Latest / Content, Briefly / Crossbeam: How Sean Blanda Built a 55,000-person Newsletter

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Crossbeam: How Sean Blanda Built a 55,000-person Newsletter · Content, Briefly

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  Hey, and welcome to Content Briefly, the Superpath podcast that explores how content teams operate.
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  We'll be talking to content leaders from the world's best SaaS brands to understand how they think about strategy, org structure, KPIs, reporting, meetings, tech stack, and more.
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  You can learn more and kick the tires over at writer.com. Okay, I'll get out of the way now. I hope you enjoy this episode. [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Welcome to the very first episode of Content Briefly.
• 1:41
  Today we're gonna unpack Crossbeam's content strategy, team execution, et cetera. We're gonna get into a lot of details.
• 1:49
  But, um, first, Sean, could you just introduce yourself for people who may not know you and your work? My name is Sean. I am the VP of content at Crossbeam. We're about a hundred ten-employee company I
• 2:00
  think we're at now with a office in Philadelphia where I sit right now, but we are a fully distributed, uh, B2B SaaS company. All right. Let's, let's get into this. So Crossbeam, partner platform for sales teams.
• 2:10
  That's... I'm oversimplifying it. Can you explain the company and the product? Uh, and also who is your customer? Who are you guys selling to?
• 2:16
  The easiest way to describe, uh, Crossbeam, we use the phrase kinda like data escrow. So I have a list, a CRM, some data you do too.
• 2:24
  Crossbeam will, uh, allow us to combine them and only share the information that we have in common and none of the information we don't have in common.
• 2:31
  People use us for procuring partner data to help their go-to-market motion. So that's I can sell direct or I can pull in a partner and sell.
• 2:38
  I can market direct or me and a partner can go in together and produce something. Just any of your GTM departments can benefit using partner data in Crossbeam in some way.
• 2:47
  So our main customer is usually someone with a title like VP or head of partnerships or RevOps and sales leaders also end up leading on Crossbeam.
• 2:56
  So this is-- I mean, to me it sounds like as bread and butter as B2B SaaS gets. Yes. Yes, like requires, uh, two businesses.
• 3:04
  Uh, and what's, what's cool about it is it's a true network effect business, which is if all your partners are already on Crossbeam, it's a no-brainer for you to join Crossbeam.
• 3:13
  So it's really fun to run the content org for because it becomes a de facto, I won't call it a community, but a network of people who understand what this is. Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool.
• 3:23
  How about the marketing function specifically? I'm curious about the content team. I'm also curious about marketing as a whole. But like what components are there? Like do you...
• 3:30
  Have you separated out content, demand gen, brand, et cetera? And then where does, where does content fit within that? Sure. So you can think of the marketing team. There's three, there's three teams within that.
• 3:39
  The team I lead, which is content and events and, uh, brand design, though not product design, but brand design is also on my team. And then product marketing is its own team, and then our growth team is a third team.
• 3:51
  And those are the three teams under marketing. So you've been at Crossbeam for three plus, coming up on- Yeah... four years, I think, right?
• 3:56
  What does your team look like now, and how has that evolved over the last couple of years? Team right now is seven, including myself. When we started, it was me. Uh, I was employee number fourteen.
• 4:05
  Yeah, and so the, so the thing about it is Crossbeam is a, is a new thing. Like it was a way of discovering partner data that didn't exist anymore.
• 4:13
  So the founders of the company, Buck Ryan and Bob Moore, knew they had to educate the market before they even sold it to the market, and content is one of the many ways in which we do that.
• 4:22
  So that's why bringing on the content hire a little bit earlier made sense for this company. So as a...
• 4:27
  When we started, it was a lot of me interviewing our customers or would-be customers and just figuring out what their pain points are and essentially writing career advice for them.
• 4:36
  And then using that to inform the sales process, but also educate the people reading us what is this thing that Crossbeam does. We call it, oh, it's a partner ecosystem platform. What is that? How can I use that?
• 4:47
  Who is using it? What are they doing with it? Once we got that kind of positioning at least on like somewhat solid ground, then we hired more writers. We hired a content marketing manager to help manage the campaign.
• 4:59
  We brought on our brand designer onto the team. He, he was working for Crossbeam, but then joined the team. A video producer and animator who does our video work, and an events producer, and that brings us to cell six.
• 5:09
  I wanna talk a little bit about some of those roles, but I also wanna ask you about how you and your team communicate. Is everybody remote? Are there more of you-- Are there more folks in Philly? What's your like...
• 5:19
  Do you have like a weekly cadence, meetings, stand-ups, one-on-ones or, you know, kind of whatever other formats that you all use to kind of stay on top of everything? Yeah.
• 5:27
  I, I'd be curious what people listening to this do. But the content team is kind of almost like three pods in of itself. So we have of events, right? Then we have the brand and design aspect. So I...
• 5:37
  The video, uh, Kyle and Nick, the designer, that's a group. And then the writers, which is, um, Olivia Ramirez and Zoe Kelly.
• 5:44
  And then Jess Rowe is our content ops specialist, who kinda is like the connective tissue that makes sure all the campaigns are run.
