[Best of B2B] Devin Reed on Content Strategy (Founder, The Reeder)

Dasha, remember when Mcheal from Optimizedly won our exit five live AI agent showcase the 2000 custom landing pages. That was really impressive So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizedly's agent platform one for every account in an ABM campaign He built them from signals like job postings, press releases and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM That's why today's sponsor Optimizedly is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50+ pre-built ones They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time can join meetings complete tasks support campaigns and keep your website Optimized, why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay, I need one of those Same being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now go check out Optimizedly Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like McEal did check them out at Optimizedly.com/exit5 Hey quick shout out to Webflow who is also sponsoring today's episode their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year Which is our big annual conference people raved about that one guy their chief evangelist really knows aio And you shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver And that matters a lot right now right AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore I'm talking to my AI agents all day long So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers just like you and me are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95% of the time Webflow they're a great team to follow on this more than 300,000 brands can you believe that build on their platform It helps you get discovered in AI search build fully custom sites without a developer Gov on your content and see how agents read it all in one place and they just launched Webflow campaigns Agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system then generate on brand landing pages and matching ads together Check it out at webflow.com/exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027 That's webflow.com/exit-5 All right, look everywhere you look online right now everyone's telling you the new way to do marketing because of AI And I think because of that there's so much perceived change and innovation and speed and technology and AI and agents in marketing right now I think we've forgotten a little bit about the timeless lessons in marketing just like life There's a bunch of timeless principles that kind of always work Whether I'm reading a book from 1925 about advertising and copyrighting that still applies today Or if I'm doing an interview with someone here on our podcast I'm just reminded all the time about how it's easy to open up LinkedIn And feel like you're behind or feel like you need to chase the newest tool tactic or channel And so we want to profile some of the more timeless lessons here on our exit-5 podcast right Everybody in B2B is chasing what's new new channels new tools new playbooks with the fundamentals Haven't changed some marketing lessons never go out of style And that's why we handpicked this episode for you in your ears We're blessing this is one of the greatest hits of the exit-5 podcast whenever all time most played episodes And here's this one for you. I hope this is a dose of timeless marketing that you need to ground yourself today So Devon is here. I wanted to talk before the podcast, but I said I just want to hit record and Actually chat with you On the record The PR team at your company will be okay. This will be good for everybody. Don't worry But before we dive in and I ask I ask a million questions as listeners know and I take lots of notes and go in a bunch different directions like For people listening can you introduce yourself name Quick bio who you are. What do you do quick career summary and I'm going to jump back and ask you a bunch of questions from there Yeah, absolutely. So Currently director of content and thought leadership over at Clary The quick background is I spent the first six years of my career in sales So I went from being a terrible sales rep to a decent one to a pretty good one I would say right when I got pretty good at it and the money was coming in I decided to move over into marketing and so that was while I was at gong So I was the second sales rep at gong in 2017 when they're about 40 employees Move over to marketing was supposed to actually join Chris Orlov's team if anyone knows or his heart of Chris Orlov And so he was leading content right as I joined his team He was like actually I'm going to get back into sales So you can just have my job basically and so I became the one man band there When we were I don't know 150 250 employees and then scaled the team to seven Left wonder about 1200 employees last year And then yeah, as I mentioned just joined Clary about nine months ago Awesome. Yeah, I feel like I just from following the story in the silent. That's right. There was a little bit of a flip flop I feel like that might be one of the secret ingredients into why The content at gong was so good is that you were in the role of the customer that you were selling to right you weren't And I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but you weren't a 22-year-old fresh grad or marketing associate trying to like get inside the head of a salesperson You're like oh, I am this like I can talk about that was that a conscious Move and what was exciting about content? Obviously you're making good money selling software gong is going great I'm sure you were hitting all your numbers in the early days when the companies grow and craze like that There's lots of accelerators and lots of money to be made Take me into that time. Yeah, and this is I'm not saying it to flatter you by any means But I've known you for a while of you and and we've met a couple times over the years and studying you and just other folks in the marketing space I'm just trying to find the intangibles right like why is this person successful? What is it about then that draws people to them? And that's in B2B and that's in just like life right? I'm like always curious about that And by no means watering down your success to this day But one thing was like he's a marketer marketing to marketers like he's a dude marketing to himself That has to be part of it And so all of the imposter syndrome and kind of doubt I had of myself of like hey I'm going to go build a marketing team at a pretty you know at the time Lossoming you know tech company at least I know the audience like at the very least I know who I'm talking to and about and so I kind of leaned on that really heavy The reason for the transfer was Like I mentioned like I got good at sales it took a really long time But it never like felt like my calling it kind of felt forced And I didn't know that marketing was you know going to work out But I just thought hey, maybe there's just way where I can kind of you know Plants is some my more creative skill set some of my communication skill set and kind of just In just no disrespect to my friends and sales by any means But you can easily become a cog you're replaceable you're a number and like You only as good as your last month or quarter I wanted to find a way that I can maybe be a little bit more indispensable and valuable and find other ways to Bring value to the company. It just so happened to be content marketing Do you feel like now you're good enough with content and marketing and understanding content? Could you only do Marketing to marketers or marketing to sales or do you feel like I know the game now You could hire me to run content at a cybersecurity company and I think I could be successful I Humbly think I could be successful, but I openly don't want to do that. I think the learning curve I'm with you. I use that line all the time. I'm like I would be no good in that world I think it'd be a different playbook in that I would Be more of like the curator behind the scenes and try to like interview and tap into experts where like Me being the face of doing a lot of content like ad drift at that time worked really well in that market The walking and talking LinkedIn videos is not going to work You know selling to like dev ops or something like that But I think that to me is what's fun about it is like you get