Latest / Content, Briefly / Inscribe: How Brianna Valleskey ensures total sales/marketing alignment

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Inscribe: How Brianna Valleskey ensures total sales/marketing alignment · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] I've just seen over many, many years of experience that the more cohesive I can make the story throughout the entire sales funnel, the more success we're gonna see, not only just in terms of pipeline generation, but also, you know, win rates and, and closed-won revenue.
• 0:18
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm chatting with Brianna Valeski.
• 0:26
  She runs marketing for a company called Inscribe, who makes a SaaS product that helps banks and lenders detect fraud in their applications.
• 0:35
  Really interesting product, and she has a very unique challenge in the sense that these are very long sales cycles, very technical customers, and deals are being made on golf courses and over nice dinners.
• 0:47
  So where does content fit into that? And how does she stay aligned with the sales team? We get into all that. I think you'll really enjoy this one.
• 0:53
  Really different from many of the episodes we've done recently in the sense that it's kind of enterprise, a very strong focus on sales enablement, but she's still investing heavily in SEO, and we talk about how she does that and why as well.
• 1:05
  Hope you enjoy this episode with Brianna Valeski. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group. It's now 20 bucks a month. You can also get an annual discount.
• 1:16
  Your employer should probably cover it for you since it definitely counts as professional development. And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting.
• 1:22
  There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development. Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever.
• 1:32
  I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. [gentle music] Hey, everybody.
• 1:42
  Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode, talking to someone I've actually never met before, Brianna Valeski from Inscribe. Really excited to have you here.
• 1:51
  And actually, when we started talking about, "Hey, let's get you on the podcast. Let's get it scheduled," you were the head of content at Inscribe.
• 1:57
  Since then, which was not very long ago, you're now the head of marketing, so maybe that's a good place to start.
• 2:01
  Could you just introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us about your role and maybe this recent transition from content into broader marketing? Yeah. Thanks, Jimmy. Very excited to be here.
• 2:09
  Yes, I'm the head of marketing at Inscribe right now.
• 2:12
  I was recently promoted into the position about a couple of months ago, so my role at Inscribe just started with the scope of being the head of content, which the way I approach content is the strategic motion of using all of our demand channels as a cohesive storytelling arm of the organization.
• 2:30
  So depending on what the other skillsets are across any marketing team I'm on, I can generally flex into more brand awareness, I can flex into more demand generation, I can flex more into product marketing because content fuels all of those different [laughs] facets of a marketing and go-to-market organization, which really actually has allowed me to acquire like a very adaptable skillset as a marketer where I do have exposure and experience in demand gen.
• 2:53
  I do have exposure and experience in product marketing and brand awareness and brand building.
• 2:57
  And that's really what gave me the foundation to be able to move beyond just my role in content and actually be able to lead a holistic marketing team that does cover all of those areas and more. I love that.
• 3:08
  You know, it's interesting, I've been looking for podcast guests that are just sort of outside my kind of immediate network. Mm-hmm.
• 3:14
  And so I went on LinkedIn and searched for head of content and found a bunch of people, scoped out their LinkedIn profiles to see like, you know, I want like a variety of different types of experience and backgrounds and things like that.
• 3:25
  And I thought yours was really interesting because- Mm... you got your start in journalism. Mm-hmm. You worked at the Associated Press for a few years. You led content at some companies.
• 3:33
  You led corporate marketing, then led content, now broader marketing. I'm sort of curious from your perspective like what ties all those things together, you know?
• 3:40
  'Cause I feel like you actually have a quite a unique perspective on content and marketing given that you have a background in journalism and have gone back and forth between leading content teams and larger marketing teams.
• 3:50
  Yeah. I mean, gosh, the art of content is really both the art of language, storytelling, and connection. To your point, I did come from a background in journalism.
• 4:00
  I've been a writer my entire life and a storyteller my entire life, and so I really leaned into that skillset when I first entered my career in journalism and then got poached by a couple of tech companies into content marketing and found the skillset to be incredibly transferable.
• 4:16
  I mean, it really is all about understanding your audience and creating a connection between how you can help them with your product and what their needs are, not just overall, but also the needs of the day.
• 4:28
  Like, what are they thinking about right now, this week, this quarter as it relates to what's happening in the world, what's happening in their organization?
• 4:36
  And that's so similar to being like a beat reporter in any type of news organization. You're just deeply embedded with your audience.
• 4:42
  You understand their needs on a general basis, but you also understand their needs on like a specific basis and you can speak to them using their language.
• 4:50
  And because you're able to do that, that really builds trust with them.
• 4:54
  So what's really cool about content is that motion of language, of content creation, of storytelling can be applied across so many different types of marketing and honestly types of sales and even customer success.