• 5:51
  Every Monday, I have one-on-ones with everybody, and then every other f- every individual, yeah.
• 5:56
  And then every other Friday, we do a content team meeting where we go over all the campaigns we're doing in Notion, check in on everyone's task.
• 6:03
  Some discussions that happen via Slack, we'll say, you know, like, "Save this. This, this should be happening fluidly and synchronously," um, at the content team meeting.
• 6:10
  And then every Thursday, once a week, we have what we call our writers workshop, which is led by, um, Olivia Ramirez, who-People bring drafts, they bring ideas, they bring thing, like headline suggestions, like whatever they're struggling with.
• 6:21
  It's a cr- it's a creative meeting. It's a pitch meeting. It's a chance to like read each other's work and level, level it. So, cool, uh. That sounds like a fun meeting.
• 6:28
  That's a, that's, yeah, that's one of the most fun ones. Um, and actually Olivia does a good job running it.
• 6:31
  We do a, we do a cool down at the end of every one where you talk about something you're proud of, something that happened to you last week, and something you're anxious about that you could use help on.
• 6:38
  So it's a very like friendly community, it's not community, creative, uh, meeting. It's one, one of my favorite ones to attend. Yeah, that's cool.
• 6:45
  You know, so many meetings, I feel like part of the reason folks hate Zoom these days is 'cause every meeting like has an agenda. You say your update, then you tune out while everybody else talks.
• 6:53
  But actually getting together as a team to work through problems in real time is really fun.
• 6:58
  I think a content team is a creative team, and a creative team works best when you trust each other, when you're loose, when you feel like if you don't have it that day, your team's gonna come help you out.
• 7:07
  And if you treat everything, yeah, like a, a meeting with an agenda or everything's a metric to hit, it can feel cold.
• 7:12
  And it, it already feels cold enough if you're remote, 'cause everyone's this flat Zoom screen talking to you. So we have to work extra hard to add that warmth.
• 7:18
  I think we all know when we meet in person with a creative team, it feels lively, it feels fluid, it feels good, it feels... It, it, it fills your cup up.
• 7:26
  Um, and you have to do that as much as possible remotely as you can, and sometimes you have to do gimmicks like the cool down. Seven people is a pretty big team. I'm curious who you report to.
• 7:35
  And then have you found yourself needing to advocate for that? I mean, it's, that- Mm-hmm...
• 7:40
  that content is an important part of the overall marketing strategy, and there's t- probably tons of opportunity to grow out the team, to do, to do more. Yeah. Uh, I report to the CMO. That's actually fairly new.
• 7:50
  We just hired our new CMO, Alex, who's awesome, um, a few weeks ago. Previous to that, I reported to the CEO and founder, uh, Bob Vorian.
• 7:58
  Previous to that, I reported to the CRO, uh, our former CRO, Jess Waldeck, who was also great. Um, so I've reported to three different C-suite executives in my time here.
• 8:06
  When it comes down to, like, how do I advocate for resources, I think it, it depends to solo and company stage, right?
• 8:12
  So we were in the early, like, startup stage, so we didn't, we didn't even have, like, product market fit to say nothing of like, is this content working? But my directive at that time was create the category, right?
• 8:24
  Create, help educate the market that we exist. And also the people who do the job of partnerships often have, in the past, had no tools for them, or few tools for them, and no kinda career advice or things made for them.
• 8:37
  They often felt lost, right? So our strategy early was actually really fun. It was try to help those people as much as possible and, like, they, we are still trying to help that audience as much as possible.
• 8:47
  But as we mature, just simply creating the calendar, uh, category, just simply brand awareness isn't enough, right?
• 8:53
  You have to grow that audience and also make sure that the people you are attracting are the people who can actually use it and pay for your product. And that's kind of the...
• 9:00
  We're kinda in like the, the teenage years or early 20s of the content program. Like, we've proved our worth, we've done some of the early stuff well.
• 9:07
  Now we need to scale with the company, we need to grow with the company, and the responsibility grows with that.
• 9:12
  To say nothing of the current market conditions where, you know, efficiency and revenue are king after growth was king, you know, for three years.
• 9:19
  I feel pretty good about, like, content team structure, you know, how you guys communicate, so maybe we shift here to more strategy stuff.
• 9:26
  This is very timely because you're about to, or by the time we release this, you'll have published an article, Six Mindset Shifts for Scaling a Content Team. We'll obviously link to that.
• 9:33
  It's a follow-up to a piece that you wrote a couple of years ago, maybe, maybe 18 months ago.
• 9:38
  Okay, so one of the things you called out in here, which I found to be super interesting, is that the content marketing industry is fairly mature, meaning that strategy is not necessarily the hurdle any longer, it's execution.
• 9:50
  Did you find that to be true at the beginning, or did you find that to be true as you scale, right?
• 9:54
  Like, I'm wondering if, um, those early years sort of forced creativity, whereas today, as you're more of like a scaling mindset, that there's only so many tactics out there, so really the job is just to do them as, as best you can.
• 10:07
  I think a lot of the talk about content marketing strategy and, like, new tools or new thing is, like, kind of dance around, like, you have to know who your audience is, and then you have to get them to want to pay attention to you and get them to find value in the things you put out.
