121: Using Sales Content In Meetings With Doug Winter

Thank you to our sponsors, LeadIQ, Costello, SalesLoft, WorkRamp, and Dialpad for helping us produce this podcast. Head over to jbarrows.com slash blog for the highlights of this episode and explore resources you can use right away. Let's make it happen. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrow's Make It Happen Monday. I hope you all had a fantastic weekend. So, I am very interested to have this guest on because they just did a very significant report that got a lot of insights into an industry as far as sales and education and also enablement that I am in. So, I'm actually curious to ask a lot of questions around this that they put out there. But Doug Winter over at Seismic, CEO. You want to say hi to everybody?

Hey, John. Happy to be here, even if it is Monday. Yeah, right? Thanks for coming on board. So, Doug, just to give everybody a little bit of context here, walk me through a little bit of background, where you're coming from and what you're doing these days. And what Seismic is all about? All right. So, Seismic is a leading sales enablement platform out there. We focus on helping sales spend less time preparing for meetings, getting content available that they need for meetings, and let them spend a lot more time actually conducting the meetings and doing what they're best at selling. So, we do that through our content management capabilities to provide access and tools for the marketers to be able to create content and target it for specific selling situations and allow the sellers really easy access from wherever they happen to be, whether they're living in Salesforce, living on their mobile phones, living in Outlook or Gmail.

You know, content's going to find them, it's going to customize itself, and it's going to be ready to send out and track. Love it. And I'm always curious, why did you start? Because you're the founder and CEO of Seismic, right? I am, yeah. You actually found it. So, you know, you were at EMC for a while. And so, what kind of drove you to start, first of all, your own company and start Seismic specifically? Yeah. So, I've been on the entrepreneurial path for a few years now, going back actually probably 20 years or so. I know I don't look anywhere near old enough for that, but it's true. And, you know, previous company ended up getting bought by EMC. It was part of their content management stack, learned a lot about the, you know, content world and what was happening in the content world.

And we would get requests all the time from sales and marketing. Can you help us with our PowerPoint problem? Can you help us with, you know, managing all the content that we have for sales? The truth of the matter was that the tools that were out there at the time weren't really suited for that purpose. You know, they were too heavy, required too much IT. There was no real cloud-first solution for content, certainly not focused on the needs of sales and marketers. And felt like, you know, what Salesforce did, they took CRM, consumerized it, put it on the cloud, started selling it as a SaaS and changed the world. We thought no one's really doing that for content. We could do that and sales and marketing would be a great place to go because the existing technologies were such a bad fit.

So, that's where the inspiration came from. And we thought, you know, why not us? We've got the right background. Let's dive in. Let's do it. Nice. I love it. And you've been doing it now for how many years? I've missed that. Yeah, we started out in 2010, 2011, really started selling the product 2012, raised our first funding in 2013. So, the business kind of launched around 2013, really, kind of at scale. And we've been hard at it since. Nice. You said that you had that entrepreneurial itch. Was that always an itch or was that an itch that evolved over your career? Just pure curiosity here. Yeah, it's one of those things where I think I always, I was never great at having a boss. I always felt like it was more fun, sort of making my own mistakes.

I started out working at bigger companies, went back to business school right around dot-com days. You know, tried coming out of dot-com or coming out of grad school to start a company. And I remember turning to some of my friends and going, when are we ever going to be surrounded by this many really smart, unemployed people at the same time? Nice. But ultimately, didn't have the courage, went back, started working at a bigger company and lasted a couple of years before launching out on my own, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s and having looked back. Yeah, it's funny. I think there's a couple of types of people, because I have a similar story to you. It's like, I always felt a little off in corporate, right?

Because to your point, like, I never really were. I never knew how to play the political game. I always clashed with my managers or my bosses, right? And so, but I never really knew it until later on. And I've always said, I'm more of a calculated risk taker. I'm not like a full-blown, like, live on my parents' couch and eat ramen noodles type of risk taker. Like, I'm the second guy. After the first guy actually, you know, does that and then chose them a little bit, then I'm the one on board. Or unless I have, like, a little bit of a cushion to fall back on, I'm not going to take that risk. But that's kind of the same thing that happened to me. I was like, okay, I can go do this because those pieces are in place for me to really make a difference here.

So it sounds similar. Yeah, it's a lot more fun. It's a lot more fun making your own mess, cleaning it up, learning, keeping going, you know, building the team. I love the team that we've got here at Sizemake, just such a great, my co-founders, plus, you know, as many as folks that we've added over the years. Like, that's a lot of fun and very satisfying to figure it all out together. Love it. Cool. So let's talk about this report, right? So you commissioned Forrester to do this, right? First of all, first of all, why? And then give us the kind of overview of what the report, what the focus of the report is all about. And then we'll dig into some of the details here. Yeah, we often felt, and I think from day one, personalization of content was a big piece of what we did at Sizemake.

