This episode features an interview with Liam Barnes, Head of Demand Generation at Bionic. Bionic is an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform that can proactively reduce and mitigate security, data privacy, and operational risks by continuously analyzing an entire application architecture and all its dependencies that run in production. Liam is a technically trained SEO turned Demand Generation leader with a focus on taking on complex marketing issues and building successful campaigns. On this episode Liam shares his insights into why it pays to listen, how to use content mapping to resonate with your buyer, and why it's important to showcase the value of your platform.
This episode features an interview with Liam Barnes, Head of Demand Generation at Bionic. Bionic is an Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platform that can proactively reduce and mitigate security, data privacy, and operational risks by continuously analyzing an entire application architecture and all its dependencies that run in production. Liam is a technically trained SEO turned Demand Generation leader with a focus on taking on complex marketing issues and building successful campaigns.
On this episode Liam shares his insights into why it pays to listen, how to use content mapping to resonate with your buyer, and why it's important to showcase the value of your platform.
---
“People just wanna be treated like humans instead of treated like another step in the sequence.” - Liam Barnes, Bionic
---
Episode Timestamps:
*(02:37) - Liam’s role at Bionic
*(03:11) - Segment: Trust Tree
*(09:42) - Why it pays to listen
*(11:01) - Segment: The Playbook
*(13:24) - How to use content mapping to resonate with your buyer
*(27:08) - Showcase the the value of your platform.
*(29:07) - Segment: The Dust Up
*(31:44) - Segment: Quick Hits
---
Sponsor:
Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.
---
Links:
0:00:06.0 Ian Faison: Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we are joined by a special guest. Liam, how are you?
0:00:13.5 Liam Barnes: Good, Ian. How are you doing today?
0:00:15.4 Ian Faison: Doing great. Always great to talk to someone who had a podcast talking Demand Gen, so I have plenty of things to share and excited to learn about everything at Bionic.
0:00:24.8 Liam Barnes: Yeah, me too. Very excited.
0:00:25.9 Ian Faison: Okay, so let's get started with it. What was your first job in Demand?
0:00:27.2 Liam Barnes: I guess technically speaking, my first job, I was an intern doing SEO at an consulting agency called Directive. And the first thing that I had to do as an intern there was basically audit. I was just basically going through all of our new clients and auditing everything that I could possibly find that was wrong with their website. And so I started off doing a lot of the gritty work in SEO, and that kind of moved my way into becoming more and more interested in the other aspects of Demand Gen.
0:00:55.6 Ian Faison: Flash forward to today, tell us a little bit about your role at Bionic.
0:01:00.0 Liam Barnes: I was brought into Bionic about 15, 16 months ago. There was no marketing function before myself and the CMO hopped in. Today, I'm running all things Demand, running events, running fields, building out our marketing operations, paid media, website, helping from a strategic standpoint with go to market. So building out TAM and ICP. In the next, I would say, six months as we kind of grow as a company, that'll obviously change. We're an early stage startup. So what you do on day one is very different from what you do on day five. We'll see where that takes us.
0:01:29.1 Ian Faison: Let's get to our first segment. We're going to go to the trust tree, which is where you can go and feel honest and trusted and share those deepest, darkest Demand Gen secrets. Tell us a little bit more about Bionic. What does the company do?
0:01:42.0 Liam Barnes: Bionic is a Series B startup. So they've been around for a little less than two years at a stealth. And the space that we're in is I think debated depending on who you're talking to, but we are kind of coining ourselves as application security posture management. And I think from a marketing perspective, keeping it as simple as possible, we help you secure the applications that you build in-house. So developers are spending a ton of time developing code and pushing it into production and customers then using those applications to either process sensitive data or use on a daily basis. We help them secure that so that they are not subject to potential fines, data breaches, hacks, et cetera. So as you can imagine, we probably work with most of the industries that handle lots and lots of sensitive data. We're there to help you find out where that sensitive data is and protect it from potential hacks and data breaches.
0:02:37.3 Ian Faison: Yeah. Who are your ideal customers? And tell me a little bit more about that buying committee.
