Using Content to Grow Pipeline

People come in like, we need to do something different. We need to be bold and right I’m like, yeah. Talk to me. I’m the tattooed guy. Like, I I love being bold and and stirring the pot. And I think sometimes you run with those ideas. Right? And then you come back a couple weeks later, and I don’t know, maybe emotions have cooled or whatever, and you show your deck your idea, and they’re like, we we want bold, but not that bold. Right. We don’t we don’t wanna upset anybody. And I think that’s a huge miss in b two b marketing. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Sixense, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So I am I’m giddy. I’m giddy with a site. I’ve never seen you like this. I’m giddy, and I’m gonna tell you why. I’m giddy because we have Devin Reed. He’s head of content at Clari. You know, it’s a forecasting revenue platform. But he has really become a content thought leader and influencer and just spews advice and good ideas out there all the time. And I feel like every time he posts something, I’m like, oh, there’s something actual in there. So we got him on the show today. I’m super excited. He’s got his own content newsletter called The Reader. He’s launching his own show, Read Between the Lines, which I saw the trailer for. It might as well be a movie trailer. It looks so incredibly well produced. So we’re gonna dig into content. I love content. You always talk about content. So I’m just excited as can be, and I’ll calm down now, but I’m I’m really excited. Don’t calm down. Keep it going. I mean, it’s gonna be a great conversation. I feel like I don’t even need to say anything because you sold it. And so for all the listeners, let’s jump in. Yeah. And again, Clary, Gong, great story, was in sales, now in content. So absolutely, let’s talk to Devon. Yay. Thanks so much for joining us. You have a really interesting career path, a head of content who started in a different place than many. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Yeah. Absolutely. So maybe the only or at least one of the very few sales reps turned content marketer turned head of content. So I was in sales as a SaaS salesperson for six years, and I had tried kind of those last two, three years to get into marketing. It’s not that I didn’t like sales. I just didn’t feel like it was quite the right place for my skill set and my interest. And so I was at Eventbrite at the time, had tried to get into marketing. I got to the final stage of an interview. I think I passed up for someone with, like, ten years experience in marketing, which hard to complain. I had none. I’d written, like, one blog for the company and was like, maybe they’ll give me a shot. And so then I ended up moving over to Gong, again, as a sales rep back in twenty seventeen when there was forty employees globally, twelve in the states. And we can kind of maybe get into it, but ironically, their content is what found me. And that’s how I found out about Gong. Ended up on one of those blind recruiter calls where they don’t tell you the company or anything. They’re just like, they’re getting all this funding, and the CEO is really qualified. And tell me, you know, get on the call, and I’ll tell you Yeah. Yeah. I never take those, but I figured, hey, why not? And the same day that I had found Gong Labs, which is their flagship content, three hours later, I had this blind call, and it was for Gong. And so I was like, wow. The stars are aligning. Let’s go for it. So I was a sales rep there for two years. And the last year there in the sales role is is when I started doing some marketing projects. So we did something called Gong Labs Live, which was a roughly one hour live show on LinkedIn, and we did it for twenty weeks straight. And I’m really glad that I did because it showed Udi, the then CMO, like, hey. I actually know what I’m doing here. I’m really committed. And I did that while still hitting quota on the sales team. And so the first role opened up for a content marketing IC. And so I I went for it. And luckily, because I had good reputation at Gong and because I had ran that program successfully, it was actually pretty easy. Like, CMO was game. The hiring manager, Chris Orloff, was obviously game. And so I just had to get my VP of sales’ approval, which I did very easily, surprisingly, because I kinda had forgotten. But in my interview, I had told Jamieson, the VP, I was like, I’m gonna be a rep, but not forever. Like, I might be in marketing. I might get into enablement. And so that’s how I went from sales to marketing because I was able to put together a great team and and achieve some great results at Gong. I was able to get to the head of content role and, was there for three years and then moved over to Clari a year and a half ago where I do more or less the same. That’s such a different story. Right? This