And, you know, personalization of content says, you know, when you're in a selling situation, you have the right exact piece of content that's going to match that conversation. And, you know, we focused always on the B2B side of the house. It certainly applies in the B2B side of the house. It certainly applies in the B2C in our own personal worlds. We're used to it, right? And we thought that, you know, the conversations, things that happen online, you go to a website, it knows who you are. It learns. You go to Amazon. It knows what you bought in the past. It makes suggestions, you know, those kinds of things. You know, you get into the boardroom and you start to sit down and have a conversation about the product.

And that doesn't happen anymore. You know, the visibility is not there for marketing. The ability to customize that conversation is really in the hands of the individual sellers. So you get people that do a great job. You get people that don't do such a great job. So we felt that in today's world where the buyer is more educated than they've ever been before, that personalization was critically important. And, you know, we intuitively knew that. We wanted to get Forrester to kind of come along and help us quantify and sort of, you know, put some of their lens onto, you know, how impactful is this really? How big actually is the need? Cool. And so you went to Forrester and you said, like, I've never done that before.

Like, do you have to give them a very specific, like, these are the questions or do they help you actually develop it? Yeah, they really develop. I mean, they're an independent research team, right? If they came back and the answer was not what we wanted to hear, you know, they would have reported that too, right? That's their job. We really kind of worked with them and said, hey, this is the area that we feel there's a lot of potential. There's an interesting topic here. And they agreed. They said, yes, this does sound interesting, does sound impactful. You know, let us go out and let's try to ask some of these questions and see what kind of data comes back. And then we'll write a report up about it.

And, you know, that's really just the way the process works. But they bring their expertise and contacts and all their client base that they have access to to be able to actually conduct the survey and ask all the questions. So give me an example here, right? Because, you know, I wrote a blog post a little while ago called Sell to the 20%, which is my fundamental belief, right? That pick any product or service that you own. I almost guarantee you only use 10% to 20% of the functionality, whatever that product or service is, right? And because of that, because most people only use 10% to 20%, that's how I believe people buy. They really only buy the 20% that's most relevant to them based on their challenges, priorities, or whatever that you uncovered throughout the discovery process.

But walk me through, like, what is personal? I mean, and I know that you said you focus a little bit more on the latter stages of the sales process and personalization. I actually have a pretty decent handle on the front end side of personalization of content. Because I think you can read buyer personas and maybe share some content that, you know, you can have a hypothesis that, well, the piece of sales SaaS industry of under, you know, of series B round companies, you know, this is typically where their challenges are. And so here's some content that I think might be relevant to their, my sequences and my cadences or whatever. But talk to me through, like, enterprise selling, you're kind of like, let's pick a stage, right, where you're about to sit in front of that boardroom before the close, like, before the closing presentation, you're, you're somewhere in the middle there.

What, what is personal? Like, what kind of content is personalized that makes a difference that you're seeing? So, so I think there are examples of great one. You know, you're getting ready to walk in, you're going to have that first live conversation. You got a room full of, you know, five or 10 people come from a couple of different functions within the organization. Truth is, before you sit, you earn the privilege of sitting there, they've probably done a bunch of research on you, right? They've gone online. They know about your product. They probably watched an online demo. They know what your competitors are doing. They probably know pricing. They've seen a few case studies. The seller, on the other hand, you know, how much do they know, right?

They may have done, hopefully they did a good job on discovery. They asked some questions, right? And they've had to educate themselves. Now, you've got their attention. They're going to sit there with you for an hour. You're going to put up some PowerPoint slides and you're going to tell them a story. And you want that story to resonate with them, with their problem, with their situation as much as possible. Through your discovery, you learn what their major pain points are. You learn what their technology infrastructure looks like. You know, how they're going to view success. You know, certainly background information like what industry they're in and how big they are and what geo they're in, right?

So, imagine, you know, you're going in to talk to an automotive supplier and you start giving them case study examples from the telco industry or healthcare, right? Clunk. It's not going to resonate. You've got a bunch of marketing people at the table and you're going to talk to them about the value to IT. Clunk. It's not going to resonate, right? So, how do you put that story together at scale? That really is the challenge. And, you know, we've got a concept internally we call a complexity score, which talks about how this scales as an organization scale. So, you think about a small startup company in technology. It may have one product or two, right? They may sell in, you know, one geography, in one language.

