Latest / Content, Briefly / Tom Rudnai on How to Maximize and Measure Revenue Impact

Transcript

Tom Rudnai on How to Maximize and Measure Revenue Impact · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today we have something a little bit different.
• 0:12
  We recently hosted a webinar with Tom Ruddenig, founder and CEO of Demand Genius, and we are publishing that audio today.
• 0:19
  And while I realize that publishing webinar audio on a podcast is not a perfect fit because you miss the live chat and the slides and all that, I really felt that this was worth publishing because not everyone's gonna be able to sit down for an hour and watch the recording, and Tom shared a ton of great information about content attribution, which is a pressing topic right now.
• 0:38
  And so I wanted to make sure there was an easy way for people to consume that info if they wanted to. I'll leave links in the show notes so you can go check out the recording, the slides, all that good stuff.
• 0:48
  And if you do wanna try Demand Genius, there is a twenty percent discount waiting for you. When you book a demo, just mention Superpath and they will get you taken care of.
• 0:56
  As always, I really enjoyed this conversation with Tom Ruddenig, and I hope you do too. All right. So Tom, you're the founder and CEO of Demand Genius.
• 1:02
  You've built this software product that helps content teams with attribution and understanding revenue impact and all this.
• 1:08
  So we'll be talking a little bit about the product, but you have a lot of other thoughts about kind of the problem and the greater solution here, especially like in this time where this is becoming so much more important and there's more scrutiny on content teams.
• 1:19
  But first, would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are, kind of what brought you here, and then let's dive in. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:25
  First of all, I'm gonna do my very best to talk about our product as little as possible here, so I'll try and keep it focused just on like what we're seeing around the industry and kind of the change that we think is happening in the world of content at the moment, and B2B marketing more broadly.
• 1:37
  I'll skip through, too. So I guess, yeah, quick introduction into myself, and there's a couple of things I wanna say here just to like frame the conversation a little bit. So Tom Ruddenig, founder of Demand Genius.
• 1:47
  We've been going for about eighteen months now, so still a fairly early startup, but kind of moving along pretty quickly and that's the nice thing about technology now is you can build an awful lot in, in eighteen months.
• 1:56
  In terms of my background, so I've spent about a decade now, aging myself horribly, in various roles in SaaS and technology startups, so from kind of B2B, B2C startups that I launched straight out of university, and then various roles across ops, marketing, sales.
• 2:11
  You could probably look at that and say, "Well, you weren't very good at any of them then, Tom," which may or may not be right.
• 2:16
  But yeah, so I've had a fairly broad experience, but most recently at a company called Zephyr, which was an early stage startup that both me and my co-founder actually joined together
• 2:24
  a- actually it must have been about five or six... about six years ago now.
• 2:27
  We were there from kind of early, very early hires there all the way through to ultimately exiting the business to Zuora, who some of you may know is a pretty big fintech on the West Coast.
• 2:37
  And what we were doing there I think is worth mentioning a little bit because I think it's quite relevant to what we're talking about today.
• 2:43
  So I think that background, working on the go-to-market side, but for a company that helped some of the biggest media companies in the world work out how to leverage digital media, digital content more effectively and how to monetize it.
• 2:55
  So we were helping the likes of BBC, Forbes, FT, The Economist, a lot of people over in the States here just from reading the chats and your posts.
• 3:01
  Helping them understand how they can leverage data more effectively to monetize their content and maximize digital subscriptions from it.
• 3:07
  And that's what's given us kind of a unique perspective, I think, on the landscape of B2B content now, where ultimately the outcome that we're trying to drive is largely the same, right?
• 3:18
  We're taking a piece of content and we're trying to drive a commercial outcome from it.
• 3:21
  It's a little bit different in the sense that we're not typically like selling a subscription on the page, so the tactics that we use and the mechanisms that we use are different, but ultimately it's the same goal.
• 3:30
  So what we were kind of...
• 3:31
  what we're doing with Demand Genius really is taking technology that we've been implementing there and applying it to our own context in the world of B2B SaaS to solve what I think are some pretty kind of ubiquitous problems within marketing and specifically within content.
• 3:44
  So I think that's useful context for I guess where a lot of my opinions come from and where my kind of perspective comes from.
• 3:49
  I think the, like the short story is if I ever start telling anyone how to write content, tell me in a polite way to shut up because there's gonna be probably, I don't know how many we've got, three hundred people signed up for this webinar that will do a better job.
• 4:01
  And if you want proof of that, head over to our blog where I write everything.
• 4:05
  But where I do, I think, have some value that I can add is helping contextualize the role that content plays within a broader go-to-market, and that's largely what I wanna talk about today just from my background in kind of running, working within kind of sales and marketing teams.
• 4:19
  But then that-- but also how we can do a better job of driving outcomes. I think there's a lot of lessons we can take from the media industry at the moment into B2B content, right?
• 4:26
  I think like that-that's an industry that went through their digital transformation about twenty years ago, and it was a pretty painful process to work out how they could adapt to a world in which people primarily engaged with and bought their products digitally rather than physically.
• 4:42
  I think we're undergoing something pretty similar in SaaS. It's a bit slower because organizations change a lot slower, a lot more slowly than individual habits of consumption do.
• 4:50
  But it's a similar process, and I think we can learn some lessons from what they did there. But yeah, that's just about me. The only other thing that I wanted to kind of make sure that I call out
• 4:59
  at the top just to kind of frame the conversation and everything we're gonna talk about is I think one thing I'm always very keen on is I think with-- so content is having a bit of a moment at the moment, and I think a lot of the role that content plays is changing, and it's changing very quickly.
• 5:12
  The main way, and we'll get into this more, is that I think it's becoming more and more critical at every stage of the customer life cycle rather than just at the top of it.
• 5:19
  Um, and that has a whole sweeping impact on how we measure performance, how we distribute which we'll go into.
• 5:25
  But one thing I really don't ever wanna come out of this as is like a doom and gloom approach to that, 'cause that a hundred percent is not what I believe.
• 5:31
  I think it's actually an incredible opportunity and an incredible time right now to have a, like, content marketer skill set. I think it's gonna be one of the most important skill sets within go-to-market going forward.
• 5:41
  So I don't want that kind of doom and gloom element to come out. It's an opportunity.
• 5:45
  It requires change, and it requires knowing how to go out and capitalize on that, but it's a good time to be a content marketer, and I don't want to buy into the kind of doom and gloom.
• 5:52
  Anyway, that's longer than I intended already in terms of setting the scene, so I'll get into it.
• 5:56
  Like, but I wanna start off with just what we're seeing in the market at the moment in all, all the different conversations that we're having with customers, potential customers.
• 6:03
  I think the headline thing, there's a couple of things which I think are converging to, to ultimately create the change that we're talking about. Search traffic is falling very quickly.
