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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to Revenue Vitals with Chris Walker.
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B
As we get started here, and I'm letting more people in. I have a ton of questions for Chris. Obviously, I want to focus it broadly B2B content strategy, more like on the earlier stage. I know, Chris, with your stuff, you now focus more on the 50 million, 100 million ARR. I think that's a little bit outside of the ballpark of most of the audience here. So I want to focus more on the 0 to 11 to 10 range, getting things off the ground. But I also want to make this a community event. So, guys, if you have any questions at any point, drop them in the chat. You can also even unmute yourself if you have the guts to do that. And I'll do my best to moderate. Okay, we're now at 52. My record so far is 75. All right, let's go. That was with the Fletch guys two weeks ago, so we'll see if we will break that. Well, maybe first question, Chris here. I don't think you need an introduction. Last time you were on was in January this year. That was right when you had kind of started Passetto and you were in that transition phase. We talked a little bit about it back then, but what's the status update right now? About a year in.
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A
Yeah. So I've been a B2B marketer for basically most of my career. I did some consulting earlier on at large companies, but then I've been in product marketing and demand gen and marketing leadership since like 2015 or 16 in B2B companies. And over time, what I've been trying to help marketing leaders and companies and CEOs see is that the impact that's demonstrated through marketing investments is not as simple as measuring your leads or how much pipeline you get or things like that. It's actually quite complex and complicated. And while the rest of the business, sales and account management, have clear sort of targets around what they're supposed to deliver, how much they cost, and what the ROI of those investments are, marketing is typically out in their own sandbox using Google sheets or like other types of tools that aren't connected to the finance data. So what I'm trying to do is empower marketing leaders and revenue leaders to be able to look at their data through a financial lens, which is the number one way to communicate your impact and demonstrate progress to the board and the executive team. And right now, most of marketing just lacks that context, tools and things. So I think that it's empowering. I think that There's a clear sea change happening in overall go to market. And when you break that down even further into marketing, that we need to have business acumen and we need to achieve unit economics targets as a team and a unit and a leader. And what that does is that that incentivizes us to do things that are very high roi, which means they don't cost a lot and they drive a lot of results. Founder brand content marketing on the Internet would be a great example of that. Right. A lot of marketers want to do that, but struggle to show it because they try to box it in with the current attribution method or mix modeling method of marketing measurement. That has nothing to do with the unit economics or roi. And so meanwhile, the company's spending a million dollars a month on Google Ads. Right. But you can't get funded for your podcast. And for the business, that's a bad decision. But we haven't been able to, as marketers and revenue leaders, show the business and the business leaders how bad of a decision that is and what they should do instead. So I've spent five, seven years trying to figure out how to help marketers, and that's what I'm doing now.
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B
You just broke the record, Chris. We're at 78.
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A
Cool. Welcome, everyone.
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B
Dope. Now, that's your point of view, but from a business perspective, what were some of the biggest things that, like, you assume would happen when you started Pesetto and that actually turned out to be the case? Like, I think you made some changes around. Initially you talked to the cmo, but now you realize you need to talk to the cfo. Like, from a business positioning, messaging, productizing perspective, what are the biggest lessons so far? One year in?
- [03:59]
A
Yeah. And so I think when you're trying to do something really new, generally what happens is that companies do not budget for it. There's not a clear owner of a department that has it. And so it's challenging to figure out where does my new solution fit. And so I'm trying to solve a problem that sits between finance, sales, marketing, and rev ops. Right. And so while it could help everybody, no one really has the budget power to authorize our expense except for the CEO or some type of exec discretionary budget. And so that learning has been challenging for me because we thought that was the way to solve the real problem, but it's really difficult to get in with that level of positioning. And so a learning here for us has been sort of back away, solve an existing problem that people already feel position Your product. That way we don't even have to really change the product. We just position it differently, use that to get into the organization and then build and develop our expansion plan. And I think that just building technology is a lot different than building an agency. And so we've spent a lot of time getting the product right, building integrations. AI has been a massive accelerant to that over the past couple of months for us as we get to figure that out more and be able to release big features in a weekend instead of in two or three months. That I think is cool. And then there's just this big learning for me recently. It shows up in all areas of my life right now, which is just that slow. Is fast in business, in relationships, in life and fitness and anything. When you try to cut corners or you try to make things go faster than they should, you end up actually slowing yourself down because you pay the price for it later. And so a lot of my work, like I wrote down yesterday, I was spending a lot of time on it and it was like the question, the prompt that I write down was, do you need a better strategy? Right? There is friction right now in the process. There's something that you're not seeing that is really important. And I think this is great advice for really early stage companies for this audience because people might face this a lot where they think that, oh, we should just produce more content, right? Let's just do another podcast a week or another webinar. But the actual problem is so much deeper than that around product positioning, product maturity, how people are comparing you. Is there a budget line item forward or not? Do you fit into an existing category? Who else falls into that category? What are people willing to pay? What are the contract terms that people are used to? There's so many things that come into how does the customer place you and compare you in their mind? That I think that I underappreciated earlier in my career.
- [06:17]
B
Love it now. I like the action in the chat. Benny, by the way. You can't do video. You walk in with your five month old strapped to your chest. That's definitely an excuse. I don't think anyone would mind seeing that. Dan, Omar, great to see you guys in here. Now before I want to ask the question about the change that you're going to make on your content strategy, but you went with Refine labs over, I think a five year period from, I think the maximum you guys were doing was like 20, 22 million run rate. I don't know if this is the Wrong number here, but definitely in 2022.
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A
We did 21 million in actual revenue.
