A MasterClass on Middle of Funnel Content Feat. Ryan Yackel | Ep 24

Ian Binek (00:02.202)
Ryan, thanks so much for being on the podcast today. How are you doing?

Ryan Yackel (00:05.952)
Yeah, man, thank you for inviting me and appreciate to be on. How you doing today?

Ian Binek (00:11.09)
I'm doing really good, thanks for asking. Believe it or not, most

Ryan Yackel (00:13.418)
I just came from a massage actually with my wife because it was her birthday. So I'm actually feeling pretty loose. So I'm feeling pretty good.

Ian Binek (00:18.708)
wow. that's awesome. Yeah, that's so funny. I feel like most guests don't ask how I'm actually doing, believe it or not. So you're like one of the few that do. One of the few that did.

Ryan Yackel (00:29.26)
Well, you said you moved recently and you're you know, there's a lot of stuff going on in your life, right? So

Ian Binek (00:35.768)
It's yeah, it's been a really busy like past month. We were out in Salt Lake City and we were living there for a little bit. And then we were on this whole like digital nomad journey. So we decided to move to Oregon and now we're in a completely different time zone. And for that first week, I'll tell you it was so like I have three different calendars and all of them were in different time zones. And it's just so confusing. Yeah. But got all settled.

Ryan Yackel (00:42.73)
Beautiful place.

Ryan Yackel (00:56.107)
yeah, I believe it.

Ian Binek (01:01.38)
Excited for this conversation talking about middle funnel content, Ryan. I think that it's becoming more important, especially with AI and I think we'll kind of touch upon some AI later, but I'm particularly excited to be talking to you about this today because you work at Data Band, you got acquired by IBM. Obviously you guys know your stuff. There's going to be a lot of insights I think we can glean from this. So I just want to kind of dive right in. Ryan, are you ready?

Ryan Yackel (01:31.366)
yeah, yeah, and hopefully we can, I can pull from other companies as well. So it's not just a pure industry specific thing because I've been in cybersecurity, DevOps, data. So my journey is kind of all over the place in terms of the different industries I've been in.

Ian Binek (01:51.954)
Great, great, no, this is gonna be good then. And I think a lot of people will find it useful. So, Ryan, I wanna get started. I wanna start broad and then we can kinda work our way into some more, I would just say like exact or tailored strategies perhaps for some of those industries and how it looks different across some of those industries. But starting broad, I wanna just get your opinion. Some people just need to be reminded more than they need to learn things and I think like,

the people that know what they're doing, like the marketers like us, they're gonna know what the marketing funnel is, but hearing it again, just being reminded, level setting here, could you kind of describe the marketing funnel for people like, you know, as if they didn't know what it was?

Ryan Yackel (02:35.402)
Yeah. So I mean, the marketing funnel is really, there's two ways to look at it. And there's what you have is a traditional marketing funnel, which is more of like a diamond shape like this, which is an actual funnel. And then there's the other one, which I'll get to in a minute, which is more like a pyramid shape. Right? So the, the first marketing funnel is what everyone knows about or should know about, which is pretty simple. It's you have top of funnel content, you have middle of funnel content after you get them in the actual funnel.

Then you have bottom of funnel content or bottom of funnel triggers or say tactics to go on each of these different stages. Then hopefully lead to a qualified opportunity that sales accepts and that they're going to then move into a qualified lead that then they're going to hopefully convert. Right. And there's conversion processes that go in each of these different phases. Right. And that's the, that's the whole like fishing with nets and algae. you're, you're broad debt. The whole funnel is open to everybody.

essentially. The other way, the pyramid funnel is more of an ABM or say ABX approach, which is, hey, we're going to target these certain accounts, these certain personas that are a part of these accounts within our ideal customer profile. We're going to either use technology or account profiling tools to then know who to go after. And we're going to have more of a targeted fishing with spears approach, which is more of that.

Ian Binek (03:35.826)
Mm

Ryan Yackel (04:01.228)
It's gonna cost more money to do that kind of approach, but hopefully we're gonna get a more qualified lead that comes to the sales team. So at a super high level, are the two ways to look at the overall funnel.