0:02:41.2 Liam Barnes: When you're a tool that is looking to basically help you protect applications that you build in-house, we have to work with companies that build in-house applications, right? So companies that are developing lots of code, specifically in Java.NET, Python, as well as companies that are in the cloud. So typically the companies that we're working with are greater than a thousand employees. So enterprise type solution. And in those industries that have lots of sensitive data, think retail, e-commerce, finance, banking, insurance. We work with some auto companies, which is pretty cool, but pretty much anybody who's processing lots of sensitive data.
0:03:17.5 Ian Faison: And you mentioned a little bit of how your demand is structured, but how does marketing structure fit into your go-to-market?
0:03:25.3 Liam Barnes: Yep. So for us, there's, I would say, pillars as it comes to marketing. So I think we're in a unique spot where the business development team or sales development team actually rolls up into marketing. And so when you think about it, the demand side is obviously how we build awareness. And then the BDR team is the way that we actually go and source that awareness and book meetings and try to build pipeline. Actually, to take a step back before demand, there's product marketing, which is the people who are trying to figure out where we fit in the market, what's the message, where are we positioning ourselves, things like that. And then obviously every meeting that gets booked gets pushed to sales. So from a marketing standpoint, we're doing everything before sales as most typical enterprises are, and then working with sales and customer success to help with use cases and sales decks and content that they need to help sell and customer success, providing experiences for them to help upsell and maintain revenue with their customer base. From my perspective, from the demand side, obviously my job is to create demand, capture demand and get qualified people in the door. But marketing is definitely sprinkled throughout the entire organization.
0:04:31.8 Ian Faison: Any other thoughts on demand strategy or anything that you've learned in the past 16 months as it relates to building out your demand strategy and how that fits into marketing?
0:04:40.8 Liam Barnes: Yeah, I would say the one thing that I learned is what I knew 16 months ago is not what I know now. This is actually my first demand general where I'm doing everything. My previous role was just doing SEO pretty much. And there was a big, I think, learning curve for me when I came into Bionic, where I had to learn all these different platforms and a lot more of the go-to-market side of things and how to work with sales. I would say like my biggest takeaway is your customer and the way that they want to be sold in market too is the number one driver of how you should create demand. In security specifically, there's lots and lots of CISOs, which is a lot of the times the champions that we're selling to, they hate being sold to and they hate getting ads for gift cards and, hey, come in house and we'll give you a gift card to take a meeting with us. In some instances, it works. For the most part, what I was doing when we first started creating demand is very different because of that notion of, hey, these people are getting pissed off that we're doing these certain activities.
0:05:39.7 Liam Barnes: We should go away from doing those activities and try to find ways to just communicate with them. Show them the platform, show them our value and get them in the door that way, where they feel like they're taking the first step instead of us pushing them through the door.
0:05:52.8 Ian Faison: Yeah, it's interesting. Why do you think that is? Is it because it felt gimmicky or it felt too salesy or, yeah, what do you think?
0:06:00.0 Liam Barnes: I think it's a few things. I don't think this is necessarily a security-focused issue. I think everyone's sick of being sold to. The moment you put head of Demand Gen in your title on LinkedIn, you get hit up by pretty much everybody in sales and marketing tech. And I think people just want to be treated like humans instead of treated like another step in the sequence. And in security specifically, a lot of the times the way that these go-to-market strategies are being built out is, hey, we're going to go sequence every single person that fits our ICP over the next three months, get their data from a third-party provider like Seamless or LeadIQ or whatever it is, and then go email them and call them and blast them on LinkedIn, which I think is a very important part of a go-to-market strategy, especially when you're an enterprise solution. But the problem with that is that, let's say, 50% of people don't mind and 50% of people do. The 50% of the people that do mind, you're going to piss them off. And if that's your first brand touch with them, that's not going to be a good first impression.
0:06:58.4 Ian Faison: Yeah.
