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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 (00:13)
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm Tom, your host, and I'm going to introduce immediately my guest for today, which is Chelsea Castle. So first of all, hello, Chelsea.
Chelsea (00:23)
Hey Tom, how's it going?
Tom Rudnai (00:25)
It's going well, thank you. Good to have you with us. So I'll give you, well, for those who don't know Chelsea, she's run content at Brandva. I think looking through LinkedIn, it's like four different startups now at various stages. And I know some of them building it from the ground up. So super excited to get into those experiences. I guess for those who don't know, you do want to just give a little bit of background into yourself, kind of your background. And one question I'm always really interested in is like, is there a step along that way that stands out to you as like formative?
Chelsea (00:54)
that's a great question. Yeah, thanks for having me. I was most recently head of content and brand at Close, which is a small business CRM. Before that, I was leading content at Lavender, which is a sales AI email tool. Then I was at Chili Piper. So I was one of the founding marketing team members there at Chili Piper several years ago. And before that, actually, I got my start in journalism. So I studied journalism in school. That's what I wanted to do. That was my passion. I worked in newspapers. I worked in magazines. I was the editor-in-chief of two magazines. I did that for a while.
wasn't really sure where to go next. And then I went into the agency world, actually, where I worked at a marketing and branding agency for higher ed. And somehow the culmination of all of that experience with storytelling, purpose, loving tech, and just everything that I was doing on the technical side of the agency and branding kind of culminated into content marketing in tech. I really just wanted to work remotely. And tech was the only way that I figured out how to do that. So I got my start in tech at an email marketing company
called Emma slash Campaign Monitor. So I've worked at many startups now either taking a program, inheriting a program, and rebuilding it or building it from the ground up.
Tom Rudnai (02:07)
Nice and yeah, lots of names I know within that background as well. And I think it's pretty well trodden path now that really good content marketers often come from a journalism background. Because I think there's like a sense of pride in the content and integrity around it, I think we know is quite important for good content. If you had to, I guess, particularly in the tech world, is there one step along that that really stands out to you as like, that's where I really figured it out.
Chelsea (02:32)
Does anyone really figure it out? I think we're all kind of still figuring out, especially now with AI. It's kind of starting from scratch a little bit. I honestly think it might have been around my time at Lavender.
because of the team that I was working with, we were a very small company, very small marketing team, it was just me and three other people, and they were all, we were all kind of a hodgepodge of non-traditional marketers. had a sales influence, we actually had a couple sales creators, thought leaders, a non-traditional marketer and me, and we were just running, guns blazing, knowing what we were doing from a mission and messaging perspective, and just going really hard every day. And I say that that was four,
because before that experience I was a big believer in strategy before tactics and not that I wasn't but I thought I really had, I was very regimented in type A, right? So I'm like I need a documented, thorough, data-backed, research-backed, strategic document before I go do something. And then I was surrounded by, if any listeners out there know Will Aiken, so shout out to my friend Will, he is a comedic creator, he's also a sales expert.
And he was just pumping out content after content after content. And I was like, well, wait a second. Shouldn't we think about this first? Shouldn't we think about something a little more? So it just taught me a lot about finding that balance. Of course, have a strategy and know what you're doing and why and how to achieve the goals that you're set out for. But it taught me a lot about how to balance speed and execution and speaking to your audience while still being strategic.
Tom Rudnai (04:06)
Yeah, I often think it's something that people think those two things are opposed, like strategy and tactics, but there's nothing that says that while you're building a strategy, you have to be set there doing nothing and that it has to be like one or the other. And I think that's often where the problems go with a lot of like consulting agency type engagements where they view that as what comes first. It's like you can kind of ramp stuff and say, it won't be perfect, but we're doing something in the meantime. Have you ever...
Chelsea (04:30)
Yeah, absolutely.
Tom Rudnai (04:31)
Yeah, one thing I mean, so you've obviously been part of various different kind of content functions there and leading them and building them up from the ground up. Like, what are the threads across all of them? Or maybe better where framing it is like, if you think about a couple of the different ones that you've that you've done, what was different about content in each of them based on the context that you're operating in? But also what was the same across all of them? If that makes sense.
Chelsea (04:58)
Hmm.
what was the same and what was different? Yeah, no, it's just one, it's a good one to reflect on, especially at this stage of my journey of my career, where I recently left clothes and I'm navigating what I wanna do next. So it's a very good introspective question, Tom. I think what's similar, what was similar across each experience is perhaps something that is similar for everyone in terms of.
Tom Rudnai (05:03)
can reframe the question if it's easier, so probably convoluted.
Chelsea (05:31)
How do you build a brand?
over time, everything that you do in content compounds. So how do you achieve that long-term ROI and build a really strong brand that people remember and that sticky and earned mindshare while still hitting your goals every day? So how do you balance the short-term wins and the long-term gains? I don't think anyone has a perfect science to that. There are many people who have done this well, many failures along the way of figuring it out. There are many brilliant people out there creating thought pieces about how to achieve
Tom Rudnai (05:53)
Okay.
Chelsea (06:06)
this,
but that would probably be the one thing that is similar and I don't think there's necessarily a right way to achieve that. I think it has a lot to do with leadership buy-in, where the company's trajectory is and goals and understanding how you kind of make that balance with the short and the long.