• 6:10
  I'm sure I don't need to kind of hammer that point home for anyone here.
• 6:13
  It's something I'd imagine a lot of you have seen in your businesses, but certainly across-The industry we are seeing, it wouldn't be a webinar if we didn't have some Gartner data coming in at some point.
• 6:22
  So they predict twenty-five percent drop in volume by twenty twenty-six, and we've already seen a pretty large drop in volume.
• 6:29
  Again, won't flog a dead horse here, but in most of that I think can be attributed to the rise of people engaging directly with LLMs, but also of kind of zero-click searches, where people are never actually coming through to your site, and increasingly, depending where you are in the world, we're in about sixty percent of searches are now zero click, which is eating very much into like the traditional content playbook, which focuses on using SEO to capture kind of high, like, to capture very broad, what, like informational top-of-funnel keywords.
• 6:58
  It's changed that playbook quite dramatically. Now, at the same time, I think there's a lot of changes happening in terms of the way that B2B buyers want to buy and want to engage, right?
• 7:08
  And that's what's giving content a much bigger role later throughout the customer life cycle. Again, my background was in enterprise sales within, with Zephyr and then with Zuora.
• 7:16
  One thing that, again, kind of inspired me to s- get interested in this problem and, and build Demand Genius was [chuckles] put simply, no one wanted to talk to me anymore. I don't know why. Lovely bloke.
• 7:26
  But there's kind of stats to back that up, right? Seventy-five percent of buyers now avoid direct interaction with B2B sales reps.
• 7:33
  We've built our whole go-to-market on being able to get reps in front of buyers, so that's a pretty major shift.
• 7:38
  And then even if you can get a rep in front of a buyer, ninety-four percent of them don't trust sales rep claims, right?
• 7:44
  And there's actually another very interesting Gartner study, which I would recommend having a look at, talking about the difference between an information connector and an information authority.
• 7:52
  So traditionally, s- the sales reps that succeed are information authorities. They're deeply knowledgeable about their topic, about their subject matter, and they can talk from authority about that.
• 8:03
  That's not what persuades people anymore, because people don't trust those sales reps. What persuades people is information connectors.
• 8:08
  The ability to listen and connect them to the right information, whether that's content.
• 8:12
  So again, you can see how that gives content a much bigger role in supporting those reps with actually doing the job of closing deals, even where there is still a largely sales rep process.
• 8:21
  So it all trend kind of conspires to mean that it is harder than ever to get a sales rep into the room with buyers.
• 8:26
  Again, content is the way that you influence people without being in the room, and it's the way that you develop signals and re-regain insight into and influence over deals without always having to be in the room.
• 8:36
  In terms of like what I think is useful to think about, like what the impact that has on the way that we organize ourselves as a revenue function, which I think is increasingly how we need to think about ourselves.
• 8:46
  Like this is how a traditional revenue function looks like. It's built around the idea that buying for an organization is linear.
• 8:54
  That used to be true when you typically had a single stakeholder making a buying decision for their individual department, right?
• 9:01
  Is it was one person, they were empowered to make a decision, and you could just push them through a buying process, right? It's still simplistic, but it is broadly fair. That's changed.
• 9:09
  You have so many more stakeholders to a decision. You have so much more kind of finance and cross-departmental oversight over any enterprise buying decision, and it means that simply isn't how people buy anymore.
• 9:19
  And it means that we need to change the way that we organize ourselves, right? The typical model where marketing sits top of the funnel and content typically like towards the top of the top,
• 9:29
  and then generates leads, hands those off to sales, an army of sales reps calls those leads and, and tries to harangue them onto a demo, and we close them from there.
• 9:37
  Meanwhile, marketing goes and repeats the process and get, and gets the next batch in. That simply is out of whack with how people buy. How people buy in reality is a lot more like this.
• 9:45
  It's a very complex process, it's multi-stakeholder, and it's looping. I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen this Gartner buyer journey in the past.
• 9:55
  I think it, it's been kind of doing the rounds, but I think it's a very good way of summing up the complexity and just how out of line the way that we've organized ourselves is, right?
• 10:05
  Because as long as you have marketing operating here and sales operating here, what you can see is there are marketing touch points at every stage of the life cycle, and content touch points at every stage of the life cycle.
• 10:15
  There's also sales touch points at every point. The way I buy is, the first thing I do is I want to speak to someone, get a demo, understand, and then I go quiet for a year.
• 10:22
  That's completely out of kilter with how we all sell to people. So I think that's an important change to understand.
• 10:26
  And the impact of all of that is, in our opinion, any content strategy or kind of content business case, I suppose is a better term, that's built around reach, I think it's been maybe slightly dramatic wording, but I think it's kind of destined to fail.
• 10:40
  Traffic is falling across the entire industry. That's kind of inescapable at this point.
• 10:45
  So if you're building your whole kind of raison d'être, your whole business case around generating traffic, that's a big challenge that needs to be overcome.
• 10:53
  Changes in the way that people buy is also serving to push people further and push the role of content further and further down funnel.
• 11:00
  Increasingly, top of funnel is in the realms of social, dark social, and interactions with AI. Yes, there are ways that we can influence that, and we're kind of-- we can talk... I'll talk about that a little bit later.
• 11:09
  We're kind of slowly understanding the black box of LLMs a little bit better, but it still largely is exactly that. It's a black box.
• 11:18
  But what it does mean is people are having those early interactions off your site without necessarily a direct interaction with you or your content.
• 11:26
  But that means that when they do arrive on your site, they're highly educated and they have intent already, and they don't want to engage immediately with the sales rep.
• 11:34
  So the role of your content shifts largely to middle and bottom of funnel, like gone are the days of producing loads and loads of weekly blog content that's gonna capture kind of high volume keywords.
• 11:46
  It's about finding the keywords, like SEO is still a part of it. It's finding the keywords that are a much more specific brand keywords or commercial search terms
• 11:54
  that you can capture, but also getting more creative with how you distribute to people down here, and actually leveraging frontline teams as your best possible distribution channel increasingly, I think.
• 12:03
  We talk a lot about intent signals in go-to-market. Well, the best intent signals are still the people that are out there interacting with prospects day in and day out.
• 12:10
  So leverage them, and we'll talk again more about that. And the other thing is algorithms are constantly changing. Everyone probably saw what HubSpot is.
• 12:17
  That's probably the most famous example, but I think there's constant examples of times when people see this kind of impact.
• 12:23
  So if, again, you're building your whole strategy around reach in such a fast moving environment where you're constantly trying to keep up with the algorithmI think that sounds like a stressful way to earn a living to me.
• 12:32
  [laughs] So I think that's again, something that, yeah, is, is worth being aware of. I'll pause there 'cause I, I've constantly talking a lot, Jim. I don't know if we've got questions or should I carry on?
• 12:40
  I think we can press on.
