Episode 11: Personalising Content at Scale with Grant Hushek from Grantbot Process Consulting

The theme of our 11th podcast episode is Personalizing Content at Scale.

Joining our host Jeremy Balius to discuss all things content market automation is Grant Hushek, Founder of Grantbot Process Consulting (GPC).

Summary

In this conversation, Grant Hushek shares his background in automation consulting and the value it brings to businesses. He discusses his experience with Zapier and the importance of learning through hands-on projects. Grant explains the concept of no code and how it allows for automation by connecting different elements of a tech stack.

He emphasises the role of CRMs in automation and the value of enriching data for personalisation. Grant also discusses the use of content marketing and automation, including tailoring content based on segments and utilising intent data from platforms like LinkedIn.

The conversation explores the concept of personalisation in content marketing and how to scale it up. It discusses the use of no-code tools, automation, and AI to repurpose content and personalise outreach. The goal is to capture leads early in their buying journey and nurture them over time.

The conversation also touches on ethical considerations and the importance of providing value and building relationships rather than focusing on immediate sales. The key takeaway is that personalisation requires a long-term approach and a deep understanding of the target audience.

Key Takeaways

• Automation consulting can provide significant value to businesses by streamlining processes and freeing up time for higher-level thinking.
• No code tools like Zapier allow for automation by connecting different elements of a tech stack.
• CRMs play a crucial role in automation and can be used for data enrichment and personalisation.
• Content marketing can be enhanced through automation by tailoring content based on segments and utilising intent data.
• Intent data from platforms like LinkedIn can be captured and used to identify high-intent prospects for outbound messaging. Personalisation in content marketing requires a long-term approach and a deep understanding of the target audience.
• No-code tools, automation, and AI can be used to repurpose content and personalise outreach.
• The goal is to capture leads early in their buying journey and nurture them over time.
• Ethical considerations should be taken into account when using automation and AI in personalisation.
• Providing value and building relationships is more important than immediate sales.

About Grant Hushek

Grant is the founder of GrantBot Process Consulting (GPC), a no-code automation firm helping B2B service businesses streamline their operations.

As the first employee at Hampton, a community for founders with $1M+ annual revenue, I identified common automation needs across businesses. Now, GPC partners with companies to scale output without scaling workforce, focusing on automating social media lead generation, CRM, client onboarding, project management, and invoicing. GPC has partnered with over 25 companies, using platforms like HubSpot, ClickUp, Airtable, and Zapier to build automated solutions.

Connect with Grant on LinkedIn

Jeremy Balius: Hi, welcome to the B2B Tech Marketing Talks podcast, where we engage with leading marketing and channel leaders to get fresh perspectives and practical advice on the latest trends, effective strategies, and best practices for B2B tech marketing. I’m your host, Jeremy Baylis. Today’s theme is personalizing content at scale.

I’m very excited because I’m joined by Grant Hushak. Founder of GrantBot Process Consulting. It’s a no code automation firm helping B2B service businesses streamline their operations. GrantBot Process Consulting partners with companies to scale output without scaling workforce, focusing on automating all sorts of activities.

They partnered with 25 companies and they specialize in automating platforms like HubSpot, ClickUp, Airtable, Zapier, and. A whole bunch of others. This was a really fascinating conversation. Generating demand is hard. And when content teams are stretched, it can be challenging to deploy campaigns that are personalized and meaningful to different target audiences.

When thinking about how to scale this up, it’s hard to know where to start or what’s even possible. That’s where Grant comes in. I really hope you get as much value out of this conversation as I did. Let’s get into it.

Hey, Grant. So awesome to have you on the show. Thanks for dialing in from a train station in Italy.

Grant Hushek:Y eah man, absolutely. Happy to be here.

Jeremy Balius: Wanted to kick off and talk to you about your background, getting into automation, consulting work. The value that you’re delivering to business is pretty phenomenal, but I’d love to hear the backstory.

How did this come about? How did you arrive to where you’re at today?

Grant Hushek: Yeah, it’s a fun story. So I was in Europe trying to find my next job after I had finished up a master’s and I came across this community called Hampton and Hampton’s a founder community. People doing at least a million dollars in revenue in their business.

I was like, I’m working on a startup. I should apply. Didn’t know that there were those requirements. So I do my interview and they tell me, Hey, this is a founder community, it’s going to be 3, 000 a year. Can you afford that? And I go, yeah, I can. Nope. I don’t have any revenue in my startup. Can I work it off?

And the founder of the company goes that’s a pretty weird request. No, have a good day. I go, great. Okay. But I follow up in an email and I say, Hey, if there’s anything you ever need done, let me know. And I’m happy to help out. And so for three months I followed up and eventually the answer was Zapier.

And I said, I’ve always wanted to learn Zapier. Can I help you? And he said, sure. And so I got the keys to the castle and I was a contractor for a month. That turned into the first full time hire at Hampton. And I was there for about a year and a half before I spun out my agency from that experience.

Spending a lot of time with founders, especially agency owners, professional services. There’s just a lot of commonalities between those business models. And that’s how grandpa process consulting was born.

Jeremy Balius: Tell me about that first month of exposure to Zapier. What happened in that first month?

Grant Hushek: Chaos, absolute chaos, but it was the right kind.

