Podcasts about hubspot's inbound

How can brands stand out and drive incredible customer loyalty? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Katie Martell talks about what it means to find your "exceptional truth" as a brand, and why that should be the guide for everything you do as a marketer. As Katie says, "the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill," and brands that fail to speak their truth get lost in the crowd. In our conversation, we wade into the controversial waters of whether and when brands should speak out and take a stand, and how to do it in a way that keeps you tightly aligned with your customers. Highlights from my conversation with Katie include: Katie says it is the job of the marketer to understand what is happening in the world. Marketing controls brand perception, and brand perception influences whether someone will buy from you. If you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity. When you know what your buyers care about, you can align that with your brand values, and you have an opportunity to take a position that will strengthen your place in the market. Katie says that brands that don't take a position get lost in a crowded marketplace and are not a part of the conversation. By taking a stance about what you believe, you can change the conversation in your market and, in doing so, become a market leader. Katie says brands need to find "exceptional truths" - little kernels of truth that get buyers to stop, pause, and rethink the way they see the world. When you've created that seed of doubt, buyers are open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch. This takes knowing buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This approach is based on the concepts outlined in the book The Challenger Sale, which is typically used in the sales world but has a lot of application to marketing. Marketers need to be confident to convince the organizations they work for that this type of challenge is the right approach. This can be hard because marketing is a "voyeuristic" profession - meaning that everyone can "see" marketing so they think they are an expert and know how it should be done. As a marketer coming into a new company, its important to determine what your exceptional truth is and then find ways of rolling that out across your marketing in a way that makes your brand unique and different. Resources from this episode: Visit Katie's website Follow Katie on Twitter Connect with Katie on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Katie's take on why it is so important for brands to find their exceptional truths, and how to use that in your marketing to gain a competitive edge. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Katie Martell, who is an on demand communications strategist based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome Katie. Katie Martell (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. Katie and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. For everyone listening, I heard Katie speak at Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Forum in, what was that? September or October? October of 2019. Back in the days when we still went to conferences in person. And I was just so blown away. She gave such an amazing talk on Rabble Rousers and it really not only struck me for the content of the talk, but also, you were just an amazing speaker. We can have a separate conversation about that. But anyway, that's why I wanted to have you on and share some of your amazing wisdom with everyone who's listening. So I could go on and on about you. but before I go down too much of a tangent, I would love it if you would explain what an on-demand communication strategist is and what you do, and also a little bit of your background and how you wound up doing that. About Katie Martell Katie: I would love to, and I have to start by saying thank you for the kind words about that talk last year. So the title of that talk was something like "Market Like a Rabble Rouser" and it came from this fascination I have with the world of politics and persuasion mixed with what I do as a marketer. So I've been a marketer in the B2B realm for 11 years now. And what's been interesting is, I've been marketing to marketers for the majority of my career. And that was first at a B2B data services company. We were an early sponsor of the Marketing Profs event. That was a startup that I grew up to acquisition. And then it was a PR firm, an analyst from my own MarTech startups. So I've kind of lived multiple lives, worn many different hats, but always marketing in this world of B2B tech, and MarTech specifically. So I've been a student of marketing in a time when it's completely changing from what was the kind of capital M marketing that we've known it to be. And so this talk was just honestly, they had asked me what I wanted to talk about, which is a moment in time where you go, "Oh, that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous ask of me." And I was honest. I said, "Let's talk about what's happening in the world of misinformation, persuasion." I'm talking Russian trolls, I'm talking campaign interference. I'm talking all the stuff that, you know, you read on the headlines, on whatever news outlet you choose to follow. And let's talk about what marketers can learn from it. So I get up on stage. I give this talk. It went over a little bit of time because that's, hello, it's me. Well, people were absolutely polarized in the audience. We had half the room, a little more than half, I will say, who were like, "Yeah, we got the takeaway. This is great. Thanks so much." And the other half that I just think, I don't know what, didn't go across as well for many, because I presented a lot of information about Russian trolls and some of the exact campaign ads they used and it was pretty incendiary stuff, but that was the point. I was trying to get people riled up and hey, achievement unlocked. Kathleen: But I also think, isn't that polarized response just such a perfect reflection of why that talk was needed in the first place? Katie: I hope so. I was encouraging folks to really, you know, rouse the rabble, you know,? Create emotional responses, shake things up, and that's kind of what I did on stage. Kathleen: Well, and to be clear, just to interject, your talk was not an inherently political talk in the sense that you weren't taking sides, you were presenting facts, right? And people can take that and do with it what they want, but I just wanted to put that out there. Marketers need to pay attention to what is happening in the world Katie: Well, I appreciate it. And let the lesson and the takeaway here be that we need, as marketers, to pay attention to what's happening in the world. I mean, the world around us, look at this past week and today's date. I don't know if you're going to give the date here. It's June 1st. So we are coming off of a weekend of civil unrest, Black Lives Matter protests. It is a time where, if you check social media, you're bombarded with hashtag activism and names and everybody from brands to individuals getting involved in this current conversation. We as marketers should be watching this and learning. Kathleen: Yes. I mean, actually, it's interesting that we are having this conversation today because I literally, just this morning, was online on social media and I saw one person saying something about how you have to speak out and you have to make your positions known. And another person's literally saying "I'm not going to support businesses that don't say anything." It's interesting. There's so many different sides to what's happening right now, but it really doesn't matter what you believe about the current situation. The fact is that the world around us is going to make judgments and make personal buying decisions. And they could be different ones, person to person, but they're going to be made based upon what you do and or do not say right now, right. So if you're not paying attention as a marketer, you're not doing your job Katie: Because this is our job. It is our job. Marketing controls brand perception, right? Brand perception is the reality for consumers. They make a decision about us before they engage with us by the way we act through marketing. That's the kind of inherent "duh" that we know about our jobs, but what that means at a time like this and what it started to mean over the past, I would say, decade or so as the world of social movements, identity, and brands and corporate world they've started to intersect. And so what that now means is, if you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity, whether they believe in the Black Lives Matter movements, right? These kinds of areas that were kind of gray areas before of, we don't want to get political. It's not appropriate for every brand to have a comment on what's happening. For example, we're talking about the treatment of African American individuals in the US, if your brand happens to live values that embrace diversity and inclusion and have large representation from that community and you take steps to make sure that their employee experience is great and yada, yada, yada, you might as well leverage that in marketing. You might as well show the world that you're on the same side as the giant movement that's now building in States and cities around the world. My God, this is a great opportunity for marketers, which I know sounds dirty to say out loud, but it's absolutely a time to take advantage of the global zeitgeist right now, and be part of the conversation, be part of the narrative, earn trust. It might help you differentiate. It is a way of saying to the world, "This is where we play, this is what we believe, this is who we are as a brand" that may go well beyond what your product or your service does. That is an opportunity. Kathleen: I agree with you. This is such an interesting conversation. In the past year, I had a conversation about this with someone who I've always considered to be very much a professional mentor/idol/role model. I've come to realize as I've gotten to know this person better that they feel very strongly about keeping all politics, all commentary on social issues, completely out of business. And that is their personal belief. It has come into focus, I think, with this last election cycle, and we had a big debate where the person was saying companies should never post about politics. I personally don't believe that, nor do I think every company should post about politics. People will disagree with me and that's fine, but I think that it all comes back to really understanding your brand. And in this case, especially for privately held companies, brands are very inextricably interwoven with the person that owns the company. This is going to come right down to the owners of the company and what they personally believe in. There are some companies where the person that owns it is never going to talk about politics because that person, as an individual, doesn't talk about politics even in social settings. But then you have companies, and there's some examples I'd love to cite, like Penzeys Spices. They are a spice company out of the Midwest. I had discovered them years ago because I was looking for some really niche spices. I like to cook and I had followed them, and then I started seeing this stuff on Facebook and they come out really, really strongly. This is a long story, but I got into a really big debate with this person. And the person was saying, you are going to lose customers and that's not good for your business. And you're going to alienate people and that's not good for your business. And my feeling is, that might be fine. If you're somebody who believes that you want to live your beliefs and you want your business to live those beliefs, you may lose customers, but you will probably have the ones you keep drive tremendous loyalty and you may gain as much, if not more, than you lose. So, diatribe over. You're the guest, not me! Katie: Oh, please! I love your point of view. I'm honored to be here because I think you are just brilliant and I love your work. You hit on something really polarizing right now which works at multiple levels. It also kind of hearkens back to the fundamental truth that not all marketing advice is going to apply to every company. And I feel like that's an important disclaimer, because we tend in marketing to say, brands should do this, they shouldn't do that. It's really, to your point, what is right for your business, your customers, and most importantly, your goals. Now that spice company, I don't know them, but I guarantee their goal is not to be the spice for everyone. It sounds like they know exactly who their buyer is and they know exactly what that buyer wants from them. They want a spice company that stands for more than spice. Great. Not all car companies are going to be a car for everybody, right? Just like with Patagonia, right? If you're buying a jacket to go skiing and they have a set of brand values that they know aligns with the subset of the total market, but that subset will be inherently loyal to them because Patagonia is an example of a brand that's been consistent against their values. For years, they've always been kind of counterintuitively anti consumption. They sell retail products. They need to drive consumption. Remember that famous ad that was like, "Don't buy this jacket"? You don't know it. You have to Google it. And it's Patagonia saying "We cause too much waste in our industry. We build products that may cost you a little more, but they're sustainably made and we want you to wear them for longer. We're going to help you repair them. We're going to give you some tools to make sure that you can make sure you get the most out of them. They're longer lasting." These are brand values that the buyer can relate to because the buyer also shares those values. So this really isn't a new marketing problem. We like to think it is because of social media and hashtag activism and all the propaganda that's happening. But this really isn't old school marketing best practice. Know your buyer, know where you fit in their world. Bill Bernbach has a great quote that's like, "If you stand for nothing, you'll find some people for you and some people against you. And if you stand for nothing, you'll find nobody for you and nobody against you." Which is worse for a marketer? To be completely out of the conversation or to be clear about where you sit and stand and who you're intended for? I love old time radio. There's a great Sirius XM station about the radio shows from the era of when that was entertainment. Somebody had this quote in the old timey accent. They were like, "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is roadkill my dear." Right now, today, brands do not have to have a comment on who should be president. That is politics. That is up to the individual. We each have a right to vote. Stay out of it unless you're relating to the campaign or you're lobbying for a certain group. Honestly, we need to have a say about issues that matter for our buyers. That's it. If it doesn't matter to your buyers, it shouldn't matter to you and your marketing. If you're a founder, I'm going to kind of disagree with you on this, but if you're a founder trying to lever your organization for your own political, personal views, that's a mistake because not everyone in your company is going to agree with you. Just like not every one of your buyers is going to agree with you. You have to find middle ground. That's what this is about. When you canvas for a political campaign and you're going door to door for, I don't know, Bernie Sanders, you don't open the door and knock on the door and say, let me tell you why you're wrong about insert political candidate. You find common ground. You say, what do we share? What are we aligned on? And how do we then move forward together? It's not about polarizing. It's about recruiting people to see the world the way you do. And those people likely bring the same set of values that you do. Kathleen: To be clear, I should say because I probably didn't explain this, I'm not advocating that businesses come out and say "Vote for so and so." I'm more coming out and saying that the context that came up when I talked about it with somebody, was that there were things happening politically that impacted other issues, whether that's the environment or social issues, et cetera, there was like a trickle down. And there were businesses that at the time were coming out and standing for or against those environmental or social issues. That was what sparked the conversation. It's very interesting to me because the things that swim in my brain when I get into this conversation are, there is an increasing amount of data that started to come out, particularly with younger generations, that they are actually much more likely to buy from businesses that are willing to say what they stand for. Again, I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking broadly about things that you stand for. And I loved your statement about the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill. Because you know, you look at social activism and business today and you see companies like Tom's shoes, which stand for something, and Patagonia, which stands for something. These businesses are doing very, very well, particularly amongst a younger demographic. And so I think part of it is knowing who you sell to, as you said. Part of it is also recognizing that over time, things are going to change as this younger demographic ages and people follow them, who knows? I don't know what will happen with the next generation, but today's 20 year olds are going to be the 30 and 40 year olds of tomorrow and the next decade, et cetera. And so as our customer populations age, their preferences come with them as they do. It reminds me of the conversation that I've had with people about niching down as a business. I used to own a marketing agency and agencies talk about this all the time. Should we be the agency for everyone? Or should we declare that