always interest me here that. So I always tell people that I just love content. I love the process. I love everything about it. I dig in way too much on it sometimes. You do sometimes. Yeah. It’s kind of a thing. And I think one of the things that is always a challenge is creating that informational content, right, like here’s some thought leadership or here’s something interesting versus content that’s actually gonna drive someone to do something, drive action, drive conversion, push them to that next step, get them to raise their hand. What’s the difference between that type of content and how do you go about making distinction and developing that content that’s truly going to convert? It’s a good question. Because I’m not a classically trained marketer, I’ve always kind of just followed my gut on the consumer side. Like, what worked on me and what seems to be working at large and just saying, hey. Maybe we should be doing it that way. And less of the, the kind of framework I’ve seen is, like, there’s content writers and then there’s copywriters. I don’t really care about that, to be completely honest. Like, to me, all content should be insightful, relevant, and actionable, and it should drive some sort of CTA. It should have some compelling aspect to keep them going. And that’s not necessarily even to close them, right, or go to a demo, go sign up for a sales call. But, really, it should compel them to subscribe for more of that written content, for example, or subscribe to your podcast because that episode was so great. And so I think it’s kind of a twofold. One is your content, is it good enough to pay for? Mhmm. It’s good enough that someone would wanna pay for it or at the very least talk about it. Right? Like, hey, hey, Simon. I heard this podcast. You absolutely have to check it out. That kind of is your way of converting people, and you’re growing it that way. On the compelling people to act, I mean, you can dive into the tactical of, like, a CTA or a CTV call to value and all that stuff. But, honestly, I think the job is done before that. They should be eighty percent there, and then the CTA is just a guiding thing and teaching them, oh, I’m reading your newsletter, and you have a podcast? Yeah. I wanna click that. Or, oh, wow. This was a great podcast. You’re hosting event on a similar topic. Let me click that. So I think it’s really more about being intentional with your conversion point in your CTA, but really trying to create wow worthy content long before it to start to build less of a subscriber and more of a raving fan. Yep. Makes sense. Love that. Yeah. Love it. One thing that’s just really tough in b two b is telling that story. We’re talking about features and functionality and products, and wrapping it around in a story is really tough. And so even though the storytelling portion of it is hard, it’s hugely powerful. And so how do you approach creating a narrative with the right content? Yeah. It’s the that’s a big question. Because there’s the category narrative. My nicheness is is very. So I’ve not only been a head of content, but it’s, like, a b to b SaaS company that’s also doing the category play. Right? So I’m, like, I joked when I left Gong. There’s, like, five companies that want me, but they really want me if they want me to work there because of how niche that experience is. So when I think of a narrative, I think of that high level, like, what is our point of view as a company? What do we believe or what do we see that nobody else does? At Clari, I’m not pitching it. It’s just the example, is most revenue leaders view revenue as an outcome at the end of the quarter. We view it as the most important business process in your company. And so when you start with that reframe, you can start to build the narrative around it, which is, for the most part, there’s always an experience that leads to a new belief that leads to a new action. So something happened to me. Therefore, I had a new change of heart and change of mind. And then because of that change of mind or, like, a new philosophy, now I act in a certain way. So when it comes to companies, it’s kind of like, what experience usually did the founder have that led to an moment, which is usually a gap in the market or an underserved problem. And then we built a product around that. So I think at the highest level, that’s probably like the company category narrative. And then at the more tactical level, we’re working on our social media strategy here. Every time we have a product post, which is a way of highlighting our product, the easy thing, especially if you’re not very experienced as a marketer with the product, because most of us don’t actually use the tech we sell, it’s easy just to promote and talk about the features. But the a plus content marketing is talking about the story for the individual who would be using those features. So what’s