It was the kind that you learn really fast. And the tech stack was Zapier, Airtable and HubSpot. And the goal was essentially to have. HubSpot mirrored into air table. So a live sync all the time between those two different data sets, because one was really good for visualization of information, the other one was really good for general tracking and email marketing as everyone in your audience knows about HubSpot and zapier was going to be our glue piece. And then we also had to factor in stripe and a few other tools. But yeah, trial by fire. If and in its most pure form, it was great. The thing that’s really good about no code is when you have a list of things you’re trying to accomplish, which is what was just being fed to me.

You can go and figure it out. But if you don’t, if you’re trying to learn no code and say, I want to learn no code that you can go do the academies, you can do the YouTube courses. But you’re not building anything, it’s pretty hard to get it to stick. And so I just had this stream of asks that were, Full and what’s not forceful, but needed, let’s say.

And as I kept getting those, I kept finding and learning new things in the forums and on YouTube and the documentation and it all just clicked in my head.

Jeremy Balius: It must have been Interesting experience to, I don’t know, build the plane as you’re flying it, as they say. The were you exposed to no code prior to this? And maybe talk us through what no code is for those in the audience who may not even have heard of this.

Grant Hushek: Yeah, absolutely. I knew what Zapier was.

I did not know what the rest of the tech stack really was. Like, I’m an engineer. So I was always around material science. This is not my, this is not my area of expertise. But as I got more and more into the tech scene, because I worked at a startup a while back, I became aware of some of these tools.

And then I actually worked at the company That bought make, if you’ve ever heard of Zapier’s main competitor, make. com. So I was working for the parent company to make, so I got some exposure to make there and general automation. But as far as what no code is. You can pretty much think about it as all of the elements of your tech stack have what’s called an API.

Some of those are closed APIs, some of them are open, and open one means that it’s available on something like Zapier. So if you go to zapier. com slash apps and you search HubSpot, you’re going to see a ton of different triggers and actions that represent What’s available in the API. So those are things like creating a new contact, creating a new company, sending a contact to a workflow or on a trigger, it could be something like new form submission, right?

So these are all things that are happening in your daily life. Those things all have little robot. Automation potential. And so when you think about your general workday or what you’re trying to automate, you can think through it in these triggers and actions. And so that really allows people to remove a lot of the admin work or just those little clicks in that context, switching from their day.

And that’s really ultimately what we’re trying to get after.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, it’s interesting and I love the idea of using Zapier’s app page to, to understand what. Can link together and use that to think about how things could link together. I think from my own background, as well as a lot of the people that I work with, I think we’ve just gotten accustomed to these silos of.

Tech that we jump in between and maybe there’s a normalcy there of just dealing with the day to day, but not taking a step back and thinking about how could all of this talk together in a way that helps me. How do you help people visualize that? What’s the process of thinking about marketing automation?

Grant Hushek: Totally. And the, so first off completely agree. Like it’s, there’s a. All these tools are beneficial and valuable in their own right, but the huge ROI expansion comes from when you get them to talk to each other, and then you can free up a human’s brain to go and do higher level thinking, right? And more critical problem solving, so 100 percent on board with that.

And that’s really what our mission at Grandpa’s all about when it comes to thinking through an ideating and automation. The most simple version is thinking through an if then statement. And so If a form is submitted on my landing page or my lead magnet page, then I enroll them in a workflow and I create a company record and I create a contact record and I create a deal record.

And that’s the end of that quick flow. You can expand that across your tech stack and say, maybe, An email comes into a landing page form. I want to pull in a lot of information from LinkedIn and say, what is this? What company do they work at? How many employees do they have?

What’s their role? What’s their title? I can filter that using open AI based on are they a senior product manager? Are they, at CMO, whatever your ICP is, and all that information can flow back in. But really going back down to the most basic, if then, if form submission takes place, that’s your trigger, then create company record, create contact record.

Those are your actions. And so our process looks a lot like a one on one process audit. So we talk about our onboarding process. What are the key workflows that you’re looking for? Optimizing and really not even what do you want to optimize, but just what exists. And then we go into one on ones and say, great, Here are the four workflows that you identified earlier.

Let’s just go piece by piece. I want to really understand who’s doing what is automated right now in your HubSpot workflows. If you have other automation, talk to me about it. When does it trade hands? When is there a transformation of information? Those are the things that we’re looking for in those calls.

Then we map it out. We get a confirmation that is the process, and then we turn that into automation maps, which is just a series of flow charts that say, here’s your trigger, here’s all the actions, here’s your trigger.

Jeremy Balius: There’s a couple of things there that you just triggered me to use the same language. The first thing I’m thinking about is, I think your guidance there is the intrinsically valuable component because I’m thinking about the technology marketer out there. The most common profile of these guys is either they’re on their own or they’re part of a small team.

And they’ve been operating in the way that they know best. And maybe there is some process that’s been developed but the, for most, for the most part, a lot of this is tribal knowledge with individuals so I really picked up on the point about how you’re actually trying to define that process first and in what ways are these different Paces of activities taking place between different hands.

And I think that’s so immensely valuable, but the part that I wanted to pull about, pull up about there is when you talked about going beyond. And multiple applications in your stack and the way that they interrelate or talk to each other through the APIs. I think my first thing is it, that’s the possibilities are so great that I don’t even know where to start.

What do you say in that scenario?

Grant Hushek: That’s a problem. That’s a problem for sure. The first and easiest thing to do is really take a look. Even if it’s over the course of two hours, just Hey, what have I done in the last two hours that I’ve done earlier this week? Or maybe last week or earlier later today, right?