to create a different Recipe and attack it in a different way Yes, I've said the almost exact same examples Which was like would it have worked out you know from sales to like what's like get lab or some like developers like no probably not and now that I've kind of found my niche I'm just more valuable to a few handful of companies right who sell to the person I'm super familiar with So I'd rather stay there market to them and keep a shorter learning curve then say I've got something to prove I can be the head of marketing at a company that sells to developers watch me work like that. It doesn't interest me Your niche is what B2B SaaS B2B SaaS We go even further. I'd say sales Marketing or if you want to go to market. I know it's like kind of broad, but yeah, can we talk about um gone early content strategy stuff because And I use this example a lot and I have worked with a lot of B2B SaaS companies marketing teams I think one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of companies are doing content and we're we got a blog We got a podcast. We got LinkedIn. We got TikTok. We got YouTube. We got this. We got that And none of it is great and that's not even saying it is a knock But we just kind of try to do it everywhere, which like I don't know if this was the actual strategy But from the outside what I felt like I saw Gong and you guys doing was In some ways like less is more like it felt to me like you did kind of like One or two like pillar pieces of content instead of just like cranking out blog posts about sales You were like hey, we're not going to publish anything for three weeks We're going to use our own data and we're going to come out with like you know Here are the most common phrases that closers use or what I'm making this up right and We're not going to do it across every channel We know that our buyers are on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is a really busy and effective channel right now We're just kind of kind of focused on LinkedIn where I've been in the situation where it's like, well, this person on the team has like an email subscriber goal and this person on the team has like a blog traffic goal and this person has like a demo request goal and like none of that's working. I thought from the outside what you all did really well was like, nope, we're just going to kind of go all in on LinkedIn. That's where we believe our persona is and we're going to use LinkedIn to drive a ton of eyeballs to our content. Am I roughly in the ballpark of that? You're in the ballpark and you're in the lower bleachers. You're in the right spot. All right. Well, pretend like I've never heard it before and tell me the like intentional decisions because I always say now, if I were to go do something else or run marketing somewhere else, I just think that focus is the key. It's not about being on 20 channels. It's like being really good at one or two and just like squeezing all the juice out of those channels. And it also helps so much with internal alignment and who's doing what versus like the team, so many marketing teams, everybody's doing lots of stuff and everybody's really busy, but we're not hitting our goals. So the way I thought about it was, again, being having business sales rep, right? We've all heard the adage, you know, go where your customers are today. Go where your audiences today. And so I thought, well, what does a salesperson do when they log in? When they open their laptop, they go to three places. There's three tabs. They open Gmail, Salesforce, and LinkedIn all day long. Those are the three things that are open. So I thought, okay, well, email, we can build an email list, right? That's a great direct path to communicate with folks. Everyone's on LinkedIn. Let's build on LinkedIn. And I can't build on Salesforce or something there. So I'll just take two of those three tabs and I'm going to own those two or three tabs. So every time you see my name, Gong's name, it's going to be something what we can talk about with valuable means, but it has to be something valuable, highly engaging every single time. And we will condition people and inevitably they'll share our content. And so I'm like, if I can just dominate, not play, not win, we are trying to dominate these two channels, LinkedIn specifically, then we can figure out if and how we scale. But I was all in that I, we can win and dominate those two places. We wouldn't really have to go much wider than that. There's a great book on business strategy. I think it's called playing to win. And one of the basically core principles in the book is like, before you figure out like how you're going to play, you have to figure out where you're going to play. And so like, I love that you already in that first exercise, you've kind of narrowed it down to like, okay, we're going to focus on these two channels, which is going to be email and LinkedIn. But anybody can do that. Anybody can focus on those channels. Take me into like how you figured out the how and not just pumping out kind of average content. It seemed like you had a very specific bar for what you created. I always give a shout to Udi, I'm sure you know Udi well, he was, I mean, big brand guy, but really all about being different. And he always said, different is better than better. And so here I am, you know, I've got sleep on, if you can see in the frame, I'm tattooed up. He's very street level. And I'm on these, you know, videos on LinkedIn, giving sales advice, but using like you said, the data, right? And so I think one was the delivery of the content was something that I looked in the mirror. I'm like, I looked different than most people in this space. And Udi hired me so he knew what he was getting into, right? He didn't ask me to wear a great business suit on videos and in front of audiences. So if that's kind of a differentiator is how I communicate in our tone at Gong as a whole, let's lean into that. Right? And so the brand tone was something that was very different. The content itself was, yeah, we had this just, you know, treasure chest of all these different data points from the platform. And everybody on LinkedIn at the time, which again at the time, not nearly as many LinkedIn creators and influencers was not a thing. I think Chris Orlal was like the first to have 30,000 followers in that space and that was wild. Like people didn't even know that was a thing. And so it was like, hey, let's not just do opinion based stuff. I was on this one sales call and this is what happened and therefore everyone and their mom should do it this way. It was let's look at the data. There's always a difference as you know, you know, Dave from like behavioral psychology, the things we say we do and the things we actually do. And so if I was could say, hey, let's take the opinions of the best practices, the things you learn in sales school, which all the sales training, you know, when you, when you join a sales company, what if we take all of that? Then we pair it with data and say, hey, here's what you've been told to do. Here's what you think is right. Here's what actually works according to data. And that alone gave us a lot of credibility because the database, but it just jumped. It just pierced through the noise. No one was doing anything like that. And so when you take this in the way we were bringing insights and then the way we were delivering it with the tone, that's what was just like no one was doing anything like that. And that's why we stood out. So I don't want to say easily, but so, you know, so much in comparison to the landscape. For me, it also comes back to like for people that are looking for marketing jobs or let's say you want to be in you want to do content marketing. I'm a partial believer and I think David Ogleley had this line that says like, there are no boring products, only dull writers. And I think that's partially true. But I also think that when you're looking for jobs or looking for how you can be successful, like this wasn't vapor where you had a great product with interesting data that like, oh, man, this is a gold mine for marketers. And I think we had a similar thing in at the time at drift, which is like marketing to marketers. The CEO David was like really smart to be like, hey, look, if we're selling marketing, a marketing software