Latest / Content, Briefly / Tom Rudnai on Why Revenue Impact is More Important Than Ever

Transcript

Tom Rudnai on Why Revenue Impact is More Important Than Ever · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm really excited to have Tom Ruddenigh on.
• 0:12
  He's the founder and CEO of a SaaS app called Demand Genius, which is a solution for content attribution and revenue impact measurement for content marketers.
• 0:22
  Demand Genius is actually our newest partner at Superpath, and really excited to be working with them because this product solves an evergreen problem for content marketers at a time when we need it more than ever, right?
• 0:34
  Like, AI has disrupted so much, including all the kinda like top line, big numbers, like page views that I think sometimes used to cover for us when we weren't quite able to figure out exactly how to attribute our content and to understand exactly how supporting sales.
• 0:50
  Anyways, now is become, like a very important time to figure this out. I think all content teams, if they haven't already, should be thinking about how are we supporting sales? What is our revenue impact?
• 0:59
  And to get very specific with those numbers. Anyways, Tom and I talk a little bit about the product, but primarily we talk about his background actually in sales.
• 1:06
  He was an SDR and then an AE, and interestingly came to this problem because he was getting sick of not understanding how content could support him and not having good data to understand what was actually driving sales.
• 1:20
  So he, he came to this problem in, in a way that's, I would say, non-typical, at least with the folks that we typically have on this podcast who are, you know, content marketers from earlier in their careers and thinking about this problem from a very different perspective.
• 1:31
  Anyways, really cool conversation. Tom has a great story and lots of interesting insight on attribution and revenue impact. I will also tease that we are doing a webinar with Demand Genius Thursday, June 5th.
• 1:42
  We will be talking in a lot more detail about attribution impact, sales marketing alignment, data-driven content decisions.
• 1:50
  Again, I think it's like a really timely opportunity to have these discussions and start implementing these things at your company if you haven't already. So there'll be a link in the show notes to register for that.
• 2:00
  It'll be free. Again, Thursday, June 5th, 1:00 PM Eastern Time. So hopefully we'll see you there. Enjoy this podcast.
• 2:05
  And then just quickly before we go, a reminder that the Superpath Pro membership now has a 30-day free trial if you wanna check it out.
• 2:13
  In this podcast, I talk a little bit about a course that I put together for Superpath Pro members about content reporting.
• 2:19
  To tease that a little bit, we go into a lot of detail in the course about the four Ns of reporting: names, nuance, numbers, narrative.
• 2:28
  You know, managing up, advocating for resources, marketing to the org, super important, and that's really the meat of what that course is about, not just how to get the data.
• 2:36
  So anyways, superpath.co if you wanna learn more about signing up for a Pro membership. All right, I'll get out of the way now. I really enjoyed this conversation with Tom Ruddenigh, and I hope you do too.
• 2:45
  This episode of Content Briefly is supported by our friends at dofollow.com. Are you tired of spending all that time perfecting content pieces only to see them get buried in search results?
• 2:56
  dofollow.com helps busy marketing teams boost traffic, rankings, and organic leads so that you can focus on what you do best, crafting quality content that your audience will love.
• 3:06
  dofollow.com's B2B SaaS link building specialists have a proven process to regularly deliver 70 to 90 DR links from the top 1% of sites. We're talking HubSpot, BigCommerce, Canva, and ActiveCampaign.
• 3:18
  Get your free link building assessment from them now, which includes an audit of your current strategy, an in-depth analysis of your competitors' backlink profiles, and low-hanging fruit you can reap in the next 90 days.
• 3:29
  Elevate your digital presence with dofollow.com and check the link in the show notes to learn more. Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 3:39
  Really excited to have Tom Ruddenigh, a new friend, founder and CEO of Demand Genius. We have a bunch of stuff to talk about, including the company you're building, the tool you're building, the problem you're solving.
