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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 (00:00)
Anton, hey, thank you very much for joining us. How are you?
Anton Rius (00:04)
Yeah, doing well. Happy to be here.
Tom Rudnai (00:06)
Awesome. Well, look, before we get into it, I've got a heap of questions that I wanna ask you, get into what you're doing at Corporate Visions, your background, a little bit about that, and also, obviously, the great thing about speaking to content marketers specifically is you can read up on all of their views online, and so I've got, I'm armed with a lot of great things that I wanna ask you about and get your perspectives. But I guess before we get into that.
Maybe Jonah, just give me a little bit and give the listeners a little bit of an intro into who you are, your background and what you do at Corporate Visions as well.
Anton Rius (00:39)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, so I'm Anton Rius. I had content marketing at corporate visions. as you said, I've been doing marketing for about 14 years. Actually had to look that up before coming on this call cause it feels like it's just flown by. But, yeah, I've been mainly, doing content marketing specifically for, professional services firms, for a long time. I had a little bit of stats experience.
But yeah, just doing all I can to make our content as good as possible and getting in front of as many people as possible at Corporate Visions.
Tom Rudnai (01:15)
Nice, so that's the name of the game. So you've always been in the professional services world, which I think is surprising and must be quite difficult as well, because so much of the kind of thought leadership around content serves B2B SaaS, right? Is that a challenge you have?
Anton Rius (01:30)
Yeah, absolutely. It's something I've thought about a lot recently, actually. A lot of the information out there is directly about how to be better at B2B SaaS content. I think there's a lot of good takeaways you can get from that. But yeah, professional services in a lot of other ways, it's a different beast.
Tom Rudnai (01:49)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So help us a little bit before we get into it then. What are like, what would you say are the unique challenges of marketing at corporate visions?
Anton Rius (01:58)
It probably sounds a lot like the unique challenges, quote unquote unique challenges that a lot of other content people face. I think right now it feels like we just have fewer resources than all the things that we want to do. So we're trying to figure out where we place our bets, where we're investing that's going to get the best returns and really trying to figure out
Tom Rudnai (02:02)
Yeah.
Anton Rius (02:21)
how can we get our message across to our audience in the best way possible? So, you know, we've grown a lot over the last few years. We've had several acquisitions. There's been some change in leadership. you know, we are in many ways reinventing ourselves as a company.
trying to take ourselves to that next level. We've grown up a lot internally and so it's just a matter of, how do we bring that to market? How do we talk about all the things that we do now in a way that people can understand and in a way that resonates?
Tom Rudnai (02:58)
And can you share a little bit, so that reinvention, because I think that we had one episode where we had someone talking to us, Mike Beach from Causalens, about kind of marketing all through an actual full-on pivot, which I think is such an interesting thing, like how do you communicate the change over time? What was the reinvention and how did that all kind of filter into your role as the director of content?
Anton Rius (03:20)
Yeah, well when I joined corporate visions about six years ago, we did three things really well and the market knew us very well for these three things. So we did sales messaging, we did skills training and we did content. So we had like an internal content agency that actually produces content based on our principles and methodology for clients. Over the years, we've made several acquisitions, I think, like I mentioned.
So most recently we acquired a of a sort of a competitor, I guess, and DSG was another sales training company. We brought them into the fold trying to like integrate their methodology within ours as we're expanding our offerings. And then most recently we acquired a company called True Voice.
actually they were called primary intelligence at the time we rebranded them to TrueVoice from Corporate Visions. And it's a win loss analysis platform. Since they've come on with us, we've integrated our methodology so that they're actually able to take the insights that you get from your win loss feedback and turn it into on-demand coaching that people can access within the platform. So...
When you're talking about pivoting, it feels like we are constantly pivoting on the swervious road possible as we're trying to keep up with all the changes. I would say probably the biggest thing that's been something we've had to adapt to recently is just becoming... We were purely a consulting training company.
Tom Rudnai (04:56)
Mm-hmm.
Anton Rius (04:56)
Now
we are tech enabled services. And so what's been interesting as we've kind of brought on TrueVoice is now we have a tech platform. And so we are having to kind of adopt some of the product marketing best practices that other companies do so well in SaaS.
We also want to preserve the other aspect, is the experience that our customers get from our workshops, from our training initiatives that we help them with. And so it's kind of this balance of, know, in some ways we are productizing what we're doing in other ways. We're trying to, you know, make sure that, you know, what made us great.
in the beginning is still preserved throughout all the change. So yeah, it's kind of like layering on a bunch of new capabilities, a bunch of new ways we can help people, but also staying true to what we were in the beginning.
Tom Rudnai (05:44)
Mm.
Yeah, but it makes it from your perspective, I guess, a difficult blend between marketing a professional services business and a slightly more of a product business, right? But I guess in ways that's helpful because it forces you to keep to actually best practices of how you should market a product business, which is you kind of market the methodology and the perspective that you have on the market.
Anton Rius (06:21)
Yeah, well, what's been interesting, I've been thinking about this a lot and I think what it comes down to is B2B services is all about people. You're selling the people, the experience that your customers will have with the people like your company. So whatever you're doing, training, consulting, you could say the same for, you know, to simplify it, you you go to a dentist.
they're all going to offer the same products. It's really the differentiator is the person you're going to see and whether or not you like the dentist and how they do work on your teeth. So, you know, with professional services, you're really more focused on getting your people out there, I think, whereas with the B2B SaaS or product, it is about the product.
It's what can the product enable your team to do versus, you know, with a service, it's really like, what is this, you what does the service enable your team to do? But it's a lot of like that in-person experience versus like the experience with the product.
