Podcasts about lessonly

Episode Summary In this episode of OnBase, Kyle Lacy discusses strategies for achieving cross-functional alignment between sales, marketing, and other teams. He identifies the main B2B marketing challenge as aligning these groups around common metrics and goals, emphasizing the need for documented processes and a shared revenue model. Kyle stresses the importance of marketing demonstrating its contribution to sales outcomes, not just brand-building. He also shares insights on leveraging AI tools while cautioning against replacing human sales roles. Overall, Kyle provides practical advice for B2B marketers seeking to improve cross-functional alignment and drive business growth. About the guest Kyle has spent the last 17 years building, scaling, failing, and winning in high-growth software. He's currently serving the Jellyfish team as their CMO, and before joining the Jellyfish “bloom,” he had the pleasure of building a company called Lessonly. He has also been fortunate to lead teams at Seismic, OpenView, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. But most importantly, he is the father to two wonderful boys, an energetic dog, and one too many books on World War II. Connect with Kyle Lacy Key takeaways - Cross-functional alignment: Success in sales and marketing hinges on aligning around shared performance metrics e.g., pipeline, revenue) and fostering collaboration across teams. - Focus on key numbers: Misalignment often occurs when sales and marketing teams aren't tracking the same metrics. Agreement on crucial numbers is vital for achieving alignment. - Sales and marketing collaboration: Understanding the sales model, including pipeline coverage and quota attainment, is critical for marketers to contribute effectively to revenue. - Importance of brand: While brand building is essential, it must always tie back to measurable business results like pipeline and bookings. - AI in marketing: AI is useful as an assistant for research, content creation, and data analysis, but it's not yet capable of fully replacing human tasks, especially in prospecting. - Engaging content: Effective case studies and white papers should focus on clear ROI data rather than just promotional content, making them more engaging and useful for prospects. - Documentation and process: Having a well-documented process and alignment on definitions like MQLs) helps prevent confusion and misalignment between teams. - Marketing's goal: The ultimate purpose of marketing is to help sales close deals, and success is determined by contributions to pipeline and quota. Quotes "Nobody cares about your brand campaign if your sales team hits 40% quota attainment." "If you're not aligned with the sales leader and not looking at the same numbers, eventually it's going to break." Recommended Resource Books "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson: Kyle recommends this biography for its insights into the mindset of innovators with extreme urgency and ambition. Newsletters Ultra Successful by Dr. Julie Gurner: A paid newsletter Kyle highly recommends. He praises Dr. Gurner for her brilliant insights, noting that it's one of the few newsletters he subscribes to. ⁠Connect with Kyle Lacy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on LinkedIn ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website

Research from Sales Enablement PRO found that when sales processes and plays are structured, organizations report 19-percentage-point higher win rates. So how can you optimize the sales process through enablement? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Jeff Eisenberg, the director of sales enablement at IntelePeer. Thank you for joining us, Jeff. I’d love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Jeff Eisenberg: Of course, Shawnna, thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. So my name is Jeff Eisenberg. I am the Director of Sales Enablement for a mid-sized SaaS company in the communications automation space. I’ve been in sales enablement for eight years across both enterprise and mid-sized companies. And before that, I sold for 12 years. So everything I do is looked at through the lens of a salesperson. I always like to tell my sales teams that I’ll never ask them to do something that I don’t feel is beneficial to their role as I wore a sales hat for a long time. SS: I’m sure that that helps to build a lot of rapport with your team, Jeff, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. Now, one of your key initiatives at IntelePeer is, as I mentioned in the introduction, optimizing the sales process through enablement strategies. What challenges have you faced when it comes to streamlining sales processes in the past, and how have you overcome those challenges? JE: Adoption is always a challenge when it comes to streamlining sales processes. I would say that to overcome them, you need several things. Number one, buy-in from your sales leadership team and other stakeholders. They are the ones who are going to drive any initiative on the ground floor level with their team, so they need to have a voice in that process. Additionally, my CRO, my Chief Revenue Officer, always says – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. In other words, repetition is key to success, so consistent reinforcement of any initiative. Going to my earlier point, they need to understand the WIFM, so what’s in it for me, so it’s important for me to be viewed as that advocate for sales. If it doesn’t make sense to their role, tell them not to roll it out. We need to demonstrate how it will benefit their role. Now, lastly, a content management tool is critical to consistent reinforcement. Now there are some pretty staggering stats that show the rapid drop in retention from any initial presentation. So that’s where a content management and LMS system play a key role. Providing the sellers with the right resources at the right time to accelerate their sales process. SS: In your experience, what would you say are the essential building blocks for creating a sales process that really effectively helps to drive business results? And how can enablement play a key role in that? JE: Well, that’s a great question. So first, I would recommend getting buying on the importance of a sales process. Now there are two great statistics that I often share to reinforce the importance of following a process. The first is that 70 percent of businesses with a standardized sales process are high performers and see a 28 percent increase in revenue compared to businesses without one. The second stat, conversely, 68 percent of salespeople do not follow the sales process at all. Now that comes directly from Harvard Business Review. Now, those are pretty scary when you think about it from that perspective, but it also demonstrates a significant opportunity for any organization to drive revenue. Now, at the end of the day, you need to go back to the beginning and either define or refine what that sales process will look like. Now a sales process is fluid, so it can change over time, but it’s essential to really lock down what that initial process is. Additionally, and this step I think is overlooked far too often, is the need to align with the buyer’s journey. That’s more essential than ever. On one hand, technology is evolving so rapidly that many buyers don’t even know a specific product or solution exists. On the other hand, a significant majority of buyers, 70%, complete most of their research before reaching out to a sales team. Meaning they’re well into their buyer’s journey before even initiating contact with a seller. Now, specifically, When we’re looking at the essential building blocks, it comes down to a few key measures. Number one is qualification criteria. So, we need to define who that ideal customer is at ICP. And this is not just basic measures such as industry, role, and job title. But where a prospect is in their buyer’s journey. So are they window shoppers or actually interested? Do they have a vested interest in the solution? Or what challenges are they trying to solve for? The second measure, the deal stages. Now it’s important to define the criteria for each stage of the sales process and the necessary measures to continue to move that sales process along. Whether it’s initial qualification, qualification of the opportunity, proposing the recommended solution, or understanding what their procurement process is. Now that’s essential for forecasting purposes. Now, then we have to look at the desired end state. Now this goes hand in hand with the deal stages. So what is the desired end state of each stage? And then more importantly, what’s the overall desired end state? Now, obviously, the overall desired end state is closing more deals. The goal has to be defined as financial in nature and has a timeline. So, for example, if my quota is X, for this current year, do the building blocks align with that goal? And then lastly, conversion rates. So, by knowing your conversion rates, not only across the sales org, but across each individual contributor, you can uncover the gaps and plan accordingly. To bring it all to summation, as sales enablement professionals, we need to initiate, we need to facilitate, and drive the creation of the sales process and then plug in all the necessary resources to align. Whether that’s sales plays, SLPs or standard operating procedures, reports, training, CRM alignment, and the list goes on and on. SS: Absolutely. And on that note, what motivated you to re-evaluate and change your enablement tech stack and how has that impacted your sales process? JE: Great question, because when I joined the organization four years ago, content was actually shared out via MS Teams, so through chat. So, we needed to actually scroll through multiple chat groups to find the relevant content. Obviously, this is exceedingly unorganized and inefficient. Additionally, there was a lot of outdated content that was saved on individuals’ hard drives, and that’s detrimental to our go-to-market strategy because it was rapidly evolving. Additionally, we had Lessonly as our LMS. So my goal when researching the various content management solutions was to partner with a company that could help us organize and optimize our content, but also simplify our tech stack. And actually, I ended up moving forward, not just with Highspot’s content management tool, but also with their LMS solution. Now, I’ll tell you, the impact has truly been a game changer for my organization. A compliment to Highspot as the tool, they’re consistently evolving it, which is great. They’re keeping up with the times. I mean, AI is critical and the new features that they’ve added are game-changers. Number two, I will say I’ve got a great customer success team behind me that’s very invested in my organization’s success. We meet every two weeks, we have consistent agenda items, and I feel they are on the same page with me. SS: Amazing. Well, that’s always helpful to get alignment on that front. And you’ve already achieved an impressive 93 percent recurring usage rate in Highspot. What are some of your best practices for driving the adoption of your enablement programs? JE: Absolutely. First off, you’re speaking my language. I love when statistics are dropped, as you can tell from some of my earlier answers, I believe they add weight to any point or position you’re trying to make. I would say Garbage in, garbage out is my motto when it comes to Highspot. So it’s essential to monitor all content that is being added to Highspot and then track for adoption because it can quickly get out of control. Buyers need to feel confident that they’re getting the right information in an efficient way or you’re quickly going to lose sponsorship. Now, we have quite a few administrators for the tool, so it’s important that everyone is on the same page in terms of What’s being added, making sure we’re swapping out old content versus just continuing to add, categorizing it correctly, creating violation rules for quality assurance, and lastly, providing a feedback mechanism for sales if the content doesn’t measure up to their expectations. Now, I have a quarterly cadence with the other administrators where we leverage the scorecards and associated reports to identify unused or outdated content to determine the next steps. So every quarter we do a deep clean to ensure content is still relevant. Additionally, we incorporate different avenues to keep relevant content front and center. So first, our Highspot homepage is tailored to provide multiple ways to promote content, whether it’s dedicated landing pages, or featured content. And additionally, we review new content on what we call a weekly sales huddle and then send it out to the sales organization. So in summation, this is how we ensure that content stays top of mind and sellers continue to see value. Which ties right back to the 93 percent continued utilization rate. SS: Amazing. And to your point about helping to guide sellers, I know plays have been a key lever for you to streamline sales processes. Can you share more about your strategy for leveraging sales plays to really support your go-to-market initiatives and continue to optimize the sales process? JE: Sure. I would say overall sales plays are great because they build the Boil it down to the most important elements of any go-to-market initiative. Sellers, need to be focused on selling. So, sales plays enable us to deploy the KISS method or keep it simple, and straightforward. Now, Highspot does a great job of providing pre-built, smart page templates broken out into know, say, show, and do, which helps break down the information into a digestible format. Ventures, easy adoption, easy utilization. Easy, fast rollout. SS: Amazing. I love that. Now, you talked a little bit about this periodically throughout the conversation, but you mentioned the importance of having data. I’d love to understand how you incorporate data into your process of refining the sales process. JE: Sure. Now, data is critical in all areas of sales enablement. It’s how we measure the impact of everything we do, whether it’s directly or indirectly. Data tells a story on overall effectiveness and then breaks it down into digestible elements to really understand where in the sales process we need additional resources and support. So for example, conversion rates significantly drop somewhere along the sales process. That gives us an opportunity to see where we are not aligned with our buyers. Is it messaging, pricing, or lack of qualification? Then those adjustments can be made accordingly. Now, we also measure the usage of the associated tech stack to really understand what’s being leveraged, where it’s being leveraged, and the value. Now, with newer sellers where the conversion rate can be premature, tech stack adoption is a great measure to ensure that the seller is really pulling all the necessary levers to be successful. Now, this provides sales leaders with an opportunity for understanding and then early intervention if necessary. So, for example, um, the pitching feature in Highspot is great because it provides visibility to open and view rates of our content. Now, that’s a great indication of buyer interest level and where the level of interest lies. Now, if pitch utilization is low, we can then determine whether it’s a training issue, an adoption issue or otherwise. SS: I love the way that you’re thinking about the optimization process and with your focus on optimizing the sales process, what specific improvements or results have you seen? And how has having a unified enablement platform contributed to those achievements? That’s JE: a great question. So yes, of course, we measure everything we do to determine the effectiveness. I can honestly say that improvements and results have been widespread across the organization. So number one, onboarding has drastically improved with using Highspot as our single source solution for content management and learning development. We have shortened our time to proficiency window significantly. We’ve decreased our time to the first deal. We’ve increased our funnel and reduced turnover. Now, from a seasoned seller perspective, we’ve seen a drastic improvement in the sales cycle, but also in deal size. So, in other words, we’re closing larger deals, and we’re closing them faster. And then lastly, I would say time optimization. Now, Highspot has enabled us to give back one of the most important resources available, and that’s time. SS: Yes, time often is equated to productivity. And so if you can give that back to your reps so they can focus on revenue, I think every business would want to know. JE: I always like to tell my sellers that at the end of the day, when you talk about revenue, I work for them. Sales enablement works for them. Because at the end of the day, they’re the ones bringing the revenue. So, that’s the way I always like to view the sales enablement role. Because at the end of the day, we need to support sales. They’re the ones signing our paychecks in a roundabout sort of way. SS: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. I have one last question. If you could summarize maybe one crucial lesson learned from your experience in improving your sales process, what would it be? JE: It’s a great question. I would say seek to understand before being understood. Make sure you’re including all the stakeholders, not just sales, to get a baseline before collaborating on changes or improvements. This maximizes your chance for success. SS: I think that is fantastic advice, Jeff. Thank you again so much for joining us. JE: You’re most welcome. Thank you for your time. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