What was different, I mean each one was incredibly different. So at Emma, for example, it was a startup darling in Nashville, Tennessee that was bought by a larger company named Campaign Monitor. Their whole company strategy is &A. So they were just trying to acquire company after company and we were a 40 to 50 person marketing team serving five brands. So that taught me a lot about balance and that sort of thing. It was almost like an agency model a little bit.
Tom Rudnai (06:56)
Mm.
Chelsea (06:57)
So that was very much like, hey, we had this strong brand, but we kind of lost it. How do we revive this brand, this community that people loved around email and Emma, and it had just a beloved community of email marketers. How do we revive that, right? And then Chili Piper was building from the ground up. So how do we become more known where the founders spent a lot of their time?
building to where they were when I entered through sales and sales content and leaning in their sales expertise and the sales ICP and events. So how do we scale that? And then also how do we start talking to marketers? So that was a very different kind of shift.
Alarm meter also was kind of like building something from the ground up, but they had a very strong content IP messaging. We had data to work with, which is like a content marketer's dream. So they just had every perfect thing kind of like outlined to really just create a really strong brand. And for me to take and run with it and build on top of.
Tom Rudnai (07:46)
Yeah.
Chelsea (07:56)
And then clothes was more similar to Emma, would say, where it was a bootstrap company, been around for 12 years. Back in the day, the founder did founder brand marketing before that was ever a term that was coined. And I came in with the challenge of why I went there of, how do we scale clothes into 2026 and beyond? How do we revive its awareness and increase its awareness in most credit category? So there's some of the similarities and big differences there.
Tom Rudnai (08:24)
Yeah, that makes sense. There's a few things that you said in there that I were really interesting.
First of it must be quite different. This is just more of thought than a question. It must be quite different taking over a brand to building one. And this comes from someone who's only, I've ever really ever tried to build one brand. I come from more of a sales background, operations, bits of marketing here and there, but with Demand Genius, this is the first time that I've really done that. So I feel obviously an incredible close personal connection, probably because it's my business as well, to that brand. Which it must, like I'd imagine, for example, with Chili Piper or Lavender, where you were doing the same thing, it probably reflected you a little bit more. Is it very weird?
Chelsea (08:50)
See you.
Tom Rudnai (08:59)
going from that to taking over something which doesn't reflect you and is it a lot harder?
Chelsea (09:04)
It's very different. Which one do you think is harder, inheriting or building from scratch?
Tom Rudnai (09:09)
I
think it would be a lot harder to inherit one day to day because it's like, do you, how do I know how to write in that? It's not me. It's fully more, it's certainly, it's emotionally draining sometimes being disconnected to a business or a brand because you rise and fall with it so much.
Chelsea (09:27)
Absolutely, I make the comparison that it's like a house. So it's much easier to build a house from scratch rather than build or try to rebuild a hoarded house. And that's what clothes felt like and a little bit of Emma, but especially clothes because they had 12 years of so many variations of marketing and content programs. It felt like I inherited a hoarded house of stuff to be like, okay, like what do do with this room? Like do we just burn it all down and start over? Like how do you fit?
and rebuild and renovate a house that has hoarded shit everywhere and some of it's good and some of it can be improved and some of it's not great and you need to throw it out. So that's kind of what it felt like it was definitely definitely easier to kind of build from scratch.
Tom Rudnai (10:13)
And how do you know, how do you go about identifying when you come in somewhere and there are obviously like if you think of the house analogy, some rooms that are on fire, some rooms that are just a bit ugly and some that are probably looking quite pretty, how do you go and like identify what to do with each of those rooms and where to start and what needs ripping up because it must be also quite difficult to take your own taste out of that decision, right?
Chelsea (10:39)
It's interesting you say your own taste because there is a lot of that so
I'll try to answer this in a not so convoluted way. I learned a lot from how I approached that in terms of things that worked out well and some maybe mistakes that I made or things that I wish I had done differently. We were also rebuilding the marketing team. So when I joined, we had a new marketing leader who brought me in and we were in this like year long stage of kind of rebuilding what marketing at Close looked like from a team perspective, from a KPI perspective, all of the things. So we were balancing what can we do now while
Tom Rudnai (11:12)
Thank
Chelsea (11:15)
cleaning up the house. And if we're putting out more campaigns to bring more people in and start to help them understand who Close is and put our name out there more, we also don't want to invite people over to the party without cleaning up your house first. That's really what it felt like. So we kind of made a priority list of, OK, what are the highest priority things that need cleaned up? Almost like, can we stuff this in a closet for now? And then we really need to paint the kitchen sort of thing. So it was just a lot of prioritization and balancing
What do we want to get out to start executing day to day, building that awareness, because that was really my job, right? It's like, do we get more people to know about clothes and create content that enables that? And then also, how do we clean up at the same time? So was a lot of doing those two things in parallel.
And then from a content, like really nitty gritty perspective, I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this where you have a massive blog and all of these resources and they did a ton of gated content that was a little click baity and a little hook and sinker. You know, it's like, it looks like one thing, but it's really another thing. Those are all easy things to clean up. Right? So like archive it, redirect, clean those things up. Maybe there's, there were definitely some eBooks that we ungated and improve the content and design, things like that. So it was really just like a big balance.
At the time we weren't like using AI the way we were now. In hindsight what I wish I had done was more of like a, well not even hindsight because the tool wasn't really available. Like we weren't building GPGs really in 2024. But I almost like wanted to download more of that content in my brain because there was really good historical knowledge in some of that and.
