Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey, everyone, today, I'm joined by Chris Gillespie. Chris is the founder of Fenwick, a content marketing agency that specializes in helping brands create impactful and truly unique content, and that is one of the reasons why we connected through Fenwick. Chris and his team have helped clients unlock their informational advantage these insights that only they can share to produce content that actually resonates with our audience, whether you are running a like content team, managing an agency, or simply trying to improve your own content game, Chris has invaluable advice to share in this episode, we discuss the concept of informational advantage and why it's a game changer for content strategy, building systems for content creation that scale with demand and maintain quality, how to streamline review processes, to save time and preserve the integrity of your writing. And more, no one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different the dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested and right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at Dynamic agency dot community and now. Chris Gillespie, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. What's your process for identifying what a company can publish that no one else can?

Speaker 1 1:54
Yeah, I think, I think it's, it's incredibly difficult thing. Like, maybe one way to think about this is there is something unique about the people there at that company that can be a unique advantage. But it is. It's, yeah, it's a complicated thing. One, it has to feel natural to them, right? And there's different layers, I think, to look at this, there's like, what can the company do overall? And then there's, what can the founders do? And those are right we're finding right now with a couple clients working with not actually entirely related. You could have a company that is on a direction and it's it's competitive advantage is the data. It just has a data set that no one else has, which is a pretty common thing for tech companies to fall back on. Can we pull product data out? Can we turn it into reports and publish about that? And then that's own data, and we're the source of information, but the founder may be interested in, like interviewing small businesses, which is tangential and interesting, and maybe this is, you know, I'll take this in a slightly different direction, but the founder has to be really excited about it, and that company has to be excited about it to sustain that momentum. What what I think I find, what my co founder and wife have found, is that it has to start with the truth, and so it's really more like a pairing away all these different things they think they have to do, like they're seeing so much on LinkedIn, they're seeing so much in advertising, and the executives are often thinking, I need to be doing all of those different things, and our challenge is to help them narrow down to like, actually only need to do the couple things that are really going to matter and come from some unique informational advantage, which has to correlate with an interest of theirs. Because a lot of companies have come to us over the last year and said, Hey, can you help make our founder LinkedIn famous? And where that's coming from is they can see the advantage to having a following on LinkedIn, and it feels effective, and it feels like organic I don't have to pay for that time. That's really effective, and their founder may not, just may not like it, and they're gonna really struggle to get them to participate. And so it only works. I feel when that is, like it's an actual interest of theirs where they want to be doing that, right? They're like, In one example, they're on Reddit all the time anyway. And we're like, Wow, can we divert a little bit of that over the public platform, right? That's great. Keep doing that. And like, let's divert that energy to something that can accrue value for your marketing team, because there is a huge value to it. But maybe it's easier to say it as it's easier discovered than it is invented, right? Like I and maybe this is just our approach to things. It's very tough to invent a framework and architecture and slap it onto the company and say, follow this and it will work. And a lot easier to like, keep asking questions until we get to what's really true and what they would be doing outside of these constraints. And then build, build a scaffold on that

Chris DuBois 4:49
right? So it's almost a Venn diagram right that you're working with here, where it's like, they have to like it. They have to it has to be valuable. And then the third one is, you. Just specific to to a target audience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice, nice little trifecta. There. You said something interesting, though, with the that it when we started, it just has to be true. I was doing like, this thought cycle and one of these elements in the past, whereas just thinking through, like dieting, it's one of those things where it's like, for most new habits, you have to, like, actually go out and try something new, like, do something deliberate. With dieting, you just have to not do it with authenticity. It's like, pretty similar, where it's like, I just have to not add this, like, lens or layer of other stuff. I shouldn't be me, right? Like, why so? Why is it so hard for people to just focus on that, that truth, and put that out there?

Speaker 1 5:46
Yeah, that, yeah, I can, I can hypothesize. I bet it's a little bit different for every person you know. My own experience with that was, I started my career at at&t, which is a giant megalithic Corporation, and they have a lot of set ways of doing things and to fit in, you adapt and start to speak the language and the jargon. Then after a while, you can talk full sentences that are just acronyms. And you have to posture to a good degree to be able to move up. You can't just be a good sales rep. You have to also appear to be an effective sales rep. And there's all this showmanship that goes on, at least on the sales side, that, yeah, it's you. You put on armor, you put all these pieces of armor, like, Oh, I got dinged here. Like, I'm gonna not show myself in that way. And you wind up with this collection of behaviors that I in my own experience, the collection behaviors that I felt was how I had to perform at work, and then once I started to have some success, then from there, it's just like, how much of that can I peel away? To get back to being honest, so difficult for me to generalize, but that's certainly been my experience, and I do see that with a lot of clients, where they will default to the vernacular of their space, which is incredibly unclear. It's vague. And very often, when someone is being vague, it's because they don't actually understand the concept. When they say, Hey, let's put a pin in it and let's circle back, that is the absence of communication. They're just saying, I don't know, in far more words, and yeah, maybe it's tough for people, too, to accept that they might not know and to say that publicly and realize it's actually a great strength. Yeah, so why is it hard? I don't know. The workplace makes it hard. The workplace makes it hard. I think there's lots of expectations. You're getting performance reviews from a boss that you may not respect and you may not feel truly understands you, and so people have to perform. And yeah, get into a content setting and having a bunch of writers designers tell you just be yourself, like, yeah, it's probably incredibly anxiety, right?

