22: Shifting the mindset away from Sales Enablement to Demand Creation

Historically, our good friends in sales have believed that the purpose of marketing is for us to provide materials for them so that they an be better at sales.  As marketers, we have actually relied on sales to do marketing.

In recent years, B2B buying has fundamentally changed.  B2B buyers want to buy on their own terms in the same way they would purchase any other product.  Aka.. they will reach out when they are ready.

This means that we as marketers need to make resources more regularly available to buyers before they come in contact with sales.

In this podcast we jump into the specifics of how to repurpose common content pieces typically used by sales to drive demand.

Transcript

 📍 From Dragon 360, this is Digital Banter, a podcast focused on modern marketing tactics and driving real business results. And now here are your host, James and Zach.

 📍  📍 Up everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Digital Banter. As always, I'm Zach, of course. My co-host James is with me right alongside. Welcome back everyone. Welcome back. Indeed. So we had an idea for this podcast episode and it really evolved into something.

I didn't expect it to be. So really what we're tackling today is taking the mindset of sales, enable it enablement. Let's see how many times I mess that up in the episode. Sales enablement materials and moving it to demand creation. Now what we mean by that is you kind of have these typical sales enablement activities and, and if we were to go into that, some of the top ones, right?

Typical case studies, trade show booths, um, product guides. I have always called them one sheeters. Um, and, and webinars. And not to say that these aren't powerful, but what we wanna do, Really elevate the mindset behind how we're utilizing them, where they're being utilized in this demand gen experience, and taking them from this sales oriented piece of content or information and moving to more of a marketing life cycle and, and building it into just the natural movement on your marketing team.

Right. Specifically. Case studies. This is one of my favorite ones, and this is really where the conversation started for this podcast episode, is case studies are always a thing that you have, right? They're on your website, whether they're under resources or the about us view, our work type thing, right?

But then the sales team never really utilizes them. Maybe they'll use a little snippet of it in their sales deck, but it's really, Oh, hey, can you send me a case study? Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll send you a couple case studies if they're asking for 'em. Why didn't they have that beforehand? And this is where this conversation came from.

So historically, this goes back to another comment that James and I have mentioned, and um, I don't know a podcast or two heck, maybe four or five at this point, but historically, the sales team was being told to do marketing items. Also marketing was being told to do marketing items. And really what we want to get to, and we've mentioned this as well, we want the sales team to be order takers and let the marketing team do the hard work.

Right? Yeah. So old school B2B marketing, right? Was so focused on trade shows, sales led organizations and marketers were essentially. You know, it was heavily product marketing focus of creating marketing materials that sales can then go distribute. Um, and this, this dates back to honestly like pre-digital, right?

So you would go to your trade show once a year, and I mean maybe more than once a year, but you would go to your trade show and you would have all of your marketing materials, and that was like your one shot opportunity to meet with all of your customers. And there's a lot of people who talk. You know how this has changed, like Chris Walker talks a lot about this.

Dave Gerhardt talks a lot about this, but it, it's kind. Interesting how old school B2B marketing still takes place. And we'll go into like how we think that should evolve. But I mean, it's exactly what you said is that historically sales teams have relied on marketing teams to essentially just make materials for them.

Right? And then the sales team has been responsible for distributing those materials versus, you know, 2022. It's more about how can we get those marketing materials in front of our customers every day, rather than making the sales team essentially do marketing and do all of the selling. , if you go back to college and the four Ps of marketing sales actually falls under marketing just under the promotional aspect of it, right?

Where, you know, marketing is product, pricing, distribution, all of that stuff. And, and really, I. One of the big things we're talking about here is like content distribution and how it gets to our customers versus what it has been historically. Somebody comes to you and then, you know, the sales team is saying, Oh, hey, like this prospect wanted a case study.

Can we create something? Hey, this prospect  needs a sales sheet that they can bring to their team internally. Can you go create this? And, you know, marketing has, they have marketing teams running around in circles rather than, Having all that content readily available and actually in multiple different mediums that they can distribute.