we are serving this one niche? And the fear that everybody always has when you get into that conversation is the fear of having to say "no" and turn people away. What most data shows, and most people find when they do it, is that when you niche down, you actually thrive. You make more money because you really find the right fit customer and they have a higher perception of you. They stick with you longer, et cetera. And so, there's an echo of that going through my head as I listened to us talk about this. Understanding your brand promise Katie: Absolutely. And again, it comes back to branding basics. You have to know the promise that you're going to make to anyone. That's what brand is. Brand is a promise. When they engage with you, they want to know that they're going to get something that you've promised them. You don't have to take a stance around hot button issues. Stay away from hot button issues, unless you're ready for that, unless that's really core to your business and your values and live throughout the organization. There are many examples, from our history, of B2B companies that stand for something in their industry. This is where this needs to be applied to B2B. B2B listeners might be thinking, this doesn't apply to me because I sell, I don't know, refrigeration. And I'm here to tell you, there is, within the world of refrigeration, a company called Stirling Ultracold, that was kind of a smaller player within this world of refrigeration. They would sell to pharmaceutical companies, and we're talking commercial grade keeping stuff cold, right? That's the extent of my knowledge, but they are ultra low temperature freezers that companies need. This is a great example of a company in a world that we would think, what is controversial about this space? The way they were disrupting their own industry was just with this idea of sustainability and energy costs and carbon footprint -- these things that their product enabled companies to decrease. They saved something like 70% of energy costs. Energy and sustainability and carbon footprint was never a consideration point for this buyer before. They just didn't look at it along that list of criteria that they're making their decision against. It didn't matter. Suddenly, here's a company who comes forward with a great PR program, really strong thought leadership, a leader who says, "I believe we have a responsibility to have a smaller carbon footprint. And guess what? My products enable you to have it." It suddenly changed the entire perimeter of an industry. That is the exact same advice that you and I are preaching right now. Just take a stance in what you believe in your own market. That's how you're going to change the conversation in market. That's how you're going to find buyers that are aligned with you around this value that now matters, and in a broader sense, you know, to the world, but really in this industry. And that's how you're going to differentiate and earn that trust, is when you declare "Here's what we're about." And you do that with confidence, because that allows the buyer to look at you and say, "I know exactly what I'm signing up for." Change the conversation in your industry Kathleen: I love that. And it reminds me of a talk that I heard by April Dunford. Katie: Love April Dunford, high five. Kathleen: I heard it at HubSpot's Inbound conference. April Dunford is an expert on positioning and she gives this talk about the four different ways you can approach positioning for your business. And I don't remember the nickname she has for it, but the example that she gives for one of the ways is about changing the conversation. And she talks about Tesla and how before Tesla, the leader in the electric car market was the Prius. And the whole conversation in electric cars was about battery life. How long could you drive before you needed to recharge? You could substitute refrigeration, but the bottom line is that, as a new entrant, if you think about coming into an established market, you're not going to have the first mover advantage. You're not creating a category per se. So how do you catapult yourself to the head of that market? You do it by changing the conversation. And so she talks about how Tesla came in and totally changed the conversation by saying, "Yeah, whatever. Battery life. Of course, we all have battery life. It's really all about how sexy is the design and how fast does the car go?" And now, you see a completely different dialogue happening in electric cars. You see Tesla as a front runner. And you see a lot more electric car manufacturers focusing on design and speed because they made it sexy. And that's the new conversation. And it sounds like that's exactly the same thing this refrigeration company did. Finding your "exceptional truth" Katie: They had to. And this is really where I think, and I know I'm a little biased. I come from a communications background. I've seen the power of content marketing and PR and all of that working in tandem to lift up brands. I mean, I'm a startup girl at heart. When you can't be the loudest voice in the room and you can't be the dominant player of which, by the way, there's only one in every industry. So the majority are not dominant players. All of us need to figure out how to get more strategic with the way we leverage PR and content. I think we've fallen into a bit of a trap, and I'll use that word gingerly because of the rise of inbound marketing, because of the rise of the tools and tech that allow us to publish a lot of content. What we've sacrificed are the kernels of little ideas that we're using to seed the market. We've become really good at publishing education tips and best practices, which are great and necessary. This podcast is a great example of one. The issue is that we've lost sight of what creates movements, what creates change in people. It's that little kernel of truth. I call them exceptional truths that get people to stop, you know, pump the brakes and go, "Wait a minute. I've been thinking about things all wrong." And when you get a person, a human being to stop and kind of pause, you've got them, that's it. When you've created that seed of doubt, the way that they saw the world may not be that capital T, truth, they're open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch, to your ideas and your path forward, but it takes knowing the buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This is drawing from, everyone knows, The Challenger Sale. Applying The Challenger Sale to marketing Kathleen: I was just going to say, I used to be in sales and in the sales world, this is The Challenger Sale. Katie: Yes. I don't know what happened. I mean, how can The Challenger Sale extend its way to marketing? Not to say that it hasn't, but you know, is that a puppy? Kathleen: Yes. I have two who are laying at my feet and every now and then they lift their heads up and say, "Wait, there's a world out there!" They're getting excited about The Challenger Sale. Katie: They probably are just as confused as I am as to why The Challenger Sale didn't work its way into the world of PR and content marketing. To me, we need to challenge the way the buyer sees the world. I think very few brands do that. Kathleen: It's very true. I have worked in sales before and when I was in that job, I read The Challenger Sale. I used that approach in sales and it made me very successful. And you're spot on. That has so much applicability in marketing. I owned an agency for 11 years and I worked with a lot of different companies and there is, in marketing, this lemmings syndrome where we see the lemmings running ahead of us and we want to follow them off the cliff. If they're doing it, it must be the right thing to do. And it extends from everything, from messaging and the way we talk about what we do, to things like brand colors. I used to do websites for attorneys and they all wanted forest green and maroon and these very stodgy, old attorney colors. And I remember I had one client and I was like, "Let's just do something crazy." And they were like, "But nobody else did that." And I was like, "Precisely." There's this inclination both amongst marketers and within the business world to play within the lines. And I think that does hurt us. There's a sea of sameness out there and it's the content we create, it's the colors on our websites, it's the way we message. It's, you know, "Hey, you should or should not talk about this in our industry. We don't talk about that so I'm not going to" and I really think that that has tied our hands behind our backs, Katie: I have a lot of empathy. I mean, I'm a Pisces. I'm gonna look at every situation from both sides. And it's empath to the Nth degree over here. But I do have a lot of empathy for the modern marketer. And this comes from being one, but also selling and marketing to them for 10 years. I've been on the megaphone side of MarTech vendors back in the day when there was a hundred of us, marketing solutions in a world of digital marketing that was now starting to shift. Don't forget, 10 years ago, we now had to be good at becoming top ranked on Google. We now had to start using social media to develop a two way dialogue. We then had to automate everything. Then we had to start measuring everything. Now we're trying to leverage AI. It has moved at such a pace. It all happened in nine years. It has moved at such a pace that the marketer, the poor beleaguered marketing ops person and lead gen new roles that are being created because of this ecosystem in MarTech have inherent uncertainty, an inherent doubt and inherent fear because thinking about it, you and I work, we do marketing for a living. This is our income. How are we going to support our families? This is more than a job and an industry, buyers and marketing. I always had this kind of point of view when I was marketing to marketers. The buyer is more than a director of marketing at an IT company. They are an individual who's just trying to figure it out. And a brand like a HubSpot who comes out right at the turning point of an industry in flux to say, we have 10 ways that you can do this better. And five tips for this and seven strategies for success in that, that brand is going to win. That fearful buyer who's like, I just need a job, and I need to keep ahead. The biggest fear for the marketing buyer is falling behind. If we fall behind, we're no longer relevant. If we're no longer relevant, guess what? There's some 23 year old who's going to come up and take our spot because they know Tik Tok. I'm being hyperbolic, but that's constantly on our minds. And so we have to have empathy for that marketer who's like, we are going to do the things that work and copy the things that work because they work and we need a win. It's really those organizations that can allow their marketing team to do what they do best. That means leave them alone. Let them understand the buyer and the market, the way that they're supposed to. The challenge of being a marketer Katie: Somebody else said to me that marketing is a very voyeuristic profession. Everyone can see it. Unlike finance, unlike R&D or engineering, or even sales, to an extent. Everyone can see marketing. Everyone in a business thinks that they're an expert in marketing because they see marketing all day. They see billboards. They see ads. They feel like they know the science and the practice of marketing. That creates a lot of pressure on the marketing team to kind of do whatever everyone else thinks they should be doing. So we have a department that's not only fearful of falling behind, but also facing pressure from the business to do things that may be counterintuitive to what marketing should do. To your point, the lawyers with the maroon versus doing something different. The telling of exceptional truths, the disruption, the rabble rousing, it works on teams that allow marketers to operate with confidence and hire marketers that are allowing them the space to push back and say, "No, this is what marketing does. Our job is to understand who the buyer is, what they need and why we're uniquely fit that market. And that may look different than what you expect, but that's why you hired me." If you're listening to this and you're young and you love marketing, but you're unsure of the path ahead, that's the strongest thing I think you can do is to hone this sense of what marketing does for business and the sense of confidence that you need to bring to every meeting. You almost have to defend your job at every go, but the more you do it, the more resilient you get, the better you get at it. Kathleen: Well, I think it also points to what you should look for in a place of work. I completely agree with everything you just said, and, and I don't often talk about where I work now, but I'm at this company Attila Security, which is in cybersecurity. I knew I had landed in the right place and I had this sense when I interviewed. When I got into the company and I met with the CEO and I presented him with my 90 day plan and strategy, this was about 30 days in, he said, "Yeah, just do it. I hired you because you know what you're doing", you know? "You don't need my permission." And I was like, "Wow, what a great feeling". When you're interviewing, that's a thing to really watch for and to dig into and to see if that's a trait that you're going to find amongst the leadership team of the company that you go and work for. Katie: I wonder how to ask that in an interview. I'm a startup girl who's just been at companies where inherently, there's no one to tell me what to do. What would you ask if you were interviewing? Kathleen: As somebody who hires a lot, I've always been a big believer in behavioral based interview questions. Those are basically, you don't ask people "What would you do?", you ask, "What did you do?" And you ask people to talk about actual experiences. So I would probably ask something along the lines of, you know and it depends on if it's a company that's had marketers before. I would say, "Tell me about a time when a prior head of marketing proposed something that you weren't sure about or didn't necessarily agree with, what did you do?" And if they haven't had marketers before, if it's a startup, I would probably ask them something about being at a prior company. Or I would say, "Tell me about a time the head of sales proposed something," or somebody else in the company presuming that there are other leaders. Because I think past behavior speaks better than hypotheticals. Everybody can come up with the right answer, hypothetically. For what it's worth, that's kind of the approach that I've taken, but some of it is also just a feeling that you get from talking with people. And I think that's something that you hone over time as you work in more places and you're exposed to more different types of people. Standing out in a world saturated with marketing content Kathleen: But one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, you mentioned HubSpot and how they solve for something very specific at a time when it was a real need. And, it got me kind of circling back to a little bit of what we started with here, which is this need to tell exceptional truths and should companies go there? Should they not go there? One of the things that I started thinking about as you were talking is that the interesting unique moment that we live in right now is that content marketing has become so commonplace. And there are so many companies creating content that there is this saturation. There's just a lot out there. There's a lot of blogs. There's a lot of newsletters. There's a lot of video out there. We're all busy. Nobody has the time to read all of it. So how do you choose what you're going to consume? And this applies to anybody, any buyer out there has this dilemma whether they're actively searching for something or not. And it seems to me that one of the factors that's really affecting what works now in marketing is that one of the most effective ways to stand out amongst a very saturated world of content is to have a point of view. We've talked a lot about in the marketing world about authenticity, and a hot topic lately has been email newsletters and getting really real in your email newsletters and showing personality and individuality, even in company newsletters. And the reason that that's working so well, I believe, is because it is different. Just the fact that it's different and just the fact that it doesn't sound like everybody else, people gravitate to that. So I'd love to know kind of what you think about that. Katie: I a hundred percent agree. Mic drop because you said it yourself. This idea that everyone is a publisher, everyone can produce content - it makes it more important than ever to do what we were suggesting 20 minutes ago, which is to know exactly who you're talking to, what they value, the ways you share that value and just be confident that that is the niche that you have decided to own. You cannot be all things to all people. I'm hearkening back to my marketing undergraduate. This was a long time ago now. It's the one thing I learned. This is not new, right? We just have a proliferation of information now available to us. It makes it more important than ever to have not only a clear point of view, but first a very clear intended audience. You cannot be the solution, in your case, for all CIOs. You're the solution for all CIOs that are extremely risk averse or something. There's something about your buyers that you are really aligned to. Well, many companies fail to understand what that niche looks like and where that alignment happens. I have a newsletter. I call it the "World's best newsletter." I started it when I started consulting, frankly, honestly, truthfully as a way of reminding the world that I wasn't gone. I was leaving a startup at that time that I had co-founded and I was the public face of, and I needed a way to take that momentum and transfer it into my consulting, speaking, whatever it is that I do, practice. So I started a newsletter. I had no intentions with it. I had no best practices around it. I probably break