Later earlier today. It’s that repeatability. And usually the first question I ask people when I get into these audit calls is I go, What feels repetitive, like just what’s that gut feeling? I know that we’ve got workflows and we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna get there, but what feels like there’s gotta be a better way, right?

This just sucks. This is repetitive. It’s crap. It’s all crap. That’s a great starting place for anyone at home listening to this and thinking, I don’t even know where to start. What feels annoying? And one of the questions we ask in our audit is literally what makes you go, ugh, I have to do this again.

Great question to expose automation. And so when you think through that lens of just what feels like it. That’s a good place to start thinking, okay, now I’ll do my if then. So we’re building out a little flow here. It’s what feels annoying and repetitive? What’s my if then statement? Go to Zapier, see if there’s those triggers and actions, and then just try your first one, right?

And the people, the thing about no code is that it is supposed to be intuitive enough where someone could go in there build a basic flow, get going and start to really learn about it. But the thing for most marketers out there is that you’ve got things that need to be produced. You’ve got copywriting to do.

You’ve got landing pages to build. You’ve got. New marketing strategies to put together, there is a lot to be done. And as you pointed out earlier, it’s it’s hard sometimes to zoom out and say, how can I standardize and then automate? And that’s something that we love to help people with, but it’s, it is ultimately an investment of time to say, This is what I’m going to work on for this couple of days or this week or this month, just take a few hours to zoom out on your processes.

That’s going to help a lot.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah I totally get it. And I think this is such a, I think, valuable lesson to even stop and consider not just the time cost of removing frustrating elements but how to scale up other activities. I think you’ve introduced the topic there, really want to get into this idea of utilizing automation and no code in the context of content marketing and we’re going to talk about a component of that soon.

But before we get into it, I’d like to dovetail into how you are working in the context of CRMs. And and the reason why I’m bringing that up now is because it’s going to relate to how we deal with content and personalization, but how are you thinking about CRMs and databases and the value of them?

Grant Hushek: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great question. And the CRM is usually the first or the second thing that we take a look at in the company, because that’s where so much copying and pasting and snippets and. It’s just right for automation. And when so many people are using HubSpot these days, and we were better at HubSpot certainly than Salesforce, but there’s so many other options as well.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re using HubSpot or not, right? You’ve all these tools now have their APIs exposed. So there’s automation potential for everyone. But when we think about these tools, especially with the best way. Enrichment for content and personalization. It really starts with an enriched set of data, right?

So obviously the basics need to be there. Do you have contact records that are consistent with custom fields? If you’re using them, that all of them are filled out. Do you have company records that are linked? Do you have deal records that are linked? So basic data hierarchy, step one, right? And I’ll caveat that by saying that a lot of people get value out of HubSpot right off the bat by working on it.

Buying it themselves, self service, getting it set up. There’s a ton of value to be had in HubSpot. It’s a great tool. Getting a consultant to come in and really juice it up and do all the workflows, all the sequences, all of the lead scoring, it’s a whole nother ballgame. So I’ll just throw that out there that if you’re getting good value out of HubSpot now, and you haven’t worked with someone, highly encourage you to explore that option because I’ve seen people just.

But when it comes to making sure content is you can use a serum for content personalization. It’s really about having an enriched data set and making sure that you have a full a full picture of who you’re trying to market to. And so there are tools like Phantom Buster, like clay that you can go and take the records in your CRM and enrich them with what’s available on LinkedIn.

So if you have those LinkedIn profile URLs, awesome. If you don’t, there are other ways to get them. Especially if you have first name, last name company, you can do automated searches to find all the LinkedIn URLs. Then you can pull in that data about. What’s your role? How long have you been there? How big is the company?

All those different types of things. And even with clay, clay is a crazy tool. You can do things like, what was the last thing they posted on LinkedIn? What what’s the revenue of the company they work for? What’s their phone number. You can grab all that information as well. So I would say to answer the immediate question, The most important thing for personalization is having something to personalize on, right?

You can obviously do first name, last name, but if we can get a step further and really impress them with Hey, we really know what you are. Interested in reading about following, et cetera. That’s where a tool like clay can really come in handy.

Jeremy Balius: This is game changing because in, in it, it pulls back to what you were saying earlier around CRMs or automation and through Zapier look, being able to go out and pull information from the likes of LinkedIn.

And I think a lot of this. CROs or heads of sales or heads of channels that I talked to are thinking about that in the context of, I need to go to a provider to get something. Apollo and they’ll spend a bunch of money and it’s supposed to give them all of these high intent or high interest prospects that they can go out and call down or dump into campaign managers and push ads in front of but you’re taking this to a degree that I think a lot of people aren’t thinking about in that the real time poll of in what ways are people putting themselves out there and you’re pulling that in and able to react to, I think is crazy.

Amazing. That is, give me a moment here because that, that, now we’re getting into, now we’re getting into some personalization stuff but talking about it foundationally, I don’t know how well known it is that type of information can be. Accessed and made sense of.

Grant Hushek: Totally. And like I was telling you earlier, before we went on recording is it’s all about exposing people to what’s possible.

That’s the thing about no code. And these tools is there’s a sea of information around. Automation and there’s blogs and there’s new tools. And with the AI era, there’s a new tool coming out every other hour, right? It’s not even, we’re not even at the weekly, we’re at the every other hour. It feels like there’s a new market map with 20 new tools, if not 200 new tools.

