How To Identify and Effectively Market To Your Ideal Customers With Steve Kahan

John Corcoran 11:56

That’s, that’s really cool. Here’s a possibly dumb question. So if they didn’t know how many passwords they had, they didn’t know about this, or, or more broadly, if you’re working with a market that doesn’t know about the area that you want to help them with? How did you create a solution where you were able to tease out some information around it? So that’s

Steve Kahan 12:21

a great question. So one of the things if you want to have a high velocity sales and marketing model, what you need is and what I explained that free tool, that discovery free tool was one of the critically important pieces of content that we had that flew off the shelves. But what you need is you need to have content across the full spectrum of the buyers journey. That discovery free tool was really at the consideration phase when they were looking to define their problems and a little bit more detail and really understand that the magnitude of the problem, but you also need to have content at the top of the buyers journey, right in the educational stage, right. And so this is where they’re really starting to discover their problem where maybe they can’t even put the words to it to fully express it. So you’ve got to have educational content there. So there we would have things like for Dummies books, we would partner with the Wiley publishers, we played in a space called a privileged access management for PAM for dummies. an educational piece, or the experts guide to Pam, or here was a great piece of content that like a lot of your listeners could think about how this might relate to their business, is that we had what we call the privileged access management risk assessment. And what that did was someone could come to our site, answer some questions. And as a result of that, they would get a grade like they were in university A through F. And moreover, not only would they get this grade, but they would also start to then learn were based on the report that they would immediately get where they were doing well where they weren’t doing well. And because we captured information about the industry, the geography in which they are in and the size of their company, when they were filling out this info, we were able to create some incredibly great content. So for example, we could do a global report on the state of privilege access management. We could slice and dice the data to do many reports, for example, the state of privileged access management for financial services companies in the UK, right and all of this educational content lead to that discovery tool, and it fed our social media it fed really interesting differentiated information that we were Communicating out through traditional media, based on the proprietary knowledge that we had it, it populated our podcast, our webinars and so on. And so we were able to, can have that connective tissue, if you will, from the educational content at the top of the funnel down to that next stage, which was the free tools that we had. And I gave you an example of one down to the next stage, which would be more of an evaluation like a free trial. And if you have a gap in content in any one of those phases, nothing zaps the velocity of a high velocity model, then gaps, and most companies actually have those content gaps. So I would encourage listeners to really review the content they have maybe utilize some of the ideas and think about how that might apply to their business, so that they can get their business accelerating revenue growth,

John Corcoran 16:03

and how would they discover where those gaps exist? Like? Would it be interviewing non buyers, like potential leads that didn’t close? Or was there other strategies you have for kind of understanding where your own gaps are?

Steve Kahan 16:16

Right? So I would look at a very simple sort of buyers journey, right, which would be sort of discovery and the educational consideration, evaluation, and then through to purchase. And I would map all of the pieces of content that we had against those various stages to ensure we didn’t have a gap. But you bring up a really important point, which is, we had great content, and I spent a lot of my time thinking about what that content ought to be that would fly off the shelves, get us more leads more pipeline, and then ultimately more revenue. But the question that I get from most organizations is is okay, well, that’s great, Steve, like, how do we come up with ideas that would work for us. And here’s what I recommend that you do, what I would do twice a year, is I would convene a meeting with the best and the brightest in our company. These were people out of r&d, they could be sales engineers, they could be professional services, personnel, etc. And I would send them links to great content that could be inside our industry outside our industry really didn’t matter. And I asked each of them to come to a meeting with their very best idea for content that they think our buyers would cover it. And we would have those meetings twice a year, we come up with great ideas, a lot of times, because I did it with that staff, I would need help creating that content. So I built in helpers, as well as built in cheerleaders, our best and brightest who would be helping me to promote that content when it was made available. And so I would map it against the various stages of the buyers journey, the content that we had, but I would get several folks from inside and outside of marketing, to contribute their best ideas. And we always had more ideas than we could ever implement.