• 5:07
  Like, it really is such an important function of going to market and generating revenue. But at the end of the day for me it comes down to language connection and storytelling. That's cool. I love that.
• 5:19
  What a beautiful like through line through your career. Mm-hmm. And I, I do wonder if like the companies that you've worked for embrace that, and maybe we can get into that actually.
• 5:27
  Could you talk a little bit about Inscribe? Who/what is Inscribe? What does the product do and who does it serve? Yeah. Absolutely. So Inscribe was founded around 2017.
• 5:36
  We are a document fraud detection solution for banks and lenders.
• 5:41
  So anytime you, Jimmy, as a consumer, when you apply for a bank account or a credit card or a loan and you have to submit paperwork, bank statements or tax forms to show you are who you say you are and that you do qualify for a financial product like a specific loan amount or type of line of credit, um, Inscribe checks those documents for signs of tampering or manipulation.
• 6:05
  So if you've edited your bank balance using Photoshop or purchased a fake bank statement on the internet and just slapped your name on top of it, we use AI and machine learning to detect that in seconds and then also help all of these banks and lenders and financial services companies prevent-Fraud losses.
• 6:21
  Since we've launched too, we've also sort of expanded to a more holistic risk intelligence solution that not only detects fraud, but also credit risks based on applicant data that's submitted. That's really interesting.
• 6:33
  So the end user and the buyer is a bank. I can imagine ways that content fits in, but maybe before we talk specifically about content strategy, what is the go-to-market motion like?
• 6:44
  Like, is it what I imagine, kind of like an enterprise thing, where like if you wanna sign Bank of America or something, it takes six or 12 months, and the sales folks flying out to the office and meeting with them.
• 6:55
  Is it that complicated or is there a simpler version of that? You know, it's, it is [laughs] pretty much that complicated.
• 7:00
  We do have like a, a large and very robust go-to-market motion in that we use ABM, we have enterprise account targeting.
• 7:07
  We do a lot of personalization to reach out to multiple contacts within these accounts that we go after, because we do serve already some of the largest enterprise banks and lenders in the country, and so that also comprises a lot of the pipeline of the accounts that we're trying to continue to bring in to our revenue funnel.
• 7:23
  And there is a lot of personalization, not just in terms of adding someone's name to like a token on their email, but also really making sure that we're targeting their use case.
• 7:33
  We're using very relevant social proof to show other banks and lenders that are exactly like them using Inscribe and driving success.
• 7:39
  In addition to the flying out, the steak dinners, all the stuff that you would expect with an enterprise deal, we have a pretty detailed proof of concept process where someone will give us a bunch of their documents, and they can see in real time the results that we deliver.
• 7:53
  And not only how much we're saving them in fraud losses, but also how much time we're able to save them, because a lot of companies right now are using very large, inefficient manual review teams where they're asking people to, like, stare at these documents and identify the fraud signals.
• 8:07
  And what's actually pretty cool about that too, is there's even a content element in terms of building out the sales process. Like, what is the pitch that we're delivering to people? What's the value story?
• 8:16
  How can we make sure that we have this cohesive story about what we're doing and why we matter and how we can help people all the way from the first time they ever see us on LinkedIn through the sales process to their experience as a customer with Inscribe?
• 8:28
  So we do also partner very closely with our sales leadership and our sales team to make sure that they have all the assets they need. They have very relevant pitch decks.
• 8:37
  They understand how to talk to each of these customers. We have, like, biweekly [laughs] trainings with the sales team.
• 8:43
  I'm so glad you brought that up, because I wanted to ask you about when I think of the way that content strategy plays out at different types of companies has an enormous effect on what kind of team they should build and what the roles on that- Mm-hmm...
• 8:53
  team should be.
• 8:53
  And so I'm imagining in Inscribe's case, top of funnel, while important, probably takes a backseat to sales enablement, and I'm just sort of curious how the content function differs relative to other companies you might have worked at.
• 9:07
  Do you work more closely with sales and customer success in this instance, whereas maybe another company you were more focused on, like, top-line traffic growth? Yeah. Gosh, what a great question.
• 9:18
  So yes, but I would say it's sort of for two reasons, one being just the nature of our business, the complexity of the problem we're trying to solve, the complexity of the technology we have to use it.
• 9:28
  We are using AI and machine learning. We have to make sure our reps understand how to talk about that, but also that they really deeply understand our prospects too, because they are very technical buyers.
• 9:39
  Trust is huge to them, so if our sales reps are not telling a story that resonates to our prospects, or if they're not speaking the language that our prospects are using, then we're gonna lose them.
• 9:49
  We're gonna lose them in the sale. But the other reason, too, is just sort of over the development of my career.