Tom Rudnai (07:29)
Yeah, which is a really interesting point though, because I think it reflects the service you're selling or the product you're selling, but it also reflects the position that content plays within go to market a little bit in those businesses, right? So historically content has always sat very much top of funnel within a product business, right? You're trying to capture some element of interest and then you're handing off a lead to sales. So actually that's where the people get sold. That's where the human experience comes in.
Now one of my big beliefs is that content should not be pigeonholed, not that it ever really should have, but shouldn't be pigeonholed as a top of funnel mechanism anymore. Because 75 % of buyers don't talk to sellers. So your content is crucial at every step of the funnel. I'm trying to kind of make a funnel with my own.
Anton Rius (08:13)
Yeah, I can imagine it, yeah.
Tom Rudnai (08:17)
It changes the role. But so it means that as a content team, you have to do a little bit more of the building of the human type relationship, as well as just educating on product details and converting, which I think is a difficult thing to do.
Anton Rius (08:33)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so. You know, this may be a little bit of a tangent, but I was just at our summit this last week in Denver. We have, we host the annual summit through our leadership community that's called Emblaze. And so I love going to summit because it's my chance to talk to our customers directly.
And we use the opportunity to film as many customer stories as we can because we're video teams on site. Our customers are there. We can kind of set up a nice backdrop and record what they have to say. But what really struck me this time is just how excited people were about the, not just the experience there and
being able to talk to their peers and everything. But when we're talking about the services of corporate visions in particular, and I imagine true for any quality consulting or training firm, it's really about the transformative experience of the training itself. Like we had customers tell me, I'm going to take corporate visions wherever I go.
Like they are just like fans for life. And that's, that's pretty powerful to hear from your customers. But when we dug into it a little more, they would say things like, when I first heard Tim Reister stand up in front of our sales training team or our sales team. Sorry, let me start that over. When I first heard Tim Reister stand in front of our sales team and talk about the value edge.
or some of these other concepts that we talk about, unconsidered needs, they were transformed right then. They were hooked. Yeah, it's a light bulb moment. Or we have a, we call it our Elevate Value Team, which is a team of former executives who have worked as CEOs, CMOs.
Tom Rudnai (10:18)
was a life of movement.
Anton Rius (10:36)
COOs at various Fortune 500 companies. They are now consulting with our customers to teach them how to talk to executives in sales conversations. So you get someone like that up in front of a room, in front of your team, and you're hooked. I don't know how else to put it. It's just that...
you know, experience really matters and they want to share that experience with other people. So, I may have lost the plot with the question you were asking. I can probably answer it more directly.
Tom Rudnai (11:04)
No, at all,
but I think there's two things in that that are really interesting from a content perspective. One is you mentioned it's the experience of seeing the person and listening to Tim explaining this, right? And I think that's something that content is often lost in content is that it's not just about putting information on a piece of paper or on a website. There's an experience around it that you wanna try and recreate.
Anton Rius (11:32)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think, so it comes down to tactics, I think. If you're talking about marketing B2B services versus the SaaS, it really comes down to, you know, obviously we know the principles. You got to know your customer. You have to know what your goal is. You have to have a distinct point of view and what you're doing. But when people talk about content, they often think about the tactics.
first. sometimes the tactics that work for one company don't work for another at all. It totally depends on your situation, your audience, the kind of product or service you're selling. And so, you know, when we're thinking about creating content for corporate visions, it's going to be very different than, you know, what I would think to do for a SaaS.
in SaaS, I, I believe the, the product marketers is probably one of the most important people you have in your organization because they're putting together the positioning. They're getting to know your customers. They're, they're, you know, talking to product. They're talking to sales, in professional services. Yeah. I, I know my experience being a content marketer is I've taken on a lot of the messaging positioning. and so we might choose to do things.
that are not directly about like informational product brochures, not talking about our solutions as much as like, we're going to focus more on thought leadership and getting our people out there in front of our audience so that they can hear the kind of insights that we offer because that's what makes the difference. You know, the point of view comes from the people who are actually delivering the work in a of ways.
Tom Rudnai (13:24)
Yeah, so in a way, yeah, you're kind of trying to provide a little window into what it is to engage with you on a professional basis, right? And the best way to do that, but those people that are subject matter experts and very well versed in the material that they're delivering, which I would put material in inverted commas, again, awful podcast. ⁓
Anton Rius (13:33)
Yeah!
Yeah.
Yeah, we need like
the audio closed caption where you can, yeah, Tom is giving inverted comments now.
Tom Rudnai (13:50)
Yeah, have whatever hand gestures I'm making come
up and kind of explain. Yeah. No, it makes sense. I think the other thing that you said was really interesting about how you said you had your conference last week and all of these conversations, the insight that you got from actually speaking to customers. And I know that was something I read a LinkedIn post that you put out last week talking about that. And I think that's something that a lot of content marketers lose. Right. And it's what
or maybe stops them from filling that product market to roll because they have all the same strategic skill sets, right? But they're a little bit further displaced from the customer.
Anton Rius (14:25)
Yeah, yeah, I feel, I feel really privileged to, to be able to run our customer stories program as part of what I do. And that puts me right in front of customers and just hearing what they have to say directly and hearing about their experience is so valuable because we can sit behind a computer and we can, we can, you know, look at industry reports.
And we can find stats and things about what customers think or are doing or what we think they think is valuable right now. But hearing directly from customers and being able to ask them questions and especially the kinds of customers that are excited to talk to you and excited to help out, that makes it even better, of course. But just hearing their feedback, like, how can we improve? What's your experience been like?