product, like, hey, marketing team, like you guys have to use our product. He made us cancel all of the other SaaS tools that we're using. And like even if the drift product at the time couldn't do a certain thing, he's like, you got to do it because we're selling this product to the audience. Like, you're going to get better ideas, you're going to get better content, you're going to push the product team. And so a big part of that was like, oh, yeah, this is a perfect combination of like smart people who want to create interesting content, but we also have this like the right fit from a product standpoint where we can really work together to deliver interesting content. As opposed to just having to write another, you know, 15 podcasts every sales rep should listen to type of article. Yeah. Absolutely. As a leader, it's kind of like a triangle that I think about it when I come to developing the team and on each point, one is category, because that's kind of, you know, I've always done the category play. You call it point of view. The second one is audience and the third one is product. And so we had that at GONE for four mentioned reasons having, you know, I sold the product for a couple of years beforehand. But as I started building scale teams, I tried to look for where are we strong and where are we weak on this kind of triangle with each higher. So I'm going to come in with product knowledge. Like right now at Claire, I have a sales engineer turn marketer nailing product right there. So I kind of think of those three ways. And then as the leader on the team, it's my job to bring the category, you know, from the CEO, from Kyle or CMO down to the kind of more street level folks. So that's kind of the little, little way that I look at it. In the GONE example, what was the kind of cadence from a content perspective? Obviously, you, you said no to lots of other different channels. I'm sure you all had a bunch of different ideas for we could do this on YouTube. We could do this. We do that. We focused on, you know, LinkedIn and kind of long form content. What was the cadence? Did the team say like, we're going to do one meaty thing a month and that's what everyone's working on? Like, how did this come together behind the scenes? In the early days it was because it was me and it got Jonathan that I hired. So it was just both of us. And so when we joined, it was like, hey, we're really doing like one thing a month. Keep doing that. And then see if we can do like two things a month. Like that was it. We double. I doubled headcount. Can you double output? Strategy really was the Gong Labs articles, which is folks new to that. There was the data backed articles where I don't, you know, specifically 800 words or less. Extremely, you know, one big data point, a story with it and then some actionable guidance and a lead magnet. So you know, if it was like, hey, here's what was the example I think you shared, which was actually what we did. Well, like, you know, these 10 words are what, you know, best sellers do, best sellers say, we might cover like five of them in the blog and then go, by the way, here's a cheat sheet with all 10, download it and then I get your email address as well. We saw so much success with those when they popped off on LinkedIn that it was like worth rolling the dice. Like we had the equation, we had the formula, we had the team, let's just do one of those a month. We tried to get to two a month, but they're just pretty big lifts from a campaign and data standpoint. So we got like threeish weeks at best, but we just knew that we were getting, you know, and one of these popped off, we had, you know, over a thousand new followers on our page, we would get 500 to 1500 new email addresses, those folks could mql. And what was most interesting though, and kind of going to like, like, how did you get away with that? How did you get away with like one big bet and we did some other stuff too that I'll talk about. But it wasn't about adding to the conversation. We were trying to own the conversation. I wanted everybody talking about that data point for 24 hours on LinkedIn. And what we ended up finding out with like, you know, a blog would go live on Tuesday. I'd get on a call with someone Thursday, Friday, maybe even of the next week. And they would start the call day with like, hey, Deb, just want to say real quick, saw that article from last week. Someone on my sales team slapped it to me. Someone on my sales team was in our sales chart. Like I'm convinced even though I'll never be able to prove it, that slack was probably the third best channel for delivering that content because people were sharing it. Yeah. I agree. I mean, I was just going to say like, I think this is the other really important piece of this. Yes, it was using your data, but it was not self-serving. It was like genuinely useful and interesting insights that like the VP of sales at Drift might send this around and be like, oh, let's look at our gone call recordings and see what how often these phrases are coming up or like, hey, like you were teaching or sharing something unique that it was genuinely helpful. And I think that's what it takes to me to be good at content in a way that's going to drive measurable business results is like, we sell to salespeople, forget that we're gone or whoever. How do we make this piece of something so valuable that it's going to be the thing that they share and tell each other about it? out and like, "I'll check this out. I'm going to try this thing from this article." To me, that's what it means to build a brand. I think more than like logo and name and all that stuff. It's like, "Oh, Gong became this resource for salespeople." And so if I'm a mid-level like AE at some company, Gong becomes my kind of secret weapon to help me grow in my career because I'm now following your stuff. I'm reading this article, "Oh, cool. I'm going to try this out." I mean, for me, as a marketer early in my career, like that was HubSpot when they created like inbound marketing. I was one of the few marketers at a company that I was at at the time who's like, going to their conference, going to their all their webinars, following them on social media. And I felt like I had this like secret that nobody else had. And I think that's what makes it great. And so it's like about getting inside the head and then creating the level of content that's valuable and you being from sales, you can kind of pass the sniff test yourself. - Right, absolutely. It was funny to say about the being genuinely valuable. I had a no product rule, no pitch, no screenshots. This was no product allowed. And it worked really well. It was funny. There was other times where you get the pull, we'll say names or titles, but someone above like, hey, why don't we do this? There's this new product coming out. Why don't we really do this? And I was like, fine. After defending my position for months and years, I'm like, let's do it a third of the results, a third of the engagement. Because it fails the sniff test. They're like, oh, oh, we're being pitched to today. Got it. Let me click out of this because it's not the same. And especially when you've built up this expectation and this reputation for what this is, what I'm going to get, and then you switch it up on people, it didn't work. And so I was like, okay, there's my line in the sand. Can we all go back to the playbook that works? - So I think people have a pretty good idea for the types of content that you're creating. Also, I just love this as a strategy. This is how you got to start. It's like, I think too many people obsessed with on Monday we're going to this. And Wednesday we're going to do this. You said, let's try this one long form piece of content. It worked. Let's go do it again. And maybe now try to get two in the rotation and see. But there's this very thin line where all of a sudden, you kind of get diminishing returns because then I was like, oh, what if we did one of these every week? Well, then the audience wouldn't be that big. - Which came up by the way. Why don't we do this every week? - Of course it did. I have to look. My business is Exify, and we have sponsors. And I've thought a lot of times about, and I could basically triple the revenue if I tripled the sponsors and we did a one webinar a week. Well, here's