I would read a lot of it, but it was so extensive. It was not humanly possible for me to absorb it into my brain, where I think you need to do both, like absorb what you can when you're learning in the company. But now when I think about using AI, I would also be dumping all of that into a cloud project or my digital twin or something. So I have a second me, but I also need all of that in my brain as well. So that's one thing I wish I had the ability to do then.
Tom Rudnai (13:30)
Yeah, I mean, that's something we think about loads here at Demand Genius because I think it's one of the biggest untapped opportunity for marketers. I always think often sits in their own content library already. And also as we go into an AI world, AI is reading everything, right? So it's not just the high traffic pieces that matter anymore. And we've got examples from clients and from ourselves actually of like these little pieces of content where this little nugget on your old three year old piece of content is actually surfacing up in the way that AI talks about you. So so much more emphasis gets placed on like going back in shape.
Chelsea (13:41)
Yes.
Tom Rudnai (14:00)
your overall library rather than just the new pieces but I think we're kind of built to feed algorithms with new content but it must be a big challenge you know it's very hard to join a new take on a new job and for the first month be like I'm reading the website like there's like a management managing up element to that and trying to set the expectations which I'd imagine is something that if you go into a new role now is going to be quite a challenge
Chelsea (14:29)
Yeah, I think it's a challenge, but I think if you're using AI in right, I say right in quotation marks because that's like subjective, but I think there's a way to use it to your advantage, right? Where I would still do it in a little more old school way of absorbing all of that into my own brain. So for example, what close the CEO was.
his name was Stanley FD and way back several years ago he was on stages, on conferences all around the world, TEDx, on YouTube, really leading founder brand marketing. Again, before that was something that we even knew about, just putting out sales content. So I had a treasure trove of his content to work from. So earlier when you asked what kind of made it difficult.
It was difficult. It is more difficult to inherit rather than build from scratch, but I had the huge advantage and my team had the huge advantage of Steli's content that was, you know, even if it was five to 10 years old, still very much rang true. You know, 10 years ago, sellers needed a kick in the ass and 2026 sellers still needed a kick in the ass. was our ICP sellers. So a lot of it still rang true. So we had a treasure trove of source content, right? To download into our brains. We wrote a guide for ghost writing like Steli and then I did build a Steli GPT
Tom Rudnai (15:25)
and
Chelsea (15:41)
for sales advice, for writing like him, for talking like him. So that enabled us to kind of bring him back into the fold and restart his founder brand again after he stepped away several years ago. So that was like a huge unlock as well.
Tom Rudnai (15:55)
Yeah, that makes sense. It's interesting you saying you do it in a bit more of an old school way. One of my big beliefs is that over the next couple of years, like I think one of most valuable things at the moment is judgment and judgment requires context and building up context takes time. So as there's so much focus on efficiency and you should be delivering stuff within your first week, because AI can let you do all of this. I think it's something that leadership actually needs to get comfortable with is that you need to give people time to think, learn and build up the context they need to use judgment. Because actually that's what you need your people to do.
actually a very good place not getting so focused on the hacky ways of doing things always.
Chelsea (16:25)
Yes.
I love that you said that, honestly should be on a billboard. Like AI and this big pressure in our industry to use it is convinced they're trying, whether intentionally or not, I will hold that judgment aside. They're convincing us that we can't do things that we've been doing since the beginning of time. We've been writing, we've been communicating to each other, connecting to each other, convincing each other, persuading each other, telling stories. We don't need AI to do certain things and we will lose those skills.
We will lose those abilities and I'm a big believer in finding the right way to have a human in the loop and to use it and certainly not anti-AI. I'm just very much in the component of...
I don't want my brain to be as smooth as a bowling ball, right? Like I want to challenge myself. I want the friction. There's actually a lot of studies happening right now about what happens when you remove the friction and obstacles, especially when you remove an obstacle in an endeavor, like it's the obstacle that gives it meaning and it's the friction that gives you the growth in the neural pathways. So I'm just a big believer in how we can weave it in in the right way without losing our humanity or digressing back to gorillas or something like that.
Tom Rudnai (17:18)
Yeah.
Chelsea (17:42)
capable of continuing to do the things that they're convincing us that we need AI to do.
Tom Rudnai (17:48)
Yeah, well, it's interesting, yeah, because I think about that in terms of the way that I sometimes catch myself thinking about both myself and the team here at Demand Genius is you forget about the human progression and learning element and it's very easy in the way that I think about my own day actually to be like...
look I need to be such a machine and I think the reason is that the opportunity cost of not working has been increased by AI so you think okay AI can do all of these things and so it's going to mean I have to work less but it actually means that the opportunity cost of any minute that you're not being effective or productive is way way higher because if everyone else is using all of their minutes then
the cost goes up. But actually, I think it's making it a lot harder and it's diverting focus away from improving the people that you still do need to learn and develop. And that is still going to be your biggest leverage because you can't get AI to do way, way better beyond a certain point for you than it does for your competitors. I feel like I'm going way around the houses. Did that make any sense?
Chelsea (18:45)
Absolutely, yeah, I
think we did not to get too like existential about it, but I think these are important conversations and I'm seeing it happen a lot more in LinkedIn where there's a divergence of people who were writers of course are going to be enamored when you can write a simple prompt and then get a bunch of copy that you could use as a LinkedIn post or comment in the same way that Canva makes non-designers feel like designers.