Absolutely. At the end of the day, one of the biggest things behind this discussion and why this can be a hot topic and, and why this is really kind of a. A, a key idea in demand gen, whether you are listening to us here at Digital Banter or listening to other podcasts in this sector, right? It's at the end of the day, standardized sales enablement.

What we've known prior is not scalable. You're not going anywhere with it. And there's a couple reasons behind that, right? One of the biggest one,  is the sheer amount of people involved, but then also,  the cold outreach. It, it's difficult in a, in a traditional, Style of sale. Right. And I, I've experienced this, I've worked for a SaaS company.

I mean, those SDRs is very typical job title for them, Right? Are making cold calls to these businesses or organizations. What, what's coming out of that? Why are we, James, I can tell. You wanna say something like, The big thing, the big thing with sales is sales falls under the assumption. Everybody in your ideal customer profile is ready to buy.

And it's just whether or not, and it's just whether or not they've heard your story yet. And I mean, the reality is that is just not how it works. You know, you'd have no idea what the financial situation looks like in a certain company, how budget is allocated, who the key decision makers are. Like all of this stuff changes from company to company.

And again, if you're going from this, Outbound, I mean, you're, you're moving from outbound to inbound. That's what we're talking about. I mean, this like HubSpot 20 2006, Right. , Um, where if we're creating marketing materials for outbound, there's just, there's, there is no scalability to that because like you said, you're adding headcount, you're adding it's cold.

Outreach is difficult. I mean, you reach out to a thousand people. Get in contact with one versus, Hey, via paid media on LinkedIn. Like, I can reach everybody for a price point, of course, and they're gonna come to us when we're, they're ready because they, because our messaging resonated, our story resonated, et cetera.

Absolutely. And I, I think that's a key proponent, right? The. What's out there? We mentioned this, I wanna say it was last week or the week prior, that everything needs to work in tandem with each other. When we're making these one off materials. Odds are it's for a very specific purpose. Now, if, let's say this client, this prospect is coming from paid media efforts, and yeah, they went through a couple channels, right?

They saw stuff on LinkedIn, went retargeted via display, retargeted via Facebook, and then ultimately through a branded search. Ended up filling out some sort of form and now they're to you, the sales team, right? Odds are you're one sheeter that you're going over or sending to them has almost nothing to do with what they've previously read.

Whether they read a blog, an ebook, whether they were reading just standard ad copy that is long form on LinkedIn and maybe they didn't engage with it besides, you know, click the C more button type aspect. So, and everything has to work in tandem together. So what's the sales aspect, right? At the end of the day, a lot of what the marketing team is putting out there is niche content that is relating to this prospect, right?

Typically it's a problem, solution, and down the path. So, Now a sales one sheeter, in my experience and in a traditional sense, right, is speaking more to the sale and less to the problem solution, right? If you spend this much money with us, you'll get this as opposed to, Hey, here's your problem. We literally have the solution to solve all these with one tool, right?

What is gonna relate to them more? What have we been speaking to more? Again, everything needs to work together and almost. Again, part of the whole journey together. They go from one spot to another. It should be consistent. Yeah. And we'll, we'll get into this a bit, but like it's, it's about storytelling at the end of the day.

Absolutely. Like you need to have a consistent story and consistent messaging. And that's where. These sales led organizations, it all the time wasted that it come, when it comes to one off requests that happen because of events or a specific large deal that they're working on. , a lot of that stuff should already be regularly available and not in, It's funny, we, we talk about, I'm going back to what you said about case studies, right?

So Yeah. With a case study. What they're looking for is sales has always asked for a case study and they wanna find a case study that directly relates to whoever they're talking to. Right? Absolutely. Because whoever they're talking to is asking for proof of like, Hey, proof that proof to me what you're selling.

Does what you say it's going to do. That's, that's all a case study does. And I mean, let's be honest, like most case studies are kind of a load of BS when it comes to like SAS stuff cuz it's like, you know, I don't know, IBM saved 30 hours and was able to, this resulted in this much money, right? That's like basically what a SAS case study works with.

But like that, that's not the story that is gonna make somebody make a decision. , , they wanna see how this is directly applicable to their business. And that's where, like you, you, you need to have the story behind it. And like I said, we'll go into this in further detail, but I feel like that's a huge gap that's missing right now in how marketers are making materials, is that we're just being reactive rather than proactive.

