
Have you noticed a kind of, is there almost a measurable uplift you've seen in the efficiency with which you can go and tick off all of these tasks? Because you said you've done it all before. Have you noticed the time for each one shrinking?
Jamie (22:24)
Yeah, so in the same way that a blog and organic search is compounding returns in terms of impressions and clicks in Google, you have compounding returns in the more that you produce a piece of content, the more efficient it gets. So we, the first play took way, way longer to produce than the last play. and every time we do a play, we think about how we can better optimize it. So we have a process weekly called Kaizen, which is a Japanese methodology of continuous improvement. It's basically.
each week come to the table with one single idea that could improve the way we do something. And it could be anything from change the way we name folders in Google Drive to I think we should change the recording software we use. So we're recording on Riverside. That's a very optimal piece of software to use. If you record on Google, you then have to do a lot of editing in something like Premiere Pro or Descript. Riverside, you can record, you can change the layout, you can
reduced the gaps between speaking. can speed it up. You can do AI voiceovers very, very quickly. So that would be a Kaizen is moving from an old tool to a new tool. So we do that on a weekly basis. have quarterly, lessons learned sort of processes. So every week and every quarter, we're continuously optimizing the production process to the point where the first month of the stream and the sales stoic, like producing the first
batch of that for launch on January 1st was a slog, like an absolute slog. No one in the business had ever operated in that way before in terms of producing a daily release across 10 different channels, you know, in multiple different formats in different languages. But after the first couple of months, it's now like you can kind of sit back and it kind of runs itself because it's just so ingrained in the team of how they produce each different series.
a new series now, we put a new partner series on stream yesterday, which is basically if we have any partners, like company level partners, Dealfront and another company, and they've got a series that we think would add value to our target market, we will put their series on stream as like a added value series that you can consume on stream. We could upload a whole series, 10 episodes in about four hours.
And that's just because we've got to the point where we know exactly how it works and where we need to get things from and the most efficient ways of doing things. So yeah, it gets quicker the more you do it.
Tom Rudnai (24:45)
one thing that I think is very interesting is that you've built this all...
or largely around kind of on platform, right? It's on your website. And I think that flies into the face a little bit of a trend people are seeing away from the website, the blog, things like that. But I know you are also very active on social. Talk to me about the role that different channels play in the distribution.
Jamie (25:04)
Yeah, so we've spoken pretty heavily about stream the platform, but stream the IP of stream is not the platform. The IP is the content. It's the series itself. It's the value that we're adding in the form of content. that stream, I love it. It looks amazing. It's a great platform. Very, very proud of it. But the bulk of consumption for our IP, stream IP, the content is actually the distribution channels. So
For the sale stoic, let's just take that as an example. It's our biggest series We distribute that on stream first and foremost. It then goes on spotify apple and amazon for podcasts It then goes on youtube and youtube shorts for video. It then goes on linkedin facebook x Tiktok for socials and email if you'd rather consume it So 10 plus channels where you can watch the sale stoic If you watch it on stream
Thank you. I love you. I'm super proud of stream, but me myself in the morning, I start my morning. I eat my breakfast with YouTube. So if I don't put content on YouTube, I'm not going to watch it. Like personally, if a brand puts content on a website, I don't go on a website and watch it. I watch it on YouTube. So we put it on every single channel. We already know people are comfortable and enjoy consuming content and wherever they want to watch it, I'm happy. So stream.
think less about the platform, even though that's where we started and that's the brand, the IP is the content itself. So the stream is the media house. So the stream is almost like the Warner Brothers. Like it's the production company behind the content. Yes, we have a streaming platform, but in all honesty, that's one of the smaller channels for us in stream, the biggest being YouTube. And I'm proud that YouTube's the biggest because that's one of my favorite networks.
But no, very, very much a multi-channel approach to stream.
Tom Rudnai (26:58)
Yeah, meeting your customers where they are and where they want to go. It reflects the kind of demand gen approach to it anyway, right? It centres on the customer, what they want. I'd imagine, I'm guessing, it's a pretty big distribution kind of workflow that you have. I think there's a lot behind that.
