S3 E10 - Transformational Leadership | Devin Reed - Head of Content @ Clari

Welcome back to Stacking Growth, everybody. It's Cassie. Carl, how you doing? I'm doing good with Devin Reed.

Oh man, I'm excited about this. Devin, how are you? I'm doing good. I'm doing real good.

I'm feeling good for Thursday. Yeah. Are you typically not doing it for Thursday, Devin? Are you like a Monday Tuesday guy?

Thursday is actually my least favorite day of the week. Now, the reason is I've just noticed morning is good. It's 11 AM, my time. So you're in a good spot.

But like 3, 4 PM on a Thursday is where I just become useless. I've got two kids under two, two beautiful girls, full time job, run a newsletter. And I've just found it's just my lull for the week. And then I wake up Friday like, I got this.

We'll power through. But as I told you before, we started hitting record. I've genuinely been looking forward to this. So I had my typical double shot of espresso this morning.

I'm still feeling good, ready to hang. Love it. I love it. So a lot to talk about.

But let me start by, you're right gone. I feel like I've known you forever, even though it's the first time I've actually talked. You've been at Clary six months. What's that ride been like?

What's it like at Clary? You kind of stepped into a company that was from the outside, already hitting on a lot of cylinders. Awesome company. And being able to kind of leave your mark pretty quickly.

So what's that journey been like? How'd that come about? I think everybody thinks of Devon and Gong, and kind of your journey there was transformational for that company. So what's been like at Clary for the last six months?

Yeah, it's been great. It has been great. It's been a big learning curve, as you can imagine. And I think there was the learning curves I knew I would run into when I took the job and was evaluating options.

And then a couple that I probably under, maybe underappreciated or undervalued. And so it's interesting, right? At Gong, I was the one man band after Chris Orlob. So it was just me.

And then I scaled the team out to seven people over three years. That's really different, as you all know, if you've been in leadership for a while. It's my second time in leadership. But I adopted a team.

And then the team grew quickly from what I call annexation, which is folks from Wingman in India, because Clary acquired that company, a conversation intelligence platform. I ended up getting a customer marketer on my team to help elevate our customer evidence. And then I hired someone new. So I went from, oh, and someone went on Matt Leaf.

So it was like, I had three people, one person left, one person went on Matt Leaf. Now I got one guy. And then a week later, I have seven people again, but from all these different places. So that's a big learning curve as a leader.

How do I integrate these teams, these cultures quickly? And then as well, I guess the other one was kind of just onboarding virtually. I was in person at going. I was on a sales team.

I knew everyone deeply. I was there for as a marketing leader. And then when you went remote, it was a lot easier than now completely remote until we had our RKO, like a sales kickoff. And I got to start to meet people.

So a lot of challenges I kind of didn't anticipate. And then I've got the usual challenges we'll dive into, which is starting content strategy from scratch, getting a seat at the table, starting to educate the company of what great looks like and how we're going to get there. So it's been good, but definitely a challenge. How did you, Devin, think about, like when you step into a new role, like you want to make a splash quickly, right?

You're looking for low hanging fruit. You're looking for like the easier wins, where you could like solidify yourself as like, OK, like Andy Byrne made a good choice here, right? Kyle Coleman, like Devin was a good hire. And that's tough at a clary, because again, like Cassidy said, there's a lot of cylinders that are firing super well.

It's easier to make a big splash at like a really small startup where like there's nothing happening, right? Like you do one thing and it makes a huge impact. How did you think about that stepping into, stepping into clary in the first few months there, weeks? Yeah, yeah.

It's a big challenge when it's a company that mature. And other departments around you already have it kind of figured out when they're scaling and you're in ground zero in a lot of ways. So the framework I kind of use is the build or optimize. So when you're doing organic channels and organic content, it's really hard to go to Andy, RCAO, and say, if you just give me nine months, my man, I promise, it'll all pay off.

But nine months in today's economy is like life or death for some companies, luckily we're in a good spot, but it's too long, and no one wants to hear that. So the build is, what can I build that big splash? That's mine. That's my team.

It's got a name on it. And it hits the right metrics. And then the optimize was, how can I make the people around me better, faster? The teams that are already doing well or how do you have projects in flight?

How can I put my fingerprints on it and make it even bigger, make it better? Because one, you're going to build relationships with them. Oh, Devin came in and this Nurture email series launched faster, had better results than the last one. Put up a quick webinar, our webinar series, but it's a little slow, cool, let's throw one really quickly in the next 30 days.

Let me show you how we sprint. And so by elevating everyone around me as quickly as possible, I think it kind of gives us quick impacts. I can point to different dashboards and say, hey, see that little stair step? We're doing the right stuff.

And then also buying myself a little bit of time to build some of the big new things that takes some time to develop. That's awesome. And you touched on a couple of things there. Before you touched on tying to, you mentioned the strategic priorities, et cetera.

You seem to be world class, Devin. I mean, just watching your career on LinkedIn, is like a master's class. And OK, so Devin is special because somehow takes something that can be seen as a commodity in a marketing department or an organization, right? Content.