So I think that I’m really happy to be in this position to tell people about these things. And one I don’t know if it’s inside baseball or just a tactical nugget to take home. If you are interested in using clay and you have an Apollo account, clay is best at enriching, not great at finding.

So from an, on a tactical level, if you have Apollo or you have a CRM, export that list of your. Emails, your LinkedIn profile, URLs, whatever you have, export it from somewhere else, export it from Apollo or get it from HubSpot, your CRM, then put that in clay and enrich that because clay will not do a good job at finding you new leads.

It’ll do a great job at enriching the leads you already have. So just one, one little tactical thing, if you are interested in trying clay, come with your leads and let clay make them much better. So I’ll just leave that, that one there.

Jeremy Balius: I think just reacting to that comment there’s a couple of scenarios that we come across a lot, and this is from mid tier through to multinational, a database.

Of prospects or leads that have been somehow vacuumed up over the last 10 years. Hasn’t been segmented or cleaned in any way over that 10 year period, it’s just this bucket of prospects. There’s oftentimes there’s very little work done, even in figuring out where opportunity lies or any enrichment.

So I think what you just said would be a great start to figure out what are we even sitting on here in the first instance. And then secondly, I think that helps respond to the executives who tell me regularly, we have this amazing database and. If we just started marketing to them in a strategic way, we would unlock all this opportunity, but because there’s no enrichment, as soon as marketing starts, you get hard bounces at 40 percent and you get all the soft band and all these triggers happen, but I think the, what you’re talking about in terms of clay and Apollo, that it might enable guys to start sifting through.

And getting real strategic around their prospect engagement.

Grant Hushek: Totally. And the other thing I’ll add too, is that the emails that are coming from Apollo typically are not either. They’re not up to date or they’re not verified. So if you are, I hear that a lot of Oh, these emails from Apollo suck.

It’s probably a good idea to double check them either with a never unbounce some of those email verification tools. Or just starting from scratch and saying not scratch, but you take your lead list from Apollo, run it through clay and it’ll do a new email sweep. And it’ll check like 6 to 8 different email service providers to find that up to date email.

And then it’ll also verify it. You’re not going to get hard bounced on those and be marked for spam. So it’s Some of these tools clay can be used at scale for the, 10, 000 emails a month, 20, 000 emails a month. People do that. But I also believe that a lot of people are getting sold to pretty aggressively these days.

And so if we can do an enriched cycle and you can automate it all to its nth degree, but like doing enrichment cycle, you’ve got good emails, have someone have a few sales reps or have a few people on the team. Just try Some higher touch outbound sales using email, using some of that enrichment data. And if you do go down that road.

Remember that you can probably send about 20 cold emails from your main domain. So I’ve been burned on this. I’ve seen other companies be burned on this. Do not go and send a bunch of cold emails, a bunch meaning, 100 a day, you’re going to toast your email domain. So keep it low, keep it small, keep it intimate.

And then you can do a handful of those per day, but from your main domain, but just a food for thought, trying to try to make sure no one gets hurt out there.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s really important to for anyone who’s cold emailing. And also we should note to be aware of local privacy laws when it comes to cold emailing as well.

Now we’ve enriched contacts. We are pulling in information that is highly personalized in real time. What do we do with that? If we start thinking about that in the context of content marketing and automation?

Grant Hushek: Great question. So if we’re thinking about the content itself, there are things that we know That if we see segments inside of our lists, there’s things that we can put like specific words into the content or making a bunch of different duplicates of the same content and switching things out.

So for example, if you were to do an enrichment cycle on people who are in your CRM or you were looking specifically for senior product marketing managers or something like that, you could start tailoring the first. Drafts of your content, whether it be from an AI tool or just, you’ve got the same template in Canva.

Canva actually just released automations with make dot com, which is very exciting. So if you’ve got the same square image or square tile, you can start to print multiple versions of that with senior product manager, marketing manager, product manager, all these different versions of the same thing and start getting more and more throughput.

On the same tile, right? And then if you wanted to go inside of one area that we’re really interested in is in linkedin. If you’re sending content out about a specific area and you’re tracking, there’s tools that allow you to track who’s liking and who’s commenting and who’s visiting your profile page and who is following you.

That’s a bunch of intent data. That’s rich data. And so what we do is we say, let’s get the first page. Batches of content out. Let’s go image forward. Let’s go video forward. That’s what gets people to stop scrolling. Then if people are engaging likes comments, profile visits, those are the people that we want to do outbound messaging to because we’ve getting that intent and then we’re saying, great, you know who I am.

Let’s send an LinkedIn outreach, right? Let’s send a followup sequence because those are high intent, potential buyers. And we can also filter those people based on their role. So there’s a lot that can be done. Off the back of content, especially when it’s, in the founder led or per a personal brand side of things.

Jeremy Balius: What’s really interesting here is, for thinking back to the evolution of demand gen where and I know there’s a lot of marketing teams that still do this purely because the demand from the businesses on them to have to do this, where a white paper download. It becomes a marketing qualified lead and it gets shoved through this funnel.

But you’re talking about something much more detailed here and nuanced almost in the way that there is an opportunity to see and understand inter action with content across multiple channels. I think that’s really fascinating. How are you capturing that data? Is that possible to pull it back into through to the CRM or is that going somewhere else?

Grant Hushek: Yeah, that’s an awesome question. So it originates from the platform. We’re really good at LinkedIn but the tool is called phantom buster and it can be used on Instagram It can be used on X in varying degrees, but LinkedIn is really great because it has that profile visit And I think that’s like for all the marketers out there, the white paper download that is strong intent because they’ve taken an action, but the actions that we can’t see normally and that we don’t have the time to track, that’s what we’re getting after with automation.