• 12:41
  Aaron asked if there was sources for some of the data points you cited, which maybe we can gather up later 'cause there's some really good data in there that I'm guessing people will wanna bring back to their teams as part of a discussion on how do we handle this, where are the opportunities, et cetera.
• 12:55
  So I can follow up about that later, but otherwise, no, I think we're good to press on. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I can share the sources for all of them.
• 13:01
  That's when you know you're talking to a room full of former journalists and content- Yeah. [laughs]... when they're, they're asking for your sources. Tom, could I ask one question? Yeah, of course. One just rolled in.
• 13:09
  Dark social. Could you explain what you mean by dark social? Yeah. So dark social, and have a look, there's some good writing by people like... Oh God, the name's just gone out my head.
• 13:17
  I said, uh, Chris Walker, who I think kind of coined the term. Essentially dark so- like, what we're seeing is a bit of a rise of micro-communities.
• 13:25
  I can't think of a better word to call them, but basically WhatsApp chats, closed off groups of buyers, right?
• 13:31
  Senior people who are fed up of being harassed on LinkedIn by constant sales interludes, and so have kind of taken their communities off of those platforms and off of the platforms where you can reach them.
• 13:41
  So a lot of key interactions in the buying process increasingly are taking place on a WhatsApp chat between 10 CMOs who know each other, things like that.
• 13:50
  So obviously a very difficult thing to influence and impossible to attribute, so a big challenge. Yeah. Okay, cool. That's really interesting.
• 13:57
  You know, I, I have found over time that things like that happen in communities like Superpath, but not in public channels, that groups of people will set up DMs with each other to chat about stuff kind of like this.
• 14:10
  It's like a smaller, like, very trusted group and, like, even I can't see it, you know? Like I- Yeah...
• 14:15
  wish there was a way for me to, like, sell that value to a sponsor or something, but I don't even know that it happens unless I happen to hear about it later on.
• 14:22
  So it's pretty interesting that there's quite a bit of that happening that is, you know, it's totally untrackable. Yeah. And Superpath itself is probably a good example, right?
• 14:29
  There's a whole load of conversations that would happen here, and I think increasingly, particularly at the start of the buyer journey when you're kind of compiling a shortlist, basically there's so much noise online.
• 14:37
  Yeah. Even the traditional review sites like G2, I don't know about you, I don't particularly trust them anymore. I don't trust those reviews are authentic reviews. No.
• 14:46
  I'm sure a lot of them are, but I'm not gonna base a, you know, 100K buying decision off of that. So yeah- Yeah... I think that it's a big challenge. For sure.
• 14:54
  Yeah, every now and then I get an email from some software that we use here at Superpath, and they say, "Hey, we'll give you 50 bucks if you write us a G2 review." [laughs] You know?
• 15:03
  So that, like, I'll do it for 50 bucks, but that makes me not trust [laughs] any other stuff that's there at all. Yeah. Well, I'll stop sending you those emails then. Yeah.
• 15:12
  So I think the biggest thing that I want everyone to take away from this really is that this is actually a fantastic thing.
• 15:18
  I think it's very easy to be doom and gloom about it because it's the old content playbook kind of, there's flaws that have been developed in it, and it's a changing of the role.
• 15:26
  But it actually pushes content teams a lot closer to kind of the sharp, pointy end of go-to-market, which is a lot closer to revenue, and that brings with it tremendous opportunities.
• 15:35
  I think there's the kind of look view of it from a content perspective, but also from a go-to-market perspective, and it's what makes me so optimistic.
• 15:41
  At the end of the day, we are all, as go-to-market teams, under pressure to improve efficiency, right? Prof- blah, blah, blah. Get my words out. Profitable, efficient growth is kind of the name of the game now.
• 15:50
  Well, we live in a world where we are getting super high intent, super educated traffic to our website, right? So yes, we're getting less reach, but a lot of that isn't necessarily the people you want anyway.
• 16:02
  People that aren't us are doing the filtering for us to remove the people that we don't actually want to be able to talk to and boil it down just to the 10% of that traffic potentially that is used, and they're doing the job of educating them in the early stages for us.
• 16:17
  It changes the way that we need to approach them in terms of how we talk to, like how we write. [laughs] Doing what I said I wouldn't do.
• 16:22
  How we write content a little bit in terms of focusing on value, keywords, and finding ways to be discovered.
• 16:27
  It changes the way that we approach the experience we put around content in terms of gating and things like that, but it can only be a good thing, right?
• 16:35
  We have a more focused audience that is more engaged and has more intent. That's a fantastic opportunity to capture.
• 16:40
  There's also, I recommend for anyone, have a quick look, it wasn't the most revealing thing, but Google released some guidelines recently about kind of GEO and how to get into the AI overviews, which I think I've got somewhere in this, and we'll share the slides afterwards, so there's a link to it.
• 16:53
  But it's a benefit they're explicitly now selling as a response to people complaining that they're not getting traffic is look at the benefit you are getting for the traffic and a more focused group.
• 17:02
  The other thing is from a pure revenue GToM- GTM perspective, buyers, we're under pressure to improve efficiency, and buyers are actively pulling us and asking us if they can engage via more efficient one-to-many channels, AKA content, rather than a human.
• 17:16
  So I think it's difficult because this is kind of out of the control probably of a lot of people who on this call who are approaching from a pure content perspective.
• 17:23
  But this is the message that I would say we need to get across to revenue leaders is why on earth when you're under that pressure would you not lean into that change and invest in content that can basically influence deals without needing a very expensive,
• 17:38
  always want typically overpaid sales rep to be in the room. I think it's a crazy thing to not... We like to cling onto the old playbook, but it's something that we should absolutely be leaning into.
• 17:48
  But it does require adaptation, right? That it changes the role.
• 17:51
  In order to fulfill that role that content, I believe, now has, there are ways that we need to adapt how we operate and also the tooling and the technology that we use. And I'm gonna try and focus more on the first one.
• 18:02
  But essentially it comes down to successful content teams, I believe into the next five, 10 years, it's difficult to see far beyond that at the moment, will be the ones that build their business case around impact, not reach, and are able to successfully integrate them much more into the broader go-to-market strategy.
• 18:17
  So I'm gonna talk, I won't go through them now 'cause we're gonna kinda talk about each of these points-Specifically from this point on, but I think there are some key shifts, like moving away just from kind of focusing on optimizing for specific keywords to actually answering questions.
• 18:30
  Basically get back to just writing really good engaging content rather than worrying quite so much around the kind of the almost the sci- like focusing more in on the art of content rather than the science.
• 18:41
  Integrating that work into go to market, making sure that we're putting an emphasis on owning distribution channels rather than always been building on kind of rented land and third-party platforms.
• 18:50
  They absolutely have a role to play, but if you are fully reliant on them, again, there's so many examples of people, whether it's n-not just SEO, but people who rely on the LinkedIn algorithm, and it just changes overnight, and their business drops off a cliff.