In this week's episode of the For Everyday Leaders Podcast, Brandon and Alex welcome Alex Mislan. She shares her journey, discussing how she prioritizes personal growth and identity while cultivating a deepening passion for supporting foster care families. Alex Mislan is a product manager at Boardable with a strong background in tech, having previously worked at Lessonly (now Seismic). Prior to her tech career, she held various coaching roles as a Division I basketball coach at IPFW, Butler, and IUPUI (now IU Indy). Committed to foster care and adoption advocacy, Alex is actively engaged in related initiatives. She is also a member of the Wayfinders Impact Studio Cohort for fall 2024, working on community-focused projects. The Forgotten Initiative: https://theforgotteninitiative.org

Kyle Lacy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Jellyfish—a platform that helps developers make data-backed decisions on resource investments. Across two decades he has built companies like Lessonly, Openview, Salesforce and ExactTarget. He's also a husband and the father of two kids. In our conversation today we discussed:* Managing work, life and parenting appropriately* Handling stress across the different facets of your life* Dispelling the myth about separation of ‘church and state' between family and work* Learning how to put your kids before yourself* The role of nature vs. nurture in parenting* The most important invention ever - the pee pee teepee* How most parenting advice is complete crap—Where to find Kyle Lacy* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy* X: https://x.com/kyleplacyWhere to find Adam Fishman* FishmanAF Newsletter: www.FishmanAFNewsletter.com* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjfishman/* Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/startupdadpod/—In this episode, we cover:[1:33] Welcome[2:10] Kyle's Professional background[4:26] What life was like growing up[6:12] Siblings[6:24] Do your siblings have give you parenting advice?[6:53] His family now and how he met his wife?[9:06] Are his kids back to school?[10:59] Decision to start a family[12:34] Work/life balance[15:27] Support network[17:23] Separation of “church and state”[19:58] Earliest memory after becoming a father?[22:43] Dads and emotions[24:11] Putting kids before yourself[26:37] Surprising aspect of fatherhood[28:18] Advice for younger Kyle?[29:55] Advice to ignore?[31:29] Fav book to read to kids[32:14] Nature vs. Nurture[33:27] Parenting frameworks[35:29] How Kyle's parenting style evolved[38:02] Did parenting change you as a manager?[40:53] When do he and his partner not align[44:02] Kid's relationship to tech[47:42] Mistake as a father?[48:33] Follow along[50:11] Rapid fire—Show references:Jellyfish:https://jellyfish.co/ExactTarget (now Salesforce): https://www.salesforce.com/Lessonly (now Seismic): https://seismic.com/lessonly/OpenView: https://openviewpartners.com/Sam Richard LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-crowell-richard/Sam Richar Twitter: @SamCRichardSpokane, Washington: https://www.visittheusa.com/destination/spokaneIndianapolis, Indiana: https://www.visittheusa.com/destination/indianapolisAnderson University: https://andersonuniversity.edu/Twitter Marketing for Dummies: https://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Marketing-Dummies-Kyle-Lacy/dp/0470930578Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourselfby Erik Deckers & Kyle Lacy: https://www.amazon.com/Branding-Yourself-Social-Reinvent-Biz-Tech/dp/0789749726CodeSweep (now HCL Software): https://www.hcl-software.com/appscan/products/appscan-codesweepFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/Orange Theory: https://www.orangetheory.com/en-usGreenlight: https://greenlight.com/Linda Flanagan Episode: youtube.com/watch?v=YLqEX8lZeFIPee pee tee pee: https://www.amazon.com/Peepee-Teepee-Sprinkling-WeeWee-Cellophane/dp/B000NM3DFYWhat to Expect When You're Expecting: https://www.amazon.com/What-Expect-When-Youre-Expecting/dp/0761187480Boston, MA: https://www.boston.gov/Calvin & Hobbes: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calvin-Hobbes-Bill-Watterson/dp/1449433251Dogman: https://pilkey.com/series/dog-manGemstone Dragons: https://www.samanthamclark.com/gemstone-dragons/Diary of a Wimpy Kid: https://wimpykid.com/Big Nate: https://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Popularity-Nothing-Possibly-Strikes/dp/0062968610Crocs: https://www.crocs.com/Jibbitz: https://www.crocs.com/c/jibbitzJosh & Carla's Episode: youtube.com/watch?v=YiaE6ZmaOIQNew Balance white shoes: https://www.newbalance.com/men/shoes/all-shoes/Nike: https://www.nike.com/Bush's beans: https://www.bushbeans.com/en_US/The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt: https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/B0C9N2L56X/Apple Vision pro: https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/iPad: https://www.apple.com/ipad/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Diaper Genie: https://diapergenie.com/Colts: https://www.colts.com/Corvette: https://www.chevrolet.com/upcoming-vehicles/2025-corvette-zr1Pink Fong: https://www.pinkfong.com/en/Baby Shark: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNVE4szbMrOZk9IheX8vHbQHome Alone: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099785/Gettysburg: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107007/—For sponsorship inquiries email: podcast@fishmana.com.For Startup Dad Merch: www.startupdadshop.com Production support for Startup Dad is provided by Tommy Harron at http://www.armaziproductions.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit startupdadpod.substack.com

On this episode, Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic, talks about how he grew Seismic from a small startup to a major player in sales enablement. Doug shares the key moments and strategies that helped Seismic succeed, including important acquisitions and staying focused on goals.Specifically, Doug discusses:- How Seismic started and the tough decisions they made along the way.- Why they focused on big companies to find their place in the market.- The reasons behind their Series A funding and staying in San Diego.- Their approach to acquisitions and how competition played a role.- How buying Lessonly boosted growth for both companies.- The importance of company culture and people in making acquisitions work.- What they learned about the challenges of merging with competitors.- Why having clear goals is crucial for successful mergers and acquisitions.Resources Mentioned:Doug Winter - https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-winter/Seismic - https://seismic.com/Jackson Square Ventures - https://www.jacksonsquareventures.com/Lessonly - https://www.lessonly.com/ This episode is brought to you by:Leverage community-led growth to skyrocket your business. From Grassroots to Greatness by author Lloyed Lobo will help you master 13 game-changing rules from some of the most iconic brands in the world — like Apple, Atlassian, CrossFit, Harley-Davidson, HubSpot, Red Bull and many more — to attract superfans of your own that will propel you to new heights. Grab your copy today at FromGrassrootsToGreatness.comEach year the U.S. and Canadian governments provide more than $20 billion in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses. But the application process is cumbersome, prone to costly audits, and receiving the money can take as long as 16 months. Boast automates this process, enabling companies to get more money faster without the paperwork and audit risk. We don't get paid until you do! Find out if you qualify today at https://Boast.AILaunch Academy is one of the top global tech hubs for international entrepreneurs and a designated organization for Canada's Startup Visa. Since 2012, Launch has worked with more than 6,000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries, of which 300 have grown their startups to seed and Series A stage and raised over $2 billion in funding. To learn more about Launch's programs or the Canadian Startup Visa, visit https://LaunchAcademy.caContent Allies helps B2B companies build revenue-generating podcasts. We recommend them to any B2B company that is looking to launch or streamline its podcast production. Learn more at https://contentallies.com#salesenablement #businessscquisitions #leadershipgrowth #product #marketing #innovation #startup #generativeai #AI

2x CMO. 2 acquisitions. 3 books. 1 llama merch line.Meet Kyle Lacy, current CMO of Jellyfish. Not only is he a renowned CMO and thought leader in marketing, but he's also a family man who's managed to strike an enviable balance between his professional and personal life. He's authored a couple of successful books and has over 45,000 LinkedIn followers, and Kyle stands out not just for his marketing brilliance but also for his down-to-earth insights on work-life balance. And his creativity for marketing (specifically merch drops) is one of the most memorable and impactful things he has brought to companies he has worked for.In this episode, we're diving into how to create swag that people actually want to wear (and buy), his “surprise and delight” brand philosophy, and the nitty-gritty of managing work-life balance (and/or guilt, to be honest). Here are a few of my favorite takeaways:Incorporating merch stores as a part of the sales cycle can surprise and delight prospects. It's more than just a revenue stream; it's a differentiator. Unique and creative experiences resonate more than generic gifts. (Cue Kyle's story on Lessonly's golden llama.) Balancing work and family life is an evolving art. Kyle shares how he's learned to shut off on weekends after experiencing burnout, including how to communicate with your kids about your work life to prevent guilt, build connection, and share teaching moments. This episode is a goldmine for anyone grappling with the balance of ambition and family or looking to elevate their brand game to new heights. Let's get into it.Jump into the conversation: (01:33) Meet Kyle Lacy(03:27) Wins & Losses in Writing 3 Books(12:43) The Golden Llama: How to Create Great Merch(27:38) Surprise and Delight in Sales(29:09) The Role of Great Design in Client Experience(37:15) Balancing Career and Family Life(48:43) Communicating with Kids About Work⬛ Follow Kyle on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy/

Director Christopher Nolan once said:“You have to do something that really excites you. It's the things that you can bring to what you're doing that maybe not everyone else is doing. That's what's going to distinguish the thing.”That's the energy we're taking into this episode of Remarkable. Guided by our guest this week, Jellyfish CMO Kyle Lacy, we're taking marketing lessons from the Oscar-winning director, Christopher Nolan. Together, we talk about mastering each channel, building the day-to-day life of your buyer into your content, and much more.About our guest, Kyle LacyKyle Lacy is CMO at engineering management platform Jellyfish, the pioneer Engineering Management Platform that enables engineering leaders to align engineering work with strategic business objectives. There, he helps engineering leaders translate and maximize the business impact of their teams. Kyle has 17 years of experience in high-growth software. Prior to joining Jellyfish in November 2022, Kyle served as CMO of Lessonly. He has also led marketing at Seismic, OpenView, Salesforce and ExactTarget. He is a published author of three books: Twitter Marketing for Dummies, Branding Yourself, and Social CRM for Dummies. He is a marketing and digital trends speaker, having spoken at marketing and technology industry events around the world on content marketing, collaborative consumption, email marketing, technology trends, and more. He has been recognized as one of Indiana's Forty-under-40 by the Indianapolis Business Journal, Anderson University's Young Alumni of the Year and TechPoint's Young Professional of the Year. But most importantly, he says, he's the father of two boys, an energetic dog, and one too many books on World War II.What B2B Companies Can Learn From Christopher Nolan:Master each channel. Reach a deep understanding of what your audience wants and needs from each channel and create content for it. Kyle says once you've mastered the channels, “you can start creating brand content that is more creative and entertainment oriented and more about the human that's buying the product, not necessarily the product itself.” It's like how Christopher Nolan has mastered fiction with Memento and Inception and non-fiction with Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. He understands what viewers of each genre are looking for and creates content specifically for them.Build the day-to-day life of the buyer into your marketing. Include different storylines and details in your content so that it shows an understanding of your audience and their lived experience. The more your content clicks with them, the more they'll remember your brand when they're ready to buy. Kyle says, “We sell to an engineering leader. There are 500 other things that that engineering leader is dealing with on a day to day basis that might not necessarily pertain to our product, but does lead to exuberance, stress, productivity…the Amazon package being late for his daughter's birthday present. So how do we build more of the day in the life of the buyer into our content? It's the human element that's the most interesting part of marketing.”Quotes*”When you've mastered your craft and you understand the minute technical details that make it enjoyable, whether that's marketing or producing a movie, you can make decisions and take risks because you understand what the impact will be because you've spent so much time obsessing over it. ” - Kyle Lacy*”Christopher Nolan got very lucky that he has a brother that's a very good screenwriter. But he also understands how to surround himself with people that are very good at what they do. And I think part of being a manager - and it doesn't even have to be marketing - is that you have to find the people that truly love their craft and are good at what they do so that the end product, no matter what it is, is the best that you could possibly do.” - Kyle Lacy*”Anybody can tune into a podcast about leadership values. And what does it take to be a great manager? Like there's 500 of them because it's easier to do. It's harder to do what we're doing right now. Y'all prepped for a Christopher Nolan-slash-CMO interview. But it's interesting, right? And that's why people like to be on it. That's why people listen to it. And that's, I think, this idea of illogical marketing, right? Like the more illogical you can be, the more creative it is and the more people enjoy it. It's just hard to grasp for a lot of marketers.” - Kyle Lacy*”I think the nuance Is how you balance the extremely illogical podcast, weird direct mails, lego building sets, all the stuff that I think surprises and delights people with the other things that might not be as fun and creative but drive business value. And that's where I would love to tell you that there's a framework you should follow. But it's, what is enjoyable to the customer? How do you understand that they like it, whether that's an increase in listeners or shares, or you got more people wanting to be interviewed? And then it's that you're hitting the numbers that you put in front of the board, and that's ultimately the value.” - Kyle Lacy*”You kill creativity when you try to apply too much ROI to a project. Doesn't mean you shouldn't track it, doesn't mean there shouldn't be ROI. But you sit down with a creative team and say, ‘Hey, let's think about how many downloads we can get or how much pipeline this thing is going to drive. And they just glaze over. Good creatives glaze over because you're not starting with the most important thing, which is the experience that thing is driving. You can work back, you can figure out the business impact of the thing. And it really depends on the piece of content, right? Like a playbook is going to be different than a podcast.  But I'd like to start with the experience and then back into the business impact because I think it just has more value and people are more creative when you start with the experience.” - Kyle LacyTime Stamps[0:55] Meet Kyle Lacy, CMO at Jellyfish[2:51] Exploring Christopher Nolan's Storytelling Techniques[4:45] The Art of Making Complex Narratives Work[7:31] Christopher Nolan's Unique Approach to Filmmaking[10:14] Applying Nolan's Strategies to B2B Marketing[17:47] Drawing Parallels Between Nolan's Work and Marketing[18:52] Mastering Different Storytelling Formats[21:32] The Human Element in Marketing and Filmmaking[23:51] Exploring the Camera as a Character in Marketing[24:59] The Human Element: The Core of Marketing and Storytelling[26:26] Christopher Nolan's Mastery of Objects in Storytelling[28:04] Marketing Lessons from Nolan's Use of Totems[29:32] The Power of Mascots and Brand Identity[31:33] Creative Choices in Filmmaking: The Case of Bane's Voice[39:17] The Challenge of Balancing Creativity and Business Goals[43:58] Advice for other CMOsLinksConnect with Kyle on LinkedInLearn more about JellyfishAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.