Chris DuBois 7:53
This is good. I send you a question for a psychologist, and you gave me a decent answer instead of but yeah, I have, I have one client right now who, like, we just started, and we're starting to kind of work through his offer and stuff. But as he was going into his annual planning, the big thing that his team actually wanted was just clarity on what they do. They're like, we sound the same as everybody else, but like, what would these words actually mean? And it's like, it's awesome that his marketing team is actually saying, you know, we need to be more clear and actually say something of value. I thought that was, that was great, but I guess, yeah, so having a sales background has probably given you some great insights into the marketing side of things, right, and how you kind of transition that. What are some of those things that you've seen can be the most helpful for for businesses,

Speaker 1 8:44
you know, so the Sales Insight, yeah, just, I think, so I'm obviously biased. I have only done this one way, but the way that I did do it was I came up through sales, and sales teaches you how the full business works. And I don't think that that, to me, doesn't feel that true for many other roles. Another role is you're the silo, and you see how other parts are interacting and maybe like annoying you, but you don't really get to see the full beast in the way that you do as a salesperson who's trying to understand your customers and how they work and how you can sell them something that is actually going to benefit them, and all the blockers and all the people involved, and then you're trying to get the deal done internally, and the product doesn't support it. So you're going to the product team, and you're asking, why doesn't this feature work the way that it does? And they're like, well, it could, but we don't want to, because we don't want that kind of client. And in in the process of having to sell a fairly complex B to B software, I think you learn how all parts of the business work. You have to go beg for product, you have to go talk to marketing. You have to go talk to it. You have to talk to customer support. And you develop a sense of how the whole thing works and how it makes money. And I feel like that's really, really important for then being able to advise companies on like, what is it we're doing here? Marketing definitely has, marketing has got to be one of the hardest jobs. Jobs out there, there are so many things to try to understand. You have to you have to understand how the whole company makes money. You have to understand your customers make money, how all of that works, and then figure out where to try to push or pull things. I think it's really tough. And so I think bringing the sales, sales side of that as like at the end of the day, it has to be really clear. It has to be really clear, it has to be effective, and has to help people like with a real pain. Ogilvy has a quote in his book, and it's something like, never hire a writer who has not had direct response experience. And that always stuck with me, because that's what it was like being a junior salesperson. Like, it's just rejection after rejection after rejection. And so all of these darling ideas that I would think would make my outreach great, usually, almost always failed, and your paycheck depends on you getting really, really clear on what people are going to actually listen to and respond

Chris DuBois 10:53
to, right? So now I'm gonna hypothesize, yeah, the so a good marketing team, right? Should be going to product. Should be talking to sales. Should be doing all these things to be able to collect all the information they need, to be able to make great decisions and in the actions that they're taking the I wonder if the reason that sales is more likely to do it is one, they're incentivized to close the deal like, there's a more direct correlation to the revenue right? Like they can see it, like, if I take this action, I get paid this but also their feedback loop is going to be much shorter. Or, like, with a marketing campaign, you might have to wait months, you know, for to hear anything back. Versus I can get in a conversation with someone, I find out if this language works or doesn't work, and now I fix that for the next one. Yeah. So I wonder if there's a way to, like, incentivize marketing teams to do something similar, and then shorten that feedback cycle so that they can actually, and I know this isn't your necessarily, your area of expertise, I'm just going off on this. No. I

Speaker 1 11:52
mean, it's a very interesting concept. I think, I think they're fundamentally different for exactly the reason that you said it is. It's the skin in the game. And this is why there's, I think, resentment between sales people, marketing people, salespeople and marketing people, is marketing people just do not know. They just will never know what it's like to not be paid in a month because a deal slipped like they'll just never know what that's like. And that amount to the skin of the game, like make gives you what what Jared Diamond calls, he's an anthropologist who writes a lot of books that I like, calls constructive paranoia. You're like, paranoid, but it's for a reason. It's because everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And so, you know, what is marketing? Marketing is sales at scale, like if marketing team was only going after a couple accounts, they like, start to look not that different from the sales team, which is what Account Based Marketing is. It brings them into the room and makes them accountable, except for not in a revenue sense. And when you're sending out emails and you get dinged on a bad email, like, that's that's something, but losing your job because you didn't sell something that you thought would happen and all the pieces fell apart, and having to sit in a deal review with your manager who's trying to tell you, like, Hey, you got to put something on the board here. And you know, you know, you know in your heart of hearts, that there is nothing to put on the board. You put something on the board because you're getting pressured. Like that was one way too much for me, and I had to quit and get out of that. But I also think that it makes you, yeah, constructively paranoid about what is really gonna land in a way that I don't think you get as a writer, as a marketer, you're kind of safe. There's you are a layer of abstraction away from that, and so the more you could get them into actually feeling skin in the game. That's great. Like any writer should do direct response ads. I believe that, like, you've got to be able to write ads, because you're gonna think it's genius, and then it will come back and it's like, wow, we just wasted $5,000 on that idea. You that feedback cycle becomes very personal. So it's both the speed of it, right? It's also how personal it is.

