Latest / Straight To Voicemail / How Close Stands Out in a Crowded CRM Market with Chelsea Castle, Head of Content & Brand, Close
Transcript
- Amanda Smith (00:00): Amanda Smith. It should come as no surprise that I'm always thinking about how content is helping people achieve business outcomes. Chelsea Castle at Close is somebody that I've admired for a really long time. She has so many smart things to say, and her approach is through content with clothes, but then also her personal brand. She's re-imagining what it means to create content that not only attracts attention, but helps them do what they need to do. She has a unique background in journalism and magazine editorial, and she's also led brand strategy and tech. So with those unique skills, she is helping clothes stand out in the crowded CRM market, and their focus is relational selling and human to human connection. She's bringing the brand back to its roots with founder-led content and rethinking product storytelling. While you do have to be different enough to break through it all, she's staying true to what makes clothes unique. So of course I asked her, what are you doing differently with content to help close achieve business outcomes? Take a listen. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message. Chelsea Castle (01:25): Hey Amanda, sorry. Missed your call. Love that question. A few things that we are doing at close to create content smarter are two core things. We're really getting back to our roots of creating founder focused, founder-led content. So our CEO historically was the content engine got burnt out and is coming back. We're not making him the only face of clothes anymore, but we're really relying on his brand, his reputation, his expertise, first and foremost to kind of inspire what we want our content and our vision to look like now. So a couple of things we're doing is we created a series called the Blueprint Series where we're talking about how he scaled the company from zero to 30 million, both written and video content. We did some really strong layered distribution around that where we slice and dice the content across different mediums and content types and channels, really amplified it throughout the company internally and externally. (02:17): And now we're actually focused on this quarter we're doing a LinkedIn sprint, is what we're calling it, where we're working in kind of like a hive. Mind me, my team and our CEO Stelly, we're working literally daily. I've never done this before with the founder, where we're working daily on churning out content as much as possible. With all of these things in mind, we're like, how can we create content smarter while working directly with the person who is setting the vision for not just the company, but also what our content should look like? I think that's where a lot of people's content should come from, your customers, your strategic narrative, and a lot of that is all interwoven with your founders. The second thing we're doing is thinking about how we can tell the story of our product in a way that's compelling and different tech, and especially us like a CRMs not inherently sexy, but I really challenge all of us to think that we can make it, that we can make it fun and engaging and compelling. (03:05): We're humans selling to humans. At the end of the day, we're selling software to other humans who need it to do their jobs better. That's inherently what we're all doing here in SaaS. So we at close are kind of thinking through how can we create content, better product that is really just cutting through the noise and telling the story of the product differently. So a few ways that we're doing that are creating conceptual product series where we're being engaging and kind of doing something that is unexpected. I think that's one of the core things is like, how can we lean into our brand of being this hero archetype and create content that is what you would find to be unexpected. So we have a series called Desiree Demos where we're kind of demolishing both the way in which you're currently doing something and showing how our product can help you do it better. So we have a play on words there both visually with what's happening in the video and then walking through the product in an interesting way. So some pretty cool stuff that we're doing in both of those ways to kind of attack some ways that we can create content smarter. Would love to hear what you think. Amanda, talk to you soon. Amanda Smith (04:13): Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.