• 3:50
  But before we get into all of that, Tom, would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are, maybe just a quick background on your career and kind of like what led you to where you are today.
• 3:59
  Yeah, of course. Hey, everyone. Thank you for having me on, first of all. I've been listening to the podcast for quite a while, so this is cool.
• 4:04
  In terms of me, so my background has been in the software space for the last seven or eight years or so.
• 4:10
  So as soon as I left uni, I've had a whole load of roles from kind of operational, sales, marketing, but eventually sales is where I ca- found my spot, so I call myself a recovering sales rep now.
• 4:20
  So I spent the last five years or so at a company called Defra, where I joined them as an SDR, went through to an enterprise AE there.
• 4:27
  We did something that's quite relevant to them, what we've gone on and built with Demand Genius, which is we were building dynamic paywalls for B2C media companies.
• 4:34
  So if you go onto the website of BBC or Financial Times or The Economist, you're probably gonna run into a paywall that me and my co-founder helped to implement there.
• 4:44
  But what we were doing was quite cool, which was using first-party data, propensity modeling, and business logic to kind of change at an individual level when the paywall's gonna come down.
• 4:52
  So super cool, super innovative stuff, and it just gave us this really cool perspective on how content can be monetized and how in B...
• 4:59
  In our own-- applying it to our own context in B2B marketing, there's just this massive gulf in sophistication, and that's the gap that we're trying to fill, really. Oh, that's really cool. Really interesting.
• 5:10
  I'm just thinking through, like, my own experience, my own adventures on the internet, and, like, every now and then when you hit a paywall, and that actually didn't really occur to me that it could be-- that paywall could be totally personalized to my behavior and what that business knows about me to try to get it at the exact right time.
• 5:25
  Oh, yeah. You're a profile in a customer data platform, and that's feeding a propensity model. For the bigger organizations, this is- Yeah....
• 5:31
  that's feeding a propensity model that looks at your demographics, what you've engaged with in the past, and tries to understand, okay, at this moment in time on this specific article that's maybe about sport or about finance, how likely is Jimmy to convert through so that we can choose when and where to deploy the paywall, what products to bring into it, things like that, to give us the best chance of converting him without pissing him off and sending him away.
• 5:54
  Yeah. Yeah. It's funny 'cause I think of, about that type of thing from a marketing perspective. Like, I think of other- Yeah.... people. Like, I want to target that.
• 6:01
  I don't usually think of myself as the one to be targeted, but that's kinda, I guess we're all sort of in that same boat.I know. It's hard when you realize you're a pawn as well as a- Yeah. [laughs]...
• 6:10
  as well as a, the knight. [laughs] How about content attribution? I mean, is that where you kind of first saw what a giant problem attribution was, and did that get the gears turning about your next venture?
• 6:24
  Yeah, a little bit. I think like with anything that... We kind of stumbled into that problem. I'd love to say that it was more of a, a master plan and a grand strategy that took us towards that.
• 6:33
  Like, initially what got us focusing on this was I noticed as a sales rep just this massive shift in that people don't want to talk to me anymore.
• 6:40
  The way that B2B buyers want to engage is very different, but the whole go-to-market playbook is still built around getting sales reps in front of buyers and then the sales rep kind of pushing them through a sales funnel.
• 6:54
  And I used to be...
• 6:54
  You're kind of told by your sales leader, who's generally just a salesperson who was successful in that old world that was very sales led, that you need to be talking to your champion every other week, and I didn't feel like I was enabled properly to do that in a way that was adding value.
• 7:10
  So that's where we saw there was a really good opportunity to leverage content more effectively in B2B, particularly further down funnel, and that feeds into everything around the kind of content experience.
• 7:19
  So there's part of the platform still that is about content gating and what we call reader-led gating.
• 7:24
  So if we're gonna ask reps to be sharing content with people, let's make sure that we're not then sending them to a gate at the wrong time. So that was what we initially built.