Chris DuBois 13:46
Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Let's, let's take it back to some of the work you're currently doing. Yeah, I guess when you, when you are working with tech companies and stuff you mentioned, right? Like data ownership and these tech companies, that almost becomes our moat now, right? And these weren't your words, but I think with with any tech company, it's only becoming easier now to kind of copy the technology of your competitors. And so so the tech itself can no longer be what separates you from the pack. And so really it comes down to what data do we have that that we can leverage in order to do all of these other things, because no matter how close they can copy or like our structure, our software structure, like, if they don't have the data to back it up, it doesn't matter. But I guess, how are you now leveraging that data in order to create, you know, valuable content that you can put in front of, in front of their audiences,

Speaker 1 14:43
yeah. So what I would say is that we're very lucky in that we have a small number of very advanced clients, and I've worked with a lot of companies in the past, and it would probably guess that four and five tech companies are a lot less advanced than they look on the outside, and that though the data. May exist. Marketing will never touch it. Will never see it like that's my overwhelming experience is having the idea, wow, we should just use our product data to do X. And the difficulty of getting the product data from the product people and somebody to actually figure out what questions should we be asking to, like, analyze, that is actually incredibly rare. So I think it's a really valuable moat for the marketing teams that can build that relationship. You know, one of the best examples I've ever seen of this was a company we worked with called gusto, which does payroll. And gusto, I don't know who on the comms team had this idea. They hired economists, and they got the data out of the platform, and they had the economist report on it, because it's payroll. So they're processing billions of dollars in payroll, and they're a lot faster than the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So they can publish a statistically accurate report of what the BLS will bring out, like two to three months in advance, and they can make themselves a source for journalists to report on. And then you've got the world writing for you, right? And you're the source of all the backlinks like that is incredibly valuable. So, you know, there's a lot of packaging I think that goes into that you can't just start publishing data like this is another, another mistake that I see sometimes is the desire to do the piece of content, irrespective of your buyer, who's the consumer of that data, and what are they going to do with that information? Like in the case of gusto, it's very tightly aligned. Their consumer is actually not the buyer, right? Small businesses are not looking for economic data, but their consumer is the PR people and journalists and anyone writing about that data, which then filters out. And it's a very clever play, like, the interlock is complete. People are like, hungry for that data. You've got to figure that out for that company, like, Who is the person who is the consumer of that data? And then how can we create a report that is, like, genuinely, genuinely useful for that person, and not just a list of statistics where we hope that somebody is going to be able to make sense of this? And so that packaging matters a lot, and I think brand matters a lot in that too, because I don't think you can just come out and start publishing statistics and have it do much for you. It's a lot more valuable to be known for doing that right. That value then creates this halo effect where your customers are thinking, wow, I have a question. You know, who might have the answer to that is this company, right? Because you have been doing it, I think that's where it really starts to take off. And so that's where naming the reports, right? Giving it a name, giving it its own sub brand, and then sticking with it. A lot of these things never make it past the first year. And it's not after the first year. It's not until after the first year that they really start to take off, right? So any client that we're working with that has an annual Benchmark Report, everyone went through a year two slump of having to defend it and justify it and convince everybody that this was worth a portion of their marketing spend. And in years three through five, that's like, that's when people start to realize that you're doing and she's got to keep it up.

Chris DuBois 18:01
Yeah, great. It actually becomes a driver for them. Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 18:06
like, you know, monster.com What is like, one of those famous case studies for content marketing, and I'm sure it was just a complete waste of money for the first four or five years that they were doing it. But 10 years in, they are getting 20% of their inbound leads just from passive traffic from this publication that they manage and like, yeah, it takes a lot of faith on this side of the executives to keep funding this thing that looks that may sometimes look like an art project,

Chris DuBois 18:35
so super valuable for a long term brand play. Yeah. What? What are your recommendations? Then around doing something more short term lead gen kind of keep the lights on while waiting for that to work out. This, this