John Corcoran 18:27

I love that idea of convening a meeting with all of your experts within the company because they have the knowledge twice a year and and kind of sussing that out of them. I want to ask you about you, you, you mentioned this, the way that the team, the salespeople in particular would follow up. And it changed the way that they were to follow up and more of a consultative model. And I think that’s such a key point. So I want to dwell on a little bit more kind of the process for making the follow up more relevant, because I know that’s such a better approach rather than just did you see the proposal yet? Did you see the proposal yet? You know, did you miss my email that kind of annoying stuff. So talk a little bit about the way that you change that follow up model?

Steve Kahan 19:12

Yeah, so most companies would be like, just scared if they actually heard how a lot of their leads are being followed up on. And really from a couple of different perspectives. One is that it’s like a pushy salesperson who really doesn’t understand the customer and is not asking questions, but is real like just because they want to get in everything that they have to say. Yeah, right. And it’s like, and it just turns people off, right? Yeah. Right from the get go. Right. So that that that’s one perspective, or following up in ways that just that just aren’t relevant. So for example, someone downloads a piece of content and then it’s almost like the sales Person following up really is starting from scratch when they should know what they have downloaded what’s in there, what’s the best practices follow up. And so what I find is that most organizations are not training their customers on their content, or excuse me, their salespeople and partners on their content on the campaigns, letting them know that the campaigns that are hitting and when they’re going to hit and who they’re going to go after, and what are the best practices for following up. Simply by doing that, you put yourself in a much better position for an effective follow up. And I would also say that it even goes a layer beyond that, because today, a lot of times, there are multiple ways to follow up, for example, a lot of organizations have website where they have chat on their websites with chat on it, right. And so we would create a lot of the content for those salespeople. So that so that they’re not, there, chats are loaded with misspellings, or the wrong types of follow up, which again, just don’t reflect your company in the best light. So it requires a little extra time to properly train. But also remember, it’s not just your salespeople that are your employees, it’s your partners, who might be selling your products as well. Right. And, and, and if you have that regular training, you’re keeping sales informed, you’re requiring that they actually have absorb the information where they’re not like on their phone during training, not paying attention. Like that’s that little extra effort will go such a long way. And then it’s I would add one more thing, it’s staying on top of things because the competitive environment doesn’t stay static, it shifts. So when we were delivering messages around simplicity, one of our bigger competitors, who was really good company, public company, and really the 800 pound gorilla, their product was very complex. And they saw that our simple message was working. And so what I did is I started to do some research, I knew that our product documentation was about 30 pages. And I did some research and I found their product documentation. And it was like over 1500 pages. So I compare their product documentation to like the fourth largest novel ever written in human history, and then trained our sales and partners to use that out that table of contents in their follow up Warren Piece. Exactly. It was like Warren Piece and and from that day forward, their simplicity message fell flat.

John Corcoran 23:06

That’s funny. That’s funny. I want to ask you about something else that you mentioned in here, because I’m picturing you going into like an executive meeting with the C suite and saying, Alright, guys, okay, we’ve got a great solution here. You know, those for Dummies books. Yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna do something there. So did you come up with like a whole for dummies book or? Yeah. You said like a partnership with them? How did that? Yeah,

Steve Kahan 23:28

like so you could Wiley books like Wiley Publishing. The Wiley actually published my first book, but they, they do the for Dummies franchise, right. And they own that, right. And so you work with them. It’s literally like you’re coming up, it looks like a for dummies book. It has the outline, like it’s a for dummies book, right? And all of that. And so you work with them, you’ve got to write it, they’ll assign some people that will help it be in the right, the same manner that a reader of a for dummies book would would recognize. And, and so we created a number of them and our customers loved them and the security expert that sort of helped us to put it together. Like I remember him at trade shows, because we made sure his name was on him as well. Like he was signing on like he was some big time author at trade shows. Actually pretty humorous, to be honest, but like people really love those books. And, and, and we used to get a ton of leads from those for Dummies books.