It's like, oh, yeah, whatever. Just crank out some content, right? It feels commoditized. But you spin it and execute it so strategically.

And you seem to take very seriously connecting to executive priorities. I think every content leader or marketing leader says or pays lip service to, yeah, I want to do that, of course. But you've done it. You've performed the trick.

You've cracked the code. Like, can you walk me through how you've taken something like that that can be perceived as commodity and made it such a strategic, just differentiator, a strategic advantage? I mean, at GONG and Clary, the content is strategic advantage, right? There's no doubt about it.

How do you do that? How do you think through building a content or with that in mind? At the risk of saying, well, it all started back in and then listening a year, a long time ago. I genuinely believe it was kind of two things that happened.

So one, I started in sales. Never planned to get in sales like most people, but I was a sales rep for six years. And so the idea that your value to the company is directly attributed to a single number on a dashboard has always been in my DNA. And if you are on top of the world, you're 120%.

You get more money. You get more fame, glory, all that good stuff. And if you fail, you lose your job. And I have been laid off before at a very small company.

So I've experienced the highest of highs. Nine months in a row of quota. I could buy it. People are like, you're going to buy a car with that money?

And I'm like, no, I have a kid. So not going to buy a car, but I do like the money. And I've been laid off and I've been on PIP, a different company. So I really lived through that.

And so when I went to such a kind of say, the accountability that I have naturally, or I should say, was beaten into me. And then the other part was when I made the switch, I specifically didn't pick content marketing manager as my title. Because as a sales rep, I've seen a lot of fluffy content. Content marketers don't usually have much of any respect at most companies because there's one of them.

How important is the function if there's one? It's usually a very junior-green person. And the function doesn't seem to be really well understood other than blogs. I didn't want to fall into it.

I didn't give up my sales career to go be that. And so I thought about what title can I give myself to one, not smell like marketing because I sell the sales people. And we already have that apprehension towards them. And two, just kind of elevate the role.

And so I thought this is so simple. My strategy seems to have a lot of cloud. Maybe I just put content strategy in there. And that will guide my mission.

This isn't a marketing function. It's a strategic marketing function. And so I was content strategy manager. That was my first title.

And then as the team scaled, it became head of content strategy. The function and the way I operated my team and the way we reviewed inside of GONG reflected that title. And I know it seems super tactical, but it's kind of just like having a mission statement. This is what we do and why we do it.

So that's kind of the back story, Carl. The way it actually kind of takes shape is, I always say, start with the CEO slide. Every single year, every CEO, right? They have their new slide and there's three initiatives on it.

Sometimes it's revenue or pipe. Like revenues usually one. Sometimes people keep it off because it's kind of like breathing you need it to stay alive. But I say, great, that's what we're going to do.

We are going to get all the way to the CEO level and say, what are these three goals and what are specific channels, programs that we can execute. And directly or indirectly say, we are supporting the number two thing that the CEO cares about. And so when you start there, you already elevate the conversation because you're not saying I'm going to put out volume of content. I'm not going to give a bunch of MQLs.

I'm going to help drive revenue. I'm going to help build and dominate this category. That is a huge investment. Or we're going to create market awareness and drive pipeline through this new product launch or new geo, right?

These are examples from that slide. So I start all of my planning there because all the tactics that connect to it already known. There's already a million ways to write a blog, to do social, all that stuff. That's already kind of figured out.

So when I connect those strategic goals to the methods and tactics, then the fun part starts because then I get to do things differently, bigger, bolder, and then just make sure you're measuring and reporting back on that to executives. Have you ever been in a situation, Devin? And again, I think you've worked for companies that get it, like going and clearing. What advice would you give to a marketer or a content marketer or a content strategy, you know, head of content strategy, et cetera.

That is like fighting, like they want to do that. Like I don't think we're talking to a marketer that's not like, yeah, I want to be nailing the three things on the CEO slide. But they are fighting against this inertia of we need leads or we need that white paper. And none of it is strategic, right?

It's all like distractions or somebody that's just sending you down rabbit trails of different things to do for different reasons. It's not strategically oriented, right? What do you do if you're that marketer? What advice would you give to them besides finding another company and trying to work for Garner and Clary?

There's only so many companies that kind of get it, to be honest, but I am seeing a lot more directors of content, a lot more head of content roles opening up. And I love to see that. So it is starting, I think, to catch some momentum. The first thing I say is, like, you're never going to get fired for driving revenue.

And so if you can get true pipeline, and you all talk about it quite a bit, like, you know, different levels of intent and what actually converts, I think that's a fair place to start. And there's just channels that you want to start with, right? I think events is probably one of the best ones, field or digital. I think podcast arguably is one of the worst, only because it takes so long to build an audience.

And I know that could be questionable based on the fact that you have podcasts and I have a couple. But you know, if you're like CEO comes to you and says, I need pipeline tomorrow, launching a podcast is not the answer, in my opinion. Now it can be the head of your content waterfall and it will drive pipeline and I know there's different models to try to figure out exactly how to measure that. But the key is just like understanding the impact of your work.