Speaker 1 18:49
is the forever, his forever challenge of content marketing, is I and you know, content marketing may be on its way out, like as a concept, and it was a great idea that I think is sort of, it's a failed to experiment in a lot of ways, because if you go back and read Robert Rose's original writings about content marketing, the idea was to become a mini media company and to be incredibly generous with the information and to be giving it away. And what I have seen over the last 10 years of doing this is everyone doing some version of that. That is worse. They're collecting, they're gating it. It's like it really was lead gen by a different name. And so it's left all these companies with all these sprawling publications of hundreds of articles that were like just really shallow SEO plays where the writer just googled the answer and then took whatever was on the first 10 answers and made their own version of it, very few, I think, created an actual brand around being known for giving away useful information like that. And so the short term play like we are always engaged in multiple workflows with a client, because there's always going to be the really short. Term demands. Hey, it's the end of year. End of quarter. Marketing is behind on our targets. What can you do for us that is content and it's not content marketing, right? That stuff is not about to, like, win hearts and minds and like, hopefully someone in six months is advanced enough to come back and buy that's not that. So there's, like, always the workflow. That is the pressure valve for the marketers needing things right away. And that's that's probably what I think you're talking about. And then we will do that in the interest of also having workflow two. And workflow two is what's the long term play. How does all of this level up into something if we're going to do ads over here and social graphics over here, like someone on the team has to be thinking about how all those turn into something greater. So we're accruing value, because otherwise you can easily go through eight to 10 years of doing that and kind of have nothing to show, like, not have built upon it, right? Not be known for doing that kind of information, you know, having that informational advantage. So short term stuff is what closing deals right now, right? Like, that's an investigation with the sales team, with the marketing team, to figure out not what is not working, but what is working. Because what is not working is a puzzle, and that's a long term thing to figure out. But for us, it's like, what are you currently doing that is very demonstrably generating stuff? Let's do 10 times more of that, like, because there's a lot of time we could spend trying to figure out why things are not working. But give us, give us the signal, and let's go chase that down. And then, as much as we can, like, you know, the earliest, it's hard to know without knowing the company, but the first place is like, go listen to Gong calls and talk to salespeople and figure out what questions they're getting over and over and why that buying cycle is difficult, which it often is, and create things that try to automate that. So at the very simplest, like, hey, we hear this objection on every call, cool. Let's do an article series on that. Let's try to get it so that people go to that and get educated before coming in and share it with people, and then figure out how to be really generous with all this information we have internally externally. Because the content is a product, right? It's like it's a product that just happens to be free. It should be as good as a product, and we shouldn't be shipping that as continuously and as generously as we are able. And when a company really does believe in that and things are not gated like it does, tend to work in the way that you hope it does. But for the short term, like, yeah, how do we help sales close deals?

Chris DuBois 22:16
I think the you just pointed out probably the biggest disconnect, right, where marketing and sales just aren't talking Yeah. So a lot of the marketing content is is purely an SEO play, because they're doing their keyword research based off what SEMrush is telling them they need to be ranking for. But those that doesn't necessarily mean it's the problems that people are actually having, and so just going in and talking to them, talking to you, whoever's on the success team, and figuring out, what do people actually care about? Like, yeah, it's immediately going to help more for short term wins than that. You know that multi month SEO play that you're aiming for. And

Speaker 1 22:49
you know, this is something that I saw over the last year, is a lot of marketers, a lot of very senior marketers, got let go on the basis that the executives were not able to figure out, were they having an impact or not. And so these executives, I know, I know multiple instances of this executive fires the very senior marketer and says, let's keep the junior person and just give them the title, and they can do anything they want, because the senior person wasn't achieving much. What's the worst that the junior person could do? And the answer is a lot, because that junior person is going to trace art projects. They're going to figure out they're like, Wow, I want to do the LinkedIn influencing thing. And that is where you get random acts of marketing that are entirely disconnected, like you're saying, from anything related to the sales process, right? They completely conflate the awareness play with the bottom of funnel. Let's close deals play. So it takes a very it takes a skilled content marketer and a marketer to like, yeah, get get into those deals like, the closer they can be, the better. And yet, there's also this filter layer that's really important, because marketing knows something that sales doesn't know. Marketing can actually see the whole elephant sales is just tugging on the tail because they've got a single deal in a single space at a point in time, and all that matters to them is getting that close. And I was that salesperson. This is how I got into doing this is I was at Marketo, and I was on the sales team, and this is at a time when they were going enterprise, and so it felt like the small business segment got starved of marketing support because they were now trying to win much larger deals. And I would go down to the marketing team and say, Hey, I've got this deal in New York City, and I need an article that shows that we know consumer businesses because they looked at our logos and they think we don't do consumer which is mostly true, but I'm a salesperson, and I need to close this deal. How can we show them? And the marketing team more or less said, listen, we're super busy. Why don't you try writing it? And I did, and that's how I got into doing what I'm doing now, as I started writing articles to support my own deals, so the client would be like, Wow, it's an incredibly relevant article on the market blog, writing it on the back end. This is for me, exactly for proof. And so, you know, the salesperson is going to be locally obsessed in a way that the marketer can be globally aware. And so they do, they do. You know, there is a value to having that. Overall insight, where they're like, that would be a great deal, and that is not our target market. Like, we don't want that deal. And I sold a couple of those, and I'm pretty sure they made a rule after I sold the smallest deal that Marketo had ever had, that we couldn't discount more than that level. And like, you know, the salesperson is going to try to squeak those through in the marketer, because they have less skin in the game. Can can say no, like, Hey, we're gonna say no to companies of this size, even though it is money, it's expensive money, and we don't want those ones, yeah,