What is it, one of my favorite questions to ask them is like, okay, you're talking to a peer, what's something that you would say to them? Like what is the best piece of advice that you would give to a peer in your role who wants to up level their sales team? And you just get these open-ended responses that can be so valuable. It's not about your product, it's not about.
you know, making yourself look good. It's really just about understanding what it is your buyers are going through so that you can create content that resonates in the best way possible.
Tom Rudnai (15:55)
And how do you, so it sounds like you have your of customer case studies that you do which provide you a great opportunity to do that. Are there other ways that you can manufacture those types of interactions? Because I think it's often very difficult as a marketer, everyone in the business is told you should be close to customers, you should be talking to customers, but there has to be a kind of value exchange and a reason for the interactions from the customer's perspective as well, right?
Anton Rius (16:19)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So in the past, I've done this by sitting in on like, I guess like quarterly business review calls with a with account managers or customer experience team. Now with call recording, I think that's a great way to just listen to recordings of sales calls and get perspective on
what your customers are talking about, what they're saying, why they're talking to you in the first place. So that can be a valuable source of insight. Not to get too self-promotional, but with our win-loss platform, one of the things that I thought was really cool when we acquired primary intelligence, now TrueVoice, was that a lot of the conversation or a lot of the
excuse me, a lot of the decision making process from buyers happens outside of sales calls. And so it's one thing to get in front of customers and talk to them in a customer success kind of environment where they're gonna tell you their experience as an existing customer. It's another thing to get on sales calls and listen to what...
prospects are saying to your sales team within that conversation. But what the win-loss data does is it gives you more insight into what customers think and how they are forming decisions outside of those things. When no one's in the room, when they're just behind closed doors making decisions about their business and comparing competitors. It's been able to surface some insights that we
we previously just had no access to, just around competitive positioning, you know, how people think about us compared to other providers. And it's given us a lot of insight into what we can do better.
Tom Rudnai (18:10)
Yeah, well, and to me, that's content's primary role, right? You're the ones that do the selling when sales aren't in the room. And more and more sales aren't in the room. It's very hard and very expensive to get someone into the room.
Anton Rius (18:23)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's
a great way to put it. Yeah. And I love that you mentioned before about content, you know, having so much, a much bigger role than just top of the funnel. I feel the same way. I always get a little frustrated when I hear, you know, content marketing in so many words equals SEO or content marketing is like publishing.
X amount of blog posts. It's like, great, but there are so many other ways that content can be beneficial to not just for the prospects you're trying to put in your pipeline, but also for your existing customers, for sales conversations while they are talking to your sales reps. Like, are they using the content that you're putting out there? And that's where the magic happens. When you can create pieces of content or a story that
your buyers are going to use and reference throughout their journey.
Tom Rudnai (19:21)
No, absolutely. And I think it's a, there's a feedback loop that needs to be, there's a feedback loop that needs to be established, right? Because it's about, as a content marketer, you are separated from the front line. So there's all of these conversations going on, which are an increasingly small proportion of the bio journey, and it's putting more pressure on your work, but you still need to be finding a systematized way to extract insight from that, that can feed into what you do.
⁓ What do you do, so you've said talking to customers is obviously a huge value add for you. I presume another one is working with sales reps and customer success and people who are on the front lines. Like do you have a process for feeding their inputs on what people are talking about into your roadmap?
Anton Rius (19:46)
Mm-hmm.
So it's something that we can certainly improve on. mean, that's always been kind of the, like, if you can crack that code, then please let me know. But what I can tell you what has worked in the past is at a past company, what we did was we brought together all of our sales reps in a room.
Tom Rudnai (20:11)
I think my script is on that one.
Anton Rius (20:23)
and we went through a content brainstorming exercise. And it was really focused on the kinds of things that sales reps are hearing from people. Same with customer success, you can include them too. I think that's probably better because you get more insight. But really just trying to capture like, okay, what are people saying and how can we address those questions or concerns or anything else in a way that's gonna make sales.
easier. I would also say, know, just my point before about like listening to call recordings, like if you have Gong or one of those platforms for call recording, now with AI, like put all those things into AI, like let's have AI scrape it and give us themes and different questions that you could answer.
based on those conversations and the themes that it's seeing. So yeah, think a specific process, that's something we're working on, but more like kind of ad hoc at the moment. We're taking whatever data we have and trying to feed it into our systems to come up with ideas. A good example of that actually is it's not directly related to our customer feedback, but
I published an article earlier this year about the, the, like most pressing stats and themes that, buyers, sorry, it's, it's a, I published an article earlier this year about the, buying behavior in 2025, how it's changed over the years and, what people are doing now.
kind of what they're struggling with. And that was just a collection of a lot of different industry reports, along with some of our own original research that we've done to kind of surface what are the trends that people are dealing with now. And based off of that, we were able to identify like some specific things that we could focus on in our content strategy for this year. And then we laid out kind of a roadmap of, okay,
Every two months we're going to kind of hit hard on this specific theme. We're going to have a like kind of checklist of content that we're going to create based on this theme. And then next two months we're going to do a different thing. But part of that is identifying specifically what kind of questions people are struggling with.
what are the most pressing challenges people are facing, developing content to address that on a marketing front, but then we can easily take the same data, the same information and flip it into like sales enablement content for our enablement team. Like, okay, so someone comes into the pipeline, they're thinking about this specific theme, how does that connect to a solution? What kind of call scripts do you need? Like.
what can you do, like what resources do we have enablement wise to support that conversation at the next stage so you can take it from pipeline to close one.
Tom Rudnai (23:25)
Yeah, I mean that's super cool. I think it's cool, like...
