This episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast features a conversation between Steve Goldhaber and Michael Brenner, an experienced marketer with a 25-year career in sales.
In this episode, they discuss how Michael got into marketing and how to create effective content strategies that meet the needs of customers. They also cover topics like employee activation programs, developing an online content strategy, and creating a solid editorial strategy.
Finally, they discuss the power of compounding results, the importance of consistency in content creation, and advice for their younger selves about life and career.
Tune into this episode to learn how to create an effective B2B marketing strategy!
Connect with Michael Brenner and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.
This episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast features a conversation between Steve Goldhaber and Michael Brenner, an experienced marketer with a 25-year career in sales.
In this episode, they discuss how Michael got into marketing and how to create effective content strategies that meet the needs of customers. They also cover topics like employee activation programs, developing an online content strategy, and creating a solid editorial strategy.
Finally, they discuss the power of compounding results, the importance of consistency in content creation, and advice for their younger selves about life and career.
Tune into this episode to learn how to create an effective B2B marketing strategy!
Connect with Michael Brenner and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.
Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)
Steve Goldhaber: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. Thanks for joining the podcast today. I'm here with Michael. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. I'm excited about the podcast today because we both have deep backgrounds in content marketing. So this is gonna be like us sharing notes over our careers, which should be good. Give us a little bit of an overview in 60 Seconds of who you are.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, sure. So, 25-year career in sales, mostly marketing almost exclusively B2B lead generation, performance-based ultimately content marketing. Big companies, small companies, companies like JP and Nielsen, as well as startups and growth companies as well. Started my own firm, marketing Insider Group in 2015 and have been helping clients ever since with effective content marketing strategies.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay, awesome. We're jumping into case studies and the first one has to do with building a content marketing platform. So take it away.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, first case study. So was working with one of the largest software companies in the world and was struggling with essentially generating inbound organic search traffic. When I started working with them, 99% of everyone coming to their website via a search engine was typing the name of the company into the search engine which they thought was good. They were like, oh, look, our brand is really doing really well. And I'm like, no, the only people finding you are people who know who you are. Yeah. And at the time the company was known for a very specific, Type of software. And their growth has been in every other type of software. And so it was not a good thing. And so the challenge there was really building the business case to convince executives that talking about products that nobody knows about or really even cares about is not good for organic inbound. we've all heard the HubSpot stat, right?
Inbound leads are 62% cheaper than outbound. And, this company just didn't get that. They wanted the cheap leads, but they didn't want to, they didn't want to put their own selfish promotional desires aside to create content that actually helped people. And, I usually, Have to guard myself from being sarcastic when I talk about this case study.
But yeah, I mean, that was really the challenge was not what we ended up doing, but convincing executives to build the business cases, I like to say for the need for content marketing.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So, all right. I'm gonna jump into the classic argument here for content marketing.
There is the, hey, our SEO. Isn't optimized the right way. So like we have good content and there are technical issues with how it's structured. And then there's the other scenario which is like there is no content, so it doesn't matter that it's structured incorrectly. Like how are you balancing both of those worlds in this case?
Michael Brenner: Yeah, I mean, in this case, then, I mean, this was a, a few years ago, but then as now SEO is starting to move away from keyword stuffing and meta descriptions and title tags, like the, the technical part of SEO is pretty basic at this point. Like, if you've got a fast website that loads quickly, And has all the right structural components, then it's really all about the content. And in this case, the gap. I mean, they had an, they had amazing s e o company that had done all of the right technical things. The problem was not just did they have content, but cuz they had plenty of it. Like most companies, the problem was that they were getting 99% of their traffic from brand search because 99% of their content was about the brand. Yeah. And it was a classic. Do what you want to do selfishly versus meet the needs of customers. Yep. And so I was able to use those sorts of arguments to kind of convince the team.
Steve Goldhaber:Yeah. It sounds like you made some progress in getting them to take a more customer-centric view, but like a big software company, these things take a lot of time. How long did you have to fight that uphill battle?
Michael Brenner: So it took a year, it actually took us a year to convince the executive team to move in this direction. And then, the story that I love to tell is it was actually sales. I was a sales guy for like 10 minutes, it's like the first couple years of my career I was a sales guy and I moved into marketing cause I was frustrated with the stuff marketing was doing.
And then I've been there, here ever since. But I was trying to convince the marketing leadership team, Here's, here's one stat that proves that we should do this. Here's another stat that proves that we should do this. Look at our peers. They're doing it. We should do it too. None of that worked.
And then finally, I was asked to present sort of a digital strategy presentation to the sales kickoff meeting. And I asked the sales team, and I was like, Google Big Data, which was a new product. We were, we were launching a big data solution, and competitor one, competitor two, and competitor three showed up.