And the likes in the comments. Yes, we can see those names. Oh, new senior product market manager. Awesome. But the profile visits and the following, like no, one’s getting an aggregated view. So what we do is we take that information from fans and buster from LinkedIn and we ship it into HubSpot. With custom objects.

So that all adds up when you click on that contact record. And there’s that little timeline that we say, they open an email here and they did this here. Like we can go, we can ladder up from that to, they followed us. They visited our profile. Let’s get all that data into HubSpot. Let’s put a lead score around it.

And then the one that really kicks ass is you get all that intent score. They are all that intent data. That’s, I’m not going to say impossible to track, but really time consuming. You get all that automatically bundled up. They hit a lead score threshold. Maybe it’s two likes and a profile visit or something for these lurkers, right?

So someone that doesn’t even, they don’t think that you are aware of them on your profile, but you are tracking that and you say, Hey, they visited my profile twice. They’ve liked two posts. Let’s go grab their email from clay. Let’s enrich it. And then let’s send them an email and drop them into a workflow.

Now that is some pretty intense stuff but that is something that is really crazy powerful to say you are getting intent data from pretty unique buckets. That’s very relative to my company specifically. Let’s get that into the CRM and if they are hitting enough of those sweet spot or data points, let’s grab their email and let’s see if they’re interested in talking.

Jeremy Balius: I’m just going to straight up say that I’m getting goosebumps and the reason being in, in, in tech marketing, there’s been a shift and away from the marketing touch points. The, we just need to be able to, on average, get a certain amount of emails read and something happens. And that’s going away because.

Of the amount of relationship building and trust eliciting required these days where most guys are selling very similar kits. To each other, and it’s really hard to differentiate in the market this whole interaction component becomes more and more important. And and so some of the language is shifting towards creating meaningful moments, as opposed to touch points and what you’re describing, I think.

Enables executives to understand what those moments actually are. They’re not just saying, Oh, we’re podcasting and good things are happening. It’s no, we are across multiple channels. Interacting with the right people whom we’ve identified and guess what? We actually know when they are interacting with it and are able to hand them over to inside sales or pre sales or technical sales or whomever.

That’s really cool, man. That’s really cool.

Grant Hushek: I’m glad again, it’s all about exposing people to what’s possible. That’s the biggest thing is that there’s so much out there now. And it’s like, when you combine the tools and just the right way for your business and you have that perspective, you can do some pretty fricking crazy things, right?

Like it’s really awesome. And I think a lot of marketing is also about What is that unique data pool that I’m going to tap into? And so it’s what’s private to me that everyone has access to and what’s private to me that only I have access to. So examples would be everyone has access to who is attending all of these clay webinars.

I’m probably the only one that’s gone through and scraped every single person that’s attended, found them on LinkedIn, had someone decide if they were an agency owner and then put them into a sequence. So that’s a. Unique data set that only I am paying attention to, but everyone can, right?

And the other side of that is everyone who’s coming to my profile on LinkedIn. That’s a unique data set that only I have access to, but I’m making the most of that and using that as a 10 signal. So I think everyone should be on the hunt to find where are these unique data sets as we are, as the world is becoming so inundated with cold email marketing and so many LinkedIn messages and all these different things, it’s like there is a lot of stuff to pay attention to, as there always have been, right?

What’s the stat? We’re seeing a thousand ads a day or something like that. If we can find those little pockets of data that set that show that someone is. Interested in a certain thing or a certain topic or whatever it is product. That can be the intent data that we use to say, Hey, I saw you’re really interested in clay automation webinars.

Chances are you’re probably interested in process efficiency automation too. That’s a way for us to find that stepping stone to a conversation. And all we’re trying to do is start conversations. That’s why all of our outreach now is just like a very simple question. What CRM are you using?

Do you know that there are workflows, like just very simple things to get the conversation going. That’s what it’s really about for us.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. And I think that conversation’s so critical, particularly in in the component of B2B Tech land that we most operate, aside from SaaS, where in SaaS the purchase decision can be pretty rapid or a free trial can be spun up pretty quickly.

But there’s a whole side of. Tech ecosystem, where what they’re selling infrastructure as a service or networking or platformization is what Palo Alto’s just tried to make stick in terms of a new word that they’ve invented the sales cycles can be like. Two years, these are very long sales cycles and, but and these leaders are looking for opportunities to how do we continually stay in front of our buyers when we don’t necessarily have a specific reason to in a sales cycle.

And so what you’re telling me is fascinating to think about. This could be a huge unlock to continually personalize content for your. Buying committee decision makers on the other side of the table without necessarily being able to pitch something to them constantly, but you can remain relevant over time.

And it sounds like capture the data of whether it’s working or not.

Grant Hushek: Yep, exactly. Content is. I think the, it’s the top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel for a lot of businesses now because they can always be producing things to get in front of people’s eyes. And I think the stat is that one or 10 percent of your LinkedIn Followership will see any given post.

So if you think about it, it’s like a lot of people are worried. Hey, am I posting too much? The common practice I spend a lot of time with people who are focused on this content world, so you post every day and you know that at least once every two weeks you’ll be top of mind for someone.

And that’s it. That’s basically it. That’s exactly where you want to be. And then there’s, if you want to be more frequent, you can do a newsletter weekly or multiple times a week. And there’s ways to be able to deliver value in a more personal way. But yeah, as you said, the sales cycles are getting longer.