• 7:33
  It was just I was annoyed about repetitive lead forms around content that I wanted to access. You go back the next day, you hit the same five questions. It's pointless- Right... friction and so easy to solve.
• 7:43
  What we then kind of realized was in solving that, we built this solution that sits b- as a layer between the website and the CRM, so we know where everyone is in the pipeline.
• 7:52
  We also know what they're engaging with, and we were like, "Hold on, we can actually solve a, a much, much bigger problem," and that's where it's kind of morphed into this platform that allows people to attribute the ROI on every specific type of content, and also understand from a buyer journey perspective, what are people reading in demo stage, in discovery stage, in proposal stage, and as they progress through the pipeline, so that you can kind of feed that all into how you build an actual revenue-focused content strategy rather than one that's looking at the top of the funnel.
• 8:21
  I'm-- That's where I think there's a, there's a huge gap, and it's a pretty critical problem for content marketers to solve because, again, we've kind of stumbled into this, but if your business case for content is built entirely around we generate traffic, we generate eyeballs, reach, well, that's not a very good place to be right now because AI has taken an absolute sledgehammer to your ability to generate reach organically with content.
• 8:42
  Yeah. So that's where we now, like, we kind of view ourselves as helping you build a business case and build a, a model around your ability to impact further down funnel where traffic is still very strong.
• 8:54
  You're getting less traffic to websites, but the traffic you do get is super high intent, super educated, because it's already been talking to Sam Altman for the last six months about what product to buy. Right.
• 9:05
  Okay, a couple follow-ups. One, y- you're so right that there's a, a timeliness to this. Content attribution has always been a problem.
• 9:11
  I think it has, at least in some cases, been kind of de-emphasized because if the numbers are big, if the page view numbers, the top line metrics are big enough, it's kind of like we can all live with this if it's not perfect kind of thing.
• 9:24
  Mm-hmm. That, like you said, that's gone or going away for most companies.
• 9:29
  One thing I've observed, you know, in my time in content, both on the in-house side and on the agency side, is everybody has the same question, like how do we know this is working?
• 9:37
  You know, but I've been doing this for almost 15 years, and there's never been an industry standard way to attribute content.
• 9:44
  You know, anytime I've come across either a customer I'm working with or a team I've been on that goes down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out, like, what's our ROI on this, it's a totally bespoke solution. Mm.
• 9:56
  You know? It's like it's still not perfect, it's just close enough.
• 10:00
  Like, the people in the room kind of agree, like, "Well, okay, this isn't perfect, but, like, for our purposes and the tools that we use and the way that we do content, like, this is
• 10:09
  kind of a close enough triangulation of, you know, our ROI." And so I guess one of my questions for you is, how opinionated are you and how opinionated is Demand Genius on content attribution?
• 10:23
  Meaning, do you have a standard way that you believe companies should go about it, or should it be customized on the very particular use case for each individual company? Yeah.
• 10:36
  So I mean, if, if people who know me will probably say I'm opinionated on a lot of things, but I think on...
• 10:40
  Attribution's a tricky word, and I actually go back and forth on whether it's one that we want to attach ourselves to- Oh, interesting...
• 10:46
  because I think it denotes a kind of competitive, we're squabbling over who gets to claim that MQL or who gets to claim that- Yeah. Yeah... right? I think that's always gonna be very difficult.
• 10:56
  And so I would split content attribution into two things, right? One... There's two questions you might be trying to answer. One is, how does content perform in relation to other marketing channels?
• 11:07
  And then the other one is using it as a, a mechanism to optimize content that you're producing itself.
• 11:14
  I think when it comes to the first, no, there's no standard approach, and bluntly, anyone who's saying they're gonna solve that problem for you, they're selling snake oil, right?
• 11:21
  And don't get me wrong, there's some platforms out there that do a very good job and have helped make that... Because as you said, it's always something that's been custom. They've helped make...