And I actually think a lot of folks don't really understand that completely or they can't succinctly explain that to a CEO. And so for example, Karly, to me, you should, and I tell us to my team, you should look at anything you're doing. And I should be able to go, Karly, why are you doing that? And you should answer quick.

Or hey, how come we're not doing that? And mostly you should be able to answer that too, because if you truly understand your strategy and the metrics that you're trying to hit, you know what every decision you're doing, all the resources you're allocating where they're going towards. And you should also build answer. Well, yeah, we're not doing 10 blogs a month because we're doing a podcast episode every week, a blog every other two weeks, this, every step, so-and-so and so-and-so.

And all that's going to build up to these key indicators, both early and late. There's something you said here that was so subtle that I see often overlooked in any function. And that is to build your strategy you started with, what's most important for the company and the CEO. And then you figured out how can I influence that or impact it directly or indirectly?

And then what are the things that I'm going to do? And I'm sure you can tell that story back at the chain. So if you're CMO comes and says, Devin, what are you working on? You're like, listen, this is the objectives of the company, that's the priority, revenue, et cetera.

These are the things I'm doing to influence that. And here's my kind of plan to make it happen. This seems extremely logical to the point where we would move past it, but it's actually rare. I see in marketing in general as a function.

And I'm assuming the content space, it's really rare. Is that, where'd you kind of get that DNA? Is that just because you came from sales and needed this new, there's accountability always driving revenue for the company. And therefore you apply that mentality to your role as a content strategist?

Was this something that you worked with, I don't know, who did you at the beginning and gone, like made a combination? But I find this just extremely rare when it comes to marketing teams, marketing leaders at the individual level or even at the CMO level. You know, I don't know if anyone does therapy or even just watch the movie about it. It's like, whatever happens in your childhood, kind of reflects how you behave later in life.

I have to imagine just carrying a quota is a huge part of that. It's just like, I don't get a quota for activity. I don't get paid for activity. I don't get paid for how many opportunities I start, but don't finish.

Like there's one thing that matters. Are you driving revenue or are you not? It's very binary for me. Now the challenge is, of course, measuring content and marketing in general and D2B is not that binary.

But I think a lot of people just accept that and go, well, MQL's are pretty straightforward. So I'll just put my money on that. But they don't really think of, well, which MQL's are converting? What if you might have a pocket of like, what if, I don't know, enterprise opportunities are coming through your webinar series at a high ASP and a high conversion rate, but you only do one quarter.

And that's the biggest goal for the company is to go up market, right? Imagine you're sitting on something that could be polished and you look like a superstar, but you just don't know because you don't have, you know, kind of the education yet, you know, having to talk how to do that. Or you just haven't had the resource to kind of go figure out like what do those numbers look like? So I think that's a big part.

I've got kind of an example too, kind of like other examples of maybe doing things against the grain or kind of standing on like, you know, I don't care if you don't believe in it. Here's why we should be doing it and here's why I fully believe that. Yeah, we'd love to hear it. The biggest one is social media.

I think most social media, you know, you get an intern or the most junior person on the team and you say, go open up a Facebook, a Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and just go for it. I just hired somebody. I got one headcount this year at Clary, maybe more pending, you know, obviously how the year shakes out. But I went to Kyle Coleman, CMO and I said, if you give me a senior person and I can dedicate 50% of their time to LinkedIn, I will build you a powerhouse.

And he was like, tell me more because Andy won't believe that right away. He's gonna have questions, right? And so I said, think of it this way. Category domination, right?

The Rev CG, revenue collaboration and governance is other than revenue, the number one thing for us. The most strategic initiative we have. Andy cares about it, Kyle cares about it. It's a whole company initiative.

The biggest megaphone that I can get to educate the market is social media. It's social media. That's the biggest market we can grow an audience. We have the biggest reach.

And when people start saying, what about email and what about this? What about word of mouth? Social media tips, word of mouth. Social media with the right strategy, feeds web traffic, feeds your email list.

It feeds all of the other things. It makes you stronger. It helps your overall channel health. And then you start to say, okay, let's start talking about it.

What else will they do too? And then you can build a wreck around it. I did it at Gong, I'll do it here. Maybe not the next time because the world changes, but I truly believe people that are posting once a month on LinkedIn or preventing their employees from building brands, whatever you wanna call it, is a huge miss.

There's a self, because we are a client of yours. We have a self attribution report. People punch in Andy Byrne, people punch in Kyle Coleman, people put in LinkedIn as the reason why. And we're seeing that increase month over month in the few months that I've been here.

Yeah, I'd love to unpack that a little bit. And the reason is maybe break down the conversation a little bit more with Kyle, and specifically what I mean is, Kyle has a big following, Andy's pretty active. You're active. There's probably others in Clary active on social media.

Yeah, so when you bring in this person, what are they doing that's kind of additive to that in terms of the strategy to kind of take it to the next level? Real quick, if I can't, you said Andy's been active. That was an intentional decision in Q1, was to get Andy going. Andy had, I think, two million impressions first 30 days, two million impressions on his content, which was pretty short, is more web traffic than we had the previous six months.