And I think that the more we can do. to be delivering value along that journey for people. It’s like the buying window will eventually open, right? And if you’re there and you’re top of mind because of the content you’re putting out, or the newsletters you’re putting out, or just the ways you’re trying to be helpful, that is what ultimately leads someone to say, I remember hearing about grant a year ago.

I’m really need some automation work. I’m going to go back to grant and see what is his thought about my situation. And if I’m the first person that someone calls that’s a win. That’s a year’s worth of hard work, culminated, right? So it is tough to play that long game sometimes, especially when in marketing, the sales team always wants the next set of leads.

And everyone’s always thinking about the quality of the leads today, but sometimes it is important to have that perspective, to zoom out and say, Hey, we’re playing a long game. The buying window is not open for everyone and we need to play high quality games until people show up and say, I’m ready to learn.

Not even to say I’m ready to buy, but I’m ready to learn intentionally. It’s a tough psychological change, but it is something that, I’m frankly working on trying to be better at too, I’m early in my business too. Yeah, it’s just a little reminder out there that it takes time and it’s, it just takes patience and.

And being consistent. And that’s also a note to myself. So when I listen to this later I’ll remember I got to do that too.

Jeremy Balius: No, I think that’s a note for all of us. I think it’s the consistency component is a challenge for just about everyone.

I think I want to take this into. I want to pivot into or going further into this concept of personalization as we’ve talked about the benefits of no code, we’ve talked about the opportunity of automation, and we’ve talked about thinking about how to get started and how to leverage in a beneficial way.

From a marketing perspective and how that interrelates with content. But tell me about how we use these concepts or this framework to scale up content marketing, how to how to, how do I think about this in In personalizing content, but increasing beyond my own capacity to be able to deliver a personalized experience for people where I may not necessarily be creating the content myself, but I’m touching it to ensure that it’s on message.

How would I go about thinking about that?

Grant Hushek: Yeah. So this is one of my favorite topics right now. And I’m glad you asked because we actually have a partner that is trying to repurposing machine. Inside of their podcast, short form video content ecosystem. So for context, this person has a podcast that does 30 to 45 minute videos.

They do mid medium length, 10 to 15 minute videos on YouTube. They do shorts on YouTube and Instagram, and then they also do a newsletter. So those are, we’ll call those our inputs, short and medium, short, medium, long form video. Where this really becomes valuable from a repurposing standpoint is saying, getting my information transcribed into text, right?

So that’s a, an automation step that you can use files that are up to two gigabytes in size. You can take MP4s videos and turn them into MP3s to make sure they fit that size. But there’s a tool called deep gram and that’s just deep than G R a M. You can transcribe any of those audio files. And then we give them to tools like OpenAI, and we give them to Claude, and we say, Hey, pull out the topics from this piece of content, and then when you have a topic, create one LinkedIn post, create one tweet thread, and create one single tweet.

Let’s just make three pieces of content. And then we’ll load all of those into our preferred databases air table. So we’ll load all of those into air table and then you can literally just go through and say, yep, I like that tweet. Good. I’m going to, I’m going to edit this LinkedIn post a little bit.

Okay, great. This other LinkedIn posts. That’s pretty good, but I don’t like the emojis, so I’m going to get rid of the emojis. And as we move through those different editing cycles, we’re also saving the edits themselves. So now when you go back in a week or in a month and you go back to the model, to the LLM, and you say, I would like you to do the same thing you’re doing automated, but here’s what you produced.

And here’s what I changed it to. Then you have the additional context to say, this was the first draft. This was the final draft. I want more final draft stuff. And so this can get really technical and I’ll, I want to try to keep it useful and high level for people who want to go home and make a plan out of this.

So I’ll summarize it by saying you are creating content all the time. Whether you have a podcast, you have a newsletter, you’re writing content on LinkedIn, Or if you’re doing none of these things, you can even go on to open AI and to chat to BT and say, act like a podcast interviewer and ask me questions.

That will be enough to get the brain flowing about what you’re an expert at, right? You get that knowledge out. Then you turn that you take those little knowledge nuggets, whether it be from original content or just from chat to BT, yeah. Play around, take those and give them to the model and say, make me a LinkedIn post.

And it’s really helpful if you have a LinkedIn post that you can tell it to base it off of. So for tone and style and length, give it an example. Examples are really helpful. So give it an example, say, write something like this, and then that is that allows you to see how the model can create content.

And then if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, you can look at automating the end to end system of. I’ve got my inputs up here, short, medium, long form, video, and newsletter, and down here, I want three different types of content for each of the topics discussed in each of those transcripts. There’s levels to it, for sure I hope I answered, I hope I answered the question, just that content repurposing, it doesn’t need to, it doesn’t need to come from Original content that you’ve already published.

It can just be you on chat to BT talking around or a sales call. You can use a sales call. You can use an audit call, make sure you’re either asking for permission or don’t use the people who you’re talking to, but at least your audio, that is content. Those are things that can be used and repurposed.

So I’ll get off my monologue, but there’s a lot that can be said for that.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I think that’s interesting. I think. I think generally people understand the value of repurposing content in order to maximize its usage and to create better efficiencies, but often lack the framework and structure to be doing it efficiently.

I think done manually a lot or someone’s paid to do it manually. So it’s interesting to think about it in terms of that workflow. It, are there ways to then connect that activity back to your CRM as well? Does that go back to the interactivity of people with the content or are there ways to personalize it even further beyond that?