the issue. Because we're only doing one webinar a month right now, these webinars are getting 1,000 people registering for them. All of a sudden, if you do that every single week, then all of a sudden 1,000 becomes like 220, 186. And you only have so many, like I just, and that's why I love the approach that you all took to marketing, which is like, use your ammo wisely. And so when you post on LinkedIn, it's gonna have a bigger result than if you did that every single day or every single week, it's gonna have a worse result. - Absolutely. Yep, you're a hip-hop guy. So I'll go deep reference. Do you remember, I don't know the year, man, I'm terrible. Like 2007, 889, when Lil Wayne went on an absolute terror of like dropping a mixtape like every week or month for like two years, do you remember that? - Of course, no ceilings. It was a-- - No ceilings. Do you remember like-- - Yeah, it was probably like 2006 to 2009, yeah. - Yeah, it was in that ballpark, yeah, right? And so remember like, at first it was like, oh my, no ceilings was crazy. There's some really good ones. And then eventually there are so many coming out that like you kind of just lost interest, at least I did. I remember being like Wayne, I only got so much time in the day, man. Like, and they weren't getting better. Like they got a little worse. - The drought nine, you're like, no, I don't have time. - Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm like, which drought are we on? I haven't even heard seven yet. And nine comes out tomorrow. And I always remember that. I always remember that of like leave people wanting more. Let people anticipate because it's gonna help with your results, like to your point. If I can get Dave every week live in the webinar, it's not as interesting if I have to wait a month, right? Or just for an example. And so I was big on that. And so what we did instead was, was just diversify the content format, which would say, okay, great. The blog did really well. People liked it. Let's turn it into short form. What's now called zero click content. It was zero click content before Amanda coined it. And it was put that out on LinkedIn. Hey, let's get Devon on video for two, three minutes and walk through it and put that on LinkedIn. And webinars as well. - Can you explain zero click content for people that don't know? - Yeah, zero click content is effectively content that you're publishing. And I would say email too, I don't know if she only meant for social, but effectively it's link less. So there's no link. I'm not promoting a link. I'm just sharing the content in the feed or in the native channel. And the goal is just to get people to consume it there, build trust, grow your following, grow inbound. That's what we were doing. And so when I say we did one big thing a month, it was like one big new thing a month. And then we would repurpose, reformat, and you know, host webinars and all that good stuff. But the point was that all that was easy 'cause we knew we had gold, it was just repurposing it. - I also think of zero click content as, in your example you mentioned that like you can consume it all. I also think there's a right way to do it where not only do consume it all without clicking, but it's so good or so interesting that people are then gonna go to your website or find it anyway. And so you and I are recording this on a Thursday. Yesterday I announced the relaunch of exit five and we're on a new platform and all this. And we drove hundreds of new signups on the first day. And I didn't actually link to exit five website. And there was no UTM, there was nothing. I made a loom video walking through the new community. I posted it on LinkedIn and I said like, you can go and join right now if you go to exit five.com and I spelled out.com because I know that it's a, well it's a short, easy URL, exit five.com. But also like LinkedIn doesn't like links 'cause I don't want to send people off the platform. Now if I was an advertiser, I'd be well, how do we track this? Well, I track this because on that day, there was 300 signups yesterday 'cause I told people in the video, go to exit five.com. But there's no Google Analytics or any tags or anything that's gonna show that. But the content matched the audience and we built up enough demand and it was interesting to people. And I think back to the gong stuff, it's like do less stuff, build up more demand for it, do it better. And then when you have a hit like, it's almost like for gong, like people are like, well, how did you promote the content? And they're like, that's the easy part. Like we posted it on LinkedIn and we had built an audience there. And so like everybody wanted to go and like download this piece of content that we created, we didn't have to think of 16 different ways to promote this piece of content. Quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world famous exit five live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against exit five live. Now how good is that? So good, I wanna print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge. In a world of AI slot, we just wanna make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. Especially a webinar, but don't you dare call the webinar even though I'd break my own rule and do that all the time. It's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these choosing the topic, the prep calls building the run a show and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1500 plus registrants for session, hundreds of people show up live and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high water market, 527 people live for an hour with us. Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics and all lives in one place. So running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio. They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos. At least that anyone can see. Just please do not look at our internal slack. Okay, all the caps lock in there. Don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out zoom.com/exit5. Learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live. We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out. It's called exit five live and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com/exit5. All right, if you're at a B2B tech company spending over $50,000 a month on paid media, compound growth marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan. Free? Okay, I'm listening. What do you get? I know free is usually too good to be true, but check this out in the first session. They're going to learn your business. And in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI and where your reporting has gaps. And look, I trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing. Twice? Well, I've hired plenty of agencies as a VP of marketing and that is rare. I'm more than just a thought later, Dash. You should know that. So CGM helps high growth, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel, paid media, AEO, and a dedicated GTM engineering team. Ooh, and a former VP of marketing started it. So they actually get B2B. That's right, John was one of us back in the day. So check it out. You can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Link in the show notes. Yep, totally agree, congrats on the relaunch by the way. Thank you, quick plug. I do my own marketing here. A lot of times, even myself have to defend, right? Like, how do I know it worked? And so we would just look at the inbound numbers by day and Salesforce. And you would always see a spike. Obviously, on these big days, like obvious spike. But it's the halo effect, which is, look, I don't have a GTM. I don't have anything. But one thing happened that day, we did an email campaign. We did a webinar. We did this Gong Labs. And you see a very clear uptick. And a lot of times, again, not always, but sometimes someone is digital. Oh, well, we did launch a new paid ad that week or that day. And it wasn't the ad. And I said, OK, hey, if we don't agree that it was what we did, then we'll just stop doing it. And we'll find something else to do. And then the loss of version kicks in. And people are like, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on. Like, you know, probably had something to do with it. And it's like, maybe it's correlation. I don't know, but it's pretty