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#37: Brendan Hufford on Structuring the Content Engine
How do you transform a rough patch in your life into an inspiring and thriving career? Join us in this episode as we sit down with Brendan Hufford, a former high school teacher who conquered personal and professional hurdles to become a leading authority in content, SEO, and marketing. Now the founder of Growth Sprints, Brendan discusses how his multifaceted background has shaped his innovative approach to marketing, offering invaluable lessons for revenue leaders in the B2B software and services sector. Don't miss out on Brendan's remarkable journey and the wealth of knowledge he brings to the table.
Our Favorite Brendan's Posts:
is like that's all I needed to know that this was going to work Right. Like when I said the words to a human face to face, they were like oh, like they did that the puppy head tilt that I just did Right. And sometimes that's all you need is, when I say it to you, people like they physically lean in, even if it's virtual Right. All of a sudden you have their attention.
Gary:Right. Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.
Gary:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Ready to rock? All right, let's do it. We are excited, yes, so brendan hufford is here with us and uh, we were just before we hit the go button on record. Um, we're gonna get going here because we we could go on for a while. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I will do your introduction, no service. So, brendan, can you provide us just a background? I mean, what I find unique and curious and I'm sure it's informed a lot of where you are today is content, seo, marketing, a lot of different firms, organizations, places of the last few years especially. So you've seen this content thing from a lot of different angles and I think that's what's gonna be really fascinating here.
Brendan:Can you just kind of talk us through your arc and then how you started growth sprints yeah, so I went to school to be a teacher because we let 18 year olds decide what they want to do with their lives and take on a ton of debt. You know, I mean like I would never give an 18 year old a hundred thousand dollar loan for anything ever.
Brendan:But, we're like, yeah, no, a hundred thousand dollars to make a bet on your career where you're probably not going to use that major. Sure, here you go. But I went to school. I remember I went to. This is going to date me, I'm so old.
Brendan:I was sitting in the cafeteria one of the cafeterias at Ithaca College, and I had a course catalog, if you remember the course like all digital now. I remember when we get to pick our classes online and it was like a big deal. But I had a course catalog which was a giant for those of you who don't know a giant like phone book size thing. That was a printout of all the courses they offered and in that moment, by myself, with no instruction, I decided to become a teacher and be in high school for the rest of my life and I did that for 10 years. I tried to climb that ladder. I have my master's in educational leadership, really, really tried, and I think, looking back, that was an invaluable experience. Right Like I had to look high schoolers you know 20 to 30 high schoolers in the eyes every 45 minutes for 10 years. They'll'll, they'll eat your lunch if you're not ready to go so I'm not a tough crowd everything you see right now is a product of that.
Brendan:but in that career I was rewarded with. You know, I tried to climb that ladder. I was rewarded with uh, an extra 25 pounds around my midsection. Uh, I would argue like some level of depression, a really unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and the only upside was like a push of like I can't do this anymore. I started listening to podcasts about online business. I started some hobby websites, I sold those and I remember it was probably my 10th year of teaching. Remember it was probably my 10th year of teaching.
Brendan:I was sitting in the car and I'm a big dude, I'm 6 1 and pretty big, and I was in a Nissan Versa which, if you know what those are, they're real little. Yeah, I'm sitting in my little car on the phone with my friend in the parking lot during my 20-minute lunch at this high school I was working at and I was like dude, I can't do this anymore, my business isn't taking off, I don't know what to do. And he's like Brendan, why don't you just go work somewhere? And I swear to God, I had never considered that. I had never, because I came up in online marketing, not digital. I like digital marketing, which is what we all do.
Brendan:Online marketing is like a lot of those YouTube pre-rolls about courses on how to make courses and webinars about how to do webinars and podcasts about how to podcast. I came up in that weird world and I had never considered it. That day I went back into the classroom. I was probably not a very good teacher. For the rest of the day I probably filled out 50 applications and by the end of that school year I had a job working at a web design agency, worked there for a couple of years, launched a couple of hundreds of websites for a couple of years, launched a couple of hundreds of websites. Went and worked at another agency that was more focused on B2B, helped that agency reposition, helped it survive through the pandemic all this stuff. Then went in-house, worked at ActiveCampaign for a couple of years and then, just a little bit over two years ago, I went full-time on GrowthFriends.
Brendan:Man that is, and it's so what a ride so right, yeah, well, that's what.
Gary:I say it all at once. That's why, yeah, that's why the, the, that narrative right, Going all the way back to the origin story, if you will. You know, often requires us to go back farther than we think because, like these are cumulative experiences that you don't actually appreciate how they inform your worldview or what you do or how you approach a problem, until you've gone through that. So thank you for sharing. That was really helpful.
Brendan:All right. I would also add like you know how many people told me I was throwing away my teaching career. It's so laughable now like throwing it away. I'm throwing away a $40,000 a year job where I have to work so much and so many like you're not throwing like I have. I firmly believe that, like teachers have such an incredible skillset If they go and do other things later in their career, they're almost like it is the best low paid, uh like internship for literally anything else you want to do in your life.
Gary:Yeah yeah, such a great story, okay, so we've got a few things, so let's so, with growth sprints and we're going to, we're going to unpack some of the things that you've been writing about over the last few years, but what was the? What was the catalyst that had you step into that to say this needs to exist, like and and obviously we're here talking about content, but with the capital C, as we say, in the strategic nature, which you align with very well. So what was that thing? You're like this needs to happen.
Brendan:Well, I was already doing a bunch of consulting on the side. I had launched a. I read Cal Newport's book Be so Good, they Can't Ignore you and I was like, look, I want to become a person that's known in this industry. Like, look, I want to become a person that's known in this industry. I came up in SEO so I knew I wasn't going to outrank Neil Patel or Backlinko or SEMrush or Ahrefs or HubSpot, so I couldn't do SEO about SEO. But I knew I indexed really well like this right. I knew I could out podcast them, I knew I could out YouTube them and I did a hundred day project. I think anybody who wants to get noticed in their industry do a 100-day project For my 100-day project every single weekday for 20 weeks. So five times 20 is 100,. I launched a blog post, a podcast episode and a YouTube video every single day and that got me on so many people's radars. It got me my job offer for my next job.