• 9:54
  You know, at the beginning of my career in content, it was always very top of funnel focused, very focused on SEO, very focused on social media, very focused on blogs and demand gen content, and we still do all of that at Inscribe.
• 10:06
  You know, we have a very robust demand gen machine.
• 10:09
  But I've just seen over many, many years of experience that the more cohesive I can make the story throughout the entire sales funnel, the more success we're gonna see, not only just in terms of pipeline generation, but also, you know, win rates and, and close one revenue.
• 10:24
  That's fantastic. I love that. I think you mentioned that there is a biweekly training between marketing- Mm-hmm... and sales.
• 10:30
  That means marketing is training sales on using the assets that you create for them or vice versa?
• 10:35
  And I guess assuming it's the former, is there a reverse of that where sales trains marketing on what they're hearing from potential customers? Yeah.
• 10:43
  So with the, with the biweekly trainings, those are just for trainings for the sales team. It's not always coming from marketing.
• 10:49
  Sometimes it'll come from our sales leadership, sometimes it'll come from different parts of the organization, but- I see...
• 10:54
  it is sort of this predetermined time slot that when we do have something we wanna go train the sales team on, it's available and it's there.
• 11:01
  We have separate forums and separate meetings where then we kind of complete the feedback loop, where they come back to us and give us feedback on how is this story resonating, how is this pitch resonating with prospects, where are the bottlenecks you're running into?
• 11:14
  What other types of enablement do you think you need right now? Or just like, what are the challenges that you're hoping we can help solve for you? Got it. That makes sense.
• 11:22
  Do you find there's any tools in your tech stack that enable some of that? I'm imagining things like Gong to- I was just about to say, I use Gong every single day. Every single day.
• 11:33
  I mean, gosh, five years ago, Gong was still probably my favorite tool when you would just have to listen to the whole recording yourself.
• 11:40
  But nowadays, when there's, like, so many different types of alerts, I can have Gong, like, tell me where different questions appeared in the conversation and give you a quick summary.
• 11:49
  I'm in there all the time, because as a storyteller, as someone who's using the tool of language to create a connection and connect a prospect with a product that's really gonna help solve problems for them, I need to be, like, on the ground and in the front lines to understand what's working and what's not working.
• 12:06
  That's awesome. I find that sales-marketing alignment is one of those things that for most companies is this, like, low-hanging fruit missed opportunity.
• 12:15
  And for an organization like Inscribe, you're essentially forced to have marketing and sales on the same page, otherwise it's not gonna work, because, like, you know, if you go off and drive half a million page views that don't turn into new deals, then what's the point of that?
• 12:28
  That actually happens all the time, though, at, you know, maybe like a more PLG type company or maybe a company that has, like, a freemium product or a free trial where, like, they're just trying to pump tons and tons of volume into the system and hope that one and a half percent of those folks convert.
• 12:42
  So I think that's really interesting, and I would imagine probably informs-A lot of the work that you do, and probably informs your team too, which is another thing I wanted to ask you about. Mm.
• 12:51
  What does the marketing team look like at Inscribe? Like, could you just give us, like, a quick overview of some of the roles on your team?
• 12:56
  And really, I'm sort of curious, like, on a day-to-day basis, like, what are the individuals working on? Yeah, sure. So we're a Series B startup, so we're still pretty small with a, a lean, mean marketing team.
• 13:06
  It comprises myself. As I mentioned, I was the head of content, but I was recently promoted to head of marketing, so I'm sort of dual wielding the roles of content leader and marketing leader right now.
• 13:16
  But I'm very fortunate in that the rest of our team is made up of absolute rock stars. I'm not exaggerating at all. They're really fantastic people. We have someone in the product market- marketing role.
• 13:26
  We have someone in the demand generation role. We have someone in marketing ops, and then of course we have a brand design person.
• 13:32
  So really, we have the primary pillars of what we need to be successful as a marketing team. We do scale by using freelancers, by using technology, external vendors and contractors.
• 13:45
  First and foremost, I always work with an SEO team to make sure that I'm creating content that drives organic traffic to the website.
• 13:51
  Anytime I get into a marketing team, that's, like, the first thing I always do, 'cause SEO just, like, is compounding gains over time. And then I also have content freelancers I work with.
• 14:02
  Tends to be the same people that I've built good relationships with over my career and worked with across multiple jobs.
• 14:07
  But then also, I have been recently using a lot more generative AI tools to scale our content creation efforts. Yeah, that piques my interest. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.
• 14:17
  So I would say that as it relates to AI content generation, I have been excited, I have been skeptical, I have been anxious about it. I've been all of those, and I used to be much more skeptical.