• 10:21
  And it sounds really glib and, like, flippant, but, like, that simple idea is incredibly difficult. Incredibly difficult. And to me, like, that is a, that's execution, right?
• 10:29
  Like, it doesn't matter if you accomplish it via seven-second TikTok videos you put out every day or one 50,000-word opus once a quarter. Like, it really doesn't matter as long as that goal is accomplished.
• 10:40
  So that's what I mean, it's an execution game where the, the varying tactics that you choose to execute that could just, like, differ immensely.
• 10:48
  But you're not gonna discover some way of doing that, or it's gonna be rare to discover some way of doing that, that just hasn't been attempted yet. Yeah. There, there's not a lot of fertile ground.
• 10:56
  I think one of the reasons because of that is, like, the tools we use to, you know, quote unquote, "consume content" are the laptop, are the phone. SaaS as itself is, like, pretty mature.
• 11:06
  So unless someone invents, like, a brand-new hologram machine or, like, new platform... I mean, AI, like, people are, like, as bullish on that as being a whole new opportunity maybe.
• 11:16
  But, like, until that happens, we're really dealing with the same tools in our toolbox.
• 11:20
  And rather than be, rather than searching for the different tool, just look at the tools in front of you and be the best user of that tool.
• 11:27
  And I think a lot of, you know, extra time is wasted of people looking for a better hammer when you have a hammer right in front of you. That makes me think of email, which you talk about in that post.
• 11:37
  Which is like, yeah, it's kinda... To me, email's like one of the hammers. And most people are like, "You know, it's too, it's too boring." Yeah. Yes.
• 11:44
  It's boring to say, "You gotta build a list and, like, communicate and give value," and everyone will be like, "Yeah, I know, but give me the shiny thing." And I'm like, "No, d- doing that is so hard." Is so hard.
• 11:52
  It's, it's like when you watch a cooking show and, like, Gordon Ramsay makes everyone make an omelet, and everyone's like, "An omelet is easy."
• 11:56
  But, like, to really nail an omelet on a French chef level is incredibly difficult. Very different. Um- Yeah. Right. Right. And that's like, that's what I urge, I think. You have to find joy in doing that.
• 12:06
  And, like, I'm not saying we're even there where we need to be, but, like, that cycle of improving on that to me is a better use of time than searching for a brand-new channel.
• 12:16
  You wr- you write in the post that you've built, you- you and the team have built a newsletter list of over 50,000 people in three-ish years.Strikes me as really impressive because I think, one, people are less, uh, less committed to email than they were, say, five years ago.
• 12:33
  But two, there's just a lot out there, you know? Like you're- Yeah... competing. I mean, obviously, like, attention is, uh, in short supply. Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 12:40
  Like, I'm imagining, uh, like, a clickbait article that's like, uh, "How we grow our email list from zero to fifty thousand in these five simple steps." Right, it's like... And again, it's, like, makes up people one.
• 12:49
  So, like the... It is so difficult, right?
• 12:51
  We, we send a weekly Tuesday newsletter, and, like, you could debate whether we even should be doing that as the best way to do that, but that's one way we, we service this email list.
• 12:58
  And we think constantly about, like, what do they like? What... How do we put it in a voice to way? How do we make something that's worth the time of them opening and clicking it?
• 13:06
  And, like, the best feedback I can get, and I know anyone that runs an email list gets this, it's like, "Hey, when I see your email, I'd open it right away," right? 'Cause I know it's gonna be valuable. Yeah.
• 13:14
  That trust is so hard to earn and keep. It's so hard. It's so, it's, it's so difficult, and I don't think it should be brushed aside that that's true.
• 13:22
  And I think as brands get, and as companies get bigger and the scale and the pressure to grow more, they lose that, like, humanity, right? That's a relationship, the, the inbox relationship. And they lose that on the...
• 13:33
  Chasing some metric, and then they may have short-term growth, but long term they're doing, like, damage. And, like, your job as a content leader is to balance these two things, right?
• 13:41
  Like, yes, I am not naive to a business. I need to prove a bunch of numbers. Yes.
• 13:45
  But I also need to, like, clear the way for my team to execute creatively, to make the best email, to make the best video, to write the best blog posts, and I think that is the job of a content leader at a company at our size and, and, and maturity.
• 13:57
  Yeah. There's... Okay, there's a few things I wanna follow up on there. One is metrics. What I guess I'm asking is, was it a leading indicator of your success, or was it a by-product of something else you were doing?
• 14:07
  I think it's a leading indi- So my belief, again, like, thinking long term, you can build organic traffic, right? But, like, Google can switch its algorithm and has. It, like, has wrecked whole content programs, right?
• 14:17
  Yeah. You can even... You're seeing it with LinkedIn all over right now. Like, people are leaning into LinkedIn, and I see them tweak the algorithm and just, like, wipe things out or make it, like, much more difficult.
• 14:25
  Like, company pages on LinkedIn actually, like, don't do so well right now I'm observing, right? It's, like, the p- it's, like, individual sharing, right?
• 14:31
  Just, like, they can make these little tweaks and just totally disrupt months of work. But for email, that's largely not the case. I'm not saying Gmail can't invent some filter that will change things, but, like, the...