• 11:30
  I'm thinking about HockeyStack and Dreamdata. They've helped make that accessible at lower ends of the market, and that's really cool. It's not gonna be perfect, though.
• 11:36
  And so I think any time anyone is looking at any particular one attribution model, firstly, and kind of treating that as gospel or just treating attribution itself as a north star, I think is a problem.
• 11:47
  There should only be one north star for everyone who sits in a revenue function, whether it's content or sales reps, and that's are we growing revenue? And that's a team- Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:55
  That said, I do think there's a lot of value to, as a content team, getting a handle around attribution and understanding the impact that you're having simply because...
• 12:05
  And again, I think it goes to your point a little bit about-We've always agreed it's good enough, and I think where attribution gets solved as a problem historically is when the push comes top-down, right?
• 12:18
  So people higher up the organization push you to solve that problem, and that's when we go and do something about it. Yeah.
• 12:25
  What I think is a good thing for content marketers to do at the moment when our job is under threat is recognize, okay, where can we...
• 12:32
  Like, rather than cling on to our old role in go-to-market, which by the way we hate it, 'cause [chuckles] we're pigeonholed as a top-of-funnel mechanism, you're far removed from revenue.
• 12:42
  I know you released your data a while ago. Looked like, what is it that holds content marketers back in their career?
• 12:47
  And it's that distance from revenue, so why such a large percentage seem to cling on to that role, it kind of baffles me a little bit.
• 12:55
  But recognize that there is a role in the new go-to-market where we are critic- the critical channel for engaging with our company further down funnel, because most people now are starting to ignore sales reps.
• 13:05
  So anyway, I'm going around the houses a little bit, but it's my way of saying I think it's time for content marketers to lead the push towards attribution themselves and take responsibility for positioning internally that, no, we are a revenue critical channel, look at the impact that we're having,
• 13:22
  and also get a better understanding of how they're having that impact so that they can start optimizing for that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's so interesting. I wonder if content marketers [chuckles]
• 13:33
  as a whole, and I'm gonna generalize a little bit, are a little bit afraid of this. Mm. Because what will it tell them, you know?
• 13:39
  I think a lot of us, like, and I'm saying us specifically, like, a lot of the content work that I've done in my career has been very much based on gut feel. Yeah. You know, it's a creative pursuit I want to chase.
• 13:51
  Y- you know, and it's like if you were to apply the most objective possible lens to it, would it tell me that's the right thing to do or that the thing I did worked? I don't know.
• 13:59
  I would be a little nervous to find out that answer. And so the question that I'm kind of working my way up towards is, how do you think content teams can balance that? 'Cause there has to be some balance, right?
• 14:10
  Like, if you have a, quote unquote, "perfect attribution model," and it actually tells you, "Oh, this type of content really works," but, you know, it's one lane of content, it's one type, and the team still wants to do the more creative stuff.
• 14:22
  They wanna do the brand stuff. They wanna- Mm... you know, try something new. Like, do you find that, like especially with working with your customers, that there's still room for that, you know?
• 14:31
  Or are people so happy to finally have good data that they're just like, "No, just do the thing the data says"? No. So I think there's absolutely still room for it.
• 14:38
  Just 'cause you kind of capture new information doesn't mean that you have to become a slave to it, right?
• 14:42
  And I think that's, again, it's where taking control of the positioning of content a, a little bit, I think is really valuable.
• 14:48
  Because you can kind of then lead the conversation on why you're doing the different things that you're doing. Yeah.
• 14:52
  What is directed at influencing pipeline, what is directed at generating it, and back all of those things that you're trying to do up with data. So I, I think that is a important point to make.
• 15:05
  Like y- you-- just because you have this information doesn't mean that it needs to be your only goal. The other thing is that it shouldn't be
• 15:12
  just because brand activity that you're doing will still contribute to revenue, right? It doesn't really matter how long that time gap is.