every rule in the book. People love it. And what I do with it is what I've done from day one. I collect the things that hook my attention throughout the week, that I believe more people need to read, and I send it out weekly. And I say, "Here's what is important to me". I am a human being with other other interests outside of marketing. I'm a fierce advocate for feminism, and I'm a fierce advocate for human rights. And I have a documentary coming out about the intersection of marketing and social movements. And all of that is jam packed into this little newsletter, seven links and a quote of the week. It makes no sense. If you were to tell me, as a marketing consultant, it wouldn't make any sense. There's a lot of marketing stuff in there, but sometimes there's a really important New York Times cover story about racism in America. It works for me because people know what they want from me. It's neat. I have been really reticent to do that. It feels wrong. It goes against everything I'm taught as an email marketer, but you know what? It performs. It might be because it's real. I think it's because it's honestly what people want from me. I think that's really what matters. And they come back to it week after week because it serves that need and it's fresh. They don't get it from other people. Finding your unique brand voice Katie: If you're a business, trying to figure out what to send in your newsletter, think about that first. Just like a product and the way that you develop a product, look at the consideration set. What are you up against? What are the other emails looking like from your competitors or even others in the same general industry? Do something different. Maybe it's just doing it shorter. Maybe it's coming at it from a totally different angle, right? Content and thought leadership should be treated like product development. Not only is it something new and different, but it's like this muscle that you have to work on. You've gotta be really good at coming up with the processes to uncover those insights from inside the business to say, "This is what we believe, what we know." And then really, really good at delivering that in a fresh and new way. That's what makes the job of content fun and hard. But it's not what most people do. Most people opt for the easy ebook, the 10 tips, best practices. And then they wonder why isn't this performing? How to find your exceptional truth Kathleen: So true. So if somebody is listening and they're a marketer, who's come into a company and they're thinking about - and let's talk about startups because I think that's the best way to illustrate how this works. If you come into a startup as the first head of marketing, it is a green field, right? You get to shape the clay. If you're coming into an established company, that's a different story, but it's still, the challenge is still there. It's just how you navigate. It might be different. Putting on my hat as head of marketing at a startup, I'm coming in, it's the first time we're going to have a marketing strategy. If I wanted to come in and really mine the richness of what you talk about as exceptional truths, what is the playbook for doing that? Katie: Well, good luck finding a playbook. The place to start, in my mind, is to ask yourself the question, just like you would if you were starting a movement and activism, "What is the change that you want to see in market?" What is that end result that you're hoping to get people to switch? It could just be, you want them to choose you instead of a competitor. Great. So what does that mean? What belief do you need to shift? What misinformation do you have to correct? What new insight, to quote the Challenger model, do you have to bring to the table to get them to see the world a bit differently? I'll give you an example from HubSpot again, because I think HubSpot did this so well. And it's an example that we can all relate to. Your podcast. The name is a great example of the power of what they were able to do, how this came to market. I hate to say it, they were just a blogging, search engine optimization, social media, and eventually an email tool mixed into one. They were not the only player doing this at the time. However, they thought about this brilliantly. They needed people to see the way they wanted things to change. They were advocating for us to use these tools instead of cold calling, billboards, et cetera. The way that they got people to make that shift was to create a dichotomy or create an enemy. I actually presented on this at their conference two years ago, create an enemy. You can find it on their inbound library. And they saw the world in two ways. There's inbound and outbound. There's the new way forward, Mrs. Beleaguered marketer, who doesn't want to lose her job, the way that you're not going to fall to irrelevancy. And there's the old way that you're going to fall behind if you keep using it. They were extremely polarizing with this perspective. It was just one article that started all of this, right? They were like, "Here's the way forward. This inbound and outbound. One is good. One is bad. White, black, right? Devil, whatever it is." And 80% of the market was like, "Oh man, there's no way I'm going to go there." They were pissed because HubSpot is over here, challenging the existing status quo, the way they sell. 20% saw that and went, "Oh, you're right. Let's opt into this." And so HubSpot now of course built an entire movement around inbound marketing. It is a practice. It is a job title. It is a category in and of itself because they started with that kernel of what changes do we need to create. We need to figure out a way to get people to move from A to B, to go from what they think they know to what we want to advocate for. And then they brilliantly built a movement around it. And they did so with a ton of content ideas, a community of people that were proud to call themselves inbound marketers and this kind of repetitive, consistent muscle they use to push the movement forward, now extending years and a $125 million IPO and19,000 people at their conference. It just has ballooned because they were smart about this kernel of truth that they've never deviated from. Are you going to be the next HubSpot? No. This is right place, right time, right conditions and market. But, you do have to find and be willing to provoke, with purpose, the existing beliefs of buyers, and then be consistent about that. If you can do that, your startup is going to make a lot of noise. You're going to punch well above your weight. Even if you don't have the biggest budget, you're going to make waves and you have to be willing to do that or risk falling into irrelevance. Kathleen: It's a really incredible story, that story of HubSpot and it's certainly not the only one. You have Mark Benioff at Salesforce who famously picketed outside with a sign that had a big red X through the word software. And he similarly named the enemy and it was software and his solution was move to the cloud, software as a service. That is an approach that absolutely works. I would say to go out and read The Challenger Sale. So many sales people read it, but so few marketers do, and I love that you brought it up in this conversation. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are going to run out of time soon so I want to make sure I ask you my questions. I could talk to you forever. My first question that I always ask my guests is of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is just a great example of how to do inbound marketing in today's world? Katie: I think Rand Fishkin and his work with Moz and now with SparkToro which he actually details really well in a book called Lost and Founder. It's a great book. If you're thinking of starting a company read this first. It may scare you away, but he always was the example for me of somebody who was again, challenging white hat versus black hat, giving away all the industry secrets to become a trusted industry resource, to ranked the highest, but it really builds trust in his company and him as an individual. And I think it's just his consistency, Whiteboard Fridays, he was writing five days a week. That's still the best example of consistent inbound marketing. Kathleen: You know, it's so funny because I could not agree with you more. He is somebody that I have followed really closely. I read his book. I read everything he does at SparkToro. I follow him religiously. And I have been very surprised. I think you might be the first person that has mentioned his name. I ask this question of every single guest and that has baffled me because I think he's amazing. So I'm really happy that you said that. Katie: He's also the world's nicest guy. We both spoke at the SpiceWorld conference in, I want to say, 2018. Both of us were speaking in the marketing track and I'm sitting here backstage fan girling because I love him. Who hasn't read his stuff? He comes off stage with the mustache. He's the nicest guy. He's just, you know, very down to earth. And I think that's the secret. He wrote this content to truly help others. And I think that genuine purpose behind the content is really what sets him apart. More people should have mentioned him. Kathleen: Yes. I agree. And maybe they will now because we'll turn them on to his stuff. All right. Second question. You mentioned earlier that the biggest fear of marketers is falling behind. And the second question I always ask everybody is exactly that. It's like every marketer I talk to says, they feel like they're drinking from a fire hose. There's too much to keep up with. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Katie: 100% LinkedIn. I'm a huge advocate for using LinkedIn appropriately. I have a big following there, so I love it as a platform, but I also use it to consume a lot of best practices. I ask a lot of questions. I'm constantly looking through comments. It's become a resource that just, I find invaluable. It's a mess. Sometimes now people take advantage of LinkedIn to post some really nonsense stuff, but at the core of it, it's there. Can I give two answers? There's a lot of Slack communities that are being built around specific topic areas. I'm not in marketing, but I'm part of a great marketing operations Slack group that keeps me knowing what's going on. I work with a lot of MarTech vendors still as an amplifier now and a community evangelist. I need to know what's going on. And so even on that, in the practice, these Slack groups are hidden sources of insight. So if there's not a Slack group for your world, your community, build it, invite people. They will come. This is not field of dreams. They're desperate to connect, one-On-one, sometimes outside of the loud world that is LinkedIn. Kathleen: That group would not happen to be the MoPro's would it? Katie: No, but now I want to join that one. Kathleen: I'll send you a link. A guy I interviewed once for this podcast has a marketing operations Slack group that I am in. But I agree with you. I have a ton of Slack groups and there's only like, let's say, two or three of them that I'm religious about checking every day. They're just insanely valuable. But, love all of those suggestions. Again, I could talk to you all day long, but we're not going to do that because we both have other things we need to do. Great conversation. I'm sure people will have opinions, both ways, about what we said here today, but that's okay. That's why these conversations are important to have. If you listened and you disagree, tweet me. I would love to hear your perspective. This is all about learning and listening and I'd love to hear what more folks think about this. How to connect with Katie Kathleen: But Katie, if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Katie: They can Google me. I'm very, very, very Google-able. You can LinkedIn me. You can find my website. I'm just, I'm everywhere. Kathleen, congratulations on over 150 episodes of this. This is a service to the community and we are grateful for it and it's a lot of work to put these together. So thank you for doing what you do and thank you for having me, really. Kathleen: Well, I very much appreciate it. And I will put links to your personal website as well as your LinkedIn in the show notes. So head there if you want to connect with Katie, and she does produce some amazing stuff, so I highly recommend it. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you just felt like you learned something new, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts, because that is how other people learn about the podcast. And finally, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Katie. Katie: Thank you, Kathleen. Everyone take care.

How do you market a company that is selling something fundamentally new and different? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, John Rougeux of Flag & Frontier talks about category design. It's not a tactic for every company, but when used strategically, category design can drive truly remarkable marketing results. John digs into who category design is right for, how long it takes, what a category design go-to-market plan looks like, and how to gain organizational support. He also shares examples of companies and marketers who've successfully created new categories. Highlights from my conversation with John include: John is an experienced category designer who has also owned and exited a business. He says that compared to traditional inbound marketing strategies, category design requires a much larger lift when it comes to educating the market. Every business has a choice to either compete in an existing market or create a new market.  If you're creating a new category, you have three choices: 1) try to fit your product within an existing category; 2) ignore category in your marketing and focus on the product's features and benefits; or 3) create a new category. John says options 1 and 2 don't work. When considering whether category design is right for you, you need to honestly evaluate your product and determine whether its simply a niche within an existing category or something that has truly never been offered before. If its the latter, then category design is really the only logical solution. Category design takes time. John says you should expect to spend six to nine months just designing the category behind the scenes, and then once you roll that out publicly, it can take another few years before it really takes hold. Category design needs to be a business initiative, not simply a marketing strategy, because it affects product roadmaps, sales and more. When executing a category design strategy, it is critical to focus marketing messaging on the problem that your audience is experiencing and the outcomes that they will experience as a result of your solution rather than how the product itself actually works. The companies that have been most successful at category design have evangelists whose job it is to go to market and talk about the problem and why there is a new solution. Its also important to build a consistent conversation around your new category. That might mean holding a big event (like HubSpot's INBOUND or Drift's HYPERGROWTH) or building a community, like Terminus's FlipMyFunnel.  If your company is venture-backed, it is also important to get your investors on board with the idea of category creation so that you have the funding to support the strategy. There are examples of category design all around us. Some of the bigger and more visible ones are minivans and music streaming services. The category wasn't created overnight, and in many cases, people don't even realize its a new category, but we see it is as fundamentally different from the status quo, and that is what successful category design looks like.  Resources from this episode: Visit the Flag & Frontier website Email John at John@FlagandFrontier.com  Visit John's personal website Purchase a copy of Play Bigger Listen to the podcast to learn more about category design, when it makes sense, and how you can use it to dramatically improve your marketing results. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is John Rougeux, who is the founder at Flag & Frontier. Welcome, John. John Rougeux (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks for having me on. John and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you here for completely selfish reasons. I am deep, deep into the weeds, trying to learn everything I can right now about category creation because it's something that I'm kind of working on for a little project at work. And I stumbled across your name. I think it was in a LinkedIn post mentioned by Sangram Vajre at Terminus, and he mentioned you as somebody who's doing a lot of work on category creation. And I immediately thought, oh, I need to have him in on the podcast. And here you are. I am so excited, so welcome. John: Thanks. Thanks. I actually want to come back to something that you said a minute ago. You mentioned this was a little project for you, so I'm going to pick your brains about why it's not a big project. Kathleen: I think I might just be downplaying it. John: Okay, all right. Kathleen: It's a huge project. John: All right. Kathleen: Yes, yes. It is a giant. In fact, it's probably bigger than I think it is. No, it's- John: Well, Sangram told me a few weeks ago. He said, "If you're not doing something that scares you a little bit, then you're not setting your sights high enough." So I think you're on the right track there. Kathleen: Yeah, no, I think my whole career has been a succession of choices that consistently terrify me. So hopefully, that means I'm on the right track to somewhere. So you have an interesting story. You started out or your career really grew in B2B tech, and you worked in some companies that were looking at category creation as a potential strategy and it seems that that wet your appetite and led you to where you are today. Can you just talk a little bit about your background and how it got you to where you are now and what you're doing now with Flag & Frontier? About John Rougeux and Flag & Frontier John: Yeah. Yeah, happy to. So the thing that I like to tell people is that I always wish that I knew about category design earlier in my marketing career. I think it would have helped me be more successful and make better choices and think through the strategy of what I was working on at the time a lot more thoroughly. So the reason I say that is in 2013, I co-founded a company called Causely. And I won't get too far down into the weeds of what Causely does and the business model, but we were basically using cause marketing as a way to incentivize people to take action. And specifically, we were looking at incentivizing referrals on social media. And at the time, I was looking at marketing through a fairly narrow lens, like a lot of people do maybe when they are kind of earlier in the middle of their marketing careers. We were looking at things like you know how do you improve the performance of an advertising campaign? How can you write a better better blog post? All of those kind of tactical things. And I didn't realize at the time that what we were doing was something categorically new. People didn't have context for what that meant, what they should compare it to, what value they should expect, what things should it replace or not replace? And so we had a reasonable trajectory. We scaled the business to a few thousand locations. It was acquired. But when looking back on it, I know that if we had had this lens of category design of how do you describe something when it's different than anything else out there, I think we could have gone even further. And so when I joined a company called Skyfii in 2018, I had started to kind of understand what that meant, so I had read Play Bigger. I read some, the works by Al Ries and Jack Trout that talk about how if you can't be first in a category, design any category you can be first in. And at Skyfii, that business, it's a publicly-traded SaaS company out of Australia and they found that they were participating in a fairly commoditized space. Or I guess to be more accurate, the perception was that they were a competitor in a fairly commoditized space. And their business had evolved past that and the product did all sorts of other things that were much bigger than the category the market thought they participated in, but they didn't really have a framework for talking about that. And so we went through a repositioning exercise where we defined a new category that better reflected what they were all about and and how people should kind of relate to that. And that was a really, I think, powerful and challenging exercise to think through.We've got something new in the market, but how do we describe that? How do we tell the right story? How do we tell the right narrative so that people know how to relate to it? Why category design is a fundamentally different approach to marketing Kathleen: This is so interesting to me. There's so much I want to unpack here. I guess, starting with something that you kind of started with, which is that there is this typical marketer's playbook, right, where people come in and they think, "Oh, we need to top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We need to create content and attract people," this and that. And when it comes to category creation or trying to market something that is different than anything else people are used to, that playbook doesn't really work. Because as I'm quickly learning, especially looking just at the top of the funnel, traditional top of the funnel marketing, it's like well what is that problem that people are having and they start to look for a solution. And the challenge you have is that if the solution you're offering is something they've never heard of, it's such a steeper climb to try and gain their attention. It's like they don't know the right questions to ask even, if that makes sense. John: No, that's absolutely right. And I always like to mention a really thoughtful post that Mike Volpe, the founding CMO of HubSpot wrote a few years ago because it lays such a great groundwork for any discussion around category design. And the blog post simply says that look, every marketer has two choices on their strategy. They can pick an existing category and try to carve out a niche within that category. Maybe they can dominate that category. But basically, they have to pick a space and then do the best they can within that space. Or they can try to design a new category. And when you look at kind of the underlying product or business model and you really take a close examination of what it is and whether it's different or whether it's something better, you almost don't have a choice. If you're doing something that is new that people don't have a framework for, you really have three choices. So I want to pack these for you. So choice number one is you can try to shoehorn this new thing you've built into an existing category. And we'll come back to why that doesn't work in a second. Number two is you can just talk about the products, like features and benefits but not really think about a more underlying narrative for that. And then number three is you can design a new language, a new framework, which is called category design. And so here's why number one and number two don't work. So again, number one is if you try to shoehorn something new into an existing category. The reason that works against you is that people will make the wrong comparisons for what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to be priced, how you deliver value. That just works against you. Secondly, if you just try to talk about the product itself but don't provide a larger context, you're not giving people, you're not giving them really any framework, and it makes it difficult to understand what you're all about and why they should be interested in you. I'll give you a great example. A friend of mine works at a company and I won't mention the name of the company, but they combine two different categories kind of in an existing platform. So one of these is VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol communication software, very established, known space. The other thing they do is they have these marketing automation functions that they add to their software to at least in my view very disparate types of software, but they combine them together. And so far, they haven't really given their buyers a context, a category for what this thing means. And so they're basically letting people to their own devices to understand and come up with their own conclusions about what that is. And that just puts a lot of work on your buyers when they have to think about who they should compare you to when they need to think about what department is this even for, or what products does this replace or not replace? That's generally too much work for people when they're trying to understand something new. And like you said, Kathleen, if you're not telling them what questions they should ask, then chances are they're just going to be too confused before they'll even really be interested in having a conversation with you. Kathleen: Yeah, and there's two other aspects to what you just said that I think are really interesting, which I'm beginning to appreciate more with the work that I'm doing. One is that human nature is such that people want to slot you into something that they already understand. They don't want to have to think outside the box. So when people hear about something new, that their natural inclination is to try and categorize it in with things that they already know. And that's a hard thing to battle because you are literally battling human nature. And the second thing is if you do allow yourself to be put into a category that already exists that maybe isn't really truly what you're doing and you are actually successful in selling your product, you will wind up having a lot of problems with churn once you do sell it because people are still going to be thinking that you are like that other thing that you're not actually like. And they're going to be looking for your product or your service or whatever it is to solve for them in the same way that other thing does, when in reality your thing does not solve those problems. So it's like you're setting yourself up for a very long horizon of failures that you might not see at the outset, but it's kind of a you're failing before you've even begun. John: Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, people do... They tend to... The world is so complicated, and there's so many things that we have to deal with and try to understand that we use this rule of thumb of categorizing things. Sometimes we do it explicitly, like smartphones are a great example of a category we all know about and buy them and we know why they're different than a mobile phone. Sometimes we just do it implicitly. We don't necessarily have the language or the terms to describe that category, but we know that we try to group likes things together because it makes it easier to understand the world. Kathleen: Yeah or we use analogies. So many times, you hear things like, "Well, that's just the Uber of," and then they list a different industry. Or, "That's the Airbnb of something else." John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: And so we're constantly trying to put these things into comfortable mental frameworks, which I think is fascinating. So you mentioned there were three things. The first two, I think you covered. And then the third is really designing a new category. John: The third is designing a new category. That's right. That's right. When does category design make sense? Kathleen: So how do you know... I guess the first question is how do you know when that's the path you should be taking? John: That's a great question because I've heard from some people that they have this idea that every company should try to design a category, and that's really not the case. It applies to some companies. But for many other companies, like if you're developing a CRM, a better version of a CRM, don't try to build a new category around that. So yes, so the way you would look at that is there's no formula you can put into Excel and calculate and churn all this out, but it really comes down to does the thing that you've built, does it solve a problem that has not been solved before? Or does it do so in a way that the world isn't familiar with? So is there a new business model behind that? Is there a new delivery mechanism behind that? It really comes down to those two things. And maybe if you want to look at it at a more fundamental level, you could ask yourself do the existing categories that my market is familiar with, do they accurately capture the type of thing that I'm offering? If they do, then one of the reasons you may want to choose to carve out a niche in an existing category is that people are looking for established products in established categories. People are looking for marketing automation software, they're looking for smartphones, they're looking for video communications tools like Zoom, like we're using today. And so, if you say, "Hey, we have the right tool within this category for this specific market or for this specific need," that can be very powerful. And arbitrarily forcing yourself out of that category just because you like that idea of category design is going to work against you. Now, that being said, again to kind of flip it around, if you find that the categories and the language that are used to describe existing products your market is familiar with just don't capture what you're doing or they limit it in some way, then ultimately you need to find a way to break out from that and that's what the process of category design is all about. What does it take to create a new category? Kathleen: Now, one of the things that I've come to appreciate just the more I look at this is what a big lift creating a category is. As you said in the beginning, this isn't a little project, right? I would love it if you could just talk a little bit about sort of expectation setting. If somebody is listening to this and they're thinking this really sounds like it could make sense for me, from your experience and what you've seen and you've talked to people who've been involved in category design, how long does it take before you can really expect that the market will recognize a new category? John: Yeah. It's a pretty long-time horizon. And so I mentioned Mike Volpe at the beginning of the call and I'll mention him again and Kipp Bodnar, the following CMO of HubSpot mentioned the same thing I'm about to tell you. And they told me that when they first started talking about inbound marketing, it was like standing in the middle of a town square on a soapbox just shouting into the wind with nobody paying attention. And that was the case for two to three years before that phrase really started to work its way into the lexicon of marketers. Salesforce, they pioneered, not so much CRM but cloud-based software. And even today, they still talk about other applications to cloud-based software that's 20 years later. And another example might be... So at Terminus, they talk about the account-based marketing gospel. And maybe this kind of hints to the challenge of how difficult it is to build a category. Sangram used to be there, I think he was their head of marketing if I'm not mistaken. He's definitely a co-founder, but his role is chief evangelist. And so they recognize that to really get people to be aware of and to understand and use this terminology around account-based marketing, they've had to invest very heavily in evangelizing that market or that message out in the market. Kathleen: Yeah. The other story that I've always found interesting... I followed all the ones you just mentioned really closely. And then the other one that's been fascinating to me is Drift because they came on the scene. And if they're listening, they may take issue with what I'm about to say, but look. A big piece of what their product does is live chat, website live chat, and then they have chatbots. Well, those things have been around for a while. That was not anything new, but they were really smart and they coined it as conversational marketing and they really focused more on, not so much the how and what the technology does, as what it enables the business to do, and kind of wrapped a methodology around existing technology in a way that made it feel fresh and new. And it was pretty genius. And I feel like they actually moved really quickly by comparison to a lot of the other examples I've seen. So it's interesting to me why in some cases, businesses are able to gain traction faster than others. John: Yeah. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the culture and how quickly or rapidly that business has gone through change in the past. And the other thing we should probably discuss is just the timeline of everything that happens before you share your new category with the world. I was talking with... There's an interview I did with, let's see, Anna and Cassidy at a company called Narrative Science. And they expected just the category design process itself to take about six to nine months. This is before they released language out publicly. And at Skyfii, that was our experience as well. And for that situation, that company, I think they were founded in 2012 or 2013. So they were five, six years into the business and there had already been a lot of discussion around the space that they started in, which was Wi-Fi marketing or Wi-Fi analytics. And so anytime that you're going into a space where the culture already kind of thinks and has a mental model for what their business is, the process of reworking all of that and getting everyone on board, especially the leadership team and perhaps even investors, getting them on board with that new message in a new way of thinking about the business, it takes time. And I would argue it should take time. Because if you rush the process and you ask your team to start using maybe even radically different language about what you do, people need time to really think through that and maybe they need to push back or challenge you a little bit or ask questions or provide suggestions. There's just this change management process you have to go through. And if you rush through that, people are not going to feel like they're a part of that process. And then ultimately, that's going to undermine your efforts in years one, two, three and further as you're asking your team to help you share that message. And at Skyfii, Skyfii is publicly traded in the Australian market and so they have investors and they have a public... They're very thoughtful about the message they put out into the market. And so they really wanted to take the time to make sure that message was right and that it made sense. And so, yeah, it took us, I don't know exactly how many months, but yeah, around six to nine months to really start that discussion and then get to a point where we were comfortable with the category name and the underlying narrative to support it. Why category design needs to be a company-wide effort Kathleen: Yeah, and I think there's... To me, one of the most important things is consistency because you kind of said if everybody is not on board and everybody isn't speaking from the same playbook, all it takes is one or two people to diverge and talk about your thing and language and terms that puts it squarely back in with all of the other things out there that... And it destroys your effort. John: Yeah. Well, and this is probably a great segue into another really important point about category design, which is that it's not a marketing project. Sometimes, it can be spearheaded by marketing, and marketing will often do a lot of the legwork, but it's not something that's relegated or exclusive to marketing. It has to be something that that CEO is involved in. It affects the company vision and is affected by the company vision. They kind of play off of each other. It affects the product roadmap. It affects what the sales team says. It affects what you might tell investors. So if your CFO is in charge of investor relations, he or she, they have to be on board and educated on the message. That's another misconception I heard a few times and it was... Personally, I thought it was a marketing initiative when I first read about it. But the more I dove deep into it and the more people I talked to, I realized it's actually a bit more of a business initiative, more so than a marketing one. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a great point. Having that buy-in top to bottom, it's really important. John: Yeah. What's been your experience at Prevailion in kind of leading your team in that discussion? Kathleen: So it was interesting because I came in really excited to make this a category design play. And shortly after I came in, we hired a head of sales, who also had some experience with category design and saw that that was a really strong play for us. He and I had both read Play Bigger, and we just kept talking about it until we basically beat the rest of our leadership team down into buying copies of the book. They've all now read it. They're all super excited about it, and it's great because it's given us a common language and framework around which to talk about what it is we're doing. So we're still really early stage, but I think we have that excitement and that buy-in in principle at least is there. And now, we're at the stage where we have to figure out our plan. What does a category design strategy look like? Kathleen: So along those lines, let's talk a little bit about somebody who's listening and they think, "Yep, this makes sense for me. Okay, I'm going to set my expectations. I understand I need to get top to bottom buy-in." What are the elements that you've seen in your experience from the companies that you've studied that have done this that contribute to successful category design efforts. In other words, what would be a part of a company's plan if they were looking to move forward with this? John: Yeah. So I'll mention two things that come to mind. So one I touched on a moment ago, but it's making sure that the CEO and the leadership team are involved and to the extent that they feel like they have a stake in the success of the project. What I mean is it's not enough for them to say, "Sure, that sounds great. Category sounds great, Mr. or Mrs. CMO. Go for it. Let me know how it turns out." That's not sufficient for getting buy-in. So getting them to be a stakeholder and have a real level of participation, that's absolutely key. And there's an interview I did with Chris Orlob of Gong.io, where we talk about that in more depth. So if you want to link to that, I'm happy to- Kathleen: Yeah, that would be great. I would love that. John: Yeah. The second thing is category design, it's all about talking about a problem that you're solving and less about the product. And so one thing I always like to say is that problem... Let's see, so your solution, your product. Solutions don't exist without problems, right? And then problems don't exist without people. And so you have to go back and understand the people that you're trying to work with and serve, and understand the problem you're trying to solve and the language they use to describe that problem, and the context for which they're trying to solve that problem or maybe they're not even aware that it is a problem or they think it's unsolvable. The point is you have to really understand the problem first and use that to lead your messaging. If your category is all around, here's why this specific product is so great and it's called this category, you're kind of missing the point. When you look at the language and the marketing that companies like Drift, for example, do, 80% of it is on the problem. Drift likes to talk about how the buying process has changed. Buyers are not interested in waiting hours or days or weeks for someone to respond to them. They want a response now. And you even see that word, "now", used.  Kathleen: Yes. That word, that one word... I went to HYPERGROWTH. I think it was not this year, but the year before. I went this year too. John: Okay. Kathleen: The year before, their whole keynote at HYPERGROWTH was all about the one word, "now." And it was so powerful, the way they distilled that down I thought, really, really simple but effective. John: Yeah, yeah. And they've written a book around conversational marketing. If you've used Drift products, you can kind of see some tie-ins but it's really about the problem that they're trying to solve. And people smarter than me have said lots of times that if you can articulate that you understand the problem better than anyone else, then people will assume you have the best solution. You don't have to work so hard to talk about every single little feature or benefit that you offer. Showing that you understand the problem creates empathy with your audience, and then again, they'll assume that you have the best solution to address that problem. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting that you talk about that because I think that's a really easy mistake for marketers to make, which is to say that, especially when you talk about B2B technology, it's really easy to fall into the trap of talking a lot about what the product does, how the product works. And I think many times, that's facilitated or even encouraged sometimes by the customer asking, "What does the product do? How does it work?" John: Right. Kathleen: And yet, I think the challenge as a marketer is to try to really get ahead of that and take control of the conversation and steer it towards not only the problems as you say and really deeply understanding them, but the outcomes that come from the use of the products. There's problems, and then there are what is the outcome for the user? How does it make their life better? How does it change them for the better? If you think of those as two different poles, and in the middle, lies the product and all the stuff it does, if you can keep the conversation more at the periphery on those poles, then I think you can be really successful. But that's tough. John: No, I've never heard it described that way, but that's a really clear way of describing that. And it's funny you mention that because I was having the opposite experience just this week. I was there was looking for a new email client for my computer. And that's a pretty established category. There's a million email clients. And in that context, you don't need to talk about the problem of communicating with people. Kathleen: Right. John: You know what email is. You don't need to talk about the outcome so much. There were a few features I was looking for and I was trying to find a client that had those features. And so you can talk about that a little bit more upfront when the category is established and people know what the category is, what it isn't, what it's supposed to do. But to your point, Kathleen, if that category doesn't exist and you're really trying to sell a vision around solving a problem, emphasizing what the problem is and then emphasizing the outcomes are really what's necessary to get people interested in just having a discussion around this new idea. And then from there, they're probably going to ask, "Okay, this sounds really good. Tell me about that product itself. What does it actually do?" Then you're in a perfect position to go into those details because they're ready for it. And they get the larger idea. Kathleen: Yeah, and that's where I think the traditional framework of top, middle, and bottom of the funnel comes back into the discussion, right? When you do get towards that middle to bottom of funnel stage, you can get into the weeds of how it works. And I know in our case, for example, it might not even be the same person we're having the conversation with. Our ultimate buyer isn't going to ever care so much how it works. They're going to hand that part of the decision off to somebody on their team and say, "Validate this for me." And it's almost like we've talked about it. We just need a spec sheet, but that... It's kind of like when you're going to a conference and you get the convince your boss letter, but in reverse. We're selling to the boss and the boss needs a convince their engineer letter that they can just hand to them and say, "Here, take this. It's in your language. It'll answer all your questions." Right? To me, that's the steps that we need to go through, but if we get too stuck in the weeds of convincing the engineer early, we're never going to get to convince the boss. John: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Building your category design go-to-market plan Kathleen: Yeah. Well, have you seen... So there are those foundational elements of how you talk about what it is you're doing, how you talk about the category, how you begin to gain share of mind. And then there's the actual go to market. And I've seen a lot of information written. For example, in the book, Play Bigger, which we've mentioned a few times, which is kind of like the Bible for category creation and other places. They talk about the concept of a lightning strike, which is just really a big kind of splashy go to market. It could be an event. It could be some other, something else that really makes an impression on the market and gets it talking about your thing. What have you seen or have you seen anything that has worked really well as far as like quick, well, I don't know if quick is the right word, but very high impact kind of strategies for really making an impression on the market? John: That's a great question. I'm not sure that I've seen a ton of really great examples beyond the few that we've discussed. So back to HubSpot, I don't recall a big... They have their INBOUND event, right? I don't recall that having a huge kind of blow up the world moment at the time when that conference first came out, but they've certainly been consistent and they made it a very conscious decision not to call it the HubSpot User Conference or even put the word HubSpot in there. It was about inbound, something bigger than themselves. I've seen Terminus, they have focused on this idea of a community of people who are interested in account-based marketing. Sangram told me they started with a fairly small event, relatively small event. And they've kind of built it from there. But that's more of an ongoing exercise, I guess, an ongoing process. Drift has their HYPERGROWTH conference. They came out with a book called Conversational Marketing. That's probably the biggest kind of high profile thing they did that was explicitly around that category. I think one of the things around lightning strikes is that, at least the way they're described in the book, is that they feel like they could be appropriate for a VC-backed company, or maybe a publicly traded company who's launching a new category and wants to really make that big splash and can afford to do that. I would say if you're earlier on and you don't have millions to drop on a big event or a massive campaign of another nature, it seems like other companies can can be successful with more of a process-driven approach of who are we trying to get to care about this category? What are they interested in? Where do they spend their time? And how can we just have these conversations with them on a repeatable basis? Because, like we were talking about earlier, it's not like once you name your category, the whole world suddenly cares about it and there's all these... Gartner doesn't give you a ring and say, "Hey, I guess we're going to create a Magic Quadrant because we saw your lightning strike. That's good. This is so great." Everyone who I've talked to anyway, who's done it well, has had to dedicate consistent resources over time to really get people to understand it and think about it. Kathleen: Yeah. You're talking about something that strikes very close to home for me because I've looked at those examples too and I had an opportunity... I've interviewed Kipp Bodnar. I've interviewed Nikki Nixon, who was one of the first leaders of the FlipMyFunnel community for Terminus. I interviewed Dave Gerhardt at Drift. So I've had a little bit of an inside peek into some of those companies. We didn't talk about this topic specifically, but what did strike me about all of those conversations and all of those examples is, as you say, consistency but also not just consistency, volume. There's a difference between, "Hey, we're going to consistently blog once a week, and it's going to be a great blog," and that's just an example. All of these companies not only have been super consistent, but they have turned the volume dial way up in terms of the amount of content they're creating around their category. I think every one of them has written a book actually, because Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote the book, Inbound Marketing. You mentioned the book that Drift wrote. Sangram has written a couple of books. I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just a coincidence, but I think it certainly has helped. But it's also a reflection of that turning up the volume. We're not just going to write a bunch of blogs and use this keyword on them. We're going to write the book on our topic and really own it. And to me, there's something to that. If you're going to do a category creation play, you don't necessarily have to have the biggest budget in the world. Maybe you're not going to throw a HYPERGROWTH type conference, which is a cool conference. But you are going to need to really be prepared to just saturate the market with content, flood people with educational content around what is that problem you're solving, why it matters, why it's new, and why the new approach is better than the old one. John: Yeah. And that comes down to having patience and the right time horizon. And like you were asking about earlier, if your expectation is that category design is something maybe you can do for a few months and then you can go about business as usual, that's a wrong time horizon. And it will take months or probably years for people to really get what you do and talk about it, independent of conversations with you. And you have to have the content to support that, whether that's an event or a blog or a book or a podcast. And I think you also have to make sure that your investors understand that vision. They understand that you want to create something big, you want to create a category that you can dominate and design to your favor. And then if you do that, five to 10 years from now, you will be in a very good position. But also understanding that the first few years will have a different trajectory than someone who's just really trying to scale growth right off the bat at a very high level. Kathleen: Yeah, I feel like you just brought the conversation perfectly full circle because we started talking about how important buy-in was, top to bottom. And you can think of top to bottom as like CEO to the bottom of the organization. But honestly, if you have investors, that's really the top. Your board has to be totally bought-in because you'll get a ton of pressure. I mean we do have investors. We just got a series A round, so I'm dealing with this right now. And we're very fortunate that we have a really bought-in board, but I completely agree with you. It's also fascinating, you mentioned earlier analysts. That's another thing. If you're working with the analysts, what are the expectations you should have there? Because I recently read a quote that was like, "Gartner will never create a new market if there's only one player in it." Right? Because what's in it for them to build a Magic Quadrant for one company? They're not going to do it. So by definition, if you truly, truly are creating a new category, your thing is new and different and not like anything else and you "don't have any competition" which is like the bad words to ever say... Because even if you don't have competition, you have perceived competition. There's nothing in it for an analyst to say, "Well, this is a new category because a lot of work to produce a Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave." They're not going to do it for one company. So that goes back again to the conversation around time horizon. So it's such an interesting play and not for everyone certainly. You mentioned a couple of really good examples from the marketing world, Drift, HubSpot, Terminus. Can you think of any examples from outside of the marketing technology world that are really great examples of category creation? So if somebody is listening and they want to kind of look out in the wild and see who's doing this well, who would you point to? Examples of category creators John: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Once you understand what category design actually means, you start to see new categories all over the place. So I'll mention two. So in high school, Kathleen, I drove a minivan. It had wood siding, I hated it, and it was just the dorkiest car you could drive. But at the time, I didn't know- Kathleen: We have to come back and have a conversation about that in a minute. John: So at the time, I didn't know that minivans were actually representative of a new category in the market. And I can't remember when they first came out. I think it was maybe the mid-80s, and I mean there were these full-size work vans, but people didn't conceive of this van that you would use to haul your family around. It was a completely new category. And it continues to be... I've come full circle. We've got a minivan today, another one. And so anyway, that's kind of a great example. You see that in automotive all the time, so hybrid cars. The Prius was a great example of designing that category. Tesla now for electric cars, SUVs as well. So that's one. And then another one is, I was actually thinking about this on the way to work this morning, the way that Apple and Spotify have really created, I guess, a new category around how music is distributed, I think, is another interesting example. And I think it's a... The reason I bring it up is category design isn't so much about a specific name or a specific taxonomy or a word that Gartner has capitalized. It more has to do with the business model and the way people look at a space. So when Apple launched iTunes, they completely changed the way music was distributed from buying a full album to buying individual songs and to needing to have the physical copy of the media to having a digital copy you could take anywhere. And now, I would argue that maybe Apple or iTunes created that category. They are the first to do that. But I would also argue that it's really Spotify, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think their user number is larger than Apple's for Apple Music, they're the ones who have actually designed the category. They're the ones who said, "This is what streaming music looks like. This is what you're supposed to pay. This is about how many artists or songs we're supposed to have available. This is how we're going to curate music to you." And that's a completely new way of using music or listening to music. I don't know what the official name for that category is. Maybe it's just called streaming music. It's not something I'm an expert on, but that was a very long answer to your question but those I think are two that come to mind for me. Kathleen: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I do feel like we're surrounded by category creation. And it's happening even faster than I think it used to because of the pace of technological change. We just don't necessarily recognize it as such. But when you have that framework through which to think about it, you do start to see it everywhere and it's really interesting to watch. And I think it's kind of like the whole frog that boiled in the water analogy, which is actually a terrible analogy when you really think about what you're talking about. But the notion that- John: Who's actually tried that by the way? Do you know anyone? Kathleen: No, God, I hope not. That's like, don't they say serial killers start by torturing animals? No, no, no. Do not boil any frogs. But the whole idea being it's happening to us. We are experiencing category creation. It's just that it's happening at a pace that we don't like see it. It's not like a yesterday it didn't exist, and today it does. That by the time the category has happened and has become commonplace, it just feels like it's been there all along kind of. It's really interesting. I think there's probably a whole psychological aspect to this that hasn't even been mined in a way that it could. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: But all right, shifting gears because I could talk about category creation forever, but we don't have forever. Inbound marketing. We talked about really what the podcast is about, and I love talking about category creation as part of it. Because when you talked about consistency and HubSpot and Drift and Terminus, really they were all phenomenal examples of companies that really did inbound marketing well. So when you think about inbound marketing as it is today, is there a particular individual or company that you really think is killing it? John: I'm going to say that it's really like a style of inbound marketing that I think is starting to get a lot of attention and it's this idea of having an evangelist be a voice for the company. And the reason I think this is so interesting is because, like our world is, there's so many messages we get from brands today, both on the consumer side and on the B2B side, that I think people have a real... They started to see that you can have a brand say anything, right? It's a construct. But when you have a person who's a real human being talking about the vision and the values and what their brand represents and how it might be able to help, to me, that's a much more authentic way and it's just very relevant in the world today because I feel like people just crave more human-to-human interaction. So a three examples of that. We've mentioned a couple already, so Sangram and Terminus does that very well. Dave Gerhardt does that. He doesn't have the title of evangelist, but he's much more of the face of the company I think even than David Cancel or others. And then, Ethan Beute at BombBomb is doing that really well. Kathleen: Yeah. John: I know you had him on a previous episode, and yeah. I know there's others out there, but those are the three that come to mind. I see their content very regularly. They all do a different job. They have their own styles. They have their own voice, but they're very authentic. And I think they're adding a lot of value for the respective companies through what they do. Kathleen: I totally agree. Those are three great examples. And picking the right person or settling on the right person to fill that role is such a critical decision for the company. It has to be somebody that truly, deeply understands, as you said, the problem that the audience is experiencing, but that also can come across as charismatically and passionately believing in that shift that needs to occur to create that new category. So it's an interesting mix of skills that you look for when you try to find your evangelist. John: Right, right. So does this mean you're going to step up and be the evangelist at Prevailion? Kathleen: I don't know. We actually... I'm really lucky. And one of the reasons I joined the company is that we have this amazing team of really smart people, who are also very invested in participating in marketing. So our CEO is unbelievable. He could sell ice to the Eskimos, not that he would. That makes him sound like he's a smarmy sales guy. He is so smart and he really has been in the market a long time and knows it, and he's also incredibly well-spoken. So while I would love to get up and talk about it, I think I'm really lucky that I have an executive team that is full of people who could probably fill that role better than I could. John: And you know what? I don't think it's entirely an either or situation. Some of those companies I've mentioned, they have someone who's maybe has the largest following or the loudest voice, but there's others on the team who can contribute to that. And I think that's what's really exciting, is it's not just one person, but you can have a whole series of people on your team evangelize for the company. And I don't know about you, there's something about when I just see the people behind a product that I'm thinking about using. I feel so much more comfortable having that conversation and and exploring what they do than I would if I was just reading pure brand messages. Kathleen: Absolutely. It all comes down to trust, right? And if you feel like you can trust that person who is the chief spokesperson, somehow or another there's a halo effect from that that shines down on the brand. And it really saturates the brand with that feeling of trustworthiness, that makes you want to buy from them. John: Yeah, that's right. Kathleen: Yeah. I love it. Well, digital marketing is changing so quickly. This topic of category creation is so fascinating because conceptually it seems like something that will stand the test of time, but then how you implement it obviously will change over time. With everything changing so quickly, how do you personally stay up to date and stay educated on all things marketing-related? John: Yeah. For me, both listening to and hosting podcasts has been a big driver of my growth. And so conversations like this one with you are really helpful because you and I could swap ideas. The episodes I've done... So I co-host a series on the B2B Growth show around category creation. I also did a series on FlipMyFunnel. That's given me the chance to talk to people who have done more category design work than I have and learn from them in the process. And for me, that's been so much more valuable than anything I could read or stumble across in a newsletter, not that those things aren't valuable. But having one-to-one access to experts, there's few things that are... I'm not sure if anything is going to beat that. Some of those conversations have led to ongoing relationships, where I've been able to ask questions and dive deeper into other topics. And so that's where I found the most valuable use of time, is just having conversations. I love to read, love to listen to podcasts, but anytime I could just talk to people and listen to them and then talk through my own ideas, man, I'd do that every day if I could. Kathleen: Amen. I just filmed a LinkedIn video about this, about how I learn. And the number one way I learn is through hosting this podcast, which when I say that to people, I know that that's not something that's going to be feasible for everyone. Let me just spin up a podcast so that I can learn. But it is the most amazing vehicle because you get to meet such incredible people like yourself, pick their brains, really get into detail that you can't get into in other ways. And it's amazing how much I take away from it. Second for me is I love to listen to Audible business books on 2X speed as I do my commute. John: What are you listening to right now? Kathleen: I am finishing Crossing the Chasm. And then before that, it was Play Bigger, From Impossible to Inevitable, and I come back. I'll listen multiple times to books because I feel like you absorb more the second time. John: Right. Kathleen: So yeah, lots of good ones. There's never too many books to read or never too few books, I should say. I always have more. John: Right, no shortage of content, yeah. How to connect with John Kathleen: Thank you. That's what I was trying to say. Well, if somebody has questions about category design and they want to reach out, learn more about what you're doing, or ask you a question, what's the best way for them to get in touch? John: Sure. So you could email me at John@FlagandFrontier.com. So that's J-O-H-N@FlagandFrontier.com. You can also just put in John.Marketing in your browser, and it'll bring up a really simple page with just my contact info. Sometimes that's easier to remember. Kathleen: So smart. That's great. I love that. John: I can't believe no one bought that domain, but it was there so why not? Kathleen: Genius. John: It's easier than spelling my last name. And then you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I won't attempt to spell my name here, but if you want to link to it in your episode- Kathleen: I'll put that in the show notes, absolutely. John: Yeah. You know what to do next... Kathleen: Great. Well, I have really enjoyed this. I've learned so much. I feel like I probably could have made this podcast three hours long, but nobody wants to listen for that long. If you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, I would really appreciate it if you would take a minute, go to Apple podcasts, and leave the podcast a five-star review. That is how other people discover us, and that is how we get in front of a bigger audience. So take a minute and do that. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thank you so much, John. This has been fun. John: Yeah, my pleasure, Kathleen. And hopefully, we can have another conversation later on as you go further into your own category design process. Kathleen: Yes, about that and also about the minivan that you drove in high school. John: All right, sounds good.

How did Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance use blogging to grow the company's website traffic from 30,000 visits a month to one million visits a month while increasing revenues by 350%? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yale Appliance and Lighting CEO Steve Sheinkopf shares his company's journey from a small Boston-based lighting and appliance store that relied heavily on advertising for business, to the world's most trafficked appliance website and a business in the process of adding its third store. Central to Yale's success was Steve himself, who blogged five times a week in the early day's of the company's content marketing efforts and continues to create key blog posts to this day. Highlights from my conversation with Steve include: Yale Appliance is the most trafficked appliance website in the world Steve started blogging in 2007 and at the time, Yale Appliance was spending around three quarters of a million dollars on radio ads. From 2007 to 2011, Steve blogged five times a week, but despite the volume of content he was publishing he wasn't seeing any results.  In 2011, Yale was getting 30,000 visitors a month to its website and today, it gets close to a million a month - all due to the shift that Steve and his team made in the way they undertake content marketing. Yale doesn't talk about itself on its blog - it talks about statistics and facts relating to its products, and that is what makes readers trust them. Steve says blogging is all about building domain authority and to that requires a sustained and consistent effort when it comes to content creation. Steve sees blogging as a core competency of his business at Yale and as such believes strongly that it shouldn't be outsourced. Steve still writes blogs for Yale, but today, the company's sales people blog as well. The company tracks the ROI of its content marketing efforts and can show, using data from HubSpot, that views of its blog and buyers guide have driven millions of dollars in business. Steve writes all of the posts relating to reliability, "best of" lists, and articles detailing problems that frequently occur with certain brands. One of the biggest benefits of Yale's content marketing efforts is that the leads it generates are very high intent. His team can see the content they've consumed on the website and it shows exactly what they are interested in. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained approximately 15 to 20% in revenue. In that time, Yale has increased its revenue by 350%, from 37 to about 122 million in a 10 year period. They have also gone from one store to adding their third in November which will be the company's biggest store. Resources from this episode: Visit the Yale Appliance and Lighting Website Follow Steve on Twitter Connect with Steve on LinkedIn Email Steve at steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com  Listen to the podcast to get learn how Steve Sheinkopf and the team at Yale Appliance and Lighting used content to drive traffic, leads and sales. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week my guest is Steve Sheinkopf who is the CEO of Yale Appliance and Lighting. Welcome, Steve. Steve Sheinkopf (Guest): Good to be here Kathleen. How are you? Steve and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I'm great. I am excited to have you on and I can't wait to dig into our topic. But, not everybody who's listening may know who you are, so can you just tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and your business? About Steve Sheinkopf and Yale Appliance and Lighting Steve: Sure. We're a 97 year old appliance company located in Boston Massachusetts. We sell appliances, lights, we do a lot of service work, and our company's powered by really content marketing and not advertising. That's pretty much what we do. We sell all brands of different appliances, from Sub-Zero down to Samsung and we compete against pretty much 60 Brick and mortar competitors in a 20 mile area plus Online plus Amazon, Wayfair and all the people, Home Depot, that sort of thing. Kathleen: You're being very humble and so I'm going to toot your horn for you because this is like a David and Goliath story. You guys do compete against 800 pound gorillas with huge budgets. If I understand correctly you also in some respects, at least for content and search engine share, you compete against the manufacturers of the appliances that you sell. So on paper this story shouldn't be possible which is what I love about it. But you guys have one of the most trafficked, if not the most traffic to appliance websites in the world. Correct? Steve: Yeah. I think so. Kathleen: It's amazing. So all right, for people who are listening, I have been bugging Steve and his team to try and get one of them on this podcast for about two years now because I first started hearing this story of Yale Appliance a couple of years back. It was before I joined IMPACT I had heard about it from Marcus Sheridan, who plays a role in the story. And then I had the opportunity to get to know these guys better through IMPACT and all along I've just been so impressed. The reason, and it is a classic content marketing story, and I say classic because it's the things we're all told to do. Only you guys actually went and did them which is the big differentiator. But the reason I was so excited to have you particularly on is that most of my guests are marketers and they're already drinking the Kool-Aid. The biggest challenge they tend to have, is getting the C-suite not only to buy-in, but my gosh for them The Holy Grail is to actually participate in the process. And you've been doing this all along. So that's really what I want to talk about. But let's kind of rewind the clock if you would and start back from when you first began. I've heard the story a couple of times but I'm sure everybody hasn't. So maybe you could just tell the tale of how did you guys first travel down this path? Because you're a 90 year old company and you were not always the most trafficked website for appliances in the world. How Yale Appliance discovered content marketing Steve: Oh, clearly not, clearly not. It's a long story but really it starts in 2004. I went to this thing called The In-Planet and it was absolute genius. There's a bunch of it was I think Boston visors or the Bain or McKinsey guys, they were talking about the future of marketing and they were talking about how digital one day overtake outbound and to prepare for it, it wasn't happening yet. And they said. "The least you can do is get on the whole review side, that reviews are going to play a big part of how people are going to purchase from your company." So that's the first thing we did is we got on with all the yelpers and instead of berating them for giving you bad views, we looked inside