Brendan:All these cool things happened in my career. But I started making courses and doing a lot of consulting and all this different stuff outside of work and then a lot of things really irked me about the way that the agency was the work that I had worked at, where, like I would get yelled at for churning clients. Every client that churned I got in trouble for and I felt like that was a real ignorant on leadership, to be like we have to retain 100% of people forever. There was no acceptable churn number. It's like maybe we don't need a churn. I remember I was riding home on the train from Chicago back to where I live and I realized that on a long enough timeline all my clients are going to fire me.
Brendan:I'm not going to retain anybody forever and the only way this relationship ends is with you firing me. That sucks. Like can you imagine it? Like I don't. I don't love using the like romantic relationship analogy for marketing a lot, but like can you imagine if every single relationship you're in is going to end with them breaking up with you and there is no hope for a lifetime relationship? Like that would be dystopian, pretty depressing. And I was like maybe if I just worked in sprints, like maybe similar to the web design agency I was working at where we did do retainer for marketing services, but once the website was up, that part was done and we double overhand high five and we part as friends and you love me and you refer work to me and maybe I work with you at your next job.
Brendan:Like that's what I wanted to build and that's where growth sprints came from was like a point of differentiation and positioning, but also like me just wanting to have peace in my life and like wanting to be friends with the people that I worked with.
Gary:Yeah, that's such a. You know, it's interesting that we take the same approach with Yield Group, where we work in these 90 day sprints, because this the reality is, it's long enough to have enough time to be able to actually get a project done or work towards the next phase of the next project, but not so long that you end up with scope creep and ambiguity and it, frankly, it forces discipline because, like, you have an end date, you have this 90 day and everybody signed up for that and we found that to be just a really fantastic for both sides, a fantastic way to work. So okay, so that's growth sprint. So one of the things that caught my eye we talked about before we hit record was your concept of content, ip, intellectual property. So, for context, a lot of times with lower middle market companies, they're, of course, producing content, but we would argue it's content with a little C.
Gary:It's what we described earlier, which is we're looking around out at the world of what other people are producing and in a lot of ways, we're mimicking that because we think, well, this is what marketing is supposed to be right. I'm supposed to have testimonials, I'm supposed to have blog posts, I'm supposed to that. You know the keyword rank. I'm supposed to have emails, I'm supposed to have white papers, I'm supposed to have landing pages, and so we go do this stuff, but today more than ever, because everybody's played that playbook into the ground that that's just not like. We're truly in this attention deficit era because of that. So that's what really got me about the IP concept is it's like how do we get to creating some known standards around what it takes to get to good? So can you unpack the IP framework for us and how you got there?
Brendan:So this is going to be a little bit meta, literally. This morning I got a DM from somebody who is a head of content at a really popular I'm not going to out them, but like a really popular sales tech company If you think of like the most popular sales tech company, it's that one and they messaged me and they sent me a screenshot of somebody from LinkedIn that said, hey, we're hiring for a head of content. And it said right now, we produce 20 blog posts a week, one live workshop every week, 27 emails a week. And it was just a list of volume, no indication about the premise, no indication about resonance. It was just the 2012 hubspot playbook of like, do more, do more, do more. Out volume, everybody. And back then, look like I created and sold two businesses off of 100 organic Facebook reach Back when you could post something and everybody saw it.
Tiana:Yeah.
Brendan:That was great. Those were good times, but it's not 2012 anymore. We don't have 100% reach on social. Seo has gotten harder, it hasn't changed. I hate it when everybody's like SEO. People position themselves as like the algorithm is constantly changing. It's not, it's still content and backlinks. People position themselves as like the algorithm is constantly changing. It's not still content and backlinks. Um. But you know, I I saw people doing that and I still see people doing that like this. The guy who shared it this morning was, uh, jason lemkin from saster, who's great, arguably, like he produces. You know, they produce some really interesting stuff that I like to read, but I can't read all of that. I can't read 20 emails a week. I can't read 20 emails a week. I can't read 20 blog posts and go to your event. It's a volume play.
Brendan:I started calling that checkbox marketing. That was my piece of IP that I developed and I started pushing into content IP because I noticed most of the customers and clients that I work with who are B2B SaaS companies, they all went in really hard into category creation, Like everybody had to create a category. We saw Drift do conversational marketing. We saw what was the other one Was it Gainsight? That went into like customer success.
Gary:We all saw all of that happening and like- I was looking at when Play Bigger was written, cause then everybody read that book and was like, oh yeah, it's a good thing. Yeah, I was looking at when Play Bigger was written, because then everybody read that book and was like, oh yeah, yeah, lockhead.
Brendan:I swear to God, if you can see behind me, I'm still setting up my office. I just moved offices. I have the same thing. I have Niche Down and Play Bigger. We all read the same books and we were like everybody has to have a category. Create a category. Create a category, first of all. Most companies shouldn't. That's super confusing. It's better off saying, hey, this thing that you like buying, we're that, and here's the points of differentiation. Don't create a category.
Brendan:And I was in-house at ActiveCampaign and you're going to realize this over the course of our conversation. So much of what I do comes from me just being pissed off with the status quo. But I was in-house at ActiveCampaign. The value prop of ActiveCampaign was and I would argue still is enterprise grade marketing automation $9 a month that's the value prop and it's an awesome one. They were the first ones that have visual email builders or you could like spider web automations out and everything. They started that and then, when I was there, they tried to become customer experience automation what Nobody's asking for customer experience automation. It confused the market and revenue started to flatline. There was no growth. We were working harder than ever. We were doing more checkbox marketing than ever before. Nothing was growing and that was one of the biggest reasons we tried to create a category and I was like, well, what if, instead of creating a fancy name for our solution, we create a name for the problem that we're all experiencing?