Now, of course, those are not the same apples to apples to apples to apples to apples to apples to apples to apples to apples. But if you think about that, in 30 days, two million people saw Andy Byrne, CEO, Clary, and some really good thoughtful content, that's pretty impactful in my book. So that'd be worth throwing in there. So there's a three-prong approach, Cassie, to what this new hire is going to be doing.

So there's the Clary social channels, that's kind of standard, right? Then there's helping with executive presence, we're starting with Andy now. Andy writes all of his own content, they're all of his ideas, but building a strategy, how are we going to measure success, how do we help put the process in for him to make it easy to go from ideas to content to publishing? And then the third one is, don't really love the phrase, but I haven't come up with a better one yet, employee advocacy, or what I just call employee activation.

But a lot of people view it as, okay, how do I make it easy for them to talk about us, right? Give them prompts, go talk about Clary, go talk about Clary. What we do is we actually do free training and learning. Like, hey, do you want to build a brand on LinkedIn?

I'm going to host a 30-minute call just to teach you. It's not even about Clary, it's just how to use the platform. Hey, if you're in sales, you want to get more leads, you want to learn how to engage with prospects, we're going to do another session for that as well. The last two or three minutes is, hey, by the way, we're going to make a real big push here at Clary to be more active on LinkedIn.

You're going to hear from this person's name, you're going to hear from Devin, and they're going to present prompts completely optional. Would love for you to share. And the thing they see is they see Andy doing it, Kyle doing it, Devin doing it, hopefully some of their peers doing it, and it starts that snowball effect, but it's give before it's get. And so that three-pronged approach all plays into each other.

It all compounds into this kind of flywheel, where eventually how this echo chamber, where we're dominating on LinkedIn, and it's really intentional on what that content looks like, what's coming from it. Let me add one question. And when you say, yeah, I love this framework, and it's something that we've done on a smaller scale here, what is your philosophy around the employee activation and what you want them to communicate? Do you say, hey, listen, we're building this category, and there's some certain themes that we want you to advocate and kind of post them out on LinkedIn, obviously in your own words, or is it more, you know, spend a third of your time on kind of the business, a third of a time on like your function, what you're passionate about, a third of a time on personal stuff, like how prescriptive you get when you're trying to activate somebody who doesn't have maybe the, who hasn't built the following kind of the muscle to do this?

Yeah, what I learned at Gone was most people aren't posting on LinkedIn because they're just, they want to, but they're a little timid. They don't know how, they don't understand the platform, and then of course there's a comment, just a little afraid to put myself out there. And what helps is building that, that has to start from the top. There has to be an executive in my opinion, who's doing this.

Just to show it's okay. And ideally that person, like you know, you cast, for example, if you post stuff for your profession, right, we'll call it your domain expertise, perfect. If you happen to sprinkle in some stuff that you have kids and your dad or whatever your personal hobbies are, even better, only because that shows it's okay to be, I don't want to say unprofessional, but not quote unquote, professional, like it doesn't have to be profession based, I guess is a jargony term we could put on it. And so the whole point is just getting people comfortable and saying it's okay, it's all good.

We want you to do it, but we don't want you to do it for clarity, we want you to do it for you. I want you to understand the benefit that comes from you because your LinkedIn profile and your following and all that stuff is yours to keep. If you leave Clary one day, you don't, you hand in your badge, you hand in your laptop, you don't hand in your LinkedIn profile, that's yours. And that's going to help you get bigger jobs, better jobs, more money.

And then of course, connect with cool people in network and really build out some actual connections, not the feature connections of people that you'll keep with your whole career. And the people that are drawn to that message, the people that show up to the 30 minute training and they start to post. And then later when I say, hey, we just launched run revenue.pro, when you share it, they're happy to, because they're comfortable and they've already gotten something in return. Let me go the other way.

Was it difficult to get the Andy the CEO involved? No, even CEO of Clary for 10 years, maybe he wasn't out there as much as he is now, caught him on Lockhead's podcast as well, which I thought was really good. He seemed to embrace it quite quickly. He'd be like, hey, built a strategy.

You got everybody's buy in. This is what we're going to do in Q1. And Bambi's out there. How much work ahead of that happened in terms of getting a pretty busy CEO to spend time doing this?

Well, I'm a little bit bigger than Andy. So I just got him in a conference room and put him in a headlock. And I said, when you say uncle, I'll let go. And you will start posting now.

By the way, we should do that with Carl. People call Carl a lot of Carl's a giant man, intimidating guy, especially that beard. Just stop, just stop Cassidy. Again, back to you.

His beard would be enough to put me in a headlock. I don't think Carl would even be involved. To be able to just do me. Don't forget that.

It wasn't that hard. But to be honest, and giving credit to Andy, he's always, what more can I do? We get done with a big strategy meeting. We get next steps.

And he's just looks and he's like, is there more we could be doing? And he really means it. It's not that kind of lip service that some managers will give you. And so he is all in on the category.

