Stop Selling and Start Educating
Jamie Gier shares her insights into the power of educating your buyers, how to create valuable connections with inspiration, and why it’s important to put customers at the core of your business.
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I'm joined by a special guest, Jamie.
How are you?
I'm great.
How are you doing, Ian?
I am wonderful, excited to have you on the show, excited to chat marketing and
demand
and your background, everything in between.
So starting out, what was your first job in Demand Gen?
How far do you want to go back?
You know, maybe your dealer's choice here.
Okay.
I'll actually go way back to when I was a kid.
And I just happen to have the right product, so it sold itself.
1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.
I'm a Washington state native.
That was May.
And that summer we had a family reunion in Iowa and did a road trip from
Washington
to Iowa.
My sister and I had an idea of taking buckets of ash since it was a big global
event.
A lot of people knew about it.
And we sold vials of ash along the roadway.
And as we saw that there was big demand for it, we kept increasing the price.
I think we finally got up to 25 cents a vial.
But that was my first memory.
And I think, and I was, God, I'm going to date myself here, but third grade,
when that
happened.
I think I bought a vial of ash when we went up and visited Mount St. Helens
when I was
a kid.
So I don't know if I was a customer or if I was if it was secondhand ash or
where I
got it.
Maybe I made it's way.
But I do sometimes wonder if anyone held on to that or not.
And now I'm wondering, was that even legal?
But it doesn't matter.
I said third grade, right?
It was 1980.
So.
Not.
It's stringent back then.
And so fly forward to today.
Tell us a little bit about your curl.
Yes.
So I'm the chief marketing officer of Sarah's.
We're based out of New York, though I am here in Seattle.
And we have a content creation platform to help B2B businesses create immersive
interactive
content as part of their digital strategy.
And so I oversee everything from brand editorial to digital marketing and
demand generation,
product marketing and creative.
And what are the types of companies that you all work with?
We work with largely mid-sized to large enterprise customers.
We're global.
And so we have about 900 global brands that are partners of Sarah's.
So anyone from United Airlines to Kimpton hotels, we have a partnership with
Pinterest.
So if organizations do not have a license to Sarah's or studio, then they can
partner
through Pinterest and do post-click experiences.
And so Lego, for example, is a customer of ours through that interest
partnership.
So we have multiple channels, but we are in various verticals and different
industries
from healthcare to education, manufacturing, B2B software, real estate, you
name it.
Anyone who sees content as pertinent to how they go to market and how they
serve their
customers, we're there as their partner.
All right, let's get to our first segment.
The trust tree is where we go.
You can feel honest and trusted and share those deepest, darkest, and managing
secrets.
I've heard a little bit about the company and your customers.
Who is your buying committee?
Who's the person who signs the dotted line?
The person who signs the dotted line is me.
So it's typically your chief marketing officer.
Perhaps it's the head of marketing.
In some cases, depending on the organization, it could be your VP of creative.
So Prudential is a client of ours and our primary buyer and champion.
It happens to be their VP of creative.
And then our users are designers or any type of creator that has a design
background or
is design savvy.
One of the attributes of our platform in is that it's no code.
So you don't have to rely on front end web developers to do the animation and
the interactivity
of the content.
So if you're a content marketer and you are familiar with, say, some of the
Adobe tools,
you can easily get into our studio and create immersive experiences.
But it's largely used by designers and the buyer is the marketing head.
Yeah.
And you mentioned some of the types of customers that you go after.
What does your go-to-market strategy look like?
What is your marketing strategy and how does demand fit into that?
Yeah.
So we have an ICP that we adhere to.
We've learned over the years who are the ideal buyers and users of our
technology.
Usage and adoption is really important to us.
But I would say that our go-to-market is any organization, again, mid-size and
up, who
has a design team, but sees content is absolutely critical to how they go to
market and serve
their customers as well.
And so for all intents and purposes, we have the marketing persona.
So anyone within a marketing role that oversees marketing strategy, content,
digital, they're
one of our larger personas.
And then, of course, the designer as well.
And I mean, we take the approach in, which is be where your customers are.
And so we have a multi-channel approach to how we engage from exposing our
brand all the
way down through evaluation of our technology, even if it's in a competitive
situation.
What I love about SEROS, because we are a highly creative organization, is that
we value
even those things that can't be tracked and measured, but we know instinctually
and through
intuition where buyers are going.