Brendan:And I looked my friend, kurt Woodward from Zoom Info. He has a journalism background. I'm such a big believer that a lot of journalists are great marketers, specifically content marketers. He was like, hey, have you ever heard of a conceptual scoop? And I was like, no, what's a conceptual scoop? He's like, well, you have, you just don't know what's called that in journalism. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, have you ever heard of quiet, quitting or the great resignation that was people noticing, journalists noticing like a concept, a trend was happening, a thing was happening and instead of doing like other journalism where it's like we're going to get like a behind the scenes scoop and we're going to publish information you can't find anywhere else, it's a kind of a different type of journalism where it's's like we're just going to name a thing that we're all experiencing and once we have a name for everybody goes, that's it, that's the thing. We're quiet as soon as I heard the great resit first of all. That's just like those are both like chef's kiss the best copywriting you've ever heard but like the great resignation. We were all like, yeah, no, that is happening. And the same thing with quiet quitting. We were like, yeah, that is happening.
Brendan:When you give words to the problems people have, that they can describe long-form right. Like we all had that, like on, we, we all had that like frustration in our careers during that time. All of a sudden we had words for it. We were like, whoever gave us those words, we trust them a hundred times more than everybody else. And the same is true in a company. If your customers, your ICP, your audience is struggling with something and you're like, oh, yeah, we call it this, they're like, thank you, thank you, I didn't have, I could give you a paragraph about it. I can give you a paragraph about it. I can give you a. I can write you a book about this stuff. But I never had a two to three word phrase of what this was called.
Gary:And now I do so now.
Brendan:I trust you to solve it for me.
Gary:Yeah, it's interesting. That's so interesting Cause, as you said, that you think about, you know immediately race to live situations, um, with which we're working on the clients and it the the like, take quiet, quitting as an example. It really is the culmination of a compound set of things that are all happening at the same time that result in this outcome, right, or that that that creates a whole bunch of problems out of it. But it's, it's fascinating how that those two words that that capture both the inputs and the outputs of what's happening at the moment. That's I certainly have heard the name from your previous work on IP about naming the problem. It's like that's an unlock.
Brendan:It absolutely is, and my own piece of IP is exactly what I already mentioned. It's checkbox marketing. Everybody around me was going B2B is boring, b2b is boring, b2b is boring. And I was like, well, why? Why is it boring? And I took a minute. And this is a hard thing for marketers If you are stuck in checkbox marketing, it's hard to get out of it because you don't have time to think about IP and all these other things that have bigger impact. But I was like B2B is boring because we're just checking boxes. We're checking these boxes. We're doing our weekly blog, our monthly webinar, our daily email or whatever. We're checking the boxes, but we're not checking the box that matters most, which is impact. We're still just solely focused on output.
Gary:Yes, okay. So that, then, is the first element of IP, right? Is the naming of the problem. Let's keep going, unpack the okay. We now go through that process of what that looks. First of all, to your point, it takes a lot of work to get to the point where you actually can get in a room and all agree what the problem is and what's causing the problem and what are we going to name it. Like that is not insignificant. So, where you've seen that work, what were the ingredients to make that happen?
Brendan:It was a genuine understanding of their customer. And when I say customer conversations, and when I say customer conversations and when I say customer interviews, people kind of ask like the similar, like jobs to be done, type of questions to people. I think those are valuable. Let's start there. But if you want to push further I learned this from my former boss at ActiveCampaign he's actually back there now Benjamin Elias, to look to.
Brendan:In these interviews, what you do is you don't need more than 10 of them, otherwise you just get like diminishing returns.
Brendan:You talk to people and what you're looking for is pushes, things that push them to make a decision, around what you do, things that pull them to make a decision, habits they have that either they needed to reinforce or they needed to break.
Brendan:And then fears, fears, and you interview these people, you ask this series of questions and then you transcribe it and you go through with a physical highlighter and you highlight all the fears, one color, all the pushes, one color. And then eventually you have this big stat. You know it might just be a stack of papers or whatever, and you're looking at it and all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is the common push, this is the common pull. Here's two different fears that all these people have. Now, all of a sudden, I can start like having a better understanding of what we're actually doing here. That's what I've noticed. The people who win know the problem the best because they either they built this for themselves you know the tool they have or whatever their you know their platform or service or they've done this type of like customer interviewing.
Gary:Right and that I'm sure it's all over the board. Sometimes it's a, you know, an aware founder who is just tapped into the problem and digging through that, you know the case is product market or what have you, but I'm sure it's different by size. Digging through that the case is product market or what have you, but I'm sure it's different by size. But other than there's certainly a person who is doing those interviews and perhaps even synthesizing those down, but who are the other parties that really need to be involved to make this stick? It feels like more of a company narrative, almost right.
Brendan:Yeah, I think a lot about Andy Raskin and strategic narrative and stuff and how he talks about he only works with founders, because if the founder is not or the ceo like it has to be top down for some things, I think for things like content ip, it doesn't necessarily have to be top down. You can do this as a solo content marketer at a company. You can have these ideas you can lead and test with. I'm going to post this on social. I'm going to do this as email subject lines. We want to get early signals of like all right, cool, this piece of IP, this problem that we're thinking of talking about naming, is really resonating with people.
Brendan:I worked with a client and he was like, yeah, I went to a meeting at this huge conference. I met with five people. I mentioned it to all of them and their eyes lit up and he's like that's all I needed to know that this was going to work Right. Like when I said the words to a human face to face, they were like, oh, like they did that the puppy head tilt. That I just did Right. And sometimes that's all you need is, when I say it to people, like they physically lean in, even if it's virtual right. All of a sudden you have their attention.
Gary:Right, that's what you're looking for, yeah.
Gary:And then to your point, when you've got that validation, which, to your point, doesn't take statistically valid sample size right, it's like this is qualitative in nature and so you know it when you see it and you see those patterns repeat themselves, is then that also difficult is to then seek to help solve that problem. I think the thing that we see is that, okay, we get there from a problem perspective, but then we immediately go into here's our widget and it's the only way to solve the problem, like that's. You know, there actually are a set of things that have to be true for our product or service to be the thing that actually should be in your consideration set. How do you see people you know make that trend? What's the next step in? Okay, now that you have named the problem and we have alignment on that, how do we start thinking about that, the, you know, communicating the solution set or solution landscape?