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B
Yeah, 21 million in revenue now with Pesetto. I don't know if you're on the 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 million trajectory, but you started from 0 in some sense. Obviously you still had your audience. How would you right now describe your content strategy for Passetto in a nutshell?
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A
So we're in the 1 to 10 journey now. So, like, 0 to 1 was actually pretty straightforward. And we've been using professional services and consulting as a way to supplement and be able to use customer income and adding value to accelerate building the product and also to fund building the product ourselves instead of having to raise money. So it's a new strategy that I think a lot of people should take. And then when it comes to the content strategy, I think, and this is like advice for, mostly for founders and the people that are around the technology and the product marketing, is that I think that everything has changed a lot when it comes to AI and AI generated content and how that all works. And then you look at AI and how it's used for software development and how it will be used to copy and plagiarize other things in the future. That I think about my ideas and my intellectual property completely different than I did two or three years ago, where I was like, I'm going to basically tell everyone exactly how I do it and then they'll do it and trust me and hire me. That was the old strategy. And many people will still take that strategy, right? And I think it's. It's a fine one. But when you're doing something new now, if you tell everyone what you're doing, they can copy your product or technology or build it into a feature in a couple of weeks. And so I'm spending a lot less time talking about what I'm doing, and I want to spend a lot more time, more surrounded around everything that the audience needs, not just pushing my thought leadership message. And then through that, you just get a halo and then it pushes down. And then once people arrive at your website where you have that, then you tell your story around the problem that you solve. So it's a different strategy than I've taken even up to this point, I've taken a different strategy. I'm really going to change it in January. And so before.
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B
Before we get to the change. So a lot of people, when they first get into content, the kind of gurus or the people who, you know, make a living by telling people how to do content, they're like, share everything, right? Share your ip, share your playbooks, share exactly how the source is being made because people pay you for the implementation. And what you're saying is that you now disagree with that, actually. Because if you share everything now, we're in a world where people can just easily copy that and bake it into their product. So you spend less time talking about the playbook that you implement for your customers that pay you money. I guess my question would be the reason why people say you should do that is because that's how you even establish credibility in the first place. Because you say, well, look, I mean, I thought this through. It works. It's a process, it's a playbook. It's.
- [09:35]
A
I was the biggest promoter of give away this free content, People will try it, trust you, and then hire you. Right? So like, and I massively benefited financially in my companies and things from that strategy. Right? So I come from a position of like, I've done this before and I done it for five years and now I see how things are changing and I'm adjusting.
- [09:55]
B
I'd say that's how what, what I'm trying to do right now. So, like, enlighten me.
- [09:58]
A
Yeah. And so I'm adjusting because long term, you have to think about what are strategic moats in the business that are difficult to replicate. And so I've nailed it down to a couple of key ones. Number one is having a close, deep connection with your customer. Not just the people that pay you, but your entire market. How are they showing up at your events? How do you have a feedback loop to them on your messaging? How do you have loss analysis and qualitative research happening with your customers? How are you involving them in the product? How do you have such a close connection with your customer? Mainly so you build the right thing. Because it's not about how fast you can dev anymore. A lot of people can dev fast. It's more about do you build the right thing that solves the customer problem, which is a lot more strategic and should be empowering for people. Because it's very hard for companies that have big teams to actually figure out what the customer needs. They build for what they think the analysts say that they should build or how to be competitive in their category. They're not really building for the customer. They're building for the category of what the category positioning is. And that gives all of us an opportunity to build a unique product that solves problems for customers and start to take their market share with a new and different solution. So being close to your customer is huge. And then being able to deliver repeatably a meaningful business result. So not just delivering software or like giving them a deliverable like here's our graphic design or here's the video that we made for you. But being end to end connected with the actual result that the customer that you promised and being able to deliver that repeatedly is a huge advantage. And then lastly data and AI I think are the are the three that become can be real competitive weapons over the next three to five years. But people are going to be able to copy your product. People have been doing it for years copying my thought leadership, copying my messaging, taking my trademarks and making it their hero one on their thing where their product has nothing to do with what I'm building. But they just take the language. So like all that stuff is copyable. Right? If you look at SaaS vendors, they're all saying the same thing. And so like the message on your website is not strong enough to drive differentiation anymore because the copying happens too fast. The feedback loop from when you do something to when your customer knows to when they react has gotten a lot shorter when it comes to website development and product development.
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B
But then to bring it back to the content playbook, if someone's at that zero to one stage, would you now not recommend them anymore to share how the sausage is being made?
- [12:23]
A
I think that depending on your market and your ACV that I think that you would be better suited doing invite only events directly to your ICP and explaining how the sausage is made in a situation like that with 12 of your target customers. Personally, like that's what I would do if I was selling a 50 or 100k solution. So I mean everyone can have their own strategy and this is really like CTO founder talk at this point so we can get back to content. But like I do think this is real and I think that there's a way in content to instead of just like pushing your strategic narrative to the customer. And I've kind of done this my whole career, maybe subconsciously, but it's surround the entire person and everything that they care about, not just the little piece that your product or company serves. And so taking a much greater scope of what are the other 30 things that this person cares about that we don't help with. And also having content and medium for all of those things. So I think it's more about picking the Persona and the audience that then drives and then listening to them about the content that they want. I think that is the strategy I'm taking forward.
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C
It feels like you're advocating audience building, thought leadership, community building versus lead gen direct content. Can you just kind of talk through those two different parts so I can understand it a little bit better?