0:06:58.5 Liam Barnes: And especially in security, security is all about protecting people's data. And when your go-to-market strategy goes directly against that, it leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
0:07:09.1 Ian Faison: It's the same thing that I always say about the outbound motion that if you're just spamming over and over again, that it's like, how many people are you alienating? And that's the question that we don't know. And I don't know the data on that, right? Yeah, you can get unsubscribes for sure. But that doesn't... Unsubscribe is a very binary thing. They either unsub or they don't. But that's not like how mad they are at you, right?
0:07:32.7 Liam Barnes: Yeah.
0:07:33.5 Ian Faison: Or how mad they are at the sales rep who has to keep reaching out because their boss is telling them to or whatever it is. How do you think that you could do a better job of inviting them in the door?
0:07:42.8 Liam Barnes: There's plenty of tools and companies out there that are making a lot of money doing this. The other thing is just listening to them. I think a big change from what we did even six months ago, then what we're doing today is before we launch any campaign, before we create any piece of content, we go and have conversations with the people that we're selling to and ask them, "Hey, is this something that resonates with you?" And then when you're actually distributing the content or reaching out to them via a BDR or launching an ad or whatever, it's something that actually resonates with the person that you're selling to rather than guessing, which a lot of the times marketers do is they go, "I have this feeling based on this thing that I heard, I'm going to go and create a campaign around it and then hopefully it works out. Let's go see." Which I'm all for testing, but testing with basically your blinders on is not effective. Yeah. I think if you really had to boil it down to something, I know this is like a cop out answer, but it's true. You have to go and listen.
0:08:38.8 Liam Barnes: You have to go and absorb what they're talking about. And I think you see this a lot now in MarTech, but it's been happening in development tech for years is the idea of having evangelists, having people that are in your company that are actually a part of the community to go and be a part of the community and just spread the good word about what you all do.
0:08:57.0 Ian Faison: All right, let's get to our next segment. The playbook is where you talk about the tactics that help you win.
0:09:03.3 S3: You play to win the game. Hello. You play to win the game. You don't play to just play it.
0:09:16.9 Ian Faison: What are your three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items?
0:09:20.3 Liam Barnes: Uncuttable budget items. So I'm going to say the first two that are uncuttable, and I think that they're the most effective. One is basically our field budget, which is us working with vendors typically doing one-to-one meetings with people that are in our ICP. Those typically are the lowest volume, but the highest converting for us because it's basically just ABM and sales. So we could get into an argument whether or not that's marketing or not, but it's under my purview, so it is.
0:09:47.6 Ian Faison: So why do you think what you're doing there is working and is uncuttable first off?
0:09:51.3 Liam Barnes: Yeah. So this goes back to why things are effective in marketing in general. When you go and have a one-on-one meeting with somebody and the intent is they're open to talking to you and we are there to basically educate them about what we do, the likelihood of conversion is already going to be higher because the guard of, "I don't want to talk to you" is already there. And so it's the reason why when you have things that are inbounds coming through ads on LinkedIn with the offers, the conversion is lower than when someone comes to your website and raises their hand. It's because they are already saying, "Hey, I've seen what you do. I'm interested. I want to have a conversation. Let's go and book some time." So it's a similar motion where these people are already opted in and they already want to learn about you and they already want to talk to you. And the other thing is CISOs have told us that they enjoy those because they are booking and blocking time to learn about new tech, to learn about new vendors, to talk to people. That's what they're allocating their time for.
0:10:48.6 Liam Barnes: And so if they think that your tech is good and they want to bring it in, then it typically converts into pretty high clip. And if your targeting is correct and the people that you're talking to are more likely to convert based on all the data that you've developed, that's why it's more successful.
0:11:01.9 Ian Faison: Okay. Uncuttable number two.
0:11:03.7 Liam Barnes: So I would say number two is just advertising in general. But again, I think this would change depending on the size of company and where we are as a company. Right now, my argument is we are trying to build out a category in security. We believe that we are the only company that can do this thing. And this is what we want to call it. In order for me to effectively, one, make sure that we have product market fit and two, really create demand out of nothing. I want to get as many people as physically possible into the product that we think we can sell to. And so for that purpose, we run a lot of gift card ads because my intent is, Hey, the people that are in our ICP are going to be receiving these ads. And the people that you want to sell to anyways are going to be the people that are joining these meetings. And the companies that you want to sell to are the people that are going to be joining these meetings. I have buy-in from sales. Now, the other part of it is it converts really well for us.