There's a nice structure to how that operates. And I guess it gives you an ability, if you're doing two, like it sounds like almost two monthly sprints, right, in terms of things. So you can report on those and kind of, it allows you slowly to hone in on what's really working, right?
Anton Rius (23:44)
Yeah, I love the idea of doing things in sprints. It's something that I can get better at. working at a SaaS, I just really appreciated how the product team operated. They had their developers in sprints to finish certain features, or we had specific launch timelines coming up. And we could align to that really well. It made sure that everybody knew what was coming up.
what to expect, what they're working on. And I think, you know, for a content team, we are in many ways production, loosely, like a product team is. A product team is producing, we're producing. And so I think that's an opportunity for a lot of content teams to think more like that, you know, rather than just kind of like the ongoing schedule of, okay, we're gonna do a...
quarterly ebook and we're going to do a couple blog posts a month and you're like, well, what are we writing about this time? Okay. Yeah. Why not plan upfront and like have these sprints planned out so that, so that more people throughout the organization can kind of align to it and know what to expect.
Tom Rudnai (24:52)
That's the thing, because I think it's the flip side, right? So you say, okay, content is more revenue critical than ever, but that also brings with it a lot more eyes, a lot more focus, and a lot more pressure. And that is, I think, a shift that content marketers have to get used to. But I think adopting that mind, I talk about it a lot, like the product manager mindset, is something that helps quite a lot with making that shift. Because what does the product manager do? They build a roadmap focused on...
taking a strategic vision and a kind of commercial goal, blending those two together into, okay, this is the roadmap that's gonna allow us to get there. But all along the way, they need to make sure that they're collecting input almost obsessively from all of the different kind of data sources that they have. So as a content marketer, the job is very similar. The data sources might be different. It's gonna be a combination of feedback from the front lines and kind of engagement data, traditional marketing data.
But only by creating that clear roadmap can you kind of make sure that you keep getting the lines of communication coming back. Because if you don't give people a framework, then as soon as you say no, people don't understand why, everything becomes political, right?
Anton Rius (26:02)
Yeah, yeah, no, that's such a good point. Yeah, you need a plan in place to point to, to say, is where our resources are going. Cause otherwise you're exactly right. You get requests from sales, the C-suite priorities change. And all of a sudden you're just, you're just back to production. You're not strategic anymore. So you kind of have to show, it's a lot of internal marketing that happens, unfortunately.
You have to prove your value like no one's gonna do that for you You have to prove your value by setting the strategy and sharing it internally You said something else there that I really liked so Part of it is also aligning to the strategic objectives of the company and That is so critical and I think that
kind of in a lot of ways comes from leadership down, waterfalls down, to be able to communicate what those things are. But as a content marketing leader, a lot of my job is to understand what those executive priorities are as much as I have access to them, whether through CMO or whatever other connections I have in the C-suite. I need to kind of filter that down and make sure that my team's focusing on the right things. And...
make sure that it's the things that the C-suite cares about. Because if you're just doing things that you think will work or you know will work, but it doesn't align to the organization's goals, then they're not going to value you quite as much as if you were drawing that line directly up from what your department's doing to what marketing's objective goals are to what the C-suite's strategic priorities are.
Tom Rudnai (27:49)
Yeah, and I think it's a level, And it's kind of like a hierarchy that has to flow down from them, right? As a marketer, any marketer really, whether you're the CMO or a content marketer, you need a goal and you need a vision and a kind of an endpoint to shoot for. And I think the job then is how do you build that out into a set of steps, a roadmap and a kind of plan and a distribution plan that's going to allow us to get there. If you can be really clear on
how you're going to achieve that, then that's something that's gonna allow you to create alignment at every step of that chain. ⁓ But you also...
Anton Rius (28:25)
Yeah.
And it eases everybody's anxiety about what you're working on too. Cause they can see that you have, you're focused on the right things. You're doing things that will contribute to the business and it'll eliminate a lot of the political discussions. Like you were saying of people coming in and saying, okay, well, how is content contributing to pipeline or demos or whatever your goal is? You know, you have that.
Strategy all mapped out so you can just show them
Tom Rudnai (28:56)
Yeah, well that was one of my questions that I was going to ask is how do you think about, I suppose there's kind of two questions there. In the context of your world, how do you think about the buyer journey and what are the key and content's role within it? But then also how does that filter into what you measure and how you kind of report on success?
Anton Rius (29:16)
Yeah. So corporate visions has a really unique way of looking at the buyer's journey. And I love it. So I've kind of adopted it in my own thinking. But instead of kind of the standard phases, like you might talk about in a funnel, like awareness, consideration, decision kind of thing, we talk about it in terms of the decisions that buyers are making in their journey. So for example,
One of our core pieces of IP is the idea that when you're talking to a buyer, so many sales reps, marketers do this too in their content. They just automatically jump into product features. They automatically start talking about why we're so great, why they should care about us. But the buyer at that point doesn't care. What they care about is...
Are you going to offer me a good reason to change from my status quo?
We talk about this concept of status quo bias, which is just the behavioral economics concept. think it was Daniel Kahneman wrote about it in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. But the idea is that people are highly resistant to change. Unless you give them a good reason to change, then they're going to continue with the status quo because it's good enough. They can get by with the Excel spreadsheet. They don't need your project management tool because
Excel spreadsheet is frustrating, it's annoying, but it's also free compared to spending more on your tool and all the other implicit costs that come with onboarding and getting their team onboard and actually using it and implementing it.