• 14:30
  Perhaps you could argue that I was fundamentally against using AI for content creation because at least with a lot of the tools I had used before, the copywriting is, like, okay at best. It tends to lack depth.
• 14:43
  It lacks effective use of rhetorical devices like metaphor and writing techniques like sentence fluency.
• 14:48
  And honestly, I was scared of AI taking my job, which I think is a very real fear that a lot of people have, but- Yeah, for sure...
• 14:54
  I eventually came to a place where I realized my fear was not gonna stop the industry from moving in this direction.
• 15:01
  And if I didn't get on board, then I might be left behind, and you know, I work for an AI company, so it really only made sense for me to start embracing the changes in technology and, and unlocking the potential of artificial intelligence for copywriting.
• 15:15
  And now I use it all the time.
• 15:17
  I'll use tools like ChatGPT, Writer, Jasper AI to do a lot of, like, promotional copy, you know, giving it a prompt of like, "Write an email or social post about this blog post or case study."
• 15:28
  I'll also use it to write thought leadership blog posts, but not start to finish. What I tend to do is give the AI tool prompts like, "How will this legislation affect this industry?"
• 15:40
  Or, "How can companies in this industry adapt to increasing fraud rates?"
• 15:44
  And then I sort of pick and choose different content sections that are helpful, and I adapt them into, like, a longer piece that really starts and ends with the positioning around Inscribe, my company, and the value we provide as it relates to these topics.
• 15:58
  I've even used AI tools to write Jeopardy questions for an in-person experience. Oh, cool. That's interesting. Yeah.
• 16:04
  I kinda treat the AI tool as similar to a freelancer, where I will spend a decent amount of time editing it in order to add what's missing contextually, but also add what's missing from a writing quality standpoint, especially in terms of rhetoric and sentence fluency.
• 16:19
  So I've found it to be a pretty amazing tool for operating what I would consider a full-fledged content strategy with fairly limited resources. Yeah, that's really cool.
• 16:28
  I'm the officiant at a wedding two weeks from now, and I- Oh. [laughs]... [laughs] need to write a wedding ceremony.
• 16:34
  [laughs] And sure, I could sit there and stare at a blank Google Doc and write it from scratch, and it would be very time-consuming and a little bit painful, but I asked ChatGPT to do it for me, and it gave me a wedding ceremony that looks and feels like exactly what I need, but it's not personalized at all.
• 16:47
  Yeah. So now I just go through and I personalize it, and I sort of add a story here, a nice, you know, little anecdote over here, and, like, from a content perspective, you can kinda do the same thing. Exactly.
• 16:57
  Getting from blank page to finished article is really difficult. Yes.
• 17:01
  So if AI can help you get 25% of the way there, and oftentimes it can get you much further than that, that's awesome, particularly when you're working with limited resources, which is something you touched on that I also wanted to follow up with you on.
• 17:13
  When the rubber hits the road, every content team can only publish a certain amount of content, whether they have a small budget or massive budget.
• 17:19
  Like, at some point, there's a cap on just how much stuff they can get out the door.
• 17:23
  So as you and your team sit down and make a content calendar, I'm very curious how you think about prioritizing the different parts of marketing. So, you know, let's say you can publish X articles per month.
• 17:35
  What percentage of that goes towards sales enablement versus SEO versus thought leadership, you know, versus other things that you're probably juggling as well? Yeah.
• 17:44
  So I guess the way I think about this is, like, when the rubber hits the road, usually that indicates a time when driving pipeline and revenue is needed more than ever as a marketer.
• 17:54
  And so that's when I'm gonna get hyper-focused on pipeline generation and what content do we need to generate pipeline, and are there small wins that we can use to also enable the sales team?
• 18:06
  It's more of, like, an 80/20 rule, where we're always thinking about the majority of our focus is in this area, and then we're gonna give a little bit of focus is to these other areas.
• 18:14
  But when it comes to making a decision over pipeline content or not pipeline content, we're probably gonna default to pipeline content. But with that being said, I am a bigBig believer in recycling your content.
• 18:26
  So really our content strategy is to use, I guess, what I'd call cornerstone pieces of content or big content, like a webinar or a big e-book or an annual report, and then we remix it, we reuse it, we recycle it into multiple different channels and media types.
• 18:43
  So one report for us has become multiple blog posts, a couple of webinars, and same thing with different webinars. We'll do kind of like webinar recaps where we almost like a news article about the webinar.
• 18:54
  We'll pull out the main takeaways. We'll have actual quotes from our webinar guests.
• 18:59
  And not only is it a really efficient way for us to scale our content, but it also really helps ensure we're getting our message across to our audience, because we know that not every prospect or customer is gonna see or engage with every piece of content.