Absolutely. You know, back to that case study example, one of the best case studies I ever saw, um, I can't remember the exact company's name or even who it was from, but it really was, they, they, it was following that guideline of we saved this company 30 hours, and that was what it led with, right? That's, that's a capture, right?

If you're someone looking at this like, Well, heck, I, I would love to say 30 hours of labor, but what they did with their case study is they turned it into, what did those 30 hours? Because they were able to save 30 hours, and you could tell this was an interview process with this client or some sort of system where the client told them this, they were able to, I, I believe what it came out to be is they almost built a whole new division of their business that ended up resulting in another like $10 million at the end of the year because they had this extra 30 hours, 30 hours of manpower that they could put towards these other resources.

They were able to reinnovate not only their process, but also their, their, their, what's it called? Their company, their organization, right? So taking a case study just beyond the face value of, Hey, here's, here's what we did. Bias. It needs to be more about leverage your success more than just one KPI that you affected.

At the end of the day, what is this business doing because you helped them. Take it a step further. And I think like, it's funny, like us as an agency, I feel like we miss that all the time. Absolutely. Because we can say like, I can manipulate a case study to say whatever I want it to say. Right? Like, I mean, I can't, like we're in the, We talk a lot about like startups, right?

How many, how many agencies are just riding the coattails of a successful company? Like a, Oh hey, like their revenue grew 10 x while they were with us. And it's like, okay, well that's just because you got in early. They had a really awesome product and it sold right. Versus. What did you actually do to contribute to that growth?

And, you know, in the agency space, it's, it's impossible to give that level of detail. I would much rather have an open, honest conversation with a prospect around what we think we can do for them, and then maybe cite some relevant examples. But like dropping a case study on them is, , you know, hey, this, this company increased our traffic, this company increased their clicks.

This company had this return on ad spend. Right? You can, everything's, you can manipulate anything. And in this day and age, I think everybody understands that. Yeah. And see that's the problem too, is people can read through the bullshit these days, right? So it, it's becoming more and more. Important. It's, it's, the importance is growing here to be, um, relevant, right?

Be helpful as opposed to being sales forward. You need to be able to be there as like, Hey, we've got your back. We're a team behind you. Right? And I think that's an agency kind of model, right? We've talked about it before, partnership versus vendor, right? We're here to help you, or, Hey, we actually have your back.

We're a part of your. Right. And that, that kind of speaks to that mentality, and it goes to the, it, it speaks the same to what you're putting out there. So, um, really the, the looming question here, right, and I think we're gonna go through each of these kind of examples we've talked about is. How do we reach our audience and change the sales enablement mentality to be helpful, relatable, relevant, whatever, you know, spark word we want to use for this, right?

Um, how do we do this? And I think the best way to do it is talk about how we can really leverage our content to a whole new level. And I think, you know, we've been on this case study pathway because I think that is one of the more. Underutilized, but overused pieces of material, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Case studies are something that, you know. We, we've, we, I don't know, I guess we kind of shit on it a little bit, right? But really what it needs to turn into is a user story. And I talked about the, pardon me, I talked about the, the case study that I absolutely loved. And again, this was years ago. I couldn't even tell you what it was.

I wish I could share it with our audience cuz it was fantastic. It was a user story because it told the story of, Yeah, hey, in the first paragraph, Yeah, we used their software, they did a good job. We saved this much time. Right? Save money, saved time. Very typical, right? But then it became two or three more pages of here's what we did with that time that they saved us.

Here's what we did with that money that they saved us. This legitimately worked because we were able to do this right? And at the end of the day, what you can chalk that up to. More, you know, user generated content ugc, if you will. Yeah. So my philosophy here, is that a recommendation, Let's go back to where marketing originated.

Word of mouth. Yeah. Word of mouth recommendation is a hundred times more effective than. Proof that you did essentially like fake proof that you did what you said you were going to do via case study, right? Would you rather have five recommendations from five different CMOs who worked with you and had an awesome experience?