Tom Rudnai (30:58)
Yeah, and it's
safe, it's comfortable, right? People have a comfort zone within, even within a process that they get frustrated by, that to a lot of people is more appealing than the unknown.
Anton Rius (31:03)
Right.
Right.
Yeah, exactly. So my job as content in a lot of ways is, is making sure that we're sharing the insights that show them that there's a risk involved in staying the same and not doing nothing. Now, once they convert or when they like come to our site, that's where you start talking about, okay, here's, here's what that means. Here's what we offer.
And so a lot of the content that we put out is not us focused at all. It's more about sharing our research and our insights around a particular challenge that our buyers are facing. And then kind of easing into like, here's our point of view about this particular thing. And here's how we believe that sales teams can solve this. But we leave ourselves out of the conversation until the buyer shows that intent that they are.
Interested in talking to us and learning more. So that's like landing on the website engaging with the sales BDR or sales rep, you know that kind of thing So it's a little different than what other then then what I think other marketers may Think about when they think about the buyer's journey, but it's it's really about answering that why change question first and then talking about why you and then there's other steps to like
you have to kind of justify a decision to the C-suite. You have to go through the negotiation process till you close. And then on the other side, we kind of have these, the other side of the journey is like the customer experience, which is more about, okay, why should I stay with you? Why should I buy more from you? If you're doing a price increase, why should I, you know, pay more for what I'm already getting?
those kinds of things. So those are the kinds of questions that we try and answer. For content in particular, I would say we're more focused on the first question, just because our goal in the marketing organization is to build pipeline. So we're going to build pipeline by getting people interested and get them to talk to sales.
Tom Rudnai (33:21)
And creating the conditions in which someone can be persuaded, right? It's creating the openness to listen. don't think anyone, this is where like no one wants to talk to a fucking sales rep, right? We're annoying creatures. I think that's the job of marketing often is open people up to that conversation. A sales rep is gonna have a very hard time convincing someone who doesn't wanna change that they ought to change. It's a long job and every sale, there's such a vested interest in the conversation.
Anton Rius (33:33)
Hahaha.
Tom Rudnai (33:49)
it's not the right person for that message to come from. Traditionally, it was always how it worked, but I just don't think that's realistic anymore. What they can.
Anton Rius (33:55)
Well, yeah,
and people are not necessarily, you they might be looking for how these things work in their own journey. I mean, you said it yourself, the buyer's journey is lot more self-guided. People are doing their research on their own. They're gathering their own, you know, short list of vendors to approach. And so the question on my mind is how do we get in front of people before they reach out to us?
best way to do that is, from my perspective, is sharing those insights and just not talking about yourself. Like it seems counterintuitive to a lot of people, but just like leave yourself out of the equation and just think about helping other people solve the challenges in the best way they can. And they're naturally going to pay attention to what you have to say. They'll become interested on their own.
Tom Rudnai (34:42)
It's one of those things that's kind of marketing 101, but it's actually in the reality of doing it, it's so hard to stick to because it's just what we all default back to. I love the approach of like, you're trying to get people out of their reluctance to change. It makes me think of my first sales job, there was a rep there who you would hear on the phone probably three to five times every day asking a prospect, is doing nothing an option here? That was always his question. Someone's kind of on the fence.
We'd ask that and some of them say, actually, yeah. Like, I can just do nothing about this. And that's like the best qualifier you could ever imagine. Cause they were gonna work that out eventually. But a lot of them were like, well, no, it's not. And then it always led into a conversation. But I think that that's almost the thing that you're trying to educate against and then qualify against a little bit before it gets over to sales, right?
Anton Rius (35:12)
You
Yeah. And it's, it's a lot more well known in sales communities. think Challenger, which is a competitor of ours, they popularized that idea of like challenging the status quo. The idea that, you know, lot of your competition isn't your direct competitors because 40 % of deals in the pipeline, in the pipeline and the no decision, meaning the
Prospect just decides to do nothing instead of choosing you or a competitor. So it's really important to address and I think it's something that a lot of marketing teams overlook.
Tom Rudnai (36:11)
No, absolutely. And it's where marketing needs to help support sales and support reps in doing that job. ⁓ I'll ask you a couple of questions as well about like, just some of the things that I've read, because I know you've been putting a lot of content out there recently. And one of the things you've been talking about is how are you kind of, how are you balancing in a content function, efficiency with creativity? And I know that's something that a lot of people are thinking about at the moment, as there's a lot of pressure in content.
Anton Rius (36:19)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (36:41)
towards efficiency, right? How are you using AI? Talk to us a little bit about what the role AI plays in your content creation process and how you keep the fun in it as well.
Anton Rius (36:52)
Yeah, that's just a big can of worms to open, of course, with the conversation around AI. ⁓ As I was thinking about this a little bit, because I know you prepped me with a couple questions, but as I was thinking about this, I was thinking more about how we schedule out our content production. So we use Gantt charts mostly to...
Tom Rudnai (36:57)
Yeah.