clear causation to me. If you did one thing, one thing on Wednesday, and then bound one up Wednesday and Thursday, probably that thing. What also comes back to like having in building an audience. One of my least favorite types of content is when people write like how Mr. Beast launched X brand. I'm like, how did he launch it? Because he has a bazillion YouTube subscribers. And he says, hey, I have, I have a new thing. Go buy it. Yes, exactly. And so like, that's always going to alert or like anything a Kardashian does. It's like, did they need creative promo? No, they have a huge audience and they say, like, hello, the store is now open. Go to it. And that's what you can do. Two things I want to come back to. So you mentioned you'd create this content and you'd post it on LinkedIn. But most certainly you you didn't just post it on LinkedIn and grow followers. Like, did you have a dedicated like LinkedIn company page strategy? Like, you know, you were posting. Chris was posting. Ooty was posting a meat. Maybe that's been more recent. Like, my guess is you were also doing stuff to build the audiences on LinkedIn so that when you did have a piece of content, you had people there to go find it. Can you unpack some of that? Yeah. So at the time, and if you've been on LinkedIn long enough, you know, every what day, like two-ish years, they go through these big waves of features and functionality. They want you to adopt. So like, articles were a thing. Remember articles, like, those were hot, like six, seven years ago. Then it was video and I don't know what it is now. But anyway, so I would just publish an article from my page because we knew one people wanted to hear from a person, not a company. Two, I had the credibility as a previous salesperson. And three, it wasn't as mature at the time. But we were pretty damn sure profile pages were getting more views. So we said, hey, let's just do the obvious thing. That's easiest. So I would publish it at eight in the morning via LinkedIn. And then we would do what we call the gongster activation or employee activation, which was, hey, internally slack and email this new article went live. Here's who it's for. Here's what it's about. Like two sentences. Please go like and comment or share with your prospects if interested. There was no monitoring of that. If you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to. But a lot of people did because again, sales team had bought into the content. And then, yeah, of course, you know, Udi would reshare. A lot of the folks wanted to share because it was so much buying into the marketing. And they also believed in the content. And it was clear, like, I would put in their p has the more people that share more shares means more views means more pipeline every single time. And so it was kind of like, okay, well, if you care about pipeline, you should probably share this. You also had an important ingredient, which is like, you had a company where people wanted to be there. And they were engaged and like, Gong was a thing. And like, people had equity in the company and the company was growing. And so like, everybody's rowing in the same direction. It's much harder to be like, hey, go and share our stuff on LinkedIn when like, people think the product stinks. Moral is low. You know, it's like, that also is a huge factor in being able to activate the employees like that. Huge. Absolutely. At the time, too, is like, you know, the first hour, you want to throttle the engagement as much as possible. So, you know, for those on, you know, again, how long you've been on LinkedIn, there was the golden hour. It's still in effect now, but not like it used to be. Like, if you used to get a hundred likes in an hour, you were going to go like a super viral sensation. Not so much anymore. But we also did email, we emailed the database and we sent them to that LinkedIn article. Like minutes after it was live. Like, we were trying to send everyone, which is like the digital team's nightmare. Like, we're not driving them to a property that we own. Like, what are you doing? And it still worked. Like, you know, like to your point earlier, people saw it. You know, they go to my profile, they go to gongs profile, they go to our website. And it worked. Like you, I think people are smarter than we give them credit in some examples, which is like to your point on like not even pitching the product. It's like, Oh, shit. I shouldn't be using slides in my discovery calls. I don't even know if we're doing that today. I bet gong can help with that. Like, that's the simple train of thought. And then people go and get a demo. And you know, fairly a lot of times you're like, Look, I don't actually know exactly what you guys do, but I like you. And I saw your content. It's great. And I just want to learn more. And then we had a great sales team. I'm sure they still do. Obviously, I'm not there. But and so it was like cool, super warm lead. I just had to do some education, which we had to do anyway, because no one was recording calls five years ago. Yeah. So kind of just naturally a bunch of people in the company start posting and start growing the following, growing individual followings. And then you all are excited about what you're doing, interested in your field. And so like then, you know, you're kind of like on your LinkedIn, you're writing an insight of your own that has nothing to do with gong, but you're like, Hey, I was in a meeting today. And this interesting thing happened. And Ooty's doing the same thing. And Chris is doing the same thing. So each of your personal accounts starts to grow. Okay. Make sense. I also feel like you had a intentional strategy with the company page two. Yeah. And on the employees side, we held like LinkedIn trainings, optional, like lunch and learn type things like 15 minutes. If you want to build your personal brand, how to post on LinkedIn, because what we learned was a lot of people wanted to post, but they're just nervous. And so we did, like non-gong branded trainings real quick of just like 10, 30 minute trainings completely optional. And that's what sparked a lot of people to start posting. So that's, you know, if you're listening, trying to get your folks more engaged, try that. We did. And it was going back to that thing for the company page, which was one insightful thing a day. If you see our post, it has to be so good that you want to go, you have to go follow. It's impossible not to follow us. That was what it was. And it was one post today, usually, you know, at the beginning, just me looking at blogs, looking at stuff we've already published, repurposing it, finding new stories, you know, and then throwing the data piece in there. And when I hired, I think it was my third person, maybe it's Jonathan, maybe it was my second person. Then it was like, okay, let's go to two. Can we double? All right. Cool. We're keeping engagement up. Can we go to three? Okay. We did that. Can we go to four? Oh, we're seeing diminishing returns. Okay. Great. Three was the magic number, played around with the timings, because by then, and I'm going quickly over time, you know, we're going international, right? So we want to hit on different time zones, but the goal was always the same, which was to produce the most engaging sales content on the fucking planet. That was our motto internally. Like we said it all the time, anyone on the team would know that's what we're here to do. And we protected that feed tough. Like chief people officer once, like candidate shout-outs or stuff, you get one post a week. We finally budgeted. We're like, okay, we have to start helping other teams. Like, okay, recruiters, you get one post a week. Okay. This team, you get one post a week. And we like scattered it in. And we still try to make it as fun and engaging as possible. Congrats to Gong on being one of the San Jose business journals, 30 fastest growing companies. That's what we lost was the corporate, the corporate, you know, awards and stuff, which of course we wanted to share. I'm not trying to make it seem like we were all for ourselves or anything, but we just knew what worked on the feed. And we're like, I don't want to post that stuff because it's not going to work. Like, you know, a new CFO for sure. That's important. That has a little bit of, you know, gives