ourselves to say. " Maybe we're really disappointing people organically." So we started in 2007 blogging. And at the same time it was doubling down on radio. We did a lot of radio at that time I think it was the final number was somewhere around three quarters of a million dollars. And we doubled down during the recession and the more we advertise it was like diminishing returns. I used to ask the phone people anybody called them radio ads. When we started doing it in 2000 it was popular by 2010 no one really seemed interested. So we started blogging in 2007. It was 2011 when I met Marcus Sheridan and I thought it was going to teach Marcus something. The first conversation we have, everybody loves Marcus. He's like a folksy guy and back if we rewind the clock in 2011, at that time I was blogging every day but I wasn't blogging by keyword. I wasn't- Why the CEO of Yale Appliance dedicated himself to blogging Kathleen: Now you yourself were blogging? Steve: Yeah, I was. Kathleen: I just want to clarify that. Steve: I did that five days a week. Kathleen: That's amazing. Did you publish, was it five blogs or was it? Steve: Five posts a week. Kathleen: That's great. Steve: Well it's great when it's good stuff, not so great. And it was well-meaning, but it wasn't... Even when it answered the question I never titled it right, I didn't met a tag it. So our first conversation was just absolute beat down. It was pretty bad, but he was right. At that time we have 30,000 people a month going into our site, which on paper doesn't seem bad but we started blogging strategically and now we expect a million visitors a month, we were busy and somewhere out six, 700,000, we're not. And with that comes certainly more leads, more traffic, more business and that's what this is about. And I can't believe that, I can't believe. But if you were to say to a CEO, look we're going to start this program that's not going to be effective in six months, then you probably not going get much buy-in on the C-suite. But if you say to somebody, I'm going to reduce ad spend to zero and increase revenues disproportionately to your market share - I mean, what does the bottom line look like? And it's a great learning tool and it creates trust and it creates distrust for your competitors that aren't doing this. They're selling products that maybe they shouldn't be. That's a pretty compelling case so if you structure like that, I think people get more buy-in from the people that need to buy in to say this is a revenue expense game and it's what, how people really want to consume stuff. Because nobody really wants to listen to me say how great I am. In fact, we never talk about ourselves. We talk about statistics and facts and helping people make purchases because you go to all these content marketing seminars they talk about trust and that's how you really trying to do. If they trust you and your pricing is good and your execution which is the back half of what I really work on is are we executing to, what our value proposition is? Because blogging without execution is just bad. Work on execution first then blog. So that's the whole story. Kathleen: You raise a really interesting point and I've been in this inbound or content marketing game a long time. I had an agency for 11 years. Something that you said really struck me because you talked about if you say to a CEO, we're going to create blogs and you're not going to see any results for six months, that is what I would say the disproportionate percentage of people in this space say it when somebody says, how long will it take for me to get results? Which everybody wants to know, right? Because that's what it's all about is the results people will always answer with, well it takes time. Six months to a year you'll start to see something. And while there are aspects of content marketing that that is true for, there are also aspects of it that that is absolutely not true. Where you can see some sorts of results right away. And I think you're right when you set that expectation that's going take a while. That's not exactly the best way to sell it. Steve: Well, I mean, blogging is about domain authority. Strictly we use words to cover up what we really mean and you don't become an authority figure with one or two posts. You need to show over a long period of time that you know what you're doing, whether it's getting a client, business, life, whatever it is. You don't become an authority with one good post. That said, if you write about something that's brand new that nobody else's, you could probably rank high pretty quickly. Kathleen: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I've always said that the best moments in my content marketing career have been when I googled a question and didn't find an answer for it and I was like, ha ha, I'm right that answer. So what I'm curious about is you actually were convinced even before you met Marcus, that just that blogging in and of itself had value now obviously there was a better way to do it. Why you should insource content creation Kathleen: But what I'm really interested in understanding from you is when you first had this realization that hey, we might need to blog as part of our corporate strategy. What was it that convinced you personally to write? Because I think most of the CEOs I know who have that Aha moment and realized blogging is important. Their first thought is, I'm going to assign that to somebody or we're going to outsource it. Very few think I'm going to do it. Steve: Well, it's like anything else. You want to outsource things that either you're not good at or someone can do cheaper. If you want something to be a core competency you have to do it yourself, right? You can't be good at something, outsource it and then hope it gets better. Right? If you want it to be a core competency where every year, like every month, every week, every, if you're part of it and you're interested in it and intrigues you and it touches the customer it's important. That's something you don't outsource. So it's a matter of I think people that are outsourcing, the losing the whole kind of how do we get better? How do we read, what are customers asking and how are we better solve the problem? Goes into merchandising, it goes into everything we do, what lines we sell, what lines we don't sell. Because we have the finger on the pulse of what we think the customer reacts to. But you're never going to get good at it... Let's forget about if we call it something else, like social media or writing or customer outreach. If you're outsourcing it as a methodology, nobody's going to know your business better than you do. And it doesn't matter which content conference we go to whether it's Impact or Inbound or HubSpot or whatever those. Anybody that's outsourcing with writers from whatever, what Fiverr from Indiana they're just not getting the results they could if they did it themselves and treat it like a crucial pillar of our business of ,your business which it could be, which it should be. Who creates content at Yale Appliance Kathleen: Now in the beginning you were writing five articles a week. What does that look like today? Are you still actively writing or are there other folks in the company that are primarily doing it? Steve: Well, it really depends, but the sales people. Sales people write blogs to varying degrees. I still edit most of them and I still write the important ones. And again, some of the ones I've written have, there are two that are over 2 million, 20 million views. But forget about the views, we have a report that shows people that go into our buyers guide from blogs and how much money we derive from that on a monthly, yearly basis. It's certainly well worth doing financially to do that, be part of it. And again my time spent at the CEO and culture and metrics and enforcing standards, after that really social outreach which I can reach a whole market of people by writing a blog. It's just so worth my time I think. Kathleen: And you mentioned that you write the important posts and that there are certain posts that really take off. What are the topics that you feel like best come from you? Steve: Well, the ones that resonate are the ones that are reliability posts that we were ranked manufacturers based on a service in the first year. I think some industry problem ones, are best from me, I think some of the comparisons other people can do. Again, when you look at blogging, if you want to figure out if your sales people know what they're talking about, you read their blogs. And if they can't tell you what the five best gas range tops are and in a blog they probably won't be able to sell if the customer comes into the store. So is a good learning tool for new people to just read Wiskott-Aldrich. So the time to get a new person up is much quicker. But I write reliability, best and problems ones. Kathleen: Were you always just really comfortable with writing? Is that a format that you gravitate to? Steve: Not initially, I realized the value of it but if you look at what I wrote back in 2007 versus what we write now, it's much better, much different. And that's true of anything. Everyone always says. "I'm an awful writer." Everybody is awful. This saying that every expert starts as a beginner. If you stick with it and you write three articles a week every week, if you're new, by the time one year rolls around, you've written 152 articles. That's enough for authority, but you're going to be much better after a year than you are in the beginning. Everything you do that you practice you work hard on you're going to get better at. Whether it's blogging or anything else in business. Kathleen: Now, do you find that you've gotten faster also? Steve: Yes. I think in blogs now. I've been doing it for since 2007 .I think in blog posts like comparisons and invest because I've been doing it for that long. Kathleen: How long does it take you to produce a blog? Steve: Me? Kathleen: Yeah. Steve: I can produce a blog in probably a couple of hours. The ROI of Yale's content marketing efforts Kathleen: That's great. I think it's interesting because a lot of CEOs would hear a couple of hours and think there's no way. My time is too valuable for that. So you mentioned that you guys have systems put in place to track how he is this content turns into revenue. Can you give me a sense of what that looks like and what that's produced? I don't even know if you can get it down to like what is a blog worth? I'm sure each of them is worth a different amount, but I'd love to understand better what kind of ROI you're seeing. Steve: Well, let's forget the fact that basically the path to purchase goes to the Internet. It has since probably 2005. Alright? So but the way we do, we use a very crude metric. I have Google analytics where I can... that our time on site jumps when you talk about a blog posts really, time on site pages views equal to consumers. But we can talk about store visits, but in terms of share revenue the number that we look at over a 12 month period is anybody that's downloaded a buyer's guide. So let's say you download a buyer's Guide and get 20th. If you come into the store buy with that same email address, we track them and let's just say your friend, partners, significant other, spouse buys under theirs, that's not tracked. So just from the people that download buyers guide, they buy it comes out to be about a million or a million and half per month in revenue. Yeah, that's just that not including... What we tried to do when you look at when anybody looks at Google analytics, typically Marcus said for his pool company, once they hit pages 30, his conversion goes up. For us I think it's seven minutes or 10 and a half pages and blogs play a big part of that. You want to get trust and then you want to execute. And that's kind of how businesses and the blogging is in marketing is half that or say a third of it, the sales and execution, delivery, install, all that stuff has to be in order for this to work. Certainly the articles have to be good, but the delivery experience, the installation experience and the service experience of what we do, which is our differentiating factors have to be as good if not better. Kathleen: So this has had a major implication for your overall business. Obviously it's not just revenue, clearly you're getting a lot of traffic and that's turning into business for you. But can you talk a little bit about some of the new directions that you're thinking of heading in as a result of this? What Yale's success with content marketing has meant for its business Steve: What we've been able to do certainly on the revenue side. The average appliance store in 10 years has gained probably 15 to 20% in revenue. We've, increased our revenue probably 350% in the same time. 37 about 122 million in a 10 year period. So that certainly plays a part of that in terms of stores. We've gone from one store to we're adding our third in November which will be our biggest store. But really what we've done is we've taken that 2% that we normally two or 3%, we normally take in marketing and we put it in customer touchpoints and really the customer touchpoints, are systems and people. We've been able to keep good people because instead of blowing it on $3 million worth of say, Glow Buds or radio spots or something, we have a better medical, we have 401k matching. To me that's... You market to your people first and those people market to your customers. So we've been able to take that wasted spend and put it into areas that people really appreciate. And that's people, systems, displays, warehousing, all that stuff, that's the other half of it. Is to take that money you would have spent and put it where people really want it. The first thing during the recession when we change management, first thing I said is we're going to answer the phone, right? We're going to answer the phone and we're going to be good on the execution side. And we put our money towards that rather than putting money on marketing. And it wouldn't take off if we didn't have some kind of social profile, which that whole blogging is a part of really, if blogging is a core competence that helps people come into the stores and then it's the execution side. It's two parts to this it's not just blogging that drives the revenue. It's the execution that keeps the revenue. Kathleen: It's funny because there's lots of buzz that I hear at least that we could be due for another recession sometime in the next couple of years. When you think about the evolution of the company and how you've done marketing and consider that there is this prospect that we may get hit again with another recession. How do you think the company will fare given your new marketing approach? Because it's very different than what you did the last time around. Steve: I think we'll do a lot better again because one of the things is we're not wasting money. We all know that outbound marketing is a negative ROI deal. I think as long as you understand who your customer is and you're straight and transparent with them, I think you have a leg up over people who do not do that. And that's pretty much everybody in our space. There's some people that are doing it, some people that are doing well, but they don't understand the whole execution side. Kathleen: Now the other thing that I think is interesting is historically you've been a local business. You're in the Boston area and well that's a big local market. It's still a local market and now you're getting all this traffic. I have to imagine a considerable amount of that traffic is not from the Boston area. Some people might hear that and think, well that's great that you have more traffic, but it's not really, that's not valuable traffic because they're not going to be able to walk in the door and buy from you. How do you look at that? Steve: Oh that's very true. 88% of our traffic we cannot sell to. Because delivering an appliance it's not like delivering Sharmane tissues.Especially in Boston because we got brownstones and walk-ups you need very specialized delivery people. That's why we pay the delivery people well because we're not spending it on marketing. But the worst thing you can do is ruin your reputation by not execute. It's a fair question a lot of this traffic is not really valid traffic. Let's take a million people say that we got last month on the blog or 800,000 or whatever it was, say it's 800,000 we'll minimize that means 12% of 800,000 in your market. How many people... We write to a specific audience. So how many people? 