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A
I mean we're talking 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 and it's like not really the strategy to like spend a lot of money on advertising in lead gen when you don't have a million in ARR. I just find it to be a waste of money and really in a efficient way to figure things out. And so I'm kind of catering this talk to the audience. Now when you go to 50 million ARR and you have, you know, 30 or 50 sales reps and those sales reps need pipeline then advertising and some forms of, you know, high intent lead generation can be very cost effective and really smart to scale. I'm kind of catering the talk to the stage. In reality you should have beyond 3, 5, 7 million ARR depending on the company. Like beyond that you should have both things running at once. This is not a one or the other. We need supply chain to our sales team, first and third party signals of qualified accounts and buyers. And then we need demand creation, brand, whatever people want to call it that gets target accounts in market. And so you really need both long term. And then if your TAM is a thousand accounts, like I would estimate that my total addressable or the market that I'm really going after is probably a thousand accounts right now. And so when you have a thousand accounts, like doing a broad podcast thought leadership strategy, while it's just already in my workflow so I do it, it's not as effective when you sell to a thousand accounts when rather than a hundred thousand or a million. And so now with a thousand accounts it'll be much more of a targeted paid strategy which is very cost effective. I spend $5,000 a month to target all the important people at all of my accounts. And so it just becomes a different strategy. And I think so stage total addressable market average deal size. There are a lot of variables that determine what you should do. And I think a lot of times right now in content and advice given to marketing, it's kind of like blanket advice of like this is what we should do. And really there are a lot of nuances to it.
- [15:24]
C
But you're advocating instead of shouting into the ether, trying to be the global thought leader in X, finding your target addressable market and designing content that specifically for that, as you said, 1,000 customers, 1,000 targets and then really leaning into that facet of it because that's your productive patch. Did I rephrase that? Okay.
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A
I mean, I don't think it's an either or. I don't think it has to be that way. Right. Like, I think that there's a path to do both. But if I had to choose between one or the other in that situation, it would be faster and more effective and more cost effective to use targeted paid to get to those thousand accounts rather than shouting off into the ether.
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B
Let me give you a specific scenario. Let's say you're talking to a SaaS founder. He's doing 3 million in ARR. He's, he's selling it to mid market. So he has an ACV of like 50k, 100k. I think back in like 2022, your kind of, let's say templated playbook that you pushed and that you were running was do a weekly live event, invite your, your audience, your customers, your prospects to that live event, share your point of view and then chop that up into micro pieces for LinkedIn and that becomes the, let's say the distribution bit. How has your thinking on that change if you, if we get like really tactical into like what channel, how, what approach? If you were, let's say this SaaS.
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A
Founder, I mean if you're trying to run a social first, video first organic strategy, like I do, like having an event that time boxes, enforces consistency and then using that recording as a way to chop up and create the assets, I think is a great strategy across the board. Right. Like the only other way that you could go that's further is to vlog. Right. And I'm just not really going to do that. But like being somewhere every week where you're like recording, getting questions, recording content, creating enough volume that you can have a podcast and YouTube videos and cut that up for other channels, if that is part of your strategy, then I think that's one of the easiest and best ways to do it. And I've been doing it for more than five years.
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B
One of the things that I would say you are known for is having a strong point of view and, and that point of view has evolved and changed over time. But a lot of people don't have a strong point of view or they struggle with finding their point of view. Do you have any insights onto like how to help people define their point of view or how to find it or how to find their angle?
- [17:48]
A
If you do not have a clear point of view or an angle, then you need to spend a ton of time making your customers successful with what you promised them, and you'll find out how to do it. It's like if you don't have that clarity, then you don't have confidence that you consistently deliver whatever outcome you promised your customer, because if you did, then you'd have the clarity. And so I think whenever this happens, it's always about going deep with your customer, like trying to figure out what are they trying to solve, what are we doing for it right now? Is it working or not? When it doesn't work, why isn't it? Or if they're switching from us, what are they trying instead? Or what are they trying instead before they use us? And I think when you start to have that level of understanding, then you can start to craft the positioning and point of view around it. I know deeply because I watch all of my customers try to do something in the way that everybody else tries to do it and watch it fail 99 out of a hundred times. And so I have a lot of confidence now that, like, the way that you're trying to do it is going to cause this big expensive problem. Why wouldn't you at least try it to do it a different way, knowing the data and that type of stuff. So. And once you get to that level, then you have some form of confidence in your. And not everyone will understand it. Right. Just because you're confident and you've seen the problem doesn't mean everyone's going to buy into it. Especially when you're early with something. Right. We probably work with 20 or 30 companies so far that when you're early, you're going to get a lot of no's just because people don't get it yet. And timing the market is really important too. The stuff I'm talking about today is just a more mature, repackaged version of things that I Talked about in 2022 that people forcefully pushed against during that time, even though it was just ahead of the time. Right. The unit economics problems were just starting to happen. And I started talking about that problem and a method to fix it, which is what I'm same thing I'm talking about right now. It just took the market one or two years to figure out that efficiency is important and that this problem isn't going to go away in six months. And so timing really matters as well. I've said this message basically my whole career. In 2020 and 2021, it fell on deaf ears. Nobody cared about CAC. Me talking about CAC literally was like Nobody cared. And partially it's just because there was a lot of market tailwinds. The revenue multiples were really high, and there just wasn't pressure on investors. So it's not like everything worked better in 2019. It just happened to be allowed. And so now what happened is the pressure gets put on and everything gets slow. And now the old ways that people did things don't work anymore or does still don't work. They just get exposed. Yeah.
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B
A nice side effect of putting out your point of view for such a long time is that you can kind of refer back to it. I saw you at some point post a video from like 2019 where you talked about CAC.
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A
The headline was nobody cares about CAC in 2020. And I was just calling out like, when you get customers for less money, that means you grow faster. Like that's what it is. It's not like we're doing it so we can cut costs. We're doing it so that we get a customer for. For $2 instead of $4, which means we get twice as many customers for the same amount of money that we budgeted for. Yeah, seems like a good deal to me.