• 19:02
  It's very easy to be tempted by the promise and the upside of third-party platforms, but it's important to always balance that with risk.
• 19:10
  Focus on maximizing the high-value traffic we are getting in, ultimately not just capturing eyeballs, but kind of revenue generation. And again, I just hope I'll come back to some SuperPath data.
• 19:19
  This is a fantastic opportunity for content marketers to kind of break out of the pigeonhole that they've, I think, always been frustrated to be cast into, which is that it's a kind of top-of-funnel mechanism.
• 19:29
  Um, it absolutely isn't anymore, and with breaking out of that pigeonhole comes a whole lot more opportunities, right? This was SuperPath data.
• 19:36
  The lack of clear ROI to content and undervaluing content marketing is the biggest kind of obstacle to career progression.
• 19:41
  I suppose our big message would be content marketing skill set is super, super valuable, super important, and that ultimately will unlock bigger budgets, career progression, and kind of personal financial opportunities as well as we're able to capture that.
• 19:55
  So I'm gonna go into those a bit more. I'm gonna pause again and just open a window as well because it's hot in here. So I'll pause for questions. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Love the, love the last slide.
• 20:03
  I shared the salary report, which includes some other data around that, uh, specifically about earning more, but kind of in the context of, like, what are kind of the macro factors that affect some of that, so there's more data there.
• 20:13
  And then I also dropped a link to there's a podcast I listened to just the other day. It was Sundar Pichai, Google CEO.
• 20:19
  He was on a podcast discussing the type of traffic they're sending to websites and the quality of traffic they're sending to websites, and he had some data on that.
• 20:26
  I thought it was a pretty interesting discussion, so I put that in the chat as well. And then let's see. Yeah, yeah.
• 20:31
  Peter in the chat, not necessarily a question, but says, "I see a lot of sense in the integrated into GTM approach over the content silo play," which, yes, I definitely agree with.
• 20:41
  Dean says, "Interesting that companies undervaluing content follows from a lack of ROI being tied to content." Definitely. I feel like-- I mean, Tom, I'm sure you would agree.
• 20:49
  The better you can track it, the less it's undervalued. Like, I think most of us believe that the proof exists as long as you can find it and have some data points to talk about.
• 20:59
  And then one from Nicole: "Knowing the heightened importance of conversion-focused content, what role do you see more demand creation-focused content having, i.e. thought leadership?" Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah.
• 21:11
  So knowing the heightened importance of conversion-focused content, what role do you see more demand creation-focused content? Yeah, so thought leadership.
• 21:16
  I think a lot more-- I think there's a few things that pop into my mind. I think first of all, like, we're gonna talk about it in a little bit, right? The focusing on answering questions, not keywords.
• 21:24
  It all lends itself, but it points to different formats because you don't necessarily have to worry quite so much about optimizing for SEO as a distribution channel.
• 21:32
  So you can be more creative with the format, and that allows you to build out the content more and invest more in thought leadership rather than being kind of restricted by the need for it to be an HTML blog style or something like that.
• 21:43
  The other thing is the point I said, like, I think there's always a balance a-for any content team to tread between supporting sales and supporting, or I should say, frontline teams, because it's also CS and the way that we think about revenue growth, I think, is definitely changing to, to include that more.
• 21:57
  Just taking myself off my train of thought. Yeah, uh, uh, like supporting those teams without becoming a support function, which we'll talk about again in a little bit.
• 22:05
  But I think thought leadership is critical to that, right? If we're saying that, okay, in... A-as a sales rep, you need to be able to be an information connector.
• 22:12
  You need to have access to the information to connect people, too.
• 22:15
  I think as content has a bigger role, not just top of funnel, but further down funnel, it's replacing the role that salespeople have always had, which is changing perspectives, influencing people.
• 22:26
  Thought leadership is how you influence people, and you build kind of your unique perspective as a brand rather than just capture interest.
• 22:33
  It's critical to actually changing people's mind, and that's what a good sales rep does. So I think it makes that twice as important. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I, I actually love the idea of demand creation-focused content.
• 22:44
  Thought leadership is really the perfect medium for that.
• 22:47
  The way I sort of think about this is, you know, as all this changes, there's like a loose analogy to be made between, like, trying to get your musician and you're trying to get your music played on the radio, which is incredibly hard, but gets you this broad distribution to a lot of people.
• 23:00
  But there's also a lot of other ways to reach people before you get to that point. It's Bandcamp, then it's YouTube, then it's other social channels, then it's Spotify.
• 23:07
  And, and I think that a lot of us are gonna have to be thinking a lot more about the ways that we work around the big, giant algorithms, primarily Google and increasingly OpenAI and Anthropic and the other AI tools.
• 23:19
  Like, those are gonna be incredibly competitive. Will they be worth it? I'm not sure.
• 23:23
  Maybe they will be, but I think we're all gonna have to think a little bit more about how we're gonna reach people without those, and thought leadership is the perfect style of content to do that.
• 23:31
  Yeah, some interesting stuff here on MOFU and BOFU. I think TOFU is going to be a short-term channel for now with GEO. I tend to agree with that. Cool. Yeah, I think we're good to dive back in.
• 23:39
  If folks have questions, keep them coming, and I'll keep queuing them up for Tom. Yeah, cool.
• 23:43
  So we're gonna kind of go one by one now into each of those points and just share, like, what we're seeing as, like, a way to kind of create that change.
• 23:49
  So yeah, do, like, at this point, hit up with questions a-as we go. So yeah, we're gonna go into e-each of those ones. We'll spend a little bit more time on some than others.
• 23:57
  I think one of the, like-- And this is less of a kind of, like, an insight we have at Demand Genius, but I think just really important to summarize what I'm learning as well from the market as we go.
• 24:05
  Like, what succeeds now, didn't mean to say great great, but I think that does kind of highlight the point, is, like, focusing on high-quality content, right?
• 24:13
  We're, like, getting away from optimizing content for keywords and focusing on just how can we make this as engaging and as influential as possible.That's what helps at the kind of top of the funnel where there is still a job for content and people do reach.
• 24:26
  But whatever the distribution channel, whether it's via kind of direct channels or leveraging sales, that's how you imbue everyone around the organization with credibility, and it's also the key increasingly to being discovered.
• 24:37
  So GEO, we don't know everything about it, but we do know from Google's explicit guidelines, and there's the link here if anyone wants to check that out, it's about answering questions, not optimizing for keywords.
• 24:47
  And from an SEO perspective as well, where traffic is still strong and people are getting through to websites rather than just staying on the page on Google is on those more specific, detailed, high intent, both kind of bottom of funnel search terms.
• 25:04
  So how do we start fulfilling that? One of the things that I would urge everyone on this call to spend time doing going forward is really invest in how you can understand the buyer journey better.
