Video: Data-Driven Content: From Engagement to Sales Intelligence | Duration: 2772s | Summary: Data-Driven Content: From Engagement to Sales Intelligence

Transcript for "Data-Driven Content: From Engagement to Sales Intelligence": I talked a while ago with, was it Adam and was it Dale or I can't remember, but it's good to reconnect. Well, we'll have fun, Ariana. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. And we live? Are we live? I don't know. Is it gonna tell us when we're live? I believe we are, but I think the timer ran out. So hi, everyone. Hi, Emily. You're listening to all our back chatter. I appreciate the heads up. Hi, everybody. My name is Theresa Anderson. I am here with 2 of the smartest people I know to talk about one of the biggest sticking points inside of your go to market team right now, which is the disconnect between content and sales. And I could not have asked for 2 better partners in this. I have with me Ariana and Jake. I'm gonna turn it over to each of them to talk about themselves and their amazing companies and the point of view that they're gonna bring to our topic today, and then we're gonna jump right into it. So, Ariana, can you kick it off? Tell everybody about yourself and then a little bit about sales intel. Yeah. So hi, everyone. Ariana Shannon here, director of brand marketing at Sales Intel, dialing in from the extremely hot and humid Tennessee today. It's been very hot, but it's been good. My dog is loving this right now. I, as a person who spent my entire career in startups and doing bootstrap things and things that are very scrappy, understand how to create content on a budget or create content as a team of 1. So when you're trying to create content at scale and create content that resonates with people, it's so important. And that's why now what I do at Sales Intel, which is all about making sure that you find the right accounts, the right, contacts within those accounts, that you get the right signals, and that all of that information is kept up to date for you. You don't have to do it yourself. I can kinda drink my own champagne and say, great. This is my audience. This is who I should be sending this particular message to and when. So that's that's the perspective that I'll be able to provide here. And, you guys will get to hear a lot more of my hot takes moving on. So I'll I'll pass the mic back to you. Okay. And that was that was fantastic. I think a lot of people on the chat here in the in the in the in the audience today can can identify with being a content team of 1. I think that's a very common situation that companies find themselves in. I'm gonna pass it over to Jake. Jake's gonna bring the sales heat today. I'm so glad you're here, Jake. Tell us you tell us all about it. Yeah. I I guess that means, like, I'm representing, like, the dark side. Right? I I don't know. We both we both have the 4 stones, so that's important. Right? That's the that's the key. So I'm Jake Rennie, the cofounder of Revenue Reimagined, and, we we help early stage founders, really identify go to market gaps and and driving from the founder led sales motions into the phases of product market fit to go to market fit and and scaling through each one of those processes and understanding what's required to actually get out of these critical stages to drive a a smooth go to market machine, in their organizations. I have 2 amazing partners, Adam Jay and Dale Zisinski. Love what I do. Spent a lot of time in my career, early stage start ups, either scaling upmarket, downmarket, or bringing new products to market, and it's something I absolutely love and have decided as a recovering CRO to go out and and do this, with with my 2 partners full time, and it's just been an incredible journey. So I'll bring all of of my experiences. Not sure what's wisdom and and what's just opinion, but at the end, I'll swear I'll share as objectively as I can. Good. And, Jake, I have learned that when your mouth is moving, I'm paying attention because you do bring such a great perspective, and it's so needed. I think somebody said it's the dark side, but the needed side about sales and revenue. And I think that's true, and I think it's a good balancing force, as we're speaking of the force for marketing to have that sales voice. So I'm excited to have you and your years of wisdom and perspective here. My name's Teresa. I'm working with the Juice doing some con doing some content and and and support around the idea of, marketing and content. I am a long time content person. I'm a big fan of the content manager. I think it's an undervalued role across the board. And so the idea here is that we if we can connect what content does to sales, I think a lot I think if we can tell that story better in our orgs, we'll get more, attention. So I think this is a great conversation. We're gonna draw a nice, clean, straight line between content and sales today and revenue. So let's, launch the deck. Jake is on, another Jake is on as our producer today, so we appreciate him and his support today. Jake, if you can throw up the slides, we're gonna jump into this and we're gonna kind of start with the state of, things today. So basically, we have a lot of we have a lot of content sales conundrum going on. There's a lot of disconnect between these two teams that should be aligned a 100% aligned. So how many of you and and I wanna hear the sales point of use, especially on this Wednesday. Content side, sales complaints that we don't create what they want. They can't find anything. They never use it properly. Now those are my complaints from the content and marketing side. What's the content disconnect on the sales side, Jake, specifically? Like, what's the sales team saying about the content? Well, first of all, you're right. The sales is saying all that stuff. And I can't defend them Because because the the reality is, well, let's just meet in the middle, right? I