• 19:12
  But if we put the same pain points, the same value props, the same buying triggers, the same best practices, customer stories, you name it, out into the world, either multiple times or across multiple channels or both, it's not only increasing the chance of your audience seeing it, but it increases their chances of converting because we all know that the principle of mere exposure effect, you know, the more person someone sees something, the more they're gonna have affinity for it.
• 19:36
  Um, and then of course, nowadays it takes like what, thirteen marketing touchpoints to convert a lead.
• 19:41
  So the need for a lot of content across a lot of channels has never been greater, but there's a lot of ways to scale that without starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel every time you're trying to create a new piece of content.
• 19:54
  Yes. I feel like AI is potentially a great way to enable some of that work too. Exactly. Like there are tools like Writer have things built into it, the sort of automated repurposing stuff.
• 20:04
  Actually, we talked to a woman named Jess Cook recently on the podcast who talked about a data point she came up with to track how much additional awareness her content got by being repurposed, and she called it her repurposing multiplier.
• 20:16
  And it's actually pretty interesting.
• 20:17
  She was able to basically separate out page views on what she would call like an atomic unit of content versus derivative versions of that content that end up in many different places.
• 20:27
  And she found that she could reach about twelve times the number of people- Oh my gosh... through the repurposed content- I love it... versus just the original piece, which I was like, sweet, that's awesome.
• 20:36
  I've never seen a data point tied to that. And I thought that was a really interesting way to... You basically have to make the case that it's worth operationalizing this because- Yes...
• 20:43
  everybody says, "Oh, we should repurpose this," but there's always a demand for net new content.
• 20:47
  And so a lot of teams I think fight this balance of like, wow, we really should try to get more out of what we've already done, but there's this need for more SEO content, sales team needs stuff or whatever.
• 20:56
  Like, there's demand from across the organization. So I believe that having that data point actually can really help a content team hone in on that and take the time needed to do it well. I could not agree more.
• 21:05
  And another way that we really try to scale in terms of the content itself is we put a lot of effort into capturing institutional knowledge.
• 21:14
  So we have probably what's now at this point like a sixty or seventy-page messaging guide.
• 21:20
  This is not something that we expect people to memorize, but when they do wanna reference something, like we try to create a lot of self-serve options for our go-to-market teams, so they don't always need a one-pager for us to like solve something or, or help them with something.
• 21:34
  All of our messaging we've captured in a very robust document that not only has a table of contents, but you can go in there and Control + F and find anything.
• 21:42
  It's messaging by use case, it's messaging by product, messaging by industry. So we really try to not only train the sales team, but give them resources that allow them to help themselves.
• 21:52
  That's the type of documentation that just brings a smile to my face.
• 21:57
  [laughs] It's just I love when teams take, especially institutional knowledge, where like most companies have so much subject matter expertise on their team, any way that you unlock that and make it accessible to people, one, it sort of gives everyone the same accessibility so that everyone can get access to it, but it also makes the messaging from whoever's sending it, whether it's sales, product marketing, content, makes it so much more consistent, which kinda gets back to your, what you were mentioning earlier about storytelling, which is like you need the same narrative across all the customer experiences, and that's not gonna happen without that documentation.
• 22:27
  Yeah, exactly. And there, there's just so much you can do to enable teams to, no pun intended, but be on the same page- Yeah, yeah... about how we talk to prospects and customers.
• 22:37
  And really, something is better than nothing.
• 22:39
  So I, in my past, and I've seen a lot of other teams just get caught up in perfection, but you can provide them with some sort of resources, some sort of materials, that's gonna get you closer to creating this cohesive narrative than trying to like over-index on having the perfect narrative or delivering it perfectly.
• 22:54
  One thing we like to ask everybody about is how you communicate with your team. So you mentioned you have product marketer, demand gen, marketing ops, and brand design.
• 23:03
  That's really interesting to me because that's a very well-rounded team, and each of those people bring in very different skills. Their day-to-day is probably gonna look quite different.
• 23:11
  How do you sort of keep everybody on the same page? Is it a lot of asynchronous documentation? Do you meet on a weekly or monthly basis?
• 23:17
  If you do, is there like a certain agenda that you rely on to keep everybody together?
• 23:21
  Yeah, a combination of all of those things, but I think it, it really starts almost at the principle or philosophical level that we really believe in integrated marketing.
• 23:31
  We're big, big believers that as close as we can stay in lockstep with everything that we're doing, the better and more effective our programs are gonna be and the more ROI and results we're gonna see.
• 23:41
  So we do have regular team syncs, like a weekly team sync once a week for an hour.
• 23:46
  We have like a very specific structure, a shared agenda doc that everyone has access to, but ultimately, as the team leader, I'm responsible for the agenda.
