Content Marketing Playbook for SMBs

A Beginner's Guide to Sales Enablement

What does a hip nightclub have to do with Sales Enablement?

Are you calling yourself an Enablement team when you're in fact a Marketing team?

What does success look like in Sales Enablement?

Melissa Madian, founder of TMM Enablement Services and author of Enabler? I Hardly Know Her joined us on Cuppa Press recently to answer all of this and more.

Time Stamp:

00.46 - Sales enablement as an everyday concept

02.37 - The sales enablement equation

04.34 - Key traits of a sales enablement leader

07.32 - Sales enablement in an SMB vs an enterprise

09.03 - The need for a dedicated sales enablement team

10.54 - Getting started with sales enablement and the three pillars of sales enablement

12.38 - Common mistakes in sales enablement

14.37 - What success looks like in sales enablement

17.56 - A common misconception about sales enablement

19.11 - Helpful sales enablement resources

Differentiation Hot Takes

If asked about trashy differentiation tricks that are touted as best practices, most people might hold back.

But Peep Laja is not most people. Having spearheaded brands such as CXL and Wynter, Peep steamed out hot takes one after the other, without holding back.

"Differentiation has somehow become something you can sprinkle on top. So you're a SaaS company. And then you turn to your marketer or your copywriter and say, ‘Hey, can you add some differentiation on top?’ That doesn't work.

Differentiation is not a line of copy.

It starts with your actual DNA of what your company is about and how it behaves,” he started.

Makes sense, but how do you do that?

What factors can you differentiate on? Are there upsides if you choose to differentiate on brand over pricing? What about customer experience and features? Not to forget messaging and personal brand of key stakeholders.

And don’t even get us started on category creation.

In a tech world with differentiation strategies aplenty, how do you ensure you don’t end up becoming yet another commodity product or service?

Tune in to the latest episode on Cuppa Press to find out!

Time Stamp

0.38 - Commonly touted advice on differentiation that is trash

1.49 - Affiliation before differentiation?

10.56 - Feature differentiation

12.28 - Customer experience differentiation

14.31 - Price differentiation

16.22 - Brand differentiation

19.17 - Personal brand (of founders and key stakeholders) differentiation

22.04 - Messaging differentiation

24.17 - Gripe with general storytelling advice

26.12 - Testing for message-market fit

28.20 - A personal messaging failure

29.35 - What shouldn’t be included in messaging

31.27 - Brands standing out with messaging

32.34 - Category Creation

33.25 - About Wynter

Previously on Cuppa Press

• Content Strategy for Dummies
  
• Stories, Vulnerability, and Binge-Worthy Content
  
• How to Build Your Marketing Superhero Suit
  
• A Beginner's Guide to Newsletters
  
• Decoding Presales and Product Management
  
• Selling in This Digital Economy
  
• Content Marketing Playbook for SMBs
  
• LinkedIn, Quora, and Personal Branding
  
• All things Branding
  
• Brand Storytelling for Millennials
  

Find us on Youtube and Spotify.

Live streaming as part of your outreach strategy

B2B brands have toppled the podcast bandwagon with a new podcast launching every 8.9 minutes (that’s a completely made up stat, but you get the idea).

They create these podcast episodes, cross their fingers, shut their eyes tight in prayer, and hope their listenership magically increases at the blink of an eye.

If this is you, you’re probably nodding your head now, especially if you’re just starting your podcast from scratch. And if you’re even remotely involved in content, you know this approach is every content creator’s Achilles heel.

But what if there indeed WAS a way to increase your listenership? No, we’re not talking growth hacking or throwing away dollars.

What if brands can leverage the audience base they’ve created across their social networks over the years? Genius, right? That’s where live streaming comes into the picture.

Peanut Butter: Jelly:: Live Streaming: Podcasting

We discuss all of this and more on this episode of Cuppa Press where Christoph Trappe, Content strategist at Voxpopme joined us. He’s also the Chief Content and Strategy Officer at the Authentic Storytelling Project and an avid podcaster.

Topics covered:

• 3.22 - Clubhouse: Podcast’s Friend or Foe?
  
• 4.55 - What makes a good podcast
  
• 8.11 - Outreach strategy and where live streaming fits within it
  
• 10.27 - When live streaming works best and what kind of audience you need for it
  
• 12.32 - Live streaming and content strategy
  
• 17.45 - Authenticity and live streaming
  
• 19.09 - Ensuring your content is audience-centric
  
• 21.42 - What makes a good story and why you need to repeat your story over and over again
  
• 24.29 - Why aren’t a lot of brands live streaming?
  

Content Strategy for Dummies

Posting content on every social media platform, every single day works for people with an extensive team dedicated just for this.

But will it work for you?

Making you ponder on this is Kris Hughes, a content strategist with over a decade’s experience. Kris has worked in multiple domains ranging from sports to SaaS. He’s also building the Leapfrog Collective, a community for emerging professionals to build their personal brands by leveraging content!

He breaks down everything related to content strategy in the newest episode of Cuppa Press.

Time Stamp:

2.41 - Why content calendar is not equal to content strategy and what content strategy really means for companies at various stages

4.08 - The steps to devise a content strategy

5.49 - How the steps differ for small, scrappy teams and larger teams

7.24 - When it's time to stop leaning on freelancers and make your first full-time content hire

9.16 - The most common reason people fail to succeed in content strategy

11.24 - One thing that non-experts believe to be true when in reality it's not

13.39 - What beginners should know about content strategy

15.27 - LinkedIn, content, and leveraging personal brands on LinkedIn

17.19 - Interesting trends in the content space post-Covid

19.06 - What success in content strategy looks like after 30-60-90-120 days

21.36 - Tools Kris cannot live without

Stories, Vulnerability, and Binge-Worthy Content

As the camera started rolling, a sense of comfort settled in on her face as if to reveal she was always meant to do this; as if she was home.

Hailing from the beautiful city of Uppsala, Sweden, Synne Lindén joined us in the recent episode of Cuppa Press.

A strong advocate of stories and creative writing, she helps brands identify cornerstones that set them apart and map out a course for content to ensure it reaches the audience in the right way.

In this episode, we explored the length and breadth of storytelling, empathy in creative writing, and creating a binge-worthy content experience for your audience.

Time Stamp

2.44 - Creative writing as a source of inspiration for business writing

4.44 - Significant detail in content creation

5.59 - Getting started with significant detail

7.10 - Why stories are the most powerful way of creating a true connection between a business and its customers

8.37 - How all stories cannot and should not be fit into a narrative structure

10.27 - How being vulnerable is a superpower in marketing and sales

14.02 - Identifying your voice and personality as a brand

17.21 - Making communication evocative, captivating, and interesting

19.16 - Creating a binge-worthy content experience

21.33 - One brand that does storytelling exceptionally well