John Corcoran 24:37

Interesting. Wow. So you’d actually get people contacting us saying that they checked out your book?

Steve Kahan 24:42

Oh, yeah. All the time. I mean, there were 1000s upon 1000s that were downloaded from around the globe. And still to this day, the company that bought us I looked at their website last week and they still four years after Oui oui. For over four years after we did our original for dummies book, and we did several, they still have one on the homepage. So it’s still producing many years later.

John Corcoran 25:12

Yeah, it’s interesting, because you know, a lot of brands would maybe think, oh, that could water down our message or water down or credibility, we’re trying to be serious or trying to be professional here. You know, and yet, that doesn’t seem like that was the case at all. Ya know,

Steve Kahan 25:27

people love those books. And really, what, what I found is, they’re not for Dummies at all, like, there’s a lot of really good content, they’re just kind of written in a certain style. But then we paired it with a, what we call the experts guide. Right? So hey, you want to go to the next level and get the next level of info, here you go. Right. And so again, it’s just more ways to capture leads. And for me, I knew that if I was growing website traffic month in month out, which we were, and I was getting 5% of those visitors at least to convert and become a lead that my content was world class and think about what that means. What it means is, is if people are doing like what you and I probably almost never do, which is online, giving your name, email address, phone number, right? It’s like, you gotta want something really bad. To give up that info, right? And, and if your content is great, that will be one metric you could look at that will reveal that it is, in fact, Great.

John Corcoran 26:42

That’s good sign, high velocity, velocity, digital marketing, Silicon Valley secrets to create breakthrough revenue record times the name of the new book, inspired, I imagined, in part from the the acquisition, talk a little about what inspired you to write the book.

Steve Kahan 26:58

So I read a McKinsey study that said 83% of CEOs expect their marketing to drive most of their company’s revenue growth. And then I read Harvard Business Review study that said, roughly 80% of the CEOs are not satisfied with the return on their marketing investments. And so if you talk to a lot of sales and marketing leaders, they feel overwhelmed by revenue expectations they can’t meet. And part of the reason for that is that the way people buy now has totally changed. And to really understand this, think about it in your own lives. If you’re going to go buy a car, you probably are not going to go to 10 different dealerships, because you’re looking forward to talking with 10 different sales representatives at those dealerships nothing against the sales reps.

John Corcoran 27:57

Absolutely not. Right. But

Steve Kahan 27:59

what you’re doing is people now rely on digital content to make purchase decisions. So if you’re going to go buy that car, you’re going to go to Google, you’re going to start researching the cars, you’re gonna read reviews, you’re you might go to sites and build those cars. So that’s exactly the way you want them, then you’re going to research how much they should cost. So before you ever even walk into a dealer, you probably know more than the sales reps. Yeah, right. And that’s

John Corcoran 28:32

just the sorry to interrupt, but I mean, I’m buying our furnace broke about a month ago. And so I’m buying a new HX system now. And I met with one this morning, it compared to the first one I met with a month ago, night and day difference, because a month ago, I had no idea I was just broken, wasn’t sure what to do. And then in the last month, I have educated myself, I’ve read so many reviews, watch YouTube videos, all that kind of stuff. The guy who showed up this morning, I was like, This is what I want. These are the different things, you know, it was like, it’s really kind of the modern buyer compared to the old way by

Steve Kahan 29:04

67% of buyers prefer not to interact with sales reps as their primary source of info. And so when you think about how people are buying today, that like their marketing just hasn’t evolved to capitalize on that shift and to do so in a way in which you’re accelerating revenue. And what this means with all of this information that’s available to buyers, is that there’s almost like this information parity during the buying process. It’s changed the way marketers need to interact with potential buyers to influence them towards their products and services. So high velocity digital marketing is really all about teaching you how to become great online if to consistently grow revenue. and it’s very much written not in a theoretical way, right? I’m a startup guy. So like I, you know, I don’t have time to read a bunch of theory and prefer not to write, I want how to like, what could I learn? And like implement today to affect revenue? Right. And so that’s sort of the style in which the book was written as well.