• 23:54
  So if no one else puts stuff on there, then I'll add agenda items too. But our team is very proactive and self-serving, so they'll also bring their important topics to the sync.
• 24:03
  In every meeting too, we try to cover a mix of high-level strategic stuff, but also on-the-ground tactical stuff.Every week we go through highlights, lowlights.
• 24:13
  We look at our metrics, so we look at where are we pacing to our meetings goals and our opportunities goals for the quarter, and that's where we'll spend the most time.
• 24:20
  If we're pacing really far behind, what do we need to adjust? What can we look at? What's not working the way we didn't think it was working?
• 24:27
  Then we'll look at big projects, which is also how we rally the team around sort of the same initiatives.
• 24:32
  We also have OKRs and stuff too that roll all the way up to the company level, but specifically on the marketing team, every quarter we go into it with like a very clear program plan, but also the other big priority projects that we as a team are focused on, and at least two to three-fifths of our team are involved in every project we're working on.
• 24:51
  So that enables us to stay pretty aligned. But there is a lot of async stuff where we will just have like an FYI section of our agenda document where we can link to decks or presentations.
• 25:02
  Here's the most recent sales training we did. Here's an update on the website revamp, and you can preview the design here.
• 25:10
  And then we tend to include like a fun or funny team-building question at the end of every meeting just to build camaraderie because we know that the more that the team trusts each other, the more they will be able to like autonomously and asynchronously like work together and stay aligned, and less oversight that I need to have as a manager in terms of orchestrating the way our marketing motion works together.
• 25:30
  We also do have, like I have one-on-ones with each of our team members just to stay aligned on all their projects, remove any bottlenecks for them, kinda make sure that they have what they need to go succeed.
• 25:40
  And then most of them tend to have one-on-ones with each other autonomously as well. So- Oh, cool. Yeah. And that's super encouraged.
• 25:47
  And then we will have like one-off meetings as it relates to projects too, and then we do have a regular like production meeting where we go through what's in production for copywriting, for design, for web development.
• 25:58
  But I do think it all really starts with this underlying belief and value of I know that if I partner really closely with the rest of my team, we're gonna be hugely successful. I love that.
• 26:08
  You know, I'm assuming your team is remote because I assume every team is remote. Yeah. Okay. Are there any tools that you all use for communication? You know, whether it's like project management or real time.
• 26:17
  I mean, everyone uses Slack probably, but I'm always curious if there's anything that teams have uncovered that's like a little outside the box that they find to kind of make the asynchronous stuff a little easier to deal with.
• 26:26
  Because I find, at least for myself, that like async is great to a certain point, and then it's tiresome, I think. Yeah. Oh gosh. I always just wanna get on a call and talk about it. [laughs] Yeah.
• 26:37
  But I, I can operate asynchronously. You know, honestly, I've, I've also searched for like a silver bullet. Haven't really found one.
• 26:43
  We use Asana to manage big projects, major trade shows, sponsorships that we're doing, or like extremely cross-collaborative projects like product launches. We use Slack for day-to-day communication.
• 26:55
  We use Figma for our design, which is really cool because Figma does allow you to be like quite collaborative. And then we mainly use Google Docs for content creation, but we use a lot of Notion too.
• 27:06
  Notion is really big for us as a company.
• 27:09
  I was not a huge Notion user until I joined Inscribe, but in the same way that I wanna speak the language of my external audience, I always wanna speak the language of my internal audience.
• 27:18
  We do spend a lot of time on internal marketing at Inscribe. It's a lever that I always find very worthwhile in terms of maximizing the results of our programs.
• 27:27
  Notion's great, where it's a little bit more collaborative than Google Docs, and the search functionality and the organization of Notion Docs is a little bit better. But sadly, I, I have no silver bullets for you today.
• 27:38
  That's cool. It makes me feel better, actually. [laughs] Yeah. [laughs] You had mentioned as you were talking about your meeting cadence that you touch on key metrics on a weekly basis. Mm-hmm.
• 27:47
  I'd love to just zoom in on that for a minute because I'm always curious, like what data points do you care about?
• 27:52
  But there's also another step to that, which is how much do those data points actually inform the work that you do? Mm.
• 27:57
  And I, just in observing content teams and being part of several myself, I find that what gets measured gets managed is sort of the simple way to say it.
• 28:04
  But like if a data point is talked about on a, say, a weekly, if not even a more frequent basis, then the team can talk about, okay, are we on track? And if so, how are we gonna stay on track?
• 28:14
  If not, what are we gonna do to get back on track? And that conversation then informs the work that each individual does on a day-to-day basis.
• 28:21
  And so I'm curious for Inscribe, are you able to share a couple of data points that you care about and track regularly, and then how much do those data points trickle down into the ways that your team, when they get to work in the morning, actually spend their time?