Brendan:This comes from my teaching background and I think it's really uncommon. I taught AP government for a couple years and when you write an essay for an advanced placement class in high school to get college credit, you have to get really good at drawing conclusions and comparisons between things. Problem is most people compare two things by going uh yeah, they're different because one is a and one is B, and it's like that. That's not how they're different. You're just saying they are two different things. How are they different? I'll give you an example. If you're, let's say, I don't know, gary, how tall are you Six?
Gary:one.
Brendan:Perfect. Uh, cause we're the exact same height. So there's a bad example. You're six one and let's say I'm, I'm five feet tall, right, and we're writing that out and we're like, no, no, no, gary is six one and Brennan's five feet tall. Well, that's not what makes us different. What makes us different is we are different heights. What is that mode of comparison? What does that bridge between the two? I promise I'll land the plane here.
Brendan:The having learning to write bridges and learning to write and think through like what is the actual difference between two things was super helpful and kind of why I like content marketing because I have to build a bridge between what you're dealing with and way over here I have my technology or my service. How do we get there? I can't just keep like hitting you over the head with being like hire us, hire us, buy us, buy us, book a. I call it like the demo deluge or somebody called it a demolition derby. When you go to a website and there's like 27 get a demo buttons Awful, I want to throw up in my mouth every time right, there's other things. There's other ways we can help people.
Brendan:Inherently, marketing's job is not to get to book a demo. I don't care what the sales bros say. I don't care if you have a sales led company and your CEO thinks this way. The goal is to build enough trust that somebody wants to book a demo, not to book a demo at any cost. I think we're post VC. I don't think we're yeeting millions of dollars in Google ads into the sun anymore like we used to, and I think we have to be a little more thoughtful. So the goal has to be to build trust. How do we build trust? I have a simple framework for like how do we take this content IP, this problem? And the thing is you might solve five problems. So maybe over time you have five different pieces of content IP. But the easiest way is, once you know the problem you solve and you have a piece of IP for it, we're going to keep harping on five different types of content.
Brendan:The first is just talking about the problem over and over and over. I can't talk about checkbox marketing one time on LinkedIn and be like, oh, that really resonated with people and never talk about it again. I have to look for examples of it. Talk about it over and over again, all of that sort of stuff. So the first is just like talk about the problem. The second is talk about the first roadblock to the problem. Almost every marketer skips that second one. They're like they skip the roadblock to like yeah, a problem, and again, our technology is the solution Mistake. There's not enough of a bridge there. So talk about the problem, talk about the roadblock to the problem. Talk about give them a template to solve the problem themselves. This could be an actual template, a Google sheet, a Google doc or a slide or something, or it can just be a way of thinking about something, right, it could be a visual or verbal template.
Brendan:When I was selling a lot of SEO services which is still like a core of what I sell to clients I was like one of the roadblocks is none of them can explain SEO to their CEO. It's too complicated. Right? They give them this long, weird answer we're going to pursue SEO and Google and to Blackbox and all this stuff. Their CEO is like I don't get it, you're not getting the money. And I was like oh okay, cool, so they need a way to explain. The roadblock is they can't explain it to their CEO. Why don't I give them that? Why don't I invent the I am framework?
Brendan:Seo is simple. It's three different things it's intent, it's asset and it's medium. I am super easy. Now they can. I've helped them solve the roadblock. They can now explain to executives what SEO is, how it works. Three simple steps, right.
Brendan:So it's name the problem, talk about the roadblock to the problem, give them a template to solve the problem and then talk about a customer story. Who have you solved this for in the past? Right. And then last and this is my favorite one is do a bit of journalism, do a bit of exploring. Talk about how somebody else is solving the problem Not a client, not a customer, just somebody else out in the wild. Do some digging, find some interesting stuff.
Brendan:One of my favorite things I ever found and shared was what HubSpot did before they were an SEO monster. That website is a beast for search. What did they do before that, though? How did they get their first customers? People would be surprised. I did the same thing with ConvertKit. It was like the information's out there. Listen to a couple of podcasts, send a couple of DMs to people, do some that sort of stuff. How did they solve this thing that we now have IP for? Just do? They don't have to necessarily be and it's not going to help Like is this good content marketing? We're just building trust. Oh cool, you did the digging to find out how other people solve this problem. Thanks, I appreciate that. I trust you more.
Gary:Right, yeah, and it's that whole idea of um. I'm sure you're familiar with the jolt effect and sense making and this whole idea that buyers especially today right, Buyers have hundreds of choices in a particular category, that's software services related, and even more that are other ways to solve a problem beyond their ability to comprehend all that. And so what you just described was us digging in and saying let me help you make sense of the ways that you can solve this problem and then you can begin to match what your objectives are with the resources or constraints that you have to determine which subset of those actually are relevant, which is huge value, because now I don't have to worry about hundreds. I'm like, oh, you just put it into three buckets and I'm going to stay in this bucket.
Brendan:It also pulls us out of checkbox marketing quite a bit. When you have this kind of framework of like look, we know this is the impact we want to have. It's a question of how do we stay focused and, instead of doing 20 blog posts a week, question of how do we stay focused and instead of doing 20 blog posts a week, freaking why would we ever do For what? Why not 18? Why not 30? Those questions come up right. It pulls us out of checkbox marketing. It's like no, no, we just have to keep producing these five types of content in our emails. This informs the premise of our podcast. This informs what we share on LinkedIn, all of those sorts of things. It keeps us focused. I've noticed that as companies grow, this informs the premise of our podcast. This informs what we share on LinkedIn. It's like all of those sorts of things. It keeps us focused.
Brendan:I've noticed that as companies grow, that's one of the biggest problems. They're like we've already written about this keyword. What do we write about now? It's a huge mistake. They just keep expanding horizontally instead of taking it deeper, which is, I think, where you need to go. There's this concept called mental availability, where well, here I'll just ask you all this we're all familiar with Salesforce, right? When do you buy Salesforce?
Gary:When you need it Okay.
Andy:The last possible way.
Brendan:And the last possible.
Brendan:you can wait, and I'm not trying to be patronizing but, like, none of us know the like, a concrete answer to that, right, it's not a certain revenue number, it's not a certain number of salespeople, it's not a certain anything. And it's constantly people wondering am I leaving money on the table by not buying Salesforce or am I wasting money by buying it too early? Right, salesforce has a huge problem in that nobody knows when to buy them. Everybody knows them, everybody's like that's the one at the top of the mountain. Nobody knows when to buy it.