Jamie (27:01)
Exactly.
it's horrendous. It, it,
it's extreme. That's why, so the, in Asana, can break it sub task, or you can break a task into sections by putting like headers in the, in the task list. And we break it down into different stages. have like a briefing stage with multiple sub tasks. have a copywriting stage with multiple sub tasks, a recording stage, and then we have a distribution stage. The distribution one is at least 50 % of the whole ticket because
You have to distribute, have to upload it to stream. You have to upload it to Captivate, which is where we host our podcasts. Then you have to upload it to YouTube, LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, we use scheduling tools to make the social side of scheduling a lot more efficient, but the distribution is a good 50 % of each of the tasks, not necessarily in time, but certainly in the individual tasks needed to execute, deliver that piece of content. Distribution is a huge portion for us.
Tom Rudnai (28:08)
Yeah. And does AI play a role in that?
Jamie (28:12)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we use AI throughout. from a stream point of view, we use Opus for clips. So yes, we record with Riverside for a lot of stuff, some stuff we record in studio, but we use Opus for clips. We found that to be the best tool to turn long form content into, say, 60 second clips. So we do everything clip wise, 30 to 60 seconds.
The reason for that is you go over 60 seconds, you can't post it to YouTube shorts because that's a cap on the clip. I don't want to create two versions of the same clip, one for YouTube, one for LinkedIn. So we just do them all 30 to 50, 30 to 60 seconds. And that means we're covered on all social and all shorts. So we use Opus clips for that. Very, very good. Would highly recommend we use Riverside to transcribe. So this episode that we're recording now, you'll be able to transcribe that in Riverside. That transcript could then go into the chat GPT and you could do something else with it.
We actually put the raw transcript in on the streaming platform because if you think about how rich that is for SEO, a 90 minute conversation in transcript form is just keyword, keyword, keyword. We use ChatGBT or Gemini. We're not too particular on the tool. ChatGBT is personally for me is better for certain stuff. Gemini is better for other things. So we use AI search engines and say ChatGBT for YouTube keywords.
So for a series, we'll say, give me a set of YouTube keywords for the series description, or can we give me a set of YouTube keywords for the transcript? That's really, really good YouTube timestamps. can generate a 90 minute video timestamps for 90 minute video with AI like that. Previously, would have like a few years ago, you'd have had to watch the whole video and manually set timestamps. And then for certain series, we'll draw, if we've got 10 guests in one series,
will upload the transcript and say chat, give me an episode description, make sure it includes this, this and this. And then you do that in one chat window and it learns over the course of that series, how you structure things and how you want it. So we use AI a lot. it goes without saying we don't use AI to create, like long form written stuff. Like we have a copywriter for that, but AI is very, very good for, like I said, like generating keywords.
Giving you timestamps giving you a short episode description off the back of a 90 minute transcript. That's where it's great It's also great for ideation. So we'll say Here's We've got this idea and we want to produce a series about X Y & Z. Give me some like series names Like ideation like giving you ten names for a series stuff like that is good playbooks and
Our playbooks are structured so it's a video at the top and then long form written piece of content. We use a tool called Synthesia, which is an AI avatar video generator. Essentially it's you have a proper pre-recorded person sitting on a sofa, let's say, and then you upload your script to the backend of Synthesia and then it changes the mouth and the eyes and the facial expressions to give you a
pretty hyper realistic video of someone talking to the camera. Yeah, yeah, do you know what? We're not ashamed to admit it's AI. We don't care if people know it's for again, from a scalability point of view, it's very difficult to get people sitting in a room when you work remote to record 10 plays in two months. So we would love
Tom Rudnai (31:30)
I saw it earlier, I was having a look and I was trying to work out whether it was an AI for a little bit.
Jamie (31:53)
for people in Dealfront, we call them Dealfronters, to sit down on a sofa and talk through a play. They're only five minute videos, recording would be about seven, eight minutes. So we're gonna make our plays better by having a Dealfront employee record the play on a sofa or on a desk. But we're gonna do that in summer. I think we're gonna fly out to Germany and just get loads of people in there over two days and we're just gonna have like a content.
I don't know, content camp, maybe we'll call it like a content summer camp. And we're just going to film as much content as we can in two months. But Synthesia is fantastic because we can write a play, which is two and a half thousand words, two thousand words, whatever. We can put that play into Chachie PT and say, give me a five minute video script based on this playbook. Then we upload that script to Synthesia and we've got a five minute video of someone talking through the play and introducing it before you read it. And it like the results pretty good. It's very scalable. It's efficient. It's cheap.
we use chat GPT as well for carousel ideas. So we'll do a 2000 word piece and we'll say, give me a 10 slide carousel. That's great. The copyrights will proof it obviously, and then we'll come up with the design and the images that we do with it. But it's great for giving you like 10 slides for a carousel on LinkedIn. and then we use something called notebook LM, which is a Google tool. it's free at the minute. would they have a child's free? I don't know.