Or would you rather have a bunch of stats that showed that their revenue increase over the time that they were working with you? Right. I would go with those recommendations absolutely. Any day because it's, it's, and this kind of goes back to brand, it's about whatever that brand experience is working with you as a company.

If you're a software product like, I mean, I mean, does it do what it says it's going to do? In most cases, the answer is yes, but the things that you don't know is like, is it easy to use? Was it difficult to onboard with your team? Um, like what are some of the, the other pain points aside from the results that this tool helped you accomplish?

And that's where your agency side, I think it's exactly the same way, like we should, I would much rather have those recommendations than a bunch of stats that I pulled.  And I would encourage people to ask for recommendations, but really what this goes into is playing on the emotional element of these case studies Absolutely a lot more than the statistical elements of these case studies.

And that actually changes the form, like it really changes the format of the content. Right. Like most case studies are PDF documents that are about three pages long. They talk about the problem, the solution to the problem. And here's a pretty graph this, and here's a pretty graph. Here's the stats at the end, but like, what was the, like, who was the hero of that story?

This is a, you know, film storytelling. Like who's the hero of the story and what did they get out? Right. Did the, so the director of Demand gen get promoted to CMO because the demand gen activities got whatever, like, um, tho like you wanna be relatable to the individual. And I mean, the best way to do that is through social content, video content, , take, take those ca take those case studies and transition them into user stories.

You know, the stats will come out. Like if you drove results and results like, and you're doing, like doing an interview with a somebody that you've worked with. If it's like those, those stats will come out and they'll be 10 times more meaningful. Like, you know, all they need to know is, I'm gonna use us as an example, being a marketing agency.

Like, oh, like, you know, our business grew and we were like super happy working with these guys. This is how they work. They were super organized. You know, this is roughly what our strategy was, and it, it just becomes much, much more relatable than saying like, Hey, we did paid media and we had a return on ad spend of 500%.

Having no idea how those metrics were actually calculated. Absolutely. You know, you, you kind of nailed it on the head, One blooming question, right, is back in traditional marketing, right? Recommendations are a little bit easier, especially if you looked at like a localized company right now with everything so digital.

How does one go, you know, how do I get a recommendation from this CMO? To cmo? To cmo, right? With being so digital. The easiest way again is that video content. We've talked about it before. Um, short form, easy to digest, you know, snackable content. It's simple. Um, well, I shouldn't say simple, but what I'm trying to get at is you don't have to overcomplicate it, right?

You don't have to get a full on videos crew into their office to do this massive recording where they're in a suit, you have a backdrop, lighting, makeup, all this stuff, right? Sure. That will be a great fricking video, no question of that. Well, hopefully if you have a good editing team, a good fricking video.

But if, even if it's something as. Much like our CEO records videos from his office with a webcam and a nice mic. He could do a recommendation for something via just what he has available to him. Something that is not necessarily a scripted story, but more actually coming from the heart. It speaks back to what you're talking about, right?

There's gotta be a, What's the biggest thing marketing teams struggle with? It's the buy-in. Where does that buy-in come from? These people need to trust. So if it's going to feel like a scripted event where they're being told what to say, almost like a hostage situation, then yeah, it's probably gonna come off that way.

But if it's a CMO that is genuine about, Hey, here's what actually happened, I was able to grow my team and in today's recession, you know, lingering feel out there, being able to say, I grew a team because this software helped me do this. I mean that, that's worth more than any script could ever give you.

This is gonna vary industry to industry too. A hundred percent. I mean, we, we, we come from a professional services background being a marketing agency, and I think like a big part of this too, I feel like this falls under case studies is like that. The idea of evangelism and being out there posting.

Basically showing that, you know, what, what the hell you're talking about, right? This podcast is like a perfect example of that. The videos that come from this podcast are a perfect example of that. Like, you know, we're not actively trying to earn business and sell or whatever. Like we're, we're just trying to show that we know what the hell we're talking about.

Um, now you may listen to this and say, Hey, these guys don't know what the hell they're talking about, and I think you're wrong. That's, yeah. But it is what it is. . Um, but again, I, I, I think of that. A version of a case study. I mean, we can, a great episode that we should do sometime. Or like, Hey, what here are the common mistakes that we find when we take over work from other agencies and this is how we fix it and this is the results that it leads to.