0:11:56.7 Liam Barnes: And we have a huge ACV. Like our contract value is well more than my annual advertising budget. So it's really easy to where if I run gift card ads and they close one deal, I already covered my costs. That's a little bit easier to get buy-in from an advertising perspective. The other thing is I want to be constantly in front of the audience that I'm trying to sell to. And the most effective way to do that is through advertising at the scale in which I need it to right now. We don't have a big enough audience to do it organically. We're building that up and we've done a pretty good job. But as of right now, we don't have the audience size across all of our social channels. And we don't have the awareness to where I could put out a LinkedIn post and 40,000 people will see it. And so for me, that is uncuttable because if we want to continue to grow as a company, we can't slow down that awareness factor. And so obviously there's ways to track whether or not it's working or not, which is why we have a form field on our inbound form that says, how'd you hear about us?
0:12:57.6 Ian Faison: Yeah, so do we.
0:12:58.8 Liam Barnes: Yeah. We see about 50% from LinkedIn, whether that's organic or paid can be up for argument, but I bucket it all together. So yeah, for me, that's, it's an uncuttable, the part that will get cut eventually and it won't get cut a little, just get converted over to brand awareness is the gift card stuff, the "lead gen stuff." But again, the argument for me right now is it's partly gen, it's part just product marketing. Like you get a lot of information out of someone who hasn't seen a platform before.
0:13:23.2 Ian Faison: Sure. Yeah, totally.
0:13:25.0 Liam Barnes: We try to do it throughout the marketing team. We have a, you must listen to at least three calls a week and give a breakdown of everything that you've learned about that call and post it into our channel. And the reason for that is twofold. One, you get a lot of information that you can pass to the entire organization, which is helpful. And two, you learn more about our audience, which makes you a better marketer, which makes you better at your job. It's another positive that comes out of these like gift card ads.
0:13:49.2 Ian Faison: Yeah, I love it. And I think that there's the moments where they say, "Hey, I had no idea who you were. This sounds pretty cool. And I'm probably not buying this for two years in the meantime." And then that person changes their job a month later and then they buy it at their new company or whatever it is. Think about that all the time of like how important it is to just get swings at the bat. And that's where I totally agree with you on advertising, especially like you said, if your conversion is like, "Hey, if we close one of these deals pays for my ad budget," if you're in a situation like that, which is great, then why not just try to get as many of those demos as you can. Now, obviously in sales, you don't want to be pitching people that have no propensity to buy, but if they're in your ICP and you're targeting the right folks, you're accepting those as an actual opportunity. Even if they walk into the call and they say, "I straight up don't have budget," to me as a marketer, I'm like, "that's okay. Talk to our person, fall in love with our product. And then you can fall in love with it all over again next year during budget season."
0:14:42.1 Liam Barnes: Honestly, that's what most companies here, "Hey, we're closing up the year. We don't have budget this year." They'll reach out to me in January or even back in May, June, July. "Hey, budget season starts in September and we're planning for next year in September. So let's go and get a POC kicked off in September, October, and then we can see whether or not that works for next year." I think like most companies, you see that ramp up in Q1, Q2, and then slowly die out towards the end of the year.
0:15:06.0 Ian Faison: Yeah. And I would add another thing that there's an opportunity cost with advertising and spending those dollars where you could do other stuff. Obviously you could focus on organic channels. You could do other things, but the idea is like, we were talking to Jason from metadata and he was saying that whether it's paid ad words or whether it's advertising, using that as the wedge that gets you from here to your content objectives is so important. Like eventually the tables will turn. All of your investments in content will continue to perform and then outperform advertising. But until you get there, there's not a lot of other options to get your name in front of that many people.