• 25:15
  Like, the questions that you need to be able to answer in order to do this are, like, what questions are arising for a prospect at every stage of the journey?
• 25:22
  If we're trying to capture those super specific keywords, it requires whether through data or through direct interactions with them, we have on the data part, the other part, and I can share actually at the end of podcast with some- with Anton Roos, who might be on this call actually.
• 25:36
  Hi, Anton, if you are. Who was talking about how they go about that at Corporate Visions.
• 25:40
  But, like, getting closer and closer to customers and trying to find out in their journey, like what were the thought processes they went through at every stage?
• 25:48
  What questions come up at different points so that you can hone in on those keywords? And so th- there's different ways to do that. What's the best format to answer them?
• 25:55
  The way that people like to consume information for different purposes and different questions and tasks and workflows changes, right?
• 26:02
  So depending on what those questions are, they-- there's gonna be evolution in how people-- what content people want to engage with each time. You need to understand- Yeah... that so that you can capture that. Yeah.
• 26:13
  Tom, sorry to interrupt you. Just real quick, this morning, actually, I was having a problem with a Stripe payment. So I'm an existing Stripe customer, having a problem with payment. I go to Claude.
• 26:21
  So I don't go to Stripe's support because I don't wanna wait in the queue, and I find the whole process to be frustrating.
• 26:26
  So I go to Claude, and I find the answer to my question, I assume because Claude is accessing Stripe support docs. And not only do I get my answer, I get an upsell.
• 26:36
  So Claude is telling me, "Oh, actually, like if you upgrade to the next plan, like that will make this a lot easier next time." And I was like, "Wow, that's sort of an interest..."
• 26:43
  Like, I didn't have to talk to a salesperson to be upsold. That happened through the indexing of Stripe's very good support documentation.
• 26:52
  And it was kinda like this built-in sales experience directly from Claude, which I found to be somewhat fascinating.
• 26:57
  But I could imagine a similar type of thing, like a different style of content support docs, where people can ask very specific questions about the product and actually get the answers in real time and make that...
• 27:06
  To your point, by the time that they end up talking to a salesperson, they're way more informed. Yeah.
• 27:11
  I mean, it's interesting that, like, I think there's a lot of, like, bandwidth being given to, like, how do LLMs end up monetizing what they do and kind of having that built aback.
• 27:20
  Well, that's quite an interesting thing, right? I think they're actually directly upselling you- Yeah... without having to talk to Stripe. That's kind of terrifying and interesting at the same time. Yeah. Um- Cool.
• 27:29
  Sorry to derail you. No, no, no. It's a good point, right?
• 27:32
  Like, like depending what the question is that you have, you're gonna go to a completely different place, and the better we can understand that, the better we can create content and create a kind of distribution strategy across the board spectrum of routes that we have to buyers that's gonna hit all of those.
• 27:46
  For sure. The second element, which I think I'll talk a little bit more about is like getting integrated into the broader go-to-market strategy.
• 27:55
  So ma- like, making sure that we're not operating as a silo at the top of the funnel, but we're kind of going out and proactively creating the role that we think we should have across all of the revenue function, right?
• 28:05
  As long as we are looking at content within the kind of narrow confines of this role at the top of the funnel, there's gonna be all of these touch points that we're not influencing as much as possible, right?
• 28:17
  That's gonna create challenges from an attribution standpoint, but also it, it's a missed opportunity. We need to kind of extend the way we look at this.
• 28:23
  And, and again, this is where it goes back a little bit to how we build a narrative internally and go and kind of create the change that needs to happen here because it-- part of this always comes down to the way that, the way the incentives are set and things like that, which is always a difficult part of this, right?
• 28:37
  There's only so much that you can control as a kind of an individual contributor.
• 28:41
  But I think that's something where we are starting to see a lot more change, and everyone I speak to is working on getting everyone around go-to-market aligned around revenue.
• 28:48
  There are different stages of that progression, but it's certainly a message that people at the top are looking for help with.
• 28:53
  In terms of like what I think that looks like and a, a better way to visualize the role that content should play, in my view, is viewing it as at, like, foundational to every workflow that happens across go-to-market.
• 29:05
  And you can look at that in a lot of different ways. So there's like the jobs to be done element that we take from, like, the Gartner, so problem identification, solution requirement building, supplier selection.
• 29:15
  There is an opportunity for content to influence in a very positive way that fits with how buyers want to engage every single phase of that, right?
• 29:25
  And if you look at how that then maps over to how we organize ourselves from a go-to-market perspective, you can kind of loosely map demand gen, lead gen, engagement, closing.
• 29:35
  Again, like, think about what content can influence each of these ways, and how can we measure that, and how can we make the argument for it? And it goes through to all of the different activities, right?
• 29:45
  So whether it's social, SEO, website. This is where I think everyone on this call is probably very comfortable building a strategy to impact this and then reporting on how that's gone.
• 29:55
  I think the further through this process we go, the more it kind of bleeds away from our comfort zone. But there are 100%-- like, there is opportunity down here that can be captured.
• 30:08
  And so I wanna think a little bit about how you actually go about doing that 'cause I think one element will always be the way that KPIs are set, but there are also things that can be proactively done from a content perspective, and it comes down to better relationships.
• 30:21
  I would boil it down to three things. So the first is like understanding the strategic context within which you operate.
• 30:27
  So as a kind of revenue critical function-And the way that I like to think of this is if a VP of sales came into a company and didn't understand the broader context that surrounds their KPIs, right?
• 30:37
  They know they need to hit a particular revenue number. They are also going to know all of the detail that sits behind that, right?
• 30:42
  We need to hit this revenue number because we're going for Series B next year, and that's the benchmarks that in early conversations we've been told we have to hit.
• 30:51
  All of that additional context beyond the KPI is critical to making the plan for how we're gonna hit the number, and that I think is more true than ever with content because it has such far reaching, such a kind of long tail impact, right?
• 31:02
  So if you go from knowing, okay, I need to generate this many leads, to understanding the reason I need to generate this many leads from content or this much, if you go even further, this much traffic from content is we need to hit this number and that's the reason why, well, suddenly we can start optimizing a lot more effectively for, like, all the second order effect of what we do, right?
• 31:20
  Because the number of possible approaches gets narrower and narrower with each time, right?
• 31:26
  Building a strategy for reach, there's 100 different ways that we could go about doing that, and no- none of them would be wrong, right? There might...
• 31:32
  You might get better or worse results from some than others, but every one of them is going to ultimately get you more eyeballs on your brand and your content. Same goes with for lead gen, but a little bit less.
• 31:41
  Once we start optimizing for this, then you can be really clear that, okay, this is our content strategy because it's gonna generate this much reach, this many leads, this much revenue.
• 31:50
  It's also gonna have the effect of building our kind of thought leadership as a business as we approach Series B, giving ourselves, like, a unique perspective and giving the executive team collateral that they can leverage in conversations with investors, right?