• 14:42
  it's more of a... it's an open protocol, and it's more of a direct relationship.
• 14:46
  So I, if I have to invest 10 hours of time, will always spend it building the email list because that is an audience I can return to and I know I'm gonna reach, and it...
• 14:55
  that's not the case for nearly any other platform. Okay, this is interesting. Th- I...
• 14:59
  This is, again, a kind of a recurring theme that we see popping up in conversations in Slack where there is some tension between audience building, which I think email kind of falls under that- Yeah...
• 15:10
  uh, category, and then organic traffic growth, which kind of sends teams off in a different direction. Mm-hmm. Where does SEO fit in for Crossbeam?
• 15:19
  Is it something that you've pursued aggressively, or is that kinda, like, the next frontier as you think about how to scale content as the company grows? So I... It's the next frontier.
• 15:28
  So, you know, to get, to get into weeds, our audience growth, I'm seeing it, like, starting to, like, level off, and the growth rate, right? It's not this, like, rocket ship it's been.
• 15:38
  And then what that's telling me is we're producing stuff that's servicing the existing audience, but we're starting to decay a little bit on the stuff that's reaching out to new people.
• 15:45
  So that does include organic traffic, right? It also includes, like, content partnerships. It also includes, um, you know, swapping, like, doing co-marketing with different people.
• 15:54
  Like, we all have different ways you reach new audiences, right? So I will be like, yes, we will be, like, leaning into SEO, but, like, there will be other versions of that a- and to acquire new audiences.
• 16:04
  So in the past, uh, for the first, like, year and a half, I didn't even care about SEO really. I was like, "What are the community of people talking about that's relevant, and, like, how can I meet that?"
• 16:14
  And then as a result, we ended up actually ranking for something. So as an example, one of our very, uh, basic posts that's like, "There's a lot of acronyms and partnerships. Here's what they all mean."
• 16:22
  And that ranks very highly for SEO for reasons you might expect. It's, like, a definition post, right? It's like- Yeah... part, part... Like, like, the meat and potatoes of SEO. But the reason we wrote that wasn't SEO.
• 16:31
  It was like I kept talking to people, and they would say, "I find the terminology extremely confusing. I wish someone would classify," right? Perfect setup. Um- Yeah. Yeah. So, like, that's how we led to that.
• 16:40
  Now, as I, like, keep an eye on, i- we use, uh, Ahrefs, Ahrefs? Ahref. I don't know. I don't know the right way. Uh, Ahrefs. Um, things like, uh, co-marketing is a use case for Crossbeam.
• 16:51
  It's really important, and we, like, rank well for that. And when we don't, yes, I do, like, deploy some things to make sure that we rewrite that post or publish that thing or check our category page.
• 16:59
  Um, so I do, I do that in a reactive way. And what I think we're moving to as we scale is to be a little more proactive in expanding our organic traffic footprint.
• 17:09
  Especially as, as a SaaS company, we're expanding personas. So, like, right now we're really talk... only talking to the partner persona.
• 17:15
  Now we're starting to talk to the sales persona 'cause our product is starting to ha- like, also be useful to the sales persona as well, right? So we have to follow the business in that way. Yeah. That's cool.
• 17:23
  Okay, speaking of talking to personas, another thing you touch on in that post is that, that you and the team really embrace this idea of journalism thinking.
• 17:31
  Basically you've kind of created this environment for your team to lean heavily into subject matter experts,
• 17:38
  hear what they have to say, and then let, let that lead the way as you all are thinking about a topic you might write about, as opposed to exporting a list of keywords from some tool and then figuring out what belongs in that article.
• 17:50
  Has that been hard to scale? I mean, I imagine that there's a sweet spot of a company where in the early days it's kinda like the lone wolf figuring it all out, you know, just reacting- Mm-hmm...
• 17:58
  to whatever they're learning. Then you sort of hit the phase where it's like, "Okay, let's let the subject matter experts guide us."
• 18:03
  But then you hit the next phase where it's like, "Okay, now we ha- really have to grow," right? And so, like- Yeah... what are our levers? SEO, like you mentioned, becomes one.
• 18:09
  Can you talk a little bit about how you've created that environment? Are there any... Maybe it's like you've hired people who have journalism backgrounds and- Yeah... let them do their thing.
• 18:19
  Or maybe it's sorta like that you've advocated to leadership that, you know, you wanna bring in expertise from, you know, quote unquote, "influencers" to help-Uh, level of growth or whatever.
• 18:30
  The reason we advocate for that is this market of, like, using partner data and ecosystems to affect your go-to-market motions, right? Like, your company is some version of what I'm describing.
• 18:39
  Like, the thing you're trying to service is changing so quickly that the people who understand best how it's going, what their troubles are, what's working, are the people in, in the trenches, the people doing the job.
• 18:49
  Yeah. And so if anything, you can think of it as, like, if you reframe it from, like, subject matter experts to, um, potential customer interviews, right? It's like, yeah, yeah. That's essentially what it is.
• 18:58
  Interesting. Right? You're realizing the things they... that's working and not working, and then you're reproducing that as thought leadership.