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B
Brendan. Brendan Beck asked. By the way, you DM me that question. Brandon just put it in the. In the main chat, but he asked any tips on coming up with topic ideas to fill the time each week on those lives?
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A
So if you're doing work with customers every week, you're going to always have things to say about it. Does it takes me five minutes to think about topics on a Tuesday morning and make a bulleted list of 5 things? I know my shit and I'm like, that's all I need to prepare and talk about the stuff. Because I'm always in there with customers. There's always different coming up in patterns. I'm having sales conversations, I'm winning deals, I'm losing deals. I'm working with different executives, different companies. I always have a stream of like, what are the things that people. There are patterns that people don't seem to be getting. How can I use this as an opportunity to like clarify or help shift someone's perspective? And so really it all comes down to that stream. And I've been trying to communicate this a lot. The benefit of this, like founder, brand strategy or whatever you want to call it, you could call it an evangelism strategy. It doesn't have to be the founder is actually not the pipeline that you get from it. It's the insights that you get from your customer that make you go faster that have a way higher roi. When you message your product differently, it can change your win rates by 50%. You could double your win rates. Right? It's unlikely that you get that type of efficiency or that type of ROI gain from advertising or something like that. And so, and then building the wrong product with the wrong information is so expensive. If you actually think about like the R&D ROI, it's very expensive to start building the wrong things. And so when you start building it and the customer gives you feedback through a podcast or other meeting that you don't have, you can redirect your message, redirect your icp, redirect your product strategy or short term roadmap almost in real time from your customers in market that I think a lot of founders and CEOs just don't get. They don't have that stream of insights. And it's also hard to do it as a marketing manager or a product marketer because you don't influence the product roadmap and the investments and stuff enough. And it's no knock. It's just the reality of how the department hierarchy or this organizational hierarchy works, I guess.
- [22:37]
D
Chris, a little context on this. Like I've been running this playbook that you've been talking about since like 2022. So thanks, like honestly have loved the stuff you've been putting out since 2020. So yeah, your shit's working. But I guess on that, like I've always been like the go to market, early sales hire, not the founder, like one step removed from that. And the founder is always kind of one step removed from like being on sales calls, working like super, super closely with customers. And I find myself in that position again, like any tips on how you do that? If you, you know, we're kind of like dragging your founder along on this stuff and they're like kind of reluctantly going along with it. And I don't know any tips for that. Especially with like, I think the big thing we struggle with right now is those weekly topics like finding something that really feels fresh and not stale.
- [23:17]
A
Don't work for a founder who doesn't do it. There there is go about to, if not already happening, a massive sea change in how C level leadership operates. C level leadership used to sit at the top and wait for these little insights to bubble up from their data and from their team and then they have this messy set of insights about no, they're going to be on the ground. The CRO that doesn't visit customers is not as successful as the one that does usually the CMO that isn't doing marketing for her personal brand and experimenting for herself and getting into an ad platform or a data platform with their team, or going and doing customer research at an event and trying to do events differently. If the CEO that isn't connected with the customer, that isn't evangelizing the problem, the finance leader that just sits in the corner and counts the beans instead of being involved in how do we make this company more valuable and more efficient? And how can I help with my particular skill set? All of the old traditional ways that leadership have happened will totally change and people will get back down to real life instead of sitting in an ivory tower. The reason is because when you're back in real life, you get the insights about what you need to be a C level executive that you don't get when you're five levels removed from the customer. And so this is different advice for Salesforce, right? Salesforce has got it unlocked. But go to the $30 million company or the $10 million company or something like that. If you watch the people that are most successful in those types of roles, they are in the work they are sales leaders are selling deals, not managing three sales people to sell deals. And so I think that there's a whole different level. And as you, if you're going to be a C level executive, you're kind of betting on, on the jockey for, of who the founder is and who, who that person is, right? So evaluating them as your leader, your head coach, your general manager, however you want to look at it like, are they the person that, that you want to be the CRO with? Do you want your success to live and die by how they plan and manage the board and talk to customers and build the product? I think that we should be evaluating our leaders as much as they're evaluating us.
- [25:14]
B
I think I was listening to podcast with Mark Benioff and I think the main way he spends his time is sitting in a plane and flying to his biggest customers and just talking to them.
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A
As a founder, you have to be obsessed with your customer and obsessed with solving their problem. And as you start to get out of touch with this, which I've been guilty of as a leader before, and as you start to get out of touch with it, every single decision is less focused on the customer and lead your company slowly in the wrong direction. It's so important.
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B
This kind of ties into, I think one question that I wanted to ask, which is I think there's many people who copied your Playbook, let's say I would consider.
- [25:51]
A
Adam Robinson talks about how he copied my playbook and he's having a ton of success arguing I'm doing it me right now and I'm like, great, dude. I've been talking about it for five years. I wish more people copied it. Like go for it. Like it's not coming away from me if you're successful. And so like, yeah, everybody should do it. Take it playbook and then just apply it to what you're doing. Sorry, go ahead.
- [26:09]
B
So the what is pretty straightforward, right? You do a weekly live event, you invite people to it, you have a Q and A, you chop that up into LinkedIn posts. Okay, the what is straightforward, but clearly you've had a lot of longevity. You are very successful with it. A lot of people who copy that playbook are way, way, way, way less successful with it. What are some non obvious things about how you do it or some other things that you have going on that are not copyable that makes it work so well for you? While many other people would try to copy it, it's just any far from that successful.