Tom Rudnai (19:10)
Hmm.
Chelsea (19:10)
And now it's a little fun to kind of flip that to the engineers and say, huh, look what I just vibe coded. Like I don't even need to learn how to code. Like how does it feel just because I have that tool? Yeah. It doesn't make me an engineer. Just like everybody thinks they can do marketing just because, it's just writing or it's just this. Um, like, no, like they're disciplines for a reason. So kind of digress there, but I think there's a lot to be said about how.
Tom Rudnai (19:18)
It's about time!
Chelsea (19:36)
Yeah, I think we're just getting a very big inflection point right now and it'll be interesting to see how the rest of the year goes because even from January to now, which is May, I've just seen the conversations progress and we're learning very rapidly and talking about it, at least in my little LinkedIn bubble. So it's really fascinating to see how it's going.
Tom Rudnai (19:54)
Yeah, for sure. And I've not thought about it, but now I do actually share your smugness. So yeah, it's about time that engineers got a taste of their own medicine. They've they've been replacing other people for long time. It's about time we averagely replaced them.
Chelsea (19:59)
you
Yes. Exactly. The one thing
that we thought we could never do. Like, I learned how to do HTML in middle school, but I could never, like, the coding world, it's just so, it seems so big. now we're, now I can do it.
Tom Rudnai (20:19)
Exactly, So let's try and get back on track and talk about marketing. There's another thing that I wanted to come back to that you said, was everything you do in content compounds, which I think I know, but it's actually really interesting to think about a little bit more.
Chelsea (20:21)
Yes, I will.
Tom Rudnai (20:35)
And what you've described a couple of times, you said stuff that I think really links to that, which is like the balance between strategy and tactics and also the way that you approached it at close, which was to kind of strict prioritization so that you could get some motion. And what you're describing there is like, you want to start compounding in a direction without being too perfectionist. I guess I'm meandering my way to a question. Like when you say everything in content compounds, can you give me a bit more of an insight as someone who is deeply impatient and often
switches course before it has a chance to into what that compounding looks like in practice, how it shows up as you're building up a brand and maybe what the initial signals that you might get are that you're on the right track versus off the right track without just waiting to see.
Chelsea (21:20)
Yeah, that's a great question. Think about brands as a memory structure, not just messaging. If you think about any brand that you are devoted to, probably a B2C brand. I don't think anyone's devoted to a B2B brand, although I do love Asana. But other than that, it's like you can probably recall...
moments over time where you've had connections or interactions or exposure to that brand and they're all like marbles that gather in a jar.
Right, so every time you see an ad, every time you get that Apple packaging and it's beautiful and minimalistic and pristine and you can turn the phone on and it's charged and the setup is easy and the migration from phone phone is easy, the ads that make you tear up, like Nike and Apple are some of the easiest ones to kind make those parallels to, they are little moments that add up over time and create that memory structure in your brain and it's repetition. There's always studies that are changing but it's like you need to hear something seven times or 17 times
Tom Rudnai (22:09)
Yeah.
Chelsea (22:21)
or 30 times, whatever study you want to pick, you need to hear something that many times in order for it to stick in your head. So it's a balance of repetition. It's about what brand associations can you create. So in B2B, Chili Pepper, for example, we had the Chili Pepper logo. So it Chili Pepper with Chili Pepper logo. And we had certain things that we would say, certain ways that we would say it. And the logo and.
fire emojis and the hot sauce, like little things here and there, almost like an ecosystem of brand associations that went across everything.
red threads essentially, and that could be a point of view, that could be a tagline. You need some sort of red thread and brand associations and all of those things compound over time. And while you're doing that, to your point about like kind of being antsy and still wanting things to happen day to day, you're creating different types of content and programs and life cycle marketing and emails and you can do it all, but at the same time, nothing that every function in marketing is going to matter if there's not some continuity
to it and everything that you do every day needs to reinforce that same idea and you don't need to I think where a lot of marketing leaders go wrong.
is you don't need to talk about your company or the product in every single thing you do. I've definitely had those leaders where every email, every social post, everything needs to tie back to saying what we do, saying what our product does. No, like nobody's going to want to consume that shit. Like nobody's gonna want to read that. There needs to be a red thread, but a lot of times it's implicit. It's not explicitly said. And that I think is like a little bit of the art in the judgment and requiring context, right? And then the other component to that that I would add.
Tom Rudnai (23:40)
Yeah.
Chelsea (24:05)
is the people who win, the brands who win in any category are the ones who empathize with their audience's problems better than anyone else. So that's where the human connection part really comes in and where a lot of my philosophy has to do with we are wired for connection at the end of the day. No AI, no technology is ever going to change that biology in us as humans.
So you need to find a way to do that, whether it's through a funny video or an edutainment video on social media or a content piece or an email that makes them feel seen or a re-engagement campaign or a customer gifting campaign or fill in the blank. It has a lot to do with what you're building day to day, but also having the bigger picture in mind and ensuring there's a red thread to tie it all together.
Tom Rudnai (24:51)
So let's go back to Chili Piper because I think it's probably the best known brand of the ones in your background. What was the red thread beyond the kind of design and the chili? What was the red thread there? Are there any really good examples just from other companies, maybe Ysosana if it's one you love, what their red thread is and what makes a great one?