• 19:03
  But also, I have aggregated and collected a bunch of insights, and so has our staff, right? And given it to our sales team like, "Hey, I keep talking to people that say X, so this is something that's gonna come up."
• 19:12
  And occasionally the sales team like, "We're seeing that too," right? And so that's how it's getting, like, ahead- That's weird... of where the market's going, right?
• 19:18
  Um, but then, you know, as we grow, something funny started to happen is we went from being an observer of this space to an authority of the space, right?
• 19:25
  Because we've talked to so many people, we have so many, um, resources to have. That I've been on calls where people are like, I'll say, you know, "How are you conducting co-selling?"
• 19:33
  And they'll be like, "I don't know, man. You tell me. You guys are the experts," right? So something that we're trying to, trying to balance is like, yes, keep talking, but also, you know, one of our...
• 19:41
  one of the things we're imparting onto the market is this concept of ecosystem-led growth. You know, whatever you were using to grow, put your ecosystem data on top of it, and it will go faster, it will go better.
• 19:49
  And so we've actually had to shift a little bit from interviewing people about what they're doing, more saying like, "Hey, we're looking at this space, and this is how we're seeing a potential, like, growth avenue for you," the people reading this blog.
• 20:02
  And then, you know, as we put that out there, people raise their hand and be like, "Oh, I'm actually doing that." And then we have a bunch of more examples, right? So it's kinda like this, it's look forward, look back.
• 20:12
  Like, we look at what the market's doing now, we maybe make some predictions or analysis on ways it could help with data and our own analysis, and then flip it and then interview them about that, and we just kinda, like, bounce back and forth between that.
• 20:25
  And I think if you frame it as just like I'm making content, interviewing subject matter experts, that's like a hard sell, but if you're saying like, "We have the pulse of the people who are our best customers or could be our best customers," I think that's a different, like, business proposition.
• 20:38
  To me, what it, what it says about Crossbeam is that, like, from the top down, there is a strong emphasis on really understanding and knowing the customer.
• 20:44
  And it also sounds like sales and marketing alignment is pretty strong, which is also a beautiful thing. How much content does Crossbeam create on a weekly/monthly basis, and what types? Obviously there's blog posts.
• 20:57
  Are you doing webinars? Are you doing, you know... Ki- kinda like, what other, like, buckets of content are you, are you all working on? Yeah.
• 21:03
  In general, we do a blog post every once a week, um, usually Thursdays, but sometimes we do Fridays or Mondays. We send out a weekly newsletter to the list, but we suppress for inactivity, right?
• 21:13
  So if someone doesn't open it for a while, you don't get the newsletter, um, every time. Sometimes we'll do a, a re-engagement campaign, um, that's every Tuesday.
• 21:20
  Every th- one Thursday a month, we do our customer newsletter. So this is like, "Hey, here are all the new features happening in Crossbeam." Webinar-wise, we do a thought leadership webinar, I would say quarterly-ish.
• 21:32
  Um, we have one coming up on February 14th. Um, and then we also have a series of as-needed per, like, launches and things like that we'll call product webinars, right?
• 21:41
  So, like, how do you do a specific thing in the product? Is your team responsible for that stuff? I mean, it sounds kind of product marketing. We, we work, we work in concert with the product marketing. Okay.
• 21:48
  They do a great job doing the content and the, the... bringing the guest on, and we- Got it... try to make sure technically it runs well, as well as getting it in front of as many people as possible. Got it.
• 21:58
  Um, but yes, they definitely do a ton of work there. And, uh, I'm trying to think if there's any other thing. Um- Any, any gated assets? E-books? Yeah, sorry. So yeah. Things like that. Yeah.
• 22:09
  So we do, um, our State of the Partner Ecosystem, which is a survey of the space gated report that, that's happens in Q1 every year. Um, we have an occasionally updated, like, call it like encyclopedia.
• 22:21
  It's called The Partner Playbook. It's like, "Hey, you are starting from zero. Here's the thing. Here's everything you need to know." That's our most popular, um, gated asset.
• 22:29
  It hasn't been updated probably in a year almost.
• 22:31
  And we have a series of, like, smaller things like the Crossbeam Guide to Account Mapping, the Crossbeam Guide to Co-selling, the Crossbeam Guide to Vetting and Integration.
• 22:39
  These are all just, like, use cases for our product- Yeah... combined with, like, thought leadership as well as like here's how to do it in the product.
• 22:44
  So it kind of blurs a little bit the traditional content role in product marketing. Let's talk about events. So, um, you talk about events, uh, quite a bit in this blog post.
• 22:52
  The first thing I thought when I read it was events and content. I mean, k- I guess events are content, but you don't typically...
• 22:58
  It's like most content teams don't operate podcasts either because it's a specialty medium, and so usually you bring in people who know what they're doing to do that.
• 23:07
  I've, at least sort of in my own experience, that's... there's, like, an events team, they sort of deal with that. Like, maybe we'll help them publish the content later. How does Crossbeam think about that?
• 23:16
  Like, it, it sounds like events are actually quite integrated with content to the point where you even have a dedicated person on your team. I always think of events as publishing, right?