• 15:18
  If we can see, okay, there's an interaction with content up here, someone bought here, you can still track that that was content influence revenue. It's further separated, and you need to have a longer term view- Yeah...
• 15:28
  and you need to build the buy-in within your organization to understand, like, it's where ex- aligning with what your execs actually want. Is there the patience for that longer term view?
• 15:36
  I think in a effective marketing function there is. But if there's not as well, you need to know that, because otherwise you're still gonna find out, just not until it's too late. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's interesting.
• 15:46
  I... That's interesting.
• 15:46
  Patience for the long term is interesting because, uh, I recall this, especially like in my agency days, where you can come up with a boilerplate content strategy in like 10 minutes, and like, I bet it'll work, but you have to do it for two years.
• 16:00
  [chuckles] You know?
• 16:01
  And like, no one's gonna do that unless, one, they feel like an enormous amount of confidence that this is, like, a good way to spend their marketing resources, but also that there's checkpoints along the way
• 16:14
  so that they can collect some data to say, "Okay. There, yeah, this is leading us in the direction that we wanna go."
• 16:20
  But I feel like for content marketing, probably more than any other marketing function, you do need time. You just need- Mm... consistency, time, patience. Like, these things
• 16:29
  almost always work if they're executed well and given enough runway, for lack of a better term, to do what they're supposed to do. Which is- Yeah...
• 16:38
  probably also one of the same reasons that marketers struggle with the attribution question more than other functions, because it, it's difficult to make a case like, "Oh, we should do this for two years, and sorry, it's not really that easy for me to measure, so just trust me on this," you know?
• 16:52
  [chuckles] Yeah. And I, and I think that's again where leading the conversation is really helpful, 'cause it helps you to sit like...
• 16:57
  One of our core contentions is in this landscape, content marketing is absolutely a revenue critical function. You are more important than ever to the overall revenue picture.
• 17:07
  But you need to kind of lead that conversation internally and make that case.
• 17:10
  But that also gives you access to a level of insight that can help you understand the context you operate in and whether there's the patience for that. Like I often...
• 17:18
  There's an example I use, which is I think most people around an organization know what the goal is, right? We need to grow sales 20%, we need to increase revenue 20%, whatever it is.
• 17:28
  What only the kind of people who are seen as strategically really important often get is the how and the why underneath that. So your executive team have an understanding of how they're gonna do that.
• 17:39
  We're gonna increase NRR to 110%, and we're gonna improve close rates from 25 to 30%. And the reason we're doing all of this is 'cause we're gearing up for a Series B fundraise next year.
• 17:51
  Well, as a content leader, that helps you when you go to define your strategy and to defend it and ma- and kind of evangelize it internally, which is important to do.It helps you narrow down your strategy from, okay, if we're just trying to grow revenue, there's 10 different things we could do, right?
• 18:05
  If we're just doing stuff, it's gonna have a positive impact on revenue, right? Otherwise, we really are... We really do have a problem. But we can start to be a lot more specific.
• 18:13
  Okay, I'm gonna shift budget away from SEO and towards thought leadership, because that's giving sales tools they can use to improve close rates, and it's helping add value to customers to improve NRR.
• 18:23
  It's also got the ancillary benefit of helping establish us as thought leaders ahead of our Series B raise.
• 18:29
  That's the kind of level of detail that allows you to go and keep demanding more from your executive team and keep, kind of reposition how you're viewed internally.
• 18:38
  But I think unfortunately, because there's this pigeonhole a lot of content teams are put into, they're often displaced from that.
• 18:44
  And so that's where it kind of requires some buy-in from the c- from the executive team, but also proactivity in going and solving this problem. Yeah.
• 18:54
  You know, I bet in the six, almost six years that the Superpath Slack community has existed, I bet the theme that has come up more often than any other single theme is managing up.
• 19:06
  And it manifests itself in different ways. It's like advocating for resources. It's I'm frustrated with my boss, they don't get content. It's marketing to the org.