Brendan:So, taking all this stuff, all this trust we've built, taking a layer deeper Now here, when you hit bop, bop, bop, these three points, or whatever it is for your company, when you hit these three things, if you want to do X, y or Z, that's when you buy us. Make sure people know and then you can sit back as long as people know. When I hit X, y or Z, that's when I buy this solution. We don't need to book a million demos. That's the thing. That's scary is we end up falling into this faith-based marketing, right? This publish and pray kind of approach of like. So what? We just make it, brendan. We just make all this content and hope people come and sign up and book demos, no, no, there's ways to pull people deeper, but I don't think forcing somebody, or trying to trick or convince somebody by BDRing them to death is necessarily the way to get them to sign up.
Brendan:Right, tiana, you laughed at that. Have you been a victim of the, the, the BDRing?
Tiana:Yeah, absolutely, and actually, actually, one thing that I love about your example is that, well, what you're saying is that well, it always comes up to mind because, well, he's top of mind for me. But, anthony Pieri, with Fletch, that's exactly what they do. They say what they do in a sentence. They're able to describe exactly what problem they solve for in a sentence. They go deeper in their content every day with it. They talk about it in 10 different types of ways, but they always talk about the same thing, which is getting a better positioning and messaging in the top of your well, in your website, basically in the homepage of your website, and that's what they do, and whenever one thinks about that, they're the first one to come to mind. So when you ask the Salesforce question, I was like I have no, I don't even know where to start to think about that. But if you ask me the same question about Fletch, I know exactly how to answer you, because they have it very clearly described everywhere.
Gary:Yeah, and the other thing that I liked about that analogy is um, you go back to when do you buy? You actually are whether you don't have a solution or you have an alternative solution. You're actually describing where the problem meets the dynamic of the particular organization. Right, we say that all the time. But go go a layer deeper on buyer dynamics, which is to your point. You can have two firms that look exactly the same on paper 200 employees, same industry, same growth rates but the way that they're structured and how they run their business could be the difference between them being a great fit for your product or service and a terrible fit, and so it is.
Gary:If you are feeling these things and doing the and it's almost starting with this is when you begin to explore a solution like ours and there are other alternatives. And then, once I get you there and here's why we believe, and here's why we what you need to look like, or what your goals may be, for how we believe we are best suited to that Like, here's our view on the world in that perspective, and even if they choose not to, for whatever reason, first of all, you've done one thing, which is you've made very certain who your ICP is, so that you don't attract bad ICP who are going to churn anyway because you're not a good fit. And you're very focused on that and you've actually added value to the, to the buyer, because now they're like great. I now better understand my problem and the solutions available to me.
Brendan:Yep, have you ever seen? It's why, like demographics and firmographics sometimes are like personas can be so messy. There's a great meme of like this persona that is the exact same, and you get to the bottom. And one is like the King of England and the other one is Ozzy Osbourne and they buy on paper, they're the exact same person, right? So I think things like that and I think the other piece is that, like, when we think about that, it's just yeah, it's.
Brendan:We've gotten lost in like channel specific stuff. Too many marketers like we've spent too much time doing like LinkedIn ads and thinking everybody is company size, revenue teams. The way that they do their targeting is not the way humans solve problems. Not every business of the same size in the same location in the same industry has the same problems.
Brendan:And to your point, I think that the other mistake is we've been pushed as marketers so hard for so long to get more conversions, to constantly grow the whatever it is like triple, triple, double, double type of thing that every VC would want.
Brendan:We've been pushed so hard for so long that we didn't care about people churning, we didn't care about retention, we didn't care about renewal or expansion or any of that it was just new logo acquisition over and over and over and over and CS can figure that out. That's not our problem and that kind of like passing the buck. I don't blame any marketers. I think there's a lot of people on LinkedIn especially that love to like, make marketers look even other marketers. They're like if you don't do this, you're stupid or bad or wrong. I'd come from a point of empathy, of like. I think the model, the business model, forced us to come up this way and we missed and we skipped a lot of fundamentals like I'm very blessed that I spent 10 years teaching psychology to high schoolers really lucky, those high schoolers probably like lucky.
Brendan:Those high schoolers, probably like 1400 of them. They know more buyer psychology than most marketers. We were being pushed so fast with checkbox marketing and all the other stuff like move fast and break things that we ended up just missing that piece.
Gary:We didn't get that education yeah, absolutely okay, I monopolized the questions and I know andy andy and tiana have topics they want to jump into, so let's.
Andy:It was teed up very well and I it made me start thinking about the founder dilemma in that they oftentimes fall into our product does so many things. We, we have so many features, we solve so many problems for so many people. We want that right. And then what that happens into is the marketing team starting to do the skimming marketing which is going to new verticals, new markets and trying to find that first layer of people that you know. Hey, yeah, this sounds good and it relates to checkbox marketing. It also relates to SEO and I really love that post that you referenced.
Andy:Sean Bland has turned this upside down. Where you start with keyword research and I think of it the same way, where it's like and you brought it up earlier going lateral, right with keywords as opposed to going deep, and I think those five steps very much speak to that. But if you could just quickly, um, uh, allude to how you approach that for seo, because that's I think that that's a good um platform with which to reference for a lot of people out there, they, they think of that, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna do keyword research. I'm gonna find the thing that's somewhat related to what we do, that has a lot of volume that I might be able to rank for. Like. That's the process which is wrong. So how would you, how would you approach that?
Brendan:I think I want to put a pin in what you also said of like when you, the marketing team, tries to be everything to everybody Like. I saw that firsthand in-house at active campaign Right, and I love it. We have such like mid, like core, Midwestern values of like we'll never turn away a small business active campaign, even like, still has like on-prem installations for people Like they literally will like send them like files so they can have their stuff on prep like old school, not even in the cloud type of installations. They're awesome but they're everything for everybody and they will never change that positioning. That is just part of their Midwestern values of. We're here to support small business. Problem is Klaviyo came along and was like we're only for direct to consumer and primarily shopify and they freaking ate our lunch in that segment. So you try to be everything to everybody, market every solute. You know what our product does, everything like. You see stuff like jasper and copy ai and all these like generative ai content tools. They're like well, we could do everything. Huge mistake, right, you spread your marketing too thin, especially if you have a small team On the SEO side of things. So I was enamored.
Brendan:I won't give you the long story, but the short story is I spent a year writing a guest post for Sean when he was at a former company and Sean Blanda is one of the best editors I've ever worked with to the point that I wrote this big 8,000 word blog post and he's like you're going to kill me these two paragraphs right here. That's the blog post. That's the interesting part. Can we make this the blog post? And God damn, if he wasn't just so right. He was absolutely right and I was like, yeah, man, yes, A hundred percent, and in retrospect it's like some of the best work I've ever done. I'm very, very proud of that. He went on to do like really cool stuff at Envision and Crossbeam and he's great.
Brendan:I saw this harmless tweet and this is how you know it's a great writer when they don't have to say a lot, they don't have to go on a long wordy rant. He saw a post from a generative AI SEO company like spin up infinite blog posts with AI. That type of thing. These companies drive me crazy. I'll save the rant. But he saw this post and he saw that they were like here's how you do SEO and here I'll even I'll pull it up.
Brendan:It said like step one keyword research. Step two copy the other top 10 results. Step three bring in customer insights. Step four include subject matter expertise. Step five think about the company's narrative angle and brand voice. And Sean said in four words such a good writer, such a good thinker turn this upside down. And he couldn't be more right.
Brendan:Start by taking a stand, Start by having strong opinions. They show experience and expertise. Right, Like this, it's got all the right five parts. They're just in the wrong order and I think that's where we've kind of lost. Like that stuff worked in 2012. Like what's our keywords? Sort for highest volume and lowest difficulty. Right, Export them into a spreadsheet and you do your sort and you're like yes, this is it. Highest volume, lowest difficulty, let's do this one, let's do this one, let's do this one. And you went down the list but there that's where you get, like the checkbox, blog posts that don't say anything. Like how many times have you googled something? Gone to the blog post and it's like have you? Let's say, you're googling like marketing automation? And you get to the blog and it's like have you ever wondered about marketing automation? Marketing automation is very important. It's like I'm the one that Googled it.
Gary:Our analogy for that. When we see that is when somebody says I'm really looking for a way to just be healthier, give me some tips how to be healthier. The advice is you need to eat better and go to the gym, and their advice is you need to eat better and go to the gym Mic drop.
Tiana:Thank you very much.
Gary:That's the blog post, Like technically you're not wrong but You're not wrong.
Brendan:but who's that helpful for? Not very helpful. But if I started that blog post where I said, hey, I've lost 70 pounds of body fat, put on 30 pounds of muscle, I feel better than I've ever felt in my whole life. Here's why, right. And then I said, but I, I almost died because I did one big mistake. You're going to read that blog post Absolutely, absolutely as opposed to like, yeah, maybe walk more, lift a couple of weights and like don't eat garbage anymore. Yeah, well, no, yeah, of course.
Brendan:That's the problem with this type of content. When you start with keyword research, you start by copy. It's the same thing. I remember I was looking. I'll give you a really concrete example. I was writing about digital marketing skills and if you Google I think this is still true today If you Google digital marketing skills, the results for the past probably five or six years have been top 10 digital marketing skills, top 20 digital marketing skills, 30 crucial marketing skills. And the listicles just get longer and longer. And if you read them, they're like be a good listener. They mix between hard skills and soft skills. Right, like, get good at ads, be a good listener. They are entirely unhelpful lists, but they're just copycatting each other right Like that's I think I call it like the three C's copycat corporate commodity content. That's what most of it is right, because that was the game Google required us to play. It's not again not going to blame marketers. It's not their fault. That's what worked.
Andy:It is what it is at one point, right at one point, it worked. You could get a demo from that, and then what we're seeing now and you you hear this all the time right, that's drying up yeah, you're right.
Brendan:Let's clarify worked.
Brendan:It worked for rankings, it worked for, maybe, traffic. It did not work for driving business results. Now let's say you're writing about digital marketing skills because you are grow class grow class is a really cool cohort based digital marketing training and you're writing about digital marketing skills because that is literally the thing you teach people and you will get that will drive business results for you. Now, if you just do another listicle, you might get in there, right. But what I looked at was the google autocomplete, and the google autocomplete for digital marketing skills was digital marketing skills for resume. Digital marketing skills in demand. Digital marketing skills 2024. And I went these areend job and learned digital marketing and changed their life.
Brendan:And if I told the story in that blog post that I told you earlier about sitting in my car and putting you in that moment and in that tension of like, how am I going to take care of these kids? I have all of the like I can get real I could probably make myself cry right now. Getting in that. It was rough, I didn't know what I was going to do and I learned these skills and my life is radically different because of that. If I told that story in the blog post and I titled it three digital marketing skills that will save your life, or that saved my life. You're going to read that. That's going to resonate, that's going to drive business. So there's other pieces in there. You just have to, like Sean said, flip it upside down.
Gary:Brendan, we have technically three minutes left, but I know Tiana has some more, so do you have a little extra time so we can I got all the time you need this is so fun.
Brendan:Do you have a little extra time so we can I got all the time you need. This is so fun.
Gary:All right, awesome. Okay, so this is bonus time. Gtm Pro listeners. Tiana, take it away.
Tiana:Yeah, well, we actually referenced it a bit earlier, actually at the beginning of the podcast, and I know I've already told you the question before we had record.
Tiana:But that post that you made about that, we think we can see marketing, how people do actual marketing, because we constantly see, quote, unquote, like these, all these different marketing actions that people do, right, like the keywords, the videos, events, the LinkedIn posts. But, as you said in the post, you can try to mimic it, but it will never be the same and it will never work the same because, of course, all parts are different. So what you did reference is that a true marketing leader actually knows that they need they actually need to know what the marketing team looks like, who they report to, how they track production and outcomes, what big bets they've made and what they're betting on forward and while the marketing philosophy, which is like the twist dearest to my heart. So I would actually love to know the answers to these questions, because you've said you you had a huge research on it, so I love to hear about that so the the real quick origin story of why I started doing this is especially coming up in SEO.
Brendan:You would get I would read all these blog posts and I knew they were driving business for companies, but it would and it drove me crazy because it was just wrong Was you would see, like how Canva wins and they would do this blog post showing all these like Ahrefs graphs or SEMrush graphs and they're like they publish this many posts, they would do this very cursory research. And it drove me crazy because I was like I very cursory research. And it drove me crazy because I was like I know the guy who bought backlinks Spanish language backlinks for them. You don't know that person. You've never even talked to anybody at Canva. How the hell do you know how they wanted SEO? You have no idea what it looks like. Nobody can copy this. It's meant to just look impressive. So you go oh, they seem so. Look at this. They know how Canva did this and it's meant to pull in, not to be rude but not very savvy customers, because a really savvy VP or CMO is going to see through that and go well, I don't actually see, this is just a bunch of Ahrefs graphs, but somebody who's not very savvy, they're probably not going to be a great client. And I was like, well, what do marketers actually need the people I'm friends with, the CMOs, the VPs, the directors what do they actually need? They need to know that behind the scenes stuff.
Brendan:And at the time I was enthralled with and still am to some degree with Lenny Richitsky's newsletter. I thought he I loved I'm such a sucker for good copywriting. When I get an email and it says how Figma builds product, how Notion builds product, and I open the email and he's asking these questions about how they actually built stuff behind the scenes I was like, why don't I looked? This is most it's the reason I started a marketing, most like it's the reason I started a marketing community. It's the reason I started doing these interviews that you're referencing right now.
Brendan:Nobody else did it. I wanted it to exist. I was like, look, if somebody else is doing this, I'm happy to just read it and learn. But nobody else was doing it. So I was like, well, what if I just asked Lenny's questions to marketers? Like, how do you track things? What does the team look like? Who comes to the strategy meetings? Like, who do you report to Some questions I stopped asking because every marketer that I interviewed was like I report to the CEO and I'm like this is a dumb question, we don't need to ask this anymore. It's always the same, right? So things like that. It's changed a little over time. It'll change even more in the future, I'm sure. But I just was like somebody needs to be doing this and it's not a volume play, it's not a reach play.
Brendan:The people who want to read a 1500 word blog post about how ActiveCampaign gets customers or how whoever Sendoso gets customers, or how Path, that's a, that's a very small audience, right. But I was like, if I actually want to make something that resonates, if I actually want to make something that they'll forward to each other, to their peers, that they'll share in their private WhatsApp groups, right, this is the thing to make. So I started just asking them. I started doing hour long interviews. I'm putting one out about Help Scout this weekend. I keep doing these interviews because they're really interesting to me. You end up finding out so many unique things about how they structure their team. Sometimes it's not channel-specific, sometimes it is. Sometimes they have totally different marketing philosophies than one another. That type of stuff is fascinating.
Brendan:What I want to do, my end goal, is to have a library where you're like, okay, cool, I can say I want companies who are at this amount of revenue and maybe have this team size. What are the constraints? And we said earlier they don't all do it the same. They don't all have the same needs. But if I have some idea of what their constraints are, I might not learn as much. It might be entertaining to read how a $300 million a year company gets customers, but ActiveCampaign has like 70 marketers I don't know. I forget how many. They have A lot, but if I have two, I may not learn as much as if I go in Brendan's library and I find all the people who have less than 10 people on their marketing team and see how they do stuff. And then maybe I read the rest and I might be able to pull some highlights. That's what I want. I want like the ultimate library of like behind the scenes, how companies actually get customers.
Gary:Like situationally specific, based on size, resources, capabilities, whatever.
Brendan:Like don't tell me what their audience is Like, if I have a couple interviews like so far it's been a bit of martech um, but like I talked to, uh, the cmo at tomorrowio and they like launch satellites, like their competitors are like the weather channel and like stuff like that. Like they're and it's really cool techno, like it's kind of technology where they're like hey, don't run your train today because the winds are coming out of the northeast and your train's gonna has like a higher percentage chance of getting derailed because of the wind stuff. I come on like it's really cool. Their audience is not more. It is not martech um, but it's really cool to find out like how wait, they went up against like government eight, like they compete against and with they work with government agents, like cool insights, right yeah so it's not just the constraints, but it's.
Brendan:I think that this stuff is also like really interesting because, like everybody loves almost like a lifestyles of the rich and famous kind of thing. Like I want to behind the scenes, like what does their day actually look like? How do you, how does that like the? When I talked to Dan Slagan at tomorrow, like I was like how, how are you doing this so well? He's like I just didn't get fired for four years. That's why I'm doing really well right now.
Gary:Right.
Brendan:I was able to stay here and like here's what I actually did before I got hired. That set us up for success, and I was like that, that's it. You know what I?
Gary:mean Back to the very beginning when we're talking about the arc. Right, it's. People just look at the you know the ultimate 10 years to overnight success. Right, 10 years to overnight success right. They just look at the overnight success period and forget that it's actually the previous 10 years, both in that company or out of that company, that actually were the building blocks to that period of success. And sometimes as well, many times it's just right time, right place.
Brendan:We got lucky right, that happens more than you think. But I also want to help people solve the problems that are not Google keywords. There's no Google keyword for. I'm a new CMO or a new VP and I'm coming into an organization that had a really crappy MQL to SQL model. They were still running the predictable revenue playbook. It clearly wasn't working. It's why I'm here, but I don't know how to change the culture to something different. There's no Google keyword for that.
Brendan:But I know that that happened with Pete Larenco at Path Factory. I know Casey Jenkins at Sendoso went through that, and then when people read these things they're like, oh, that's how I could think about this. It's the non-Google-able problems that are super high resonance.