And I was like, Google Cloud Computing, which was a big push for the company into the cloud. Competitor one, competitor two, and Competitor three showed up. We showed up on page 36 of big data and page 22 of cloud computing. And so I was like, this is the promise of digital marketing. The promise of what I'm trying to do, and what I've been trying to do for the past year is to show up on page one with our competition ahead of our competition.
And so it was the sales leadership team that went to my peers in marketing that finally said, let this guy, run for a bit, give him a little bit of rope to hang himself. Yeah. And let's see if it works.
Steve Goldhaber: That's such an important point because sometimes marketers by default say, I need to get approval from the CMO. And they don't leverage enough of the sales team. And I, when I've seen change happen really fast, especially in big companies, it's because the marketers built a relationship with sales. Sales then influenced the CMO to say, you gotta do this.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, and it, the part of the whole point of my last book was I don't know if we'll get into that, but it was really all about successful companies that are customer-centric. And so, I was trying to influence sales to influence my, my boss in marketing, if you will, or about bosses, the executive stakeholders. But the message was all about just doing what the audience wants. Like if we just do what they're telling us. Yeah, like the keywords are telling us what content to create. The keywords are things, our customers are typing into the search engine, the ones that they use. And so let's just do what they're looking for. Let's be the answer to the questions that they're asking. And it was really that I think customer centricity that, that, made sense to the sales team first.
And then they were able to influence the marketing folks. And, then, the pl the program we implemented, we saw success within months and the end of the first year was a $7 return on investment. we had revenue that was seven x the investment. It was unbelievable. And that, now, a few years later they're one of the largest content marketing providers in the technology space that you could find. Yeah. And so, obviously, it worked really well.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That's gotta be exciting for you. That moment where you've spent all that time to convince them for a paradigm shift, they've seen the results a couple of months after.
At that point, is it like, Hey, we're building this team in-house. Were they outsourcing it? How did they approach it? Now that they knew that there was a big opportunity?
Michael Brenner: Yeah, I mean I could talk about this one case study all day, but there were, it was a, it was a combination, first of all.
So we had so much expertise in-house that was doing examples. We had, we had folks that were, that were writing personal blogs, sharing their expertise to a website that no one was seeing because it was joe smith.com. I asked if we had like 12 of those guys, men, and women, and I asked them, can we share?
Your content on the company website. With attribution and we'll say it originally appeared on. Yeah. And so the first like three months, that's all we did was just re-share stuff they had already written. That was really good. And I mean, they were experts thoughts in the industry, and all of a sudden it went from them having no exposure of that content to thousands of people seeing it.
And the company has tens of thousands now, more than a hundred thousand employees. All of a sudden, hundreds of other employees are like, I wanna be like Joe Smith. I mean, he's getting all this, these accolades, and his LinkedIn Yeah. And executives are talking about his content.
I wanna be like him. And, so, the early days were all about just generating internal buzz and, and gamifying essentially the content. The thought leadership that we were sharing, but then we, we needed, we needed expertise on the platform. We needed editorial expertise. The new folks coming in weren't great writers.
They were maybe thought leaders and not great writers, or maybe great writers. Yeah, but not thought leaders. So we had a lot of external support and taking, doing interviews, and turning the subject matter expertise in an interview into a really good article. So those kinds of things really helped.
And then the third piece was distribution, which I'm a big fan of. Organic is the way to go if you can get it. But sometimes you've got great content. Sometimes there is a tree that falls in the woods that you want someone to hear, you gotta push it out. And so distribute paid distribution was something that we really figured out, I think in that instance.
Steve Goldhaber: So I'm gonna focus on the area that you just talked about are you identified these writers who, who were already, they're working at the company, but. Their content wasn't connected to it yet. That's the biggest advantage I've seen at working at big companies is there's scale there to find great content.
And I've done similar things as it related to employee advocacy programs to, create content for people to then push out on their personal, LinkedIn channels, or Facebook. And my approach to that was always to say, Hey, I'm working at a huge company. I want to find all the employees. I want you to sort them on their follower counts.
And I could kind of say, all right, here are the top 1000 people in the company who've got scale. And the top 10 usually were ridiculously connected for whatever reason. And it was like, all right, those are my VIP ambassadors. I will build really good relationships with them because if they send out a post a week, like the, the impressions there were crazy.
So, it is funny how you, you have that luxury at a big company are just to mine for that content. And it's like you said in this case, it's already there. You just gotta redirect it. Mm-hmm. All right. Let's jump into case study number two and the one you're gonna share here has to do with Marketing ROI. So let's talk about that one.