So for example, this podcast.
And so we may not be able to measure it, but we know your listeners are likely
going
to go and check out SEROS.
Maybe they're going to see an adivars on LinkedIn or say in some other
community.
But we take into consideration that the places people go to get information isn
't always
trackable, but we're not going to, for that reason, not go to those channels.
And so one of the important pieces of how we go to market is just making sure
that we're
visible where buyers are, whether you can track or not.
And how do you structure or how do you organize your structure to go acquire
those accounts?
You mentioned a little bit of kind of like what marketing owns.
How does that kind of relate into your sales team?
We have a really solid relationship with our sales organization.
It's a partnership.
And so we have collectively determined which segments we're going to go after.
We do have target accounts that we focus on, but also we realize that there are
going
to be buyers that come in outside of that.
We have both an outbound SCR team and an inbound SCR team.
And so marketing is measured on inbound based pipeline contribution as our
sales team is
measured on outbound pipeline contribution.
And so we have a handshake agreement in terms of how much pipeline will
generate through
both inbound and outbound and work very closely with them on how we do proper
handoff so that
as a buyer shows interest and we book a first meeting with them, we hand them
over to sales
to continue the relationship and make sure that that customer is served.
Okay let's get to our next segment.
The playbook is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that
help you win.
You play to win the game.
Hello you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
You do your three channels or tactics that are uncuttable budget items.
Content?
Of course.
Not just because we create content and help other people create content.
But you know I've listened to many of your podcasts and I share a similar point
of view
with many of the CMOs that you've had on your podcast.
And content is really important for how we expose our brand, how people can
find our
brand, engage with it and get them to take some call to action.
And so content is really important because it feeds all of the channels that we
use.
And so it begins with that.
It will never be cut.
We have a whole team of people just dedicated to our content assets whether it
's for paid
media or for landing pages, infographics, quizzes, any sort of asset that we
think is
going to emotionally hook the buyer and get them interested in exploring more
about
seros.
Google Ads is probably one of our highest performing channels.
In fact nearly 60% of our demo requests that came in in Q1 for example came in
through
Google Ads.
Again, we recognize that it's not just one thing that gets somebody interested
but that
is the last touch that gets somebody to fill out a demo request form.
The other one I find that's really exciting I know that you had Kevin Tate on
here from
Clearbit.
We're one of their customers and I'm really keenly interested in intent data.
So we use Clearbit to de-anonymize website traffic and then we retarget on
LinkedIn and
Instagram and Facebook.
And that's showing to be extremely valuable in driving up high quality leads at
a lower
cost than other ways that we do lead generation.
I think the other and this seems so old school to even talk about but email
marketing, good
old email marketing.
And so we made some investments there and doing some nurture campaigns and our
email strategy
is working.
We have really, really high open rates and click rates.
And so we're just very intentional about how we use it.
Again, we have a multi-channel approach.
But I would say those are largely the uncuttable budget items.
I would say though Ian too that events, events work for us.
And so we have a whole event strategy.
We're actually going back in person.
We have our first event coming up at the beginning of May.
Super excited about that.
But those are the high touch ways to have that face to face time with your
buyers.
I'm curious, marketing to marketing people, content for content people, a lot
of that
stuff.
Obviously, you drink your own kombucha or a champagne or beer, dog food or
whatever.
Drink your own Mai Taiz.
But I'm curious, it is a space that is a little bit more tough or our toughest
critics
as marketers and as content folks.
How do you break through the noise there?
You break through the noise by offering a value exchange with your customers.
You need to be relevant in what you're providing them.
And I think sometimes where we go wrong with content is we sell our product.
We don't educate our buyers.
And oftentimes we're looking to be educated on best practices.
Look, I've been in marketing for 27 years and I still don't know what I don't
know.
And even for myself, the content I interact with most are best practices, top
five ways
to do something so they're very educational in nature.
And that's a value exchange because I'm then more willing to give information
about myself
to retrieve what I think is going to be something valuable to me.
And so the approach that we take at Zeros in our own go-to-market is how do we
offer
something of substance that's going to help somebody be better in their jobs?
Whether or not they partner with Zeros, the reality is that we have expertise
and we want
to offer that to other marketers and designers who are looking for answers to
problems that
they might have or are simply looking for solutions or new fresh ideas for how
to do
their jobs.
So it is about how we offer value to our buyers and to our customers by the way
because you
want to continue to feed them once they become partners to you through
inspiration and education.