think the biggest challenge for a lot of sellers is that they feel like the comments have been created by the marketing team has been, without any input, has been without their insight, and it oftentimes, the argument is like, this feels too marketing, and this doesn't really align with the story that I'm telling today, and this isn't really the way I sell. And I think the the biggest symptom of sellers Frankensteining their own content is actually because they don't feel like they're a part of the creation of it in the first place, where where marketers are feeling, you know, from the conversations I typically get to be a part of are feeling just exhausted from, hey. We created you this and then we created you that, and this is this is request number 13 for this, something similar along the lines of x. Why haven't you used these other 13 assets? Like, I don't even see them getting any play, and and yet we're missing an opportunity to have the actual conversation of itself. So if if I could just get to the point of of how we start solving for this, we need to actually start having sales and marketing and those who are actually having the conversations with the front line, with the buyer, communicate together on what's the story that needs to be told from the marketing's perspective and how the buyer actually engages and understands that story based on the experience from the seller. I see you nodding your head, Arianna. And I I have to say, like, you've taken, you've knocked it out of the park and I appreciate your honesty and transparency here. The reality is, is we have no frontline feedback loop. So content's operating in a vacuum and, and the content team is operating in a vacuum. And like you said, there's that disconnect between what the prospect actually, the questions they're asking during the calls. And we're also getting but, on the frustration side, we're getting a bunch of suggestions from sales that aren't validated. One guy needed something. I'm not writing a case study, taking 30 hours to run a case study for one use case, for one industry, for one call that you had. You see what I'm saying? Which is where data comes in. So, Ariane, I'm hoping you're gonna have some solutions here around how data can help us with this, but this is the state of the union. Yeah. I mean and when it comes to really understanding what your team is using, that that's really the challenge. Because a lot of the times, the disconnect just starts with I, the sales team, don't know what we have or I, the marketer, have not communicated that more effectively. And granted, there's a million tools out there that help with this, like the internal content communication to your team, but nothing beats a close relationship with your sales teams leaders. Because where do the salespeople go when they have questions all the time? Your sales leaders. So if you can enable your sales leaders, that will help the teams by proxy because it also isn't fair to ask the marketer to have a relationship with every single seller. Y'all outnumber us very significantly at most most organizations. There's always gonna be a larger sales team, so it it gets more difficult. But in terms of, like, the data of what you're looking for, when it comes to the content that we're creating, what I found is that any piece that's created by marketing typically is at that higher level. So you're trying to do that awareness component. But what you need from the sales team is someone that's a little further in their journey. So being mindful when you're creating a sales asset, it's because there's already been a conversation. There's already been this deeper dive. You need something that's a bit more deep into what you're talking about and the specific positioning of that content. And those pieces will get used more and perform better. Yeah. A 100%, Ariane. I I think that's the dream state that we all wanna get to. And what is going what is going to be the future state if we can get this right? Like what's at stake. And the reality is, is that we already know that what is it? You know, upwards of 70% of the sales journey is happening before they ever reach out to sales. So they're consuming content before they ever get to sales. So that content has the power to not only pull them in. There's on our demand gen folks that are pulling content, pulling people through the funnel to get them to sales, but it also can let's it also can help sales people qualify. I think that's another missing component to people's understanding. Content can actually help a salesperson know, hey. This guy is really ready because he downloaded, this comparison between me and my top competitor. And I know when he downloads that, he's ready to go. He's ready for me to to talk to him. Right? So there's there's a lot that can that can be gained from this close alliance and us getting this right. So one of the best ways that I have found to do that when we're talking about data is looking at the first party data you already have in your org. Right? You already have a ton of first party data that'll let you know what your person wants to consume and when they want to consume it. And I wanna hear, like, the idea here is that there is internal research and external research. And I have found that content managers are really good at SEO and keyword search. Right? They've been living there for a while and they do a lot of that. But what they don't do as much of is the first party data, the CRM, their own website, their own product utilization, which can tell you a lot about what your customers want to to to consume and then that allows you to personalize. So, Jake, you're personalizing, content as a sale, like messaging as a salesperson. Does the content so if I guess the can tell you, hey. Our top people respond to these 8 pieces of content. Does that make it easier for you to do your job? If I know with with actual data that this is what's