Michael Brenner: I called the story the best marketing ROI I've ever seen. I, I hate to make that promise, but I'll, I'll challenge the audience, your audience to, send me an example of something that's better. So we're not gonna name the company, but they're a large professional services organization globally.
And they compete with companies that you would all know. And if, if you're a golfer, you would know these companies. Because these companies all love to sponsor golfers and this company, at the time when we started working with them, they reached out and they were like, we know we're trying to fix our content marketing, strategy, but the CMO and the c e O wanna sponsor a golfer.
And the CMO was like, that's pretty exciting cuz it's like a 20 million budget increase for me, but we're not sure it's the right thing to do. And they had done some research. They found I think something like, 12% of their audience were, were sort of, avid golfer, enthusiasts.
Another 8% were sort of, they were, were aware of it, they followed golf a little bit, but they didn't watch it on TV and 80% of their audience could care, does not care about golf. This is probably true of most, I think professionals. Yeah. I think many audiences probably fall into that that breakout.
And so, they're like, well, what, what do we do instead? And so we, we built a proposal, basically to push back on the CEO to say, for 0.1% of the cost of a golf sponsorship by, effectively it was really an employee advocacy, advocacy program. I don't like that term. I prefer employee activation because, to me, advocacy is, Hey, we're an amazing company.
Activation is, Hey, I know stuff, and you answer a question. You have. And so we really implemented I should say they implemented, I, I helped them with the strategy, but they implemented a program that identified the folks similar to my first example. They identified the folks in their organization that were willing to share their expertise.
They needed to build the platform. So there was some cost. So, the pitch to the CEO gives us, give us one year. 0.1% of the cost of a golf sponsorship, and we think we can get you measurable brand awareness. We think we can get you a measurable pipeline. We don't know if we'll close it, but we at least get some awareness of the pipeline.
Yeah. And sure enough, the CEO, sort of begrudgingly gave them a year and, and the 0.1% and. They built a platform, totally based on employee activation or activating their thought leaders. It was very well connected to LinkedIn. So they actually, they were, they actually worked tech technologically with LinkedIn to build this sort of like connect with me.
So on their website was an author, and the author had their LinkedIn profile sort of connected. you could connect with their LinkedIn profile on the right-hand side in like a little bio section. And sure enough, I mean, at the end of the first year they had. They had a million page views from this content.
They had a hundred authors signed up, kind of the same thing. 1%, one or two of them were superstars. Another 9% were really good. And the other 90% were like, they did two or three posts but they had a million million page views. More than that though, as they closed a million dollars in revenue and so, maybe that doesn't sound great.
I promise this was the greatest marketing ROI case ever. But it was a, they actually didn't think they were gonna close anything. And so they went to this and they're like, Hey, it worked. we, we didn't have to spend a lot of money. We generated measurable increases in traffic to our website.
So these are folks that would not have come to us. These are folks that didn't care about golf and they came to our website because they're interested in what we do. So they're interested in our, pro prospect audience. And by the way, we closed a million dollars in sales that we, sort of, stumbled upon because they reached out by land, they asked for a proposal, and we closed, five or six $20,000 deals or $200,000 deals.
So then they said, give us another year. Double the budget by 0.2%. We think we can get two or 3 million. They doubled the budget and what they really focused on was the engagement on LinkedIn. So, they doubled the amount of contributors, but those contributors were actively sharing on LinkedIn. Actively connecting on LinkedIn.
they were sharing their team member stuff, so it was like, Hey, Joe Smith shared this great article, article. You check it out. Yep. So it wasn't 2 million in revenue, wasn't 3 million in revenue. Are you ready? You have a hundred.
Steve Goldhaber: I'm ready. if there was a drum roll sound effect, I would drum roll. I should be pushing it.
Michael Brenner: So 24 million in revenue in the second year. Like wow. They closed more revenue after that period. But in that second year they closed 24 million in revenue. And they spent, I can't tell you the exact number, but it was a very low six-figure number, it was an ama, I think 1200, 1200 x roi.
So I'll challenge you and your audience to come up with a better example. And it's not like, it's not funny numbers. Like they spent, low six figures, they generated 24 million in trivial revenue directly from Yeah. from their folks on LinkedIn and Yeah.
Steve Goldhaber: Best ROI program I've ever heard. I love it. I'll stop using my employee advocacy description for this podcast since you're an activation guy. I appreciate that. Yeah. I love these programs because in the beginning of my career, the content, the advertising, and the messages were always from the brand, right?
And, then there's a time and a place for that. But in, if you're into the B2B world where you've got scale and you have that authenticity of individuals, I, I don't think you can have a better. Roi. I'm totally with you on it, is the most, it, it's not just about cheap because like, yes, you need the technology platform, you need to create the content, but the distribution is essentially free.