According to McKinsey, 84% of execs say that innovation is important to their growth strategy. So how can organizations prioritize innovation in the year ahead? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Chris Ho, the sales asset manager at Uber for Business. Thanks for joining us, Chris. I would love for you to start by just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Chris Ho: Hey Shawnna, thanks for having me here, super excited to be here today. My name’s Chris Ho. I’m currently based in San Francisco, California, and I’ve been here for about three years, and I originally grew up in Monterey, California. I’m currently a sales asset manager at Uber for Business, working under the sales enablement team, which sits under the larger umbrella of sales operations. I currently manage a few enablement tools, which include Highspot, Lessonly, Seismic Knowledge, and Gong. SS: Wonderful. Now, Chris, one of the things that I noticed as we were preparing for this podcast on LinkedIn is that you actually have an engineering background. How does that background influence your approach to enablement? CH: Sure. So when it comes to my work, I’m a very process and execution-oriented person. I also generally tend to take a data-driven approach to problem-solving. I imagine this way of thinking is largely attributed to my engineering background. I generally try to think in terms of what we can tangibly do. Bringing this back to enablement, you know, while sales enablement does, have a very high potential for positive impact, as we all know, I think it’s oftentimes difficult to concretely measure and communicate sales enablement's impact with existing tools. Not just our existing tools at Uber, but sales enablement tools in general. I think the sales enablement industry has a lot of analytical white space. I feel there’s a lot of benefit to be gained from better, more convincing correlations to business outcomes. I think many sales enablement teams, including ours, are well-positioned to provide convincing and data-driven correlations to business outcomes if given the right tools. SS: I love that. Can you give us a little more insight from your perspective? What does a good enablement strategy look like? And, you know, maybe in other words, what are some of the key components of your enablement strategy? CH: I think, we generally base our enablement strategy on principles. And the four main principles we tried to lock in, it’s going to be buy-in, engagement. scalability and support. And what do I mean by those? So buy-in is like a prerequisite to receiving any engagement from your participants. If there isn’t buy-in from your participants, or if they don’t believe in what you’re doing, then you can expect low engagement from them when you actually try to roll out the strategy. Engagement, you know, a lot of our job is about teaching behavior change and ensuring the adoption of new behaviors. In my opinion, participant engagement is absolutely necessary to realize any results from the things that we teach and implement. Then there’s scalability; a scalable strategy is a sustainable strategy. In order to have a consistent standard of excellence across large organizations, I think it’s critical to have a scalable process that can meet the needs of growth. And then lastly, support. So every enablement strategy, I think should have some sort of support system to back up the training, the teachings, and the coaching, whether it’s having a subject matter expert on call, PDF resources for best practices, or creating slack channels, or whatever. Or, you know, Google chat channels for quick answers. I think reps need support to sufficiently carry out their complex set of duties. SS: I love that four-pronged approach. And, you know, as you mentioned in your intro, you all leverage Highspot there. What role does Highspot play in your overall strategy for enablement and what, from your perspective, is the value of having an enablement platform? CH: I will preface that Highspot is a very useful tool for us and unlocks a lot of value, and it was fairly challenging to summarize this, but, you know, I think at its core Highspot serves as our central repository for sales content, internal and external. It currently provides a great means of distributing content and tracking engagement internally and externally. So this means tracking how our reps use content, as well as enabling them to see how their customers use our content. I think Highspot or, enablement platforms in general, provide a very unique, versatile, and intuitive way to track the performance and engagements of our sales team with the content that we distribute and hand out. So this enables us to create a data-driven feedback loop that informs how we iterate upon our enablement strategies in the future. SS: I love that. And since implementing Highspot, you have actually driven a lot of innovation around kind of the way that you guys leverage Highspot at Uber Business. One of those areas is with Digital Sales Rooms, which I know that you’ve put a lot of work into, and you’ve actually increased the usage by 75% in the last few months. Tell us a little bit about how you’re leveraging digital sales rooms, or DSRs for short, and maybe some of the results that you’re seeing. CH: Yeah, the different types of digital sales rooms our sales teams are generally using depend on the stage of the sales process that the seller is in. So for example, someone at the top of the sales funnel would likely use the digital sales room to provide living deal rooms that provide a personalized introduction to our products and services. Someone mid-funnel might use the digital sales rooms as a repository for posting content related to the customer’s mutual success plan, helping both parties stay aligned on the latest updates in the business relationship. Someone at the end of the funnel might use the digital sales room as a living customer support website to help customers post-launch. In terms of results in general, we’ve seen that a good digital sales room for a quality customer relationship can enable larger returns of use effectively. So, you know, at Uber, our digital sales room has served as a really great forum to get users and at Uber for business, we work with businesses and their employees. We see that the digital sales room has been a great value add for getting employees to get a taste of the products that we deliver. SS: I love that. And as I said, you are definitely on the cutting edge. And as we look to some of the innovations we have coming, we’ve heard that you’re really excited about a few features that are being launched. One is our team scorecard. I would love to understand from you how are you envisioning being able to leverage that and what’s exciting about it to you? CH: Going back to what we were talking about earlier with respect to there is a lot of analytical white space and sales enablement industry. I think the team’s scorecard really helps fulfill this gap that we’re seeing at its core. Prior to the team scorecard, we were always looking for ways to correlate our team’s performance and our team’s engagement with content and correlate that back to sales performance, and using a lot of roundabout and jerry-rigged ways to do this reporting and to surface results and any trends. I think the team scorecard is going to be a really great tool to be able to consolidate the information in an easily digestible way and allow us to distribute performance and any correlations without having to use so many different tools or integrations, etc. It’s all in one place being updated live as we go. SS: I love that. I think another area of innovation that has definitely driven a lot of excitement in the enablement space is artificial intelligence or AI. I’d love to get your perspective. Why, from your perspective, is AI an important topic to pay attention to, especially given the current sales landscape? CH: Yeah, in my opinion, if you’ve already used some sort of AI platform to help you with your work, you probably know that it can be extremely useful. With that being said, if you’re not already using it, I honestly think you’re probably behind. Your peers in the competition who are effectively using it are likely operating at a significantly higher productivity than what you might be used to. That’s just my take. The sales landscape in tech is increasingly becoming more complex, requiring a high cognitive load on our sales reps. AI will be instrumental in reducing this cognitive load while enhancing sales effectiveness through guided selling capabilities. What we want to do is get to a place where we can automate the best-recommended sales motions to sellers at the right time, giving them more time to focus on high-impact contributions to close the deal. SS: I love that. And specifically, how do you think AI is going to benefit the enablement industry? CH: Yeah, I think in short AI will scale the amount of enablement that can be provided by the same number of team members. It’ll allow enablement team members to focus on higher impact tasks while continuing to provide a tailored just in time learning and selling experience. SS: I love that. And you were actually a beta user of one of Highspot’s AI-driven features, Highspot Instant Answers. Can you provide some first-hand insight into how practitioners can use this feature and its potential impact? CH: Yeah. I have a fair amount of thoughts on Instant Answers. And I’ll start by saying that I think it’s a great product, a great feature, I should say. And we’ve been using it a lot. As of late, I think Highspot's Instant Answers have unlocked our ability to quickly update our knowledge base at scale, and also unlock all of the great insights and knowledge that our content management system has, which previously wasn’t always readily available. I think the most notable impact is that you can take advantage of the versatility of Highspot to create your own decentralized process for keeping content up to date, while centrally maintaining visibility and accounting for hygiene, all without too many steps. I know it sounds like a lot, but really, we want to get to a place where we can hand out the responsibility to the subject matter experts to update the content that they’re providing, and then centrally keep that visibility to make sure everyone’s being held accountable and everything’s updated and accurate. As folks are listening to this, and people are working with new AI tools, I think given the newness of AI-generated answers, it’s important that we continue to think of ways to reduce errors and human oversight. SS: I could not agree more. We’re all still learning our way through a lot of the new AI capabilities, but I am very excited that we have this path now toward being able to leverage AI to make all of us in enablement and our reps more efficient and more productive. So thank you, Chris. Last question for you, really appreciate it: as we continue to see all of this innovation in enablement technology, we’re What are your best practices for optimizing and evolving your enablement strategy to keep pace with this new innovation? CH: For a few years, I think it’s been a mission of most sales enablement teams or companies to consolidate and simplify the sales workflow from the technology perspective. Hence why so many places place such a strong emphasis on the importance of integrations as a prerequisite to onboarding any new software. And only now are companies producing their first iterations of a unified seller experience, conjoining CRM content management tools, learning platforms, knowledge platforms, etc, all into one. So in principle, I don’t think the best practices change. I think what’s been most helpful for us with the advent of so many new technologies being implemented is to constantly have your ear to the ground, building relationships with sales and gathering buy-in piece by piece as early as possible; and extra emphasis on the “as early as possible” and “piece by piece”. We’ve almost considered it like a cheat code to success. I think oftentimes when you’re rolling out new platforms, and new innovations to a large set of people, we all know that there’s so much reluctancy involved with adopting new behaviors. So we found that it’s absolutely critical to really have the boots on the ground, and work on one-on-one to understand the seller experience and slowly gather and accumulate that buy-in from the decision makers that you work with cross-functionally. SS: I love that, and I love that you guys are trend-setting at Uber Business. You’ve done a fantastic job there, Chris. And thank you so much for joining this podcast. I really appreciate the time. CH: Yes, thank you so much for having me, it’s been great. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Marketing is an act of love. The marketer puts out content like little thirst traps. We want to dazzle with our beautiful pictures and words. And we definitely didn't lay awake at night trying to think of the perfect thing to say. We marketers are gently wooing our audience from their first glance to becoming a dedicated customer. We are working to build everlasting relationships. And today, we're learning about doing just that from the hit reality show that explores what it takes to go the distance.In this episode, we're talking about Love is Blind with the help of special guest, Senior Director of Brand & Events at Seismic, Katie Brunette. Together, we chat about breaking the ice, wooing your audience, and using cliffhangers.About our guest, Katie BrunetteKatie Brunette is Senior Director of Brand & Events at Seismic. She joined the company in November 2021 as Senior Director of Global Events. She is an experiential marketing professional specialized in strategic corporate events and large-scale sporting events. Prior to Seismic, Katie previously served as Associate at Revenue Collective, Director of Marketing Strategy & Brand at Lessonly, and Event Marketing Coordinator at Salesforce.About SeismicSeismic is the global leader in enablement, helping organizations engage customers, enable teams, and ignite revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™️ is the most powerful, unified enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. From the world's largest enterprises to startups and small businesses, more than 2,000 organizations around the globe trust Seismic for their enablement needs. Seismic is headquartered in San Diego with offices across North America, Europe, and Australia.About Love is BlindLove is Blind is a reality show in which people who are looking for love get engaged before actually meeting each other in person. So how it goes is 15 men and 15 women who live in the same area come to live in pods. And they can “date” by talking to each other through speakers but never see each other. Participants can propose at any time. If and when a participant says “yes,” then they can meet their fiance in person. The show follows their relationship right up to the altar in some cases. For each season, there's a reunion episode, and “after the altar” episodes.Production-wise, the first season filmed for 38 days. And then some couples got married. They started on October 9th in 2018 and weddings were held on November 15th. Participants do get paid $1,000 a week, and the rings, resort stays, wedding, etc. are paid for by the show. However each person is responsible for their own hair, makeup, and clothing.The series was created by Chris Coelen, produced by Kinetic Content and streams on Netflix. It premiered in February of 2020, and got tons of viewership, especially because of the pandemic. 30 million households watched the series within four weeks of its launch, and according to the Netflix 2020 viewing trends summary, it "stayed in the US Top 10 for 47 days straight after its release – the second-longest run of any title that year behind Cocomelon.” (64 days). It got some really funny reviews, the best being from Lucy Mangan of The Guardian, who said, “Love is Blind is, basically, crack. Or meth. It's crack-meth. You will decide to give it five minutes before bed one night and find yourself still on the sofa as the sun rises on another day. You will be bleary-eyed and shattered from all the shouting you have done, the emotional investment you have made, the WhatsApp messages you have typed to a specially formed group and the heartfelt contributions you have made to various internet forums on the subject. It's that good, is what I am saying.” But then she goes on to say that it's not good from a moral sense.It now has 5 seasons out.What B2B Companies Can Learn From Love is Blind:Break the ice. Introductory content meant to build awareness about your company or product is a great place to use humor. It's attention-grabbing, light, and memorable. Plus, it starts you off with a positive brand association that will help build your relationship with them. Ian says, ”Long-term commitment is scary for most people, and it's very serious. And so you need to start with an icebreaker. So much of our content or our marketing stuff is so serious. We don't have good icebreakers. So much of the stuff that we create has so little levity, when even just showing a little bit of that allows you to break the tension.”Woo your audience. Commitment takes time. The content that will resonate with someone who just found out about your company will be different than someone who is ready to buy. Create touchpoints in your content that speaks to them at different phases of your relationship. Katie says, ”I kind of equate getting engaged to taking the demo. So how do you get your audience to the demo? You have to talk about the values. You have to talk about the things that mean the most to them, so that way you can connect on that human to human level, but also connect on their business outcome.” Use cliffhangers. Save the good stuff for the end of your blog post, your video, your podcast. Ian says, “Choose your best stuff and just put it at the bottom of the article. That stuff is so powerful and we don't do it enough.” When relationships hang in the balance on Love is Blind at the end of an episode, you know people are going to tune into the next episode. It's how you keep people engaged and even improve viewership.Quotes*”If you knew that you had 30 hours to try to attract somebody to take a demo with you, what pieces of content would you put all your efforts into? Is it a webinar that you can get some live engagement? Is it an in-person event that you're trying to get them to? Is it a really great designed ebook? Is it a blog post? If you know that you have 30 hours of their attention, what is that high quality content that you're going to produce?” - Katie Brunette*”It's so important to make that investment in your voice early on, especially when you're trying to set yourself apart from your competitors. Your voice is the easiest way to relate to people, and the easiest way to set yourself apart from competitors who essentially have the same product. Maybe some of the features are different. It might look a little bit different. It might work a little bit different. But you're selling the same thing. So how do you differentiate yourself? It's through your voice.” - Katie BrunetteTime Stamps[0:55] Meet Katie Brunette, Senior Director of Brand & Events at Seismic[2:24] What does Katie's work at Seismic entail?[3:07] What is Love is Blind about?[19:27] Katie on the Impact of Love is Blind on Marketing[36:44] Reflections on Brand and Content at SeismicLinksWatch Love is BlindConnect with Katie on LinkedInLearn more about SeismicAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.