- [26:44]
A
So imagine that you're like an executive or anyone in, in a single company, right? The main reference point that you have of that company is your experience at that company. Maybe you're there for two or five years, right? So you've just had like the difference between the old economy and the new economy. You only see that inside of one company vehicle, right? A sample size of 1, which makes it hard. You can hear what other people are saying and some people are saying our ads are doing good or like some qualitative things like that, but you don't really have a perspective on the company performance and what's happening. So but for me, because I come from outside of the company and I see the financial data and expenses and CRM data, the board reports, the QBR decks, how the executive team is set up across 25 or 50 companies. And I talk to those people and those people hire me and pay me to solve their problems. So they tell me the truth about the problem and then I see the pattern of the problem over and over and then I communicate it back to people. So I'm not making up my strategic positioning. I'm listening to all the patterns of the problems and then just making it apparent to everyone that it's not just them that's facing the problem. And so that is the core strategy of why I'm successful and why the content used to resonate. Because I see the problem Right. And so you need to have a view of, you need to have a view of the company that's broad and ideally you have to have the data around the company performance because if you just sit in the marketing department it can feel like the company's doing good while you have a four year CAC payback period. And so that isn't good. But it might feel good for your department and team based on those companies goals. But it wouldn't fly in public companies or many other companies. And so having the data element has been very, is an accelerant to me especially over the past year as we start getting into ARR, waterfall data churn, NRR new ogoCat, go to market efficiency, some really higher order numbers that you don't debate with attribution. The numbers are the numbers and I think that's also an important point.
- [28:40]
B
So it's about being in the trenches. Does that also mean that your playbook or this playbook works especially well for people who are let's say consultants because they're so involved. Like if you're the SaaS founder you probably talk to customers if you're a good one.
- [28:54]
A
SaaS is going to change. Companies are going to force their software vendors to get more involved in them doing more than just plugging in the tool and integrating into stuff and fucking around for a year and asking for a renewal. Customers will force a company like an ABM platform or Zoom Info or some other expensive like tool that sits in go to market and force them to operationalize the product in the CRM and to help them change the executive team mindset that makes the product and the $250,000 software successful where right now it just sits on a shelf and people don't use it. And so software founders that used to not ever do those things. And you think consultants are, the consultants are just helping solve the customer problem at a next level that you outsource to an agency or partner that doesn't do it well most of the time and it costs you NRR two years later. And so over time people will get smart and say hey, we need this layer to make our customers successful so they stay longer, pay us more, upgrade more, et cetera, et cetera. And people will get down into the trenches and solve customer problems.
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B
It is a weird trend that I see that a lot more bootstrap softw where companies have tacked on services like even two years ago.
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A
It's an advantage. It'll be an advantage. Yeah.
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B
Okay.
- [30:06]
A
If you look at the hundred million dollar martech or sales tech vendor that grew basically from 2014 to 2022 or 2023 and now have slowed down or stopped growing and are seeing churn increase. At this level it would be very hard for them to build professional services. It would be very hard for them to fully implement an AI foundation. So now they're kind of stuck. Right. And so as a bootstrap company you have massive distinct advantages to add services and make your customer more successful. To build natively on AI, not as a bell and a whistle feature, to not raise money, to not have preferred returns and grow things so you can do the right things for your customer at the right time and stage. So I just think that people underappreciate how much has changed in the past two years and I think that a lot of people continue to play by the old rules and I just don't think that we're going back to at least for software, right? If you're an AI native product like yeah, you'll probably get a hundred x or more revenue valuation still. But as a software market overall you can see what's happening in the public markets. Stocks are going up like that's a good thing. But in terms of the valuation multiples and things like that, they're just very different than they were a couple of years ago.
- [31:14]
B
All right, let's get to some more audience question. John Kim says Chris, data architecture is a key enabler for measuring the revenue factor and performance on the R and D. Could you discuss what are some of the key factors challenges you're seeing in getting data architecture right?
- [31:28]
A
I think a lot of people, and I've actually thought this for a minute that like implementing a CRM data architecture will fix a lot of the problems that you have in go to market. But actually I think that that's wrong now because what you do is if you get better data right, like yeah, you have better data but then you feed that better data into the same old demand gen waterfall model. You don't have financial data to calculate unit economics. And so if you just have better CRM data and feed it through the rest of the same process, you'll just have better data to make the same stupid models and decisions. And so we really need to be looking at this as greater as like I've been trying to help companies see the CRM architecture is one piece of like a six or seven piece puzzle to fix this because the problem is actually rev ops, finance, sales, marketing, the cross functional layers between it. So it's a very complex problem that One individual tool implementation project is unlikely to fix totally. Is it the first step to do it? Yeah, I think it's the first step for most companies to be and it would have a dramatic impact on visibility and not wasting so much money on marketing and optimizing your SDR channel. And yeah, I think there's a ton of short term benefits but I just want to make people be clear that the rest of the other things also need to change because it's really the model that's broken the model and best practices built around the growth at all costs era where the thinking is all we have to do is just figure out how to put 10 million more dollars a year on sales and marketing and just okay, here we go. We'll just guess our and we're not that accountable. We'll grow as fast as we can, manage the board, raise money. Eighteen months later, that model doesn't work. And then when pressure slows down, I call the the current systems that companies use, Fair Weather analytics systems. It's great when things are going well and then when things start to go wrong, you have literally no data to do anything to fix it. All you can do is figure out who to blame between your SDRs and marketing and you don't learn anything by that. And so we need systems that help us make decisions when things go wrong. Most people do not have the foresight to think about that before things go wrong. I'm really trying to help people do it because it becomes so expensive from a founder standpoint. Imagine having to like your company barely grows for two years. You have to raise a whole nother round at 50 million and then you've create all that further dilution that you literally didn't need for anybody except for spending irresponsibly on sales and marketing.