Ian Binek (04:17.618)
That makes sense. And I think I didn't even anticipate you to kind of go into the reverse pyramid, which are just the pyramid view, which I love. ABM, I don't think we're going to dive too much into ABM here, even though I think that a middle of funnel can be super valuable and it is super valuable, right. For ABM. But I'm, I think I want to gear this conversation towards.

you know, the demand gen campaigns, the people that are just running, you know, Google ads, and they're trying to gather anyone that's raising their hand saying that they want to work with, you know, somebody that solves X problem. And so I kind of want to get into, you know, before we even get into specifics on like what middle of funnel content looks like, we need to first understand what the buying journey looks like, especially for the B2B world. It's not linear like it is in B2C where you go to the store.

and you check out and the journey's over. In B2B, it's different. You go to the website, you go to various number of pages, maybe you leave, you get a retargeting display ad, you maybe come back or maybe you don't go back. It's very convoluted, a lot of touch points. So I kind of wanted to maybe somewhat simplify what that process looks like. Could you kind of explain in your own words, like what would it be to...

Ryan Yackel (05:26.849)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (05:37.638)
B2B buyers, what are they looking for before they choose a

Ryan Yackel (05:42.686)
Yeah. So I think that the main thing that any buyer is looking for is aside from like middle of funnel content is something that helps you be differentiated in your, in the product that you have. And so I come from a product marketing background and I lead marketing now, but I came from, used to be a sales engineer and then moved into product marketing. so product marketing, are, you're basically building middle and bottom of funnel content constantly. That's all you're doing.

whether it's a salesperson asking for help, whether it's the marketing team, the management team saying, hey, we can have a webinar that's more focused on like a solution than problem. And then our product, you know, there it's not, it's not a awareness, you know, what is this category kind of a thing. It's more of a, Hey, we know these particular challenges. We want to tell you how to solve those. And then kind of later in how our product does it. So I'm very familiar with those, those two types of areas and

When you're building that type of content, it has to align back to a differentiation that your product actually stands out in the industry that you're in. And what I do is before we get into the tactics of the content you're going to create, you've got to have like three things that I coach people on. One is a narrative design, which is...

something that is relatively new, not super crazy new, like not, it's not like ancient or whatever, which is basically you're cultivating a story of your, what's the big change that's going on in the world? How has that impacted the customers in the space that you want to target? How are they trying to adapt to that change, both negatively and positively? And then what you do is you name the old way of doing something, which is the status quo.

Ian Binek (07:12.198)
Sure. Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (07:33.674)
Then you introduce either a new way or a quasi category that is either within a current category that you're selling into, or it's a category that's a brand new category, which is more risky, which we can get to that if you want at some point. You're positioning within the category your customer knows. Then you explain how it's hard to achieve that particular new way.

Ian Binek (07:49.372)
Sure.

Ryan Yackel (08:00.928)
then your solution comes in to be the guide to get them to that new way. And so that's like the first thing you need to do as a company, which I encourage everyone to do if you don't have that, because what that does is it aligns the product marketing team, the demand, Jan team, the entire company really of like, what's your overall story and why are you different? And how are you introducing this new way of doing something that the customer is going to remember? And so examples of that in the past, we did that in

Tricentis, was two companies before this, they're close to a $400 million company now, did global product marketing there. It was a category that was saturated in the category of test automation. And so we introduced a new way to think about it, which was continuous testing, not just test automation, that's a component of it, but everyone can say they do test automation. Here's how we do continuous testing. And the other company I worked at was Keyfactor.

Ian Binek (08:44.346)
Hmm

Ryan Yackel (08:59.936)
There's a lot of products out there that did machine identity management and everyone could say they did machine identity management. We took a different approach and said, hey, we enable you to be crypto agile or enable you to have crypto agility, which is something that's further, more future -proof like in the future where it's not just you're solving a problem today, you're getting ready for quantum and algorithm changes and all these different things, right?

So we can position around, we allow you actually to achieve crypto agility, not just, we just do this one thing, right? Then we do the same thing with, with data band around. We talked about where you have a shift left approach versus a, we'd say more of a reactive approach to observability. So I say all that to say, you got to have a narrative first to tell the story so that then you can create, okay, now that we know our narrative, we who we're targeting, we can create an ideal customer profile, which either you have customers already that fit that.

Ian Binek (09:31.932)
you

Ian Binek (09:55.186)
you

Ryan Yackel (09:59.808)
customers you're going after, then the personas come after that. And the reason why that's so important for middle funnel content is let's talk to, as we're talking about today is because you do not have a story, compelling story that's differentiated. You don't have an ICP where you want to go after it. You don't have the personas locked down. Then how are you going to create content for these people? How are you going to create compelling middle funnel content that actually then backs up your new way and backs up your differentiated way?

Ian Binek (10:08.766)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (10:21.371)
Exactly.