• 28:34
  Yeah, definitely. Happy to chat about that. I know metrics are just so important in terms of determining priority and then understanding what's working and what's not working.
• 28:42
  Marketing is, in my opinion, a much more scientific motion than most people anticipate if you're not inside of marketing. So we are a small marketing team.
• 28:51
  We start at the highest level in terms of what metrics are we responsible to the company for. And for us, that's marketing generated pipeline, mainly completed first calls with our sales reps. Oh, I like that.
• 29:02
  Very specific. Yeah. [laughs] C-completed first calls with our sales reps, and then also actual sales opportunities generated.
• 29:10
  So when we're looking at that data, that's really where our prioritization starts in terms of our planning and then tracking throughout the quarter.
• 29:17
  We do also have different goals across different industry segments and verticals, but those are really our key results and lagging indicators.
• 29:25
  We are always looking at leading indicators as well, especially when our lagging indicators aren't showing us what we were anticipating from them.
• 29:32
  So if pipeline is not tracking to what we're looking for as a team, that's when we start to double-click and dig deeper.
• 29:38
  Okay, so which programs didn't perform the way we thought we were gonna perform, or which email nurturers have dropped off in terms of performance? Okay, let's double-click.
• 29:47
  Which email are they dropping off at, or which emails have the best performance, and can we remove the ones that aren't getting a lot of engagement?
• 29:54
  So I have seen some marketing teams where like they're reporting on email opens and clicks all the way up to the executive level, and I think that's a little bit too in the weeds for someone at the executive level to look at because at the end of the day, what really matters is are we driving the revenue funnel?
• 30:10
  And for us, that's pipeline.
• 30:12
  Everything else is sort of a leading indicator and a contributor to that and can be informative and insightful to help give us an indication of where we should focus our attention and effort, especially if we're looking at the overall revenue funnel.
• 30:25
  What are our conversion rates telling us? Where are things dropping out of the funnel? Where are conversion rates lower than they should be in terms of industry standards or in terms of our historical data?
• 30:35
  So aside from just the key metrics that we are responsible to the company for, I look at every other metric as sort of an insight and information.
• 30:43
  We don't try to benchmark ourselves against too many metrics because losing focus is one of the biggest [laughs] destructive forces, I suppose, [laughs] for a, a small marketing team. Definitely.
• 30:54
  And so that's really the goal. And we are still looking at those leading indicators though, like ad impressions. Organic web traffic is a huge one that we're always looking at.
• 31:04
  Email engagement, more top of funnel metrics, leads, MQLs, MQL sources, MQL first touch, MQL last touch, to understand what's working and not working so we can make sure we are pulling the right levers-To hit our top line goals.
• 31:18
  I'm so interested and excited that you said, "Did marketing help book a sales call? And did the call happen?" Like, that's such an awesome way to decide, did we do our job? You know, [laughs] did we do it well? Yeah.
• 31:28
  And I'm curious as a follow-up to that, is it easy or difficult to attribute that- Hmm. -to a certain type of marketing? Like, I do find that some teams go into kind of the data analysis rabbit hole. Yeah.
• 31:38
  And attribution is, at least from what I've found, there's no perfect way to do it.
• 31:42
  So it's like you have to get close enough, and then everyone has to say, like, "Okay, we understand how this number is calculated, and we feel comfortable enough with it."
• 31:50
  Is that how you all have set it up, or is there a simpler way where you can just say, "This person provided their email address as a result of this guide that we did, and that now that we can identify them, we can track them through to a sales call"?
• 32:01
  Yeah. I mean, we could spend all day arguing over is first touch attribution the way to go? Is last touch attribution the way to go? Is multi-touch attribution the way to go?
• 32:10
  I mean, the best path to success that I have found, and the path of least resistance is, like, just whatever we as a revenue organization can agree on.
• 32:18
  So right now at Inscribe, our marketing team and our sales team have agreed that if the last touch was a marketing campaign, then it's attributed to marketing.
• 32:26
  If the last touch was sales outbounding before it went to them getting into a meeting, then it's sales generated. So there is no perfect science.
• 32:34
  There is no magical metric that's ultimately gonna tell you who really gets credit for this. It's just at the end of the day, what you can get your revenue team to agree on.
• 32:44
  Yeah, that makes sense, and that feels like a simple enough way to do it.
• 32:46
  And then I would assume, like, whether it's marketing or sales, because you're working closely together behind the scenes, that even if sales gets credit for that particular call, that marketing supported them in getting there, and vice versa, right?
• 32:59
  Like, if you're listening to gong calls and that informs the marketing, and then marketing gets credit, then that feels fairly, um, holistic and seems like a very fair way to go about it. Yeah, exactly.