John Corcoran 30:23

Yeah, yeah. And you kind of start with what we were talking about here. First laser, focusing on your target audience, building the content, getting into mastering Google creating high performing website. We haven’t talked about that yet. Any other tips around the website that are changes that you made? I mean, we talked about it, I guess, to a certain extent, but any other ideas around that?

Steve Kahan 30:46

Yeah. So I mean, from a website perspective, I mean, certainly, I think we talked about content is really key, but also being great on Google is key. Right? And so if you think about it, I mean, just as in the case of your purchase, or soon to purchase, right, you you Google, right. And so a lot of organizations, they struggle with being great on Google and, and then there’s books that that are like 300 pages, or you talk to an SEO expert, and your head spinning with all the acronyms. And so here’s something like listeners could start doing right now to start improving their results. Right. And so we knew, because we talk with our customers, we use tools to figure out also what they’re searching for the phrases, the words, the number of those searches, we had a list of what we call coveted key words and phrases that we always kept live, right. And so whenever we were creating new content, whether that be for the website, or for some of the pieces of content that I was mentioning, we would always start that with the content creator and our SEO expert who would review for that piece of content, what would be the keywords that they ought to be using. And then at the end of that process, they would review that SEO expert would review the content to make sure we weren’t missing opportunities, then we would make sure that every piece of content that we created was exposed to Google. And that scanning helped us to improve results. And then finally, our partners loved our content. So that helped us to create a ton of backlinks. Just by implementing that process. Most organizations could put themselves in an entirely better spot to becoming great on Google.

John Corcoran 32:51

So let me ask you, I must be someone at the door, I hear the dog in the background. But let me ask you, how do you This is probably what some listeners might be thinking, Well, how do you do that without your content sounding robotic, by stuffing it with too many keywords.

Steve Kahan 33:07

And so that that is very important, right. And so you always err on the side of readability. But you make sure that you get in the content as best you can, right? And so, so you would never ruin the reading experience based on the content, utilizing the words that you want to get in there. But I would always push it like to like at what level can we get to and still have great content, right? So I would always want to be right on that edge. And then you might be saying, well, how do I know that I’m at that edge? Read it yourself? Like if it seems like it’s forced, or that you’re putting in words that like don’t kind of fit, then then you’re you’re going too far? Right? Really

John Corcoran 34:00

is Seo really is an art and a science? Without a doubt. Yeah. See this in my grade? We’re almost out of time. So I want to wrap with the question I was asked, which is, you know, a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way $5 billion in shareholder value. Imagine you’ve had a few people along the way that you would thank you, especially peers, contemporaries, maybe some mentors too, as well. Who would you want to, you know, and acknowledged publicly?

Steve Kahan 34:31

There are so many but I’ll pick one who is who I used to work for. But then also is a mentor. His name is Doug Irwin. He runs a venture capital company. And he really viewed startups where I’ve spent my career differently than most he viewed startups and define them as the last frontier for outlaws a place where non conformists could live set and create their ideas. And, you know, for me who doesn’t want to be that rough writing rebel running circles around the bureaucratic large organizations. And so he was tough, demanding smart, but also treated his his employees like family and and we exited a company called PentaSafe many years ago when he was the CEO. And still to this day like 1516 years later, we still have huge attendance at annual reunion parties where all we could do is talk about what a an awesome experience it was, and not how one single day ever felt like worked. Doug was chiefly responsible for setting that tone. And I learned a lot from him.

John Corcoran 35:53

That’s great. This has been great Steve, such a great background explanation on on how to create high velocity digital marketing, where can people go to learn more about the book and learn more about you?

Steve Kahan 36:05

Yeah, High Velocity Digital Marketing is available wherever you would buy books online. And you can contact me at my website, which is beastartupsuperstar.com.

John Corcoran 36:16

Love that URL. Steve, thanks so much.

Chad Franzen 36:20

Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.