• 32:04
  You can start being super strategic in how you present the value of what you're gonna do and boil it down to what is gonna best optimize for that.
• 32:11
  The other thing is, like, establishing as much as possible, and there's always two sides to this.
• 32:16
  I've been kind of on both of them, actually, as a marketer and as a sales rep, but more recently on the other side as a sales rep. I get it.
• 32:22
  Sometimes it's not as easy as a slide deck will make it seem to go and generate input and have that kind of feedback loop.
• 32:30
  But I think there are things that as a content team you can do, and I think it's a very important thing to do at the moment.
• 32:35
  For a couple of reasons, you are relying ultimately on input from people, right, who are close to customers, having conversations day in and day out to understand, like, to take the pulse or the, yeah, the pulse of the market.
• 32:47
  It's important to do everything in our power to go and make sure that feedback is getting back to us. Frontline teams also have the best intent signals that you can ever imagine, right?
• 32:56
  So when you're thinking about how to distribute content within the context of a role that sits more middle and bottom of funnel, it's again, it's an opportunity that you're missing if we're not going and maximizing that and being proactive.
• 33:07
  And that, that's kind of the last point here is just rethink how we approach the distribution. I tend to think of it as a matrix now rather than a kind of set of channels.
• 33:15
  It all needs to fit together, and we'll talk a bit more about that in a bit. We do have one question here which I, I think we may need more context, but Mitangi asked, "Tom, how do you approach this...
• 33:25
  How does this approach change," excuse me, "for content that can't drive conversions but only influence them?" Yeah, I think it's a good question.
• 33:31
  So I mean c- like, content that is not gated essentially, right, where there isn't a lead form. Yeah, that's how I understand it. Yeah. I think there's a couple of things. I think first of all, there doesn't...
• 33:40
  Like, just because something isn't gated in that moment doesn't necessarily mean that it's not driving a conversion, right?
• 33:47
  That conversion, again, if we think of it, there's hundreds of touch points that are going into influencing just one stakeholder probably.
• 33:54
  The fact that we didn't directly convert someone from that particular blog post or whatever it is, doesn't mean that it didn't influence a conversion.
• 34:02
  But what dictates whether you will ultimately get that conversion is your ability to genuinely change their perspective.
• 34:07
  So I think everything that we're talking about in terms of focusing in on quality and on persuasion and thought leadership still applies even where that isn't the point of conversion.
• 34:17
  The other thing is, I think, and this goes back to our background in kind of dynamic paywalls, viewing that kind of gating decision and that lead form decision as a binary choice, right, we gate it or we don't gate it, I think is one of the biggest misconceptions in B2B content that exists.
• 34:33
  Like, if you knew the level of sophistication that goes into that decision over whether to drop a paywall or not on a particular piece of content, like, there's rules that they're creating with a tool like ours, like business logic to say if this, then that, and they've got this huge complex canvases where there's, like, hundreds of decisions made while the page is loading as to whether the content should be...
• 34:55
  as to whether it should be gated or not, and if it is gated, what gate should we put down, what product should we put in front of them, all of that. And going into those rules are complex propensity models.
• 35:04
  Like, like, the level of sophistication is insane and the level of experimentation with that. There's also not a binary outcome, right? It's not gate or no gate.
• 35:11
  There's different mechanisms that you can use to drive a conversion, whether it's kind of embedded forms and call to actions within the content itself, kind of over the top of the content as a pop-up, metering that.
• 35:23
  Like, there's so many different options to allow you to drive some conversions without having to decide before whether that's a piece of conversion content or not.
• 35:32
  You can kind of let the user lead you a little bit more on that. Again, it's something we can talk a little bit more about in a bit, but there's a lot more sophistication that can be unlocked on B2B. And it's not...
• 35:41
  It probably sounds very far-fetched, far removed from where we are now, but it, it's not technically that complex and it's something we can always help with as well. Does that answer the question? Yes, I think so.
• 35:51
  Actually, we have some clarification on the question. I think you touched on a lot of it. If we have time, I think we should come back to it, but I know we have some more stuff to get through.
• 35:58
  So I think we should press on and then we'll get through as many other... that question and as many others as we can closer to, to the end. Sure. Got you.
• 36:06
  So this is kind of what we're moving on to now anyway actually, which is how do you, like, focus on maximizing the high value traffic rather than looking at how can we go and get more eyeballs, right?
• 36:14
  Let's focus on how can we make the best possible use of the traffic that we are getting because it's high value. So we're casting a smaller net, but let's fix the holes in that. So again, three kind of points.
• 36:28
  First of all, reduce the friction to your content. I think there is a gen- there's a lot of debate around gating.
• 36:32
  I'm not-Of the belief that you should never gate content or anything like that, but you can be super deliberate and there was a phrase I heard recently, like gate with intent.
• 36:41
  Think very clearly about why we're making that decision, and wherever possible, make that decision reader-led rather than content-led, right?
• 36:49
  The tendency in B2B is we look at a piece of content and some combination of kind of the thought that went into it, where we think based on our assumptions, it sits within the funnel, how much we spent on it, how valuable we think it is, we're gonna make a decision on whether we gate it.
• 37:04
  That's not what matters. What matters is the buyer, where they are in their journey, and what the right thing is to actually help us progress them down that journey.
• 37:12
  There are points within the buyer journey where a content gate is absolutely what is required for you and the buyer, because there are points where you need to change the context of the relationship, right?
• 37:21
  In order to keep helping someone solve what is a complex B2B enterprise style problem, we need to shift them into a different medium, right?
• 37:29
  They need to stop engaging with content, and we need to gather data, or we need to interact with them directly. So there's a place for gating.
• 37:36
  It just needs to be a lot more deliberate based on who the reader is and what job we want to do with them next.
• 37:42
  But let's not put up unnecessary friction, and that was actually the first problem that got us to start Demand Genius was just the frustration at like repetitive lead forms.
• 37:50
  You go on to download a white paper or sign up for a webinar and over again, you're hit with the same sign-up details. It's absolutely unnecessary. Like, that's fairly simple capability to improve.
• 37:59
  The other thing, and we could do a whole webinar on this topic, but I think something that's overlooked quite a lot in B2B marketing again is the value of a known user is something B2C figured out quite a while ago, and it's why you would've seen if you go onto large publishers' websites, there's this kind of rise of getting registration walls.
• 38:18
  So before a paywall, you're hit with just an ask to subscribe because what that does is it basically brings you into their owned ecosystem.
• 38:25
  It creates a direct relationship, and that unlocks a lot in terms of personalization. And again, if we're trying to optimize for small numbers of high value people, we wanna be as targeted and as...
• 38:36
  It, it's worth investing in personalizing the message, the content, the gating experience, things like that, and that, that... Or the authentication, the known user relationship is what unlocks that.