Chelsea (25:13)
Yeah, so at Chili Piper, it did change a couple times because we did some category shifts.
so when you think about a red thread, I use that phrase very, like, as an umbrella term. Like, it's not necessarily like a tagline or messaging. think, I'm trying really hard not to use like a big brand, but it's it's the easiest one. So if you think about notion maybe, like they talk about how tools should like adapt to you, not the other way around.
Tom Rudnai (25:42)
Yeah.
Chelsea (25:43)
So
they show that in the product, they show that in some of their community templates. They show that in their brand tone, it has a very calming brand tone, so they really lean into how the tool should be, you're customizing it and not configuring it. it has this vibe of ownership, where you're the one in the controller seat almost. Or you mentioned Asana, because I still think I love Asana. They talk a lot about clarity-enabling teams to do their best work.
And then they talk about that through their messaging and like that comes through very much like their focus and alignment You see that like product features and like tying it to like visibility And I think they're also a little like philosophical if you've ever seen some of Asana's Like App Store updates like the copy very much like kind of leans into that a little more empathetic
So yeah, those are a couple of examples that come to mind. You could also maybe think about Vector is a smaller, earlier stage startup right now. They're owning, I think it's contact level marketing.
I think I got the category name wrong. But they're very much reinforcing, focusing on how their product can help you really target the people, individual people, individual, individual, like individual people on your list and not just like a random, you know, ABM list. And they're scaling it to a more personalized messaging state without actually saying personalized, right? And then they're tying that together with their ghost brand mascot.
Tom Rudnai (26:52)
Good.
Chelsea (27:20)
That's another good example, I think, of a way that you can have a brand association that makes sense. I think some people try that, and it's almost like they're trying to force it. For them, they're playing into how...
your buyers will visit your website and then just kind of ghost you. So it's a very clever, very witty, like direct product, direct problem association. So it's not just random, like, Clippy was really popular. just like squeeze in, know, squeeze in a Clippy. Or there's like a brand recently I've been consulting with, they're like, want to use their cat, like their pet cat. Like that's very cute. I love cats, but like how does it work with what you do? So that's like a few examples. Vector, for example, is a great job of like what the brand associations and the red thread of the messaging.
Tom Rudnai (27:54)
point.
It's funny, so you used a vector example. At first I was like, not heard of them. And then you started talking, I was like, isn't that Jess Cook? And then you see Ghost and I was like, yes it is. And now all of these things come back to me. I've never met Jess, but I have seen a few.
Chelsea (28:10)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (28:17)
good pieces of content that she's put out, like for leadership type stuff. I've seen some funny things on LinkedIn where she's like bantering with her CEO in a very transparent way that is unusual on LinkedIn. So that's the contact level thing and they're living that out and then the ghost and the straight way. Then I was like, okay, yes, that is Vectors. So that's actually a fantastic example of how they've taken something that initially I didn't know, but as you, and now this whole framework of understanding them as a company comes through and they do it quite a good job of reinforcing that in the way that they live and operate.
Chelsea (28:43)
Exactly.
Tom Rudnai (28:47)
you
Chelsea (28:47)
Absolutely, yes, yeah. Jess is amazing. What they're building there is phenomenal. And that's a good example that you just highlighted all of those different things because those are all brand associations. Brand associations isn't just a logo or a phrase that you use or a color. At Chili Piper, for example, the color, everyone kind of made their background on their profile picture on LinkedIn. I wouldn't say that we are the ones that started that, but we were definitely on the beginning of, and it wasn't even me, so shout out
Tom Rudnai (29:13)
You kind of want...
Chelsea (29:17)
to the team that did that. Everybody added an orange circle on their profile, and then everybody in that and the emoji. So I think we actually did originate the emoji thing, where everybody had the pepper emoji in their name. And then every single time you saw somebody in your feed with that emoji, you knew that they were from Chili Piper. So that really skyrocketed and helped build a foundation of our employee-generated content at Chili Piper. But even at Lavender, for example, so we had the color, we had the people, we had...
Tom Rudnai (29:33)
Hmm.
Chelsea (29:44)
the same red thread of what we talked about around email. So we were writing for sales for, we were an email tool for sellers and everything we talked about in all of our content, and I say we because the four people in the marketing team were also posting on LinkedIn every day and that was part of our marketing strategy. We were nearly 100 % inbound as a PLG sort of self-serve tool.
but we were all the evangelists for the product and the content. So we had a list of data points that we would always talk about. We had frameworks we would always talk about. So the red thread, and kind of using that as an example, could also be all of those things. Or those are the brand associations, right? Like the things that you reinforce in everything you do.
Tom Rudnai (30:31)
Yeah, that makes sense. And it's funny because I think a lot of what you've described, there's two things that shone through in the way that you're talking. One is there's an almost like obsessive repetitiveness of these things. And that must be quite a challenge to instill. I think so. Let's talk about that first. Do you find yourself often having to be the kind of
I'm picturing like the school teacher internally who's like, hey, you don't have to tune pipe a logo on the thing. And is that a challenge for me? I think I'm British and we're very skeptical kind of negative people, not like you wonderful, positive, happy Americans. Like I can imagine it would be a lot harder to entrench here.
Chelsea (31:09)
That's funny. I don't know if we're happy or we're just blind. Blindly following. Yeah, you're a little more scrupulous with your decision making.
Tom Rudnai (31:14)
pretend.