They may, you know, have a selling process that includes a couple stages and maybe they sell across two industries. They have nuanced messages through two industries. You multiply all those things together and you get, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen, three dozen different selling situations that a particular seller might find themselves in. Okay. Now, you could theoretically have 36 PowerPoint decks perfectly set up in advance to tell that story to that particular customer. You go in, you add a couple personal details, you know, the logos and that kind of stuff. You're good to go. Now, imagine you're a couple of our customers like, I don't know, IBM or American Express. You go in there to IBM, you know, it's a big customer of ours.

They have 14 different divisions. Each division has hundreds, if not thousands of products. They sell in every single corner of the earth, right? They have every persona possible that they're selling to and they have marketing messages directly designed for that person. You can quickly find yourself in a situation where you have hundreds of thousands or millions of unique selling situations. Now, how are you going to go in and talk to that person? How are you going to personalize the messaging at scale? You know, and part of the data that came back from Forrester, you know, they found things, you know, from the buyers, talking to the buyers, 88% of the buyers said they expected a more relevant and personalized information today than what they used to.

You know, they're expecting you. Five years ago, they didn't expect that. Today, they do. Because Amazon can do it. How come I can't get that same experience at work, right? Amazon's screwing all of us. Literally, that experience is because I'm right there with you. Like, it better be personalized to me, right? It's got to be. Yeah. You know, and probably even worse for those of us that sell all the time and for your audience, like 85% of the buyers that they talk to said they're very likely to dismiss a seller if they don't get relevant, personalized content from them on the first interaction. So if you screw up that first interaction, you send out the wrong stuff, it clanks, clunks, boom, you're out of there, right?

And they're going to move on to your competitor who's doing this better. Well, it's even, you know, it's funny. I go a lot on, I don't know if you pay attention to the Gong blog, but I love the data that they put out there. And, you know, they talked, and actually, Chris Voss actually alludes to this in his book, Never Split the Difference. And it's all about, like Gong says, you know, too many people focus, like case studies, for instance, perfect example. Case studies and reference selling, there's a significant uptick or it's actually, there's no middle ground on case studies. They either significantly help you close the deal or they significantly decrease your chances, right? And it's like when you name drop, so for instance, like a lot of, like I could easily name drop, oh, I work with Salesforce and LinkedIn and Slack and Google and that type of stuff.

But if I don't, if I say that to the wrong persona, the wrong ICP, they're like, all right, pal, I'm a, you know, I'm a 20 person startup here that's self-funded and thank you, you sound really too expensive, right? And the other problem that is that people, they focus a little bit too much on the outcome, right? And where you actually have to focus way more on the before, before you can get me to buy into the after, right? So you have to get me to realize that, yes, what you're, that scenario that you just painted there, yes, that's me, right? And Chris Voss talks about this is like, if you ever hear you're right versus that's right, if you hear you're right, that's actually a dangerous sign because that's them telling you, hey, you know what?

You're right. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, sales rep, you're right. That's a big problem for us. But if you, if you rephrase whatever their issue is and you identify with it and you, and they say, yeah, that's right. Well, now you got them, right? Because if you can rephrase somebody's problem better than they can and they can relate to that scenario, now you can tell, you can sell them on the outcome, but too many people. So is that, how do you get to that point though? I mean, do you through, let's, let's, let's talk seismic here for a minute, right? Because, because I could, I could see taking every piece of content and tagging it on every single scenario, right? A stage of the sales process, persona, scenario, that type of stuff.

That seems to be a relatively, like a yeoman's effort. This is why most people internal content sucks because they don't want to go through the effort of really categorizing all of their content at the various stages. So how do you recommend people start on that journey of, of, of, of categorizing the content that they currently have for the, the scenarios that they would face? Yeah, great question. I actually try to encourage our customers to turn it upside down. So rather than starting with categorize the content that you have, take the process, the sales process, the buyer's journey, and the other variables that you think are important along that buyer's journey. If it's industry or if it's product, whatever it might be.

And think about if I'm in a situation where I'm, I'm at this stage in the sales conversation and I'm talking about, you know, to this persona and I'm talking to them about this product, like what content would I want in order to help facilitate that conversation? What are the questions that they're going to be asked maps back to the buyer's journey, you know, and coordinates off of what product am I talking about? Okay, now do I have the right content? If I don't, well, then I should go build it. Or maybe I have content that's much bigger, much, you know, I got a ton of information, but in fact, that'd be more impactful if I trimmed it down to just what's necessary, a bite-sized piece for that.