0:15:43.9 Liam Barnes: Yeah. And by the way, your content, I think this is a big gap that people don't understand. Like the brand awareness stuff that we do is a healthy mix of brand and then all of the content that we create. So I would say like probably 25% of the ads that we run are just ads that we create that match our message or are a demo video of what we do or are like a hype video that we created to make our brand look nice. Right? The rest of it is all content distribution that you get in feed. Right? So I know like a lot of people, the Refine Lab folks and metadata and all them, they all kind of subscribe to the same thing of people should be consuming the information within the feed of the social media platform in which you're distributing, right? All the content that we're creating and the ads that we're building off of that content is all just converted and like repackaged content that fits LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff. So that I always like to separate, I think at the beginning of when I worked at Bionic, I was like, "oh, demand should own content because content is something that needs to be distributed."
0:16:48.9 Liam Barnes: Quick shout out to my counterpart who runs product marketing, Janie. She owns content because one, she gets the industry a lot better than I do and she's more tech savvy in that sense. But two, she understands what needs to be done from a content perspective about matching it with what our audience cares about and she also gets what I need from a demand standpoint to where we can take the content that she creates and I can turn it into whatever I want in order to distribute it effectively. So yeah, I don't like the fact that a lot of what I'm seeing in a lot of these companies, especially in deep tech, like the security and developer technology is like content is just like a channel when really it's like everything that you do in marketing.
0:17:28.9 Ian Faison: Yeah, for sure. It's a huge frustration for me as well as a company that does podcasts as a service because you throw the term content around and it could mean 50 things to 50 different people, like the copy that you're writing in your paid campaigns, the images, what is video mean to you? What does audio mean to you? There's a million different ways to do that. The audio in your demo video, who does that? Is that different from an audio that you're doing for a podcast series? Is that different from what you're doing in an event series? It's also interconnected anyways and someone needs to be able to at a minimum be a center of excellence owner on saying, "how are we making stuff and are we making duplicative stuff and where can that stuff go in other places where it would be valuable for our community, for our customers, for our prospects and all that." Okay. Uncuttable number three.
0:18:14.6 Liam Barnes: So I think for me it's tough because I'm going to get pushback on this, but I think it's at a minimum, it's this term air coverage that a lot of people don't find value in. I find value in it from a competitive standpoint and a present standpoint and that's event marketing. Now, when I say event marketing, I don't mean trade shows. It can be, trade shows can be included in it, but I don't solely mean trade shows. When we think about what I talked about earlier about the people that we are selling to want to be sold to in the way that they want to be sold to, not the way that we want to sell to them. And events are really good places to break down barriers because you get the human element and yes, it can be overwhelming and there can be, I was just at AWS re: Invent, there's 50,000 people there and there's 150 vendors all trying to sell to the same 50,000 people. But ultimately I think it comes down to your approach and there's two different approaches. There's, let's go to these events and scan as many leads as possible and then pass them to the BDRs and try to sell to them.
0:19:12.3 Liam Barnes: Where the way that I usually determine success at these events is cost per demo given to a target person. I think last year at AWS, we spent, let's just call it like 40 grand. We scanned 700 leads and we maybe got an opportunity out of one of them. Right? And the way that we approached it was, "Hey, we're new here. Let's give out t-shirts to every single person that stopped by our booth." We'll hang them out in front of the booth and try to get people that want to get them. By the way, they're awesome t-shirts. People did actually like them. But this year we decided to not put the t-shirts front and center and instead let people come up to us, let them read the message about what we do, see the map on the TV that we had, look at a demo and then determine whether or not that person actually interested or not. If they wanted to get more information, we would scan them and then put notes down. And the cost per demo provided to someone in our ICP last year was probably 10 to 15 times more expensive than this year, even though we spent probably twice as much money.
0:20:10.3 Liam Barnes: And that's because the approach was let people who are actually interested come and talk to us, focus in on them very deeply, pretend it was basically a sales meeting in person and then create that human element. We talk about your issues. We talk about your priorities right now. If there's any projects, we show you the demo. We show you how it would incorporate into your organization and then go from there. So I would say it would be a cuttable one if I did version one. It would be a cuttable budget if I did version one, which is the lead gen side of things. It's uncuttable if I can get a cost per demo given to someone in our ICP as low as we got it in the last event that we've done. The other part of it is like all of our competitors are at these events. And if I think every marketer is scared if we don't show up to the event and our competitor is there and we're not, and someone's looking for us, then we're going to miss out on something. So maybe not uncuttable for me, but it's definitely uncuttable for I think every single leader in our organization.