Chelsea (31:20)
That's really good question because I'm actually doing a skit later this week about brand police and how you're, when you're that person, whether intentionally or maybe because you've been on the other side of it, you kind of feel like, I don't want anyone to feel like I'm brand police. I've never experienced what you just described, thankfully, in terms of like having to like crack a whip, but it has a lot to do with the founders and the leadership team. It has to start at the top. It has to be a tops down thing. And that's why at close, it was a little bit tricky, honestly, and this isn't like necessarily
sharing anything confidential, it was a different model where the majority of company wasn't necessarily interested in that. And I kind of had to find ways of navigating that.
Something that a former team member recently told me is that my superpower is sort of like engaging and empowering and supercharging those people internally. So you need leadership involved, need internal SMEs involved in marketing. I mean, you need employee engagement, whether it's on LinkedIn or other channels. Like you really do need everybody. Marketing is everybody in the company, whether you're an engineer or...
you know, in the office and you're the janitor, like everybody is in charge of marketing. Everybody is a part of marketing. And at Close, it was just a little bit harder to kind of get everyone rallied around it. So instead of like what I did at, I'll kind of make some comparisons for some good case studies is I just had to find, it was challenging. It wasn't like Chili Piper where everybody wanted to do it because everyone was doing it. The founders were doing it. It was almost like it was ingrained in the culture, right? So everybody wanted to do it. Everybody wanted the
Tom Rudnai (32:33)
Thank you.
Chelsea (32:58)
Everybody wanted the chili pepper emoji. And at close it was just a little bit different because the culture was a little different. So even if the founder was like, hey, we're doing this thing.
What we did is we focused on kind of like big fires rather than like a little bit of like small fires throughout the year. So we would have like a, launched one big content program called the Blueprint Series where that was kind of the relaunching of Steli. And we made that the big moment to kind of get the entire company to rally around the distribution of that was incredible. They had never done anything like that before because everyone, we were really able to activate and empower and enable everybody to go out on the internet and distribute to their networks. And that was like a big distribution success for sure.
That's not possible at every company to do for every launch. Chili Piper, we would literally have a calendar invite on everybody's calendar every week. That was something that they were helping amplify. So every company, that's going to look a little bit different. It might be as engaged as Chili Piper or as unengaged as Closed, where you kind of rally people around big moments rather than asking them to rally around everything. So yeah, that's kind of been my experience with that so far.
Tom Rudnai (33:54)
No.
Yeah, I can see it's something that needs to come from readership though, because it kind of did.
the thing that you never like to talk about, but it kind of, I think, is linked a bit to where power rests within an organisation, right? You've got a traditional sales-ed organisation where the sales reps are the money makers and the rain makers and things like that. It's very difficult for anyone to come in and create that level of buy-in to brand concepts because that's just not, that doesn't fit with everyone's understanding of what makes the business work. But if leadership is setting the expectation that, no, that's critically important here and it's not like that, old stereo.
Chelsea (34:20)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (34:45)
type of marketing, know, brochures and colors look nice and things like that, that's something that has to be set at the top. I can see it's very difficult in certain places where that doesn't happen to get that reflected. But the other thing that I think is maybe more...
And this links to what we think about a lot who actually are demand geniuses. We're all about helping people build brands in the kind of AI world that we live in now. And a lot of where we start with brands often they expect like SEO style hacks and tips, which I think is awful, awful advice for anyone trying to figure out how to get AI to position them in the way that they want to. It doesn't work. We often come back to fundamentals and people are surprised that the first thing we're helping them talk about is what is your perspective? What is your ICP? All of those.
kinds of things and it's insane how many brands don't have that. Everyone focuses on how we get cited by chat GPT not why the hell chat GPT should cite us. And one thing that you've described in a lot of your kind of success stories from a brand perspective is a really strong perspective on the market or opinion that underlies all of the campaigns and gimmicks and that seems to be like the key driver.
Chelsea (35:38)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (35:54)
Is that fair? also, that something that can you set that as a founding content marketer or brand marketer? Or does that have to come from leadership as well?
Chelsea (36:04)
Yes, I would say that's absolutely accurate and it's a little bit of both. So I think the success of that and the success of a marketing team, especially at a founder led company. So it's a little different for a CEO, know, non-founder backed company.
It really does have to start with them because if that's not clear, then you don't really have a red thread. And I will admittedly say like that was a struggle at close, even with a very opinionated founder. So we kind of had to work with what we had. What are the opinions that he does have? You know, we would build sales commandments essentially, like what are his commandments so that we have that continuity with what we're saying. But we didn't necessarily have one strong spiky point of view in the market. So this is going to be a little muddy, but when I was at Chili Piper, one of the other two
founders, so married couple Nicholas and Alina. Nicholas had this point of view about how, and this is gonna sound very obvious, but at the time it wasn't, but we authored this manifesto of his point of view of saying, hey, like the way that buyers buy has changed. When they come to your website, they're already educated, so you need to get them to sales right away. You need to ensure that you are expediting that process. And of course, now like that's a dub, but this was like many, years ago, where...
helping, putting that point of view out in the market of saying, hey, people are already educated when they come to you. They're 80 % of the way there. That's not how we used to view marketing websites. So that was kind of a change in the market. So having that spiky point of view.