So I try to encourage our customers to flip that process over and think about creating content. Now, in truth, you're not going to start over. You're going to take a lot of content you have and try to repurpose it. But it's the mindset that's different. It's saying, look, I'm thinking about this from the point of view of what content do I need to progress this sales process along? What questions do I need to add or to answer for that particular situation that I'm in? The key thing, and this is really controversial, right? You're going to love this one. Telling the marketers, get out there and ask sales. I know, right? Holy shit, right? Yeah, what are you thinking? Come on, we can't do that. Go out and ask them, like, hey, you're in this situation.

You've been in this situation before. What do you think you need in order to get the job done? And then, yes, you can create the content. You can tag it or you can build it that comes into that way. And then at some level, you need automation to help you. So one of the reasons Seismic's been successful is we have technology that allows content to be customized and personalized. So PowerPoint decks can actually be kind of templatized and they can fill themselves in with the data that's relevant. So if you're going to grab the exact case study, you can imagine a customer like, you know, a PayPal or Quest Diagnostics or one of these bigger companies. They have thousands of case studies. How do you pick the right one?

Well, most sellers resort to the ones they already know. Yep. But if I could have a nice database where I can say, hey, these are the attributes that I'm looking for. Put together the right case studies for me. Tell me which ones are the best fit then and have that happen in an automated way. Man, I'm going to have a much better experience. So now I want to talk to you about like the how do you measure the impact of this shit? Right. Because I think there's one thing about like, hey, I think like you go to have the marketers go talk to the sales reps, right? Sales reps are going to tell you what they think as far as, yeah, well, I need a better power, you know, and, you know, I hate to say this, but most sales reps are lazy as shit.

And they want the perfect deck. They want the perfect thing or that, you know, they're always want the silver bullet thing that's going to all of a sudden make it rain from heaven. So how, first of all, how do you know what they're telling you is what they really need? And then second of all, as you create that content or as you curate that content, how do you know what's working and what's not as far as the various stages and what content is truly having an impact on moving a deal from stage one to stage two? Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm an engineer by train. That's where I came from. And so you always think in engineering about closed loop systems. You measure the results, you make some changes that you think are going to have an impact, and then you watch to see what happens.

And you take that feedback and you continue to iterate on that cycle, right? That's how Six Sigma, basically, right? Yeah, that's how, you know, Tesla drives itself down the street, right? It's kind of that same closed loop system. I think the same thing applies here. You know, it's being able to, I've got a hypothesis, and I'm going to come up with what I think, how I think content should map into the buyer's journey, okay? And I'm going to talk to sellers. They're going to give me some input. You're right. You can't just stop with one. You're going to hear, you know, different things, and you're going to get some, and you're going to go, that's completely stupid. And you're going to hear some others, like, that's brilliant.

You're going to make, you know, as a content owner, they're going to make their best guess on it. And we can, you know, you can have some tools that look. You can look and see what have they done in the past. You can kind of try to see, oh, when sales were at this stage, this is what they used. Then you set that all up, and then you watch the system for a while, and you see what's happening. And you see who is adhering to the process, who's using content at the right time, and who's not. And you see when they're using content the way that you think they should be, does it move things forward faster than if they don't? You know, and humans can pay attention to that, and we can look at the data, and we have all kinds of analytics and dashboards that can tie it all the way through to revenue.

When this content was used, deals moved faster, and they were one with a higher frequency than if it wasn't used. But you can also, that's where, you know, we've built a big data infrastructure to be able to collect all this data, and we're collecting millions and millions of data points on our platform every day now. We can watch that, and we can start to see, you know, humans can start to see what's going on. But now this is also where the machine learning becomes interesting, because now the machines can try to start looking for patterns in that behavior and say, hey, this is working, this isn't. Then you can start to highlight, hey, this piece of content, you know, it's not being used the way you thought it should be used.

You might want to look in and dig in deeper on it, or when it's being used, it's not very effective. No one watches it, or no one likes it, or they don't take the right behaviors. So you want, that's where as a marketer or a content owner, you want to put your energy into, hey, let's go try and make that better. Let's try to improve it. And I probably should have asked this to start, or backed up a little bit, but could you give me some example? Like, because I think a lot of people listening to this would say, okay, I get it. Like the PowerPoint deck, right? When I'm presenting my presentation, there's the PowerPoint deck, or, you know, the case studies, easy examples of content. What other components of content are there that people should be looking at?