Cuz like there's, you know, we, we take over stuff all the time. It's just kind of like messy, littered with mistakes. And you know, honestly, most people who are searching for an agency kind of comes down to, they know something's going on. They don't know what's going on and they're just looking for somebody to kind of rip apart the current agency's work and show them that they can do better.

And, you know, being able to break down something like that into content, um, like, Hey, here's a live audit of like what we do as a professional services firm. Like this is the steps that we go through. This is our framework that we follow. And if you do all of those things, By the time somebody reaches out to you, I'll be honest, they shouldn't even ask for a case study.

Mm-hmm. , they should be like, Oh, you know, Hey, I'm working with James. James, I've been listening to your podcast for a while. I really like the stuff that you say and let's do this thing. I. Absolutely. No, that's great. I think, you know, I think we've really hit the head on, on case studies and how we can transition 'em if we were to chalk it up, right.

Go to more use stories, less of a traditional case study. I, I think if you were to sum it up in any way mm-hmm. . Now another one that's very traditional and one that even I don't even have a ton of experience with, um, is trade show booths. You know, my knowledge of trade shows is you put up a booth for a lot of money, typically.

Typically it's a lot of. Um, sometimes, you know, if your company decides to be a bronze, gold, silver, platinum sponsor of the event, yeah, maybe you get a booth as. But ultimately, you know, you're paying for these booths to showcase your product, to potentially people who don't actually care. They're just there to see what's out there.

Or you're trying to, James, I think you put it right, speak to investors to try and get, you know, Get some funding or even sell, um, different things like that. Right. On a, on another piece, right? You typically have marketers who are attending the events and if the purpose of it, um, I believe we just attended,  Saster, right?

We just had a representative of ours, um, at Saster. Um, yeah. And you were telling me that the purpose of that convention or trade show, excuse me, was SaaS companies looking for funding or investors we're there as marketers, right? We're there building connections. How open to those conversations with those people.

Right. So marketing, they're not there to be sold. They're there to sell type aspect. Yeah. It's like trade. Trade shows are extremely tough and there's. . There's a lot of, there's a lot of people who talk about this already, so I'm not gonna go into to huge detail, but you know, again, if you guys haven't figured out, I'm a Chris Walker fan to some extent, but like one of the things that he always talks about is like, why would you, why would you go to a trade show when you can do this literally every day online?

And he's spot on? Cuz there's, it's not only, but it's more than just like the time and effort that goes into a single event for people that you can reach every day. The other thing is like the time wasted at those events. So I'm gonna give an example, and this example is strictly related to me, my personality.

And don't get me wrong, there are other people who are different, but going to these events and meeting people and talking to people isn't the easiest thing to do in the world. Usually, you know, go in as an agency or, or kind of whatever, whatever your business is, and you're like, Okay, these are the people who are gonna be there.

These are the people that I wanna talk to, and. Then you get there and there's 10,000 people there, and you really don't know where they are unless they have a booth and then you go to their booth and it's not necessarily the person you wanted to talk to. So there's all this time wasted in like trying to find the right people to talk to.

And then me, like I, I actually consider myself like a fairly outgoing guy and like, I'll go and I'll like walk up to somebody based on their badge, be like, Oh, you work at this company, You know, what are you here for? What are you looking to get out of this? And then I'll end up talking to them for 20 minutes and find out that they are like, certainly, like there's no.

Huh. There's no value in this relationship besides like, Hey, you're, you're a nice guy. I'm a nice guy like this. This was a good conversation. Um, but we're talking about a day,  an event that's maybe three days long and 20% of the people that you talk to are going to be interested in what you have to say, whether they have existing solutions or whatever it is.

So as you're going up to people, just because you're a friendly person, You're spending a half hour, 20 minutes with somebody just shooting the shit about absolutely nothing, which is just time wasted. Um, like if you really are going there from a business perspective, now there's all. There's tons of value in that, like, you know, personal growth.