• 38:46
  And the other thing is it unlocks insight, right? We are sitting on... We love intent signals as in go-to-market.
• 38:51
  Most of our intent signals are bought from third party providers, which means all of our competitors also have access to those same intent signals.
• 38:59
  Content is like a machine that can generate completely proprietary intent signals, where not based on like an IP lookup or anything like that. I can identify this is Jimmy, and I can plot his every interaction.
• 39:10
  I can compare that to all the other interactions we're seeing with our, with our CP, and I can get a really in-depth understanding of how, where Jimmy is in his buying process.
• 39:19
  So the ability of content to be critical to that process, I think is really, really valuable. Again, we could go into that in a lot more detail, but I won't do that now.
• 39:28
  And then the last thing is what we talked about before, right? Understand the buyer journey as far as possible. So what questions are coming up? How can we answer them?
• 39:34
  And also trying to think about like, where are your customers handoffs.
• 39:36
  So we have kind of fairly arbitrary handoffs defined within the go-to-market process, typically around where it, where a lead become-- go-- transfers between teams.
• 39:46
  But like I was saying, there are points within your buyer's journey, and this is gonna be different for every business, where there is a handoff that is actually needed.
• 39:53
  Try and figure out where that is and how we can better align the way that we organize ourselves and the way that we approach different formats of content with that.
• 40:01
  And kind of linked to all of that and what we're talking about the ecosystem is focus on owning your own distribution channel or at least some of them.
• 40:08
  The best approach to this that I've heard was from someone called Kathryn Aragon, who I had on the podcast talking about an authority ecosystem, right? So social is absolutely a fantastic tool to leverage.
• 40:19
  It's a great way to reach lots of people and to get people into your ecosystem.
• 40:24
  But at that point, you do want to have a owned audience that you can speak to directly if social platforms, whichever mix of them you're leveraging drop off, you still have access to an audience.
• 40:37
  But the other thing is diversify across those social platforms because again, if you're entirely reliant on LinkedIn, if it falls overnight, then that has a huge impact.
• 40:45
  And again, it's balancing risk with the reward that these platforms offer, which is undeniable. So you-- like we're crazy if we don't leverage that.
• 40:51
  And then because I'm conscious of time, I wanna make sure we have more time to come back to questions.
• 40:54
  I think the last element, which is kind of our biggest thing at Demand Genius, is shifting the focus of how we measure ourselves internally and how we talk about performance, right?
• 41:05
  Content metrics, so by that I mean kind of the volume output that we're putting out traditional like vanity, what there was often referred to as vanity metrics, reach, even leads generated, things like that.
• 41:15
  They're great signals. They're all leading signals, but they should be no one's north star in go-to-market.
• 41:21
  And if our goal is to recontextualize or reposition ourselves within the context of that revenue team and make the case that we are as revenue critical as I think
• 41:31
  kind of this audience is, we have to change the way that we talk about our performance towards like are we generating an actually progressing pipeline?
• 41:39
  What percentage and volume of all of those deals are we influencing, right? Like are we having a broad effect across deals or just reaching a small pocket? Are we helping to stay front of mind post MQL, right?
• 41:51
  If you're B2B and it's a complex enterprise type sales process, after the MQL is three, six, twelve months, you typically have a sales rep owning that process, and I can speak from experience here, and that's an awful long time to maintain a relationship without support, and I kind of think you can kind of view content as the air cover for that process, right?
• 42:13
  But there is a clear role for content to play in helping stay front of mind, particularly when engaging directly is so much harder to do, right? The days of having a biweekly catch up with a prospect, it's just over.
• 42:25
  No one wants to engage that much. And what percentage of a stakeholder to a given deal are we influencing as well? Again, thirteen stakeholders to the standard enterprise deal.
• 42:33
  As a sales rep, you simply cannot influence all of those thirteen. There's gonna be sale, like personality clashes that prevent some of them. They're not all gonna engage.
• 42:41
  They're gonna be at different points of their journey. Content is the way that you can cast a wide net and that you can also support the sales rep in reaching more of them directly as well.
• 42:49
  So that, yeah, I think the way that we talk about our performance in turn is really important. I'm gonna skip through this. I think we probably wanna get to some questions.
• 42:57
  Is that fair, Jimmy, if we've got some queued up or? Yeah. Yeah, I do have some for you.Yeah. Okay. I'll leave this in the slide deck.
• 43:04
  It's a way that I've tried to kind of contextualize on like a framework that I've created to contextualize just for myself in terms of like the better way, and we've got our strategic thinker here.
• 43:12
  But like there's a whole load of literature in terms of how like a product manager operates, right?
• 43:16
  Which is ultimately, how do we build a ro- a strategic roadmap that maximizes enterprise value and is obsessively capturing feedback along the way to doing that?
• 43:24
  And I think that literature is actually super, super helpful to think about how a content marketer goes about plotting their roadmap.
• 43:30
  So like how do we understand the overall objectives, build a strategy and roadmap that's aligned to that, communicate that, obsessively seek input, but always weigh that input against a really clear framework and for how something gets onto our roadmap, right?
• 43:44
  And that, I think, is the critical difference between like supporting, supportive and support function, right?
• 43:51
  A support function kind of triages those requests and, you know, based on the political capital of the person requesting it, delivers them. A supportive function
• 44:02
  has a clear framework for weighing them against what they know is gonna ultimately deliver value and then distribute that, and it's a constant cycle of going and seeing how that, as those objectives align, how can we kind of course correct.
• 44:16
  And then, yeah, um, I, I won't kind of hammer this point home, but in terms of how we help at Demand Genius, we help with that whole process, right?
• 44:25
  And I always think of it as everything that sits around the great content work that you do in terms of measuring all of this, and then in terms of building experiences that are gonna help maximize the value or maximize the impact.
• 44:35
  That's where we sit.
• 44:36
  So that sits across kind of attribution, measuring at a glance really easily, like what impact is each individual piece of content making at each stage of the buyer journey, and what's the overall impact that we're having on the bottom line, whether it's MQLs, SQLs, and quotes on revenue, most importantly, but also the like leading metrics that go into this.
• 44:56
  So that instead of reporting on traditional vanity metrics, we can go and we can report on overall revenue impact, but also how...
• 45:05
  like what impact is the number of content engagements within the sales process or between specific points in the sales process having on deal velocity, ACV, close rates, the leading revenue metrics rather than the content metrics, and helping to contextualize your performance within what people higher up and the reps that you wanna build closer relationship with actually care about.
• 45:27
  Buyer journey insights so that we can leverage all of that to understand, okay, what's performing then at each stage, and how can that inform the way that we distribute content at each stage?
• 45:35
  I'll skip through one actually, and a good example of that is what we're building on the mark- sales and marketing alignment front, where we're actually looking for design partners at the moment, if anyone is interested in that, where we're building this really cool add-on that takes all of that buyer journey insight and puts it in line for our reps so that with a single click, they can bring the right piece of content into any email.