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that either marketing or sales should be, like, what other pieces, outside of, like, the PowerPoint deck, or the case study, what other examples of content are there? Yeah, there's all kinds of other stuff these days, right? And Seismic, we've tried to stay fairly agnostic, although, you know, like it or not, PowerPoint still does have a pretty dominant role in the universe. Of course. But video is becoming increasingly important. Okay. People are investing a lot in creating videos and short video clips that tell certain specific stories. You know, even case studies now are oftentimes being converted into video. You've got, we have a number of our customers that use us and have created interactive, rich, interactive HTML experiences.

We have customers in the med device space, for example. They're chasing doctors through hallways, or maybe they're even in the OR, and they're, you know, they're having to grab, you know, five minutes with a doctor in the hallway on their phone or on their iPad, and they want to show them, you know, the cool, spinny model of the spine that you can zoom in and see why, you know, this disc replacement's better than that disc replacement. So, you know, content itself can be in lots and lots of different types, and, you know, being able to tie it together through playbooks is also critically important. You'll say, hey, look, here's how this content should be used so that new sellers can ramp up more quickly.

I find myself in this situation. The playbook's going to help tell me, use this content. Maybe the training is even associated with it. Hey, I'm not super familiar with how to use this interactive 3D model or how to deliver this PowerPoint deck in the right context. Let me train you. Let me show you either here's a training class or here's a video of someone giving this presentation that you can learn from and get coached on, you know, that kind of stuff. Tying that all together is really what we're trying to do. Can you get as micro as, like, the specific questions that you would ask in a certain scenario or to a certain persona? And do you look at it that way, too? Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, questions that you ask or more likely questions that you're going to be asked.

Right. Yeah. So objections or something like that. Questions, you know, you want to be able to lay traps for competitors so you find out which competitor is in there with you and you start to, you know, pull up the right set of landmine questions that you can lay. Yeah, because I think that's what we're doing right now. Like, you know, in lieu of, you know, a tool or something like that, like what I'm doing with Morgan right now, so my, you know, he was an SDR, SDR manager. And now he's delivering for me, you know, we're actually micro testing very, very small things, but we're with a hyper focus on it. So, for instance, you know, all this month, we're going to make sure that when we meet with a SDR manager or, no, it's actually right now for, here's a perfect example.

VPs, like, one of the challenges that Morgan has, you know, and everybody has, is getting to power, right? How do you get to power? Like, we're stuck at a certain level. You know, you got to get there and we're testing out questions. And I always say my favorite way of going over somebody's head without pissing them off is ask them questions that they don't know the answers to, right? That are important questions, not just to, not to insult you, right? But to genuinely understand, right? Because like, you know, you, for instance, at Seismic, when you stood up, when you stand up in the beginning of the year and say, team, this is what our growth goals are. This is our projections. These are main priorities for this year.

If I can't figure out what those are and how my solution aligns with those, when my training bubbles up to you, you're going to look at that and you're going to ask those questions. And if we don't have answers, it's going to be a waste of time for me and whoever's below the power line. And so a lot of like directors of enablement, for instance, you know, they talk about ROI and KPIs. And one of the questions we're asking is, hey, do you know when a rep becomes profitable for you? Right? Because there's that, you know, you've seen that graph, right? Where the rep starts and then all of a sudden it's like, bing. And what's that point for your company, right? Most enablement people, like especially kind of manager slash director level, will not know that answer, right?

And what it's doing is, and I'm saying to Morgan, look, we got our playbook. Here's how we run our meetings, right? Let's insert this question. And let's just see what the responses are this year, this month. And then at the end, I want you to be very hypervigilant on actually taking notes for that specific question. Did it open up the conversation? Did you get valuable information? Did it, you know, did it get you to power? And then we're going to look at it at the end of the month and say, yeah, that question was worth it. Or no, it wasn't, right? So do you encourage people, like how do you encourage people in lieu of, you know, a solution like Seismic to test content in a way that is meaningful enough for them to figure out whether it is having a true impact on it?

Like what's a structure you could put in place to be able to do that? Yeah, I mean, I think that the same platform and approach, the same structure really would apply. You know, what I was talking about, the way I thought about creating content for a purpose and then monitoring it, you know, if you are, you know, an IBM or any company with some significant scale, of course you need tools and technology to be able to do that. If you're a smaller organization, though, you can do the same thing manually, right? And you should. You should be thinking, why am I creating this content? What's its purpose? And then you should be evaluating, is it being used the way that you thought it should be? You know, that can be a training issue or it can be a, hey, I thought this content was great, but it's really not.