- [33:42]
B
So Dennis Honnold asked, does it make sense to take somebody else than the founder to lead the events and shut them up for LinkedIn or will this not save a detached CEO's performance in his ivory tower?
- [33:53]
A
So I don't necessarily think that the CEO or founder needs to do this. I think that the person that you select that needs to do this has to be deeply connected with your customer, be respected in your market or have the potential and credibility to be respected and influences the product strategy and positioning of the company and then hopefully is long term incentivized so that all of the tangible value and assets they provide they're not going to walk away in two years after they've collected all those things. So I think that becomes the Magic Superpower. Many of that times it's a founder, but there's like a chief strategy officer or chief customer officer. Chief Evangelist. Sangram Verger has done that before. So I don't think it has to exclusively be the CEO founder anymore.
- [34:37]
B
Buddy at Gong maybe.
- [34:38]
A
But UDI is gone. Right. And I haven't heard from Gong in 18 months. So like is that a defensible strategy?
- [34:43]
B
Like I mean if you have all the characteristics that you just listed in the founder versus not in a founder, I feel like you just have a competitive advantage as a company anyway.
- [34:54]
A
Or you build it up and you have a risk. Right. Like over time if those people aren't incentivized long term with the company and move on. It's just basically a big asset, a big audience leaving your company. So ideally you'd have those people in agreement where they want to stay. Yeah.
- [35:09]
B
Especially because companies have not yet caught up in like compensating people in that extent. Because at least with AES, if they really, really crush you would hope that they make a lot of money. But if you have some internal SME who is really good at creating this content and is building an audience, I feel like very few companies are comping that in some sort of way other than you just get your regular salary. Anyway, we went down a whole bunch of different tangents. At the very beginning you said that you want to make a content strategy change in the new year. So what's that content strategy change?
- [35:40]
A
I mean we kind of went into it a little bit like deep technical things will happen in invite only events and I, I encourage people to just think about this. Right. You're probably not going to do it tomorrow for whatever reason constraints you have in your business. But I don't have those constraints. So I'm going to do it soon and then likely people will catch up to it. So invite only webinars directly for your customers where you get into the real nuts and bolts and you mean prospects, not paying customers? Yeah, but it could be both. Right. Like okay, but yeah, ICP qualified people. Right. Many people on, on this event are not ICP qualified. No offense to anybody. Right.
- [36:13]
B
Raise your hand if you're running a 50 million ARR.
- [36:15]
A
So, so me making a webinar showing you a 30 slide deck about like our strategic narrative, like isn't that valuable to any of you. Right. And then it also just puts my IP on the Internet that someone could come and rip away and say oh, this is how they do that five step process. We can at least pretend to copy that and then use the same words. And then people will think we're doing the same thing, even though technically it's not the same. And so, like, that doesn't do any good. So invite only webinars for ICP that we get into the details and after, and then pick the audience and then build the content all the way around those people. Right. And I right now think that I have a lot to offer. Like, we've had quite a few conversations with insights around, like, what should you do as a founder? What should you do as an entrepreneur? What should you do as a CEO of a 30 million or $50 million company? And that's something that is. I'm passionate about right now. And so I'm going to take that direction. And I think that anyone that's in the marketing department, as a marketing manager or something would learn a ton to follow that information. Right. Even though it's not specific to how you run your ad or you make your content. Today, the way that I got to where I am was by listening and watching what CEOs did since I in 2014, when I was 24 years old and I found my way into boardrooms, observed what people were saying, built business cases, met with the CFO, watched what's how CEOs behave, what their habits were, picked the things that I liked, got rid of the things, said, I'm not going to do those things that I don't like. And over time, I built my own style. And so being able for you to. Not that everyone needs to be a CEO and I definitely don't recommend that, but being able to see how people in the organization that see a bigger view of the company, how they think, I think can be really empowering and helpful.
- [37:54]
B
So is it almost like a group demo?
- [37:56]
A
I don't think I would call it a group demo. It's more about the why and the what than here's this feature thing, right? Like, and the way that we solve the problem is through a combination of rev ops software and management consulting at the level of like McKinsey or Bain. And we think that in order for this problem to get solved, you need all three, which is why a single software vendor or something like that hasn't been able to really fix it. And that becomes another. That's a moat, right? I can say that out loud and like, still a lot of people won't copy that because it's hard and it goes against their financial principles.
- [38:30]
B
Ishan said, most of us know your playbook, that you openly advocate But I would love if you could put some light on how it gets implemented and the systems. Is it you or content team, behind the scenes?
- [38:43]
A
Other. Yeah. So I use a studio. So I'm in a studio here in Austin, Texas. I used to do it in my bedroom, but now. Or in a third bedroom I converted into a studio, but now I found that like going somewhere else and recording somewhere else actually gets a better performance out of me. So like now I come here for two or three hours a week. I stack so I just record from 10am to 1pm On Tuesdays I get three one hour slots, different topics like this one. Then I'll do my other one. So I have different mixes of content. Then that stuff gets uploaded. And then I have a team, a company called Hatch Hatch does all of our post production and editing for all my content and channels. So they'll then take those long form, cut them into square for LinkedIn, vertical for LinkedIn if I want to go that way, vertical for YouTube shorts, landscape for YouTube, post the stuff on the podcast, write the show notes. And then so some of the stuff happens. Like they'll post, actually hit post on podcast and YouTube and I'll actually hit post on LinkedIn and then if I post on TikTok or other places, I'll also hit post there. And so that gives you a sense of the flow. Like I record and then the places where specifically where writing the copy is really important and that those are the platforms we're all right for, which are to me right now are TikTok and, and LinkedIn where you really need clarification in text a lot of the time for people to understand what I'm trying to say. So post a video on LinkedIn with no copy. Then the video doesn't do very well. Like the copy really matters on LinkedIn.