Ryan Yackel (10:29.772)
That's what I always start with. Every company I go to, even if we have a messaging guide in place or whatever, I always go through that process to make sure we're 100 % aligned to these things. So then we can then actually deploy things like ad campaigns and content and know what keywords we're going after and retargeting and blah, blah, blah. If you don't have that, you're just kind of flying in the blind and you're going to burn money.

Ian Binek (10:55.874)
Absolutely. I think painting the picture the way you did, one, I've probably never heard it explained as well as that before. And two, I'm sure you're probably aware of this, but for the listeners that aren't, there's a ton of companies that don't have those things. They don't have a narrative design. They think they have an ICP, but they're like, these are my guesses. They don't know, right? And you can't sell that.

Ryan Yackel (11:12.811)
and long.

Ryan Yackel (11:19.775)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (11:22.202)
and they want to turn ads on and they're like, hey, we're going to turn ads on, we're going to get leads, but it's like crap in, crap out. Like I say this to people all the time, but if you don't put in the right inputs, you're going to get the wrong outputs. Like it always doesn't matter how great of a team you have managing your things. So yeah, it just comes down to the strategy at the end of the day and the kind of content that you're going to be talking about. I think let's talk about what that content looks like now a little bit.

You know, we've decided X positioning and we've decided that we're gonna go after Y ICP, right? Like these are just variables I'm putting in there. Hopefully this makes sense. But how are we gonna reach them? Like especially today in the B2B world, like how are we gonna reach them? Is it social media? Is it through DemandGen? Is it through DemandCapture? Like what are your thoughts on that?

Ryan Yackel (12:16.864)
Well, mean, demand -gen and demand -capture obviously are totally separate strategies you go after. Demand -capture says you have, like, you know the pool of either keywords people are going after, content they're consuming, challenges, pain problems, things like that. It's an awareness thing. so, sorry, it's a capture on the thing they already know about. And so an example of this is...

Ian Binek (12:39.73)
Mm.

Ryan Yackel (12:44.0)
for at key factor, we had one of our, we had two sides of the business. There's enterprise and IOT. So enterprise IOT was, and I'm gonna try to talk about this way that is like very not nerdy and people aren't gonna like say, Ryan, you're really annoying. don't want, I have nothing to do with cyber scares. Let me just try to like bring it, like boil it down. So enterprise IT, they would basically, that was like demand capture, meaning that

we already knew that the challenges existed and the people we were talking to those challenges, they already knew they already existed. And so an example of that was they would come to us and they would say either one of two things. They would say, Hey, we have this legacy public key infrastructure. Again, don't worry about what that means. Like CPKI, don't worry about what that means. And they're like, we don't want to deal with this anymore. want to offload it. So that's a

real challenge that they identify themselves. We're not telling them about this challenge. already know that they have this challenge. They're already in a hunting motion to figure this problem out, right? So you want to capture that. we would say, okay, we have this as a service, peak as a service model that we can help you out with. The other one would be, hey, we keep having outages in our business and that's affecting our bottom line. It's affecting our security posture, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We need something to help us, you know, not make those out just happen. And we say, yeah, we have a solution that does blah, blah. Okay. That's like the main capture. And so how would you build like middle funnel content around that? All of that had to deal with building out video campaigns that align to showcasing that we had products to solve that problem. So if you even go to key factor now, you go to the demo center. I think my face is still there.

on some of these things, but we went through and talked through like challenges that they face in a public infrastructure environment. Like how, like we understand those challenges. They should be nodding along going, yeah, these are all the challenges that we have. So we'd say, Hey, here's your five steps to get off your legacy PKI. Like actual steps, not just, you know, thought leadership, fluffy stuff out there. we would build things around, Hey, here's a certificate management, maturity model. So if you, helps you say,

Ian Binek (14:54.14)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (15:02.974)
If you identify your problem, step one, we can get you to step five. And it's actual, it's practical steps and questions you should ask yourself along the way to make sure kind of where you're at. It's a true guide to help them understand like where they're at. Right. And we take that repurpose it, you know, create videos and create webinars and create all different pieces of content for that, would flow into ads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That would be a demand capture motion. The demand awareness or demand gen motion.

that we did on the IoT side is very different. Because on the IoT side, it was, hey, I'm a manufacturer that is going to build in security into a wearable. So if it's like a watch, it could be a sensor on a meter on something that's way out, my wife brought me coffee. I just wanted to make sure. She brought me a very,

Ian Binek (15:55.878)
You

Ian Binek (16:01.647)
nice.