happening inside of our own CRM, inside of our own product, how does that affect you as a salesperson? Is that good for you? Does that help you? Well, I mean, absolutely. The the every seller is if they're a good seller and if they like to get a paycheck, I should preface it there. They're they're they're gonna pay attention to data. Right? Like, the the the key things that I think is so interesting amongst sales is, like, until there's actual clear direction and clear insight on on what's working, what's not working, what's gonna happen is, like, reps are gonna start whispering on the sales floor. What what's working for you? What are you doing? Right. And and and and sometimes it's actually this actually hurts, because a lot of what I call a lot of sales reps, you know, accelerate the suck on the floor as much as they accelerate what's working as well because they're just sharing ideas until we have the data, and then all of a sudden reps start seeing, okay. This is working consistently. If I use this asset at this stage or at this point in the conversation, you know, my peers are increasing their close rates by 15% or they're they're they're exceed they, you know, they're increasing their their conversion rate at this stage or they're accelerating their sales cycle. And so if you can provide that kind of data and that insight to sellers, they will absolutely be inclined to utilize, those pieces of content because oftentimes sellers are not really clear what should I use and when. And that's that's the big challenge is that that now that they have lots of content, the key thing is when do I use this and how do I use this and what's the right context to use it? Yeah. A 100%. A 100%. The vacuum kills us all. The vacuum kills us all. And, and the vacuum from sales that we're not getting that information from sales, But if sales isn't getting that information from us, that's also going to kill us. I'd like to hear like this is to me every single time I research my first party data, my own misconceptions and misunderstandings are usually I walk away with my tail. I could I would bet my life on some belief about the customer, and I go into the data and I'm wrong. This a 100%. You too, Ariana? Does that happen to you now? Yeah. I mean, a little bit. There's and it goes back to this concept of what you're talking about of looking at your first party data and really being aware of that from a content creator. I'll give you an example of that. A long time ago at Sales Intel, we were creating a blog for our tool, our Chrome tool that we have. And we're like, great. This is we're getting so much traffic. We're getting so much so many conversions. Oh my goodness. Yes. Pat on our back. This is fantastic. Later, we, we closed that loop. We went back to sales, and sales was like, hey. What's up with this? Could you not do that? Can you not create these kinds of, blogs anymore? Because all of the people that are coming through, they're interested, but they're just not ready yet. Yet. They're they're not they're coming too soon or, like, the deal the deal size was too small. It was a lot of individuals. So then you can understand the changes that happen and what your team is actually asking for versus what you're passing to them. And especially when it comes to your first party data that you have, whether that's coming through people that are visiting your website, if you're using any kind of, g two reviews or anything else that can give you that signal and help paint that picture, it all comes together of, okay, where is this person? How will where are they, and what message is most gonna be most impactful to them at that time? Right. And I don't think any competitor research, any external research can take the place of that of that first party knowledge. Yeah. I wanna add one other thought here too. Like, you know, it's one of the bullets, but it's it's such a key component. I I think it's skipped often because I think marketing teams and sales alone, alike, don't necessarily know how to do this, but interactive content is such an underutilized, medium. And and and and that's because I think we're so used to static content being the norm that it's just our go to. Let's just create a linear static PDF and, you know, share it out. But the reality is that's not the way that people consume. I I, you know, I've I've actually, upgraded so much data, especially when I was at a company called Tile and understood, like, the way we normally interact as humans is is like no conversation is linear. Right? It's every conversation is a choose your own adventure, and then why can't content be that way? Why can't we why can't we create interactive immersive experiences in the content itself that allow buyers to actually go down a journey that is relevant to what they care about? Why can't they select the path that they take, or why can't they engage or interact with with, elements of the contact the content as they're reading it because it it will create more engagement. So I I think we also need to be thinking about what are other ways that we can create better immersive and interactive experiences and guess what, like, a natural consequence of that is gaining more data on on the individual. Right? Yeah. A 100%. Like, the I think we have a stat in here. And all these stats, the guys are gonna get a copy of this deck, and they're all the stats are linked so you can go and check on them. But, I think I think there's 2 things in what you've said. I think, a, the type of content you create and matching it up to what the person wants when they want it is huge. And I think that the content itself being interactive is huge. But I think it's also a very important realization for sales and for content that people do not consume in a nice clean line. Right. But, you know, like, the the the idea of how I personally want to bring in the process that I'm gonna go through, the content I'm gonna