I don't think there's a better program. I've built a couple for them, for companies and they tend to have the same reaction where it's just, Why didn't we start this sooner? The question I have for you is, were you using LinkedIn's program called Elevate, or was this a separate software they used?
Michael Brenner: it was sort of Preva. In fact, I think, I'm not sure and I know the folks at LinkedIn, I've never had this conversation with them, but I think that this program sort of started, like I said, they were working with LinkedIn technically, like, the product people on the backend. And I believe Elevate, elevate came out of that collaboration.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Yeah. I loved it, I was on Elevate for a couple of years running it for two different companies. I, I love the platform and it's too bad that they shut it down. Mm-hmm. But the thing that I really enjoyed about Elevate was the ability to go in. And rank SSI levels. So ssi, social selling index, it wasn't a perfect metric.
Mm-hmm. So it, it's not, this, we're not gonna spend the rest of the podcast debating how that SSI sucked. But there were enough good things in it that it was a proxy for scale. It was also a proxy for a little bit of like a healthy competitive thing for someone who may not share a lot of content.
Mm-hmm. To be like, Hey, you're really. You're silent. You, you should be more active on the program. Yeah. And there's all kinds of software that, that do that today. So you can still make that happen. But I remember when I worked really closely with the Elephant people, and when they shut that down, I was like, I, I don't understand.
Like this, you've created like donuts and now you're taking the donuts away from the people. But yeah, I, I don't get, get it anywhere. Yeah, I mean, what, what I've been told off the record is always it was actually a really profitable program for them, but there wasn't scale to it. So when they kind of said, Hey, we think we've tapped out the top, 30, 50 big companies, it just wasn't one of those like, Big businesses to scale for them.
Yeah. So I think that was like, yeah, there are probably 15 other things going on. And I think this was also around the Microsoft merger so that probably that's one of those projects that's like, oh, you guys are only making 30 million a year. That's not a lot. we should be making a billion dollars a year on, on stuff.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, well, and you've been doing these programs too. I I can see that because, so, on our blog, we always have like three or four themes that we're trying to push, and it's, it's been pretty consistent since I started. It's been content marketing, demand generation, marketing strategy, and then usually something else.
And that's something else that has changed from event marketing to social media marketing. And, for a while, we were doing employee activation. And what's really interesting is I thought it was some of the best content we've created. Like what is employee activation? Why does it matter? This is the future of marketing your employees sharing your content, creating and sharing your content.
No one cared. I, I actually joked, actually joked with a speaker coach of mine that the stupidest thing I've ever said is that HR is the future of marketing. And I, cuz I said that at a Mar a Marketo event. I, I know, I hope I'm allowed to say company names in this case, but they, they don't exist. they're, they're part of Adobe now, but yeah, I was at a Marketo event before they were acquired by Adobe.
And I said that to, to a room of like 500 marketers and they went white, like I could see it, what is he talking about? And I'm, and he was like, no to self, never say that again. And so, it just, for whatever reason, It's a topic that doesn't resonate with folks, despite the fact that I think it works to your point, I think it's companies that do it. Don't know why they didn't start it sooner, but I don't know, marketers love to play with toys and we love to push out, campaigns and so maybe, maybe you could talk to somebody smarter than me who could understand that, but I, I think that's why
Steve Goldhaber: I, maybe that's the secret recipe for marketing success is look for unsexy things that work really, really well over time and that that's the foundation like, and it's, it's not to say you couldn't be having fun, but like look, there's probably three to five foundational elements that are just like Boring rice crispies, right? you need rice crispies. And then on the special days, I'm channeling my kids' breakfast cereal routine right now. It's like you're not getting Lucky Charms unless it's like St. Patrick's Day or some special holiday. Yeah. But marketers like Lucky Charms, they, they want, they want the magic.
Michael Brenner: I think you all cool. Yeah. You just helped me define my company's new tagline. Unsexy stuff that works.
Steve Goldhaber: Unsexy stuff.
Michael Brenner: That's gonna be, that's it. Started here. Thank you.
Steve Goldhaber: And, I already see a model that has a registered design mark around u ss. We, use a methodology. Yep. Exactly. All right, let's jump into the final case study.
This has to do with competing with bigger companies.
Michael Brenner: Yeah. So this is my current, shiny object fa favorite new toy. But yeah, they're, they're a, 6,000-person technology company competing with one of the largest. Cloud computing companies that really well-known brands.
And, their question is how do, how do we build, we do something really unique and we can work with that company, we can work with other companies. They sort of, they sort of act this sort of middle, middle man middle ground and So, the, the, the plan that we came up with was sort of a combination of the things that I've already talked about.