Ryan Yackel (16:02.308)
cup too. So she didn't bring me my manly cup. It's okay. It's okay. I'll take it. got the birds on this cup. But so we would build content around actually educating them that they need to embed a type of security in their wearable, in their IoT device before they actually develop or created it. so they don't, so in the difference with this is they don't know that they

problem. Like on the other side, the enterprise IT side, they know they have a problem. They have an outage, like their systems don't work or they can't upgrade their PKI infrastructure. Like they need to go find a solution, right? So that middle of funnel content is like very easy to do. The IoT side, it's harder because they're not even aware that they have a problem. So you got to start more top of funnel to actually bring them aware that there's a solution out there called PKI for IoT.

Ian Binek (16:45.692)
Mm

Ryan Yackel (16:58.986)
then go, okay, maybe I should consider this in my security by design process. So very different, go to market motions, more focused on middle funnel content on the enterprise and enterprise IT side, more focused on the awareness side, top of funnel on the IoT side.

Ian Binek (17:16.242)
Yeah, no, that's, it's a cool breakdown. think it also just, yeah, very much, it varies across industries. mean, a lot of the clients that I've worked with too are cybersecurity. And I found that a lot of the time it's demand capture in that, in that side of the world. It's, I need a penetration test. Hey, I need a SOC 2 compliance or ISO, you know, 2 ,700 one. Like it's, yeah, it's interesting. So.

I think on the flip side, to echo what you just said, I've worked with startups that they're making markets and they're like middle of funnel and even their bottom of funnel really just kind of, it's really top of funnel. Like everything is top of funnel. They have to talk about it, be the evangelist for that literal like initiative alongside the company that's supporting that initiative in a way.

Ryan Yackel (17:53.633)
Yes.

Ryan Yackel (18:11.926)
Well, and I'll talk about how at DataBan, you know, so I would say, you key factor and Tricentis, they were pretty much established categories, but we needed to position within that category, right? They're pretty mature categories. DataBan is very different. DataBan was, there was an emerging category, which was data observability. That was the, that's the title of that particular category.

Ian Binek (18:28.071)
Mm.

Ryan Yackel (18:38.716)
It mixes in things like data quality and data reliability. I'm sorry for people that are listening. They're like, I don't care about that. the takeaway here is this, is that we had an awareness problem in the data space because people were getting confused about what data observability is compared to their traditional way of doing data quality or data governance or data reliability.

And so what we had to do was actually accentuate the awareness tactics that we did. We, and then have that funnel into more of a product led growth motion for them to try it out, experience it, see how it works and go from there. because, it w it's a, it's a, an emerging category where people are a little bit skeptical of how this is going to actually play out. One of the things we did,

for a top of funnel and we did this for bottom of funnel too, depending on the things we did. But what we did was we reached out to a lot of the third party content creators and authorities in the data space on LinkedIn and we're on YouTube and we built relationships with them to come onto their platform because they had a broader reach than we did, get access to a community that we didn't have access to right away.

Ian Binek (19:44.711)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (19:49.094)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (20:01.132)
And we were able to do things like coffee and data. did that with Kate Strasny. She's an awesome data leader on LinkedIn. We reached out to George Farrakhan. did, it was like data observability and brews or brews and data observability. We drank beers in the morning. I drink like, I drink like a quarter of them because it was like a 10 o 'clock in the morning. Cause he was like in France or something. I was like, dude, I was like, we're have to like dial this back.

Ian Binek (20:17.552)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (20:24.707)
It sounds amazing.

Ryan Yackel (20:28.556)
And actually one of the drinks I had was a non -alcoholic one. So I like, I just want to make sure that I can like function. And it was like 30 minutes. I was like, I can't drink all these in 30 minutes. It's not going to be good. But we did that. We did this thing with Scott Taylor that was around like data puppet creation and things like that. So we were trying all these different tactics that were just to get in front of an audience that we didn't know. And we're also highlighting a thing they may not be aware of.

Ian Binek (20:33.014)
yeah. That's hilarious.

Ryan Yackel (20:57.784)
Because they'd be maybe thinking data quality, data reliability, not thinking, I need a data observability solution. And so in that way, we just had to get our brand out. We had to get the awareness out because it's such an emerging category. And then from there, obviously, that would flow into, explore interactive demo, come explore our sandbox experience, come enjoy our trial experience. So then they can actually move down those funnels.

and try it out themselves and go, okay, this seems like a legitimate thing. And it's different than let's say, something I've already been thinking of.

Ian Binek (21:33.604)
Yeah, I think there's a huge difference between having a PLG model where someone can literally trial the product before they even need to talk to anyone versus gating it behind a demo. It's really more of a discovery call before they even show you the product, which obviously leads to a ton of friction, I think, in a lot of the B2B settings in the SLG sales -like growth approaches.