Anton Rius (37:17)
to manage our content production. And anytime there's a project that we have coming up, it goes into this tool. use a tool called TeamGantt for Gantt charts. The team loves it because what it does is instead of having a list of specific tasks that you need to accomplish, like you just go down a task list and just like check the boxes. I did this, I did this, I did this. What we're doing is we'll say, okay, you need to write
the draft of this ebook or the draft of this article or the campaign doc of emails and landing page copy that goes along with it. And we're going to give you a window in which to do that. So you have a week, let's say. So five business days. And on the Gantt chart, that's your timeline. It's not one day that you have to accomplish it, but it's five days. And we know that there's other work that needs to be done. There's
bound to be other requests from other teams that you need to address. Things come up, you got to put out fires sometimes. But what that does is it allows people to work kind of it's within the boundaries of the time that we need things to get done by, but it allows them the flexibility to work when and how they want on those things. And as long as the projects get done, we're good. So we're not questioning how people get the tasks done. We're giving them the room.
to do it on their terms, but within whatever constraints we have to work with. And that's something that I learned a lot from, like design thinking. There's always constraints into whatever you're doing, but yeah, the whole idea is you're trying to think as creatively as possible within those constraints. When you're talking about AI, I think that just accelerates
accelerates the process in so many ways. Cause now, you know, if we have something within our production cycle that can be easily templated, we're just in a template and put it through AI. And so I think how it's changed, how we're producing things and making us more efficient is, you know, we've looked at any of the tasks that we have to do.
Tom Rudnai (39:13)
Mm-hmm.
Anton Rius (39:26)
that are somewhat repetitive or somewhat templated. And we'll just build a custom GPT or we a tool called Lex. ⁓ It's a Gen.E.I. writer. But that has a similar kind of functionality where you can just build custom prompts and have it kind of give you the format and the structure that you're looking for. And it gives you a nice first draft. We always feed it.
Tom Rudnai (39:36)
Yeah, I know that.
Mm-hmm.
Anton Rius (39:53)
audience information, we feed it our corporate visions, voice and tone guidelines. We feed it all the things that it needs to create semi-decent responses. And so we're not just relying on AI outputs, but at least it gives us something to work with. And that eliminates so much. It eliminates like the blank page syndrome, where you're just staring at the blank page, not knowing what to write. It helps us just kind of overcome those hurdles a little bit faster.
in our production process.
Tom Rudnai (40:22)
Yeah, it's something that I always find difficult, the way that it is, because you have all these tools to now get you over the blank page fear.
It's very, I find it very hard to almost allow yourself the space. And it sounds like you've created a structure that makes sure that you are doing that because create anything creative, inevitably you are going to have moments that don't feel productive where you sat there for an hour and not really got through anything. So it's kind of, it's a tough balance to strike between creating the conditions where that's acceptable, but we have things to help you through. And I think that's something that falls on leaders to do, right?
Anton Rius (40:53)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. And unfortunately, I think a lot of people just don't understand it. ⁓ I posted recently and this just post just took off just about the idea of the quiet creative on a brainstorming call where, you know, a lot of leaders think they could just get on a zoom call or whatever it is and get everybody in a room and just say, okay, we're going to tackle this thing right now. And
Tom Rudnai (41:04)
Hmm.
Anton Rius (41:23)
everybody come up with your best ideas and I'm just have this blank word doc and I'm just going to list them all out and we'll decide it right here. creative people often don't work like that. They actually need the space and time to process information and let it percolate and then come to the table with good ideas that are fully formed rather than just like trying to shoot things off the cuff. So it's absolutely up to leadership to be able to create that environment where, where people, especially
quieter ones on those calls have the room to be able to think and do their best work.
Tom Rudnai (41:56)
Yeah, no, think it's, I mean, it's always been a challenge that leaders have had to face, but I think potentially in a kind of Zoom remote world, it's amplified a little bit, right? Because I think in a group setting on Zoom, it's so much easier than before for it to become dominated because you take away all of the social anxiety of the people who are dominating, right? You take away their sense of there's someone who's trying to get a word in. It's kind of, it's an extrovert world.
Anton Rius (42:24)
Yeah, yeah, it is in a lot of ways. but I do think I work remotely. We're fully remote company and, you know, what it's done for me and my team is just, you have to trust that your people are grownups that they can manage their own work. And you have to hire people of course, that you can trust to do that, but you can't micromanage that stuff. I can't be on my team all the time. Like, Hey,
Have you written this yet? Have you written this yet? You know, they need the space to be able to, you know, do that on their own. Amidst all the other life things that we have going on now, you know, that we have to deal with. It's, if you want the best creative work, you have to give creatives time to think.
Tom Rudnai (43:04)
Yeah, I mean, the good thing for you is you're going to have a whole load of AI agents working on you pretty soon that you can micromanage. you can, as leaders, can put all of your micromanagement tendencies towards them.
Anton Rius (43:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, for better or worse, we're all going to be managing machines pretty soon. Yeah. It's getting to that point.
Tom Rudnai (43:19)
Yeah, I mean,
I'm quite excited for that because I think it frees you up to be completely creative and hopefully create more space. I think we've you could almost plot noisiness on a graph. And I think we are at the peak now because what AI has done is allowed so many more creative ways for people to insert noise into our life. But I think increasingly the people who succeed aren't going to be the ones that thrive in that and are super busy and always on. It's going to be the ones who manage to actually create some separation from it.
Do some thinking.
Anton Rius (43:49)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's a couple schools of thought on AI and, you know, I appreciate the work that the HubSpot team is doing. They have this show, Marketing Against the Grain, which is great, but if you look at some of the titles of their YouTube videos, I actually feel like it's not helping.
It's not helping us get to this point where it frees up creative time because, you know, I think I saw one the other day that was like, this will replace your creative team. But that's the wrong direction. That's exactly what you should not do with AI. You need AI to, to take the non-creative paths off your hands so that your creative team has the time and space and energy to be able to, you know, do
creative work, because that's what's going to stand out. Everybody has the same baseline of AI now. Creativity is what's going to be the difference maker. And yeah, if you're taking away creativity and outsourcing it to AI, that's the worst decision you could make.