• 23:24
  Events are like a capstone of the, what I would call, like, a reader experience, but you might call, like, a customer experience, which is like you hear about us via blog posts, you begin to trust us because we're producing insights that are useful to you.
• 23:35
  Maybe you then pay for Crossbeam, or at least use, like, the free tier of Crossbeam. You download our reports and, like, y- like, use those to benchmark your partnership team. Like, you end up trusting us.
• 23:45
  And then to me, the final act, or one of the final acts, or, or most, like, engaging acts you can do with the brand is I will get on a plane, leave my family for three days, listen to other people talk about partnerships, and listen to, like, a curated experience, which Crossbeam has made for me, right?
• 24:03
  You have to trust us immensely to do that, and I think that should feel like a cohesive journey from the first blog post I read to the event itself.
• 24:11
  Like, it is either the capstone of the pre-buying journey, or maybe you b- you've bought it and it's the capstone of, like, um, the customer journey.
• 24:19
  But either way, getting someone to physically show up and trust you with their time and money is, like, just the hardest thing and a tremendous honor, and I think a content team is well suited to do that because you're the one, the tip of the spear helping to build that community of people.
• 24:34
  The people who produce and write and star in your blog posts are future speakers, right? The people who- Yeah... react well to, like, your webinars can be, like, leading a workshop one day, right?
• 24:45
  Like-The content you do should be, like, the early proving ground for someone to eventually represent you at an event. And I think this is all connected and better when this is all on the same team.
• 24:55
  That's so interesting. Are events a line of revenue, or is it a marketing function? Like, is there an events P&L, or do you just consider whatever costs associated with it as just part of your marketing budget?
• 25:06
  The answer you might expect is yes to all those things. [laughs] Um, I, I think, I think broadly when we started events... So last year was the first full year of, of these events.
• 25:15
  We didn't know what would work, what the market would react to, what motions would lead to sales, right? So it was very experimental. It's like, we'll do a little bit of this, we'll do a little of that.
• 25:23
  This year is us focusing in and on, on a handful of either, like, brand building or pipeline fill-filling events, depending on what the event is. And honestly, it's like a conversation we're still having.
• 25:33
  It's like, what is the best use of this limited time and money? 'Cause events are very labor and capital intensive, right? Yeah. So if you're gonna be really sure about the goal of one and that it meets that goal.
• 25:42
  And, you know, I'm having meetings all throughout this month, honestly, on some events we have planned and being like, "All right, is this a brand one? Is this a pipeline?" We're like, we, we, like, wanna make sure we...
• 25:50
  And we don't have it nailed down. We don't.
• 25:52
  But we do know that if we and when we nail an event, it just has profound positive ripple effects throughout the business, whether that's customers, whether it's just, like, good vibes, whether that's people, like, paying attention to us.
• 26:03
  Like, I think the secondary and tertiary effects are great. Now, I'm not naive, nor should you be, the fact that things cost money, and if you put a dollar into marketing, somewhere down the road, it should be $3 back.
• 26:13
  Yes. And, and we are held accountable for that, and we are trying to do a better job of tracking. Got it. Really cool. Can I ask you a couple just, like, small questions that have kind of- Yeah...
• 26:22
  accumulated in my brain as we've been going? Yeah. I'm curious about measuring quality versus measuring data. Like, do you hold your team accountable to any key metrics?
• 26:32
  You know, you might read something that someone on the team writes and say, "Oh, this is great," but it doesn't achieve the kind of the objective results that you might hope for. Yes. It's...
• 26:41
  But sometimes you, like, don't know, right? Whether before you release it. But I, I think, right, there's...
• 26:45
  The creative in me wants to be like, if you write a thing and 10 people effing love it, that's worth, like, 100 people being like, "eh" about it. Yeah. We know that's not true. That just can't be true, right?
• 26:55
  We can't have, like, these tiny pockets of people who absolutely, like, love, like, the, the... SaaS businesses have to scale at a ridiculous exponential rate in which that is, like, kinda hard to defend.
• 27:05
  The key is these things in balance, right? You don't wanna ever feel like you're just running a content farm that's just trying to... You know, you're not trying to do UpRocks, right?
• 27:13
  Or you're not just trying to do, like, snotty, like, The New Yorker, where, you know, I just want, want the right people to find this enjoyable, and that's it.
• 27:21
  Uh, there's a, there's an in between, and I think the hard thing is, is balancing those two things with limited resources and, and allocating them accordingly.
• 27:27
  So like I said, I think actually, like, we have focused too much on the let's service the diehards and not enough on, like, let's expand.
• 27:33
  Like, that's something I, I have in mind as a, as a content, like, leader right now is like, okay, maybe we need to, like, re-rebalance this stuff.
• 27:39
  Years ago, I heard Seth Godin on a podcast, and he was asked, "What tool do you use to write your daily blog posts?" And he refused to answer the question on the basis that it doesn't matter. Yeah.
• 27:49
  Which I sort of appreciated, but I always am a little curious, like, are there any tools you use that you're like, "Ah, this is really helpful."
• 27:55
  You know, whether it's team communication or for, like, keeping tabs on how each of your team members is developing professionally or, you know, measuring and attribution.