Yeah, and also on the topic of reaching out to creators and getting them to talk about your product and your solution, especially in a market where you're really just trying to make the market and you're trying to shift people's perception on what the true solution should be and how yours is potentially better or different for certain circumstances and better for certain circumstances. I think that you guys must have been pretty early to that.

Because now it's very common. think you see a lot of products now trying to get those paid sponsorships through influencers. The biggest one that comes to mind really, which I guess it looks a little different because it's not like a paid sponsorship through influencers anymore. And it's now it's like, hey, we're going to hire you as a content creator. And now you're like technically a part of our team. And so I see that like Clay, like I don't know if you're aware of clay .com. They're like a huge example of this where

Ryan Yackel (22:58.636)
Yep

Ian Binek (23:00.06)
They hire people that maybe are agency owners or maybe they work for other companies or whatever. And then they just come on as a content creator and they only make YouTube videos like going through the product. But it works so well and like you grow, you're going to grow that company page. You're going to grow awareness for your solution. And then, I mean, it's like outsized returns on investment in my opinion.

Ryan Yackel (23:21.162)
Yeah. no, a hundred percent. And I would say, think clay and hockey stack does this too. And there's a lot of other companies out there that do this. I would say those types, like that type of content creation works really well. And I'll get, maybe get in trouble for saying this, but I don't care. It works really well for software that is marketing or sales software that is targeting marketing and sales professional buyers. It doesn't work as well for.

what I'm in, which is B2B technical enterprise, highly skeptical, engineer -focused, developer -focused buyers, because like they need to actually, number one, skeptical by nature. And number two is a lot of times when you're dealing with these types of developer, engineer kind of folks is that they can build for the most part, a lot of the things you're saying your solution can.

Ian Binek (23:58.546)
Devs, yeah, yeah.

Ryan Yackel (24:18.848)
but it's just a better solution. So for example, again, could somebody go build an attribution marketing software out there? Maybe, I mean, potentially. Could somebody go build a CRM internally for their business? Maybe, like, yeah, could they? Could they go build their own database? Probably not. They would probably, what they probably do...

is that they would go use an open source tool, open source database, take it, customize it, do it, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And then they get to a point where they go, I can't scale it. Maybe you'll look for vendors. And so when you're dealing with like the more technical developer community, there's always this, well, I could build it myself or I could do it myself. I could, don't need you versus like marketing and sales software. Last I checked, like there isn't like an open source email marketing automation platform.

that you could just go take it and you're going to have a marketer go do some coding on it and plug it into their HubSpot instance, right? That doesn't work. Right. So I mean, I think that there's a lot of like low hanging fruit in all the marketing and sales software space, which is good for them. Like I think that that's a great way, great way to do it, but we have to take a more, Hey, we're, we're, we're showing you the

Ian Binek (25:15.258)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (25:21.359)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (25:31.73)
Sure.

Ryan Yackel (25:39.368)
actual technical pieces of our product to get trust and build the trust that we have between you. So that you actually want to try it out and actually see that it works. An example of this is like, some of the third party data creators that we did, some of them we use that were very top of funnel and some of them we moved into more of a middle of funnel. And so one of them was a guy named Andreas who

He has a whole series on learning how to be a better data engineer. And so he actually got our software, used it and showed how easy it was to like hook in like an airflow instance or Python instance, a spark instance into our product. And so now you have a third party person that has authority in that space saying that, yeah, I tried it out. Like he's not making this up. It's not like he, you know, we gave him a video and he pressed record and he just made up the fact that he

Ian Binek (26:10.736)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (26:32.827)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (26:33.918)
you know, interact with our software. Like, he actually did it. anyway, that's my two cents on the marketing and sales software.

Ian Binek (26:40.178)
Yeah, that's I mean it goes a long way. think similar to the gold rush the people that got wealthy in the gold rush they sold shovels they didn't find gold Selling the marketing and sales agencies. I There's there's the figured of shovels there in my opinion. I think I Mean it's crazy the number of ad agencies that will work with another advertising partner to do their ads for them because they can't do it that well

where they can't drive demand for whatever reason.

Ryan Yackel (27:11.064)
And again, like I'm not, I'm not knocking on that, but what I'm saying is like, if I'm a sales leader or a marketing ops leader and I see something funny being said about HubSpot versus Salesforce or something, and I'm like, you know, I'm looking to buy clay maybe or something. It's like, that's funny. It's a funny little gift thing or whatever. Like the engineering folks and the

Ian Binek (27:31.12)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (27:41.004)
developer folks and things like that. They're not as active on LinkedIn as marketing salespeople. they kind of want to stay, especially security people, they want to stay off of it. Really? Like they don't, it's also not just like the type of industry you're in. It's also where your audience is. And you've got to go to different places and use different tactics that are not the, I would say like the shovel approach. I think that it's easy for easier for marketing and sales. I'm not saying it's

Ian Binek (27:45.338)
Yeah, definitely not.