• 45:53
  It understands the context of that email because it's a Gmail add-on. We will do other kind of platforms as well, but it also is overlaid with all of our performance data.
• 46:01
  So it knows, here's a CMO ask in technical stage asking a question about this.
• 46:05
  We can filter through our directory to say, "Okay, this is the piece of content that best answers that question," and we also know it performs for a CMO in technical stage.
• 46:13
  So kind of putting intelligent content reps and making it easier for them to add value with content than to not, because it's literally one click.
• 46:20
  It's kind of solving the white pa- the blank page problem for sales reps as well.
• 46:24
  And then the last element is content experience, so that's where like building different gating experiences code-free, super easily deploying them live from our platform so that you have a different experience on every page depending on where you are within the buyer journey.
• 46:37
  Really cool. I dropped a link to Demand Genius in the chat. Would encourage people to go check it out.
• 46:42
  You can also get a discount as a Superpath subscriber or member, which we'll include all that info in the follow-up stuff that we send out. And then Tom, I'm gonna put a link to your LinkedIn in the chat as well.
• 46:51
  You've been posting a lot of really good stuff related to this, so we'll put that in there as well. And then do you wanna talk about content audits real quick before we dive into questions? Yeah, let's do that.
• 47:01
  I'll skip through. So yeah, this is something that we've built recently as well. Actually, initially... I've fast come through. Thanks, Bree [laughs]. Kind of building...
• 47:11
  B- basically we've built an AI tool that automatically creates content audits for you. So it'll scrape every page on your site. It'll build a complete directory of that.
• 47:21
  That's something that you have, you can engage via our kind of AI interface with that and ask questions of it, uncover where the gaps are, things like that.
• 47:29
  Also share it with frontline teams so that they have a complete directory and they can ask questions of it, "What should I follow up for this purpose?"
• 47:35
  But interestingly, it also pulls out loads of cool insights in terms of your... to give you like an objective perspective on your content strategy. So what audience are you appealing to?
• 47:44
  W- what kind of funnel stages have you got on there, and which, and where are the gaps? So that's something that we're doing at the moment just for free for people.
• 47:51
  We're gonna build it into the product, so we have a wait list to get that once it's productized, but if you scan this, then we'll make sure you're the first to know, and we will do it for you for free. Cool.
• 48:00
  Yeah, Tom did one for me. It was very cool. Really interesting, so encourage people to do that. Again, we'll send all this up in the follow-up email too. And then we have a couple minutes left.
• 48:08
  Are you good to answer a couple questions, Tom? Yeah, yeah. Sure. Okay, so we have kind of a clarifying question, and a few people... this seemed to resonate with a few people, related to long sales cycles.
• 48:18
  With long sales cycles and multiple content pieces involved, how are you deciding what content gets attribution credit, and how does that help your model or strategy going forward? Yeah, good question.
• 48:29
  I think there's two points to make.
• 48:30
  One, so I mean, that varies company to company, so th- like from a platform perspective, it's set within the platform of what do we want to consider a kind of content influenced deal and things like that.
• 48:40
  And there's a distinction I always make between like pragmat- when it comes to attribution, pragmatic attribution and kind of political attribution almost, which is seeking to work out which is best versus seeking to work out what's working and when it's working and in what circumstances.
• 48:54
  So I am of the quite controversial opinion for someone with an attribution product that attribution is kind of bullshit in the sense that it... So I don't know if I'm gonna swear, but I've made it fifty-eight minutes.
• 49:04
  In the sense that I think it encourages very bad behaviors internally, right? It encourages a lot of internal finger pointing. What we always focus onIs making sure that any attribution is two things.
• 49:16
  One is like actionable, so it's not just how much revenue you'll be driving from this.
• 49:21
  It's like understanding the specific inflection points where that content is effective and being able to feed that into decisions that we make in terms of distribution. But the other one is contextualized.
• 49:32
  It's set within the platform, but I think the benefit of good attribution and of being able to quantify this stuff is not necessarily in being able to compare one to the other at the aggregate level.
• 49:43
  That's just something that needs to be done to demonstrate our impact. Where the value comes in is looking at it and like understanding the specific inflection points where it adds value.
• 49:52
  I think I'm kind of talking around the question a bit here, but does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, that's like an age-old evergreen
• 50:00
  problem, which now thankfully we have some better tooling around to help us get more clear answers around. Yeah. I guess the better way to put it is we're not trying to reach perfection.
• 50:08
  So like from a platform point of view, we let you decide what you think the best way to do it is. But my take would be every single way is going to be flawed, so- Yeah. Yeah...
• 50:18
  but not-- making sure that we're not blindly following whatever we do go with as well, and we're playing around with it and contextualizing it. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.
• 50:26
  Actually, we have a course on content reporting for Superpath Pro members, and we kick that off by saying that reporting only matters if everybody agrees that these numbers are good enough.
• 50:36
  You know, because if y- you can go so deep into the weeds and at some point it doesn't... it stops mattering- Yeah... if the people in the room don't agree on what they are and what they mean.
• 50:45
  We do have people saying, some folks, they are-- they're starting to head off to the rest of their day.
• 50:49
  I guess one I'll queue up for you, Tom, is would you say that all content needs to be considered sales enablement content? That's interesting.
• 50:56
  It's kind of a content strategy question, and I would say it probably could be. I don't know. I'm curious what you think. Yeah, I would say so.
• 51:02
  I think the distinction between those two things definitely should be a lot less. So I think having that mindset for each of these pieces of content, right?
• 51:10
  If a piece of content isn't something that when a particular topic comes up, a sales rep would happily distribute to that prospect, that's a huge red flag for the piece of content, right? So I think that's a very valid.
• 51:19
  There is still probably a distinction, and I would say not all... You could probably say it the other way and it wouldn't be correct, right?
• 51:26
  Not all sales enablement content is marketing content, but all marketing content is sales enablement content. Hmm. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, I think this may be the right point to wrap up.
• 51:35
  Folks are saying goodbye in the live chat, and I think probably folks are going on to have lunch or next call or just get on with whatever else is next in their day. So thank you so much, everybody, for coming.
• 51:44
  We will send out an email with a recording of the slides. I'll grab all the links from the live chat. We'll have a discount on Demand Genius. Tom, I'll put your LinkedIn in there as well so people can follow you.
• 51:53
  We'll have the link to get in the waiting list for a free content audit. And Tom, thank you. Thank you for supporting Superpath.
• 52:00
  Thank you for building a tool that's gonna make all of our lives easier, and thank you for being here today to share all of it with us. No, thank you for having me. It's been fun. Awesome. Thanks so much, everybody.
• 52:09
  Take care, and we'll see you next time. [outro music]