you some credibility in the market, but like we don't need 14, you know, shout-outs for new job racks this week. No one's even clicking at them. So like, let's not fool ourselves. It also all adds up, right? And so like I noticed with my own stuff, there was a time when I would kind of just like every day talk about drift and promote drift. And like that didn't work as well as when I kind of stopped doing that. And I just kind of talked about like what I'm doing and marketing in general. And I happened to work at drift. And then let's say one out of every five posts, then I'd be like, hey, next week we're doing this webinar, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the link. That's when I started to notice like, wow, I just drove like hundreds of signups to our company webinar through my personal page. But again, back to what we said earlier, if I posted that type of stuff every day of the week, twice a day, it's going to be very small returns from that. People are going to mentally unsubscribe. They know they're being sold to, they know they're being marketed to give them the zero-click content of valuable stuff four days a week. They'll happily take that fifth thing. The mental unsubscribe. I have some more LinkedIn stuff, but I want to just kind of talk about this idea of a lead magnet that worked really well for you all at GONG. There's a lot of chatter in the world today about people poo-pooing this content generation strategy and lead capture and gated content. That's not really mqls. Do you have an opinion on that? Has your opinion changed? Did it work for GONG then? It might not work now. Just I want to hear your perspective on that. Yeah. I learned after about two years in marketing. So again, going into it, I didn't know any of these phrases. I just called it like a gated piece of content. I was like, it's gated. I'm trying to collect email addresses. Because again, obvious is I'm trying to get direct line of communication to these people. I want them to expect my name. I remember you had written one time. It's not your subject line that they read first. It's your sender name. Still true. That's what matters. Leave it completely. So I'm like, we've got to come correct. They see Devon at GONG, Devon read at GONG labs. They need to be like, oh hell yeah, and brush to that email. That's what I was trying to build. I got to get email addresses, right? And so I don't give a shit what people think about gated content or not. If you hate it, it probably because you didn't do it right, or you got burned as a consumer of it. But the truth is, if you put good content out there, they're going to find your blog and subscribe, or they'll happily give your email address for that piece of content, right? And so there's really a trust trade that's happening. That's what you're doing. You're trading trust, because your email address doesn't have a monetary value, right? It's not worth one or a thousand dollars. It's just worth trust. And so every time we wrote a landing page, we wanted to make it as compelling as possible, but we wanted to over-deliver when you got that piece of content. Again, it had to wow you. It had to be so great that you wanted to share it with somebody. And so we were just delivering on that over and over and over again and collecting a huge email list. And so now we had to rent again, what we call now a rented audience and an owned audience. And that kind of built our moat a little bit. And so for me personally, I think it's crazy not to build an email list. Like I'm sure you have one. I'm sure it's one of the most valuable things that exit five is that email list. If your podcast burned down, you'd have your email list to go start a new one, right? If LinkedIn kicks you off the platform, you have an email list to start to keep communicating with them. So I'm doing it a little bit differently now at Clary, but like my reader, my business, like my email list is the most valuable thing aside, IP. Yeah, I mean, the email list is the print money button yesterday. When I relaunch exit five, the creative marketing strategy was tell the email list about the new thing. and give them a link to do it and they did it. I think that the disconnect on the gated content, like lead capture is you can't run that playbook and then be like, yeah, all these people who downloaded this gong article about, you know, sales tips are not ready to buy gong. You can't, you can't like say that those are MQLs or whatever they are or SQLs or whatever. However, if you just had a thousand people get your content about how to do a better discovery call and you sell a product that is a really good fit for those people, then you can say, hey, remember me, Devon, the guy that you got that great content from, well, actually, we have something that you might be interested in. Do you want to try it? It's our free tool that can do X, Y, Z. And so I think it works is also you have to have the whole like vision and picture mapped out of what the whole content strategy is going to be, not just like, yeah, these are thousand people downloaded this ebook. Let's call them. This is a great point because it's not intent to buy. It's intent to solve. There's a problem that you have. You wouldn't have downloaded the content if you didn't and you're trying to solve that problem. Well, we ended up doing probably like the last year I was there. We went from one a month to two a month to one a week. It wasn't always a new thing, but it was some evergreen content every single week. And so what we started to do was create what we call a content pack, which was a one page Google Doc, which was the 411 on what this piece of content was and what it means to your prospect. So if you're a BDR and you get a Salesforce link that you got 10 MQLs today, right? This VP of sales just downloaded this discovery cheat sheet. The goal wasn't to pick up the phone and say, "Hey, heard you want to buy gong?" It was, "Hey, you might have a discovery problem." So I you downloaded this thing. That's actually kind of exactly what we do is help with discovery calls. Like would you be interested in learning more? If you call them within the first 24, 48 hours, they're still excited and hopefully remember that piece of content. You're going to get a warmer call that's going to lead to a legitimate intro call and hopefully at what would be an SQL or a true opportunity. So that's the way that we viewed it. We coached the teams appropriately. Yeah, we got a ton of MQLs, but going back to the Halo effect, you would see a spike every single time we sent an email. That one day a week, we sent one sometimes too, but we always saw people came inbound as well. And so that's why I think it's worth it, rather, however you want to calculate it from MQLs, direct inbound, direct traffic, whatever. I'm just in the camp of less, but high quality content is going to serve the business. All right, I got a bunch of random follow ups, we're going to save them for maybe the last five to 10 minutes of this. We're eating up time, which I could talk to you for three hours about this and you could tell me everything. But I do want to spend a couple minutes on, take me into as much as you're comfortable sharing without giving away secrets. But what is the content strategy at Clary now? How is it different than GONG? For me, it was fun to change companies and get to do something again, but with different people, different ingredients, different market. And I bet you're having some of that, even though there's some overlap in the market. So what's the content strategy today? How are you thinking about content? What's fun about your job right now? Yeah, that's a good question. So a lot of it is the same and that we are selling to sales pros or, you know, GONG with sales very specifically like the VP of sales at Clary. It's revenue pros, so it's a little bit more at the executive level. Sales is like a part of that umbrella, but at CS, it's CROs, it's finance to a degree sales operation. So it is the same but different. Also same is there's a category play, right? So GONG, revenue intelligence, Clary's a little bit longer. It's revenue collaboration and governance or rev CG. And so the first six to nine months was all about that thought leadership. So the nine months leading up to me joining our year, so