Ian Binek (27:51.249)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (28:08.908)
100 % slam dunk, but it's just a little bit different.

Ian Binek (28:13.272)
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, there was only one thing I want to say to finish out that topic. Let's just pretend that you're not a PLG company. Maybe you don't have an easy way for someone to sign up immediately on your website and get into the platform. The easiest hack around that, similar to what you were saying, Ryan, is to just give access to someone who has influence in the space that would find it useful and have them make a video using the tool.

because then you can kind of embed maybe that video or resource like it behind like a little gate on your website or even just make it open. Like someone can just view it on the website. They don't even need to give you your email address, which I guess for your audience probably makes the most sense because I'm sure that the more technical people are not going to give their email address to look at it unless they're really influenced already and they've heard about it before. But if you're talking like fresh people,

Yeah, trying to give them as much information as possible without asking for anything. Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (29:17.9)
100%. And, and, and we've done that. at data band, did that with, you know, I'd say they're, Helen on our team is an amazing job on the PLG front, but basically there's been different, different steps to it. There was a, there's the interactive tour, which is a click through demo. You just click around and mess around with it. Anyone can do that. Like any, any product can do that. The next step would be, if that's like the crawl, the walk would be, Hey, let's have a sandbox experience or a playground, which is you get, you actually play with the.

the true experience in the browser and you just read only data. So it's sample data in there. And then the run, obviously it's the full blown trial where you can hook it up to your environments and so on. And quite honestly, PLG and that's not, that doesn't encompass PLG. know if Wes Bush was listening to this, he would probably say that's not PLG, Ryan, which I know. I know that's not PLG. Those are components of PLG. I'm not saying that, but.

What I would say is like not all companies are benefited to do pure PLG either. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of companies, they aren't even equipped internally to try the product out unless it's done in a POC environment. Meaning like if you're in an industry that is super locked down and you have infrastructure platform team that's basically like.

You cannot just sign up for any SaaS software you want and just go and spend money. You know, we have security protocols that are in place here yet that it just isn't going to work. Right. And I say all the time, go PLG for the most part makes really good sense. If you are a marketing and sales software, it makes really good sense. If you are a creative, you know, software like Canva or something like that.

Ian Binek (30:51.494)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (31:06.708)
Or if you have like a, if it's meant for like small agile teams, like something like Atlassian, right? All those products like are very easy to sign up for, get going and without a lot of technical experience, just kind of go, go, go off and go. Right. But a lot of times if you're in a enterprise developer, engineering focused space, sometimes they're even able to access your software to even use to try it out. So you've got to have that in your mind as well. Like PLG isn't a silver bullet.

Ian Binek (31:19.91)
Mm -hmm.

Ian Binek (31:34.748)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (31:34.836)
And as an example for that, like back at key factor, there are multiple different paths to a opportunity being created. So we had the community edition for one of our products. was pure, go on, open source it, grab it, run with it. You raise your hand when you're ready to get into an enterprise motion with us, right? Then there was the full POC environment. Hey, you know,

we're going to set up a six to eight week cycle of setting this up in your environment, deploy it for you, get it going, right? And then there was the, Hey, go on to AWS and you can spin up your own instance right away and just pay us and get going. But not all of those try by deploy. Not all of those were in the same bucket for the products that we offered. Very similar to Trisensis as well. Like there's

Ian Binek (32:25.253)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (32:28.428)
products that work really well in a PLG bottoms up approach motion, but a lot of other products like are more top down and they're not conducive for that, hey, I'm gonna just go do this by myself, try it and buy it and be retained and just give you money because we're looking at higher deal values, not lower deal values, high volume, we're looking at smaller volume of total deals, but higher ACV. So that's something to also consider as

Ian Binek (32:58.316)
Absolutely. All right, Ryan, I want to shift gears a little bit here and talk about something that's hot on pretty much, I mean, every industry is impacted by it so far, but I think talking about its impact on the middle of funnel content is interesting, which is AI. We kind of teased it at the beginning, but I want to know what are your thoughts on it?