And that is like, can you say that nobody else can say? As far as you can go, like, you can kind of get into the philosophical debate of no original thought and there are no original ideas, but truly, like, you as a human, like, what is something that connects to your mission and your vision and your product?
that is a like a spiky point of view should rub people the wrong way. Some people should disagree with it. You don't want everyone to agree with this. Like what are you standing for? And also what are you not standing for? Like what are you not? And having clarity around that, I think that's why there's a lot of success with Andy Raskin's strategic narrative work, which if you're not familiar, that's a lot of like what is the old way? What is the change that we're seeing? And then what is the promised land that you're building for your customers? And that's a little bit of what you're describing with like having a spiky point of view or perspective.
or content IP, like you can name it a myriad of different things, but it's really like what do you have to say that's different and why should your audience care and connecting that to your audience. So as a founding content member, marketing person, like yes you can derive that, but you can only, it's almost like a chef, it's like you can only work with the ingredients that you have. So you kind of have to like make the best dish that you can with what you're given.
Tom Rudnai (38:29)
Hmm.
I guess, because my question, and you might have just answered it a little bit, actually, but my question was going to be like, what differentiates a red thread or a perspective from just an opinion? That's pure from like Rachemate. And I guess maybe that's where the content marketer comes in a little bit of the marketing skillset or the brand skillset, because it's like, you need the original spikiness and you can maybe shape it around the edges and turn it into something that goes. like, yeah, what makes something a really good perspective versus
something a bit different.
Chelsea (39:27)
That's a good question.
I think it has a lot to do with the origin or the intention, right? Like anybody can go on LinkedIn and say something insane for clickbait purposes. It's all the intention, right? So if you think about, I'll use Dave Gearhart as an example. So for anyone who doesn't know Dave Gearhart, he built...
His brand at Drift and a couple other businesses now He's leading exit five and did the founder brand thing wrote the book on founder brand He has this line that is used often in the market about how life is too short to work for a CEO who doesn't understand marketing Or something like that. Maybe understand brand Or a pep leha at winter says like your opinion doesn't matter, but your customers does so like
Tom Rudnai (40:07)
Thank
Chelsea (40:15)
Those are like kind of examples of point of views that could be debatable about how spiky they are, but the intention has to do with you're not just like saying it to say it, you're not trying to, it's the intention behind it, I think, like to answer your question. Or like, Steli, for example, what Close would say that the root of sales problems or sellers problems is actually themselves. It's a human problem. Like they get in their own head, it's psychological, it's emotional. There were lots of debates about whether or not
that's what we should go to market with or lots of people who disagree with that. So if people can disagree with it, I think that's strong, but that's not the only criteria. So I'm kind of going around the horn there, but I think it has a lot to do with intention. You shouldn't set out to have a spiky point of view just for clickbait or rage bait, like you said. It has to be rooted in something, rooted in your experience. So the example I gave about Steli, that was rooted in his sales experience as an ICP, as a sales coach.
Tom Rudnai (40:48)
Hmm.
Chelsea (41:14)
somebody who's been in the trenches and actually has done it. Maybe it's rooted in data. Maybe it's rooted in your story of how you founded your product. Maybe it's rooted in your founder's story. It needs to be rooted in something that's connected to your audience and what you're building. can't just be, you just threw a noodle on the wall and saw what's stuck. Saw what's stuck.
Tom Rudnai (41:32)
Yeah,
there's probably a huge amount of survivorship bias in any conversation about this because all of the examples that we can think of are the people who worked, but they were right and they were and resonated with people. So that's like, that's that's the key.
Chelsea (41:44)
Yeah.
The best example probably
is Chris Walker. I don't know how that wasn't the first thing that came to mind, but also Chris Walker founded Refine Labs and has gone on to do many other things. Like he, several years ago, people disagreed with him. They were, was like MQLs are a vanity metric, stop optimizing for them. He was leading the charge with many spiky points of view, spiky points of view, and they were all right. And then he built a business to essentially prove that with data from working with clients. And at the time, people did not like that direct attack on how most marketing
teams were measured and now look at how that has completely changed the needle of how we think about marketing measurement and KPIs.
Tom Rudnai (42:23)
Yeah, no, that's a really good example. Actually, the other one that I was thinking of is Adam Robinson, I think that maybe is a little bit more, yeah. Last question and then we'll get on to some quick fires and I'll let you get on with your day. One of the things that always strikes me with this is it's really hard.
Chelsea (42:29)
Yeah. Little more divisive.
Tom Rudnai (42:42)
For me, when we're kind of thinking about doing this, to communicate this red thread or this perspective consistently without feeling like a broken record and just thinking, God, I'm bored of hearing me talk about this, everyone else must be. And I think that's probably not true for everyone else, but maybe it is in my case, but hopefully not. But like, are there any keys or any insight that you can share on the best ways to keep consistency in the message and the red thread without just repeating yourself? Or should you just repeat yourself and...
Chelsea (43:14)
I mean, that's a good question. think
I mean, that's all in the how, not the what, right? So I think there's some schools of thought that talk about how consistency beats creativity, but I would say maybe just the bad kind of creativity, like using AI to create your social media video or something like that.
Tom Rudnai (43:39)
Yeah.
Chelsea (43:40)
You still need consistent signals to really compound that interest in your business. don't know, I'm struggling a little bit because I've never necessarily ran into that. think the repetition, if you're feeling like you're repeating yourself too much or how can I say this a different way, then that's where you can kind of... Yeah, I don't know, I've never really struggled with the repetition. I think that's where...