There's, there's a lot of things that I, I think live events do bring to the table, but if your, if your goal is like business development at live events, like I think that there's, I dunno, this is kind of a giant waste of time and money at this point when absolutely you can be hitting those people every single day.

Yeah. And in, in, in speaking to kind of how we reach people online, right? It's all about building a community, right? Those people who are at those events are online in some way. Now, there's a lot of tools, um, and methods, right? Some, one of the biggest ones, right, of a lot of people are gonna be active on LinkedIn.

Do a live session on LinkedIn. Literally be there for q and a. Have a topic of course of mind. But you can go live on LinkedIn, literally speaking to those same people, same thing here, right? Some of these new channels up and up and coming, right? TikTok live, um, you can go live on TikTok now. That's probably one that's under utilized in the BDB space, but it's still a very valid option.

One of the ones that I think that is, More professionally utilized, and this is one I have never dabbled in myself,  but it's Twitter spaces. I see a lot of people going live in Twitter spaces. I actually am aware of a couple podcasts not related to marketing that do live podcasts in Twitter spaces. Um, and it's a very interesting way to get community feedback, community, um, questions in like real time.

Um, but it's a way you can utilize that. Another one that again, is very similar to LinkedIn Live, maybe a little different audience, is Facebook Live. You can go live on Facebook from your company's page, right? If you're the cmo or let's just say demand gen director or director, manager of demand gen, whatever your title.

You can go live speaking to your community that you're hopefully building, if not already built or consistently building through various means, right? And speak to them directly. Let them type you a question in real time. , another one of course is YouTube streaming. I mean, there's so many streaming sites of where you can go live out there.

But if you think about it, what is one big aspect of why people don't wanna get on a sales? Right. It, it, it's formal. It's almost like a semi commitment of I'm willing to hear you out, but I still have questions. Right. And you don't wanna waste a salesperson's time. You also don't wanna waste your time.

These live features, whether it be a, a social media live aspect or something like a Twitter spaces where it's mainly just audio, it's informal. You're inviting people to come in and talk to. To ask questions, right? What is a trade show? You're setting up a booth for people to come up to you, ask questions, talk about your product, right?

Yeah. You might have someone who comes in, wants to talk to you about trying to sell you something. Odds are that may actually happen in a live. But at the end of the day that, that's just the reality of it, right? You have a business, people are gonna wanna sell to you, not just as you're trying to sell to people yourself.

Um, I think I've already kind of mentioned it, webinars, those are probably the more utilized in this space. Um, whether it be an on demand webinar or even a live webinar, that becomes an on demand, right? Sending out registrations. Very common, um, piece of advertising that's out there. We're having a webinar on this date.

Join us, register ahead to get the link right in your inbox. Um, at the end of the day, it's all about connecting with your people online. Now, James, what I will say about the trade shows, again, our representative, you spoke to him who went to s right, He was saying that people were saying it was nice to see everyone in person.

Is that correct? I mean, that came from him, but that also came from everywhere. Oh, well  that came from every, like, everybody who posted about, everybody who posted about Saster online had nothing to do with. Who was there, how nice the booths were, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was all about like, Oh man. It was so nice to see these people in person because over the course of Covid, honestly, like all these online communities, BET were built.

Connections from these online communities are 10 times stronger than the way it used to be. Where you used to meet somebody at a conference and kind of stay in touch and then forget about them in six months. Because you're just like actively engaged, actively sharing thoughts, like I think like I'm part of like exit five.

This was a big thing that everybody said there. Like there were a bunch of SASS people and they were just, You know, hey, they had their meet up and it was nice to meet everybody in the group. That's like what it was. It was about meeting people in person, which obviously, like, there's still a ton of value of that in person element, but meeting somebody in person for the first time after you've been engaging with their content for six months is much different than going up to somebody at a conference and being like, Oh, hey,  your badge says that you work for ibm.

 That's cool. What is, what are you looking at doing here? Um, so probably, you know, brings a lot more life to the event too. Absolutely. There's nothing more genuine than meeting someone in person. But again, I mean, even as Covid has showed us, it reshaped the world, um, people had to adjust right. I'll be honest, a since Covid, um, really hit, I've seen more lives and,  streaming services and webinars than I ever did before because a lot of people did save their budgets for trade shows.