consume on my buying journey is chaotic. It's search I might go back to something, come up forward, skip ahead, share it with a friend. I I think that also too we need to realize that and and not only things to be interactive, it needs to be dynamic enough that people can And especially with the rise of the self direct buyers, that was a topic that I know that we had explored earlier. It's, oh goodness. Like, when someone asks you your favorite movie and the stat just pops out of your head, a large number of b to b sellers are more confident of just following a self guided path than actually talking to a salesperson. So there's a rise and a desire for self directed and for PLG, but you're still gonna need that sales component as it goes through. So it's how are you creating your content to address the people that aren't ready to communicate with you. So your hand raisers are no longer people that are just interested in wanting to learn more about you and kinda get their questions answered. The hand raisers are people that are saying, okay. I'm ready to be making a decision at this point, and this is how content impacts your funnel and how it's changed. When you've got all of your market that's up here, when you've got, like, your and I love the slide that we have for this. When you've got the 90% of your market, which is anyone in your ICP or your ideal customer profile that you should be talking about, Only about 5% 10 5 to 10% of that market is actually ready to have any kind of purchasing position with you. What we're seeing is previously, and this is even, like, within the last year, everybody, the decision and action phase is where we saw this kind of intent coming through. So people that were ready to make a decision or ready to purchase, and they were starting to reach out and to look for things, that's when you would be able to reach out to people. Now with the change in buyer behavior, this is how it's also been impacting our content. Because now we have to reach out to people in this, higher side of this funnel where they're actually doing they're, like, they're becoming problem aware, and they're starting to get some interest in solutions. If you're not a part of the conversation or a part of their research at that time, then you're playing catch up by the time you get to the 3rd party side of this, when people are saying, yes. I'm actually looking for your intent. Sorry if I kinda took us ahead there, but I saw a pop That's perfect. Slide. No. No. That's perfect. And that and that is, you know, the the big deal here between sales and content. What sales and, Jake, I love your take on this. I think that a lot of times sales think that content's a nice to have. And if they could see this slide and if they could realize that this journey is happening for the most part, the bulk of the journey is happening through content before it ever gets to them. I feel like it would change their mind about content. But, Jake, what do you think? Is is that your perception too that that salespeople think that content's kind of just a nice to have thing, not critical? Yes. Because it is. But let me let me let me infratches that. It's because conversation is the needs to have, not and and content does not equal conversation, but context equals conversation. So if you have content that allows you to gather context, then you can have conversation. And I think that's the key piece here is that content is the catalyst that helps us drive context and get conversational value. Now the reason why sellers feel that is because they don't know how to translate the content into a real conversation, and that's the thing that I spent a lot of time with my sellers on. And in fact, like, you know, Challenger oh, Challenger team did some really awesome research around this during the time that they were at Gartner. And and what they we they talked about was, like, the the sense maker rep, right, and the importance of the sense maker rep in today's sales environment. And that's the because there's so much noise out there and because there's so much relevant content out there and because there's so much thought leadership value in the content that's being created today more than ever, it's really hard for our buyers to actually navigate this journey with all the content. And it's hard to know what content is is reliable and what's not because it all seems very, very, very reliable. And so sellers today, what they need to do is actually help their buyers navigate and make sense of the content in a way that actually, helps them draw type back to what's matters to them. And and the key piece of that is they talk about in this in this data is that sellers who who present and and pitch alone without content, underperform against sellers who pitch and present with I'm sorry. Let me let me correct this. Sellers who pitch with a a a asset alone underperform in comparison to sellers who have conversation without an asset. So conversation outperforms content. However, the key to this is what they found is sellers who use a awesome polished image or a a a clean, you know, piece of content and are capable of driving conversation and and at the same time with that content outperform both. And so that's the key here is that if you are leaning on content to drive the experience for your buyer, you're losing. But if you're leaning on content to help you drive conversation, then you're winning. So I have a controversial hot take here, Jake. So I feel like and this is just me, how I prefer to consume content in the buying process and maybe somebody else have another thought and opinion. I'm a dataset of 1. But I feel like good content is somewhat conversational. It's answering my questions as I have it. Not that I don't need to wrap that all up with an actual person to person conversation. That's great too. But I do feel like there's a lot of the idea is is to create a content conversation