He just brought me over to run content. And it's a big priority for him. So when I come to him and Kyle comes to him, and we have pretty sizable following. Kyle's over 100,000 now and growing very quickly.

And he wants to be part of that. Not for the engagement, not for the clout or anything like that. But he's got me and Kyle in his ear saying, this will drive the business forward. This will help dominate the category.

And this is going to help your personal brand if that means to you. And he's like, all right. Let's give it a shot. And if you check out his LinkedIn profile, he says, Prime Minister of Revenue.

That took me a little nudging. Like, come on, let's just put it on there, man. Let's be different and cool. And everyone's got CEO of something.

But who's the prime minister? He's like, all right, let's put it up there for a little bit. And he was honest with me. He's like, I'm a little nervous about it.

But let's go for it. And a couple of days ago, we got an email response. And he's like, Andy, just want to let you know, love the Prime Minister of Revenue. Says it all.

And I screenshot it and I send it to him. And I'm like, dude, it's working. Like, people like this. This is the stuff that makes you connect.

You're more of a person than just a title. I got to talk to you. That's genius, man. That's genius.

By the way, I'll let you Kyle go. You got your CEO to do that. It's so on category, too. That's the world done, man.

That's hard to do. Kyle, go for it. Well, that's why Devin is so impressive. Because he can get, like, ACOs are two things that nobody else can seem to get their CEO to do, right?

So that's like a whole podcast topic. Larry, to me, is a very professional. Refine Labs actually the same way, right? And maybe Andy and Chris Walker actually are similar in that.

They're very playful, right? They're not jokesters. That's not how they strike me online. The brands are actually a little cold, a little scientific, highly professional.

Whereas if you look at GONG, it's goofy, silly, right? And you have even other brands that are even more goofy and silly, right? Like Labbard or something like that. How do you challenge that?

Because I think there's a lot of value in taking a really professional polished brand, like Clary, like even like on Run Revenue, whatever the URL is, Run Revenue dot pro. Like even the image that you have, it's like five very serious professionals, like not smiling, slightly smurgy. How do you, there's value in that? I think there's also value in like challenging that prime minister of revenue, like it's goofy, right?

Like how do you navigate not being off brand, but challenging that because there's value in it? Like walk us through that. Well, you both know me well. I mean, I've got tattoos.

I wear hoodies pretty much every day. I wear like sneakers to the office. I don't, I say I don't care. It's like I just, I just, I just, I am.

And my thought coming to Clary, which is a little intimidating to that point. I'm not that. I'm the antithesis of that. Yeah.

But my CMO and CEO brought me in for a reason. And if it wasn't to put on a blazer and be, you know, put on my leather shoots and be a blazer guy, that's not who they brought me into be. So I had to remind myself of that when I run into some, some resistance here. But it's a delicate balance, right?

Carl, because the gong brand was more jovial, right? And in a good way, I think it worked at the time. Like it was perfectly timed. We did the bottoms up approach and all this good.

Like it worked. I have no regrets at all. When I joined here, I think there was some questions like, oh, is he going to just kind of do like, are we, you know, do the gong playbook? And I tell everyone on day one, I'm not here to build gong 2.0.

I'm here to build Clary 2.0. That's what I'm here to do. So we can take our blazer off or leave it on if you want. But like, we're going to be more street level.

And some of the examples I just share, Carl, like on the blog, I'll highlight random points, put it into the Hemingway app and go, I didn't go to grad school. And this is at a 16th grade reading level. So what do we say we bring down like eighth and just start to be a little bit more casual? We can still be intelligent.

You can still be thought provoking. And you'll actually have more resonance if you're speaking to people at a more street level, especially because a lot of B2B companies, I think, their brand is, how can I build credibility? I've been the smartest in the room. And I'm like, why don't we just be intelligent and relevant?

That's going to work better. And so then you get it from the tone to the type of content you create being a little bit more digital first, a little more short form versus kind of long white paper style stuff. Run revenue pro at the time, the Clary.com, before we did a little bit of a refresh, was a little more white and blue, a little more standard looking. And so Run revenue.pro looked like Nike in comparison.

People saw it were like, whoa, that's super dope. And other people were like, hmm, OK. Well, we'll be sending my prospects there. I face value to the point of the header image.

I'm still kind of tweaking the tone. I didn't quite hit the tone I wanted. But I like that it's kind of like some badass revenue pros. That's what I wanted.

You can have some swag. You can have some style at work. It's OK. That's the stuff that stands out.

And I point to Lynn Powers, who's our number one rep for four years in a row. She's got swagger, man. And I'm like, that's a big part of why she wins deals, because she wins people over before she wins the deal. She's got championship rings on car.

When I caught her on Zoom call for the first time, I was like, wow, I like that. Jewel gets nice. She's like, oh, this, every time I'm the number one rep I buy a championship ring. And I'm like, that's what I want.

That's the brand that I want. Some just earned confidence and earned swagger. And so it's a gradual process to move the brand in that way. That's awesome.

Yeah, I don't know, Lynn, but I want to meet her now. Yeah, it's like there's even something beyond what I found with really confident reps or marketers or just professionals. It's like, it's actually beyond confidence. It's like certainty.