Tom Rudnai (44:58)
And it's tough because that's so at odds with the messaging that I've spot a rolling out, which is it's all about taking back your time and freeing humans up to do the value add works. But that's such a good example of then as these things all kind of trickle down the waterfall of a roadmap and a hierarchy, you end up with something that's so at odds with your core vision, right? That's a.
Anton Rius (45:21)
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting. and, you know, I, they're, they're smart people. They're smarter than me. They know what they're doing. So, you know, but I, but I do think that we can get caught up in like the click bait of it all and the hype. And we kind of just have to stay focused on, okay, long-term, what is really going to show returns and how are we making those decisions now? Like, where are we placing our bets now with our resourcing?
and the kinds of things that we're asking our teams to do so that it'll pay off long term and not just focus on short term being.
Tom Rudnai (45:56)
No, absolutely. Look, there's loads more that I would love to ask you, but we're kind of approaching time. So if you've got a minute, let's get into a couple of quick fire questions and then I'll let you get back to your day. First one, what's the biggest change that you've noticed in B2B marketing since you started and you're not just allowed to say AI?
Anton Rius (46:01)
yeah.
Yeah, that is the biggest thing.
It's gotten a lot more complicated and I don't know if this is just because for my career I've worked for larger organizations. But when I first got into marketing, I'm self-taught. I went to art school. I worked in a variety of different things before turning to marketing. But when I got into marketing, it felt like the heyday of social media where you could just be online.
and just be talking to people and having conversations and connecting with people. And that's what it was all about. You'd like find your little pod and they'd all share your stuff. you know, we still were capturing people on a newsletter, but it was almost, it wasn't quite like, you know, the very beginning days of blogging. It was a little more complicated to get things out there and get attention on it. But it did feel like it was a lot more about.
connection and people at that time. And maybe, you know, that's just me looking back on the good old days now that I'm a surly marketer. now it just feels like it's a lot more complicated with all the tech we have. People are so focused on optimization and efficiency. And granted, we're under a tremendous amount of pressure right now to do more with less. So I understand.
But I feel like it's too easy to get the human element for, it's too easy for the human element to get lost in, in all of the technology. so yeah, again, I'm not sure how much that's changed, but I do know like the tech that we're using, the platforms that we're using are changing the algorithms from when I first started on LinkedIn or, you know,
I'm not on Facebook anymore, but when I was on Facebook back then, Twitter doesn't exist anymore, of course, but with X, it's just, it's so much harder to get any reach on those platforms without paying. And it felt like it was a lot easier then to just kind of have a platform and build your personal brand or your company brand.
Tom Rudnai (48:14)
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think it's worth it. They've just been flooded and I'm kind of seeing people lean in one of two directions. You either lean into hyper efficiency. We have to do so much in order to make any noise on these platforms. And we're just going to accept that. we are going to quality is probably going to suffer or you lean into community. And I think we're seeing a little bit of a resurgence of local communities is a good way to create actual authentic connections as to what everyone's trying to do. But I think the challenge is that
Anton Rius (48:50)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Rudnai (49:00)
That is just slightly at odds with venture scale as a goal. And if that is your goal, it's always going to be difficult to use a community model. Not impossible, but...
Anton Rius (49:05)
Right.
Right.
Yeah, I was just talking to someone actually, and they were doing all the right things. They were on Medium Quora, were on Hacker News, all these sites that we used to be able to just go onto and answer people's questions. And that was the way you did it. You built the presence by doing these things. Now all of that is so fragmented. Now you can go into subreddits, you can go into these micro communities where people are talking about.
the thing that you're interested in that they may not be talking about publicly on social, but that's a lot of time to do that. Who has the resources to do that anymore? So yeah, it's gotten difficult. It's gotten difficult to get, especially thinking about it from a business sense, like how do you get people's attention?
Tom Rudnai (49:41)
Mm.
Yeah, it's interesting that you share, and I'm always really bad at quickfire questions, but it's interesting that you said it yourself, right? Like, people aren't willing to share it on LinkedIn. I think that speaks to what LinkedIn has become, right? That it's a very sanitised view of everyone's world and their problems. It's what they're willing to put out there. And then they find a little community elsewhere. Like, there's this kind of whole dark world of WhatsApp groups, which I'm in loads of them, and people will share things that they would never dream of putting out in public.
It's all the same people who are viewing it, that viewed it on LinkedIn. It's just the medium gives them a sense of security.
Anton Rius (50:23)
Right?
Yeah, and I'm a member of a couple of marketing communities and I love it because it is it does feel like more of that safe space You go on a public channel and all of a sudden you're worried about oh I can't talk about this for fear my boss will see it For fear that it's in a disparage my company in some way and hurt my chances at my next career move For whatever other anxieties you have about it. Just making yourself look good. You're automatically sanitizing that stuff like you said, so yeah, it's
Tom Rudnai (50:37)
Hmm.
Mm.
Anton Rius (50:59)
Yeah, I wish people would share more honestly, but yeah, you kind of got to go other places to find the meat now
Tom Rudnai (51:07)
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm definitely guilty of it as well. Another question then, what skill or trait for you personally has been the biggest needle mover in your career?
Anton Rius (51:17)
Yeah.
would say empathy is a big one for me. When I started out in marketing, I hooked on to this idea of relationship marketing and it feels kind of soft and woo and hard to quantify, of course. I think really it just comes down to, again, just understanding what it is that your buyers are dealing with right now.
And beyond just marketing to people, understanding what your team is going through right now, just having empathy to, you know, be able to kind of adjust to the way that people want to work and the way that people want to hear about you has been really powerful.