that's happening with your buyer that's answering your their questions as they have it to tee them up for that conversation with sales. And I and maybe that's a nuance, but, I do feel like content can be part of the conversation. Absolutely. And then and then in the end, that's what I'm saying. Like, content actually needs to be part of the conversation, but the keyword here is conversation. Okay. Great. I love that. That's a awesome. And so I think we have the slide up now where we're talking about the kind of you teed it up perfectly, Jake, about what's at stake, why this matters so much, how it can be, how the accuracy of how we are personalizing and creating content using first party data and making it as targeted as possible, how it can actually help the conversion process, how that data that we gather can turn into better content, which leads to better conversions. Ariana, you had an example when we have talked about this before, and I the note that I have in here is video and call connection. If you wanna explain that how how the data helped them, improve the content and then improve the conversions? Yeah. So these are actually 22 different stories, but I'll start with, the video explanation. So we had a customer of ours through Sunday Sky. They were creating a ABM video campaign. So they're trying to reach out to their entire ICP using video as their primary media. Again, touching back on the engaging content, people that, content that gets people to lean in a bit. What they were able to do is then through leveraging their own information for who they should be talking to within their ICP and pulling in that intent data, they were able to increase their engagement rate by 220%. So if they have people coming through, that's the right content to the right audience. Right. And, again, that's reaching up into the funnel to deliver it to sales, so that that does come at a higher level. I realized that we are talking about content for sales. But for me, content, when I'm creating it as a marketer, it should be to create signals that ultimately get to sales so that they can have this conversation. And that's where you see that that happen, and that works really well. And that leads into the second example of another, organization. They're a, BDR, as a service, organization. They do a lot of amazing things. They, took our data. They were gonna be doing a lot of cold calls, and they were reaching out to a very specific audience. When you have the right information and you know who you should be reaching out to, they brought in their own scripts. They knew exactly what they should be saying to this person at the right time. Their call connection rate increased. I think they had, like, a 30% connection rate, from that very first test that they had done with us. So, again, when you are making the right message and to Jake's point, the simplest message, which I think is also where we get confused. Because when we say, oh, we need sales content, that doesn't necessarily mean that we need more. We need simpler. We need better. We need things that are more direct to the answer to the primary question at that time. And creating simplified content is one of the most difficult things that you can do. It's, there's a quote out there saying I if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter. You you can be able to distill this down into what's the most important message and the most important delivery system to ultimately generate those conversations that you wanna have. Yes. That was Twain. Awesome. That's fantastic. And, and I think that I think that was it, I think it was Einstein. It's like, if you if you you don't understand it well enough, you can't explain it simply or you yeah. You know what I mean? Like, you have to really know something. And like you said, be really drilled down to say it's simple and simple at best. I also think that that kinda leads the idea too where we're talking about this, and I think we're gonna go into it in some of the next slides. But if there has to be an open feedback feedback loop between content and sales, partially because content needs to explain that message to sales. So you create this beautiful simple content piece that's meant to solve a very specific problem that you've seen in the data that that that your audience wants to learn about. Mhmm. And then you release that content and the sales team has no idea how to use it for that purpose or even that it's was made for that purpose. You know what I mean? So I I think that that education or that feedback loop is also an important part of the content thing. You can't just make the content and leave it and throw up your hands and say, okay. Now it's up to sales. Right? Yeah. I mean and this is, sorry, Jake. Go ahead. No. Please. Please. I I'm I'm agreeing and thinking, so let me cook. You you keep going. Okay. Okay. So so you keep simmering over there and jumping when you've got it. But for me, this also touches on, there's content for different purposes. A lot of, I think, what we've been talking about is content to be used by sales to your customer and to your prospect, but there's another part of this which is the enablement, The the enablement of the content that you have. And, Jake, I love when you said, a sales professional that doesn't have a lot of slides and different things to have. They're they're very confident in their talk track. They're having a conversation. They've reached you at that point. So the enablement content of all of the information of your teaching or seller is different from what you would actually have that sent to the client. And if you're having if you're sending the same thing through enablement and to your client, then you're probably providing too much detail, where it's not clear enough. So being able to very clearly say, hey. This is an image that could be really impactful to you for what you should be sending, or this is the