There's like certainty that is like a little step above, even I think confidence. You can fake confidence a little bit, but there's like you can't fake certainty, which comes with like a track record, right, of results, which I think ties into the clearing brand super well. Yeah, anyways, yeah, that's awesome. And I mean, obviously you're great at balancing those things.

I'm excited to see like more of how you kind of tweak and change that clearing brand. And I appreciate you clarifying like the purpose of that, that header image, right? How intentional you are about even like choosing that to articulate the characteristics or the core values, et cetera, right? Like you said, confidence, like slagger.

Yeah. Like that's super dope. And I think it's cool that you have the ability to sell those things internally. I have one more question.

Cassie, I'll let you go about, you said it like five minutes ago. But you were like, hey, I needed to pitch Kyle. I'm always fascinated by the scenes, executive conversations and how change makers and like rain makers like you affect change internally. Because I think it's like the number one skill that any professional needs.

When I have a successful career, you have to like sell internally. And so you were you alluded to that conversation with Kyle about the job rack, right? Like Andy's have some questions like, unpack that. Work questions would Andy really, I mean, because again, things are working.

You were brought in, but like you also gave Kyle a little bit of a vague answer, right? You were like, I'm going to blow up LinkedIn. Like it's vague. And I know that you went deeper.

So like walk through like how you sold that as specifically as you can. And what objections you had to navigate and how you were thinking through those. Yeah, so I'm a broken record of going back to the strategic initiative. So there's the big three goals.

And then there's kind of these, you know, the cascade down. And one of them for Kyle. And I know this is Kyle's big one. So again, this is like the sales background.

I know you're paying. And I know where you want to go. I'm going to connect the dots. And increasing velocity was a really big one.

Like of all the goals, that's when Kyle talks about all the time. And when I joined like on week one, I'm like, so what do you really want out of me dude? And he's like, I want you to be a transformational leader. That increases velocity on this team, not MQLs, not web traffic, like big stuff, right?

And so I'm like, OK, so when I go to make the wreck, I'm building it out thinking how am I going to position this to my buyer, to Kyle, which is look, if we up to the first part of the car was actually up leveling. I wanted a bigger budget. So I go get a more senior person who's been there and done that. And so the first part was like, you want to increase velocity?

If you give me a junior person, we're actually going to slow down for longer because I'm not the coach them for longer. And that's the less time of me doing stuff and more time coaching. That's what you want me to do. I'm fine to do it.

I've coached before, but it will be slower. We get a fat. If we get a more senior person, I can get them there faster. We can do all these things you've been talking about quicker.

And then you give examples. The other thing we said may be Q4. What about definitely Q2? His eyes light up a little bit.

OK, you're starting to dig into my self-interest a little bit here, right? And then the reason I talk about social media is I think a lot of the executives. And I don't mean to be ages. I think it is an age thing where they just kind of use social media as like, what is it exactly?

They don't really understand it. It's kind of nice to have. And so when you go to proof points, I've got 70,000 followers. And he mentions it in passing from time to time.

And Kyle's following. You wouldn't say it if you thought it was meaningless, right? You know there's some value to it. So I'm like, we have 40,000 followers for LinkedIn.

I think I had like 12 at the time that we started. Imagine if it was 100,000 for it. Imagine if it was 50,000. But senior revenue leaders looking to Andy Ford vise online every day.

That's powerful. And so you just start to have that conversation. Kind of going that aspirational big. Imagine, but then down to things that you can hold in your hand or you can imagine with your mind's eye.

And so I just still give get, which I was like very big on the social part. And he's like, OK, but for the other stuff, he's what I really need this person to do. I'm like, cool, that's fine. It's all good.

And so it was a lot of back and forth in a good way. Masterclass, ma'am. Did I hit Carl? Was that what you're hoping for?

Yeah, I think you've hit it a couple times now. And I just like it's again, it's the biggest challenge that I think any business professional faces, especially because I just talk to marketers all day, especially marketers. Great ideas, great innovators have all these dreams. Want to do all these things, very aspirational.

But the rubber meets the road in the sale, right? In the sales process where your CEO is the buyer. And I think a lot of marketers struggle to close that deal, right? And so maybe marketers have a lot to learn from salespeople.

Who knows? So anyways, cool. Cassidy? Yeah, Devin, maybe slightly different direction.

And that is, do you think you could sell your strategies in a company like Clary if you didn't have 75,000 followers and kind of live it yourself, right? So I think your point of the passing and the hallways really interesting in that. You have a massive amount of credibility because you've done it, not just a gong, but you're out there doing it. So when you say, this is what we need to do, I'm sure Kyle and Andy listen.

Do you think somebody who is just somebody who's running a content strategy in the background and is not out there actually doing it can be effective this day and age with getting a company moving in this direction in terms of a modern content strategy? I will not even pretend to say that it doesn't help, right? There's a ton of credibility that I come with because I've done it and am still doing it. I think it's an important part.