We built a business case for executives and, and really got them on board. One of the tricks to that was we went through the event team. I, I love talking about event content strategy and online content strategy. I. Because one of the things I find really cool is if you can't get excited about the online content strategy, go to the event people who are talking to the CEO, they're defining the pillars of messaging they're gonna use for their company's annual event and say, what?
We want to use that, but we're gonna do it on the website. People love that because they're like, wait, we just heard the CEO say 1, 2, 3, 4 is important, so let's just go do 1, 2, 3, 4, online after the event finishes up. So, that was kind of the trick there is, we aligned the event content and the website content strategies, which ultimately gave us credibility and buy-in from the c e o all the way through the product people.
Which, interestingly enough are often the biggest problem at technology companies because they wanna talk about products. They brought in, we created their content strategy, sort of to start. But they brought in a really, really good smart editorial strategist. And, his whole thing was defining the voice, making sure that they had a journalistic point of view.
Like it wasn't just, what is and why stuff. It was actually really hard-hitting. Journalistic pieces of content. And then the challenge, the main challenge is how do you compete with a giant? And this is where we really doubled down for the first time in my career with a client on distribution.
And so, everybody's talking about AI these days. It's like the latest hot thing. And we were using an AI-driven platform that we still, the only platform we use today, I won't name it, but it's the only platform we use today and we use basically it's a test. The winners double down on distribution strategy.
So every piece of content gets tested with an article. You might also like type ads, so if you're on CNN or The Guardian or Fox News or whatever you read, You'll see an article, if you're reading an article about, cloud computing, you might see an article from this company that talks about, hybrid cloud or multi-cloud or whatever.
And then you read that article and then they, they kind of make a note. And then we retarget those people that read those first articles sometimes with a webinar or an event, event invitation, usually something soft like an ebook. And we, we generate I, I used to do paper per lead programs in my, in my past.
They're generating $26 cost per lead outta this program with nurturing for eBooks and webinar registrations. Which, which is almost lower than what I was doing. 10 or 15 years ago when I worked for a large technology company, super efficient in lead generation. So they're getting tracked to their website, they're figuring out what their best content is and they're getting leads from it.
And then they nurture them again. They retarget them again with, do you wanna do a test drive? Do you wanna talk to a salesperson? And they're getting like $38 cost per lead when it comes to demos and, and, and, sales calls. Wow. Which is like 90% lower than the cost that, I think the industry average like if you use an appointment setting type of service all of it starts though, with a really sound editorial strategy.
They're, they're identifying the content that resonates with the audience. They're distributing it in an effective and efficient way. interested people and then they're retargeting them not right to the product, but, slowly over time, more and more promotional stuff. And it's an ROI, machine winning awards and, all kinds of stuff for this approach.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I'm gonna focus on voice cuz I think finding your voice is such a key thing in content to really differentiate yourself. The biggest challenge usually is the larger the company you're representing, multiple product and service lines. And how do you get 10, to 20 different product leads to agree on the voice?
And what was it like for this company? How did they get to that, solidification of the voice?
Michael Brenner: it's really good, you're sticking a finger into the wound. I haven't resolved this. The group that I work with sort of owns like the PR platform now. There's also a corporate blog that has not. Been able, to resolve this issue. And so yeah, it's a really, it's, it, it tb d for this client because where they've been able to say, what product team you go, you go, you go talk to the blog people, PR team, we're gonna manage this editorial strategy. We're gonna reach out to the subject matter experts, we're gonna interview them and then write articles that we are the authors of on the blog. We're trying to do the same thing and it's just not working because the product team, they have too much ownership. As I said, product people are always the problem. And I was a product person myself, so I'm, I'm busting on myself. It's. Yes. I think when you're a product marketer, you think your job is to talk about the product. Yeah. And, and you, you can't say things like that would be wrong. And you can't say, you can't be too basic because technical audiences get and ignored.
they get annoyed with stuff that's too basic. They want deep technicals like you have all these opinions about what you should be doing. All of those opinions get in the way of you hitting the publish button. And hitting the publish button is the only way to get in front of an audience. And so right now they're struggling with hitting the publish button on that side of the business. So we're working we're working through it.
Steve Goldhaber: The other big theme I've seen in working with product-heavy organizations is there's a time and a place to talk product. Like if your prospect or an existing client says, All years I'm interested. I wanna roll up my sleeves in a work session and talk product.
Yes, bring the product engineers. Into that conversation. But before that, you just need to be focusing on the pain. That's it. Talk about their pain, and that's the way to get them to sit down for a conversation. And product people just kind it. They'll get it in theory, but it, it's very hard for them to understand because essentially when they agree to it, well, now I'm not talking about my product, you know?
Michael Brenner: I like to use the term marinate in the pain. Yeah. And I, I coined that maybe I'm not the first person I'm sure, but because I, I used to do a keynote on, on storytelling and there's just so many great, I, I'm an English lit guy, so I've studied the art of storytelling and story making.