campaign that we have been running with this particular message to drive awareness for you. Now they're ready. Now they're ready to have a conversation. This is where you should be pulling them into. Yeah. A 100%. And you know what? I'm gonna say, like, we move to the next slide, so we kinda, like, show that in real life. Like, this slide is really great for that because it shows that at the different stages of the funnel, they're they're probably consuming different stuff. And this is an example. You would want to do this thought exercise for yourself as a content manager and as a and and and absolutely with the input of sales. This right here, creating this for your org, should be a joint project. What are they consuming when? Our people. Not those people. Not their people. Not anybody else. Not our competitors. What are our customers, our prospects? What are they consuming at what stage of the game? And then also that secondary education now, we know what they're consuming at each stage. Sales, do you know how to leverage it at that stage? Do you know how to read the signal that if they're watching this video, they're still in the awareness stage? But if they're downloading this infographic, they're ready for you to reach out to them on LinkedIn. It's a good question, and I'll answer, but I have a thought, but I wanna get too fast. Like like a politician, let me answer my own question. Actually, because it's something Paul said earlier that got me thinking. Right? Like, simplicity, it comes when we when we understand something so well and not that we can actually explain it in a very simple way. When and and the key thing here is that we it's it's understanding your customer. It's understanding your buyer. Like, you made a point earlier, Theresa, that buyers are 67% of the way through their buying journey before they ever even reach out to sales. My my guess is that's even further since that data point's come out. Yeah. And and if you're if you're relying on that data piece, if you're doing what most of you, like, traditional marketing organizations are doing, you're actually talking to them when they're at towards the middle bottom of this funnel just like everyone else, and you're competing against all the noise. The key thing here that we're talking about is if you understand the intent and you can get to them in front of them earlier when they're actually going through what's called buyer conflict, and they're experiencing indecision at this point. And they're trying to actually figure out and identify what their real problem is. That's earlier on in the journey. Right? And and and the conflict that they're having internally is what actually is the issue, how do we solve this issue, and I and and if they're self diagnosing and you're talking to them after they self diagnose, that's that's the problem most sellers deal with, and that's why the win rates are so low. But if we can help actually diagnose the problem and prescribe it before everyone else in the world has, that's that's where you win deals. And so the key thing here is, like, understanding how to leverage intent and all this data earlier on when there's awareness and interest and get them to the right place at the right time with relevance, not personalization. And when you have relevance and you have that context, then you can have the simple conversation that we're talking about. So do sellers know how to do this? I don't think they do it well. I think most organizations I've been a part of struggle with this because they're not feeding sellers with relevance and the insight and the information they need to have this level of conversation. So what happens, they they run buyers to the same terrible experience that they've always done. Yeah. Yeah. But I think for most buyers, their experience is it's not a funnel. It's a meat grinder. It just grinds them up. It forces them into conversations they don't wanna have about stuff that isn't relevant to them, but the salesperson is following a script. And this isn't me coming for sales, Jake. But I feel like we even train people into scripts that they're supposed to follow slavishly when it has to be a more dynamic. And, again, it has to reflect the chaos of what individual humans are not linear. They don't think in linear terms. So as a salesperson, you've gotta know this all well enough to follow their chaotic journey through the realization process that you're right for them. Yeah. I please, just really quick. Like, if you're in an organization that's giving scripts to your sellers, you stop right now. Stop. Amen. You you do not do that. And if you wanna argue with me, hit me up. Let's talk about it. But you've gotta teach sellers how to think, not what to think. You gotta teach them frameworks on how to how to be able to navigate conversation and not telling them what they need to say and when and how. That, like, that's the quickest way to take your sellers of greatest ability of being great at what they do away from them and forcing them down a linear path that probably doesn't work for them. So just stop it. Just stop it. It's the worst. And it and it it goes back to something we were just talking about is if you don't know it well enough, you can't explain it simply. So you've got to know, like, your salesperson, this nice little image that we have up here, once you and your sales team create this, content and sales create this together, and they know exactly, you know, where the conversations are happening at which stage, then the sales team has to know this is the second half. The salesperson has to know it well enough to be able to bounce around and follow their sellers' train of thinking. Up and down and back, and they're bringing in new people. Right? Yep. It has to be fluid. And that's where, again, when you try to create these systems, because I like that we have this this graph here where you can say, hey, this is the kind of