• 28:04
  Is there anything in there that, uh, even just one or two that you feel like really stand out? We, we organize everything in Notion. We publish everything using WordPress. Marketing automation's HubSpot.
• 28:13
  For, like, one-on-ones and, like, other, like, uh, bill management stuff, it's Lattice. We use Riverside to record video. Those are the big ones, man. I don't think any of that's, like, particularly earth-shattering.
• 28:24
  I write everything in Google Docs. Yeah, so everything's in Google Docs for, like- Yeah... common thing. I would write things in Notion if the co- if the commenting and version control was a little- Yeah, yeah... better.
• 28:31
  Yeah, that-that's, I don't think any of that's revolutionary. This is what I mean by, like, those tools have been around. Like, Notion's, like, kinda new-ish, and then I wouldn't even say it's that new.
• 28:38
  All those tools have been around for a decade plus, like- Yeah... every single one I just mentioned. How about content- Yeah... flow, content calendar? Is that all in Notion? All in Notion, yeah. So we have everything.
• 28:47
  You wanna get really into it, we have a single database of every single task and deliverable as one database, and then we have a series of filtered calendar- Got it... and timeline views.
• 28:54
  So, like, everything is tagged as, like... Our, our yearly event is called Supernode, right?
• 28:58
  So every-everything that's tagged in the Supernode campaign is filtered, and then I can filter by my name and be like, "Here are Sean Supernode tasks this week," right?
• 29:05
  Yeah, that's one of the beautiful things about a tool like Notion is that it's so flexible. You can make it do or not do a lot of things. Right.
• 29:11
  Whereas, like, some more structured tools, you just become trapped in notifications and- I know... email digests and stuff. I talked to...
• 29:18
  I interviewed Ivan, the CEO-CEO, like, many years ago when I was working for a vision, and that's something he said. He's like, "Everyone thinks this is gonna be a mesh of tools integrated with each other."
• 29:27
  He's like, "But I think people don't wanna do that. I think people want the one." And, you know, open to debate which one.
• 29:32
  But, and I, I'm sure we'll see some consolidation, then it'll split apart and obviously consolidation. But I think for the purposes of the creative process, a, like, the context switching is what kills you, right?
• 29:40
  Context switching. So I don't wanna give you 9,000 things to manage. I wanna give you one. Let me throw a couple more things your way. I know we're, uh, very mindful of your time. AI, we could talk about AI- [laughs]...
• 29:50
  for, um, a-an hour easy. I am curious, how are you thinking about it? Are you... Have you found any immediate short-term use cases?
• 29:59
  Are you kind of thinking of some ways to integrate it, or are you still, you know, not quite sold that it's, it's ready for, like, production use? The AI for...
• 30:08
  It's, like, coming for content in an interesting way, right? Like, people are like, "You should just use ChatGPT, and you can write your posts."
• 30:13
  My instinct is to say stuff made by humans is always gonna be better, and that's that. I think that's naive. The history of technology shows us that that's not how it works.
• 30:22
  And I think in, in the same way, I don't think this is a unique opinion. I think it's a tool to use to base your own writing and then improve it upon later.
• 30:29
  And for low stakes, like formulaic content, I can see a world where that is, like, produced via AI. But the problem with AI is it's always backward-looking, right? Like, it has to be trained on stuff that exists already.
• 30:41
  Yeah. It, it won't push anything new. So I, I do think the line will be, are you producing new insights, new, new material, new creative acts? Yes.Is it some collection aggregation of things that already exist?
• 30:55
  I can see this stuff starting to lean a little more to being like AI-assisted.
• 30:58
  I don't know how that's gonna change, like, like content strategy, 'cause like I could, right now, I could flood the zone with ten thousand AI-produced things for keywords, but like also so can everybody else, right?
• 31:07
  Yeah. So, like, I'm not sure that's like some sort of huge edge right now. And I, I hope what it actually leads to is, like, an up-leveling of the more human stuff. Uh, like, there's lots of...
• 31:16
  And even, like, music, right? Like, I can use pro tools, but, like, I still need to be, like, a capable and competent producer and/or performer to make that make sense, right?
• 31:25
  So yeah, I think it's gonna be like s- something similar with, um, AI. There's a book that Tyler Cowen, Cowen? Uh, that, uh, uh, the economist wrote called Average Is Over that was about this, right?
• 31:34
  It's like, what happens when automation and AI come for these more white-collar roles? What happens? And, like, his recommendation was, like, using the computers and AI to aid you as a tool, like you're additive.
• 31:47
  You, you collaborate with the AI.
• 31:49
  And much like a doctor may collaborate with, like, imaging software that scans for an illness to aid their diagnosis, there's gonna be something similar on this, like, marketing creative content front.
• 31:59
  I don't know what it looks like. Um, but I don't think it's gonna, like, wipe everything out, and I also don't think it's gonna be nothing. Yeah. I do think it's gonna matter.
• 32:06
  Could you, could you imagine the tenth or the 20th person on your content team being the, like, the AI?
• 32:11
  I don't know what the title is, but, like, it's the AI specialist person who, who trains it, who builds the workflows and- There's a, there's a suggestion that, like, now that the creation of content is decoupled from time, you can just make a bunch.