Grant Hushek: So answer to the first part is yes. If you have that content that’s been repurposed or it’s original and you post it, getting the interactions and sending them back to the CRM, that I think is a great place to start, but let’s get deeper into personalization. So when you think personal, personalizing this content, are we still posting it on the platform or are we sending it one to one?

With people via email or via LinkedIn or what do you think? Where is that? What’s the medium of sharing.

Jeremy Balius: That’s what we’re ideating. What’s possible, I think is, would it be, I’m thinking about it. It would be possible to have the interactions take place for us to recognize that those interactions took place and to be able to recognize other data inputs that that have been set up with that person and to transition that into some form of one to one.

On mass, mass personalization and whether that becomes a direct message or an email I think I think that could be very fascinating, particularly as you’ve started introducing AI inputs. Whether there’s an AI input that can help generate the initial outreach in order for it to sound personable and personalized, and it not being a direct sale, like we all receive 20 times a day of connection requests and then an immediate pitch, but have that some form of mass conversation at the end.

At a personalized level. I don’t know. I’m free forming here. You tell me, I don’t know what’s possible. You’re the guide here

Grant Hushek: for sure. So when I hear that, I’m thinking like, yeah, it’s either going to be email or it’s going to be a LinkedIn DM sequence and let’s stick with LinkedIn because I think that’s where so much B2B content that’s that’s where the puck is going.

I think Twitter is either become saturated or it’s just not, it’s not working for business generation or generating leads anymore. So if we focus on LinkedIn. And we also get that profile viewer signal, I would say someone has engaged with content. We know that they’re engaging with content. We can send them that LinkedIn outreach message that is very friendly.

The way that we always recommend people do it is, I saw you’re engaging with my content. Or liking recent posts or whatever derivative of that thought we should connect easy one sentence max from there. They accept the connection request. Now there’s a couple of cool things we can do. We can obviously put in a merge field for their name.

We could put in an AI written first message that talks about their role or their company. There’s ways that you can do that. But the one that I just stumbled upon recently that I think is also, it has goosebumps potential because it got me is that you can do an AI. Voice generated note. In that LinkedIn sequence, which is insane, right?

So I think a lot of people are excited about LinkedIn DMs because you can send that voice audio. It’s unique. It stands out in the inbox. You’re most likely going to get a listen. So if you can come in and either ask a question with written or ask it with even better audio and you can customize it to say, Hey, Jeremy, I’m looking, what CRM are you using?

Very easy question, but you’ve got personalization. You’ve got a question that sound that, makes me want it makes me want to respond. You know that I do automation work, so it’s interesting. Like it has potential to get a response, and that’s the thing that we’re always looking for with this engagement to outbound is that we’re not trying to close the sale on the first message.

People were trying to get a response. That’s it. You just need to get the conversation going. And so there’s another tool that does the audio messages called love growth machine. And that is like L. A. We’re both romance language speakers. So it’s like the L. A. article and then growth all is 1 word and then machine as the 2nd word.

And so they do. They do that kind of that sequencing with audio messages. They’re the only ones that I’ve seen able to do that, and I think that’s pretty nuts. So that is where that’s like taking personalization up to the next level because we’ve got the ability to customize audio. Yeah I’ll let that, I’ll let that one simmer for a second.

Jeremy Balius: That’s interesting. We’ve definitely been experimenting with training models to on voice. And right now internally, we’re just trying to figure it out for my own voice. Not so much in terms of DMS and personalized audio messages, but more so to, to scale up voiceovers on. Animations and different types of learning content that we want to publish faster and better at scale and not have to get me into the studio every single time to punch it out.

The written script would just be spoken in my voice and it’s been to mixed success. It hasn’t, we haven’t really nailed it yet in terms of it’s actually sounding like they, and maybe that’s a self deprecation there on my voice, but it’s it hasn’t worked out yet, but it certainly raises an interesting, Question, if we simply put it out there that it’s a AI generated voice message, I think the initial reaction would be that’s either not ethical or I don’t feel comfortable with that, but.

On the other hand, no one would know either. So it’s such a simple little snippet of audio, we’re, we’re only talking about a little snippet of of text to voice content that, that isn’t anything weighty other than a check in. Remains to be explored.

Grant Hushek: I’ll say one thing on that.

Like on the audio on an audio message. If you were to automate just the audio message with your voice and it didn’t have any personalization in it. For me, that’s the same thing as written, right? So I would say that’s fair game. If you personalize with a name, interesting, doesn’t cross the ethical line for me because still audio.

It’s like a merge field in a text. What did cross the ethical line for me that I have stayed away from, but I did attend a demo cause I just, my jaw was dropped is that there’s a company that is spinning up LinkedIn profiles with AI avatars with 500 connections that you can customize everything about.

So they’ll do the image, they’ll do the work experience, they’ll do the everything. And then they’ll send LinkedIn DMs from that AI generated person. And then that AI generated PDR. Then send leads to you and it would be like in the context of grandpa or process consulting were tangential to management consulting.

So it’d be like me having a team of ex McKinsey, like senior partners that are now booking meetings for me. You can think about it at those levels of extremes. To me, that was like, guys, that this just doesn’t make sense. And the thing that I knew that it was crossing my ethical line is because on their FAQs it said, is this ethical?