Chris DuBois 25:30
so that's an awesome I don't like origin story. Like to be able to be able to see both sides, like that, right? And just, yeah, I'm gonna create a solution the man, I had a couple directions I wanted to go. But let's so I guess as you're now thinking about creating content, right, there's the you need to be able to get into the the sales person's head. So let's say you go into a new, new tech company working with them. How are you or like, what advice are you giving to them to be able to document all of these objections, all of these problems? Right? A lot of companies now are, fortunately recording sales conversations, but I still don't know. A lot of them are paying attention to the specific patterns of things that come up all the time, unless a sales manager is aware of that, and then coming down, like, coaching them to like, coaching them to like, Hey, you're hearing these like, you're obviously doing something in your process, right? I guess. What advice do you have for them to be able to pull out some of those things that you need from the marketing side to create insights for for audiences? Yeah? What

Speaker 1 26:37
is the advice? The advice would be to have a writer, like a lot of marketers, writing and marketing are not, you know, another event diagram not fully overlapped. There are a lot of marketers whose job it is to create the architecture in which marketing can happen. And they are our best friends, because we are the ones who are just obsessed with figuring out how to be an advocate for that buyer. What is this buyer most want to hear? What would they find useful? What would they need? And when we, when we do, when we do this process of listening to all the gong calls and pull out insights, a writers are just going to hear different things. They're going to hear way to and a designer, too will hear way different things than a marketer will, because the marketer is thinking about the systems of it, whereas when we're on those calls, we find, and in fact, it's absolutely essential to do those interviews yourself as a content person, because you're going to ask questions that nobody else thought to ask, right? Whereas the marketers like, what are the pains? Right? They're talking in like, the architecture of marketing, the content person is going to ask, like, open up your inbox. What's there? Who do you allow to email you? What businesses do things that annoy you? If I was to try to create a campaign to specifically reach you, how would I do that? Like, what would I do? I'm like, have them puzzle through those things. Like, hey, when you started your business, was the first thing you did. And the response is like, wow, I signed up for entrepreneur and Inc. You know, it's like, these little insights about where they're accessing information and what authorities they trust allow you to build, I think a very different map than a marketer tends to take away in my experience. So, yeah, bring a writer. Bring a writer. Because the writers, their anxiety in that call is like, how am I going to pull an article out of this? And their brain is wired to try to figure out, like, what are the threads? Where is the emotion in this? Like, where are the highs and lows? And that's probably the best piece of recommendation is like, have, have a writer and be and be listening for source information, trusted authorities and topics, topics and, yeah, pain, like, which maybe comes from having been a salesperson. But anytime we listen to pre recorded calls, like, I'm dying inside a little bit, because some prospect will say, and that's when everything fell apart, and you'll hear the press on the call be like, Okay, and next question, rather than right,

Speaker 2 28:57
what happened? I need to know that. Yeah, so

Chris DuBois 29:01
All right, this, this might be one of those, like, the the official nuggets for the episode, right? Like, just get your writer interviewing people. Yeah, if so, most teams probably don't have a writer, you know, so that they could outsource, like, you know, hire someone like you to come in. How do you recommend they actually get you in contact with their clients. Do you find one that they're already successful with, have great relationship? Do you find a prospect who might be thinking about things a little differently, like, where, where do you start those interviews?