• 32:23
  But, like, it still takes a human being time to read it. Like, it's not gonna be AI reading AI content. I mean, maybe one day. But, like, right now, that's not how it works.
• 32:30
  Like, a human being has to actually read it and find, to have the time to read it and enjoy it and wanna share it and wanna, like, sit with it, right?
• 32:38
  So, like, it's not the win I think people think it is to be able to produce stuff at this, like, much faster clip. Like, the finite resource is always time.
• 32:46
  So if AI can accelerate the time it takes you to make something that is worthy of someone's time, fine.
• 32:52
  But again, the idea that, like, I saw someone be like, "Oh, I produced a book from a, a fifty-thousand-word book from a prompt," and I'm like, "No one's reading that." [laughs] No one's reading that. Right? Yeah.
• 33:00
  That sounds terrible. [laughs] Okay, cool. No, I love it. That's cool. I feel like we're gonna ask everybody about this. Even though I don't necessarily want to, I feel like we have to.
• 33:08
  Like, I feel like we have to gather very smart people's opinions on it. Like, we have to use it.
• 33:11
  You know, we have to, like, understand these tools so that we can talk about it and hopefully advise people on it a little bit.
• 33:17
  I mean, what we're finding right now is, um, there's a lot of small, as you said, formulaic stuff that it actually is really helpful on.
• 33:23
  For example, I neglected to include meta descriptions in our first two hundred blog posts.
• 33:29
  You can just feed that to an AI tool, and it's gonna write two hundred meta descriptions in five minutes, and we don't have to do anything.
• 33:35
  That makes me feel really excited, because no one was gonna read the meta description anyways. Yeah. [laughs] But you, do you know what's funny? Do you know what those meta description's for?
• 33:43
  It's for Google, another machine, right? [laughs] That's what I just... Yeah, it's not, no one, no one's reading them. Yeah. [laughs] It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine we'll probably find some other ways.
• 33:52
  Like, I think at least at the moment, there's more opportunity for folks who do a lot of A/B testing, who run a lot of display ads.
• 33:58
  I remember back in the, back in the early days of BuzzFeed, they were A/B testing headlines, and that was, like, an interesting thing.
• 34:04
  And, like, that was, like, particularly labor-intensive, and, like, now it's not, right? And, like, imagine the things that are labor-intensive now, like meta descriptions, like, becoming not.
• 34:11
  Like, that frees up the actual human beings to do more and better creative work, right? I- Yeah, totally. I also, I, I like, I like the workflow type stuff.
• 34:19
  Like, one of my happiest, uh, happiest, like, zones I can get in would be, like, b- building a workflow with Zapier, you know?
• 34:27
  And I sort of sense some of that coming too, where, like, some of the AI s- AI stuff is going to be incorporated into workflows where you could build out something that pulls the blog posts, you know, analyzes them, set the character limit, and it sends it back via an API to the site.
• 34:41
  Like that kind of, like, workflow building I think is gonna become increasingly important. I find that to be cool, because it's not really content as we know it. It's more, it's more automation. It's more ops type stuff.
• 34:52
  Yeah. Yeah, that's a, ops is a great point. Like, like, content ops, if that's a, if that exists, right, is like, that's... Like, I know people that use it.
• 34:58
  They feed a transcript to it, and they're like, "Summarize the times this person talked about X," right? So, like, you still have to then take that and make it into something.
• 35:06
  But that, like, shaves, like, forty-five minutes. Like, that's tremendously exciting. So I, I, to answer your, like, initial question, I think it's, like, net positive.
• 35:14
  And even though my knee-jerk reaction is to go live in a house in the woods and not connect any computers to it, I th- I think that's, it's, it's gonna be additive. And
• 35:23
  the way we have done content and content marketing and consuming content online has been so stagnant, I feel, for so long- Yeah...
• 35:29
  that it, it's due, it was due for this, and I hope there's three more disruptions in the next decade. It just makes things more interesting. Yeah, cool. Love it. All right. I wanna let you go. We're running up on time.
• 35:40
  Where, where should people go to check in on the content that you and the team are creating? And then where can they follow you personally? Uh, content the team's creating, uh, crossbeam.com.
• 35:51
  There's a little resources thing. I'm essentially responsible for all that stuff, crossbeam.com/blog. The, for me personally, seanblanda.com, S-E-A-N, and it's the same on Twitter, S-E-A-N Blanda.
• 36:01
  Uh, be prepared for lots of Phillies sports takes. But, um, if you care about this stuff or think about this stuff, like, DM me. I, like, love...
• 36:08
  I hop on, like, several calls a month of people just running content campaigns, and we, like, exchange notes, and we talk about wh- what's working and what's not.
• 36:15
  And Sup- the Superpath community is obviously, the DMs of the Superpath community are, like, where a lot of, like, magic happens, so, um, please, I encourage everyone to reach out. Awesome. Thanks so much, Sean.
• 36:23
  Appreciate you being guest number one and, uh, experimenting with this on- And Superpath. What a great thing for everybody. [laughs] Thanks, man. Uh, go Eagles. Pains me to say that, but, uh- [laughs] Thanks again, man.
• 36:36
  [outro music]