You know, I forgot I should have asked sales and they forgot to, but now I'm asking them and they're telling me, they're voting with their, you know, clicks. You know, if they are using it, is it working? Is it moving sales cycles along? And again, at small scale, you can look at it. Ironically, you know, Seismic, we're still a relatively small company. So we can, you know, in the early days, as we were rolling out our product, this is what we would do. We would actually do it manually. We would watch and see whether or not it seemed like it was, when it was being used properly, are those sales cycles successful? And we still publish that type of data to our selling teams. You know, are you using our product the right way?

Are you using our content the right way? And then we can see what's working, what's not working. You know, at small scale, I think it's the same thing. And just, you know, always be aware that that's what you're doing. You're evaluating, you're looking for the effectiveness, and you want to continue to improve and evolve. How much do you look for feedback from the customer? I think the result is the ultimate feedback, right? Did they close? But how often do you go back to a client yourselves at Seismic or through the tools that you use to kind of get their feedback on, like, hey, what did you think? You know, after I presented it to you and that type of thing, and you closed, right? Because I don't want to ask you beforehand and potentially screw up the deal.

Like, so, you know, walk me back through, like, what had a real impact? How often do you actually encourage or do that yourselves? So, you know, I don't think we too often go back and actually call them up and ask them. What we do, though, is we're watching. So, it's not just what sellers are doing with content, but how are the buyers interacting that Seismic is watching. So, we collect that information. We see, you know, I sent the video. Did they watch it? How often did they watch it? Did they forward it to their boss? Did their boss watch it? Did they watch the whole thing or just the first 10 seconds? If I send them a proposal, did they go right to the pricing page and they never looked at the rest?

Or did they spend all their time on, you know, our value versus competition? I know what they're interested in. I know a little bit about where their minds are at. So, the sellers love that kind of visibility. But now, take one step up and think about the content owners. Right. Go back to our PowerPoint example. You had a PowerPoint deck. It's got a bunch of sections in it. Somebody owns this section, product capabilities section for this particular product. All right. That piece, you know, people always look at the first slide and the second slide and then they're done. Yeah. They don't get to what I consider to be most important, which is on slide three. Right. So, I need to refactor that content.

I need to move things around to make it more engaging. Right. So, different people can get that visibility that ultimately ties to the buyer and what their behavior is. Because at the end of the day, if they're not into it, it doesn't really matter. Right? No, totally. And that's why I'm curious from a data standpoint and what you're seeing. And this kind of goes a little bit on the gong stuff as well. You know, I wrote a post a little while about called Time to Value, right? Like, if you don't get to value fast, you lose me. Right? In today's world. Right? And that's on a cold call. That's in a presentation. And the historical way that we've presented or at least been taught to present to sales professionals is, you know, you start, you build.

Right? And I always joke around, like, every company has the first three slides of every single fucking company slide presentation deck are always the same. It's the fucking company backgrounds, the awards that they got, and the client list. All about me. Exactly. Look at how awesome I am. And I just put two things together. And I'm not a smart kid here. But the number one thing on the planet everybody loves talking about is themselves. And the most valuable asset anybody has is time. So, you're telling me that my most valuable asset that you just had here, that you're going to spend the first 10 to 15 minutes talking all about you? Like, you've already lost me. And so, the Gong data suggests the same thing, which is, instead of building to a crescendo of, like, hey, oh, look at this, you know, the big reveal.

Like, you actually want to flip it and actually punch them square in the mouth up front with value. Like, hey, look at what this could be. And then you back into it to show them how they can get there. So, where are you, like, from an insights, because I think you probably have more insight than most when it comes to content that works, what's a good format of a presentation for somebody to follow? Or what's the format that you follow? Like, once you've gone through the qualification, you've understood what their needs are. And now you're at the next stage. Like, so we talked about that initial stage. You've kind of qualified, but now you're meeting with a board and you're still trying to figure shit out.

But now you have the opportunity to wow the shit out of four or five people in a boardroom, and this is the closing presentation. What's kind of what you've seen as the most effective content that sings in those scenarios? Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, I want to reflect back, actually, to one of the times I personally learned this lesson, which was when I was out trying to raise money. And, you know, I remember living this life because, you know, I've created this PowerPoint deck and it tells the story, the pitch, right? The proverbial pitch that we all read about on TechCrunch all the time. How to do it, how not to do it. Well, I went out there with the perfect example how not to do it.