And I said, if there is an FAQ that says this is ethical, then we should be avoiding this immediately. No. Yeah. So I do think there are lines that are being crossed out there. The things that I am experimenting with. For me, don’t do that because they’re a different medium for a merge field. That’s the way that I think about it.

Everyone make your own decisions on that. But I will say that there are lines I would, in my life, there are lines that are being drawn and stepped over and I will not be touching those.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. And I think it’s important to talk openly about it. I’m not even comfortable with organizations that hire virtual assistants in other countries and then spin up a fake LinkedIn profile and that person manually.

Sends out SDR type outreach and even that on a personal scale is challenging for me. So to spin that up into 500 connections a day or 500 connections to the profile and then there, the automated outreach, that’s. I think way over the line.

Grant Hushek: Yeah. I’m with you on that.

Jeremy Balius: Let’s pull back and go back into content marketing. I’m fascinated with once, once there’s this potential outreach. Off the back of interactions and we move into the DMS or we move into email, what else, what’s next? Is it entirely then based on the interactions with those messages or can we continually enrich our data using other content?

Does it mean you switch off pushing ads in front of the person? What other considerations are you factoring in as you’re thinking about mass personalization?

Grant Hushek: Yeah. So then the goal should be to get people off of platform, right? And into owned media emails and so on. And so there’s kind of two routes to go.

You can either go down the question route and try to get conversation going, trying to get a TM book or get a meeting booked or something like that. The other option is, Hey, if you’re enjoying my content, chances are, you’re going to love my deep dives in my newsletter, or you’re going to love this, White paper download.

You’re going to love this X, Y, Z. And that’s where you can grab another more tactical, tangible intent piece where it’s you’re engaged with my content. I know I found out here’s a little bit more about me. If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole with me to find more value, here’s an option.

And so you’re giving, or a webinar to anything that’s going to grab their email. If you can get that signal and remember, we’re plugging all that intent or all that data from LinkedIn into the serum in the first place. So then if we get email address. Through their own decision to interact with your content that can then flow up and into the CRM and say, Hey, this person just sign up for a webinar, just downloaded a white paper that now triggers the next level of intent, which either brings an inside sales, like you said, or it drops them into another workflow or it adds them to a list for outbound or SDR work.

That’s where we’re saying like, If you’re really enjoying my information on one platform, you’re going to love this deeper dive or this more rich person piece of value or valuable content over here. Just give me your email address and we’ll know that you are. highly engaged and truly a marketing qualified lead.

That’s where that transition happens. So that’s how we’re trying to add some one level deeper down the funnel by grabbing that email in a voluntary way. So that is a, that can show up in the CRM. It can be used as a trigger for a workflow or a sequence or whatever it is, or at least just a task in its most simple form.

It really depends on what, how your business is structured, but in its most simple form, you can create a task for an AE or a BDR to say, Hey, Grant just booked a webinar. We should reach out to him. And that’s, that’s another step down the funnel and that’s more valuable for the team.

Jeremy Balius: And what I particularly love about the way that you’re describing it is at no point where you trying to close the guys immediately it’s, and I think this is the biggest mistake happening across the board is I want to be, I want to find people who are so deep down in the decision making process.

Yes. That they’re ready to talk to me now. They’re ready to sign. And I just need to find these people that, that are already out there looking. But what you’re describing, the long game of let’s capture people way earlier in their cycle as they’re not even maybe aware of their pain points yet.

They’re just interacting with content as they come to some form of realization over time about what they’re trying to solve. And you’re there along the way. And meanwhile, you’ve been. Understanding that journey that they’ve been on in the way that you’re acting, interacting with the content is, it’s a lot to reflect on.

This is awesome.

Grant Hushek: Totally, man. And it’s take a really tactical thing from my life right now. I’ve got, I did a demo a week ago. Cause I like to attend demos for AI tools. I did a demo, it’s a AI calling tool, or it’s like a virtual inbox. So I wanted to call us and get support on something.

I love that idea and I think that there’s ways to apply to our audit system, but I am in no position to continue to go further down that sales pipeline right now because I am just up to the gills with work and I’m getting married. Like I told you, so there’s just, there’s a lot of stuff going on, but if that company had a newsletter or something that I could drop into or a community of some people that are aware of the same problem and they’re all talking about it, that’s where I get nurtured until my buying window opens up. And so it’s every marketer should also look at themselves in the mirror and say, how do I react to a cold email? Like, why did that cold email suck? Why did it get archived or deleted immediately? Or like, why am I not going down this agency?

That’s trying to sell to me. Why am I not interested? What about the funnel? What about the funnels that I interact with? Do I not like? Or that I would improve because it’s so easy for us to say we’ve got a fantastic product. Why are people not, clicking on our stuff? Do you click on all this stuff?

Like I have to do this to myself all the time to remember, like I am not interacting with 99 percent of the things. So what is someone, what is going to make my outreach or my content the 1 percent for someone else? It’s a good perspective to remind yourself of. With marketing and just everyone is everywhere now.

So what are you going to do to be in that 1 percent of interesting things for that one specific person?

Jeremy Balius: That’s the hero quote right there. We let’s let’s shut this down. That’s the hero quote right there. That’s awesome. I think it’s really important to remember how. Special you have to be to cut through the noise to, get on people’s radars to become meaningful for them and to stay meaningful over time.

And be that 1 percent as you described, this has been so valuable. Appreciate it so much, Grant. Thanks for coming on the show.

Grant Hushek: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, man. Awesome to jam across continents.