they had launched their category. If anyone knows Chris Lockhead from Play Bigger, he's an advisor there. That was a big reason I wanted to join was to learn from him. And so it's hey, they've just launched this new category. They purchased a conversation intelligence tool in Wingman. And now we need to go to market and really use content to go from 30,000 foot. What is this category? So how do you actually think through it and act on it? And so that was kind of the first few parts. And so we, a few different formats or channels, which is blog, social, podcast. And that's been really fun because we're doing it in a different way where at GONG, we were kind of just living the POV, which was revenue intelligence is all about using and GONG's point of view there was, don't use your opinions and gut feel, use data. So what does the content do? Attack opinions and show you data. So we were just living it. At Clary, they're living it as well, but they're using languaging. They're introducing new phrases and new terminology to the market and getting folks to understand and to adopt that, right? Like no one knew what rev CG really was. What is a revenue critical employee? What is a revenue moment, right? And starting to educate folks in that way. So it's been fun because it's like two people creating a category and two different groups of really intelligent people doing it, but going about it in different ways. What's the makeup of your of the content team at Clary? It's a little bit different. It's shifted up a little bit. I have a customer marketing manager, actually, which is why I started with different, because customer evidence is content. So I adopted that after being there a couple of months. Customer evidence, I like that term. Yeah, customer evidence. Well, it's not just case studies. I think people think case studies all the time, but there's more to it than that. I've had screenshots from Twitter and LinkedIn and board decks and email replies and like that type of stuff. And somebody replied to your content email and I'll reply back like, hey, this was a great comment. Like would you be okay if I use this on our website? And I'm like, yeah, sure, go for it. Yeah, I love, we do the same. But I think the first piece of customer evidence I got was VPS sales share that a CRO emailed him was like, we just ripped out, gone, bought Clary. It was the best thing ever. I was like screenshot that, put it on this landing page, like, and I told the creative team, don't touch it. Don't put any graphics on it. Don't add our brand. So just make it look raw and organic and it'll work. Yeah, exactly because it's real. Let's pause on that for a second. The reason why is because it's, especially in B2B, it's like, we want to like give that to the creative team. They turn it like, let's say your colors are like a blue and white, right? They want to turn it into some like blue background, white text like big font. And like this goes all the way back to Gary Halbert, Boron letters, A pile B pile, which is like, when you go home and you take the mail out of the mailbox, you get a whole stack of mail. All the things that look like advertisements and catalogs and direct mail, those go over here. But the handwritten note that looks like it's from your aunt 'cause she always sends you 10 bucks on your birthday. You're gonna open that one first. And so that's why that screenshot of the email works better. Yes, and hear me out, even in the enterprise. 'Cause you're still selling to people that is always gonna work. I love, love that play. I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago 'cause I got got by some window salesman who sent something in the mail was not in an envelope. It was just a one-pager, like just all crumpled up. And it was like a blue pen handwriting with yellow highlighter. And of all the crap mail, I jumped to him. I'm like, oh, it looks like my wife, Shalee looks like she had some sort of like quote, I guess a window broke. And then after like four seconds on this thing, I'm like, oh, I was like, look up to light. I'm like, damn, he got me. This is like printed, but that works. It really does work. So, and yeah, it's your point on the enterprise. I don't care if you're CEO, you know, I don't know, new in your career, specialist level, same psychological triggers work on everybody. So. - Anything else on the team front? I can't remember if we covered everything there. - So I have a sales engineer turn production manager, so he also has the podcast and video. I have customer, see the content marketing lead, a manager, content manager who has two specialists, and then I have another editor who's on, who's on MountLeave right now. So we've got a pretty deep bench. - And overall, how are you measuring content or where do you, what metrics are you responsible for? - Ooh, yeah, there's the heavy side for the list. Like, how deep do we wanna go? So there's a few different things. So I'll just say like they're social, which is like follower account, engagement, mentions is a big one. We're also doing, speaking of the category play, starting to measure how often is the market and the market not including Clary talking about Clary, talking about our category and so on. It's kind of like share voice a little bit. We're looking at MQLs, but we're actually not gating a lot of our content because we have a thought leadership site that we put up, which is basically just a content hub without any gate. You can sign up for a newsletter. So that's our way, hey, if we've earned the right, you can subscribe. So we look at traffic to that page. Are people subscribing? We look at direct web traffic, we look at inbound. Like honestly, like inbound to me is kind of the thing that I think if I'm doing my job right, we should just see more inbound. And then as we start to work on some of the attribution models, things like pipeline influence, pipeline source, I put like seven asterisks next to that when I report to it because there's like, you know, three attribution models and this could be this, this could be that. But overall, those are some of the big ones. - I like the idea of using inbound and I also like that there wasn't just one perfect answer there because I think especially when you're selling more at market, like you all are, it's not going to be direct response. It's not going to be, we publish piece of content and X thing happens. It's like the combination of all those pieces over time we're going to lead to improvements in more people knowing who we are, if more people know who we are, they're going to come to our website. It gets easier to measure as you go on. Okay, I got a bunch of things and we only have a couple of minutes left. So I'm going to give you like a little rapid fire around, maybe like a short answer, one or two sentences on each one of these, just your kind of perspective, couple notes that I wrote down. What's your feeling on generative AI and chat GPT as it relates to life of a content creator? - Don't let it replace your thinking, but it can help you write faster. I think it's good for answering. I don't think it's going to help you for that leadership because that leadership's all about new ideas and chat GPT is literally a bucket of old ideas. - What about, but what happens if you leave Devon? And what I mean by that is that's the common pushback that I've gotten over the years. And I believe in this people first approach to content also, but there's always, you know, one I every five people is like, yeah, but I don't know, that's really risky. what happens if Devon reads. leaves Kong or Dave leaves Drift. What's your answer to that? Do you mean it in kind of like being the face of a company or like being like the author of content and stuff like that? Yeah, or like whether it's one person or two or three people as opposed to like the brand being the author. Oh, I mean, one people want to hear from people, but two, it's like, wouldn't you rather have bigger results while they're here and do your best to keep an A player than to not have the middle? Amen. And oftentimes the people asking that are much more conservative in the sense of like, well, you're never going to get X result if you take that approach anyway. So like, would you trade? Would Kong have traded like, should you have never gone to Kong and they