But you would essentially, you can essentially upload a long form piece of content, click generate, and then it will give you like a 20 minute podcast episode of two people talking. It's fantastic. If you haven't seen it, go and check it out. So we're actually planning for playbooks. This is a, this is an exclusive, exclusive scoop where, what we're going to do is turn our written playbooks into a stream series called revenue playbooks. and what we did was uploads.
one of our first playbooks into notebook LM and out the back came or out the other end came a 25 minute audio of two people talking about how this play like they were talking about how it forms plays part of the strategy and how you would execute it and what you could do. they had a it's really, really clever in that the AI is able to put jokes and like popular culture references in to the conversation. And it's it's
It's so good So we're actually gonna release that next quarter I think which will just be an audio version of a playbook to sit on stream Sit on podcasting platforms if you want to listen to the play rather than read it So yes loads of AI we love AI If it's used in the right way, especially for content stuff, it's it's very very good
Tom Rudnai (34:22)
Yeah, I mean the one thing that strikes me as you say all this is like you called it a content engine and I think that that's so true. You can tell the way that you construct it is super super modular and that makes everything repeatable, everything scalable. It's very easy to sub one module out and make continuous improvements to the overall engine. It makes me think of constructing an F1 car or something like that, which I think is a good bit of advice for anyone who's trying to think about starting something like this and maybe doesn't quite.
have the size of team or the resources is think about what you can start with but how can you make that modular in a way which you continually expand the complexity of what you do.
Jamie (35:00)
Yeah,
it's it's very, like, yeah, very, very scalable in that it's like, it's a bolt on bolt off sort of thing of you can, you can start with one block, right? One block being one type of content. and the templates are very, very similar across all of the types of contents of stream and playbooks are very similar in the way that they're produced. If you've only got capacity to do one, just do one and do it well. Once you've got it to the point that that's, you're able to execute that maybe one or two hours a day.
and you've got more time, add a second block, another cylinder, whatever you want to call it to the engine, if we're talking engine metaphors. Yeah, look at us go, look at us go. But speaking of the size of the team, I'm very, fortunate. I've got an amazing team who have been on the journey with me over the past year in terms of how much content we're able to produce.
Tom Rudnai (35:36)
I've done a couple of metaphors now.
Jamie (35:51)
But I, when you and I first met and I was at Selligence, I was a single marketer. was a solo marketer and I was able to release 70 episodes over 70 weeks of a podcast and distributed across all different platforms. Whilst all also doing my full time marketing job, like that was a added value series that I did and it was branded for the company, but it was very much. I needed to find the time on top of everything else that I was doing. So the process.
was built for Seligence and I just brought the process across, refined it and made it work for Dealfront. And it's just so that, it's just so happened that I've been able to add loads of other different content types in exactly the same way. So to your point, it's just, it's a very, very modular system, a very, very modular structure in Asana.
Tom Rudnai (36:34)
Yeah, basically think there's a saying I can't quite remember and this can go full podcasting, something about like hard times breed good processes on there. And the fact you had to do it in your spare time intelligence got you super efficient about it. And now you're like unleashed to do that at a new level.
Jamie (36:41)
Mm.
Yeah,
I would, I would love to, I think an optimization for the team would actually be to do slightly less now. So we've actually, we've identified a bit of a champagne problem in that we're posting too much on LinkedIn. So last year, we were posting maybe four, five times a week, and it was different days at different times of just whenever we had something, we posted it for January 1st. said, said,
My expectation to the team is I want two posts every single day, 366 days a year, one post minimum, ideally two. Now we're actually to the point where we could do three posts a day most days because we've got that much content. It's a champagne problem because when you've got that much content, how do you prioritize and how do you strategize what goes out and when. So what we're actually going to do for Q2, because I believe in quarter on quarter reporting month on month at a minimum, I don't go week on week.
so we want to run the first quarter, but once we get to Q2, we're actually going to drop to one post a day on LinkedIn instead of two or three. And what that means is actually we're, going to go to schedule something and realize something's already scheduled. And then the team will have to think, is this higher value to our audience than the one that's already scheduled? Yes. Delete the other one and put a new one in. If it's not, it either gets scheduled the next week. If that's already for you, then question, is it worth scheduling?