Gary:Right, so let's, and we will land this plane now, because we are definitely going to need a part two, but all that comes together. We've actually touched on this a little bit. But one of those things is, andy, you kind of referenced this with the turn it upside down post right, which is almost the order of operations, so that when and it does start at the top when a CEO or founder typically CEO founder, because they're the ones who are at least in the lower middle market, they're the ones who are hiring marketing talent, and they themselves are, to your point, I'll say, a victim of what they believe are best practices, which is checkbox marketing, and so that's what they go search for, and so they're bringing, they're almost setting that person up for well, I've hired you to do checkbox marketing, so what is, what's your strategy to do that Then the results don't turn out.
Andy:Or or a shiny object, right, like they see this thing somebody did and that's the promotion that that vendor has out in the world that so-and-so did this and so they're like we need to do that.
Brendan:Right, yeah, mondaycom is a great example. Everybody went gaga over their SEO strategy. Look at all this traffic and all these things. And I was like, well, first of all, like they're not disclosing that they bought probably a million dollars in backlinks. I don't think any of us can convince any of our CFOs to spend a million dollars on backlinks which are so far away from revenue. Right, like, maybe influences SEO, which maybe gets us traffic, which maybe converts, which maybe become customers, but they don't. Like you can see all of that in the SEO tools.
Brendan:But everybody went nuts over it because the people the vendor, the content agency that worked with Monday went and this was like their apex case study. So they went on every podcast talking about it. And I'm not taking away from that what they did was really good work and they accomplished a lot. But that high level traffic number if you go somewhere and you're like look at what I did for mondaycom, every good ceo can and should ask how much did it cost? And that's the thing nobody was talking about. So when I was like I did a big write-up on it and I'm like this probably cost them like four million bucks your little league baseball team is looking at the yankees and their payroll and figuring out how they did it I think, like having more public conversations about like that is a really cool outcome.
Brendan:You drove 2,500 qualified meetings. Give me the cost on that.
Gary:Yeah, yep. So with that in mind, as we think about okay, so now I'm a founder and I'm thinking about content, especially in this era, and we'll kind of put these together but the how? So flip the script right. Instead of hiring a checkbox marketer, be thinking about the orders of operation. Like well, first, before we do that, we need to have a sticky point of view, the strategic narrative, what have you? And it's almost like I guess the way I envision it is, if you think about the spectrum of marketing or the building blocks to mark the marketing pyramid, it's it.
Gary:Flip it upside down is it actually starts with CEO slash founder level responsibilities first, before you can even begin. So if you haven't done this, maybe you hire somebody to help you do that. But if you haven't done this, maybe you hire somebody to help you do that. But if you haven't done these things, then you're trying to hire somebody to put them right in the middle of the grid and they don't have any foundation from which to work and helping them see that. And then, when we start talking about content the ability to assess almost a four box of if it does this and this, then you consider it good. If it does this and this, then you consider it good. If it's this or this, it's checkbox marketing.
Brendan:Have you made such a rubric and, if so, would you be willing to share it? I don't have a rubric, but I think maybe the right mindset for founders is rent to own. So I'm going to bring in somebody really smart. They might be an in-house person, they might be an agency or a contractor or a consultant, and my goal is that you do the thing for a certain amount of time. But my outcome I want is that then that thing becomes our thing. Then I'm also learning how to do it, so I know what good is and then I can start.
Brendan:We can take that system in this playbook in-house. We're not going to. I just from the front, like, especially if it's. You know you're getting a lot of like pitches from retainer based agencies, like I'm not hiring you for seven years, like I'm hiring you for six months and my goal is to learn your do you want this money or not? Because I have four other people I'm talking to and some people might say, no, we're like, we're not. Like we only want long-term partners and really you know they do this like weird hand wavy thing, relationship, family like yeah, no, it reminds me of that old FedEx commercial.
Gary:Like you said, the same thing I did. You just did this with your hands, exactly.
Brendan:But like I think, like rent to own, I got this from Alex Hermosi. He was like this is what we do. We hire contractors and then we take that process in house, like we learned from it. I've done the same thing. Like I have people that I've contracted for different stuff and I've been really upfront with them. Like I'm not swiping your stuff and then set you know, there's this meme of like little characters like look what I made, and he hands it to the other character and the other character's like you made this, and he's like, yeah, and he walks away and the character that's now holding it goes I made this.
Brendan:Like we're not doing that right it's like I'm hiring, I'm buying and stealing your processes, but, like I want to understand, there's a learning component. So I want you to do the thing, but I and I want great outcomes and I'm happy to be your number one case study, but I also want to learn here. And I think that's one of the easiest ways, whether you're early stage or late stage for like a founder or executive of like, if you don't know something like build the education piece into working with anybody.
Gary:Yeah, like what can you?
Brendan:teach me. And I think the other piece is like asking somebody how they think about editorial and how they think about angles and premise. Those words you can use it as somewhat interchangeably sometimes, but like that's the real thing. It's not like how many blogs have you written or what's this high level thing? Like show me, like tell me how you think about making something different than what else is out there.
Gary:Right, right, oh man, so good. Okay, you've been very generous with your time, brendan, thank you. We are, uh, like the wheels are spinning here. I'm very excited to pull this all down. We will summarize this in our weekly GTM shorts on gtmproco. This episode will be out in a couple of days and then a short will follow then. So we're middle of August, timeline timeline here, and we will definitely have Brendan back. This was fantastic. How are people yes?
Andy:How can they find?
Brendan:you.
Andy:Brendan, how can people find you Sorry?
Brendan:I would like to pretend that it's because I'm good at SEO that you can Google me and no matter how you spell my name, you'll probably find me. It is not because I'm good at SEO, it's just because I don't like my buddy, justin Jackson. I feel terrible for him. There's like 40 Justin Jacksons out there. It's so hard. Brendan Hufford super easy, google it, misspell it. All you want. I'm going to come up. The second thing is look me up on LinkedIn. That's one of the easiest ways to find me. It is still my home base. It's where I'm sharing thoughts and it's where I'm kind of learning in public, where I'm talking about a lot of the things. Most of our conversation today came from ideas and things that I shared there. So I think that's still one of the best places. From there you can find my newsletter, you can find my website, all that other stuff, but I think I would say LinkedIn is definitely the best.
Gary:Well, we'll keep it simple for folks and put all that in the show notes as well. So, brendan, stick around for a minute. But for everybody else, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Bye, bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.