But when I started a gong, I was a sales rep with a zero marketing experience. So I don't think it's an absolute must. Now, of course, you know, when he gets it, he gets brand, he gets content, right? And he gave me a ton of green space to go run and had a lot of trust in me.

But the point being is, even then with Udi, it was like, I knew what he cared about was doing things differently. He didn't want to be what we called then-series-a-blue, didn't want to be bland, didn't want to be this. So again, when I built my strategy, I was less strategic at the time because I was a young, you know, greener, but I knew that he wanted to do things differently, so that's what I brought to the table. So I still think it kind of goes back to that framework of like, what does the company care about?

What is the self-interest of the person that you're selling to and doing it that way? And I think the other thing, and my team's done this before, too, of like, here's why we should be on TikTok. Here's why we should do this thing that I'm not as familiar with, or maybe they haven't done, but they're really excited about and convicted about is, they get proof points. I remember Duolingo was one, I was like gong, so we didn't actually, or I didn't actually do the TikTok.

But like, she was like, Duolingo in six, you know, in three months, Devin, it's not a six month thing, it's a three month thing, we sit down and we do it right, we can have this amount of followers. And before I get over my mouth, I'm like, what does followers on TikTok mean for the business? She's like, we can convert them to LinkedIn, we convert them to like, so she had this whole plan. And I know I wasn't executive, but she came to me with proof points of other teams doing it, first movers advantage and going back to the goals that I cared about.

And that first movers advantage was my thing, because she knows I like to be first at the right, like I like to put a big bet on the right things. And she's like, it's still, it's the last part of early movers advantage. She's really good at like loss of vision, like really driving urgency. So it's like, we can wait, we can wait, but you'll lose first movers advantage.

And then competitor one and two will probably beat us to it and then we'll be playing catch up. But if that's what you want to do, and I'm like, damn it, I taught you well, haven't I? Like, all right, let's consider further. So I think it's like a long answer, longer use proof points, talk about the competition, or how it's gonna help is beat the status quo, whatever you're struggling with, depending on your market.

Yeah, and just try to use what credibility you can use around you if it's not your own. We thought with one, maybe personal question, and that is had a lot of success, you ran a certain kind of strategy at going, and now you're stepping into a big role at Clary. Did you ever have any self doubt about like, man, can I do it again? Because you said something really important, like it's not rinse and repeat.

You didn't bring the gone, Clary, you went into Clary, you built their own strategy, that's unique to them. That's a definite skill. Most people can go rinse and repeat the same thing, and hope it works the second time, but you developed a completely different strategy. How were you, how was the kind of psychology that as you went into it, if you don't mind me asking?

I don't, and we can get slightly personal. So it'll sound like a flex, but it's truly not. So at the time of leaving, going, and searching, and deciding on Clary, we had our second daughter, right at that time. So as if it wasn't enough change in the world, I switched jobs and added a second being to my responsibility list.

And during the time of looking at options, I had a couple of VP roles offered to me at like Series A, Series B companies. And at first I was like, holy shit, that's awesome. Like early 30s, people were even considering me for VP role. I wasn't even considering that yet for my next role.

And so I was like, that's really interesting and flattering. And so I was talking to my wife about it, and two things kind of came to me. One was, I'm not ready yet. And the reason I'm not ready yet is there's a big learning curve to be an executive, to be in the boardroom.

And I'm willing to take it on, but I'm more focused on being a dad right now and being a great dad of two. The VP thing is here now, it'll be here later. Unless I really botch it. So I'm going to push that off, and I'm going to double down on being the best B2B content strategy leader.

And that's straight up. That's my mission. That's what I want to do personally. And so then the self-doubt comes in.

I'm going to double down. I'm going to be the best and self-doubt creeps in. And I'm like, what if you're one hit wonder? What if you got lucky?

What if gone was going to take off regardless? And you just, you know, all those self-doubt that comes into your head. And I was going down. And I told my wife, I'm like, I think I'm a one hit wonder.

But I'm not really sure. And she's like, there's really only one way to find out. So you need to take another swing. And I was like, damn, woman, when you're right, you are right.

And I will have this potential self-doubt forever if I don't go try. And so I was like, let me go do it. Let me not copy gone. Let me do a brand new thing for a new company to me and see if we can do it.

So that was the full kind of circle in that decision. Man, I appreciate you sharing that. Great advice for my wife. And I'll say to somebody who's older.

Yeah, you have plenty of time to be the VP. And that certainly will happen. And I also think the other thing is once you've done it twice, you're going to get the taste to be like, I can do it a third time. I can do it a fourth time.

And that's going to be fun to watch. Carl, I know you had something to ask. You had a post that you want to get into. I know we're kind of running up against time.

Do you want to tackle this? Yeah, I don't do it. I would imagine time here because we're basically at time. We could talk about that.

People would have to go stop. You want to listen. So what I want to jump into is, can we just get tactical now, Devin, for a second? Like your content, okay?

Player's content, Don's content. The reader, it's good. And it's high volume. Like those things don't go together very well, right?

They're not like peanut butter and jelly. And so how are you navigating that tactically, operationally, but also vision? How do you crank out good content, high volume, and keep it high quality? I mean, how do you keep those things married together?