Tom Rudnai (37:57)
Hmm
Jamie (38:10)
Probably not, all right, just complete it, it's done. So we won't actually post everything on social in Q2, which is gonna be a weird change. You always think more is more, but it's not the case from LinkedIn's current algorithm. It's a bizarre algorithm to play with.
Tom Rudnai (38:25)
No, but yeah, it's a funny phase that you're in. tell me a little bit how how have you thought about measuring ROI of all of this and what have you seen the early results that that's interesting?
Jamie (38:37)
Very, very good question. So one of the most difficult things with a demand generation strategy as a whole is attributing revenue to demand generation. you'll probably know Dream Data, but for those who don't, they're an attribution company based out of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, one of the two. And what they released last week was a piece of data to suggest that
from the point of which you can measure the first impression. So the first point of brand awareness through an ad, the average time to close won now is 320 days and that's up from like 270, 290, whatever it was. So nearly a year, let's just say eight tenths of a year buying journey from the point at which they find out who you are from a LinkedIn impression to the point they close one. How on earth a marketer is meant to attribute revenue to the first
place that they saw you, you know, it's almost impossible task. All of these attribution platforms that they're data driven as a, sorry, their algorithm driven. So they are, they're hedging their bets on where they think the first attribution came. It's very, very difficult for them to actually have that because you don't have cookies for 320 days. Like the attribution window quite often drops off. go on a different device. They're in a different country, you know, whatever I might.
View a LinkedIn page on my laptop when I'm in Greece on holiday and then I start a new session on my phone. And you know, at what point did I go? I want to think about buying from them. So it's very, very difficult to attribute revenue, but there's, think there's a holistic way of thinking about it. You've got positive signals, which is the early signs that something is going the right way or the wrong way. So negative signals.
And then you've got actual attributed revenue that you have like we're very very fortunate to your front that we've got very very detailed Data and attribution that goes back We have legacy so we can compare it and we you know, we have a Holistic way of looking at it like we're able to attribute a certain million to organic search in that Attribution of them going to organic search
Did they find us on LinkedIn three months before they came to a spiral organic search? Maybe, but we can only truly attribute them to the place in which they first landed and then we have their journey. we have multiple things of positive signals for me is from a stream point of view or from a content point of view generally would be those media, media engine metrics. So are you reaching people and are you reaching more people month on month, quarter on quarter? Are you engaged?
or are these people engaged? So likes, comments, shares, click through, they all sound like old school vanity metrics, but the more, if you're getting more likes month on month and quarter on quarter relative to the amount you're producing, your audience is becoming more engaged. The content is of a higher quality or it's resonating more. So views like reach, engagement, we would have positive signals for the number of people who
view the blog and then go on to look at the rest of the website. we call like blog to general web or playbooks to general web. If they consume a blog and then they go to visit a product page, we track that percentage. If that's going up in the right direction or we're able to maintain a high conversion rate from stream to the rest of the website. Great. We look at watch time for stream. We look at watch percentage. So how much of the content did they consume? Is it
maintaining at a high level, is it growing? Let's hope it's not decreasing. So we look for those positive signals, which suggests we're doing something right. And then we pair that with the proper detailed attribution that we have in Tableau or Google Analytics, other tools like that. We're fortunate enough to have dream data as well. And then when you pair that with a overarching view of marketing of if we've got the same budget and we have the same team,
but we're generating more pipeline and we're closing more details, more deals, attributes marketing. We're doing something right. We might not be able to attribute that million extra we got to that piece of content. But if we've launched two new initiatives in that year, but we've had the same budget in the same team, logically common sense is we've done something different that's yielded better results.
Tom Rudnai (42:50)
Mm-hmm.
Jamie (42:58)
whether that be better targeting in our ads, better messaging, better website, whatever it is, we've done something right. That's improved something. So it can be difficult, but if you look at the positive signals at a granular level, paired that with your attribution and then your overarching like pipeline and like run rate, are you generating more pipeline? It's kind of like a multi attribution approach, using everything you've got available to you to try and build a clear picture. Cause it's very, very difficult.
Tom Rudnai (43:27)
Yeah. it sounds like a pretty healthy marketing and general revenue culture that you operate in, Because I think I am always wary of the word attribution, because I think it can lead to that kind of finger pointing thing. And I speak to so many companies where every single team within the revenue function is hitting their targets. Yet we're missing our revenue goal because you've got teams working towards vanity metrics as a North star. Sounds like for you, you're tracking absolutely everything and it's useful signal for you, but you're also
Jamie (43:46)
Mm.