And like if you look at the Pixar model there's, there's a whole bunch of steps, and like the last step is the resolution, right? And any story the hero's journey, like all, there's a bunch of models. All of the models end in the resolution and then the return home or some sort of reward or something.
The resolution is the last or second-to-last step. There are six other steps that happen, or nine other steps, or three other steps depending on the model you're talking about. you know? So 90% of the content you should be creating should be the pain. And only that last bit, that final, the conclusion, the happily ever after happens at the very end.
And, again, product people just, they, they kind of the world I think, in the opposite way and, and it's always a struggle to work through that.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Let's jump into Q and A. I'm gonna jump into your book after we, we do the first question here of just tell us how you got started in marketing.
You alluded a little bit like you, you were in sales and you just made the jump cuz you weren't happy with the marketing. But tell us about when, when you kind of said, oh my God, I'm a marketer, I'm doing this full-time.
Michael Brenner: Yeah, I mean, like I said, I was working in sales getting collateral, trying to partner with my colleagues in marketing.
And they just weren't giving the stuff, giving us the stuff that we needed. And and so a position opened up and I was like, what? Instead of being the person complaining about what I'm getting, I'm gonna go fix it. And it was not strategic. Like I'm, I'm a marketer now, or, I never wanted to be a salesperson to begin with.
so I figured why not just follow, follow my passion and, and frustration and, and so yeah, so I land, I landed in a marketing job and it was like, okay, great. Now fix it. And that was a product marketing job. And, and I get, I get, I have to give a lot of credit to this guy who's my first, my first boss, essentially.
He was th what I was gonna do, marketing. And again, as an English lit person, I didn't, I didn't have a MBA. Like, I was like, wow, okay. I, I did some, basic marketing and business courses in college, but I hadn't written this plan.
So it was the first time I had to really understand like, who is the target audience and what budget do I have and what are the channels that we can consider and what's the metric we're gonna use? So it was like, My very first day, my very first week in marketing, I was forced to create a business plan, essentially for how I was gonna spend marketing budgets.
And so that was an amazing, I think, introduction to the world of marketing. And I, I think I was hooked ever since. Point,
Steve Goldhaber: I, I agree. I've, I don't think I'll ever have another job beyond marketing. I mean, I, I run my own company right now, so I'm a CEO O so it's, it's different, but like I am, my DNA is, is always marketing.
I, I just love it. It's, it's too exciting to walk away for from my perspective. Alright. I'm gonna talk about your book. Tell us about why you wrote the book. Which one? I'm going with Mean People Suck. That, that one caught my attention. Kudos to you on a title that was very catchy and intriguing.
No,
Michael Brenner: I, so you said you were gonna ask me about the book. I'm like, I was, I was waiting for you to say which one you were gonna, you were, so, yeah, so I, I wrote two. Just so you know and I'm not bragging at all, but the, first one was co-authored and called the Content Formula. And it was really all about that first case study.
So if people want to check it out, it's, it, it was, it was basically, it was a, a presentation I gave. That I turned the speaker notes into a, 4,000 word manual and then an add into a 40,000-word book and so you can read it in a sitting. But it was really all about, how to build the business case, get the budget, and, and show return from effective content.
But mean people suck. So I, so I wasn't sure if you were gonna ask about it, but yeah, it was really all about that, kind of in charge of the future of marketing concept. And so when I saw that it wasn't resonating with marketers what I, what I, I kind of set out to try to redefine the power of customer centricity.
And the role that employees play and what I found, so first of all maybe you don't know this, but marketers are the second most miserable people from a job role perspective of any job role in I've, I've seen, I've seen the stat.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I think it's something like, is it lawyers might be number one. What's the number one?
Michael Brenner: The one that I have is lawyers are actually quite happy in their jobs. It's directors of sales and it Oh, interesting. Are number one or two, and then marketers are right below them. And so yeah, so it's we're a miserable bunch, and when I talk to my former colleagues in marketing or my clients in marketing, why are you miserable?
The answer was always, cuz my boss sucks. It was basically, he wants or she wants me to do something that we don't think is gonna work or we don't think is, is the right thing to do, or, it's based on their opinion and their gut instinct and, all this kind of stuff. So it kind of sent me down this path of, well how do you break through that?
And kind of back to my first case study, understanding the companies that have a customer-centric purpose are like by the data stock prices are, four times higher than companies that, that aren't. That was the first stat that I found. And, then it's just started snowballing from there.
And, ultimately it was like I started with how do I help my former colleagues in marketing. Two, this is really a book about organizational design and, purpose, mission statements, employee activation all of that kind of things rolled up into one. But, that was, that was the goal.