You're talking about personalized content. You've got this pitch deck that you're sending to everybody. That's right, exactly. And I remember sitting there and, you know, there's no VCs on this call, right? No, no. VCs are very, very, very attention deficit challenged. Oh, yeah. More than even buyers, technology buyers. And I'm sitting there and I'm looking around the room and there's like 10 people in the room, right? Big names, important people that have done huge deals. And, you know, one's on the phone, one's like starting to head bob, one's I'm thinking, oh, man, what's going on here? This isn't working. And I get to the slide that has a customers on it. And it was a story, the way I constructed it, it was a story of the customer, when they joined, so a little bit of history, but then also what their use case was.

And the logos were great, so I was fortunate we've got some really fantastic customers. All of a sudden, everybody sits up. Everybody's paying attention, right? So, guess what? My next meeting that I did with a different VC, that was slide one. First slide. Right? Because then you go into the details and you've got them, they're engaged. So, I think in this sales situation, it's kind of the same thing. You have to think about that. Like, what's going to get their attention? You know, a lot of times I see things that are effective is you start with what we've learned. So, I talk to a whole bunch of people at your company. This person, this person, this person, this person. Sometimes I see it even, they put pictures.

Like, I found, I talked to all these people and, whoa, I know all those people. And what I heard from them was this. Does this seem right? Is this like what you're struggling with? Yeah, that's right. Or, no, not quite. You missed this or that. Right now, the conversation is all about them. Okay? Then you come back with a case study. Well, a couple of customers of ours had a similar kind of struggle. And here's what we were able to do from them. Wow, that's really, that's cool. Would you like us to do something like that for you? That would be fantastic. Okay. Here's how our product works and what it does. Yeah. And then way back at the end, you say, here's about the company. Yeah. Like, we're awesome.

We're not going to go out of business. You can feel safe going with us. I couldn't, I love that. Because that, and it's almost like a leave behind. You know what I mean? Like, hey, here's a PDF that shows you all our fucking background. You know, I look, you know, because there's, I think, unfortunately, there's still a lot of marketing companies out there that force reps to do those first three slides. And I'm going to, if anybody's listening right now and they're struggling with their marketing department, tell them to stuff shit down their throat, send them this fucking podcast. Excuse me. I'm a, by the way, I'm a marketer. You're an engineer. My background's marketing. So I have a healthy respect for marketing, but nobody gives a shit about us.

They only care about them. So what I tell them is like, here's a nice little soft in between where you can start the presentation off with a nice little agenda. Say, hey, Doug, thanks so much for your time today. You know, I, there's a few things I want to make sure that we get over. Like, here's what we want to go through today. As far as our background and history, how much do you need to know, right? Like, like, because I can go into it if you really want me to. I'd really like to focus on what's most important is you. And look, if you haven't done a good enough job, because sometimes I will say, you know, we get sitting in situations where maybe we've had one point of contact who's now bringing us into the presentation, but those people really have no context.

They didn't do the homework. They didn't look at us online. So jumping right in without any validation, right? So usually what I'll say is, look, do you want me to give you my 30 second overview of where we're coming from, who we're doing and what we're all about? Because I can do that, but let's just get through that, right? And usually they'll be like, ah, nah. Well, yeah, let's get to what's important. Got it, yeah. Right. So, but too many reps go through the motions and press and play. And I think that's ultimately the big takeaway from here is that the tailored experience, the personalized content, there isn't a perfect slide deck. There isn't a perfect piece of content. Even if you segment it down to the perfect scenario of the perfect person and all that other stuff, your job as a sales rep is to take whatever's close enough to that scenario and can make it relevant, right?

Because what do you see the best sales reps do? Like say you give them, you feed them, right? Because there's part of this argument that says, you know what? If I sign up for Seismic, I can get pretty much a monkey to show up to a presentation because I have the exact slide deck of the exact questions and the exact pitch that they have to do and all they have to do is follow the bouncing ball, right? But that doesn't work. So what do you see the best sales reps do after being empowered with Seismic? And how do they tell that story? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, you know, they invest, the best sales reps invest the time and energy necessary to really understand what their customers' pain points are and where they are, right?

Because that knowledge, it allows you to tell a story that's empathetic. That knowledge allows you to take the seismic generated customized content and say, oh, almost, but not quite. Let me, right? It allows you to put all that, all the stuff that you're going to share into the right context. It allows you to build that trusted advisor type of relationship. You just can't fake that. You have to understand where someone's coming from and what their real pain points are in order for that, you know, for those other items to work. So they do, they absolutely have to go hand in hand. What we're trying to do is say, spend less time on the, you know, mechanical part of that and more time investing in understanding where your customers are really coming from and fill in that slide with all the pictures of all the people you've talked to because you've had the time to go talk to them all and learn the organization.