Ryan Yackel (33:16.449)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (33:22.602)
Why are people using it as much as they are? I'm assuming that it's probably a negative perception of it, or at least what you're thinking in terms of the number of people that are using deepfaked AI videos and making content with that. are your thoughts on it, genuinely speaking? Do you think it's good? Do you think it's bad? Do you think it's a waste of money? What are your thoughts?

Ryan Yackel (33:46.092)
I mean, I think that I think for a top of funnel or an ad creative and things like that, it makes sense. Like obviously like there's a, there's a product out there that uses some type of AI capabilities called Creatope. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's like, I, it's awesome. I, I, I was introduced to the company recently, but they basically help you. Like I'll say you have an ad and you want to send it over all these content syndication platforms, ad platforms.

Ian Binek (34:00.39)
Okay.

Ryan Yackel (34:13.44)
They need to be resized differently, different texts in different areas. You can basically take that template and automatically create these different ads for that platform using some AI capabilities for it. I think that's awesome. think that's a really, like if you're a designer, that cut your time down by like that, like easy, right? I think for middle of content, I think it's really good for least gen AI in terms of using, you know, we use Watson X over here for our stuff.

Ian Binek (34:22.204)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (34:30.523)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (34:42.916)
There's chat GBT that people use taking scratch notes and being able from like you said, you have a case study that you're doing. You do an hour long case study with the client. You're writing down all your scratch notes into like the different topics you're talking. Tell it, Hey, spit this out in a story format based off these scratch notes. Here's what I'm looking for. Here's some more directive that cuts down the editing time. Like by

probably 60, 70%, right? You have to obviously go in there and adjust it and change it. I think it's really good for that to summarize things. For creative, I've obviously seen it used there as well. But for a middle of funnel content, especially in MySpace, you're gonna have, like I can't tell Gen .ai to go create a buyer's guide for PKI as a service.

Ian Binek (35:13.479)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (35:35.692)
with images and content and questions to ask. There's limitations to, it's not a genie in a bottle. It's not gonna just spit it out for you like that. Video creation as well. Like there isn't a way for, if I wanted to build a playground of a video experience like you were talking about earlier to showcase the product and like the how to do XYZ thing in these 10 steps, it's not gonna be able to do that.

Ian Binek (35:38.748)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (35:44.571)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (36:03.104)
Like, can't record. It's not going to automatically record and know exactly where to go in the product to do the recordings for me. I can maybe help with editing, but it's not going to help with the actual layout of how I should be approaching the video, what I should be showing to the potential buyer or end user in a way that makes sense and logically ties back to the narrative design that I talked about earlier. So again, I think it's used for sure.

Ian Binek (36:03.434)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (36:32.724)
I've used it and I've seen other people use it as well. But I think I'm more excited about the quote unquote AI capabilities that are being baked into platforms. So if you have a CRM and you want to ask questions to get data around your pipeline or something like that, I that's really valuable. Generating reports and things like that. I that's also very valuable. I think there's limitations to the full life cycle of content you have to create.

Ian Binek (36:36.664)
you

Ian Binek (36:54.061)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (37:01.366)
top, middle or bottom, that it's just not going to do that for you unless you're a B2C company that you're selling a drink can to somebody, a drink and a can, and you say, hey, here's the image, go create a bunch of just awareness ads.

Ian Binek (37:10.137)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (37:18.071)
Yeah, I think I'm glad you brought in that last caveat because I think a lot of very early stage startup leaders are trying to use AI that way for their B2B company, which it just doesn't like, especially in an industry where maybe like middle funnel and bottom funnel does exist and like there is genuine need for that kind of content.

You can't really have like a AI deepfaked video of you talking because then it just feels like it's fake. You know what I'm talking about, right, Ryan? Like, yeah, yeah.

Ryan Yackel (37:51.934)
no, I get it. No, I don't understand it. I don't again, like I think that. You know, there's all this hype around like AI avatars and things like that. I just don't get it. Like I call me, I mean, I'm 36, so I'm not super old. I'm not super young, whatever. But like, feel like I feel like when I say this, I sound like I'm, you know, the grandpa saying, no, there's no way we're having an electric car or something like that. It's like, no, like, I just don't know if people are actually going to

Ian Binek (38:01.681)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (38:21.772)
want that. Like I think that there's going be a push against the fact that things are not authentic anymore and they want more authenticity. So it's like, like if I were to create an avatar of myself and tell it to go talk about, you know, the top 10 trends and PKI or data data observability or whatever. And I do that instead of just like doing it myself. And it's this avatar talking, are people going to trust me more? Are they going to be like, why are you using a fake?