Speaker 1 29:31
Yeah. So there's, yeah, there's a couple of different ways to do it. Like the best is ways like actual prospects. Like, if you could join actual prospect calls, which happens a shocking amount if it's a smaller company, because this the executives will feel that you're actually helping sell on the idea of what you're doing. So get in touch with the actual prospects and customers. There's always going to be some level of friction around that. Any company where marketing is sort of not. Allowed to contact the customer or the buyer because of sales interference is that's one of the greatest red flags at a content marketing operation like is doomed to fail where they can't have that direct access. And it's reflective of the fact that the people who own those relationships, whether it's the product or the sales team, fundamentally do not understand how the whole system of marketing and sales is supposed to work, because you cannot starve the marketing team of insights and then expect them to do anything worthwhile whatsoever, like they have to be in the room. And part of that, what we always propose to clients is like, Hey, give us four or five customers that we can talk to, and that sometimes it's really difficult for them. Sometimes it's incredibly easy. And that's a really incredibly easy, and that's a really good sign when they're like, cool, I've got ones. I was talking to them, one of our one of my good friends, Tara Panu, who often brings us into accounts, is like in calls with clients, and will be sending us audio clips out of that call. Hey, I just overheard this. Hey, I overheard this. So, like, that relationship should be really fluid, where they cannot find the people for us to talk to. We're always gonna supplement with our network. So I spent so many years as a salesperson, friending everyone on Earth on LinkedIn, and what it means is that now with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I can build a list with a couple of first connections in almost any industry. And so we'll go there too. And so always supplement with a couple of outside prospects who ideally have never heard of the company, which is its own unique and interesting perspective. Because you have to try to explain it to them and then have them explain it back to you. Hey, the company does X, Y and Z. How would you explain that that stuff is gold, to get them to reflect that back is that collection should be at least eight interviews. And if you can get eight good interviews with a mix of customers and prospects like you've got, you've got a lot of insights, right? That's four hours at the least of information to go through that you can start to like, notice trends. But our work is never statistically valid, right? We're the vibes we're the vibes squad here, where we're coming in and doing, like, quasi ethnographic, like trying to understand at a very high level all of these things to then go run tests. Right? The recommendation out of that should be, I heard this a whole bunch of times, and I wrote a messaging framework based on what I've heard. Now we need to get that into market. And I feel like that's a really I feel like maybe I'm going on a diatribe here, but that's a really important next step that we actually probably need to do a lot better at instituting in a lot of our client relationships, is ensure that, you know, people, for lack of time, are just going to take the thing they were handed and put it into production, and then it's out there in the world, and we honestly have no idea. That's one thing that I think maybe has helped me in my career, is I have absolutely no idea. Absolutely no idea what people are thinking, and so we have to be testing and extremely curious about it, because it could not work. And so that's part of the marketing architecture, like the marketing demand gen people's job is to take these ideas that we've dreamt up on behalf of the audience and then like, figure out, like, did that really convert ads? And half the time it doesn't, and half the time it does, but half the time it doesn't, we've got to know that, and that cycle has to

Chris DuBois 33:06
complete, right? Yeah, so it's like, treating it like it's CRO right? We're gonna set a hypothesis, we're gonna put it out in front of people. Yeah, I've got one client who we started doing some narrative work on, just what's your POV, how's this? And he took it right into sales conversations same day, and then was able to use it and sent me the clips of how the person reacted to hearing it. It's like, this is the best data right to be able to decide how this is working.

Speaker 1 33:31
One, one, you know, what I'll also plug is that it's useful to have several overlapping perspectives in that right. Like so at Fenwick, we always have at least two writers on any account, and a designer, and the designer always hears things that no one else did. The designer hears someone say, like, Well, I kind of think visually, you know? And they're like, Wait, tell me about that. What do you mean? And the person's like, oh, I whiteboard everything in whimsical. It's like, we get a lot more information on how they want to be communicated with. One I'll give a plug, like someone who does a really good job of this is Ryan Paul Gibson. He runs a Content Studio where he requires only eight interviews and can pull out the whole buyer's journey from a perspective that a lot of marketers have not seen before. A lot of marketers start with his buyer's journey. That is a template that does not reflect their reality, but it's a template and some sort of and they sort of adjust pieces of it, and he erases all of that, and then comes back with, like, an actual view, because he's a former journalist, and he's able to go really, really deep on on some of these things. And I would probably like back to the original question. If I answered that would be, I would have multiple people do that same thing. I would, I would have these interviews from the writer. I would also have interviews from a marker and like in in all of those different, somewhat overlapping but somewhat conflicting views like that, you're gonna get really, a really clear story of at least hypotheses to start testing like this is the message. This is the offer.

Chris DuBois 34:58
What I can appreciate about. This concept. And what I think more executives should probably appreciate about this is that like this structure isn't just going to help create content and build up your SEO, right? It's actually going to close deals like it is what you're figuring out. What do people actually care about so I can get in front of them, and I feel like that often goes missed just over people's heads when they're going in because they're looking at that SEO play rather than doing it. I think

Speaker 1 35:29
it's from McKinsey that less than 3% of board members have any marketing experience, and that feels very true in my experience. And so we sometimes get organizations where they're spending a million dollars a year on Google ads, and a tiny fraction of that on the ad copy, right? And that's the lever that can move everything. And it feels like the old adage, you know, we're losing money, so we're trying to make it up in volume. The unit does not work. And so in distress, they just pump all of their money into trying to get that failed message to everybody, as opposed to, like, focus on the content they offer, the message, the like, the thing that's actually going to work, and it's hard work. And a lot of people stop, I think, you know, at the 75% mark, and say, Well, this is good enough. You really have to keep going until you can get on a call and say the message, and people go, Wow, I get that, right? I get that. And I like that, and I'm aligned with your company, like, I like the way that you think about things, like, you need to get to that and, and that's a journey that happens with the whole marketing team. And we're just a little, a small team, and so we don't, we don't always get to, we can't run that whole thing,

Chris DuBois 36:41
right? I think the there's an alternative to where you're saying, they find whatever that message is, it's like, okay, and they just put all their money in there. I think I've also seen they just completely scrap it and go something completely different. And when doing that, like, you're never going to get to that, you know, 95% solution that you're continuously tweaking, where people like, nod their heads throughout the entire sales conversation, because you just started over and it's like, yeah.