But we fall into the trap of wanting to sell a product or service instead of
leading with
valuable advice or information that they might be seeking in the first place.
And so that's the approach that we take.
And I think that this is going to become even more important and I've written
about this
that as we move to a cookieless world which is coming up, it's going to be much
harder
for marketers to get the information that they need.
And so people are less willing to give up their personal information for
privacy reasons.
And so they're more willing to do it if you give them something of value.
And so your content strategy should focus on that and make it fun for them.
Make it fun for them.
Make them want to interact.
That's why I think there's a lot of power in quizzes and surveys and things of
that
nature, even games which we do a lot in our studio.
Those are really high performing assets that our customers love and use even
within our
own studio.
Yeah, it's a great point.
I think especially in B2B there's a lot of cookie cutter stuff that we all end
up doing
and it just kind of feels like noise.
But when you find that thing where you're like, "Oh, this is so good."
You're excited to subscribe to it.
You're excited to get new emails about it and all of that.
And I think that it's super hard to do but at the end of the day it's about
creating something
that's worth coming back to.
And that's what people want is, "Oh, this is so good.
I don't want to miss out on these."
And that's something we try to do with our podcast and other types of content
is just
create something that somebody trusts that, "Hey, this is a standard of quality
that is
really high and that it's worth coming back to."
Exactly.
And I think people are always seeking to be a better version on themselves.
So if you offer a way to show them how they might do that, whether it's in
their personal
lives or their professional lives, they're going to gravitate towards that.
Totally.
What about a budget item that's maybe one of your most cuttable or something
that hasn't
been working or maybe might be fading away?
I can't say that there is a thing that's cuttable and the reason why is that we
actually have
a separate line item in our budget for testing.
And so if something's not working, we don't just automatically cut it.
We try to diagnose why it might not be and then course correct.
And through testing, we've found that we're simply improving the things that
may not have
been working.
And so there's not something that we would necessarily cut because I think we
've been
very intentional about understanding our buyers and where they go to get
information.
So we've got that down pretty well, but it's really just optimizing the
channels that we
currently use.
But that test budget is super important and I think sometimes that's the thing
that gets
cut.
And marketers understand the value of it.
I think it's selling the value to others who may not be within our profession.
But that's the item you don't want to cut because it helps to optimize the
other ones
that you have in place.
I want to go back to content for a quick second here.
I think that generally speaking, especially in demand, there's an endless
appetite for
experimenting different types of content.
And it's so crazy just how many different types of things that you, even from
the things
that you mentioned, like quizzes and surveys and things like that, from making
a feature
length movie to doing, there's just content is so multivariate at this point.
Every company is a media company that cliche is 100% true.
And so I'm curious, any best practices that you see people running in terms of
plays from
a content perspective from either your customers or yourself?
Some best practices.
There's the first rule of marketing, which is just know your customer.
I know that sounds so basic, but in a very complicated world, sometimes we
forget the
basics.
The other pieces make the customer the champion of the story.
So as you're thinking through, not just the channels, but in terms of content,
what are
you going to create that helps to put your customer at the core of what you're
offering
to them?
And again, it seems so basic and but we miss those things again because we get
so focused
on product.
But if we think about the way that your customers and the places that they go
and you take into
a lot of considerations, demographics, demographics, and you offer up the best
content that you
can that's educational in nature and makes them want to learn more because you
're helping
them solve problems.
Those are some of the things that you have to think about from a content
strategy perspective.
And then also really important to that and sometimes this gets missed is
marketers work
in many different tools.
And so even if they have a content creation platform like Zeros, they also have
to be
able to share and disseminate that information.
And so integration with other systems, whether it's a marketing automation
system or a sales
enablement platform, that's really important because that is part of the
workflow.
Tracking and measuring tools are important to that.
You know what's driving performance, also fully recognizing that not everything
is tractable.
So some of the intuition has to play into that.
But I think those are some of the considerations on that.
But it does, it really does begin with just understanding what motivates and
inspires
your buyers, where they go to get information.
How do you create that value exchange?
Is then they'll engage with what you're offering them and will want to continue
the conversation
even offline.
How do you view your website?
Well the website is the information hub.
And so we use it to get people to the information that they need.
But we also use landing pages.
And so for those who really truly know what they're seeking and what they want,
we can
easily get them to a landing page so they get the information as quickly as
possible
and can reach out and open up a conversation with us.