• 19:15
  Uh, you know, people use different phrase, but that's the number one the- theme that has come up over and over again. And as a side note too, it's probably the, it's probably the single best soft skill- Yeah...
• 19:24
  to kind of add to your skill set as you grow your career. It's crazy as well, because one of the core skills of a content marketer is storytelling, right? Like, we just need to- Yeah...
• 19:32
  direct a little bit more of that storytelling expertise internally. But it always amazes me that there are people who are such expert storytellers have struggled to craft that internally, and I don't know why it is.
• 19:41
  I think maybe it's because they kind of view it as self-promotional or something like that, but I think it's an interesting irony. Yeah, for sure. We actually, we have a course, I'll plug this for Superpath Pro members.
• 19:50
  We have a course on reporting, and we cover the four Ns: names, numbers, nuance, narrative. Like those are the four Ns of content reporting. So if you're a Pro member, go check it out.
• 20:01
  There's a bunch of stuff on there about the data piece, but more importantly, like how do you craft the narrative that you wanna tell. So, okay, Demand Genius the product, how does it solve this problem?
• 20:10
  I mean, I realize it may be somewhat difficult to explain this because this is a podcast and people can't actually see it in action, but like can you give us a primer on like how does it work and how is it different than other solutions?
• 20:21
  Yeah, of course. I mean, what we try and do is help content marketers build their business case around revenue impact, so that has a knock-on effect on a few different things.
• 20:33
  At an absolute basic level, we kind of sit in between the website and the CRM, and what that means is we understand every marketing interaction that takes place with the website, but we also know exactly where the prospect is in the CRM at that moment.
• 20:45
  So that makes attribution quite an easy problem to solve, 'cause you just track progression from a lead through to whether they close or not, how much they close for, things like that.
• 20:53
  It also allows us to give a really great depth of insight into the buyer journey.
• 20:58
  Again, one of the changes we've seen in content over the last 6 to 12 months is this progression from kind of optimizing for keywords towards answering questions, right? That's what feeds the AI, that's what that- Mm.
• 21:10
  It's better content. It's a great progression. In order to do that, you need to understand what people are engaging with at every stage of the journey, so from discovery to demo to technical.
• 21:18
  If your goal is to support sales, you need to understand how the journey progresses from that front. The third element to it is in content experience.
• 21:27
  Because of where we sit, we can make real-time decisions as to what experience someone should get in every one of those stages. Again, that's back to actually where we started, which is kind of content gating, right?
• 21:38
  Your... That decision over whether to gate or not gate a piece of content or to have a call to action or what data to try and capture, it should be reader-led, not content-led.
• 21:48
  So rather than thinking about the white paper or the webinar in question, do we or don't we want... Do, do... what... and do we think that justifies a content gate? Just look at the reader.
• 22:00
  Where are they in the journey, and is the right decision for that reader to help build a relationship to drop a content gate or not?
• 22:05
  Typically, what we see is earlier in the buyer journey, we say yes, 'cause we want to convert them from anonymous to known. That's just super, super, super valuable.
• 22:12
  I could talk to anyone about that in, in lots of depth, how valuable that transition is. But later in the journey, there's no need to, and you don't have to keep doing it in order to provide value.
• 22:21
  And then the last element is what we're starting to build out now, and this is where I think there's a huge untapped potential, is the sales and marketing alignment element of what we do. Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 22:30
  I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah. To do this properly, you have people in content using the tool and you have people in sales using the tool, so they're looking at the same thing. Yeah, exactly.
• 22:37
  W- uh, probably looking at it in different places, but... So like our, our goal is content marketers and marketers are sitting in Demand Genius and getting value out of the platform.
• 22:44
  For everything with sales reps, it's pushing out and integrating straight into their workflow. Gotcha. I, I come from that background.
• 22:49
  If you don't put it in my workflow and make it really easy, I simply won't use it no matter how valuable it is. [chuckles] That's kind of the reality. But it allows...