Tom Rudnai (44:07)
Well, I guess.
Chelsea (44:10)
Yeah, go ahead.
Tom Rudnai (44:11)
I was
gonna say maybe a better way to frame it is just like, what a, so you've got this perspective, what are the best ways to actually communicate that and like embed that and make it stick as a narrative? Because I guess repetition is be a part of that, but there's probably more to it than that.
Chelsea (44:25)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it should be strung across everything. should be part of your every single member of every single marketing function. It should be part of your sales enablement. It should be part of the things that your sales team is saying. It should be part of your founder and your leadership team's LinkedIn posts. It's I think maybe where people get hung up is like is what that looks like from.
an execution standpoint doesn't mean you're saying the same phrase or saying the same words. It's almost like that's where brand strategy also comes in of what is your brand archetype? What do you stand for? What do you stand against? Why do you exist? And then just having somebody internally kind of set the tone of what aligns to that and what doesn't. If something is a little off, that's fine, but it should still, if your founder is writing a post that's a little bit personal.
Like I've seen you some founders write about like they're like balancing being a founder and having kids like things like that. Like obviously that's not directly related to your product, maybe your red thread. Because you want some human elements to all of your marketing, especially when it's coming from people. But like the ethos, the intentionality behind that post is one example. This is just like a very like in the weeds example should still be in alignment with everything else you're saying, if that makes sense. That's also where like brand associations can be helpful.
that you're kind of tying everything together. I think what you're also talking about a little bit is like constraints, where maybe marketers feel like, oh, like I feel a little constrained by the brand, or like if this is like our red thread, maybe for the year, maybe for the quarter, I think that can vary. Like red thread, think can, what that means, can flex by company, by brand, by time. I think...
Tom Rudnai (46:18)
Hmm.
Chelsea (46:22)
constraints are actually a good thing, because creativity thrives in constraints. If you look at Pixar movies, like the way that Pixar operates, they are full of constraints. Some of the best books people have ever written were derived from constraints. So having a constraint of a red thread is actually incredibly powerful because it gives you a box to operate inside of rather than, think outside the box. Okay, well, what does that mean? So I think that the benefit of almost like a anti-answer to your question is like operating with
Tom Rudnai (46:35)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chelsea (46:51)
and those constraints can actually be really powerful for creativity and expressing that red thread in very differentiated ways.
Tom Rudnai (47:00)
Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking, like there's nothing worse than being told, right now it's time to be creative. Like I think having a clear sense of who you are and it's clearly understood what, like where the guardrails are, what the bounds of who you are is, allows people to think very freely within those guardrails rather than just trying to think of everything like, is that okay? But so yeah, think that's a great place to end. Before I let you go, I've got a couple of quick words and we might have to skip a couple of them just for time.
Chelsea (47:24)
Absolutely.
Tom Rudnai (47:30)
but this has been pretty interesting so I didn't want to stop it. I'm gonna start off with the classic most clickbaity question that there could ever be which is an AI use case that you absolutely love. What's the thing that has most blown your mind that you've seen AI do?
Chelsea (47:46)
So I haven't gotten to action on this yet, but right before I left Close, we were able to connect our Close CRM to our MCP, to Snowflake, to Cloud Code. And I was able to extract data from the product to create content from. So that in the past would require a dedicated marketing engineer, and then nobody's going to give me an engineer to focus on that because they have more important things to do. So that was incredible to actually be in a position where we couldn't extract data to create proprietary content from, and now we could. So that was huge.
Tom Rudnai (48:15)
Hmm, that's a great one. Yeah, I like that. We talked to a lot of people about establishing your content IP and it's always like this, bet somewhere within the business, there's something unique that you could draw on that will give you great content, but the MCP is a fantastic way to actually get hold of it because that's normally the obstacle. And then a fun one that I always like, you were, if let's say in kind of your next job, your CEO is to give you carte blanche to do one marketing campaign or one initiative or whatever project. And the way I think of it is it's
or the one that they would never actually be stupid enough to approve, what would you do?
Chelsea (48:54)
The one that they would never be stupid enough to do. Like, what is my most unhinged idea?
Tom Rudnai (48:58)
Yeah,
unhinged, that's a good way of thinking about it.
Chelsea (49:03)
I'd want to do some sort of live content road show, almost like get a video team and me in a car and drive around the country and visit customers, but do some sort of unhinged activities with them or something. That's the first thing that came to mind, which I could probably see some CEOs approving that idea. So not the most unhinged, but something like that for sure.
Tom Rudnai (49:27)
Yeah, I'll do that as long as I can come on the road trip. are the, when you say unhinged activities, how unhinged should we talking about here?
Chelsea (49:34)
Like fear factor shit, like jumping out of planes, like skydiving, like... Yeah, things like that, I don't know.
Tom Rudnai (49:42)
Okay, I'll go skydiving with you. Cool. Chelsea, I'm let you go. This has been really interesting, actually. I'm hoping it's been interesting for people listening as well. I feel sometimes like I use these podcasts as therapy and just to ask questions that are interesting to me, but hopefully as I try to figure out, to learn from all of this, then it's been useful for other people as well. So thank you for joining.
Chelsea (49:45)
Cool, let's do it.
Yeah, thank you so much, Tom. This has been great.
Tom Rudnai (50:08)
Cool, bye everyone.