content that people would be consuming. But as a as a marketer who tried to set it up this way, sellers don't look they don't think like this. If you say, okay. You're in the awareness stage. Here's all the contact information you should send to them in the awareness stage. That didn't work then, and it's definitely not gonna work now. It's creating a system and creating that education within your team to say, these are the pieces that we have. This is how you can find the content that you need if you're looking for a very specific piece. And then anything that is missing is a feedback loop that basically comes through. In a in a in a ideal situation, Jake, and you can tell me if you agree with this or not, but it comes through your leaders. So, like, the sales leaders are aggregating the data that they need for their team. They're communicating with marketing and saying, we've had multiple requests for this. It's causing a pain point in our deals. We need to have this kind of content. We'll get it turned around ASAP. Because that helps alleviate a lot of the one off requests. You now have a team that knows how to fish. You're not just hacking them stuff. The amount of times that you can see in your marketing channel of, do we have this particular kind of case study? Where is a blog on this topic? And then you have to go, oh, go back to go back to this, go back to there. Did you look did you go look for it? Have I taught you how to find the content that you need? And that comes through that education and, again, that that enablement. Because I think, especially me on being on the marketing side, that's where I tend to think a lot of my time of, how can I make this content more accessible? How can I make sure that they have the content that they need when they're going through these conversations that they're having? Well, I'm hot take here maybe, but, sellers don't think like this because buyers don't buy like this. This is the marketer's funnel. This is not the mark this is not the buyer's journey view. And and and so, like, what I what I think marketers could do to help sellers a little bit is is come together and align on flipping this funnel on its side and and looking at it. You know, I love the bow tie. Right? Looking at it from an end to end journey of what does the actual buyer's journey look like? What does the process look like? Because that's the way sellers are thinking. I'm at this stage in the buyer's process. This is the conversation we're having out here. Right? So if if if they understand, what content is best utilized at that stage in the journey, that that helps with that with utilizing the right thing at the right time. Mhmm. But finding it is hard. You're right. Well and I would say that I think that what we're trying to say here I think we're all trying to say the same thing. I think you have to go through this process that's on the screen here to make sure you have the best your best guess at answers for each of these questions. But you also need to be able to move freely within it No. We love the framework. We Okay. Go ahead. It's, what I'm saying is is we have to remember that the framework is it it it applies, but we also have to, like, think about it from the seller's perspective and how do they understand and and internalize the framework to then apply it practically. Right. Yeah. I think we're saying the same thing. I think it's good to have all the it's good to have all our check boxes, you know, check marks. I have content for this question. I have it. I have it. I have it. I have it. And then to your point, Arianna, you keep that feed loop back loop nice and healthy. And that way, the frontline salespeople, when they're having conversations, are taking those insights and pumping them back into the content machine. And I think that is so missing in so many orgs. Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna move on. We're just gonna do a quick recap. We're getting we're actually halfway through our we're more than halfway through our time here. We just wanna recap. We've talked to them. You guys can go back. We're gonna have the deck this deck is available to everybody. A lot of this is hotlinked, so you can go right to the source material. The reality of this deck and the reality of this conversation is if you're not talking to sales and don't have a feedback loop, this is your armament. This or your talking points to go to the head of sales and ask for that feedback loop. Ask for meetings. Ask to be able to listen to sales calls. So this is this deck is gonna help you have that conversation, and the data points here will help you have that conversation. So you should be collecting first party data. There's some ways to do that, some things to look at. We wanna make sure that that our sales intention our sales intelligence, our first party data is reflected in our content so that it can push our conversion rates higher. Oh, and then we had a HubSpot example that we didn't get into yet about, about a real life example of content driving sales. I'm gonna have to share that with everybody after because I don't have that here in this deck. But HubSpot used content to drive sales, and I will share that in in the email that we send out after this for everybody so you guys have that as a as a takeaway. But, obviously, content, driving sales, driving conversions, That story is here. So I want us to go and talk and open it up for questions. If you have any questions, I also want to share on the next slide, we've got some resources. So again, as you're going to have this conversation with your own teams, that you have some stuff that you can go and look at, We have a teaser here for a podcast that's happening. I think it's gonna be released next Thursday on 25th, talking about this exact topic, first party data and content talking about this back thing. We've got an e book and we've got an article, so that you can take a