• 33:08
  It's like we do need to have attribution so we can have accountability, and we can understand the [laughs] CAC on our marketing spend, for example.
• 33:17
  But at the end of the day, I'm always of the opinion that marketing and sales misalignment does not need to be a thing.
• 33:23
  That's a narrative that's been created, and if you really buy into it, then you're gonna be more likely to have misalignment. But I'm just a big believer it's one revenue dream, one revenue team.
• 33:32
  I stay very closely aligned with my sales leader because he's-- that person is the most important counterpart for me in the entire organization.
• 33:40
  And so when there's a win, when there's a meeting, when there's a closed one deal, we all win. That's awesome.
• 33:45
  You know, speaking of metrics, there was one very specific thing I wanted to ask you about, which is on your LinkedIn profile, you talk about in your time leading content, that traffic increased forty-three hundred percent, which obviously caught my eye and I thought was probably worth unpacking a little bit.
• 33:58
  Could you kind of walk us through what needed to happen in order to get to that number? Yeah, definitely. So that was for blog traffic specifically.
• 34:06
  I mean, there's two levers to content, and it's creating the content, and it's distributing the content. So really that's the effort that we focused on.
• 34:13
  We gave ourselves a metric of, you know, we're gonna try and publish a blog twice a month. We're gonna make sure that every single blog ends up in a social post. Every single blog ends up in an email nurture.
• 34:23
  We're gonna write templated outreach sequences or sales emails basically, and templated social posts so that we make it very easy for other people to distribute the content.
• 34:32
  And that was really the biggest key there in terms of making sure we understood what our cadence was, was for creating it and understood our cadence for distributing it.
• 34:40
  But we also pull a l- couple of different levers where we feature a lot of our customers in our content or, like, our webinar panelists, and then that gives them an incentive to share the content.
• 34:49
  So ultimately, at the end of the day, driving traffic is just about getting the content out there more than creating the most content possible. Yeah. That's for, like, blog traffic, which I kind of treat differently.
• 34:59
  I treat it more as, like, a branded content type of motion.
• 35:03
  SEO is just one of the most important levers I think any marketing team can focus on, not just any content team, and that's something that right away, that was, like, one of the first things I started working on at Inscribe, and I wanna say we created somewhere around, like, fifty.
• 35:18
  SEO actually is different than brand content. I guess I'm gonna contradict myself here. Brand content, I would say, is much more about quality and distribution. SEO is definitely quantity. [laughs] So- Yeah. Yeah...
• 35:29
  we probably made something like fifty or sixty long form SEO articles last year, and we saw just an immense amount of growth in our organic keyword rankings, and it is by far the number one traffic driver to our website right now.
• 35:43
  Love it. That's awesome. I love when teams sort of identify that the volume is gonna be important there- Yeah... come up with a good process for it, and just do it. Just let it go. Yeah. You know what I mean?
• 35:52
  Because you can have it working in the background while you're doing other things, particularly if you feel very confident in your keyword research and whatever process you use to create briefs and the writers that maybe they're freelancers or other contractors that help you out there.
• 36:04
  Exactly. Amazing. Brianna, this has been awesome. One of my favorite things about doing a podcast is that you just get the chance to meet other content marketers, and we might not have been able to do this otherwise.
• 36:14
  We haven't crossed paths yet, and I'm so glad we did today. We will obviously link people to Inscribe 'cause I think it's always useful to, like, now the listener knows a lot about the strategy behind the content.
• 36:24
  They can go and see it for themselves, see what it actually looks like. So I would encourage people to do that.
• 36:29
  Is there anywhere else that we can send folks to connect with you, Twitter, LinkedIn, personal websites, or anywhere else? Yeah.
• 36:34
  If you want a taste of Inscribe content, I would definitely check out Inscribe on LinkedIn, 'cause it's a really good overview where you can sort of see the form factors and the distribution of our content.
• 36:43
  We're the Inscribe with the yellow profile picture. But also you can find me on LinkedIn at Brianna Valeski. I'm always happy to connect. I could talk about this stuff all day.
• 36:51
  So if anyone wants to come and, like, have a nerdy conversation about content or marketing, I'm a hundred percent game. I'm also on Twitter @bri_valeski, and then you can also check out my personal website.
• 37:02
  It's braveinc, inc like pen inc,.co. Awesome. We'll leave links in the show notes for folks so they can just easily go click those. Seriously, thank you so much for your time.
• 37:13
  I know you have lots going on, so not taking for granted that you spent an hour of it with us today doing this. So thanks so much, and I'm so glad we connected. I hope we can stay in touch. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Jimmy.
• 37:22
  It was my pleasure. [outro music]