In our recent research study, 100% of sales leaders agreed that you need both an effective tool and strategy to succeed in enablement. So, how can you maximize the impact of enablement at your organization with an effective platform and strategy? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I'm your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Dustin Day, senior manager of global sales enablement at Coursera. Thanks for joining, Dustin! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Dustin Day: Thank you, Shawnna. My name is Dustin and I am on the Coursera Global Sales Enablement team. I’ve been with Coursera for a little bit over a year now focusing on everything from manager enablement, product enablement, go-to-market motions, and supporting the Highspot initiative and how we position it, and how we grow it with the team. My background, I grew up in a company called CEB, which is now called Gartner, focusing on L&D research, which is really where I started to get my sales support background. I went into education publishing, now branded EdTech today, and focused on the finance and strategy aspect of sales. Then I went to an organization named Challenger, which is where I worked with global companies supporting their sales leadership, and sales enablement team around the challenge of sales methodology. That’s where I got interested in more of the perspective of sales enablement and becoming more of the practitioner as opposed to the thought leadership kind of execution side of sales methodology. I am happy to be here, Shawnna, and looking forward to our conversation. SS: I’m excited to have you here as well, Dustin, and it sounds like you have a phenomenal background to answer our first question, which I’d love to start with. What does good enablement look like in your opinion? In other words, what are some of the key components of an effective enablement strategy? DD: I think this is the big question in the industry today and I think it’s one that individuals like myself, do not struggle with, but are constantly trying to reimagine. Historically, if you looked at sales enablement, it grew out of a pure sales L&D motion, pure training, getting in front of the field, and training them on the skills that are necessary for them to succeed. That’s still a huge component of sales enablement, but being at the center of how you support the team and the growing nature of sales, we have started to see sales enablement grow into looking at the sales cycle and trying to find efficiencies within our sales cycle, the buying process and trying to identify the buying process and build those play cards to support the field and how they engage with and the customer journey. As sales enablement evolves, I think there still needs to be that mix of formal sales training or skill-building exercises if you want a position like that, but also how do we get the field to be equipped for the future? This virtual environment has changed the nature of sales, changed the nature of the buyer, and organizations like ours and our sales force are constantly learning how to navigate that as the buyer has gotten smarter and started to evolve faster than we’ve been able to evolve from a commercial engine perspective. SS: I love that. We talked a little bit about when you joined Coursera, but I know it was right at the start of the team’s partnership with Highspot. Tell us a little bit about the enablement journey that Coursera has been on since you implemented Highspot, and how has your enablement strategy evolved from then until now? DD: In the original use case for Highspot, we were hosting all of our materials on a central intranet site, and that naturally created a ton of pain points in terms of finding content, engaging with content, and proactively providing feedback for us to keep things fresh. There were a lot of inefficiencies built in just the pure commercial support engine. As we looked at Highspot, the original use case was let’s get our content onto Highspot, get it organized in a way that at least helps the team build and have those resources and the collateral available to them today. That was stage one. I think stage two has essentially defined our sales enablement strategy more broadly, which is that we created additional pain points by just uploading resources. We started to say, how do we organize, create that feedback loop and essentially help our marketing team skip a lot of steps in their process as it relates to building content and getting content onto the platform? As we developed that strategy and started to do the change management with marketing and the sales team, getting more content collateral in front of them, they created an additional pain point, which was governance. Our strategy and our problems have grown in a good way. We’ve created pain points that we needed to solve, but that is good because we are not doing what we originally did today. What we did in Q2, our team essentially built a content governance strategy that we now maintain on a quarterly basis where we archive pieces of content based on the criteria that are really important to us as it relates to content freshness. We start to track those KPIs and report on those KPIs as part of showing the value in sales enablement. We’ve started to build this governance structure to make sure that that content support engine is running on all cylinders. Our marketing team understands utilization and we’re continuing to grow that as we start to build out our Q4 and our next year strategy, which is sales play specifics. Organizing everything in one central spot so nobody has to go find things and search for things in random areas, but also as we build those sales plays focusing on getting stronger at, it’s probably the best way to say it, our customer personas. Also, the outreach Salesforce reports that we can put into one place custom-built for the AE. The What to Know section has everything that you need to know about content. We are a content company. Anytime we work with a customer, there’s a lot of moving pieces in our product. Then also what to show, so clearly breaking down that sales process aspect and making sure that the team can see before the meeting, during the meeting, and after the meeting, or if not leadership, here are the things I should be bringing to our customer. That’s how our strategy has evolved. Our KPIs have moved with it, and our pain points have evolved in a good way as well and we’ve kind of continued to evolve the strategy. SS: I love that. It does sound like you guys are moving up that maturity curve. Fantastic work there. I definitely want to come back and revisit the work that you guys are doing on Plays in just a little bit, but to help context that too for the audience, what were some of the key business challenges that Highspot helped solve at Coursera? DD: First it’s just content. We have a very large marketing team at Coursera and if you’re familiar with the Coursera go-to-market, or who we are, we have a very large consumer B2C revenue stream. It’s where most of our revenue comes from. We have a lot of B2C marketers that create a lot of B2C kind of content and collateral. As we started to clean things up, some of the original pain points were how do we get ourselves organized, get some of that more B2B content front and center, remove the noise from a content perspective from the peripherals, and get the team focused. That was the original pain point. It was a pure play of we are unorganized from a content organization perspective. We need to put some rigor behind it as we mature as a business. We did that. I think we’re a year and a half in at this point. As we continue to build that muscle, we feel like we’re growing in our maturity and the problems and the KPIs have started to grow with that. SS: How has Highspot helped you solve some of those challenges? DD: Well, first of all, we love to organize our content. We haven’t been able to organize it effectively to date, and so we are able to do two things. One was tagging our content to make it easier for the rep to navigate Highspot quickly. While it is a great platform for us in sales enablement and our colleagues in marketing, we really don’t want our field spending 20 to 30 minutes anytime they’re in the system to find what they need. The tagging and getting the content front and center have been super helpful for us to measure the utilization of our content as well. We have so much like what are people using, why they use it, and how we can be smarter in creating or building off of content that has been wildly successful as opposed to just putting it there and letting it sit underutilized. So that’s one use case. The other use case, which we’ll talk about a little bit is from a sales play organization. We’re also about to pilot our first newsletter launch here this week. From an enterprise perspective, we’re going to be consolidating all of the communication channels using the Highspot functionality to kind of pitch it out to the team. We’re going to start to look at utilization, start to look at click-through rates, and start to use the tool almost like a selling tool internally to engage with the field and start to measure how we can better support the field. SS: I love that. Actually, recently your team also expanded to use Highspot to include Training and Coaching capabilities. What was the impetus for making the change to invest in a unified enablement platform? DD: Originally we were using Lessonly. That originally started with onboarding as part of our onboarding learning paths. We were having new hires go into Lessonly and then be pushed to content and support materials on Highspot. It just felt kind of like a weird user experience. As we started to assess that, the Highspot account management team started to talk to us about the learning platform component, we made a decision to have that consolidated platform where at the end of the day, simply said, it is one place versus many places. I think particularly in sales enablement, there are a ton of new platforms and products and support tools out there. I’ve even seen Slack starting to get into certain things. Microsoft Teams has a content organization aspect to it. For us, it really simplified the one-stop shop for our team to go to as it relates to their learning paths, as it relates to new go-to-market builds, as when we went to upskill, reskill the team we’ve been able to use some of the recording functionality, have managers listen and sign off, build best practice pages around what a good pitch looks like and start to flex that muscle a little bit better than we had in the past. It also aligns with our content. We can easily say, this is content number one. There’s a great best practice pitch from a recent training and we can link to that as well. It’s really helped solve a lot of those really minor but tedious steps that our field would have to take prior to getting anything done or just to navigate any type of system we have. SS: I love that you guys are taking that unified approach, though, because it makes it a lot more seamless for your reps, and obviously we want to be where your reps are to make them more productive. Another way that you’re thinking about it from a unified platform perspective and you’ve touched on this a little bit, so I’d love to drill in, is that big initiative around the sales plays aligned to training. Can you tell us about this initiative and why it’s a focus for your team? DD: Historically we have built Highspot pages essentially in a silo, which is here’s the one-stop shop for just all pieces of collateral as it relates to an academy for example. We got feedback that, oh, how do I navigate it? Where do I go? What we did is we’ve taken the structure that Highspot provides, which is what to know, say, and show, and we’ve taken that and really run with it. We organize every one of our sales plays now around a very specific product suite. We start with what to know, which is typically something around the customer persona, or we may separate it out, depending on who the customer persona is. The customer persona is a deeper dive from a Coursera perspective into the content, and the demo environments that we have related to that. Then we go into what to say, which is much more of that, that go-to-market narrative, objections, key talking points, use cases, for example, that we can speak to. Then what to say, and that’s actually helped our team really at the end of the day, organize their thoughts and know how to quickly navigate. Another output of that is now we organize our field training around that exact same structure. It’s given us a new structure to engage with the field from a live virtual training perspective when we’re talking about more of our go-to-market motions as opposed to skill-based motions. From a product go-to-market motion, we bring up the sales play and we work through the sales play as the structure of our field training. That’s also been helpful. Sales play will continue to evolve and we’ll continue to build on it, but it’s laser-focused on, it’s got us, from a go-to-market perspective, much more deliberate than I think we had been doing in the past. I think that’s been an incredible output, and one that we’re starting to see the field feedback be, this is great, and the questions are more focused on very specific product nuances and or talk tracks as opposed to where is this hosted. How do we navigate this? It’s much less technical highspot questions and more of what we hope they’re asking questions about. SS: I love that. You guys are already seeing some amazing results. I mean, you guys have driven a 77 percent increase in play adoption. How did you effectively launch this initiative to your sales teams? And maybe what are some of the results that you’ve seen so far? DD: We piloted it with a launch probably back in July or August 2023. As part of that, it was a new motion and it required change management. We used to just, for our Tier 2 and Tier 3 launches, we used to just go through Slack and or email channels to get the communication out, link to the Highspot main page for our vertical, and then say, here are the links that you need to be effective. What we did is we launched training that was designed, yes, to equip the field but also an introduction to the Highspot page itself. Now it’s just pure behavior change motions. Now we bring it up constantly for any new sales play launch. We break it down in our communications. Here’s your know, say, show. In any training, we’ve been following up with training more than we have in the past to help kind of reinforce that know, say, show. It’s just kind of hammering the nail over and over and over again in a productive way for the field. From our perspective, we’re also driving that behavior change by making it front and center as this is the way we’re going to operate. A Little carrot and stick approach, but from our perspective, it was a behavior change play and part of that behavior change is getting people bought in that this is how we’re going to operate first and foremost, and then hopefully they see the value and they see the benefits that they get out of it. SS: Now you guys have also just seen some incredible traction with Highspot overall. I think you guys have 85 percent recurring usage. What are some of your best practices for driving adoption and how has having a unified platform helped? DD: This may pain some sales enablement practitioners but early on, we used Google Suite for Gmail and Docs and Sheets, and every time an announcement would go out, that colleague would share a Google Doc. This is the link to the Google Doc, and in the title, it would say, make a copy. You have this plethora of random copies out there to the team. One of the things that we do constantly day in and day out to anybody that we ever see send communications is if they don’t share the Highspot link to the resource, we always literally will follow up and say, hey, recommend that you share the Highspot link instead. Here’s the reason why. We can track if people are using it, seeing it, clicking on it, et cetera. We just have to get the links for Highspot out there as the single source of truth. The other bit is from a recurring use perspective, we have started to leverage Highspot for more of our knowledge management side of the aisle. This is definitely a work in progress and we’re continuing to think about and trying to understand the use cases, but we’re building playbooks for our roles. As part of building playbooks for our roles, we’re going to host that playbook on Highspot in a knowledge management center. Again, with links out into the different resources that are on Highspot to help these roles execute. It’s identified areas that we don’t have very tangible support in now. It helps us prioritize what we need to build and when we build those, we build them in Highspot. Reoccurring uses actually are more of a muscle that we need to have from a sales enablement perspective as opposed to the field. If everything is in there organized and it’s the single source of truth, as you mentioned, the unified platform, if that’s the case, they have really no choice but to go in to get the information, to get the details, to get the content that they need. SS: I love that philosophy and I love that you guys are driving that to change the behavior of your field teams. Now, you have a lot of big plans for evolving Highspot going forward. Can you tell us more about your vision for continuing to evolve your enablement and how you plan to leverage Highspot to help? DD: There are four key initiatives that we’re continuing to think about for some and explore for others in 2024. The first one at the forefront is the constant governance muscle. We do quarterly governance, like sprints we’re calling them, where we identify the content that hasn’t met the criteria for freshness. We get that content in front of our product marketing and customer marketing teams for them to vet if it needs to be there. Then an archiving sprint in the latter half of the quarter and measure in the following quarter. Constantly building in that muscle. That’s a priority at the end of the day that we cannot forget about, but we can’t deprioritize as we do everything else. The other three things I mentioned briefly, which is getting smarter about our sales plays. How do we continue to build those and make them more effective on a yearly basis? As we’re looking at our yearly strategy, what are those sales plays, those go-to-market priorities that we have to hit on, and how can we build out a sales place for that? It’s giving us more face time to be candid with senior sales leaders, and sales executives to include us in those conversations because they know to execute on that, they’re going to need our team’s support around the sales plays. Candidly there’s like a quid pro quo in that approach and that’s good. The third piece is the knowledge management aspect of it. Building that knowledge management base, that’s going to be a big priority. We’re still learning and adapting to that. The fourth piece, which we haven’t explored yet, but I know Highspot has a lot of great research around, is salerooms. That single source of truth, where you can see how the customer interacts with the content, what they’re clicking on, it’s more customer-facing. There’s a huge opportunity for us to have that more customer-facing digital rooms approach. How can we build that into our motions today? I think we have to get the sales play right, and we have to get the governance right, so people can trust the content, they can trust the source of the content. The digital rooms are kind of the next step in our maturity to ensure that we can get analytics and real-time feedback from customer engagement. SS: Absolutely. I have to say I love the evolution of digital sales rooms and the visibility it gives you into what is really resonating with your buyer at the end of the day. I really appreciate all of the time, Dustin. Thank you so much for joining us today. DD: Thank you. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win Podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Mitch Briggs, SEO Success Manager, and Betsy Koliba, Head of Customer Growth (both at Demandwell) join Dave G to talk about SEO today. They cover:  Content strategy holistically - how do blogging and SEO work together with other marketing content?  Choosing what topics to pursue Measuring the success of SEO in the B2B SaaS context The right way to use AI for SEO, and... The definition of a Hoosier...obviously ;) Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfivemedia***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, and Zapier.Thanks to our friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfivemediaJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletter***Today's episode is sponsored by Revenue Hero. RevenueHero is the easiest way for B2B marketers to qualify and route leads directly to their sales rep's calendars. RevenueHero turns days of follow ups between a prospect and a sales rep into seconds.Hundreds of businesses automate their request a demo workflow with RevenueHero including Okendo, Inflection, Ultimate.ai, Customer.io, Appcues and Rebrandly. You can get a free trial of RevenueHero at revenuehero.io.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Jonny Ross is Senior Manager, Brand Partner Marketing at Strava. Jonny has been responsible for building out a global B2B marketing function from scratch at a "consumer" company, and we talk about his role and learnings from his career as a B2B marketer.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Miranda Babitt is Senior Partner Marketing Specialist at Zapier. Miranda leads partner lifecycle marketing and previously worked in a similar role at Thinkific. Miranda sharees an overview of role of partner marketing in B2B SaaS, hat partner marketing looked like in the past vs. what the role is responsible for today, here partner marketing fits in strategically at Zapier, applying principles of lifecycle marketing to partnerships, examples and success stories based on what's worked at Zapier.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Anthony Pierri is co-founder of Fletch PMM and helps startup founders with positioning, messaging, and website design.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Thanks for listening to 99 episodes of the Exit Five podcast; here's episode 100. Dave is joined by a crew of B2B marketers: Kaylee Edmondson, Lashay Lewis, Tas Bober, and Tim Davidson. Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Dave is joined by John Short (Founder & CEO of Compound Growth Marketing) to talk about why partner marketing is underrated, ABM tactics, marketing salaries, and more.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Our internal research reveals that since deploying Highspot, customers have seen an average 16% increase in win rate. So, how can you maximize the impact of your efforts with an effective enablement platform? Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi and welcome to the Win Win Podcast. I'm your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Molly Sestak, the head of enablement at SEDNA.Thanks for joining, Molly! I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role. Molly Sestak: Thanks so much for having me, Shawnna. I’ve actually been around sales my entire life. My dad’s company is actually a manufacturer’s representative, which basically means they’re the middle people between manufacturers and wholesalers for really large commercial bid jobs. I grew up hearing him on the phone, spending time in the office, hearing how people make calls, and so on. I actually started working there when I was like 15 or 16 until I graduated from university. The funny thing is I started as the cleaner and all of a sudden one day it was like, oh, can you file a few things? Apparently, I was good at that. I don’t know how you’re bad at filing things, but a few days later my dad’s secretary actually asked me to answer the phones while she was away. Apparently, I was really good at that, so they actually started having me do inside sales. I really was only like 16 or 17, still in high school at this point. I really got my foot in sales early. I worked there pretty much every summer for five, or six years. I think after uni, I thought I was definitely not going into sales. I didn't want to be like my dad because all he does is talk on the phone and travel and all sorts, which seems nice, but I didn't want that. Well, unfortunately, that didn’t work out for me because I found tech and I absolutely fell in love. I fell into enablement naturally. It was BDR and then became a bit more senior in the team. As we started to build out that team on board new people, I took on that training person role within the team. It started off a little bit ad hoc doing team training and then they’re like, okay you are pretty good at that and I can see you like it, why don’t you help us onboard some of the new joiners? Fast forward a few months later, a job opened up in the enablement team specifically for BDRs, so that’s really where my background focus is. I went for it and never really looked back. I think that really made me realize that I love teaching people how to sell even more so than I actually love selling. I joined SEDNA about a year ago to help with coaching the sales team, building out playbooks, and so on. It’s definitely been a journey. I think every company has really had quite a lot of hardships in the last year. It pretty much has touched every tech company that I know of. I even did a short stint heading up our BDR team, so a slight shift away from enablement. We’ve finally hired somebody amazing to take over that team so I can announce that I’m finally back into enablement as of about a month ago. I have just been promoted to head of enablement and I’ve never been in that strategic role before. It’s been a really big learning curve, but slowly finding my feet and am excited to see my plans come to life. SS: Wow. When you say you have been in sales for your lifetime, you really mean from almost start to finish. That’s amazing. I’d love to understand, now that you’re focused on enablement and gravitated towards that, from your perspective, what does good enablement look like? Maybe if I was going to reframe it due to your new role, what are some of the key components of an effective enablement strategy? MS: I think that’s a really great question, Shawnna. I can of course say what everybody else says in this, I think what the key pillars are, which are content, training, and coaching. I think those are the three key things that we look for in driving enablement in a company. You can create the best programs in the world, but if they aren’t aligned with those company goals and you don’t collaborate heavily with other teams and get those stakeholders bought in, it’s just not going to move the needle. I’ve actually spent some time thinking about this and what I do differently to the above to hopefully help those who are listening out there. I think one thing that has really helped me is actually having that sales background, doing sales myself. I always bring that into everything that I do, but I also go back to that feeling of being bored in training and not being able to sit still when you have someone talking at you. When I build my programs, one of the things that I try to do is make them as engaging as possible. Does that mean that I’m asking them questions throughout? Do I make it fun? Do I put a game in there? I know when I was at Okta, I actually made a board game called Okta Land. It’s kind of like Candy Land, but it actually was with Okta questions and you had to answer questions about the product or do a cold call role play or handle an objection to move forward on the spaces. So again, it is just how we make it fun and drive that engagement throughout. I think often as enablement professionals, we get so caught up in that idea of like, we have to have this big strategy. What are we going to do for next year? I’m already thinking about 2024. What’s going to happen? What do we need to leverage to really hit those goals? I think it just turns into that tick-box exercise sometimes. I’ve thought a lot about this recently, which is funny why you’ve asked me this question. I think one of the answers to that is actually having bite-sized training that can influence the now. How do we help people do their jobs better today, not three-quarters from now? Of course, that’s super important, but we’re already doing that anyway. One of the things I actually just implemented as of last week is called Mondays with Molly. I tried to make it fun with my name, and it’s just in time snackable style enablement. It’s about three to five minutes. It’s a bite-sized video. I’m not a perfect editor, but I just threw it in iMovie and made a little jingle on Canva just to make it a little bit fun. It doesn’t take me very long. I just recorded it right before this podcast and it took me about 20 minutes to come up with the idea and actually record it edit everything and get it ready to send out Monday morning. The idea is that they listen to it while eating their breakfast or drinking their coffee on a Monday morning in the hopes that that’s something that they’re going to start doing that Monday. That’s what I’ve been doing a little bit differently than the usual enablement strategies that we see all over enablement teams today. SS: I love it. You have a creative flair that you bring to your enablement strategy to keep it engaging. I mean, attention is a hard thing to capture with sales reps, so kudos to that. How does your enablement platform help you bring that enablement strategy to life? MS: I definitely couldn’t live without it. I think that’s probably because in enablement we’re constantly faced with this idea of spinning plates and managing multiple stakeholders at one time, there’s like this huge element of collaboration. Not to mention the amount of content that we’re in charge of and making sure that people are actually using and then giving that feedback back into marketing. I’m sure that many of the people listening have just dealt with the sheer number of questions that go a little something like, hey, where can I find X document? I’ve had so many of those questions and to be honest, I made an emoji in Slack, that’s the Highspot emoji, and I just now sent it to them. It’s kind of a funny way to deal with it, but they do then get used to actually going and finding it themselves. I was absolutely buried in these. Before we had a sales enablement platform, and I really think that they helped bring that structure to the chaos. Besides that, I think the main thing is, first of all, they provide that single source of truth for all the up-to-date content that can be shared with prospects and customers or used internally to inform or upskill the team. Then, not only can you ensure that your team has access to the right content or information at the right time, but they can also share that content with their prospects and customers and get those analytics into what they’re engaging in. Not only does this help enablement, but marketing and reps, it pretty much helps every team that we touch really understand what content is resonating most with buyers. That helps us make much more data-driven decisions over time. On the training and coaching side of things, It’s a huge manual output. If you don’t have a platform it’s all live sessions, tracking things on Google Sheets. I mean, not to mention if you want somebody to do an accreditation or some sort of certification where they have a role-play involved. It is really difficult to manage all of that with the rubrics and all sorts. This really helps to roll this out and ensure completion on that, those kinds of things like training and certifications or even an onboarding program, for example. SS: Absolutely. I love that. Those are fantastic examples. Before Highspot, your team leveraged a different enablement platform. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience and maybe some of the challenges that your team faced? MS: Yeah, absolutely. When I joined SEDNA, the previous enablement team had actually already chosen Seismic, so they had been using it for about eight or nine months by the time I joined. I think before that they were using Google Drive, which is just horrible to think about now that I can’t live without an enablement platform. SS: Was there an impetus for deciding to make the change and implement Highspot instead? MS: I think once the team actually got their hands on Seismic, the realization that actually Lessonly in Seismic, they actually weren’t integrated at all. There were two completely separate logins. I think for anybody listening, who’s had to deal with two separate platforms when doing enablement, that’s just double the enablement that you have to do, double the management, and double the admin. That was a huge problem for us. I think one of the main reasons that we did switch was that I like having content with context. On pages, you have your content and then you have your context, which is your training and coaching around that. You couldn’t really do that with Seismic unless you hacked the page and it was kind of just like a click here type link. There weren’t any buttons. It wasn’t kind of like that smart navigation that you have on other platforms. With the digital sales rooms, they also kind of fell short a little bit, and the team felt that they were really difficult to create and they just weren’t used, even though that was one of the main drivers for purchasing the solution in the first place. Reps couldn’t find the content. Your platform is only as good as the content that they can find, so it was a huge problem there. That search wasn’t really optimized, and the pages weren’t that easy to navigate. Speaking of the pages, the overall look and feel of the platform just felt a little bit too clunky for a small organization and we really found it difficult to make the lessons and the pages look customized to our brand and the feel of our brand. I think you could have if you had a lot of design experience and had a team dedicated to doing that, but we didn’t. We had to be a little bit scrappy, so that was really challenging. Then finally, on the analytical side of things, it was really difficult to pull out the data and analytics on what was working and what was being used to really help us make those data-driven decisions. It actually took one of our team members multiple days to pull that data out for QBRs. She really struggled with this and would go to Seismic and ask for help and they would kind of just send her a help article. She’s like I already read the help article like I don’t know how to do this still. We really didn’t get the help that we needed. On the flip side of things, when I joined SEDNA, I did know that they were already feeling a lot of these challenges, so they were already in talks with Highspot. I think it was basically that our Highspot contact knew that we were coming up on our renewal, and also knew that you guys were launching your Training and Coaching side of things, which was a huge thing for us at the time. The Highspot reached out to my previous boss, like well before renewal, so I think that the Highspot team did a really good job reaching out and being proactive and following up because I really think that that helped us drive the change even further. That was like the nail in the coffin, like, hmm, actually we should look into Highspot again. That was really cool from the team. SS: Well, I love it, and I’m glad that you’ve joined the Highspot family. After implementing Highspot, how have you been able to solve some of the challenges your team was facing with your previous solution? MS: I think there were three main things for us that have actually solved a lot of the challenges that I spoke about earlier. The search was a huge win for us. Highspot search is absolutely amazing. I find things in one second. It’s funny because our platform is also renowned for search, so we feel very comfortable with that. Whereas sometimes when you’re searching on other platforms, you don’t really get what you’re looking for and then you have to try to figure out what page is it on. Or what folder did I put it in? This was a huge win for us. I don’t get any questions about where to find content anymore, so that was a huge sigh of relief for me. Pitching has also been a huge win for us. The team wasn’t really adopting this before, even though it was one of the absolute main reasons we purchased Seismic in the early days. My team absolutely loves that you can add multiple pieces of content in a branded environment rather than just kind of sending those one-off links to each of the pieces of content. That’s been a really big thing for us. Also just ease of use not only for the team and just how nice the platform looks in general from a UI perspective, but I think from my perspective as an admin. We completed our entire migration, tested it with the team, and rolled it out in literally about two to three weeks. It’s insanely quick. It didn’t feel quick, by the way. It was definitely a bit of a roller coaster for me trying to figure out cause I had never implemented a sales enablement platform before, but we could not have done that with our previous solution. That was huge for us in terms of the admin and upkeep. SS: To that point, I think getting buy-in from executive leaders on the impact of enablement and the value of your enablement platform is absolutely crucial. What are some of your best practices for securing buy-in from your executive stakeholders? MS: It’s pretty interesting. I think it’s about getting them to see the value through salespeople. Shouting positive things about it rather than me. I think the second it drives a deal forward or a prospect is like, oh, wow, that’s pretty cool, it definitely will catch their attention. I’m going through Sandler training right now with my new VP and it reminds me a bit of the Sandler Methodology that you have to get your prospect and realistically my sales stakeholders are my prospects and customers, but you almost have to get them to realize it themselves. The impact of something or the challenges they’re having rather than it coming from you. It’s much more powerful. I think that’s definitely the way to go, almost making them realize like oh, yeah we do have those challenges and wow that actually is a huge impact rather than you saying it yourself. I also, as I mentioned previously, include them up front in the process, and make sure they’re aware and informed throughout because that will really make sure that they’re bought in up front. They know exactly what we’re signing up for and you can already start to have key metrics that you want to measure and make sure that you’re holding yourself accountable for getting the ROI out of that platform. SS: Absolutely. Now, in addition to having leadership support, you have seen really strong adoption across all of your users. You have a recurring usage rate of 84%. What is your advice for driving adoption amongst your sellers? MS: It’s really interesting because our team was not really a fan of Seismic. In the beginning, we actually struggled to get people excited about Highspot because they thought it was like, oh, it’s just the same. We kept saying, no, it’s not, but of course, they don’t listen to us. We tell them things all the time. They need to find it out for themselves. What I did was I actually tried a few fun things when we launched it. One of those things was a holiday scavenger hunt where we provided clues that led to the most important pages that we wanted them to land on. Let’s say product or partnerships or personas pages. It helped them get the navigation down and understand where everything was located. We basically put holiday emojis on the piece of content that related to the clue so they had to go and find those. SS: I love that. Taking those skeptics and making them champions is absolutely clutch. Now, I want to ask because you’ve talked a lot throughout this podcast about the importance of a unified platform that can help you not only with content but also training and coaching and seamless experience is driving adoption. How have you started to leverage Highspot Training and Coaching and what are some of the results that you’ve seen so far? MS: The first thing that we did with Highspot Training and Coaching was actually a Highspot certification, naturally. That got them used to the features and functions of how to use it and how it was a little bit different than Lessonly, so we got them comfortable with it. Since then, we’ve done quite a lot of certifications. One of which was like a discovery demo certification that included not just some videos and some live sessions, but we actually took it one step further and did a video response with some test questions and had a rubric attached to that, that then matched our rubric in Gong. When we started to do call coaching later on, that was like the real-world example and not just kind of the role-play example. We could then take that rubric and use that later down the line and they were comfortable with it and familiar with it and knew exactly what they needed to change. That was the first real instance of using this. We were not able to do this with Seismic. The video uploads never worked for us, so we always had to do things like a manual send via Slack, which is just not ideal. With Highspot, we’re actually able to take the best video responses and I was able to then build a page with all of the best ones where people could then go and watch here’s what good looks like off the back of this. That could be Gong calls, but it could also be the video responses that they’re using. The next thing that I’m building out is actually an onboarding program for both BDRs and AEs. They join on the second of October, so I actually only have about a week left to be able to build this out, and maybe only 60% of the way. Onboarding just has so much content. I think it’s great that having that kind of platform that has both the content and the training and coaching is an absolute necessity for new joiners because not only do they have a place to go when it’s like oh I finished everything for today for my onboarding. They can go in, they have Gong calls to watch within Highspot, they have different video training that is bite-sized like my Mondays with Molly that they can go watch, they can see QBR decks, they can go kind of peruse product personal information. I think it’s just super helpful for them to have access to that content on day one and just in time when they want to discover it. On top of that, from my perspective, I can see exactly where they are in their onboarding journey. What have they completed? Pretty much every day they have pre-work, which tends to be like a series of e-learning videos or articles that they need to read, and some live sessions that we’ve run outside of Highspot. Then we throw them back into the platform in the afternoon for their post-work, which could be a presentation that they have to create, and then they need to upload the link into Highspot so we can grade it and give them feedback on it, or an objection handling role play that they need to do. We use test questions a lot, and we also use the free video response a lot. That just means that as we grow our new joiners and we have people go through onboarding we can start taking best practices and link the videos that they do within that without having to download upload and record them via Zoom. It just makes that way easier. Just having everything in that one unified platform. SS: I love that. On that note, last question for you, Molly. This has been fantastic by the way. What has been the impact of having a unified platform on sales productivity, and do you have any key wins or business outcomes you can share? MS: I think getting our top seller on board was a huge key win for us because I think if we didn’t manage to do that, I think we would have been in trouble. That was probably our biggest win of really driving that adoption and making sure that sales are productive with it. We’ve also done some additional things, like refresher training. Some of those will also be coming up on Mondays with Molly. Just little things, like if we get updates in Highspot, I know you guys are always launching new, amazing features. That Monday with Molly is a perfect outlet to then be like, hey, this is actually something new that you can do on the platform and I want you to start doing it today. I can start measuring that. In general, I don’t get any more questions, like Where can we find X? The search function is working really well. It means that reps can find the content that they need in a matter of seconds, rather than doing the whole waiting for somebody to answer on Slack, which could take hours if not days. If I’m really busy, sometimes I forget to respond. Actually, there’s a funny story that happened the other day that I think brings us to life. We have a new RevOps contractor who’s doing some territory planning and books of business for us. She actually asked me the question the other day and fair enough I didn’t train her on Highspot and she said, hey, do we have a document on ICP or something like that? I said no, actually we don’t have that document. I need to build it, blah, blah, blah. She said this back to me and I quote, I am glad I’m not crazy. Things are so well organized here that I have to keep reminding myself if you can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. I thought that was like a true testament to what we’re trying to do with not only the search function but really optimizing that guided selling experience so that if you don’t know where something lives and you’re not really sure exactly what you’re looking for and what it’s called, that you can navigate and kind of discover that content as it comes up and as needed. I think we need to refine that a little bit more moving forward now that we know what people are searching for and updating that content. I think we have a really good, strong foundation to start with and it is clearly working. Marketing was able to pull out all of the most used external content, which really provided the foundation on which they were able to prioritize which pieces of content they should actually update first. I think that was really helpful for them. We, of course, don’t have a crazy amount of content. I think we have maybe 400 or so assets in the platform, but if you had to go through 400 and try to prioritize, just kind of finger in the wind, that would have taken them a really long time. I think it saved them quite a lot of time on that front. In saying all of this, I actually wish that we had really concrete and better metrics, but with my role shifting so much, we haven’t really measured enough or properly used the governance side. It’s actually something that’s on my list to work on over the next few months. As part of the refresh, we’re actually going to dive a little bit deeper into some of these and what KPIs we really want to measure moving forward to really make that impact of the platform a lot greater. I am really excited to see where we end up. If I talk to you in a year from now, I think it will be amazing. SS: I can’t wait. I would love to have you back, Molly. Thank you so much for sharing your story today. MS: No problem. Thank you so much for having me. SS: To our audience, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.

Tas Bober is a B2B digital marketing strategist and previously Director of Digital & Website at Tealium. We cover the role of digital marketing today, mistakes with B2B websites, the role a website should play in the buying process, LinkedIn and organic content, starting a career in digital marketing, and more.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

April Dunford is a B2B positioning expert and author of Obviously Awesome and her new book Sales Pitch. Sales Pitch guides you through an eight-step sales pitch structure the helps you stand out and win business. Building on the concepts of the bestselling book, Obviously Awesome, Sales Pitch will give your sales reps a story that makes your product shine. We talk about her new book, lessons from her first book, and covered:- Positioning vs. Category Creation vs. Strategic Narrative- Lessons from 200+ B2B sales pitches- Why differentiation is everything and how to do it- Why positioning has to be a cross-functional activity - not just for the marketing- A structure anyone can use to turn positioning into a strong sales pitch- Why she set out to write a follow up book to her 2019 hit Obviously Awesome called Sales Pitch (and go through the pain of writing a book all over again)Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Lindsay Bayuk is Chief Marketing Officer at Pluralsight. We talk about the path to becoming CMO, what it takes to be a high performing CMO, going from VP Product Marketing to CMO, her marketing scorecard, doing internal marketing, what it means to think and operate like an executive, the importance of hiring/talent scouting, why org. design is so important and more.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

We're joined by Jessica Hreha (Head of Global Integrated Campaigns & Content Strategy at VMWare), Kelly Peters (Director of Marketing at Tomorrow.io), and Austin Distel (Growth Hacker at Jasper) to discuss how B2B marketing teams are actually using AI today, including:- Why and How VMWare created an internal cross-functional AI council- Why Tomorrow.io decided to hire a full-time "AI Marketer"-  Perspectives on adopting AI and setting standards for its productive use in marketing today, including examples from how their teams are using AI to drive productivity and efficiency in a responsible wayWhether you're a marketer looking to learn more about AI, a skeptic, or just someone curious about one of the top trends in marketing today and want your team to get more out of what you're doing today, this is episode on AI in marketing is for you.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

HANG IN THERE! Between Exit Five and some companies that I am involved with I can tell you that right now stress and burnout in marketing is higher than I've ever noticed in my career (so at least the last 10 years). And it makes sense as to why: the economy slumping, leads to fewer companies wanting to spend, marketing gets cut in all different areas, and we're being asked to do more with less and we're stressed / burned out / questioning what we're doing and re-visiting your career path. Hang in there. Almost across the board this is the case right now. With the exception of AI companies, most B2B SaaS companies are have a tough go of it. But maybe there's an opportunity for you to learn something new and acquire new skills during this time. Zoom out and look at your career - will you work at this one company in this one industry for the rest of your life? Probably not. So even if things aren't going great, can you take the longer term view and see what you can be learning right now? Can you think of it as you're being paid (hopefully...) to acquire new skills? Maybe you've never done a rebrand before but now you're being asked to do one one a shoestring budget. Great. Figure out how to get it done. Maybe you're selling to a new ICP and a new customer that you don't have experience writing for. Great. Maybe now you can add other layer to your depths as a writer and content creator. Maybe your boss is an absolute pain in the butt but the CEO is great and the company is in a great market. Can you learn from others around you in the company and in your industry and just ignore the PITA boss for a bit?Take a minute to zoom out, think about your career, and see the next 6-12 months as "skills acquisition" and see where it takes you. Continue to work in your current job, but see it is they are paying you for your development and maybe that can change how you think about your day-to-day job for the time being, especially if company growth has slowed.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Dave is joined by John Short (Founder & CEO of Compound Growth Marketing) to talk about two of the biggest trends in B2B marketing that aren't going away anytime soon: AI and ABM.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exit5marketing***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demos. Get your free keyword feasibility assessment today at demandwell.com/keywords.Thanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

This episode is from a live session we did with Zapier's Head of Content Marketing Lane Jones. Lane shared how Zapier has been able to generate a 450% ROI on content and she breaks down how Zapier's marketing team uses content across the entire funnel, from generating top of the funnel content for awareness, middle of the funnel content hat drives signups, and bottom of the funnel content that drives active users and paying customers.Lane will unpacks how Zapier built a strong SEO foundation with over 2,000 articles that generate 2M pageviews per month, and she breaks down the roles and responsibilities of Zapier's four person content team. She also discusses how Zapier thinks about content measurement and pitching the value of content to the CEO, plus she shares her perspective on AI + automation with examples of how Zapier's content team is using AI today to up their game.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Chris Buttenham, CEO and Co Founder of Obie (acquired by Seismic), joins the show to talk aboutHow Chris' experience installing security cameras that led to the customer insight behind founding ObieCreating and falling into startup categoriesThe process Chris took to successfully sell Obie to Lessonly and Seismic. Suggestions on how to grow the aSaaSins podcast

Kara Hardin is a mental health educator and clinician who works at the intersection of mental health and performance as CEO of The Practice Lab. She specializes in the complicated ways that mental health drives performance and how it shows up at work. She's a former practicing corporate and securities lawyer and holds a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) and a Juris Doctor from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law.We talk about:- Going from corporate lawyer to running a private psychotherapy practice- Working with high performers she calls "strivers" -- people who are pushing to be and do better- Finding meaning at work, even when "marketing isn't saving the world"- The balance between being burnout and being "crispy" and how much work stress is OK- Why she puts her phone in the closet from Friday to Monday - and why she's looking into getting a landline (!)- The myth of comparative suffering- Regulating your body- Why state dictates your story- How very few things require our immediate attention- And more (you're going to love this episode I know it)Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Lashay Lewis helps B2B SaaS companies create profit driven content strategies. We talk about why a B2B content strategy should be built from the bottom of the funnel up, why she interviews sales teams to understand "life before using the product" and why she interviews customer success teams to understand "life after using the product" and how that influences content strategy, how writing influences buyers, the power of a strong company POV, training in-house writers and freelancers in a way that scales, where podcasting fits in a B2B content strategy, why search volume can be misleading, and thoughts on how content marketers can use ChatGPT.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Allison Whalen is co-founder and CEO of Parentaly, a company combines career coaching and content to help expecting parents before, during and after their parental leave. She's a former MBA who worked in private equity and then as VP of Sales before starting Parentaly and taking to LinkedIn to launch the company and build her "Founder Brand." Dave and Allison talk about her LinkedIn strategy, starting a podcast, how someone with a background fully in sales (with no experience in marketing) came to appreciate the critical role of marketing, and more. Allison has used LinkedIn to help Parentaly grow past seven figures in revenue in under two years.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Dave shares five lessons from the wisdom of Exit Five community members about their lessons from reporting to the CEO for the first-time.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Bobby Pinero is co-founder and CEO of Equals and previously led the finance organization at Intercom as the company scaled from $1M ARR to $150M+, and from 20 employees to 600+ employees. We talk about learning from Steve Blank at Stanford, building Equals, the mission of replacing Excel, lessons from Intercom, how he thinks about marketing as former head of finance, and more.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

I hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend! Lately I've been thinking about this simple equation: Marketing = Experience + Revenue (credit: Drew Brucker) I just love the simplicity of it. Something you can explain to a 7-year-old. I brought back Kyle Lacy (CMO at Jellyfish) to talk about creativity, testing new ideas, brand vs. demand, giving your team the space to be creative, and more. Kyle is also an advisor to startups including Demandwell and Postal.io. Prior, Kyle was the CMO at Lessonly (got acquired by Seismic). Kyle has led teams at Seismic, OpenView, Salesforce, and ExactTarget. Check out our past podcast episodes: Ep. 31 - “Kyle Lacy, CMO at Lessonly, Talks About The Power of Irrational Ideas and Golden Llamas” Ep. 91 - on marketing planning (this is when Kyle was leading marketing at Seismic) Jellyfish has 209 people, Series C funding ($114.5M total) and a quick description: Jellyfish helps engineering leaders translate and maximize the business impact of their teams. In this episode we cover: What does “creative” mean to you; How do you know if an idea is worth testing; Why a great experience is the only thing that makes us relevant as marketers - it's our job; How do you separate brand + demand efforts effectively (HINT: if 75% of the effort goes to Demand, that allows your team to be more creative); How do you handle the creative experience on the Demand side; How do you give your team the space to be creative; What are 1-2 top creative marketing plays you're running at Jellyfish. You can find Kyle on LinkedIn >> https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy/  Check out Jellyfish >> https://jellyfish.co/ For more content, subscribe to Modern Startup Marketing on Apple or Spotify or wherever you like to listen, and don't forget to leave a review! And whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you: 1. Startup marketing strategy, execution and advising (25+ happy clients and mentees) >> www.furmanovmarketing.com 2. Sign up to get my monthly newsletter where I'm sharing playbooks and insights and cracking some jokes that will make you smile guaranteed >> https://share.hsforms.com/1cP1V40x7RGes5gHk1XNgNw47lba 3. Sponsor my Top 5% podcast and get startup founders, marketers and VCs hearing about your brand >> https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/anna-furmanov You can also find me hanging out on LinkedIn every single week: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/anna-furmanov/message

Generative AI is the hottest topic we've seen in marketing in a decade. In this session Exit Five Live session we went under the hood with Samyutha Reddy and CJ Donio from Jasper to unpack "Generative AI" and share use cases and tactical examples for B2B marketers today and how team's are using Jasper and AI to create content and generate ideas at scale.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Hana Jacover is an executive coach, former Director of Demand Generation, and founder of Hype House Coaching. We talk about managing burnout, fighting imposter syndrome, work/life balance, finding your right path, maintaining authenticity day to day, nonviolent communication, and how to get unstuck in your career.Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.comExit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfiveco***This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Kyle Lacy, the CMO of Jellyfish, joins us to answer the question submitted by an anonymous marketer: How does a marketing team transition to a revenue organization aligned under the pipeline?Kyle was involved in a similar process in his previous company, Lessonly. First, he explains what precedes the transition and the aspects marketing teams must focus on. Kyle also shares the challenges of such a process, mentioning the silos in which marketing and sales teams work. He says working within a revenue-driven framework helps get out of these silos. He also explains how reporting works in a revenue organization when sales and marketing teams work in alignment and how compensation should be structured for teams reporting under marketing.Special thanks to our sponsors:HockeystackAllegoOpensense

Dave is joined by Jimmy Daly (co-founder and CEO of Superpath). Jimmy is the former VP of Growth at Animalz (content marketing agency) who went out on his own to start the ultimate resource for content marketers like him: one place that covers strategy, management, writing, career development and more. This episode will be interesting to B2B content marketers and anyone that's ever had the thought "hey, I could start my own business out of this."- Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.com- Exit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/- Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfivecoThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosHere's how it works: Results: Demandwell is built for driving the outcomes that b2b marketers care about - demand, traffic, leads, and revenue.  Ease and control: Junior team members can follow recommended steps in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work.  Speed: With everything in one platform, Demandwell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours.  SEO expert or not, you should give Demandwell a try, and listeners of the Exit Five podcast can get a free competitive SEO Audit to see how you're ranking relative to your competitors. Go to demandwell.com/fomo to get your free SEO consultation today.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

This episode is from a fireside chat Dave did with Bill Macaitis, former CMO at Slack and Zendesk during G2's 2023 "Reach" event on how to build a brand in an economic downturn. We cover what is a brand, what is brand marketing, 8 ways to fit a brand into a marketing strategy,  creating a brand centric product, and examples from Bill's work over the years. - Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.com- Exit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/- Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfivecoThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosHere's how it works: Results: Demandwell is built for driving the outcomes that b2b marketers care about - demand, traffic, leads, and revenue.  Ease and control: Junior team members can follow recommended steps in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work.  Speed: With everything in one platform, Demandwell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours.  SEO expert or not, you should give Demandwell a try, and listeners of the Exit Five podcast can get a free competitive SEO Audit to see how you're ranking relative to your competitors. Go to demandwell.com/fomo to get your free SEO consultation today.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Just Dave on this short solo episode talking about how making a bet on a tool or technology can change the trajectory of your career and why it pays to be an early adopter.- Send guest pitches and ideas to hello@exitfive.com- Exit Five on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/exitfive/- Exit Five on Twitter: https://twitter.com/exitfivecoThanks to our 2023 presenting sponsors Demandwell, Jasper, and Zapier.This episode is brought to you by Demandwell. Demandwell is the best SEO solution for B2B SaaS marketers. They've helped customers like Lessonly drive 40% of their revenue from organic search. And they helped Terminus's make organic search their number one source of demosHere's how it works: Results: Demandwell is built for driving the outcomes that b2b marketers care about - demand, traffic, leads, and revenue.  Ease and control: Junior team members can follow recommended steps in the platform, while experts can customize and maintain full control over their work.  Speed: With everything in one platform, Demandwell helps you crank out content that ranks and drives leads in minutes rather than hours.  SEO expert or not, you should give Demandwell a try, and listeners of the Exit Five podcast can get a free competitive SEO Audit to see how you're ranking relative to your competitors. Go to demandwell.com/fomo to get your free SEO consultation today.Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production. They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast. Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest. Visit hatch.fm to learn more

Summary: This week on How To Win: Kyle Lacy, Chief Marketing Officer at Jellyfish and former CMO at Lessonly, a sales training and coaching platform. Lessonly was acquired by Seismic in 2021. Kyle also served as the Director of Global Content Marketing at Salesforce after its acquisition of ExactTarget in 2014. Before its acquisition, Lessonly made $24M in revenue and had a team of 230 that migrated over to Seismic. Lessonly was used by 1,200 B2B customers. In this episode, Kyle breaks down six important lessons he's learned throughout his career. We discuss making the customer the hero, why you should always be willing to experiment and take risks, and why you should encourage your teams to grow their relationships. I give my thoughts on the power of customer feedback, building a strong brand moat, and trusting your team to be creative.Key Points: Lesson One - The importance of a meaningful story (01:08) I explain why your company's story is more than just "marketing fluff" (04:06) Seismic's Doug Winter explains how they created a category around sales enablement (05:12) Lesson Two - Make your customers your heroes (07:36) I dive into why customer feedback is essential for your company with a quote from Red Hat's Claire Delalande (09:17) Lesson Three - Revenue first, brand second (10:47) My thoughts on why every marketer also needs to be a brand marketer (12:48) Lesson Four - When it comes to brand, be experiential and irrational (13:30) Rory Sutherland explains why some business problems require logic, and some require irrationality (15:04) I unpack why creative work sometimes requires thinking outside the bounds of a standard operating procedure (17:12) Lesson Five - Encourage alignment through shared goals (17:32) I define what product marketing really is, and why it's so important (22:19) Lesson Six - Invest in your team's careers (22:50) I talk through why personal relationships are essential to career growth with a quote from Verhaal Brand Design's Philip VanDusen (24:40) Wrap up (27:07) Mentioned:Kyle Lacy LinkedInKyle Lacy TwitterJellyfish LinkedInJellyfish WebsiteSeismic + Lessonly WebsiteSalesforce WebsitePlaying to your strengths and strengthening your brand identity with Seismic's Doug WinterClaire Delalande LinkedInRory Sutherland's AlchemyPhilip VanDusen LinkedInMy Links:TwitterLinkedInWebsiteWynterSpeeroCXL

In this episode, we talk How to Elevate Marketing Ops from a CMO's Perspective with Kyle Lacy. Most recently, Kyle was the SVP of Marketing at Seismic after Seismic acquired Lessonly, where Kyle was the CMO. Kyle has held several marketing leadership roles at several different companies. In addition, Kyle is an advisor to several organizations, a speaker and author of three books [this is something I just learned]. And, I think it is safe to say that Kyle believes in the power of community to accelerate careers. Tune in to hear: - Kyle's experiences working with different Marketing Ops teams, whether there were there lots of similarities in structure/size, and how he viewed those teams from a marketing leadership perspective. - How he thinks most Marketing Ops teams are perceived by their marketing leader (or executive team) and why?- What advice would he give to Marketing Ops professionals to be more involved with marketing strategy and planning. PLG Confessions by MadKudu The episode is brought to you by PLG Confessions. The interview series where top leaders in Marketing Ops & beyond share their experiences implementing PLG in their go-to-market and what they're still learning along the way.

On this episode Jordan talks with Max Yoder, CEO & Co-Founder of Lessonly. Lessonly had been building training software to help teams learn, practice, and do better work until it was recently acquired by Seismic, another player in the same space. Max has also authored two books, including To See It, Be It, which is full of notes on business and life.   Max shares his philosophy on how companies can strive to work more thoughtfully. He wants more love and compassion in the workplace, meaning a willingness to be vulnerable and greater understanding when those around us make mistakes. But he cautions against empathy as its own end: while it can be useful, it wears down people's batteries.   Looking to build your own BragWorthy Culture? Fringe can help. Fringe is the number one lifestyle benefits platform. Give your people the power of choice and save a ton of administrative headaches by consolidating existing vendors and programs into a simple, automated platform. Contact us at Fringe.us.

In August of 2021, Seismic made a big move and acquired Lessonly for $170 million dollars. Lessonly was and continues to be a teaching and enablement service, now operating under the Seismic umbrella. One of the big gains Seismic got from that acquisition was perhaps Kyle Lacy himself, who had formerly been the CMO of Lessonly. Kyle believes strongly in the power of enablement. He explained that if you're not enabling your team, you're not utilizing all of your tools and resources to the best of your abilities. He tells us more about how he's utilizing his stack to create a fully optimized stack. His other big belief is putting the customer experience first. No matter how good a tool is, if it doesn't provide the best experience possible for the customer, you may need to rethink having it in your stack. He shares all that and more.Join us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You'll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

Max Yoder is a renowned, successful and highly respected entrepreneur, visionary and thought leader. He is husband to Jess, dad to Marni, CEO and co-founder of Lessonly, and author of Do Better Work and To See It, Be It. He lives in Indianapolis, where he enjoys walking, talking, napping, reading, and writing. In this fun, deep and insightful episode, Max talks about the impact of growing up next to a funeral home, the importance of having great mentors, the story behind the Lessonly llama mascot, spirituality and the meaning/purpose of life, the downsides of social media, impactful books and thought leaders, and a moment of clarity he experienced dealing with the death of a close friend.  Connect with Max Yoder on LinkedIn Learn more about Lessonly by Seismic  Sponsors: Ninety.io Straticos Buy your copy of Level-UP To Professional: Second Edition  

Happy Memorial Day if you're in the US! WOWZA these episodes are popular...so let's keep this going! Sprinkling in another episode for the "Marketing Planning Series" where I invite back top startup founders and marketing leaders to talk about their marketing plans going into 2022. We'll dive into marketing channels, budget, resources and so much more. Kyle Lacy is SVP of Marketing at Seismic (Series G). Prior, Kyle was CMO at Lessonly (Series C) for almost 5 years where he 20X'd revenue growth (70% sourced by marketing). I've had Kyle on before - check out Episode 31 where we talk about “the power of irrational ideas and golden llamas” among other things. Seismic was founded in 2010, has ~1,175 people, is based out of San Diego, CA, and Series G funded. Seismic is the #1 global sales enablement solution. Lessonly got acquired by Seismic in 2021. Lessonly is focused on training and coaching sales teams and Seismic does way more. Here's what we hit on: 2022 Marketing Plan, budget splits (HINT: the board really cares about the one metric LTV/CAC so as long as that stayed in the lane we can do whatever with our budget); Marketing channels you're leaning into this year (HINT: organic should be primary, and should always be primary); Marketing content you're leaning into this year; How you're planning to build out resources; What's your secret sauce to managing such a big (marketing) ship?? (HINT: hire people that understand how to move quickly but also have empathy/EQ because it's easier to have those difficult conversations; You need to build the marketing plan that's right for YOUR team, resources, etc; Goals that Kyle wants to accomplish in 2022. You can find Kyle on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kylelacy Find out more about Seismic: https://seismic.com/ For more content, subscribe to Modern Startup Marketing on Apple or Spotify (or wherever you like to listen). You can find Anna on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/annafurmanov or visit my website: www.furmanovmarketing.com Thanks for listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/anna-furmanov/message

Ask a group of go to market leaders who owns go to market, and most will say the CEO. But this leader? He confidently says otherwise. In this episode, Sangram sits down with Kyle Lacy, SVP of Marketing at Seismic (formerly CMO of Lessonly, which was acquired by Seismic) to dive into his answer to the big GTM question. Kyle confidently says that marketing owns go to market, and he's sharing his reasoning–from his passionate standard for BDRs reporting up through marketing, to the power of brand on an entire customer lifecycle. This is a #MOVE podcast. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or here. Check out themovebook.com and you will find all the templates and scorecards to download for free and even an assessment that will help you find your next MOVE, faster.Listening on a desktop & can't see the links? Just search for MOVE in your favorite podcast player.Additional Resources:MOVE: The 4-Question Go-To-Market FrameworkKey Takeaways:Marketing owns the experience. Therefore, they own GTM.Go to market is an understanding of which channels and segments work“You can't build an amazing product if nobody hears about it”

Revenue leaders: Are you thinking like an ecologist?Quick refresher: an ecologist studies how wildlife interacts with their environment.On today's episode, Conner Burt (Co-Founde r and President at Lessonly ) describes Revenue Operations' nirvana state as a "healthy wetland."Now, if you're thinking ew gross a swamp with bugs—you're missing the big picture and how valuable it is to the ecosystem. Plants are improving water quality, food is nourishing the animals, and more.In the same way, RevOps is under-appreciated. Leaders must adopt a strategic, long-term mindset to understand how decisions impact the entire revenue ecosystem.Listen in to unpack this with us.More information about Conner and today's topics:LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connerburt/Company Website: https://seismic.com/lessonly/Do Better Work by Max Yoder  Meet us here every other week, and we promise to keep it spicy for you. Find Revenue Innovators onApple Podcasts,Spotify, our website, or anywhere you get podcasts.Email us with feedback and guest suggestions at revenue.innovators@outreach.io.

Revenue leaders: Are you thinking like an ecologist? Quick refresher: an ecologist studies how wildlife interacts with their environment. On today's episode, Conner Burt (Co-Founde r and President at Lessonly ) describes Revenue Operations' nirvana state as a "healthy wetland." Now, if you're thinking ew gross a swamp with bugs—you're missing the big picture and how valuable it is to the ecosystem. Plants are improving water quality, food is nourishing the animals, and more. In the same way, RevOps is under-appreciated. Leaders must adopt a strategic, long-term mindset to understand how decisions impact the entire revenue ecosystem. Listen in to unpack this with us. More information about Conner and today's topics: LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connerburt/ Company Website: https://seismic.com/lessonly/ Do Better Work by Max Yoder   Meet us here every other week, and we promise to keep it spicy for you. Find Revenue Innovators onApple Podcasts,Spotify, our website, or anywhere you get podcasts. Email us with feedback and guest suggestions at revenue.innovators@outreach.io.

Why should you communicate with your tech stack administrator? How do you track attribution consistently across sales and marketing? Is an NPS even useful?  Look no further—we have answers for you.  In this episode, I interview Jasmine Carnell , Sales Operations Senior Analyst at Lessonly about the pitfalls and triumphs of revenue operations, marketing, sales, and how they all feed into one another.  Join us as we discuss: - The intricacies of revenue operations - Challenges in marketing operations - The uses for an NPS (Net Promoter Score) - Best tools for marketing operations   Keep connected with us by subscribing on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or your favorite podcast player. Check out our website at Taylor.com.   Listening on a desktop & can't see the links? Just search for The Art of Marketing Operations in your favorite podcast player.

Mitchell Causey is the co-founder and CEO of Demandwell, an SEO software company that helps B2B SaaS marketers turn organic search into repeatable revenue. Mitchell is an SEO expert who debunks some common misconceptions about the field. They also talk about Google as the world's largest human experiment, the distinction between quantity and quality in terms of content, and the future of SEO. 0:00 Intro 0:54 Conversation with Mitch 4:16 Lessonly 5:20 Starting his own company 6:30 SEO to build brand 8:30 Google is a human experiment 10:50 Negative side of SEO 15:12 SEO stigma 17:40 Demandwell's customers 19:30 Quality VS quantity 24:40 SEO progress/results 28:38 Future of SEO, Human Experience 33:28 Share of Search Report 34:24 Outro Join The JuiceSign up for The Blend (weekly newsletter from The Juice)Follow The Juice:| Website | Blog | Twitter | LinkedInFollow Mitch:| Twitter | LinkedIn | Demandwell Follow Brett:| Twitter | LinkedIn 

In July of 2019, Lessonly Co-Founder Max Yoder joined High Alpha Speaker Series to discuss his book, Do Better Work. In this episode we revisit his overview of the themes from his book, including how to share before you're ready, getting more agreements, and having difficult conversations. No matter your rank, role, or team, the advice in this episode will lead to better understanding, accountability, and progress. Since this recording Lessonly, one of our very first High Alpha Studio companies, was acquired by sales and marketing enablement leader Seismic.

Kyle Lacy is the Chief Marketing Officer at Lessonly. In this conversation, we talk about why Marketing owns the SDR function at Lessonly, how to run your business like an entrepreneur, and how reading military history helps Kyle with perspective. If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to grow this show and find the best guests possible for you. Follow The Podcast: Apple/Spotify: Millennial Sales Twitter: TommyTahoe Instagram: TommyTahoe YouTube: TommyTahoe Website: Millennialmomentum.net