Tom Rudnai (43:56)
super focused across the entire team on the few KPIs that you treat as your North Star and they're not specific to you.
Jamie (44:03)
Yeah,
yeah, in content, I have hundreds of metrics, like in my content dashboard, I track genuinely probably over 200 metrics just to ascertain what content is doing well and if if the blog is growing, if organic search is growing, etc, etc. At a marketing level, as like a marketing function, we're tracking full funnel, MQL, SQL, the conversion rate there.
SQL to close one and the conversion rate ARR ARPA. We're tracking the full funnel and we have targets for each part of the funnel based on here's a number of NQLs. We're targeting the number of SQLs, et cetera, et cetera. And we have a target to grow ARR fundamentally ARR year over year. So as a marketing function, we are directly tied to revenue. We have a revenue figure on our head, which is how it should be. We work with sales to achieve that. Obviously we want to help increase.
close one or win rates, we want to increase the number of MQLs that convert to SQLs, etc. But fundamentally, we have revenue tied to everything we do, we have to hit our revenue targets. We have to also maintain a marketing efficiency ratio, an MER. So for every euro we spend, we have to get a certain amount back. We can't dip below that. If we start dipping below that, we're becoming less efficient.
And therefore we would have to bring spend down. So it's all of these, like we're being very, very strategic in the way we spend our money. We're being very efficient in the way we spend. we have lots of guardrails and guidelines and red, amber green of like, is on track, slightly off track, or we're going to miss it and loads and loads of stuff. but yeah, the key being that we have revenue on our heads in marketing.
Tom Rudnai (45:43)
Yeah, love that, great approach. Jamie, I've kept you too long already. Do you have another five minutes to do a few quick quotes? Yeah, cool, so I'm normally really bad at keeping these to quick for our questions and not asking a thousand follow-ups, so I'm gonna stick to it this time. First one, what's the biggest change that you've noticed in B2B marketing since you started?
Jamie (45:48)
Yeah, crack on, yeah,
In B2B marketing, I would say two key things would be pace and creativity. pace, think the, maybe it's, it's my view of SaaS, but B2B marketing, think the rate of change is ridiculous now, like the new tactics, the new plays, the new strategies, it's changing every quarter. Like there's a new company that just disrupts. There's a new something, new tool.
pace at which things are changing is ridiculous and you have to make sure you can maintain pace as best possible. It is kind of that treading water thing. The second would be creativity. think B2B marketing was always seen as this like, it's boring. It's strategic. It's just like ABM and like really dry old school stuff. you know, it's just people ringing and you know, doing calls and selling over the phone. Not at all. Like B2B is the new B2C.
I don't want to say that, but a lot of the tactics we use in B2B now were started in B2C. That's great though, because it means that the strategy is paired with the creativity. I don't think there's much strategy in B2C. I could be very wrong. That is a sweeping statement, but B2C, it's like 20 % at Christmas. Great. 20 % on Valentine's. Great. It's discount led. It's like...
There's not much strategy. doesn't feel like there's much strategy. Whereas B2B where the buying cycle is 300 days, there's far more strategy. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (47:25)
The are
so much more complex and that creates so much more space for creativity, right? When you've only got five touch points or three touch points in a journey, how creative can you really?
Jamie (47:36)
Yeah,
there's not many people who would take 300 days to buy a pair of jeans. Like if you haven't bought a pair of jeans in the first, let's say two weeks for a lot of people, you're not going to buy them. You have moved on to the next thing. So you have to use tactics and B2C that are a lot more like you want an immediate action. And typically that's discounts and things like that. So I think B2B is more strategic, but pace and creativity would be the two things that have changed massively since I started.
Tom Rudnai (47:41)
No.
Yeah, love that. Second one, so for you personally, and I'd have a couple of ideas here, what skill or trait has been the biggest needle mover for you in your career?
Jamie (48:12)
Or the one that I love the most is my curiosity. So curiosity in the sense that I hate not knowing how something works. If I see something online and I think I want to try it, I'm like, right, I need to go and learn how to do it. I'll go and watch 10 YouTube videos to learn how to do it. I will read up about it. I will listen to podcasts about it. So curiosity is massive. It frustrates the hell out of me when someone doesn't care, doesn't care about the why.