Right. And one of the biggest things you mentioned about trade shows is the cost, right? Just the booth alone, we're not even talking about travel. And odds are food stipends or reimbursements, whatever it is, Right? Um, together bad or live on LinkedIn. Exactly at the end of the day, going live on LinkedIn, Facebook, all that really takes is one, having a webcam of some sort, having a microphone of some sort in some essences that may be built into your webcam.

I don't recommend that. And then ultimately the time to create a profile or a page, which doesn't have to be great to go live. Right. Technically it can be as simple as simple can be that that's pretty dang cheap compared to a show. Yeah. I mean, I think the one thing that you're I'll, I don't wanna say we're downplaying a little bit here, is like you gotta build an audience, you gotta make connections.

Oh, of course. You have to take the ef like. You're not just gonna like go set up a profile and go live and have people follow. You're not gonna, you're not gonna just go start posting content to LinkedIn and have people follow you like, Yeah, part of being part of an online community is engaging with other people's stuff.

It's, it's not a,  build it and they will come scenario. Like, you've gotta be part of it, you've gotta be engaged, you've gotta contribute to the community, and then people will. You know, see validity in what you're doing and then, you know, start attending your stuff. Like there, there's certainly work that goes into it.

, maybe that is a little bit of a difference between, I say like, you know, if you sponsor a show and spend a hundred thousand dollars on a boother, whatever, Like, Yeah, I guess it is kind of a build it and they will come thing like if you're, if you give enough, give away enough cupcakes, Like you'll have a, have somebody recognize who your brand is from this show.

But I mean the cost, the cost analysis on that cannot be positive. Let me put it that way. Yeah, for, for sure. I like that you said the cupcakes thing, cuz I've always gotten little coo. Well was I was,  again, I was listening to a podcast this morning, somebody talking about Saster and they said like, one of the cool things with the booths there was like somebody had like a,  they were printing selfies on cookies.

Like, I'm sorry. Like it's okay. Like, all right, now tell me what that company did. Okay. Yeah. No kidding. If the one didn't take away , they like, were the cookies good? Like, what was the flavor like? Right. Oh, that's funny.  I mean, that's creative. You get people to your, your wife's a baker. Next, next thing that we do, I want her to figure out how we can print selfies on.

Cake better. I'm sure it's an expensive machine. Way better than a cookie. We'll do it right on a full size cake. Full size cake. Fun fe. All right, you here and here First drag 360. It's Saster 2023. We'll have selfie printed cakes. James just confirmed. I'll let him figure it out and we'll  go from there.

So fun.  But  moving on from trade shows. Um, one of the ones that I think is. Way too typical in a sales. Aspect, are these product guides, one sheeters, whatever you want to call 'em, right? They're pretty much given upon request. It's almost like in an interview, right? References available upon request.

Same thing. One sheet is available upon request. Right At the end of the day, right, you're creating these product guides, these very easy to consume, back to what we were talking about, right? Snackable content. But you're making it almost be like uber gated. It's almost like prison style gated because you gotta speak to the rep or someone to get it.

It's not even just fill out a form. Sometimes they'll fill out your, Sometimes they'll be just behind a form, but. It, It, Yes. I, I'm talking more on a sales aspect, right? Yeah. But at the end of the day, you've created this product guide, a very easy to understand product guide that odds are, has some relevant information, right, to an industry, and if you market that correctly, But at the end of the day, why does a salesperson have to give this to you in a traditional sense?

Why can't this just be readily available now, you did mention there are some out there. Of course, you fill out a form, you can download it right away or have access to it right away. Yeah. It's like a sales, typically now sales guide is what your product does. Like it's not Absolutely. I don't know. Yeah. I, I struggle with the, the same thoughts that you do around this.

Like why, why does this, I make it hard. I mean, think about how many, how many clients we've worked with over the years where you've literally gone to their website and like you're not able to actually tell what they do. You know, it's just like there's still clients from forever ago that I don't understand what, even in, even in our industry, like you go to an agency and it's just like literally filled with like marketing buzzwords.