Yeah, I call it the give a shit factor, right? Which is, you know, you genuinely have to like actually give a shit about, put yourself to your point. I think empathy is one of the hardest things to teach, right? And especially in this world where we're, you know, monthly quotas and all that other stuff, we got to get the deal closed. And so it, it unfortunately forces reps to skip those steps of actually caring. But man, once you hit that groove, man, and what I think you hit on with that is also something that I actually do a whole keynote on this and I stole it from Gary Vaynerchuk, which is, you know, everybody talks about content is king, content is king. He said this, right? Everybody talks content is king.

He said, fine, if content is king, then context is God. And that to me is marketing and sales. Marketing is content. Sales is context. And if we as sales professionals are not putting any context around our content, then we're no different than marketing and I have no idea why we're getting paid to do what we do. So it's to take all that and ideally curate it to the point where it's pretty damn close, but then putting that extra layer on top of it to humanize it. Because until computers buy from computers, we still have a chance here, right? No, John, I think that's right on. In fact, our tagline when we first launched the company was content and context. Love it. And that was it. Now, a bunch of people knocked that off from us now.

We should have trademarked it. Yeah, totally should have. I stole it from Gary Vee. Maybe he stole it from you, but I straight up stole it. I mean, I literally have a slot. I have a whole keynote that I do for an hour. It's called The Context of Sales Evolution. And it's a full-blown content context and where we can put context at every stage, right? So those emails, for instance, the cadence emails, it's like, okay, great. But to your point, what persona am I going after? What triggers? What things? Okay, now let me tell that story and then press play. Or social. Instead of just retweeting and reposting somebody else's shit, read it, learn something, then put your thoughts on top of it and share it out.

And then you can learn and build your brand at the same time, right? That PowerPoint deck, take those 30 slides and cut it down to the 10 that are most relevant and have a conversation with somebody before presenting it, right? 100%. Yeah, right on. You got it. Cool. All right, Doug. This has been a fantastic conversation, Doug. Where can people learn more, right? Because I think you, I'm a big believer in what you guys do as far as where you're going and I'm real interested in this space. Because I am personally, by the way, I'm on the edge right now of artificial intelligence. I'm a little bit more old school right now and I still don't trust AI to give me the right information or tell me right when it's, but I see where it's going.

So, and you guys are right in that point right there of kind of scratching the surface but still being real, right? So where can people find out more about Seismic, about this report that you put out there and where, you know, and what do you want to kind of, what's the message you want to give to everybody on the way out the door here? Yeah, and I think you're, I'd echo exactly what you said with AI and ML. Like there's some really exciting opportunities and potential out there but we're a long, long way from, you know, taking the humans out of the equation and, you know, that ability to relate and understand and grab lots and lots of different information and put it together into a story and to empathize.

Those are all, you know, far into the distance, I think, as far as I can tell. Maybe like two or three years. Well, for the common person, right? I mean, I think, you know, yeah, those who can invest in IBM Watson and shit like that, like, okay, fine. You know what I mean? But I don't have a billion dollars to create a Jeopardy toy, right? So. Yeah, so, you know, I think that's, there's a lot, a lot of great stuff out there. You know, look, I think, come by our website, you can get a copy of the report from Forrester. It really does have a lot of detail. We barely scratched the surface of it. A lot of really interesting information that's there and you can also learn about our approach and there's, I think, a lot that's really cool and unique that we're doing and a lot that's happening and it's evolving fast.

So, if you thought it was, didn't quite fit last month, come back next month, yeah, you know, it's moving really fast. Yeah, it is. And for those out there listening right now, we're going to post this on LinkedIn and a bunch of other places, but for those listening on the podcast, it's Seismic, S-E-I-S-M-I-C and I think it's just Seismic.com, right? Seismic.com, just like the word in the dictionary, believe it or not. There you go. I love it. We had to fight for that, but I like it. Cool. And Doug, it's just Doug Winter on LinkedIn? Yep, Doug Winter on LinkedIn or dwinter at seismic.com if anyone wants to send an email. Awesome. People do that still sometimes. Yes, indeed. I'm still in that world myself.

So, awesome, Doug. Well, I appreciate you coming on board here. Hopefully, everybody got as much value out of this as I did and got you thinking about a few things of what you should be doing with your content internally. So, Doug, thank you so much for coming on board, man. I appreciate it. My pleasure, John. Take care. All right, everybody. And just like I say all the time, if you don't do anything else today, go make somebody smile, go make somebody happy. Even if you had a shitty day, if you made somebody smile, you know you had a good one. So, let's get out there and make it happen. Thank you very much, everybody. Bye.