never publish things under your own known? No, they would take that trade all day, every day. And I know the same thing is true for Drift. I think it's a growth mindset versus our growth scarcity or abundancy, whatever, whatever that is. Okay. I kind of led you in there because I want to just put that on the record because I feel like we have the same opinion on that for sure. You've mentioned this term of build your personal brand. A lot of people like to eye roll and poo poo that. Look, personal brand, I get the phrase, it makes me my eye roll too, but I don't have a better one. For me, the way I think about it is, is it your reputation? It's your digital reputation. And if you build a personal brand online, it's going to open up doors of opportunity before you even reach for the handle. That's it straight up. I'm not on this podcast if I don't have a personal brand. In fact, you know what I mean? If I'm not out here publishing ideas, helping people, all that stuff, but you also didn't get out of bed five years ago and say, you know what I'm going to start to do? I'm going to start to build my personal brand. You're like, no, I like sales. I'm interested in this field. I'm going to start talking about this publicly and see what happens. Exactly. You know what? When you see it, the cringey stuff is like, in a no offensive people are doing selfies, like I'm not trying to knock, but it's like a selfie and it's like this like really crappy, you know, not so veiled thing about themself, even though it's like, wow, marketing is about this, but really it's about that. But also like my life is perfect and only work four hours a week and why aren't you two? It's like, dude, that's for nobody, but you. So I think that's the problem. It's about you. Shouldn't be about you. It should be about your audience. Talk about LinkedIn today. You're still very active there. You post a lot of content there, but platform has changed. What works on LinkedIn today? What's changed? How do you be successful on LinkedIn? Man, it's hard because we both have pretty large following. So when you start to complain that the algorithms change and this and the other, I feel like the old hip-hop guards like, man, that's not rap. This is rap. And like, so I had to kind of check myself a little bit, but look, the early stage of, you know, the early adopter phase is over. Like people get it. You can make money on LinkedIn. You can build brands on LinkedIn. It's a cash cow if you know how to use it. So you're starting to see a lot of the content reflect that a little bit shallower, I'll say personally. But don't focus on engagement so much. Focus on the quality, focus on the relationships, focus on who you're helping. And the other thing too is you get a lot of results that aren't shown on screen, which I was just talking to this gal on my newsletter. And she responded and she said, hey, because I actually posted about this day, if I said, hey, I posted this thing about 10 lessons. And the engagement was fine. But DG reached out and offered me to be on his podcast. That's the win. And so when you're posting, don't just think about likes and comments. You're opening doors for other opportunities. And she responded and she said, she had like five gals at like some retreat. And she said two of them saw her content, but never liked it, never clicked anything, but went and gave her a bunch of money and signed up for her retreat. So like, also say it's worth doing and investing in, even if the algorithm seems a little messed up, even if you're not getting the engagement you want. If you just invest over time, it compounds for real. I love that. And it also changes that that's a perfect reason why you need to think about how you measure the effectiveness of that channel. Yes, followers and engagement like our good metrics to kind of just look at every now and then, but there's huge, intangible and harder to measure benefits. Same reason for like doing this podcast, right? Like as an example, this is not the biggest podcast in the world, but it has a pretty good following and a pretty good niche. And I get lots of inbound opportunities that come from doing this where like if I just showed you the download numbers, you'd be like, oh, this isn't that impressive. But if I could show you what has come as a result of that. And I think that's why you have to be able to talk about content in a holistic way and be able to screenshot those replies and be able to show like, yeah, we booked a meeting with a million dollar client off of this LinkedIn post that had six comments on it. Yep. Dude, 100%. There's a correlation on my site, the better and the more the more I post on LinkedIn, the more inbound requests I get or the more newsletter subscribers you get and the more newsletter subscribers you get, the better sponsors, you get like it's all connected. But yeah, it's your point. People get tunnel vision on the on the vanity stuff, the engagement. Last question. Why go to Clary and take a in house job when you clearly could have built your own company and done your own thing. Kids. No, I had to throw that out there. I got two under two. No, the real answer, man. And I thought about it a lot. Kids. I mean, I won't lie. That's always a factor. Kids are always a factor. But yes. Look, I was ahead of content at a really successful company and I wanted to kind of prove two things. One, I wanted to prove to myself. I could do it again and be successful. And it was also a different challenge, right? Like Gong was you're the guy, like you're the guys and the only person on the team scale it with the company. Clary's 10 years old, you know, 800 employees established marketing team. Can you kind of turn it around? I wanted that dual experience. So when I do go solo and I do more consulting, I can say, Hey, I've done the fast pace startup from Zilch and I've done the, you know, a little bit more mid market, larger company enterprise play, turned that around as well. I think that's going to make me more valuable. So I was like, Hey, let me invest a couple more years here. Get a bunch of experience, learn from some great people, Julian, Kyle, Andy, Chris, and have fun doing it. And then I'll say, alright, cool. I'll hang my hat up and I'll go solo. Awesome. This was a great, great, great, great episode. I can't wait to post it. I'm not just saying that. If you don't know by now, this is how I do these. I take a thousand notes while I write them and figure out what I'm going to ask you. Devon read, thank you for doing this. We will plug all of your stuff in the notes and everything. But the ultimate measure of this podcast for me is not CTA exit five. It's go to Devon read on LinkedIn, connect with them, send him a message and say, I loved your interview on the Exify podcast. And maybe we'll do this again next quarter. Okay, my friend. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me now. Alright, thank you, man. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the exit five podcast. If you're in B2B marketing, and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over at exit five.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus, we have a community, a community of over 4,000 B2B marketing pros, whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit five.com. You can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out exit five.com. And I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at hatch. That's hatch.fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. It's hatch.fm. The best marketing leaders have a strong agency or two backing them up and convertive is one I'd put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is and a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. If you're shopping for a BDB agency, check out Convertive. They help enterprise marketing and opts leaders grow revenue across the business. Who do they work with? They work with legit companies like DocuSign, Databank and Constructor and they build on the search work that you're already doing, optimizing your site so more buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. In this month, exit five listeners get a free AEO search snapshot. They'll run your buyers real questions through Google and AI tools, show how you stack up against competitors and tell you what's worth fixing.