Speaker 1 37:09
And yeah. I mean, that is such a such a Yeah. That's so relevant. Is changing now because you're tired of it, even though the market has not even begun to notice it,

Chris DuBois 37:21
right? Yeah, and that's probably more reason to set an actual hypothesis right. Treat it like you're you're running a study and say, How many people do I even need to to know have seen this before I can even decide if it's worth looking at, exploring like we're not just going to call it inconclusive right away, right? Like we accurate or a failed experiment, like we need to actually have enough eyes on this to know what we're looking at, and so, yeah,

Speaker 1 37:47
or in just as often, they send it to like one customer, and that one customer has an opinion, like, right? Yep, you're like, Okay, well, and that's the, this is what I said. I think marketing is the toughest job on Earth. Everyone has input, everyone has ideas, being able to make all those people feel heard and seen and still figure out, like, how to get a handle on this whole mess of, how do we distribute, how do we create, how do we get insights? And it's a really tough thing, and figuring out the audience is like, it is such an important and overlooked thing, because it's so satisfying, I think, to be publishing and putting things out there. And that's part of why I think that content marketing has largely failed, is I think a lot of companies jumped into publishing without any core sense of why. And the question that I always ask is, if your company did not exist with your blog, and if the answer is no, why does it exist? Like, it needs to have some differentiated point of view and be a utility enough to people that when you stop publishing, someone asks you, and I don't see that very often, yeah,

Chris DuBois 38:50
yeah. I think on some level, a lot of content marketers are appreciating the dopamine hit over the revenue. How do I check that box?

Speaker 1 38:58
Yeah. You know, as far as audience like, how do you how do you how do you think about that for the podcast? Like, how do you know, I know that with podcasts, it's notoriously difficult to get data on the really, the you know, the listenership. How do you think about identifying who that audience is? Like, creating stuff that will resonate with

Chris DuBois 39:15
them? So, yeah, for me, it's going out and actually doing the interviews every nearly everyone, at this point who has hired me has heard me at some event or live somewhere, and then they went and consumed all of my content, all my LinkedIn, all my all my podcast episodes. And so when talking to them, they're literally telling me, like, Okay, this episode awesome. Or I just know so many agency owners now that I can ask them, like, what are you looking for with, you know, within podcasts? And so I can start tailoring certain things. If there's a big topic that's coming up, I'll find an expert who can come in and talk that specifically, yeah. And then I go back to those people and say, how was that episode like? Did it do? What you you were hoping it would do? And, yeah, I think that's it. But, yeah. Podcast, you can't really get a lot of good attribution data.

Speaker 1 40:03
How often do you feel you get a truly honest answer to the question, What did you think of it?

Chris DuBois 40:09
Pretty honest, because I'm pretty blunt when I talk to other people, and so I think they feel obligated to give it back. But yeah, I've had some say. Like, no, I wish you had gone deeper on on these points. I'm like, right? I guess I have to bring that guest back to ask some follow ups here. Yeah. Or even I had, like, a new client this week just asked me, Hey, I was just listening to this episode with you. I didn't understand this point. Like, can you explain it further? And so, like, one I know that's other content I can be creating now, using that podcast as like a leverage point, but it's also just a I need to make sure that when I'm getting an answer response, that I'm not assuming the audience knows things. It's like we get that level of clarity for every response.

Speaker 1 40:52
What, what do you then do with those ideas? Where do you store ideas? How do you rank and choose and like? How do you know what to act

Chris DuBois 41:00
on it? So I have what I call the content engine. I'm using notion. I've got a massive database. I take the transcripts from every every podcast, I run it through. AI to say, what are the highlight knowing, because it knows my audience, because I've made a very thorough ICP doc. And I say, what are the highlights from this episode that people would enjoy content from? And each of those becomes a bullet underneath that. You know, whoever I interviewed underneath their name got all my own notes, and I can just keep writing the content there, plugging in clips and and then I, when I test it on my like I'll publish a LinkedIn post or something like that. I'll tag like link that LinkedIn post so that I can actually track how well did it perform. I'm using shield as well for, like, analytics, but really just trying to figure out, like, is this actually good? Is it, you know, doing the things that I need to, because then I'm going to tweak any other follow up content, or when I recycle this post a couple months down the road, I'm going to try something completely different to make it happen, right, right? Yeah, what

Speaker 1 41:59
have been some insights lately that have come out of that process, like, what have you learned about your own content from this tracking apparatus, LinkedIn, performance? All that

Chris DuBois 42:11
the things I think people would care about are often not the things that people are actually caring about in the moment. And I think it's because I'm not running an agency now. I talk to agency owners daily, but I think there's like a lag between when they're the problems that they're starting to feel actually come up in conversation and and so when I produce that content, whatever is most prevalent is not usually what you know, it's what I thought it was. And then, yeah, they get to, they get to put it out. And so that's my exact