• 22:56
  Like we can say exactly what white paper's performing at every stage, so we're building some cool stuff to integrate in so that when a rep is writing an email to Jimmy Daly, we sit there in, in Gmail as an add-on.
• 23:08
  We see, oh, Jimmy's in demo stage. He's a CMO. This is the piece of content you should pull in. So- Oh, wow. That's cool... as with...
• 23:15
  If, if we're looking at optimizing content for down-funnel impact, suddenly sales is your best distribution channel. So that's what we wanna help you start maximizing. That's really cool.
• 23:26
  You know, I was just thinking about this. It's so fascinating to me that you have a sales background. Y- you know, like not a content background. You know? Like the content marketer often follows a similar path.
• 23:35
  It's like early marketing job as an intern or journalist, kind of come to content or something like that, and like we struggle with this problem. Like, that's how I describe myself for sure. And like we- Mm-hmm...
• 23:45
  struggle with this problem. It's very interesting to me that you came from a sales background, and you're like, "Actually, this problem drives me crazy too,
• 23:51
  'cause I wanna know, and I wanna be able to integrate into my workflows."
• 23:53
  'Cause I do think sometimes I observe, like even within one organization that, kind of like you said, like different people want that attribution as if there's only so much of it to go around, and I think sometimes- Mm-hmm...
• 24:05
  content teams, you run the risk potentially of wanting the ownership of it to the point where you might be frustrated with sales, when really like sales and content need to be best friends to make this work right. 100%.
• 24:19
  100%. Yeah, I mean, [laughs] it gets pointed out to me that it's an interesting background to learning what you do.
• 24:24
  I think that's where me and my co-founder both bring quite an interesting perspective to the space, right?
• 24:28
  Because we understand that basic level content from what we were doing in the media industry, but I've also been on the other side. And yeah, I was just frustrated. I always had a...
• 24:36
  I felt like a nuisance in my role as a enterprise sales rep, right? I feel like constantly I'm just harassing people. And I want to add value, but there's...
• 24:45
  I was, I was saying the other day, there's the blank page problem for a sales rep doesn't get enough credit. And I think behind a lot of the frustrations that we have with sales rep is that problem.
• 24:55
  You're under pressure to work very quickly, a high velocity. You know you need to get in touch with Jimmy, it's been two weeks.
• 25:02
  But the time taken to do it at scale across all of the deals that you're trying to work, and go and work out what's the best piece of content to leverage so that I can add value, just doesn't stack up with the expectations that you have.
• 25:12
  And so you just end up sending those crappy, crappy nurture messages like, "Hey, any update? Any update?" So that's what I wanted to solve so that I could feel like less of a pain in the arse on my day-to-day.
• 25:21
  Yeah, yeah. Uh- That's so interesting.
• 25:22
  But I'm always trying to be conscious, like to content marketers, we bring an interesting perspective, and when you come to building the business case around content, that's where I can help folks.
• 25:31
  Like writing content, the, the more creative side, I'm not your person, and I always have to try and make sure that I don't veer into having too strong an opinion on that.
• 25:39
  But luckily, that's the side that most content marketers are really good at, and the business case side is the stuff that they don't enjoy as much. So that's where I can add value. Yeah, really cool. You know, there...
• 25:48
  So much... Gosh, content has like experienced so much disruption over the last like, whatever, 18 months, 2 years or so. You know, but there's silver linings emerging from all of this.
• 25:57
  Like, at first it's just like existential throughout the content. Okay, now that's calmed down a little bit, you know, and now we're starting to observe silver linings.
• 26:04
  Like one would be like greater emphasis on differentiation. Like what can you do that helps set you apart? And that's like for content marketers, that's the best.
• 26:12
  That's where you get to like flex all your creative muscles and come up with cool new stuff to try, and that is becoming more and more important.
• 26:18
  You know, another is proximity, I think proximity to money, proximity to revenue, you know? It's like- Yeah...