But our website is both there to inspire.
So we have a gallery on our site where whether you're a user of seros or not,
you can go
to that gallery and get inspiration from what other customers are doing.
Other businesses are doing in terms of content creation and design.
It also offers up inspiration for those that are just needing a new idea for
how they may
want to design or communicate to their own buyers.
We have education, we've exposed all of our education on there.
It's for customers but we're very transparent and our site's pretty open even
down to our
product knowledge hub.
If you have an idea for our product, we don't limit that and gait it just for
customers
to submit those.
We actually allow other creators who are not using seros to give us ideas.
And so the website is multi-purpose from the standpoint of offering what our
customers
need but also just the market at large.
So you can see it as a website of inspiration, a website of education and a
website for people
to engage directly with seros.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the DUSTA.
This is where we talk about healthy tension with that's with your board, your
sales team,
your competitors or anyone else.
Have you had a memorable DUSTA in your career, Jamie?
Oh my gosh, where do I begin with that?
By the way, I think DUSTA's are very healthy.
They offer up an opportunity to debate ideas.
They could be extremely uncomfortable, especially if you have a different
opinion and you from
the crowd.
When I was working, it was a company called IDX.
We were eventually acquired by GE Healthcare and I was working for a business
unit.
We were really keen to come out with a refresh brand and a new product name
which had implications
even for the broader organization.
But I knew to be successful, I had to really push that through.
And so the DUSTA was, I just went for it and our central marketing team was not
really
happy that I was leading the charge on it because I was part of a business unit
But ultimately, I was able to get them on board because the agency that we used
did a great
job and they also were forward thinking in how could the branding of a business
unit
be applied to the broader corporate company.
And so ultimately, the good news is that the brand strategy for the business
unit was ultimately
adopted by the larger company.
But it required a lot of tough conversations with other executives getting
involved.
But I knew it was the right decision that we had to make.
It ruffled feathers, no doubt about it.
But we had to come to the table and have the courageous conversations around
why we needed
to do it.
And it was uncomfortable.
I mean, if you've worked for a large organization enterprise and you're part of
a business unit
and you may not agree with or the brand, the corporate brand, it may not be
helping your
business unit brand.
It presents a big challenge for sure.
I have a question about inspiration.
It's on, you know, you have seros.com/inspire with all these great examples and
things like
that.
Why the word inspiration?
Why is that the one you chose?
Because we are inspiring new ways of thinking about design, around creativity,
around just
the possibilities.
And so sometimes people get stuck and we can get into the status quo of doing,
of how
we do things.
And we want to inspire a world of creators to be the best that they possibly
can and
to see the possibilities.
And that's what the Inspire Gallery does for the community at large.
Yeah, think about this a lot.
You know, we've heard from listeners for this show or other shows that you want
to
learn.
But also you kind of want to be inspired by, you know, listening to folks who
are doing
things a different way and kind of like, it's funny.
I feel like I don't wake up, I don't wake up any day and think to myself, I
need to
be inspired today, right?
But we all do kind of need to be inspired and how you take inspiration and the
different
things like that.
I think it's a pretty core element to, you know, being a marketer is like
finding things
out there and borrowing those and, you know, big borrow and steal, whether it's
dollars,
ideas, all that sort of stuff.
I used to say lift, plunk and smooth, but yes, when I was on that.
But even think about this, excuse me, think about this.
We are largely a remote first workforce anymore.
Most companies have.
Whereas we used to be in the same space, white boarding ideas riffing off of
each other,
you know, standing in small groups and having these conversations and now here
I am behind
a screen having a conversation with you.
And so those moments of inspiration are now confined in a very isolated way to
a large
extent.
And that's okay.
I mean, there's, by the way, there's a lot of benefits to being remote first.
But we see a bigger calling here outside of the studio that we offer and that
is how do
we just continue to inspire people from their homes or if they're in their
offices.
And that is, you know, we feel like that's part of our contribution in doing
that.
And look, we all get stagnant.
We all sometimes gravitate towards the status quo.
We run out of ideas.
And so if we can provide and showcase some of the best of the best or what we
think is
the best of the best of how other companies are approaching content creation
and design
and writing and how they really motivate their own buyers and customers and how
they sell
their own products and services, we want to be able to surface that up.
Okay, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how quickly you can talk to someone on qualified.com, qualified.