the before and what’s the after? And spend way more time and energy on the problem. What were the specifics of that issue? What are the feelings of that issue? And then when you introduce the product, people are kind of sprinting towards clicking more and learning about it because you’ve evoked so much emotion on the story that the product is kind of like the obvious solution. The strong point of view, that’s something that I think a lot of content folks can struggle with. Right? Because, again, you can play it safe in some sense, right, you can create content like you just said feeds and feeds, features and so forth, but developing that strong point of view and my personal experience, I think, has been a challenge and you almost get people within the org that say, like, well, do we really wanna be that aggressive? Do we really wanna, like, put a line in the sand and say, like, this is what we believe and it permeates through everything. Like, we need to do this because it’s gonna help us stand out. Have you seen that kind of resistance before? And if so, like, how do you navigate that? Say, yeah. It’s worth it. Could it piss somebody off in b to b sass? I don’t know. Maybe if you get really, really strong in the field, but, like, how do you sort of navigate through that? I’m gonna answer, but I’m also gonna prep you that I wanna flip the question on both of you as well. Because I if I’m allowed, I would love to learn from from you two as well. So the first thing I think of is you need to be intentionally polarizing with your marketing. What a lot of times happens is this wishy washy feeling. Again, I’m not in the executive staff, but I’ve interacted and been in some of those meetings where you’re presenting ideas and you get, you know, different bags of feedback. And there’s some times where, like, I don’t know, maybe competition’s heating up that week or month or market changes. I don’t know. But people come in, like, we need to do something different. We need to be bold. And, right, I’m like, yeah. Talk to me. I’m the tattooed guy. Like, I I love being bold and and stirring the pot. And I think sometimes you run with those ideas. Right? And then you come back a couple weeks later, and, I don’t know, maybe emotions have cooled or whatever, and you show your deck your idea, and they’re like, we we want bold, but not that bold. Right. We don’t we don’t we don’t wanna upset anybody. And I think that’s a huge miss in b two b marketing. Most companies and candidly marketing leaders, they wanna get head nods. They want a hundred percent of the market to agree with them and say, yeah, you’re great and we wanna buy from you. But the truth is I like to follow the ninety ten rule. I’ll even go as far as eighty twenty, which is let’s create a divisive narrative and really share and amplify our belief systems and get eighty to ninety percent of the market to identify with it, to like it, and to love it. And that will grow our audience and pipeline and become customers. And the ten to twenty percent that hate it, they were never gonna buy from you anyway. So you might as well piss them off. Because even if you piss them off and I don’t mean, like, actually Yeah. Get them angry and calling your CEO. But, like, reading Adam’s post, you’re like, that’s dumb. I don’t like that. I don’t agree with that. That’s okay because the other people are gonna love Adam for that in that example. Right? And so even the people that don’t like you sometimes talk about you, and I’m all about free press as long as, again, you’re not making yourself or your brand look like an idiot or discredit yourself. Yeah. It’s totally yeah. Don’t look like an idiot. That’s a good that’s pretty basic, but that probably a really good litmus test. Right? I think I got that from Dwight Schrute on the office, but I think that’s what Michael Scott’s advice to him. But it’s kind of, like, true. And, like, at Gong, we, you know, was a very loud brand. We were very loud from colors to word choice. Like, I literally wrote a blog about cursing in sales, and that might have crossed the eighty percent. Maybe maybe we got to sixty or seventy on that one. But the point is people were talking about us. And I think that’s, like, what we should really focus on on your strategies. Like, what’s your word-of-mouth strategy? What are we gonna do and say that actually grabs people’s attention, gets them talking, and gets them interested in learning more? And then that’s where you can fill in some of your product content and how you’re different, but people don’t care about that yet. Yeah. I know you put the question back to us, and I would agree that companies do have to be bold. And bold can mean many different things, by the way. But to me, what it means is just standing out with a pretty strong POV. Whether you’re taking a humorous take on it, whether you are yelling about something that you know is gonna, you know, cause a reaction. But at the end of the day, all of our companies are in these really competitive spaces. And same old, same old isn’t gonna cut it, particularly as we’re all just trying to get in front of the same folks. I think Sixense does a great job of it, by the way. I think Sixense has a POV. I think Adam and his team come up with some great ideas and bold ideas. And sometimes the best ones are the ones where we kind of look at each other and we say, are we both crazy? Like, is anyone gonna approve this? Should we get legal to do a final review? Like, we’ve had those conversations, but those are sometimes the best ideas. And the best performing later. Like, you should be a little nervous to bring it to your CEO. You should be fairly nervous pressing publish that day. That’s, to me, the fun part. I don’t know. That’s the adrenaline junkie in me or, like, the success junkie, but I’d rather swing big and get a big win like that than, like, provide vanilla ideas that’s safe and gets no one excited. I know when the feedback is, you know, what if we’re this bold and it backfires? It’s like, well, what if we’re vanilla and nothing happens instead? Let’s take the risk and have some upside versus just, again, like you said, more of the same. And product differentiation sorry. Everyone thinks we’re more or less the same even if we’re not. And even if we very clearly articulate on our homepage why we’re different, we need to grab attention and change minds before we try to get the budget. You’re right about, like, you click the we did a campaign recently, and we clicked the publish button. We were like, oh my god. Yeah. But it in the end, it worked out and it felt great and all that. So I was happy to be part of that. So Could we get details? Honestly, I hold Sixense into high regard as a marketer. I think it’s a cool brand, and you guys are bold. And I’m not just saying that because I’m on your show. I was Yeah. Doubly excited, Adam, when you reached out. Because one, we talked about, like, cool. Me and Adam haven’t talked since, like, a reference call a few years ago. It’d be cool to catch up. But two, I was like, Six Senses is the real deal, and you guys do a lot of really cool stuff. So as a marketer, I’d love I know you’re interviewing me, but I would love to hear a little bit more about Yeah. What made you nervous and how it went, if you can share. Yeah. So we did this campaign. We were trying to, you know, get the word out about a sales contact data product that’s newer. And we were trying to figure out how to really raise awareness to it and do it in a very different and creative way. The idea was sort of dump your data vendor, and that turned itself into having a dump your data vendor hotline and then setting the entire campaign with a nineties aesthetic. We had a bunch of video content. We sort of ripped off of those old from the nineties, like, you know, check out the gospel’s greatest hits, and you would list the different songs. On the hotline, we had breakup advice from celebrity impersonators. It was just off the wall. It was really cool because we posted this content and the ads and the videos and, like, the comments. You know, it appealed to a certain age group, which was really kind of our buyer at the end of the day. Yeah. And it was a lot of really creative people on the team that came up with all different pieces of this. And I even said, like, even if this campaign falls flat, we had a lot of fun doing it. But I think we did okay. I think the most gratifying part and by the way, the hotline does take you to the BDR team who is actually having conversations. There’s a pipeline component here, of course. But I was like, where’s that phone number go to? I almost called, by the way, because I saw the video, and then I was like, well, I don’t wanna be a false lead, so I won’t jam up your engine. Yep. It goes to our team, and we had a UK version of it too. But to me, some of the more gratifying posts were when marketers write posts about your campaigns and they speak to how it hearkens to a time that they remember sitting on their grandma’s kitchen table, watching the infomercials, like, you wanna have that connection. You wanna strike a chord. And what we thought was so off the wall and maybe we took too far was actually something that was one of our biggest successes. So it’s been fun. I love hearing that it worked because other marketers listening can take this clip and to their CMO or their CEO and, like, look, other legit leaders are doing this. And I like that you led Adam with different. That’s the first thing. It’s different. And when you’re different, you can sometimes that doesn’t come with emotion necessarily. But when you think of, okay, how does everybody else go to market for this type of product? All right. Cool. We’re not doing that. Let’s do something unexpected. There’s your attention grabber. And then such a great one and and and a tricky one to do in b to b, I would say, because it’s a crossover. Right? It’s like b to b tech meets nineties infomercial. The idea, I don’t mean in a bad way, is fairly easy to come up with, but the execution from everything you just said to the hotline leading to a BDR and converting, I give, like, the hat tip. Like, that’s where it’s really tricky and really cool. So taking on that and flipping it back to you Ten. Talking about your experience. Is there any kind of campaign content piece that you put out there that either was just off the wall that you were worried about or thought it was different or just even if something that wasn’t, but just sort of fire, you know, in terms of this drove a ton of pipeline or it was influenced a ton of pipeline or it’s like something that you’re just like, wow, that was really kind of a lightning strike for us. Well, there’s a few. The ones that were the weirdest weren’t always the most successful, but maybe it was because you mentioned the hotline that subconsciously this memory came up. But it was also the time where I was clicking publish. I remember it and was, like, probably the most nervous I’ve actually ever been. And it was somewhat similar. So it was at Gong, and it was a April Fool’s Day campaign. Now this was four years ago when I think it was a little less played out. You know? It might have been the last year or two. You can kinda get away with it. At least now, I don’t think I don’t know. I feel like they’re overplayed kinda now. And so what we had was, it was a headset. And the headset would combat happy ears from your sales team. So it’s the happy ears headset. And the whole concept for the problem in sales for those who maybe aren’t aren’t as familiar, though I see head nods on this group, is, you know, a lot of times salespeople hear Adam say, yeah. We’ll book a call in two weeks and maybe bring in Saima. And the rep is like, I got a hot deal. I’m gonna put it in commit. It’s closing this month, and, really, it’s not a real deal. That’s called Happy Years. And so because Gong was a sales coaching tool, at least at the time, I know it’s expanded since then, what we did was, okay, how do we take this very specific coaching problem, which is specifically to happy years, and how do we have some real fun with it? And so we shot a similar type commercial, actually, not quite as nostalgic. I’ve seen yours. It wasn’t quite that. But it was me. I was the actor because we had very limited budget in that short timeline. So it was me in, like, a rented office space. And it was this before and after. It’s like, before I have the headset on, I do basically what I set, which is like, oh, yeah. I’ll book it and all that stuff. And then it was like introducing the Happy Years headset. Super cheesy on purpose, like, really corny music, really overplayed into it. I put it on and I’m like, time freezes. And so then we go through how it helped me close a deal. We went to a landing page, by the way, where you could quote, unquote buy Happy New Year’s headset. The video, I was like, I’m either gonna look like a total ass and, like, this is gonna ruin my personal reputation. Like, I’m acting on like, I’m not an actor. And I showed it to a couple people, and they’re like, it’s towing the line, but it’s very funny, and you should do it. So I’m like, okay. So video did great. We shared shared it on a couple different channels. People loved it. Super funny. Great engagement. And then we led to a landing page where you could, quote, unquote, buy it. And when you click to the buy button, like, you could literally select how many sets you want, and then you hit buy. And it goes, April fools, headset’s not real, but Yeah. Gong does help with this if you want, you know, wanna do demo. I think we might have somehow done it too good of a job where people really thought they were real. Like, even Gong employees thought it was a real headset, and, like, we went into the hardware space. And so I don’t honestly remember how many demos we got. It wasn’t really for demos, but we wanted to capture some fun demand, I suppose. It worked really well on the brand side, but it did teach me, like, kinda be careful how far you go with your prank. Make sure people know No. They know. It’s not real. Because I literally had people there’s SDRs flacking me that day, like, hey. When are we getting our headsets? And I was like, oh my god. I’m sorry. This is this is not real. Not real. On that note, I mean, it’s a great example of just understanding a problem, recognizing a problem, and tackling it either through humor or through some other way, but really evoking that emotion. How important is understanding the customer journey? Where they are in that journey to make sure that the content that you are putting out there is aligning to it? Yeah. It’s a really, really good question. I’ll be honest. I’m probably at a point in my career where I’m still learning that. A lot of my focus has been top of funnel and specifically thought leadership. I love when we’re in meetings. It’s like, okay. Which audience is this for? Like, what part of the customer journey? And I get to be lazy and say, well, if it’s great thought leadership, it’s product agnostic. And it applies to everybody in our audience, whether you’re a prospect or customer. So that helps me maybe be lazy in a way. But I think the other way to think about it is I kinda go back to not where are you in a sales cycle or in the customer journey, because I don’t think as customers, we think of it like that. I don’t think of myself as, oh, I’ve been a customer for two and a half years of Notion. We just have problems, and we’re just living our everyday life. And so I would love to get schooled on this either by someone on this panel or, like, you know, someone can DM me after. But the truth is I just try to think of where are they now? What’s the from to? Are they a happy customer or not a happy customer? Are you using a third of the product or all the product? And then digging into the why. So why are they not using it? Because they don’t know. If you’re in b two b tech, that’s, like, the number one thing is customers don’t even know half the stuff that we can do. And so is it an awareness play? And can we get really specific with the benefits to get someone’s interest? Right? Like, you are in the customer cycle. Hey. We’ve been with Clari for two and a half years, and we maybe use competitors for other parts of the platform simply because we don’t know. So I just try to, like, focus a little bit more on the problem statement, the from to, and then just deliver really compelling copy or messaging across different formats to get people to kinda like what we talked about earlier, like, grab their attention and make them feel, forgive me, but behind or without or at risk of messing up. Right? What’s the personal loss or the career, potential career loss or business failure, not to use too strong of language. You know what I mean? Yeah. Goes to execute. But if that sounds harsh, I’m trying to be a little harsh, honestly. Like, I want I need to strike an emotional chord. Like, if, again, I’m using Adam, but, like, if Adam is my buyer and I’m using a LinkedIn ad, I gotta stop the scroll. I can’t be too nice and too vanilla. I gotta say something a little out there to get his attention. And then, of course, like, we’ve kind of been talking about it’s about about the execution on it. I think you just described the stage based campaign, by the way. Yeah. But you really did. I mean, you talked about driving awareness. You talked about driving upsell and adoption within specific customers, cross sell into different product lines. I mean, that’s what it is. Right? The from to. So without saying it, you actually are kind of meeting that customer where they are and driving a recommended action from it. It’s very validating Yeah. Honestly. And this might even sound almost discrediting. I adopted customer marketing, not full life cycle marketing. We’ve actually decoupled those, so it’s a little bit different. But I adopted that mid last year. I’ve openly told our CMO I’ve never done this before, and I don’t really know how and candidly didn’t have it on my, like, to do list. But I go back to the copywriting fundamentals, which is it’s your audience, it’s your offer, and it’s your copy. So it’s who, what, and how, which I know is, like, the most simple things, but you can apply that stuff. And that’s what I learned. Again, I think it’s benefited me in some ways and maybe not in others, like, not coming up the ranks the normal way or studying marketing much. Like, I studied copywriting and behavioral psychology and not even a lot, just enough to get the basics. And I really feel to your point, Sam, like, you can just apply that to any part of marketing and go, do I know the person? Do I understand the offer? And then can I evoke emotion and do some of the stuff we’ve been talking about? So thanks for validating me. You gave me some confidence today that I actually know what I’m talking about a little bit. Bit. There you go. I’m gonna ask the Simon question. Sorry. K. Measurement. This is always what’s the ROI of content? Or you wrote this blog post, and how many dollars is equal, and all that. How do you think about it? Because again, there’s that very you did this, it had to equal y. And there are certainly examples of content where there is x equals y, but there’s a lot of cases where it isn’t. So like, how do you approach that both from up executive leadership? And I think being where you are kind of in the you’ve become this sort of not only just leader, but, you know, thought leader across the industry and so forth. You’ve got some credibility, obviously. So I think that’s probably an easier sell than you, but putting yourself in the seat of another content marketer maybe and saying, like, how do I show ROI? How do I measure it? But how do I also make room for what’s not gonna be, hey. We did x and we got y? Yeah. There’s a couple things. So one is understanding that there is success metrics for marketing. That’s your engagement. That’s everything from audience growth to impressions on LinkedIn. That’s our channel of choice. Right? To how many downloads. And then maybe, like, through MQLs probably. So that’s, like, marketing speak. And getting an understanding of why. So I teach this to my team. Every direct on my team, I should be able to, at any point in time, and the CEO too, point at something you’re doing and go, why are we doing that? And if you can’t answer it, then we probably shouldn’t or maybe I’ve missed my mark as a coach. But it should be because we’re trying to grow our audience and we have an audience growth strategy because we know if we create raving fans in the market, they consume our content. They’ll be interested in our product. We’re just going down the funnel here. And so you just need to be able to understand why and be able to speak and own your metrics. We We do a monthly metrics meeting with my team, whether you’re a specialist or a lead, and everyone has their own domain. So I wanna know downloads, everything. But when you get to senior leadership and you’re presenting back metrics, that’s cool. That’s nice. But what about pipeline dev? That’s really what people care about. And so, like you said, some stuff is one input led to x output, but that’s pretty much like what SEO, paid ads, maybe ABM. I’m already starting to reach for trials. Like, there’s really not a lot of linearity. And so what I like to look for is not just attribution. We make up our own attribution models. It’s kind of BS in my honest opinion. I don’t mean to be that’s maybe that’s my bold POV. But it’s like, once I learned in marketing, we just decide what a content download is worth and what an MQL is, it’s kind of BS, honestly. Like, you can fake it. And so I try to look at, did website traffic increase that week of a launch or that day of a silly video, whatever? Did we get more inbound hand raisers? And are we actually sourcing pipeline where the attribution model is nice to see whether it’s the first or last touch. Did you engage with a piece of content and then become an a real sales opportunity? I’ll take that with that little tilde in front of it, like, about four million in pipeline because we know it’s not perfect. So I like to kinda delineate the marketing metrics from the business metrics. And the way that I align all this when I’m planning is just starting with the CEO slide. Every CEO has three to five strategic goals for the year. It’s usually double revenue or these days increase revenue at all, please. And then launch a big product, launching a new geo, right, that sort of stuff. And so I just start there, and then I align all of our programs and metrics accordingly. So, again, we can always go back to the CEO and go, we we launched a podcast because we wanna dominate the category. We’d launched this webinar series because we wanna champion rev ops and drive pipeline. Question. I mean, you’ve had a unique journey to where you are now. For a content marketer that’s just getting started or getting content, going at a new company, what is your advice? Where do they start? Oh, this is a fun one. So you have two options. You’re either going to optimize something that exists, or you’re gonna build something that’s brand new. Now the fastest path is optimize something that’s already existing. Right? And it could be anything. Now Now if you’re starting with absolutely nothing, then obviously you have to build. I’ve given this advice to a lot of content marketers and leaders that started a company, like, where should I focus first? Optimize something and get a quick win. I think that’s the biggest thing. Within first ninety days, can you stand up something? And I mean optimize or continue something that’s already going. And that buys you time for the bigger build, the restructuring, or the new processes, the new strategy. We’d all love ninety days to build that strategy deck, but we know we don’t really get ninety days. Right? It’s like, welcome, Adam. You get four hours for a listening tour. I want the strategy deck by Friday. We’re gonna beat it up. So you had to provide some results quick. And in my experience, results speaks volumes and better than anything. And that’s my sales background. Like, hitting quotas, that’s all you have to do. That’s what matters most. So in marketing, I don’t really see how it’s any different. Like, you need to put up results. You need to put up numbers on the dashboard. And that gives you trust and credibility that gives you a longer leash that allows you to pitch a podcast, pitch an executive dinner series, like, whatever that thing is. And, also, when you have that mastery of the metrics that we just talked about and you can say, you know, if I can come to you, Simon, and say, hey. Here’s why I want four hundred thousand dollars this quarter, and here’s how I’m gonna spend it, but here’s how it aligns to our marketing and business goals. I have to imagine, Simon, that would be at least a more cognitively challenging and enjoyable conversation for you because we’re having an elevated conversation and not a, should we do LinkedIn or should we do a podcast, which is semi strategic on a good day. Yeah. In our prep for this, I actually didn’t throw this out to you. So I think this will come out you out of nowhere. But this is a question that we always ask to all of our guests, which is, what is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever had to do or been asked to do in your career? It doesn’t necessarily have to be ridiculously bad. It could be ridiculously good. We’ve gotten everything from smuggling a hundred Bluetooth speakers across the border to sunsetting a product to a hundred customers in a week, all sorts of fun things. Actually, I guess we’re both negative, but we did get some good ones too. But, like, what’s what anything that comes to mind for you? Well, I think the word ridiculous kind of goes towards negative. Like Crazy. Imagine that I could say. Yeah. Lacky. That’s ridiculous in a good way. I’m like, wait. What? I mean, when’s this, like, a Devin hot take, and one was kind of a silly idea that meant well. So I don’t know. I’ll kick them over to you, and you can tell me. So one was the Gong Labs. Again, it was data driven research for salespeople, looked at everything from how to cold call to how to close deals. The craziest thing I did was looking at how does cursing impact win rates. Oh, and how does it cost? Lot of people it was positive, actually. It doesn’t hurt. I’m not surprised. It had a positive correlation, but the key I don’t think everyone read it to the bottom of the blog was the main metric was actually if the prospect curses first and then the salesperson does, that had the best again, eight per I think it was eight percent increase in win rates and, again, correlation. Either people ignored that last part or didn’t read that last part and just, like, some people roasted me, like, can’t believe you think saying an f bomb is gonna close a deal with the CEO. And, well, candidly, it has for me, but you have to know the nuance, which is your buyer opening the door and shows mirroring and trust and all that stuff. So that was probably the craziest thing I’ve ever published because even years later, sales reps will get on the phone with me and be like, hey, Devin. How the you doing? And then this big smile like, See, I read your thing. And I’m like, not all the way, though. Not all the way. This may be silly or ridiculous idea that stemmed from that, I won’t say who at the company suggested it, what was like, hey, since cursing worked really well, like, what are some other social norms we could research? And, like, what about if we looked at, like, how salespeople lie on sales calls? And I was like, we will kill ourselves. Like, that is brand destruction because right or wrong, we’re saying salespeople lie and calling them out. So I was like, let’s put that one in the never pile. I don’t think that one will help. Good, Carl. And I’d say the last, like, if you were truly to say, what is a ridiculous marketing strategy in b two b today, I’d say it’s like the corporate blog or, like, trusting it to be a revenue or pipeline driver. There’s that and I’m not talking SEO. You know, SEO has its place, and I know we have to say our corporate announcements there. But, like, I’ve I’ve talked to and been a part of some real conversations of, like, we need to drive pipeline dev. Let’s do twenty more blogs a month. And I’m like, that’s literally not how anyone buys or consumes content today. Yeah. I mean, you took that in great direction. So thank you, and I apologize for the surprise. But it actually makes it more fun when it’s a surprise. I know it’s a surprise. Yeah. So Yeah. I was so excited to do this with you today, and you did not disappoint. So thank you so much. You. I really appreciate you joining us. I know I took a lot of it. I’ll be watching this recording and taking some notes. So really, really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Devin. Yeah. Thank you for having me, and thanks for letting me flip it on you a little bit because I was like, hey. I get to learn from some pros too. I don’t know how much you put the mic on yourself to answer the questions, but I’m sure people would love to hear. Yeah. Yeah. So that was great. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.