Like I went to a, a search agency's website the other day and at, no, like literally at nowhere on their website did they like say that they do paid media advertising, paid search. It was all just like a bunch of bullshit strategy buzzwords.

That's a good question. Um, that's also that also that somebody can reach out to a sales team and then you put together a custom deck based on their thing, and then also follow up on that call with a link to a sheet, a one sheeter of what they actually do. Yeah. So at the end of the day, right, make it readily available.

Um, one specific aspect to that right, is don't gate them. Make it easier to attain them. One really cool aspect that is actually a recent release of LinkedIn, I'm sure it's been in beta testing at some point or alpha testing with some people, but are the, what's called document ads. Um, we don't need to get into.

Nitty gritty, right? To be honest with you, our ceo, Andy, if you follow him on LinkedIn, made a video explaining these and how they can be utilized. So recommend check that out. Shout out to Andy. He's been on our podcast. He, he originated here. He originated here. We built him, we made him praise to listen to this and slap me now.

But,  at the end of the day, right, these document adss, what it's doing is essentially instead of a typical essence of let's say an ebook, having to have a LinkedIn ad that then transports you to the website to fill out a form and download the ebook. It's almost putting that ebook right in into LinkedIn.

We talk about right on channel lead forums versus website lead forums. Right. Typically you're gonna get less quality from an onchan lead form because it's less steps, right? But in this case, when we're wanting to get information out there, isn't that really what we want? Less steps. You do this. I was gonna say the big thing about this too, you can add it on the organic side too.

Absolutely. It's like, think about like linking these, linking these documents to your LinkedIn account. Like, oh, here's, here's our sales sheet, here's our case, here's our user stories. Um, Right. And just kind of have, have links to all those docs and it's like, Oh, this is awesome. Like I don't even have to, like I discovered you on LinkedIn and now I can actually learn about you on LinkedIn rather than having, I can actually figure out what you do.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's wonderful and, and product guides and one sheeters should be created around that aspect, right? One, what the heck do you do? Whether that is industry specific, maybe it's problem solution specific, but these one sheeters are guiding through a very specific answer, whether it is as broad as what is the product, or two, how did we help the, the SaaS industry or the FinTech industry, or MarTech industry, whatever it is, right?

So make it readily available. I don't think we have to hit that one on the head. We hit it on the head in almost every other podcast, right Gates, There's a purpose in place for 'em. A one sheeter product guide with easy to read content. It's not the place for them. Most times asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

Read it down in the comments below of what our asterisk is, right, . But at the end of the day, I think people are starting to get the idea of what we're getting at here, right? We're taking these traditional sales enablement marketing materials that the marketing team took time to make, and, and transitioning them to a more common place.

Demand creation thought process behind them. Um, really at the end of the day, it's all about do a better storytelling. Um, add a motion to what you're doing, right? That goes back to the user generated content. That goes back to what we were talking about in the trade shows aspect, right? Make sure you're going live, connect with your community that you're working on building.

Maybe you've already built it, whatever it is, right? And then the product guides, giving them the easy to understand information right up front Again. The whole purpose here is to take this sales team and turn them into cashiers, order takers, whatever you want to call 'em, right? They're the drive-through window ready to take the money.

That's it, man. Man. Turn sales to order takers. I I, I'm telling you, when we launch a merch store, that's gonna be the first thing. So has a little cashier on it. Has a little cashier. I like a little cashier hat. Little name badge with it. . I like it. But hi, I'm your sales development.  Ultimately, I, I, I don't think we can close it up any better than that.

At the end of the day, let's make it easy to build a community. Speak to your audience and give 'em what they want versus what you think they want. So thank you again for listening in this week.  We'll be back next week with another amazing topic. Not sure what it is. But we'll have it and we'll be ready for you.

So again, if you've made it this far, we appreciate you. Again, we do have a YouTube channel. We would love your support over on YouTube. Be sure to follow us on our various social medias, whether that's TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever it is. So thanks again and we'll see you next time. 

 📍 Thanks for listening to Digital Banter. If you enjoy today's episode, please be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are uploaded every Friday. In the meantime, keep up with the show by following James and Zach on social media. Links are in the show notes.