Like where would you start and kind of answer that question? When I appreciate you saying that, because I always feel like I should be posting more or writing more. And that's probably just some disease deep within me that I need to figure out. But yeah, I always feel like I'm trying to do better.

But the first thing I'd say is quality matters more than quantity. And I'll give an example and then we'll go back to a formula that we talked about earlier. So it comes up, I think, innocently with good intention of, why don't we just use chat GPT? Why don't we just use it for SEO?

Why don't we just use it for social? And I talked to a very well respected CMO we've all heard of. Who asked this question genuinely? Like, should I be thinking of this for my SEO team?

He's getting SEO started or ramped up. And I said, if you use chat GPT for your SEO strategy, you're basically investing in bad first impressions at scale. So would you rather have just an example? 10 people meet you, like you, know you, trust you?

Or 1,000 people hit your website for 20 seconds, get an answer, and then bounce off and probably never want to go back. And so that's kind of an example I share, which is, oh, that's kind of a different way to think about it. So to the quality aspect, I'm maniacal. I am maniacal.

If you are on my team and I'm your editor, you don't love me for three months. I'll be honest, you don't love me. Because it's heavy-handed. But I coach a lot and I explain the why behind it.

It's not Devin Reed's tone and you need to be more like me. I'm scaling myself. It's like, look, I'm putting myself in the reader shoes. I'm understanding the point A to point B that we're trying to get this person to.

And I've done enough behavioral psychology reading from things like influence in the basic stuff, nothing crazy, to just understand triggers. Like what's going to compel someone to act, what's going to capture attention, right? So I've done a lot of the studying on this stuff, I've done a lot of the practice. And so what it's kind of boiled down to is a three-part formula for all content.

If you want it to be quality, whatever you define that as, which we will, valuable, it needs to be actionable, relevant, and insightful. So I can break that down if you want to crawl. But that's kind of just like everything has to at least hit on that. One of those three notes, social posts can be one of those three because you don't have a lot of real estate all the time.

But those are the three things I focus on. And then I start to scale up, right? So I want to do one really great thing a week or a month. And then when we get it down to like a B plus A minus, then we can add more.

Because as you know, as you start to add scale, then the quality has to go down because you don't have to bandwidth or the expertise. So that's awesome. That framework is great. I've seen you post about that.

Talk to me about the how, right? So you sort of stayed in my kind of the same persona a little bit, right? Like so gone, like salespeople. And in a very different use case, and I sense that Clary is maybe a little bit more executive.

We're gone. You may be talking to sales managers and stuff like lower level, like sales leadership. How did you like up level, right? Because in order to make content insightful or relevant, like you have to know quite a lot.

You have to know more, right? I always talk about the sucacity a lot, like a vendor or anybody to impress me or to bring something relevant to me. They have to know something that I don't, right? And like, I don't know everything, but I know a lot.

Like casting there's a lot, like you know a lot of Devin about content and sales. So like in order to be insightful to you, that's a pretty high bar because you're very well educated. Well, you're like, you've been around the world, you know? You're advanced.

So how did you get to that level where you felt like, OK, you know what? I know something that potential Clary buyers don't. How did you get insightful? How did you get relevant?

What was like the learning process of getting up to speed on those things? For sure. So let's break down each one with some examples maybe. So let's start with insightful.

I think that's the best one to start with. Ironically, I don't call them insights because I think that's a little bit jargony. No offense when you use it. But I think it's all the time.

I don't take it from. So if you have a new term, I'd love to adopt it. Well, here's the thing. I don't really have a different, I don't really have a send in them.

We'd have to use Chag to be tedious in them. But my thought is like, and maybe because most insights aren't insightful. But here's what's down to it. So three ways you can be insightful.

One proprietary data. That can be survey data, good. Product data, much better in my opinion, because it can't be copied. Anyone can go pay.

And you can go figure out a way to get 500 to answer questions. Only you have certain, what's actually happening in a product. So there's a difference between what people say. And they do.

And then what they actually do in those results, which are the actions in the product. So do you have access to proprietary data? Data, I'm going to ignore the word insight, because I know I kind of was teasing it, is not inherently insightful, but it can be. So it can confirm things that you already thought you know.

Oh, it's good to know. Or it can be completely counterintuitive. And so it can tell you a different story, a different truth than you're used to. So that's the my preferred way.

How I want to say the best is my preferred way. If you don't have access to data, then you get to new frameworks. Can you provide a lens for me to see the world differently or to act differently? So again, what the post you were talking about is content should change the way you think and the way you act.

A framework could be a new lens, like the builder optimized example, right? Oh, that's the way to think about getting started. I mean, they're building or optimizing. That's a helpful framework.

That's insightful, thanks, Dev. Or it could just be some sort of checklist. Here's how to write a LinkedIn post from hook to close. All right, cool.

Maybe not the most expensive problem to solve, right? But you know, you get the idea that can be an inside as well. The last one, which I think you all do really well, is the point of view, which is can you show me something different? Can you show me a different way to go about the problem?