- [40:06]
B
So you do three essentially podcasts a week. One of them is your own show and then two you guests on this being one of the one example. And then I think Hatch, I just linked them up here, they're awesome. And then I think they create like three clips per podcast or something like that.
- [40:21]
A
So you would have maybe I got a special. Let's say maybe I got a special.
- [40:23]
B
You got a special. I'm sure you got a special deal. But even nine clips is way more than you can post because I think you post maximum kind of five times.
- [40:31]
A
A week right now. Yeah, yeah.
- [40:34]
B
Is it still correct that you kind of have a big collection of a bunch of clips and every morning you kind of sit down and you pick one that resonates and then you write the copy. Or what's your flow there right now?
- [40:43]
A
Yeah, it's like a 300 page Google Doc right now that has like the episode name, the links to all the clips. And the links are. The clips are stored somewhere else, I think in a tool called Frame. And then I can go there, preview the clip, say, okay, this is the one that I want to post today, download it, write the copy uploaded and post.
- [41:00]
B
What are you looking for in the clips?
- [41:03]
A
I am looking for the message that resonates with me that I think that I am inspired to write 20 characters of copy for on LinkedIn because it's not easy. And I time box it. So I only get 20, 30 minutes to write the copy because I'm trying to post before 8am after I get out of the gym. So I have like a compressed time window which has also been really helpful because you can sit there and try and write the copy for five hours sometimes. And I've done that before and they're just a point of diminishing return. So I compress the time and then I need to find something that I immediately like I could write three paragraphs about this right away, right? So the video has to speak to me. It's really a me thing. And then through that I'm able to then just write and post and do.
- [41:40]
B
Those things in the Google Doc. Do they have like a transcript in there or do you literally just a link and then you need to click on it and actually watch it for three.
- [41:47]
A
They have like, yeah, they have the video with like the first 10 seconds. And I re listen to all my podcasts. So I like, I'm re listening to them thinking, okay, I said that one made sense. I re listen to all. Every single one of my. Not like a trillion times, but at least once. I re listen to my own podcast. Yeah, to understand. Hey. Sometimes like it's ironic because like I can find places where I'm giving advice to people, but I'm not taking my own advice. And so I find that very interesting because I can immediately see that and then say, hey, like here's a place where I could shift or do better. So there's like a self reflection thing that I think is interesting. But more importantly, it's like, how did I say that? Did that hit? Could I use silence? I think it's like watching film as an athlete. Like you need to see what you did and see are there things that I could do better, explain better, communicate better? I think that's part of. Part of the.
- [42:36]
B
I need to do that.
- [42:37]
A
Yeah.
- [42:38]
B
That's so cringe, though, imagining myself.
- [42:40]
A
It's not. It's not. It's actually. Yeah, I actually don't feel that way.
- [42:44]
B
Because I can't watch my YouTube videos from back.
- [42:47]
A
I don't watch. I listen. I don't watch them. Yeah, listening.
- [42:52]
B
One thing that I wanted to ask, you know, I think there's a lot of people now talking about how to do LinkedIn and how to write video copy and all that. And I think people like Adam Robinson, they get, like, super nitty gritty with, like, engineering hooks and all of that, and squeezing the last little squeeze out of the lemon. And it feels almost like you just kind of found your rhythm and you're not trying to squeeze. You're just, you know, you write your copy and I don't know your growth numbers, but to me, it feels like you've hit, like, a high but steady equilibrium around like 200 to 600 likes per post. Do you feel like you just found your happy place and you're like, I just don't need to get to a thousand likes, and then 2000 likes and then 3000 likes? Like, so how do you think about that game?
- [43:35]
A
It's just so hilarious because, like, who the cares about likes? Who cares?
- [43:40]
B
Everyone.
- [43:41]
A
Just because I, like, can say, like, oh, here's a story about how, like, this person did something. It's probably just made up and all. It's so generic that I can get three, and then I can use my engagement pod so I can get 3000 likes, so I can go home and feel better about myself. Like, what the. Like, I want to talk about the things that I want to talk about that I think can help people. And for the first year or two of my company, I spent most of the time pandering for likes. You can go back and see the post that got 3 million views and. And I got zero business from it, and I got a bunch of followers that couldn't be my customer. And I felt good for a couple of days to show people, hey, Look, I got 3.1 million views on my LinkedIn post. But then having to keep up with that every day and talk about shit that you don't care about that doesn't help your business. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. And so it's just way better to talk about the things that you're interested in and then let the chips fall where they may. For me, like, as someone who's done played this game for a really long time. And this is an example. Like, I don't talk as much about demand gen content anymore. I talked about it for five years. Personally, I'm kind of tired of it. And so there's 500 hours of documented my thoughts on demand gen. I still talk about it sometimes, but as an artist, as a content creator, as a professional, as a person, like, I want to evolve, I want to look at new things in a different way. I want to learn that stuff. So if you're trying to do this for a long time, you need that or you'll be stuck talking about the same thing over time. Because that's where you get a thousand likes. And so my likes are not correlated with how good my content does. My likes are correlated with how niche and specific my topics are. And it's very different, right? So any moment today I could post something generic and get a thousand likes and I could use some Twitter screenshot and do the hackie and spend a bunch of time engineering my thing and like, and for what? So I can like, give myself a pat on the back or I can have a metric that says we got 500,000 impressions. It's just not something that matters to me anymore. And so I think that that won't resonate with everybody, right? Oh, look at this guy. Like, yeah, he has 160,000 followers. No wonder he's not like, easy for him to say, but it's the truth because of how it will make you feel as the content creator. You have to be authentic to yourself. Pretending to be someone that you're not is incredibly exhausting, but it doesn't work and eventually you'll get exposed. And so that's the reason that my quote unquote likes are going down. Like, I might get under 100 today for the first time in like five years. And that post is super meaningful. And the hundred people that like it are like, have to be interested in what I'm saying because of how important and interesting it is. There's a confirmation bias on social media platforms where if you talk about things that everybody already believes, then you'll get more likes because people just want to like, they just want to be there and cheer on the same thing. They just the things that they already believe, but that doesn't change their perspective. And it doesn't help your company. It doesn't challenge them to think. It doesn't make you and your positioning unique or different than anybody else. It just makes you feel a little bit more popular. And so I think that we Just need to adjust the entire north star of social media. Like I watch companies do social media through their company page and spend $12,000 a month to make content and post it and get 12 likes and all 12 people work at the company. It's a total waste of time. So likes and comments are not the barometer of social media marketing. It's are we challenging our customers to think differently, have an affinity to us and buy our stuff?