12% of a million or 800,000 it's still a lot of people that's still you're writing to 70,000 people. They're not reading your blog because they want to get to something else. It's still a significant amount of people in the market. There's no way to hit, it's like the old days they talked about radio ads. It's like they sold it to you. There's 100,000 home owners but only 2% of them are in the market and only 2% of those will listen to ad. The people that are clicking on a blog posts are showing intent, right? So those are 70,000 people showing you intent because they're clicking on something. It's not like the old radio or TV metrics. So that's still a lot of people looking to buy from you. Kathleen: Do you ever foresee that there might be an opportunity for you to somehow monetize that other 80%? Steve: No, unless we're directly involved in the actual fulfillment of the order. I don't want to be involved. If we look at... There's a lot of really good online appliance stores that have really good interfaces. They put their money on the front end, but if you look at the reviews on Yelp or Google, they're so bad and over time that'll catch up to you. Right? Because really, the one thing that I always tell the people in the marketing department is don't forget that your consumer and the path to purchase is okay, you'll read a blog everyone talks about what's the one thing, it's all about attribution. You'll read a blog post, you'll go online and you're mobile, you'll sit on your tablet, but somewhere down the line you're going to read reviews before you decide to purchase from that company or not. And you don't want everybody loves Impact because you guys do good work. But if you had a two star reputation on like Yelp or Google, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Right. So, I'm willing to... First of all, there's enough business in a local market. I want more, it's cheaper in, and easier and better to be in the Boston market. Than being partly in Boston, in somewhere in L.A. which is actually our biggest market for the blog, New York. I think it's better logistically to stay where you are. Kathleen: I was going to say maybe someday you'll have... You have three stores now maybe you'll someday have 30. Steve: The way it works from a business standpoint, this goes a little bit back to blogging is you have a warehouse. You want to maximize that warehouse, then in a third store you need a bigger warehouse and you want to maximize that warehouse and then you run stores up that warehouse, that's where it becomes the most efficient to do business. Going to L.A and having logistics there and hiring and hiring service people in a whole new network is much more difficult. Steve's advice to other CEOs Kathleen: It's a good problem to have too much traffic and more than you can sell to. I want to go back to this issue of most CEOs don't necessarily see the justification for being personally involved in this. If somebody is listening and they are a Content Manager or the Head of Marketing and they're passionate about creating content for the company and they want the CEO to be involved, As a CEO yourself, do you have any advice for the best way for that person to approach the CEO and get them excited about taking part in this process? Steve: It's like we said in the beginning, there aren't too many opportunities to increase your brand in the profile of that brand. There's not too many ways to create trust and there's not too many ways to raise revenue and reduce expenses at the same time. What is your bottom line look like by raising revenue and reducing expenses? And that's really my job is to... We used to be happy if we reduced expenses by 30, 50, 60,000. Well now we're talking about reducing expenses at our level 700, a million, $2 million in increasing the top line revenues by since we'll be doing it anywhere from eight to 15% a year in a highly competitive market. There aren't too many opportunities to do that. In fact, there aren't any opportunities to do that. And if you're a CEO and your other face of the brand of the company and it comes from you and you're answering people's questions and handling people's problems, that goes a long way in building your brand there. If it isn't that, what else would you be doing? I could sit there and run the warehouse, but there are people that run the warehouse better than me. I could sit on Ops, the people that run operations better than me. It's important for a CEO to understand the metrics of success in the company, but terms of really the overall of really the fundamentals of a P&L we have revenues, we have expenses. If you raise one and lower the other one, that's what we're paid to do. And this is a unique opportunity to do it. Now, do you have to do it to my extreme? No, clearly not. I got involved 12 years ago but if you were to do a post or two a week and maybe handle a couple of dicey problems and show that you have kind of deep seated knowledge of the industry. Especially if you're selling services, which many people do and you show that you handled that problem, a person with that problem is probably going to give you due consideration. Right. That's the way it works. Kathleen: It's very interesting that you brought up the thing about personal brand because that's something that I've been giving a lot of thought to lately. There are so many companies creating content now. You were fortunate or had the incredible foresight to start doing this very early when this wasn't as ubiquitous. I just went to HubSpot's Inbound event there were 26,000 people there who are all drinking the Kool-Aid of content marketing. And you look at crowds like that and you think, wow, all these people are bought in. It's getting harder to stand out and I really believe that one very effective way to stand out is through personal branding. Because anybody can kind of copy generic content, but you can't copy a personal brand that is inherently individual. So I'm curious in your experience for you personally, aside from the business results, what have you experienced as you've put your personal brand behind the content? Like has that resulted in anything for you? Steve: First of all let's not give me so much credit. I ran out of money. I didn't have a choice. Most good content marketers will tell you during the recession, we all ran out at doe. That's why- Kathleen: I owned a business in the recession. And I can definitely second that. That's why I started blogging too. I was like, I have all this time and no money. I'll write. Steve: Exactly. I could've just as easily destroyed a 90 year old company, which I was very close to doing. That's it I'm not really interested in my own personal brand. Really having gone through the recession as both of us have, it's more important for the company to have a strong balance sheet than it is for me to build a personal brand. And personal branding is, brands are like sponges. They can't they get everything, they keep everything that's good and bad about the brand. And the fact that my personal brand, your personal brand impact Yale, we don't know own the brands anyway. It's what's being said out there that really shapes what the brand is. Kathleen: Don't they say that your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room? Steve: Your brand is what other people say. We've lost control of our brand when the Internet became popular. So, really personal branding... I think people appreciate I still answer most of the questions on the blog and I think people appreciate the fact that it's not me I'm not building my personal brand. I think a lot of people need help they're not getting in other places. And what I do is just, I give them the what to do and how to do it. And it's not about building a personal brand at all. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: So interesting. I love your story and it's unbelievable what you guys have done. We don't have too much more time, so I want to make sure before we wrap up that I asked you the two questions I ask all of my guests. The first one being we're all about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular company or individual that you know, who you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Steve: Obviously great adversary Marcus Sheridan his killing it. I think back to our first conversation, there were two thoughts and went through my head as A. I need to do this B. I want him to eat his words. And you know the funny thing is it's like I want it to be better than him. But it never worked out that way because he was on other things it's almost like you go into the battlefield and you get a note from guys saying. "Hey, the land is yours and by the way I love what you're doing and all the rest of it, but I'm busy taking over France or whatever." His journey into his personal brand of videos is really compelling and I think his role with the pool company. I think they do a great job. The person that I liked the most in this space is a Crystal Cornea and what she did at Block Imaging I thought was fantastic. She made buying refurbs cool. She made people in that company feel cool writing about it. For me, I tell people it's good to do because it's good for your personal brand that I shouldn't control your brand. But she made it cool to do that. I've kind of lost touch with Block and what they've done since but I know she's left and she works as a consultant for other people, but I really love the way she goes about it. She's very inclusive and she did a great job with Block. Kathleen: Yeah, she's really impressive and you know, Marcus is, you're right. I interviewed him I think he was my first episode of this year. And the thing that I love about Marcus and you totally hit the nail on the head. He's constantly evolving. And the reason to me is that he's such a student of human nature, which is what makes him great at content marketing. He is not a marketer. He is a student of human nature. And so that is what led him to realize that, hey, we just have to answer people's questions. Right. This isn't super scientific it's almost once you tell somebody they sh they're like, Duh. But it took somebody who wasn't a marketer to figure it out. And somebody who's a keen observer of people. And that's the same thing that he's doing with video. He's a very keen observer of people and how they interact and communicate and so it makes them incredibly successful. Steve: Oh yeah. I think I the fundamentals to content marketing is the same fundamentals of everything else is. A. Do know what you're doing? B. Can you communicate it? And that'll come if you know what you're doing and C. And this is the really important part, this is like the C-level stuff is, are you executed once you've said that? And those three, if you put those three together, you have some special. Kathleen: And I always say also, can you get out of your own way? Because often marketers are their own worst enemies and they take their human hat off and put their marketing hat on and they write like robots and it's just, it's interesting. Steve: So they write and a lot more people are starting to write for search engines and that's troubling too. And they can't basically answer the question. There's so many people that... Everyone talks about tips, hacks, it's got to be 2000 words now or whatever it is. But the person that answers the question that best will get ranked because Google's not stupid they'll give the best experience wins. And if you can answer the question on a 1,000 words and is more compelling than the person writing 2000 words and you'll win. Kathleen: Right. The only correct answer to how long does an article need to be is as long as is required to answer the question. Second question is, the world of digital marketing is changing really quickly. And obviously your a CEO, you're not wearing the marketing hat in the company, but you're somebody who is keenly aware of marketing. How do you stay up to date and make sure that you're not falling behind the times with marketing? Steve: That's a great question now that I'm in Boston now I've commuted to stores. I actually have a commute. So I podcast a lot and there's some good marketing podcast. Patel has a very good one, Tony Robbins has a good one, some of the paid search guys have good ones. There's five or six, I'll listen to I'll read blog post and then I'll go to some conferences. Impact has become important over the last couple of years.Certainly HubSpot, we've been going to HubSpot they used to have it at the, at the Hilton hotel and [Copley 00:37:51] two rooms. When I was there initially I think it was 400 people in two tracks. And RF, which is the Retail Foundation in January they put a good one in New York, such marketing conferences and other one I'll go to like four or five conferences a year. If there's a good class I'll do that, Linkedin learning is apart, Social Media Examiner, they have to get some good stuff too. So it's a constant because everything changes and you want to be on top of that certainly. Kathleen: It Can be very tough to keep up with but I do think it's a matter of picking your five or six sources that you really love and just sticking with those and you've got anything else on top of it. That's gravy. Steve: The one thing is it's you can only be especially if you're a small team and I think this is geared more to a small business maybe, but you've got a small team or if you're a single person, like me and Pat were initially. You can only be very good in it one or two aspects. You can't be great at blogging, great at Instagram, great at Pinterest, great at Google ads. You can't be great at like there are 10 things that you can be really great in marketing that can move the needle, but pick one or two. That A. Figured out where customers are and you learned Google analytics for that. And two figure out what your passions are. If your passions with photography, like I'm not, Instagram would be a good one for you, Pinterest would be a good one for you. Wherever you think you can really dominate a certain aspect, rather be just mediocre at everything. You do not need to everything you needed to one or two things really, really well. Kathleen: Right. That's the old Jack of all trades, master of none problem. Right? Steve: Very true. How to connect with Steve Kathleen: This has been so great if somebody wants to learn more about Yale Appliance or connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Steve: I don't really know. Kathleen: Visit your website I would assume, right? Steve: Yeah. I'm on Twitter I guess like everybody else. I've got 3000 followers. I have no idea who they are. Certainly LinkedIn, my email address, you can certainly give steve.sheinkopf@yaleappliance.com. This community it's been really good to me and I'm happy to really answer any questions that anybody has. About marketing or inbound marketing or anything else. So email, Linkedin. My name is Steve Sheinkopf obviously, Twitter that type of stuff. I'll get back to you eventually. Kathleen: Great. Well, I will put the links to all those things in the short notes. And of course you already said that you answer all the questions on the blog. So I would think that people could go there and if they have questions about appliances, they know who to ask. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you're listening and you learnt something new, or you liked what you heard, of course, please leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That's how we get funds. And if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thanks Steve. Steve: Alright. Thank you Kathleen.

I'm happy to report that the SmartBugs are all back in our respective cities after a few of us were in Boston last week for HubSpot's INBOUND 2019 conference.    We had a great time visiting with everyone there and really walked away with some great key takeaways.    One of the highlights for me was the launch of HubSpot’s frictionless selling framework. The framework is a road map to reducing friction and improving the effectiveness of your sales team.   So, on this episode of SmartBug on Tap I’m walking you through the framework and how we’re applying it here at SmartBug Media. 

Business first. That’s the tagline of Element Three, a full-service brand and marketing agency in Indianapolis that works across channels to solve real business problems for clients who want to be market leaders. But it’s also the axiom that fuels E3 President Tiffany Sauder’s own approach to growing an enterprise. When the former financial analyst took the helm of the company in 2006, Sauder was 24. Over ten years later, she’s catapulted annual revenues by over 950 percent. From coaching executives through the brand considerations of an acquisition to helping them use marketing and sales technology to track marketing performance, Sauder understands that success results from an integrated approach to business, brand, and creativity. Sauder has been interviewed by the Harvard Business Review, been a featured speaker at HubSpot's INBOUND conference in Boston, and participated in panels hosted by Ad Age and TechPoint. Her agency is a three-time Inc. 5000 company, has been named an IBJ Fast 25 organization, and was awarded the HubSpot Agency of the Year award in 2012. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband, J.R., and their three daughters.

This week’s episode of Brain Lava is a special one. Our very first guest, Kerra from the Chicago Family Business Council, shared her thoughts on HubSpot’s Inbound 2018. If you missed it this year or if you’re thinking about attending next year, listen to hear Kerra’s takeaways!

HubSpot's INBOUND isn't quite like other business events and conferences. Yes, it attracts thousands of attendees (15,000+ this year), is hosted by a world-class city, features show-stealing keynote addresses (Aziz Ansari, Seth Godin, Brené Brown and Chelsea Clinton) and provides educational sessions – not unlike, say, Dreamforce. What's different about INBOUND, and what's been proven over six annual events, is that HubSpot's ambition is to create a movement. To get an inside look at INBOUND 2015, we sent two correspondents (and former guests of Hacks and Flacks), drew Wallace (Episode 2 and Episode 12) and Matt Moretti (Episode 7). In this episode, drew and Matt report back, explaining how INBOUND manages to serve up "brain fuel for marketers" that goes well beyond tactical marketing strategies and right to the heart of  human emotion. Follow drew on Twitter: @anotherdrew Follow Matt on Twitter: @Matt_Moretti Follow Hacks and Flacks on Twitter: @hacksflacks Follow Hacks and Flacks on Instagram: @hacksflacks Join the discussion in our Facebook Group: Hacks and Flacks Podcast Follow Manny and Jim on Twitter: @zmveiga and @JW_Young Follow March Communications on Twitter: @marchpr Visit the M+PR Nonsense blog: MarchPR.com/blog Show Notes: HubSpot Just Announced These 4 New Products at Inbound (BostInno) Marc Maron on the Future of Podcasting: An Exclusive Chat at #INBOUND15 (HubSpot Blog)  Subscribe to Hacks and Flacks on iTunes, Stitcher or Podbay today. The show's music is provided by Job Creators. Check them out at JobCreatorsBand.com!

Steve and guest Cathy Boudreau of Harvest Solutions discuss HubSpot's Inbound 2014 conference as well as the similarities & differences between Pardot and HubSpot. Steve also talks about the Marketo road show and what he learned about lead enrichment and predictive lead scoring.

SugarCRM raises $40 million, Sam talks about the CRM Evolution conference, Steve talks about HubSpot's INBOUND conference, the vagaries of CRM integration with email. Hosts: Steve Chipman and Sam Biardo