Tom Rudnai (52:02)
I think that's a good one and again if what we're saying is everyone is trying to find a way to build a connection with someone in a in a Marketing landscape that doesn't make that easy. I think a good place to start is always with empathy So I think I think that's really cool Last one that I'll do and then we'll get on to any recommendations that you have What's the biggest fuck-up in your career? Like I'm talking the the heart-sinking moment where you press the button and everything went wrong
Anton Rius (52:30)
man, that's a good question. certainly made mistakes.
You know, I can't think of one exact moment where I broke everything. I'm sure it's happened and I had to recover somehow. But I know that my biggest mistake that I made in my career was not continuing to write publicly for myself. I had a publication for a while when I first started out, when I was just getting my head around
you know, content marketing and social. And so I published regularly. I published every week. had, I set up the little newsletter, go out. I was having conversations with people. And then at some point I got into this job and I decided for some reason that it was better if I just fully committed my energy to my employer. And so I stopped writing publicly for myself, gave up the site. It's now some other company about the URL.
And then most more recently I just decided to start again because I missed having that platform and I'm a big proponent of writing to think and So if I'm not writing regularly, I'm not fully forming my thoughts and my opinions about things But also just it long term it hurts your career if you're not doing that because you're you know
Tom Rudnai (53:37)
Good
Anton Rius (53:54)
It's kind of a hard truth, but your employer is not going to think twice about cutting you if they don't see your value and they have to cut budget. But if you're out there, if you are showing your value publicly, you're going through your thought process and making those connections and having conversations with people, it's like a safety net.
you're going to have a much better chance of landing on your feet if something drastic does happen. But also it's just been fun. It's like just making connections like this. Like I don't think I would have, I would have made a connection Tom, if I wasn't out there, you know, just sharing stuff. So, so I think it's always interesting to me and I guess I forgot how unexpected some of the benefits are of just
Tom Rudnai (54:33)
Mm.
Anton Rius (54:42)
writing publicly and sharing openly. So I've been enjoying it, but yeah, I would say that was my biggest mistake because at this point, you know, maybe 10 years later, I would have been in a much different position than I am now, you know, as far as, you know, my own personal writing.
Tom Rudnai (54:59)
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things in there. It's very easy for anyone to let go when they get a job that keeps them very busy of the kind of personal habits, hobbies that they get a lot out of. But you don't notice the cost of that. I think normally for quite a while and you kind of like, hold on, I've given up all my hobbies and that's why I'm just not quite feeling myself anymore. ⁓ But the other thing, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. In this example, there's such a tangible benefit to writing.
Anton Rius (55:22)
Yeah.
Tom Rudnai (55:27)
If you give me two people that I could potentially hire both super skilled, but one brings an audience in this day and age where an audience is so hard to come by, I'm going to choose that person. The other thing I'm struck by an interviewing content marketers a lot for this show is the level of thought that goes into their opinions. They are clearly very well constructed, well reflected because they've had to write them down in past. They've had to structure it into an argument.
Anton Rius (55:37)
Yeah, absolutely.
Tom Rudnai (55:53)
And I think that sets you up so, so well for interviews, for any forum where you have to explain yourself.
Anton Rius (56:00)
Oh yeah, absolutely. And yeah, what I'm reminded of as you're talking is it's like going to the gym for me. I hate going to the gym, but I know I need to do it. I know I need to, like, you know, it's just like the ongoing hygiene things that like, it's painful to do in the moment, but it pays off. Like you feel so good afterward. And it's the same with writing. It's like my mental exercise where it's sometimes painful to have to sit down and like,
not just let AI write things for me and actually think through things and wrestle with ideas and thoughts and put them down on paper, but it's very rewarding.
Tom Rudnai (56:39)
Yeah, no, I think it's something we all have to be a little bit on guard of is that we don't forget how to think. Because it's very easy to do now. Yeah, right, before I let you go, one recommendation that you would have for listeners, whether it's a book, a podcast, a thought leader that you love, something they should go and check out that's going to help them.
Anton Rius (56:43)
Yeah, yeah, that's a very real danger.
yeah, I, I, I struggled to come up with just one. So I, I'm gonna, I guess my first one that comes to mind is, there is a copywriter by the name of Eddie Schleiner and he wrote a book called Very Good Copy. And anyone who hasn't read that yet, if you want to improve your writing, that is the book to read. It's a masterclass in some of the classic concepts from old copywriters.
And he's distilled it in just very easy to read, understandable, just super clear form for us all to digest. yeah, it's, I feel like I'm getting like an associates or something in copywriting just by reading it. So that's hugely valuable.
Tom Rudnai (57:45)
Well, I bet within an hour of this podcast going out, someone will have turned it into a prompt. that's awesome. And then finally, anything you'd like to plug in terms of what you're doing, in terms of what you're doing at Corporate Visions. Just give you a quick moment.
Anton Rius (57:50)
Yeah, I'm sure.
Yeah, so anyone that's interested can find me on LinkedIn, Anton Reuse. I'm always happy to connect and have conversations with people. That's my strategy on there. I just want to have good conversations with people. I want to share ideas and have smart conversations. I would say you can check out my site, which is longtailthinking.com. And as far as corporate visions goes.
The best thing you can do right now is go subscribe to our podcast. It's called the in blazers On YouTube or anywhere you get podcasts It's very sales focused but share it with your sales team Your enablement team they're going to get a lot of value out of it
Tom Rudnai (58:39)
Awesome, there you have it, the second best podcast in go to market, the Inblazers. Awesome, well Anton, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure and I'm sure we'll talk soon.
Anton Rius (58:51)
Yeah, thanks, Tom. been great.
Tom Rudnai (58:52)
Thanks for listening
everybody.