They're the best.
We love them.
They've been with us since the very first episode of DGV and qualified
prospects are
on your website right now.
So go talk to them quickly with qualified quick and easy.
Just like these questions.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
Jamie, are you ready?
I am ready.
Number one, what's a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
Oh my gosh, that is tough.
A hidden skill or a talent that's not on my resume.
I recently picked up Pickleball and I'm actually really good at it.
That's fun.
How about a favorite book or podcast TV show that you've been checking out that
inspires
you?
Well, your podcast, of course, that inspires me.
I am a big fan of Daniel Pink and so I just picked up his latest book, The
Power of Recret.
So I'm reading that right now.
I'm an avid reader, by the way.
So I don't have a favorite book.
I read probably four books at one time.
Do you have a favorite non-marketing hobby that sort of maybe kind of
indirectly makes
you a better marketer?
Being a mom.
I'm a mom to a 15 year old and he inspires me every day and he is my go-to
person on
all of the latest technologies that they're using to engage with brands,
whether it's
Fortnite, Minecraft, the whole metaverse.
We didn't even tackle that Ian.
Maybe that's a different show, but that's a different show.
That's a different one.
All other thing that's weighing on me right now, but I would say being a mom.
What is your best advice for a first time CMO trying to figure out their demand
-gen strategy?
First cardinal rule of marketing, know thy customer.
It begins there.
If you weren't in marketing or business at all, what do you think you'd be
doing?
Archaeologists.
Shh.
Without a shadow of a doubt.
I was in Egypt.
My folks had lived there and was amazed at all of the artifacts and history.
I'd be an archaeologist, which seems really bizarre given that idea of
marketing.
Yeah, I suppose there's a story in there somewhere with every artifact.
There's a story behind it.
What did I not ask you today that you wish we had talked about?
Oh, I would say maybe my favorite campaign or the metaverse.
Yeah, let's do favorite campaign.
What's your favorite campaign?
Okay, this might be a little surprising.
I'm going to go way back.
This is before we had access to a lot of the digital technologies.
When I was in...
Before Mountain Bay and Helens.
Not that one, not that far back.
When I was in healthcare technology selling very large electronic medical
records systems
to hospitals and health systems, the best way to really show off your
technology is simply
taking them to a client site.
That's not always feasible.
We can't take a group of people to Mayo Clinic or elsewhere.
We had this idea of, well, we'll bring it to them.
We built a mobile digital health system that was part...
It was a way for us to, to some degree, replicate what a hospital looks like
from beginning to
end.
It was based on the day and the life of a patient.
We would do a storyline of how to use technology to support the best patient
care.
On the moment they arrived to your system all the way to discharge and all of
the financial
systems.
It was a fun campaign because it required not only this mobile structure, but
it required
our own employees playing the lives of nurses, doctors, pharmacists.
We had our own patients in there.
It was scripted.
It was a phenomenal way for us to be able to go out and showcase our own
systems of how
we support patient care.
It was so popular that when we were working with the National Health Service,
the UK was
rolling out electronic medical records across our country.
They got wind of this, saw it, and had us build one for them as well.
It was a really cool way and tell the people to experience our technology in a
somewhat
real world way based on the day and the life of a patient.
Show don't tell.
Show don't tell.
Might be my favorite takeaway here.
I love it.
That's awesome.
All right.
Quick, quick, quick.
Right before we get out of here, thoughts on the metaverse.
One minute thoughts on metaverse.
Thoughts on the metaverse?
It is, you know, I've advised my fellow marketers to learn and test.
There's so much that is ambiguous about the metaverse.
I mean, we argue over is it a metaverse, the metaverse, multiple metaverses.
But the reality is when we think about Gen Z and if that's an audience that you
market
to, that's where they're spending their time.
So learn about it, test how you can extend your brands into the metaverse
because it's
here to stay.
I personally, you know, I prefer the real world.
I mean, I take the James Holiday approach, which is only in the real world.
Can you have a decent meal?
But the reality is for certain generations, they're in the metaverse and we
have to figure
out how to engage them, whether it's there or outside.
I love it.
Jamie, so great chatting with you.
Thanks again for joining.
Everybody go to seros.com.
So as you go to seros.com/inspired to check out some of those examples, they're
really
cool, a lot of cool design and content examples there.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
Just happy to be here with you today and your listeners.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, indeed.
Take care.
You too.
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