Ian Binek (38:27.452)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (38:50.802)
AI avatar, same thing with like the what's going on in the SDR world, right? There's this big battle now of some startups are trying to build AI outbound reps. And it's like, I don't know if the buyer is going to be OK with thinking they're being fooled by talking to somebody that's not real or, you know, I saw recently, which was wild. I know if you saw this, but like the

Ian Binek (38:50.928)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (39:02.575)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (39:17.494)
there were some images recently that looked insanely realistic about like a runway that was going on. And it's like, okay, that's cool. You can do all this, but are people going to want to really sit and watch a virtual fake runway of women and men dressed? Like, I don't know. I just don't know. I feel like people are going to be like, I don't want to watch that. It's not real. Like, yeah.

Ian Binek (39:35.932)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (39:39.288)
Exactly. Yeah, I just, I'll echo everything you just said and I'll also just put in the note that people like to do business with people. And I think the people that think that adding AI personalization to their emails or videos that they're sending via email, which by the way, like that's all

Ryan Yackel (39:53.354)
Yeah.

Ian Binek (40:07.932)
Basically, it's just software, but as like this small AI component that changes the name that you mentioned, that's it. That's all that it does. And I think that's becoming so mainstream now. People just like, like this isn't like this. Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (40:14.998)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (40:23.286)
Well, I'll give you an example. let's say you have, again, I could be totally wrong on this. I'm just speaking. When I get an email from somebody that is trying to sell me something, it's clear, I can tell they're trying to sell me something before all the AI stuff, right? They did some personalization. It didn't feel like it was real. It was like, hey, I saw you went to this college and I saw you said this talk and whatever. It's like,

Ian Binek (40:47.932)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (40:52.148)
you're just pulling stuff to put into the email to make me think that you care about what I'm about. Maybe you clearly don't care. Like you're just, you're just trying to hook me in. Right. And I think AI for it's, it's that type for, for this specific use case of the email personalization thing, it's that, but now it's even more heightened. It's probably going to pull in more stuff. And so I think that people are just sitting back and be like, this is an AI email. This guy doesn't know.

Ian Binek (41:03.506)
Mm

Ian Binek (41:20.914)
Yeah.

Ryan Yackel (41:20.96)
This woman doesn't know who I am. They don't really care. So again, I go back to that whole authenticity thing. I think that people are going to be more more scrutinized about digitally how they're being reached out to. And quite honestly, that's where we've been pivoting more to do more in -person stuff lately. More in -person, smaller events and things like that. Because get people in a room versus a webinar.

Ian Binek (41:24.922)
Exactly.

Ian Binek (41:38.214)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan Yackel (41:50.39)
higher close rate.

Ian Binek (41:51.814)
Definitely. Yeah, that's, I love that call out. Networking and then also like you mentioned about outbound being, yeah, people think it's automated, people think it's AI, like they don't feel like the person actually knows who the other person is. That just goes to show again that middle of funnel content is really important. As long as it's authentic and genuine and provides like quote unquote value, that's going to be infinitely more valuable than.

sending 500 AI personalized emails every day.

Ryan Yackel (42:25.3)
Right. And again, I go back to this, that middle funnel content has got to tie back to your differentiated story or differentiated way or else it's just another buyer's guide. It's just another maturity graph. It's just another case study. It's just another, you know, five challenges, five solutions webinars, you know what saying? It's, it's, it becomes just another piece of content that is now in it.

a plethora of other pieces of content you're getting hit with constantly. It's like, we thought content was saturated before AI. Now it's, you know, a hundredfold, right? Like more than that.

Ian Binek (43:00.956)
So much worse. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Ryan, that's all I have for you today. I appreciate the conversation. think I learned a lot. think talking about the narrative designs just at the top of the call really set the tone for everything we talked about. think that that's something that most B2B leaders just need to go back and do if they haven't done already and try to include that authentic, genuine content.

in the middle of the funnel or identify that maybe you are making a market and yeah, build the top of funnel content, educate people, get them aware of your solution. Use some of the tactics that we talked about. So Ryan, I appreciate all the insights. I think our listeners are gonna have a lot of takeaways here.

Ryan Yackel (43:47.978)
Yeah, for sure. If anyone has any questions, feel free to just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Hopefully I'm good at responding to people, but I will respond to you. I promise. you ask me a question about marketing or go to market in general, I'll try to provide my experience and what's worked for me and my company. So definitely reach out to

Ian Binek (44:12.91)
Awesome. All right, Ryan, we'll hope you have a great rest of your day.

Ryan Yackel (44:16.448)
Thanks Ian, good talk to you.

Ian Binek (44:18.194)
You too.

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