Speaker 1 42:41
experience as a writer. Yeah, like you, you know, having not been a salesperson, I feel like I had, I'd finally made it as a writer, when I wrote for a team of salespeople and they said, sounds like marketing speak. And I was like, Oh, I have fully transcended, like I am nothing years away from that experience to like, no longer be able to empathize, right? My old self, like I lost the thing and I it was a great, it was a great ego check. And as is, you know, yeah, putting stuff out there on LinkedIn, thinking this is, this is the thing that is true for all of our accounts, and this would solve everyone's problem. Crickets, yep, next post totally didn't think about it, and it does great. And that honesty loop is sort of back to what we were talking about earlier. The direct response, like, if you don't have that connection, the direct response like, I'm sure there are some people who can just ignore that and continue to say things others are interesting in. And for me, it is so useful to be continuously tethered to that and brought back to it, right? Which is why we've got to be tracking the performance of all this stuff and figuring out, like, how does it actually close deals and help salespeople sell? Great

Chris DuBois 43:49
man. All right. Well, Chris, this feels like a good time to give you two follow up questions to everything. Well, the first being, it's not really a follow up, but what book do you recommend every agency leader should read Team

Speaker 1 44:03
of Rivals, team of writers by Doris rivals. Yeah, right. Gotcha

Chris DuBois 44:10
writers. And I was like, Man, that is like a perfect title for what we're talking about. It is a follow up Team of Rivals, Team of Rivals.

Speaker 1 44:17
Have you heard of it? No, okay. It is by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and it is the best business book I have ever read. And it is obviously not a business book. It is about Abraham Lincoln and how he built his cabinet, where I'll do the short version of it, and why it's so interesting to me is he was the absolute dark horse candidate. No one had ever heard of him, but he configured the convention where they're electing a Republican president, so that he was like the third or the fourth option on everyone's ticket. And then all of these people, all these different factions, are fighting each other out. And then in the end, they go to their second option, to their after fourth option, and he is elected. And everyone says, Who is this person? So it was an absolute genius move to get into in be elected president. And then he builds his cabinet out of all of his top rivals. So he takes all the people he was competing with, and he convinces them not only that they should work for him, but that he is so incompetent that they have to or the government will fail, and they all spend the entire administration thinking that they are the ones running things, and they're No, it's him. It is so good. It is so good. Yeah,

Chris DuBois 45:34
now I need to grab a copy of that. Yeah, it's example.

Speaker 1 45:38
I feel of like complete egolessness, right? Like the ego full thing would have been to punish those that you had beaten him like, banish them into the political wilderness, and instead to have the cunning to allow Salmon P Chase, who desperately wanted to be president, to be the head of the Treasury and to manage the monetary policy, thinking that he was the one. It's just epic. It's such an epic. And, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Well, it's

Chris DuBois 46:09
interesting. So I love leadership and just the study of it, and all these things that I pulled from my military career. But the like, you never want to be the smartest person in the room, right? Like, that's common advice given to every leader, often the like, you know, I think people who, at some point think that means, like, Oh, you just, you don't need to be the smartest person, right? Like, but in this case, it seems like Lincoln was actually like, he could very well have been the smartest person, but he was bringing in other people who are at least equally smarter, could focus on specific areas to gain expertise in those places and be become the best. So he had to go to and almost by just feigning that incompetence for a bit, it was able to enable that. And so he could still be smart while still bringing smarter people in. And yeah, I like that concept. So, yeah, yeah, I will grab it. I literally asked on LinkedIn for book record. I asked for fiction book recommendations. But this was, this

Speaker 1 47:08
is perfect. It will frustrate you to no end though, I'm sure having a military background, because the Civil War need not have been five years old. It was. It could have been so much shorter. And to your point, like, Lincoln was there reading military manuals. He's like, reading Clausewitz because his generals are incompetent in the field that he is having to manage them until he finally gets one general where he's sending these telegraph orders and basically micromanaging all of the generals. And so he's saying, like, Go, take the city. Wait, wait, don't take Richmond, right? And so he's like, second guessing that micromanaging grant every single battle, somehow grants telegraph lines got cut, and after a while, they realized Grant was cutting his own telegraph lines so that no one could communicate with them. Because he was like, let me do my let me get it back.

Chris DuBois 47:56
I like it. Yeah, I wrote some multiple papers on Grant. Okay, great, college. So, yeah, good stuff. Last question for you, though, yeah, but no one expected to get, like, a history lesson in here as well.

Unknown Speaker 48:11
No one ever does. And that's, that's the, you know, that's what,

Chris DuBois 48:15
where can people find you?

Speaker 1 48:17
LinkedIn is probably the best place I am, I am very online on LinkedIn these days, partly for the reason that you and I have talked about so much, it's like getting the feedback and knowing what people are talking about is so so valuable. So I like to think that I'm doing a decent job of curating who I'm following what I'm seeing, but see a lot of good stuff on there, so that's probably the best place. Awesome.

Chris DuBois 48:38
All right. Well, Chris, this was a very insightful conversation. Thank you for joining

Speaker 1 48:42
Yeah, Chris, thank you so much for setting this up. I really appreciate it.

Chris DuBois 48:49
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to HNC forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai