Content is the center of many marketing organizations. But it’ll go to waste if you’re not doing it right.
Devin Reed, Head of Content Strategy at Gong, shares the importance of communicating what’s in it for your audience. And that applies to both your end customers and your internal customers—the sales team.
In this episode, Devin shares his advice for creating content that raises eyebrows and enables your sales team to close deals.
Key Takeaways:
- How to structure incentives to ensure cross-functional alignment
- How to create “content packs” to help sales reps convert leads
- How to address content feedback from sales
- How to turn your product strategy into valuable content
- The importance of understanding who your product is helping and why
Things to listen for:
[02:15] “To ensure alignment and support of our cross-functional partners, everyone on my team ‘majors’ in content and ‘minors’ in something else.”
[04:20] “If you're not super clear to the sales team about what’s in it for them, you'll invest a lot of time, resources, and people power into creating leads, but will miss the follow up process that converts them.”
[12:15] “Social sharing is completely optional, but there’s been a snowball effect. The more people do it, the more other people see it and want to do it as well.”
[13:25] “We view employees sharing our content as a symbiotic relationship. It's a marketing channel when it starts to take off, but it also helps people build their own brand.”
[16:45] “You want to make your sales team feel heard and approach them as a partner, but you don’t have to jump on every idea you hear. You need to build up trust to earn the ability to say, ‘yes, and,’ or ‘no, not right now.’”
[19:30] “Engineers want to hear that their product works, it's selling, and people love it. My job is to tell people that the product exists and warm up the market so that later down the line, when someone sees a demo, they love it.”
[28:45] “If you can get someone to think, you’re in a really good place as a content creator. If people disagree with you, it’s okay. When you’re creating something different and new, one hundred percent of the market should not agree with you.”
Reference Links:
Trinity Nguyen:
Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the First 100 Days. A show for revenue practitioners, by revenue practitioners. Exploring how to build an aligned revenue engine, one practical tip at a time. I'm Trinity Nguyen.
Christian Kletzl:
And I'm Christian Kletzl. This season, we're talking about building revenue alignment, by asking high performing teams how they got it done.
Trinity Nguyen:
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of the First 100 Days. Joining us today is Devin Reed. Head of Content Strategy at Gong, a software that analyzes your customer-facing interactions across phone, email, and web conferencing to deliver your team the insights they need, to close more deals. Welcome to the show, Devin.
Devin Reed:
Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Great way to spend a Friday.
Trinity Nguyen:
In this season, we discuss all aspects of revenue alignment. Perfect topic too, for Friday. So far, our guests have come from demand gen, and sales, but revenue alignment also needs to come from aligning with other business partners. Devin, what are some ways that content teams work with sales success, and even demand gen teams in general?
Devin Reed:
At the risk of starting this off sounding egotistical, as the leader of the content team, I view content as the center, or the nucleus of most marketing orgs. That's not to say that we're the most important, or the smartest, because the brain is the nucleus. More just that content supports so many different elements of marketing from product marketing, demand gen, ABM events, et cetera. Of course, if we do our job right, help sales, as we warm up the market, and provide some leads to them.
Devin Reed:
There's many ways that we support, and partner with our cross-functional partners. It really just depends, is this a program, or KPI that we own, and we're running? Or are we in more of that supportive partnership function where we're helping their project, or their campaign come to life?
Trinity Nguyen:
One thing you mentioned with me in a previous call, the way that you structure your content team, because there's so many different business partners that each content person has a major, and a minor. Can you talk more about that?
Devin Reed:
So there are six folks on my team today ranging from thought leadership, content marketing, and growth marketing. The way that I structure it, is to ensure that alignment, and that they're supporting their cross-functional partners is, we split their quarterly incentives, or the KPI associated with their bonus into two factors.
Devin Reed:
Everyone on my team, as they say, majors in content, they have a program, or something that is theirs, they own, they have control over it. I think it's really important that you can look to a dashboard, or some somewhere and say, "Hey, my work is directly hitting this KPI, and supporting the business."
Devin Reed:
Everyone also minors in something else. For example, Nahal, on my team, she majors in social media, she runs our social, but she minors in events. She has a KPI that's events-driven, that is shared with our events team to ensure that alignment. Another person minors in ABM, another person minors, maybe product marketing, that sort of thing.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's got my wheels turning, because we're like, okay, how do we structure, to make sure that our team is not spread too thin across all of these events, ABM, and then other activity on top of the content, but, splitting it out to minors, and have one person focusing on it, helps with better supporting, and partnering with other teams. Let's start out with the SDR side, partnering with SDR team, because it's also selfishly on our end user gems, that's something we are trying to figure out as well, because we're scaling the sales team, and especially the SDR team. What are some best practices, or processes that you found, that helped enable the SDR to leverage content, in their prospecting, and nurturing? Cause the content we publish a lot, how do we make sure that everyone use it?
Devin Reed:
I come from a sales background, so I was a sales rep for six years, before I moved into marketing. I've been on both sides of the fence, and really the goal is to remove the fence. There should actually be no, fence at all. One of the things that I wanted to avoid was, as a sales rep, sometimes you just get leads thrown over the fence. You see it in maybe a dashboard, or an email update, or something. And you're like, I don't really have context. I don't really know what this is all about. Then, a lot of sales teams, there's not a lot of trust in the marketing department. That's just a fact of today. There's not a ton of trust that the leads are good, are going to help them.
Devin Reed:
If you're not super clear to the sales team of what's in it for me, why should I do this thing, on top of all the other things that I have going on? You're going to invest a lot of time, and resources, and people power into creating leads educating the market. Then, you're going to miss that follow up process. That's really going to help convert them, and show up in pipeline. Something we did as well, as we were starting to scale both our content output, and our sales team, was create something. We call an event pack, or a content pack. Content for content event pack for events. The goal is to be that bridge of throwing it across the fence, so to speak, and really just make it more aligned. We were doing three years ago, one campaign a month for content.
Devin Reed:
Now we're doing one a week. As that velocity increases, it's like 50 ish campaigns, not counting events, and not counting when we do two things in a week, which happens sometimes. That's a lot for any SDR, or AE to keep up with. What we've done is, create this content pack, which the goal is, to give them in about 60 seconds, all the context, and enablement they need, to follow up on those leads. For example, we just launched one this week, which is the reality of sales forecasting report. It's a ten page research, with survey data, and all this great frameworks. I have no expectation that the audience we made it for, is going to read all ten pages. Realistically, let alone every sales rep, is going to read all ten pages.
Devin Reed:
Internalize it, and go, great. I'm going to go attack these seven leads. If you're an enterprise, for that day. What it does, it's like, Hey, here's the report. In one sentence, here's what it is, why we did it, and then how you can act on it. Which includes an email template, and a cold call talk track, that's customized for this report. The reason why is, as you know, a few months back, we use Gong, obviously at Gong. I can hear sales development, and sales outreach to these leads. I could hear like, "Hey Christian, this is Joe over at Gong, on a recorded line. How's it going?" Christian's like, "Oh, it's going well, what's up?" Cause Christian's super nice, and he would always pick up a cold call. What I would hear sometimes is, "Hey Christian, I saw you were looking at our content, how's it going?
Devin Reed:
That's not a great way to start a conversation. You're already wasting Christian's time as a busy VP of sales. What I wanted to do was transform those conversations to something more focused, which is going back to the report as an example. "Hey Christian, saw you downloaded our forecasting report. Curious what stood out to you? Was there a data point you liked most?" Christian goes, "Oh, I really like this thing. ABC whatever it is." "Oh, great. Okay. It sounds like you're focused on increasing your forecast accuracy, how's that going today?" You can pull that thread, and you can start to feel a more focused conversation, and we can see that's leading to better conversions, and a pipeline later down the line. That's the full, I would say TLDR, that was not TLDR. That was the long version, but I'm happy to dive into any of that more specifically if you'd like.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's genius, because I don't think any company actually goes the extent of turning. Some companies were trying to summarize in three bullet points about the guide, et cetera. But, to go to the extent of have the talk track, to enable the sales team, to have a conversation with prospects about that piece of content, I think that's as genius. Do you do this for every tier one, or gated piece of content?
Devin Reed:
At Gong, we're content heavy as some folks know. We have a lot, there's 80 pieces of premium content, just top of funnel. We're always adding to it, and removing because you got to keep it fresh, and prevent it from being outdated. Any new piece of tier one content, which candidly, if we're bothering to make it, should be tier one. I don't really know why we'd make a tier two piece of content or, tier one event. We're making this, because really the thought is, if we're investing, especially on the events, you can invest a hundred thousand dollars easily on a sponsorship, or something like that. If you get your President on stage for a hundred thousand dollars, you better hope every single person that was in that room is getting targeted timely, follow up. Otherwise, again you're just marketing, can become a cost center really quickly. If you're not capitalizing on all that great work.
Christian Kletzl:
You were talking about, running a campaign per week. I feel the way I've seen Gong, is that a campaign is not only what the content team in a sense does for the SDR, or for the sales team, but also the other way around. You enable your teams to also post about the topic, or add their own experience, when it relates to that topic. What's the strategy behind that? How do you actually make sure that the people post, and that the different teams work together with you?
Devin Reed:
I use campaign lightly, cause there's larger, quarterly campaigns, like our Super Bowl ad, and all the digital ads that go with it. We have these big, broad stroke campaigns, with smaller touch points in between. The ones that are weekly. We are doing social push, we're emailing our database, we're doing some sponsored ads, and pay to play type stuff. Just to get the word out there. For these bigger, we'll call them super tier ones, just to delineate. It could be a couple different things, Christian. It could be this report, for example, this took multiple departments coming together, a lot of resources. We want to get the most out of it. Another, could be just a big corporate announcement. Hey, we have this huge partnership with LinkedIn that we want the world to know about.
Devin Reed:
Or, we got around a funding, or something in that upper echelon of information that's worth sharing to the market. We do what we call, and what you've seen, is Gongster activation, or employee activation. We call ourselves Gongsters. There's three kind of ways, that's a little bit long. I can give the short version of the medium version, Christian. There's three E's that we follow to make this happen. I hate that it starts with three E's, because it sounds like a market E framework, but it just happens to be the case. It's empower, educate, and equip. At really high level, empower is when you join Gong, you feel empowered to post on LinkedIn, because our CEO's posting, our CMO's posting. Guys like Devin, sales reps, it's a cultural thing, it's accepted, and encouraged. Already from the jump, you feel comfortable doing it if you want.
Devin Reed:
The next one, is to educate, which there's two different sessions. As soon as you join Gong, you have a CMO session, which is our marketing strategy, which includes, "Hey, we're really active on LinkedIn. Here's why we're really active on LinkedIn, and sometimes this guy Devin's going to ask you, or now Nahal, on my team is going to ask you, if you want to share this information, publish it on your own, et cetera, but it's completely optional."
Devin Reed:
The second session that we do, is we put together a 30 minute LinkedIn training. A lot of people want to be active on LinkedIn. They don't know how. How's the algorithm work? I don't want to embarrass myself. We just do that for fun, and just educational purposes. That way, people leave going, okay, I know how to do this, and I feel confident. Notice it's give first. Then, the equip is the ask. Which is, "Hey, we just launched this forecasting report. Here's a prompt, another one pager, which is what it is, why we made it, and three prompts that you can use to write your own post. Trinity might be like, "I'm really busy today. I'm going to go for the pure copy paste post. I don't need to change anything."
Devin Reed:
Another version Christian might see, which is fill in the blank. It's a little more personal to Christian. Like, "Hey, as the sales leader, I've struggled with forecasting. That's why this report's awesome." That sort of thing. By having that give mentality, empowering people, and then equipping them to make it super easy the day that we want that to happen, it just takes off on it's own. I don't review anybody's posts. No one's forced to do it. It's completely optional. It's just the snowball effect. The more that people do it, the more that other people see it, and the more that other people want to do it as well.
Trinity Nguyen:
You guys are the pioneer of this employee advocacy play. That helps so much with Gong's brand, is incredible. Our teams doing it too, but I can imagine, at our size is easy to corral, and get people to buy in. Gong is huge, so be able to maintain that momentum is incredible.
Devin Reed:
We started training when we were smaller, we've been doing it for years. When I was even on the team as a sales rep, it was easier when there's 40, 50, a hundred people. Everyone checks slack, everyone sees everything. As you get to 1200 people, you have to keep the momentum going. That executive buying is super important. I email it out to people, when the CEO, and the CMO responds in two minutes, it goes awesome report, really excited, here's my post.
Devin Reed:
Everybody else is going to see that, and go, "Oh, maybe the passive,", or like, "Oh, maybe if they did it, maybe I really should do it today." That sort of thing. It's worked out really well. We just viewed it as a symbiotic relationship. It's a marketing channel when it starts to take off, but it's also, we want people to build their own brand. You don't have to talk about Gong every day. Talk about whatever it's you want. Whatever's personal to you
Trinity Nguyen:
Actually, that part's important. A lot of companies, it just ask employees to share the companies updates all the time, and it's really boring, and frankly, it's not authentic. Maybe once a quarter is one like a upper echelon on tier one plus, that's when the employees share. Then, the rest of the time, should be their personal experience. Assuming that they believe in the products, because they're part of the company, then they will share their own personal experience, and basically build a brand for themselves, and as a company, the company benefits too.
Devin Reed:
Absolutely. That's the thing too. You don't want to overuse the tactic, and you want to be intentional, and smart with what you decide, because if you ask your team every week, or two to just, "Hey, we're hiring an engineer. Hey, we're hiring a Marketing Director." Most people care, but it's not intrinsic to them. They're not passionate about hiring an engineer, if you're a sales rep. If it's, "Hey, we have this new product video that is professionally done." Or something, a big campaign, like I said earlier about whatever it is in your industry, that to me is worth asking the team, because you can describe to them. "Hey, this is going to help us build our brand. The more brand awareness, and affinity we have, the easier sales calls are going to be. We're going to build pipeline, means you're going to make more money." You just have to really, what's in it for me? Across the whole comms strategy.
Trinity Nguyen:
I think that's a tagline for revenue alignment, or just alignment general. Figure out what's in it for me, and me here is your partner team. Trying to figure that piece out, how you position content will help SDR with their cold calling. Don't get hung up on actually add value to the prospects, and AE's using this content to nurture your prospects throughout the sales process. I think when we position it that way, and help them see how, they'll actually buy in more. That's from the content enabling, or partnering with other teams. How does it work the other way? How do you see the other teams partnering with content, and basically helping your team achieve your goal?
Devin Reed:
One of the ways is ideas, which we all know sales people are really quiet, and they don't have opinions. Oh wait, no. Christian's shaking his head, he's like, that is not any sales team I've worked with. No, I say that lovingly, because my first thought is we get a lot of market feedback, but we get a lot of sales feedback as well. We'll just get shoutouts in slack from time to time like, "Hey, I had this great call." And they'll tag me in a Gong call. "Mentioned this report, they really liked it. I got a quick meeting. Really appreciate it." Or they'll come back and say, especially as we're moving more up market to more enterprise accounts, we'll get feedback from leaders, or enterprise reps saying, "Hey, this was really cool. Totally like it. Can we tweak the next version to speak to this persona, to actually hit on a different pin point?"
Devin Reed:
Cause I'm hearing this often, and that's phenomenal input. Now, the tricky part, and I tell my team this, is we're not task rabbits. Just because someone gives us an idea, it doesn't mean we jump to it, and go make it immediately, and deprioritize our other stuff. You want to make your sales team feel heard. You want to make them feel like this is a partnership, which it is. I would say one in four, or five ideas eventually end up happening, but it's not necessarily its own campaign, or its own content. It's actually like, "You know what, we're working on this thing right now. This would be a great addition." Even if it's a quick paragraph to hit on, that or something of the like. That, I'd say is a quick one. I think the key there is you usually need to build up some trust as a marketing team, to earn that ability to say yes and, or no, not right now, but maybe later.
Trinity Nguyen:
We definitely have a long queue of requests from our sales team, and CS team. If you keep running after requests, and you ended up being like task rabbits, or lose a focus. To be able to put them into a parking lot, reorganize them based on theme priorities, and business objectives, and then execute on that. Easier said than done, to be honest. That list is really long, and they live in Asana, they live in Slack, they live everywhere. It's a challenge.
Christian Kletzl:
I was thinking about the relationship with engineering, or data. I think specifically the data have a content. Again, I'm curious how your relationship is there in both sides, because on the other hand, how can content support engineering, and vice versa?
Devin Reed:
Gong, we do a lot of data backed content. When we were smaller, I would literally just get on the phone for an hour with Yoni, who was one of the product leaders, who's out in Israel, and I'd be like, "All right man, I hear about this deals board thing. I don't really know what it is. Pull up a deck, get a beer, cause it's late for him, and early for me, or coffee, or whatever. Let's just go through this." It's a really fun conversation, because I just get to basically get into discovery mode. Which, he's like, "Okay, Dev, we're building this, and here's this thing." I go, "Okay, hold on. Who is this for? Why did you build it? What problem are you solving with this thing, that you love, and think is awesome? He'll share, "Oh, you don't talk to managers about this, and they're struggling with that."
Devin Reed:
I'm just writing notes down. Because, what I'm doing is, I'm going to take that product, and I'm going to turn that into thought leadership. All you have to do, is make it product agnostic. It's funny. I'm like, "Tell me all about the product, and why you made it, so I can ignore the product for a little while, for a top of funnel." Then, between that in product marketing, now that we're much larger, and we have a bigger product marketing team, I can take that official messaging, or that product screenshot, and turn that into middle funnel content. Then of course, our product marketing, and customer marketing teams work on bottom funnel case studies, and once obviously the product is out.
Devin Reed:
That's how we support engineering in a way, Christian. From what I've experienced, engineers want to hear that their product works, that it's selling, people love it. My job is to tell people that it exists, and warm up the market to needing this thing. So later down the line, when someone sees a demo, and again, they can hear it in Gong. It's like, "Oh, they love it." I love seeing them get excited, like, "All right, cool. This thing I spent months on, it's actually being sold. People are actually using it, and they really like it."
Christian Kletzl:
That's totally true. I talked to an engineer today, and told him the feature that he launched today is like, it's going to make the week for some of our customers. It's going to make the week for some of our customer success manager, and his eyes lit up. Totally agree.
Trinity Nguyen:
I really like the part where, Devin, when you say like, "Hang on, wait a minute. Who is it for, and why did we build this?" I think that's so critical when we talk to the engineering product team, because they spend months building this, so this is already history to them. They're just excited about the feature, and product, and want to tell the world about it. For us, and for our audience, is awareness stage. Tell me who is it for? I'm going to take out that clip that you just said, Devin, and want to send to our entire engineering team.
Christian Kletzl:
I think that everybody in the team should ask that question a little bit more, before anything that they're doing. Any content, any material, even sales users, et cetera. Yep. That question belongs to everyone.
Trinity Nguyen:
Especially the product. Sorry.
Devin Reed:
It makes sense. Cause in marketing, if shouting our solution, and products, and features worked, we would sell more, and you'd see it even more. There'd be no content thought leadership, it'd just be product marketing. It makes sense, like I just built the solution. Of course, that's what matters most. It does, but if you're in marketing, you need to do problem awareness, and problem marketing first, because no one's going to think they need a solution if they don't experience the problem first. Most product leaders are going to know what that problem is, but that's also my job, is to take a four word, or ten word answer, and turn that into messaging, turn that into a campaign. Sometimes it's really zeroing in on a specific word, or one specific answer in that air quote interview process with product.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's really great. Earlier on, you mentioned partnering with the event team, and Gong just wrapped up The Road Show. Can you share a little bit how the sausage was made from the content side? How the content partner with events, and this, and building the brand for the company.
Devin Reed:
For Flagship Event Series, which is, we have an annual conference celebrate the Revenue Intelligence Summit, and then this one we turned into Celebrate: The Reality Road Show. It's a big partnership. Honestly, I'm usually very involved, not just sometimes hosting and presenting, but doing a lot of the content line up, and mapping it out. First, it's who is this for? What is our core message? Why should anyone care? My favorite thing, is to not talk about product, just because I know it gives you broader reach. People are more interested in their problems, and thought leadership, and guides, and help. Then you can say, by the way, we have this awesome product, or this is what we do, and it's a much smoother transition. We're mapping it out based on personas. For the Reality Road Show, we were pretty executive focused. Like VP's, and above Directors, for large companies.
Devin Reed:
We're looking at societal trends. What is happening in the world today that our audience cares about, which is a macroeconomic climate, doing more with less efficiencies. Some people are still growing, but we're not hiring as much, even though there's layoffs, and a talent market right now. It's really weird, but we're looking at that. We want to meet people where they are. We don't want to be too far in right field with this messaging that they're not at all resonating with. Then we align that, with persona cares. What do they care about as VP sales? What do they focus on as a CRO sales enablement? What product messaging do we want to share? We had a big announcement, we released Gong Forecast. We're connecting macroeconomic trends with personas, with forecasting. Between that, you just start to map out, okay, what sessions make sense?
Devin Reed:
Who should be the speakers? Who do they want to hear from? That's us a little bit, because we've earned that. They want to hear from their peers. They want to hear from other CRO's. The number one thing I hear from C level folks, is I want to hear from other people at similar companies, facing the same problems as me. Super not easy to do, from a content standpoint, but when you can get two CRO's, and an analyst at Forrester, not talking about Gong, but talking about, all these macroeconomic trends, and things of the like, then you have a really compelling event. That's how you can promote a really compelling event, get people to show up. Of course, you got to wow them once they get there.
Trinity Nguyen:
Basically, that sounds like your team plans, the theme of the event, or The Road Show, in this case. Even the workshop, the content within the event.
Devin Reed:
We partner with customer marketing. We partner with the man gen, we partner with the head of events. It's definitely not just content led. It's definitely a partnership, because everyone's got their perspective on the event, but at the end of the day, we all came together, agreed on the name, agreed on the flow, what we're going to do. Then, I had a big part with my team of, okay, we got to find speakers. We got to map out this agenda. What visuals do you want? You can get from that strategic level, down to the actual, very tactical level. You have to hit every note when you have a big flagship event, and especially road shows. Road shows, they're a beast. They're fun, but they're a lot.
Trinity Nguyen:
Well, that's impressive. It's almost like running a media company, at the stage that you guys are at. Fighting the guests running it. Wow. I hope you had some sleep in the last few months. That sounds intense.
Devin Reed:
A little bit. I went to the first three, there's seven total events. The first was in San Francisco, then we had one in New York, which also a hybrid event. There was a couple thousand people registered for that one. Then we went to London, I went to all three of those, and then I took a week off. I'm like, I'm tired. I've been presenting. I need some time. Then, the events team has been running with these executive dinners for the back half. Four executive dinners across the country, little bit of content, more networking, a little bit lighter on the agenda, and then a really good dining experience.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's a dream team. Sounds so good. How big is your team right now, Devin?
Devin Reed:
The marketing org is around 50, 55. My team is six, and not including myself.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's the goal standard. Anyone listening to this call right now, running a marketing team is like, "We're going to get this one day." It sounds so fun, and so exciting, and everything we want to do, but we always have to be like, five years from now.
Devin Reed:
It started three-ish years ago. With 10 marketers, putting together our first industry conference, and then we went virtual, and then we started a road show. You piece it apart, and then you compound it. As you scale your team, and if you're not growing your marketing team with people power, then it's impossible to compile a roadshow one half the year, then a big industry conference, and all the stuff that has to happen in between, to keep the lights on.
Christian Kletzl:
Not this year, Trinity, not this year. Let's maybe plan for next, but that sounds a whole lot of work.
Devin Reed:
That's actually really good. You wouldn't want to do it this year. It's too late in the year now. You'd hate yourself in a couple months.
Trinity Nguyen:
No way. I'm not planning this year. You said next year though, right Christian? I'm expecting to see that in the budget planning for next year.
Christian Kletzl:
I'm going to have nice dinners. That's all I heard from what Devin said.
Devin Reed:
Yeah. We can get Christian nice dinners. That's easy.
Christian Kletzl:
I totally think people need to listen, and then just do the same thing, because I think it's really an awesome strategy.
Trinity Nguyen:
I think what's really interesting is, Gong's been so public about the playbook. Especially you, Devin, you shared your playbook all the time. I heard you on podcast multiple times, and I always take note, and stick it behind the wall. The one tip that you shared, I think eons ago, about how you decide on topics, even content. It has to be differentiated enough, just not better. They have to let me say, raise eyebrow test. I told my entire team, like we have to do this.
Devin Reed:
Yeah, that was surprisingly well received. I thought it was like one of those silly things I made up, but I was like, literally editing copy. I'm like, my eyebrows haven't moved. This is a little boring. It was my own work by the way. I was like, well, what? I get that a lot. How do I know what's really insightful? How do I know what's really? I'm like, if your eyebrows move up, or down, you're in good shape. Because, if they go up, you're surprised. You're like, "Wow, I never thought of it that way." Or they furrow, and they go down. You're like, "Hmm, I'm not sure if I agree with that." Either way, you've got someone thinking, and that's a really good place to be as a content creator, if you can get someone to think. It's okay if they disagree with you. If you're really creating something different in a new point of view, a hundred percent of the market should not agree with you.
Trinity Nguyen:
I love it. You've been so like vocal about sharing these tips. It's like an open playbook, across a team, and everyone's basically trying to copy, and yet no one's been able to do it that well. It's really incredible.
Devin Reed:
I appreciate that. My honest thought, is marketing is market facing. It's public by nature, and so by sharing how we do it, my hope is just to help other marketers learn faster. I learned a lot the hard way in sales, just given a quota, and some coaching, and you're like, go get it. Marketing's a little bit better, but there's no school. I think Dave Gerhardt says, "You don't go to school for B2B marketing." I thought, "Hey, I'll teach folks what I've learned along the way. I hope it helps them."
Devin Reed:
At the end of the day, and I think it was like the CEO of Walmart said like, I think he like left his laptop, or his financial planning, or some big plan strategy on a plane. Someone asked him, "What do you think about that?" Essentially said, "Strategy without execution is meaningless." I can sit here all day, and tell you strategy, and what we did. If you don't have a team that can put it together, really understands how to do it, down to the tactical level. Then, it's not really going to work.
Trinity Nguyen:
That's true. Well, that's beautiful, and great way to wrap up. Well, thank you so much, Devin, for carving time on a Friday, and hop in, and chat with us.
Devin Reed:
Absolutely. I enjoyed it.
Trinity Nguyen:
Thanks for joining us on this episode of The First 100 Days. Be sure to hit that follow button as we get more revenue teams to share their stories.