And, the book did pretty well considering that the pandemic hit six months later. And I guess maybe, maybe that's why people were sitting around with nothing to do. But and then, and then we got into quiet, quitting and, so it, it's sort of like, It was, it was, I, I almost wanna relaunch it because I feel like we have a, there's a new context for it, but yeah, it, it basically came down to companies with empathy for their customers and employees are more successful over, over time than companies that aren't.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. that reminds me of the, the saying about how people, people, they join companies and they leave bosses. it, it's that, it's that truth that like, You will just say like, I'm done. I, I am not, I'm not feeling it. When you can have a totally different experience in another part of the organization, but sometimes it's, it's hard for people to move laterally because it's kind of like, I don't know, do I talk to my boss about this?
Do I, do I go around them and then ask for forgiveness? It's, it's a really delicate thing I feel for people who were kind of caught in that trap. How'd you, how'd you write it? like, what was your process?
Michael Brenner: So it was, it was similar to the first one. I had done, so I was doing some, some, some keynotes on content. I was doing some keynotes on storytelling, and then I, it was really that one that I mentioned, the Marketo one, where I, I kind of really pushed. It was, it was called the Champion Leader the name of the keynote. And I was like, Hey, if you're miserable as a marketer, this is how you can solve that.
And, and it was, find a boss that wants somebody who's gonna share their ideas, who's gonna champion who you are as a marketer and all this kind of stuff. Like I said, HR is a future. Marketing as a message did not resonate. Yeah, so I started by taking that presentation, which I'd spent a lot of time, putting together and the, and the speaker notes.
And, so I've written two, two books on this taping process. And so yeah, I turned that into, 4,000 words and then 40,000 words and then 6,000 words. What's really cool is I did end up working with a company called Book Launchers, so I self-published it, but I needed help. And and so I found this company, I'll never forget, it was like two in the morning.
I was in I was doing a presentation inland at, believe it or not, I couldn't sleep cuz of, jet lag. And I'm like, I need help with this book. It's, it's just some something's not right. And I found Julie Broad is the name of the woman who runs it. The book Broad is her, is her nickname for book launchers.
And I, I talked to her and she's like, I have somebody who's perfect for you. So I ended up working with a script writer from Hollywood. And he read the manuscript and he was like, oh yeah, he's like, if you just take, [00:36:00] paragraph three and make a paragraph seven, move paragraph seven to paragraph two.
And he's like, your story is all here. It's just not in the right order. And, all back to one of the chapters is about storytelling, but it's all, all back to the power of, the formula for good storytelling. People who know how to do it. They really know what they're doing and it really matters.
And so, making that one change, made all the difference. Yeah. And so I had to rewrite a few things, the connection points and, and stuff. The stories and examples of research were all were already done. And that, that's, that's really when the light bulb went off for me. Like, Hey, this is, I think this is a pretty, decent piece of fiction.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So here's the thing, the I, I wrote a book a couple years ago and I think the flaw that I had, and I don't know if others authors go through this, but. There's a part of you that, that says, I need to make it such a unique story, so I need to tell it my way. And then as you learn about it, you, you start understanding these frameworks and you're like, it can't be as simple as me just following a framework, because if I do that, I'm kind of cheating myself and I'm not fulfilling, like the, I have to get this outta my head and on paper.
So I, I went through that same like, struggle of like, Trusting the formulas to understand, no, these things just work. They are, you go, you go back to like the, the way that we were wired as cavemen. We, we've made some slight improvements. I always joke to my wife how I'm, I'm running caveman software 2.0 right now, so I'm like, it's not that advanced.
It's just the, it's just the next generation. But yeah, once you get, I've, I've studied some of this storytelling stuff from Hollywood and you just are like, when you, when you figure it out, you're like, I feel disenfranchised, like yeah, all these movies, it's like six different formulas and that's it.
It's, it's the same thing over and over unless you get into like really independent films that, that's separate, not as, not as formulaic there. But the big blockbusters are all, it's all the same storytelling techniques. Yeah. All right. I'm gonna ask you one or two more questions in your roles.
Like you've done a lot and you can't do it on your own, right? So you've had to find great talent, you've had to nurture great talent. Focus on like, how do you find the talent? Like whether it's, is it the type of person you're looking for? Is it how you're sourcing them? like, just, just tell me kinda like how you've identified great talent over the years.
Michael Brenner: It's really, yeah. I, I've been right as much as I've been wrong. I have the best team ever right now. And I don't know, it's, it's. So, so, I, I was I, I was just telling my neighbor this morning, I had, I was a paperboy at age 11. Just cause my, my, my dad was a blue-collar guy, my mom's home.