look at all of this in the deck that's available here for you. So that's kind of our recap. That's our resources for additional. I don't know if they have any questions or if you wanna, like, open it up to the audience that, like, throw us any questions. I'm thinking you guys so much doing that. I think this is a a good starting point for us to continue to reinforce these ideas of keeping content and sales as best friends. Jake, is there any chance that we're gonna make content sales best friends? I I think if we don't, we're gonna lose. Right. That is the takeaway. Yep. Agreed a 100%. I saw a thing that actually I'll I'll say this too. Day 1 consideration set. So this is this is a concept that was a real light bulb moment for me. The whole point of what we're doing with content and marketing and staying top of mind in that funnel with our audience is so that when they are ready to look for a solution, we're part of their day one consideration sets. Right? The first 2 or 3 things that come to mind to reach out to. Right? And I think if we think of the job of content and marketing to help us be that day one consideration set, I think that I I don't know, but I hope that that's a message that the sales team could see value in. Absolutely. Yeah. No. And sales definitely sees value in that, but, ultimately, it's up to marketing. Well, I say up to marketing. We're in charge of that kind of message, but the pipeline is definitely a team sport across the whole org. But when it comes to being are we a day one solution, that's the difference between what we have been talking about, which is capturing that demand and moving people through the journey and having conversations. That takes us back up to the other 90% that we mentioned, and that's building brand. That's creating that awareness and having the content that helps educate people on not only who you are, but what you actually do. What is it that your message is consistently around? What is it that is is very simple for me to understand? And, also, just to be a bit try to drill down on that a bit more. When we say be simple, that a lot of people think that means I need to take this down to, like, my core idea. Sometimes being simple is just reevaluating your headline or your subject line and using as simple of words as possible. If you're trying to be simple and you're throwing in all of these buzzwords, that just washes over people's heads because everyone's using the same words. Like, I'll even call out the data space that I'm in. For a long time, like, everyone was saying, oh, we have the best data. Okay. You gotta test it to know for yourself. If everyone is saying that, then it doesn't have as much meaning. That's where you have to come out and be like, no. We actually are providing data in this way, or we, have more customer service, or you're finding a different angle to present yourself. And so when people think of that problem, when you're in that 90% bucket, in that brand building bucket to be a day 1 consideration solution, it all comes together to making sure that you're present and that you're in top of people's minds. A 100%. I love that as I love that as a takeaway. You Jake, do you have a final thought on this? Like, anything you wanna say to contact your peers or your sales peers, like, as a final closing statement on on on on this alliance between the 2? You you know, I think the the the big thing is, like like, I almost wanna, like, move past the alliance conversation. You know? Like, the the if we're not if we're not there, then you're, like, you're 5 years behind. And and, like, we we talked about sales and marketing alliance, you know, 5, 10 years ago. If you're not already sitting in a room together with marketing and sales as a team, like, to to, like so we'll put here to team support. If you're not sitting together and and actually talking about go to market and buyer alignment, that's the problem. Right? So what I I guess my takeaway is you you typically don't have most of the clients I deal with, it's not a sales problem they're dealing with. It's not a marketing problem they're dealing with, and it's not typically a product problem they're dealing with. It's a go to market problem that they're dealing with. And what like, the way we solve this is to make sure that we're sitting down together and having the right conversations to understand what the buyer journey is experiencing and how do we solve for them. Like, forget about the finger pointing and who's not doing their jobs. If if you're stuck there, I'm sorry, but you're go somewhere else or or because you're in the wrong place. It's there are plenty of organizations now that get it, and I'd say just focus on solving the go to market issues as a whole. I love that, Jake. I love that. That's a great that's a great way to, to close out the the whole webinar. It's such a good thought that we do all have to work together. And we're still if we're still fighting at this point, we are. We are 5 years behind. Okay. So I would like to make sure that we keep this conversation going. There's a link in the deck to follow all of our speakers. There is a reminder here that we're gonna try this on the 3rd Tuesday of, of every month, not the 2nd Tuesday. We're gonna be shooting for the 3rd Tuesday of every month at noon. So this has to be updated. And a reminder to sign up at the juice. And again, there's a link in your deck. Any anything else before we close this out and give people their their their day back and give them plenty to think about for, for their for the next time they're meeting with sales, maybe next week? Okay. This was awesome. You guys are great. I appreciate it so much. If there's anything else, please reach out to us on LinkedIn. Download the deck, and, and let's keep this conversation going. Let's keep the dialogue happening. We'll see you next month, on our next webinar. So bye, guys. Thank you so much for everything.