• 26:25
  content is being forced closer to revenue, and like that should've happened a while ago, and so better late than never.
• 26:31
  And now also we have better tooling to help us understand that revenue impact, which has been a struggle for all content marketers for as long as content marketers and analytics and all this stuff have existed.
• 26:41
  So yeah, no, it has me like feeling actually very optimistic about what the future of all this is gonna look like.
• 26:46
  We can both be more creative and have a much better sense of how our work supports the businesses that we're working in. No, 100%. I think it's an awesome time to be in content.
• 26:56
  I think it requires a little bit of a change in mindset and a change in skill set, but that's where we can help. But no, I, yeah, I completely agree. The other thing that like in terms...
• 27:04
  Like we, we see search traffic declining, and we often view that as a threat because it is in the context of our old goals, which were reach.
• 27:12
  But it also means, okay, people are doing the early parts of their buyer journey without you, but it means that the traffic that you do get to your site is super well educated. It's got so much intent.
• 27:20
  Like in what world is that a bad thing? Yeah, yeah. Because your job now isn't... I think there's something very boring about optimizing for reach because it becomes almost paint by numbers, right?
• 27:28
  It's about optimizing the keywords. Now you're getting way less people. It's about actually influencing them and changing their perspective. Well, as a writer, that's gotta be a dream, right? [laughs] Yeah.
• 27:38
  Did you happen to read Andrew Chen's recent article titled something like All Marketing Channels Suck Now? Uh, that's not the title. It rings a bell. Something like that. Yeah, that's cool, yeah.
• 27:47
  And it's basically just describing like how hard marketing has gotten, and the folks at MKT1 did a follow-up piece to it. I'll try to remember to put it in the show notes.
• 27:54
  Basically describing that like marketing's always been hard. [laughs] You know, like the fact that it's hard actually pushes you to do better work, which is probably more satisfying, more fulfilling.
• 28:04
  So like let's not view this as a bad thing. Like let's view it as an opportunity. Yeah. I think what is probably different is the rate of disruption and the rate of change, though.
• 28:12
  I think before you found a playbook and you could probably eke 18, 24 months out of that. Now you find a playbook, you've got it for a couple of months until there's a new playbook and it's obsolete. Totally. Totally.
• 28:21
  It's a crazy time. It's a fun time, too. Tom, thanks so much for coming on. We'll have more announcements coming out about this in Slack and over the newsletter, but we're gonna do a webinar together in early June.
• 28:30
  So actually there'll be a link in the show notes about that as well, so folks can register if they wanna participate in that. We're gonna be talking a lot more about revenue impact and attribution.
• 28:38
  And yeah, wonderful to have you. It's just really cool, like I love on this podcast when we get to experience content from another perspective. So like- Mm-hmm...
• 28:46
  you know, former salesperson, building tool to solve a problem for content marketers, like totally different perspective than we typically get and I really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, likewise, content...
• 28:55
  Sorry, the podcast and the community have been so, so valuable for me as I try and try and recover from my former sales rep status. [laughs] And, and, and learn more about your guys' world in the weeds.
• 29:03
  So, um- Awesome... thank you for everything you do. Yeah, we're glad to have you. Thanks, Tom. Take care. Cheers, Jimmy. Hey, thanks for listening. Really hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 29:10
  Just a reminder that Tom and I will be doing a webinar on content attribution and revenue impact Thursday, June 5th. There will be a link in the show notes to register.
• 29:19
  We're also gonna talk about it in the newsletter, in the Slack group. We'll post on LinkedIn, all that good stuff, so you won't miss it. But if you wanna sign up now, link in the show notes to do it.
• 29:27
  Thanks as always for checking out this podcast. If you enjoyed it, this episode, any episode, or all episodes, we would love it if you left us a rating and review in whatever podcast app that you're using.
• 29:38
  Thanks, everybody. See you next week. [outro music]