Tom Rudnai (48:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jamie (48:39)
Like you ask them to do something like, okay, you know, do you have any, any criticism about the idea or like constructive feedback? That's all right. Yeah, I'll crack on with it. I'm like, no, I want you to disagree with me. I want you to question it. Like be curious. Like ask why we're doing something that way. Like curiosity is amazing. I look for curiosity in everyone that I hire.
Tom Rudnai (49:00)
What was the biggest fuck up in your career so far?
Jamie (49:04)
I'll touch on one that was more, Trait or personality is that I, I gravitate towards things that I enjoying and I gravitate towards things that I'm good at. The trouble is when I was a junior marketer, that meant I ignored a lot of work or I put it to the bottom of my list.
So I had a period of time where it was like I got a new job and for the first like six months, all I did was the stuff that I enjoyed. Like I did really, really well on the stuff that I focused on and I enjoyed, but the stuff that I didn't enjoy, I wasn't very good at. almost, I genuinely had tunnel vision. was just like, bottom of my list, I'll get to it. Trouble is I never got to it it just started piling up and piling up and it led to a, not an ultimatum, but it led to a...
metaphorical slap on the wrist from my manager who said, you're going to learn this very, quickly, but you can't only do stuff you enjoy at work. Over time, I've realized that it's often the stuff that you don't enjoy that yields the best results in terms of actually, like I don't necessarily enjoy reporting. Like I'd much rather be filming content, something like that, but reporting tells us a lot and shows
Tom Rudnai (50:05)
Mm.
Jamie (50:12)
the value of what we're doing. So I've learned to love reporting. But yeah, I would would say obsessing and gravitating towards the stuff that I enjoy and ignoring everything else because I didn't enjoy it.
Tom Rudnai (50:23)
I think it's a flip side to curiosity a little bit though, right? But it also explains why you then learn to put structure into the boring stuff, which is something I've always been like as well. I'm quite curious, but I constantly have a to-do list and all the boring stuff on there. I've learned to build structures to force myself to do the shit that I don't want to do. Cool. And then last one, just any recommendations that you would have for people listening to this books, podcasts, thought leaders that you'd recommend following?
Jamie (50:26)
Yes. Yeah.
Mm.
Mm.
Yeah, again, I was racking my brain for this one because there's so many that I could recommend. But if I had to pick one on the topic of the things that we've spoken about today and the structure and the modular templated task sort of management workflow systems, I would recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear out and out. It is a book about atomic habits, an atomic habit being
Tom Rudnai (51:09)
Nice.
Jamie (51:15)
the smallest, most granular habit that you can implement or stack together in order to achieve something big. an example I would give is that if you want to start reading before bed, but you struggle to make that a habit, you put a book next to your bed, you get a lamp that enables you to read with better light and you set a timer or a reminder, you stack these little habits that will enable you to stick to a new habit.
the gym is another, very, good atomic habit. You want to lose weight, you need to eat better and you need to go to the gym. So you implement, habits like you get your clothes ready for the gym the day before and you put them in a bag because you're removing the barrier to entry. You get your breakfast stuff out ready and make sure that you've got everything you need ready to do breakfast. If you struggle with getting up and being on time. so.
I'd highly highly recommend Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a very very good read for anyone who either struggles with making habits and sticking to them or just wants to find out more about how they can level up habits.
Tom Rudnai (52:22)
Yeah,
Jamie this has been great thank you so much for joining normally at this point I'd ask if there's anything you'd like to plug but I think I'll just do that for you and say everyone go check out Stream by Dealfront it's pretty awesome what they're building and I'm kind of in awe with the speed at which it's all got ramped up and
level of content that they're able to put out and the consistency they're able to do it. So if you work in the revenue function, go check that out. And if you are a content marketer as well, and just curious from a kind of structural point of view of how they're able to do this, I highly recommend it.
Jamie (52:55)
Well, I appreciate you. I appreciate you plug in now. That's all I was going to say. Please go and watch stream. Check it out. and we've got a lot more in the pipeline. let's put it that way. So hopefully by the end of the year, we will have, I don't know, 12 series on there. Who knows? See, we'll see where we can get to, but it's been really good fun being on the other end of a podcast. so I look forward to shamelessly watching this back when it's released.
Tom Rudnai (52:59)
Yeah.
It's great for the narcissism, isn't it? Thanks, Jimmy.
Jamie (53:21)
Hahaha.
Cheers.