And it was like what happened was I joined, I made the c y O basketball team, and, and this is right around, right around the Converse high top leather, high top phase of 1999.
Steve Goldhaber: Nice. Yeah.
Michael Brenner: 1983 probably. I don't know. So there were these like white with red leather Converse high tops that everybody was getting.
And my mom was like, if you want if you wanna get those $50 sneakers, you're gonna have to get a job. I, I was 11. I'm like, well, the only job for 11-year-olds was a paperboy. So, I became a paperboy. I worked my way through college as a Bartender and waiter and stuff like that.
I have, it's not a bias, but I just, everyone that works for me right now has a history of working in the service industry as a bank teller or a waiter waitress. I always love to tell the story. Like I don't, I'm a, we, we, we love Starbucks. My wife and I. And if, if you ever go to Starbucks or any coffee shop, there's two types of employees.
There's the one that's running around who's like, she, she or he, they got it. Like, they're like, you want this and you want a bat, who's your name? here's your name and here's the, like they just, they're, they're, they, they just running the show. They're doing 7,000 things at once.
And then there's the sloth, right? There's the, Hey man, what's up? You know? And, and like, whenever I get that person, I want, kill myself. I hire the first, the first type of people. So, hardworking, go-getting And then I let them, I just let them, kind of true to my, to the book what ideas do you have? How am I doing? How can I help you? What do you think we should be doing? what's working for you? I don't tell him what to do. Like Steve Jobs, people talk about Steve Jobs as a monster of a manager, but he said, we don't hire smart people and tell 'em what to do you hire smart people so they tell you what you should be doing and he would argue with them, but that was, at least he understood that philosophically. And so, that's, that's been my approach and trying to keep them happy as a job.
Steve Goldhaber: Really. I, you got me all excited about Starbucks now, but I fear the sloth. That should be we're just gonna create content on the show and I, I see a t-shirt in the, in the happenings. Fear of the sloth. Seriously. And it's a sloth. It's a sloth with a nice barista apron serving coffee. Alright, my last question for you is, This is the time capsule one. So you get to go back in time and you get to talk to yourself on the first day of your first job.
What are the things that you're gonna tell yourself to, like, to do, or don't worry about this, what advice would you give yourself?
Michael Brenner: So, when I was coming outta college, I had a, like a mentor. You could get a professional mentor, and I'll never forget. Him saying to me that, 90, 90 some percent of life is just shut up.
And I remember thinking like, God, that's such an old head skeptical, you know? Yeah. Such a skeptical, cynical thing to say. And I think it's true like it was true for me in college. I tell, I tell my daughter who's my oldest is now, a sophomore. College. And I told her the same thing when she went like, just go to class you don't have to do every assignment on time and do every project and kiss your teacher's butts, but if you show up to class, you, you're gonna pass. And, if you do the work, you're gonna get great grades. And that's really what I think it's all about. And so that was great advice that I did have going in that I, I wasn't ready to listen to. One of the things that I talk about, it's true for content, it's true for investing, and it's something that I'm trying with my kids, and that is the power of compounding results. And so if I had invested a hundred dollars of my paperboy money when I was 11, I'd be a multimillionaire. I, every week or every month, I'd be a multimillionaire today.
And, and, and it seems true for content, I wrote a post about the compounding power of content marketing. The real reason it works isn't because of how smart the content is or how long it is or what's, or how it's formatted. It's because you publish every week or twice a week or, three times a month or whatever a s schedule could be I wish it really of that when I was 21. I did start investing for my retirement, but not enough. I did start saving for college for my kids, but not enough and not frequently enough. And so I think that's one. And then yeah, I mean, I was pretty stressed out and anxious as a 20-year-old, and so it, everything worked out. I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self that it's all gonna be okay. Yeah. I think in general, that's probably the biggest thing I wish I could have understood back then.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, I agree. When I look back at my career, Everything gets easier, right? It's just you have more context as you move through different things.
And there are things like I work with clients all the time and there are things that I could sniff out with a client based upon where they're at or where they want to go. And just in, in a minute go, ah, I know this isn't gonna work out. Where at the beginning of my career, I would've gone through a three to four-month journey trying to get them there.
And being really incredibly frustrated when you're not. Wait, like I just spent three to four months, like, what's going on? But now it's like, yep, I've, I've learned those lessons. So yeah, everything, everything does get easier. All right. Well, Michael, I really appreciate your time. I've, I've enjoyed getting to know you more as a marketer, and I'm gonna contact my design team to get started on this sloth t-shirt.
I love it. We'll do a rev share. We'll make it fair. Of course. It's all good. I'll help promote it. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening in to this episode of interesting B2B marketers, and we look forward to catching up with you next time. Take care. All right. Awesome.