- [47:11]
B
I have way too many follow up questions.
- [47:13]
A
If you're selling influencer and a lot of the people that are promoting content and telling you what to do on social media, they sell advertising, they're an influencer. Like yeah, they make money when they get a bunch of impressions because they charge on a CPM basis. So like make sure you're taking advice from the right people too. Like a founder trying to build their SaaS company, taking advice from an influencer telling you how to use LinkedIn is not a good idea. You want to get advice. You want to get advice from founders that have been have grown companies using social media, not an influencer that get paid a thousand dollars a post for their posts.
- [47:44]
B
If likes don't correlate with actual business impact, what are some of the ingredients that you notice that about a post that do really impact, let's say the bottom line or your inbound or the demand that you create?
- [48:01]
A
I don't care, I don't look at that. I don't think about it that way.
- [48:04]
B
God damn it.
- [48:05]
A
It's an accumulation retrospective. No, but like sure maybe there's the one post that's like triggering, but somebody has watched a hundred of my podcaster videos before the triggering one. And so if they just got the triggering one and didn't have all the content and accumulation, it's unlikely it would work. And so trying to say that that post was the thing that did it I think is wrong. Like I think that the actual thing is the consistent output and I the things that I was wanted to say as well is like consistency haven't taken more than a two weeks of missing a podcast in the past five or six years. So just a level of consistency that is I think unmatched. And then lastly is that I am a key financial stakeholder in the business and I see how this maximizes business roi and I believe that. And so when I believe it and I see it and I see it so up in self reported attribution and literally every one of my customers tells me they listen to the podcast and it's helping, then those Customers are the ones that renew like it's a lot more than pipeline creation or lead gen. And so because I look at it that way, I'm a lot more committed to doing it consistently because I know it helps not only me, it helps my entire team and my company and my customers. Those ingredients are really important for somebody to do this. And I think that that VC funding oftentimes gives people the feeling or the illusion that they don't need to do this because they can just waste somebody else's money to grow instead. But I think that given where the funding environment is, it's just, it's hard to just keep wasting somebody else's money and maintain a controlling interest in your company these days. So I think that we need to be a lot more efficient and a lot smarter and go to market for early stage companies. It's about being smarter and out executing bigger companies, not outspending them. Don't try to play their game while they. I love knowing that some of if I'm working for a client and knowing that their competitor spends a million dollars a month on Google Ads, I love that they're wasting basically a million dollars a month. I can help my customer be way smarter out execute with 10% of the budget and get better results while they blow their money. So I love that situation. Other people look and say, oh my God, our competitor's spending a million a month. We better do that. Not smart.
- [50:20]
B
I think I want to just highlight. I feel like one of the reasons why this works and why you can have this approach is because you're so bought into the idea that if you just put out your point of view and you work with customers and you solve real problems and then you talk about it publicly, that that will definitely for sure impact your business. But a lot of people who get started with this, they're like, I'm not sure if this even works. I need to see proof. I need to be able to measure what the impact is on my business to. And so yeah, they want to see after three months, they want to see the likes going up because that's a leading indicator and they want to see some leads or inbounds so that they can measure the ROI and evaluate whether this works. All right, Omar, you got the last question. Omar said, if you spent months creating content only to end up with a few likes, what could have gone wrong there?
- [51:10]
A
That you didn't involve your audience in the content creation, so you were making content and answering questions that they didn't care about. Additionally, maybe you only have 700 followers on LinkedIn, and those were the 700 people that you've worked with over the past 10 years since you got out of college. And none of them actively use LinkedIn. So you post and literally nobody sees it. So you can have a content problem. You can actually have three problems. I have a strategy problem. I'm talking about the wrong stuff to the wrong people. You can have a content problem. I'm using the wrong medium, wrong words, wrong method of communication. Or I have a distribution problem. I don't get this effectively to the people in a way that it's consumed. So you can just go by process elimination. It works up. So, like a strat. A good distribution won't fix a strategy problem. Good distribution won't fix a wrong message or content problem. So you have to think about the layers and figure out which one is actually getting in your way.
- [51:57]
B
All right, I'm going to end it here because I think you have back to back. So I want to give you two minutes to breathe.
- [52:02]
A
Thank you. I do need that.
- [52:03]
B
This was awesome. Thank you so much for joining, Chris. Maybe another one in 12 months and then you can't wait. Yep. Cool.
- [52:09]
A
Thanks, y'all, for joining. Happy holidays to everyone.
- [52:12]
B
Congrats on Breaking the Record.
- [52:14]
A
Let's see. Thank you. See you soon.
- [52:16]
B
Thank you. Bye. Bye.