0:21:06.7 Ian Faison: How do you view your company website?
0:21:09.3 Liam Barnes: I think it's good for how much work we've put into it. We don't have any actual development really work going into that much. I have a contractor that I work with that helps with some of the nitty gritty, but every page you see there for the most part I built by myself. I think where we've spent a lot of time on the website is making sure that the messaging is good, that none of the demo is gated except for one thing, which is the Gartner Report and that there's demo videos available so that people can see the product whenever they want and that when they're going through all of the pages, they see screenshots of our actual platform. So in that sense, I think it's great, but we really haven't even scratched the surface with what we can do on our website. Plus we haven't implemented Qualified yet, so it's almost there, but not quite.
0:21:49.7 Ian Faison: Hey now, love a good Qualified reference. Anything going forward that you're excited about to build, whether it's that or other stuff for marketing for next year?
0:21:57.5 Liam Barnes: I'm a web guy. Digital is my thing that I'm good at. And so what's funny is I consider myself like a technically trained SEO and that's my specialty. That's where I can get really deep into work. I haven't done SEO at all over the 16 months that I've worked at Bionic. I'm excited for starting to get more into that in the new year. And we have probably two or three big projects coming next year where we're going to build out tons of really useful content, lots of campaigns that we're going to be building out, building up the structure of the website, making sure that the framework of it and the flow of the information makes more sense to the people that we're selling to. A lot of positives coming in into the next year.
0:22:36.1 Ian Faison: Y'all have used your chief architect a bunch in content creation. This is something that I think a lot of companies have just like rockstar talent sitting in their organization and also things like LinkedIn and the algorithm there want user generated content as we've discussed a bunch on the show. So leveraging your employees to share things is a lot of times a lot more efficient and effective than just coming from your brand. I'm curious, like why did y'all decide to do that? And how do you think about using internal talent for external content?
0:23:08.7 Liam Barnes: We actually have head count for evangelists. I think coming into the new year, we're going to have two or three different people that are going to come in and their sole purpose is to be a part of the community and to create content and to be active on social media. And the reason for that is because our tech is very technical. And it's the reason why we're an enterprise solution and not like a product led model as of right now. It's because it's a very technical thing that needs to be explained. And being able to have someone who's been there done that has been an engineer, has been in security, has been a part of the community, has had the same issues that our target audience has is the most effective way to get your message across. Because you're not coming at it from a I'm trying to sell you a six figure piece of software. It's, "hey, I've had these issues or in the engineering side of things, I've created these issues that security has to deal with on a day to day basis. Trust me when I say to you that this is a very unique way to look at it," is more effective than, "Hey, we're a new startup, we'd love to get your opinion on our tech. Can we book 30 minutes?"
0:24:08.9 Liam Barnes: It's something that I've... And I said this a little bit earlier, it's something that I've started to notice that marketing tech companies are starting to invest in. Like when you think of the people that are probably have the loudest voices in tech, it's things like or in MarTech, it's people like Nick Bennett, who was a marketer and started to grow his personal brand. And then all of a sudden basically became the head of evangelism there. I didn't know about Caspian before we booked this podcast, but your company and the people at your company are active on social media. But if I were to hire someone, I don't know any other podcast studios that are focused solely on that. So this thought of people starting to understand that people in the industry that you respect are active and they provide value and then you're like, "Oh, they work for this company and we need a solution that their company solves. Maybe we should go and talk to them." It's not like a novel marketing idea. It's something that's been going on for a while. Developer tech and deep tech has just invested a lot of time into it.
0:25:08.0 Ian Faison: Yeah, thanks for the kind words, but I totally agree. And I think this is just like extremely under utilized for a lot of industries and developers are just like notoriously hard to reach. They have high BS detectors. They don't like a lot of things. And so we treat them differently. But then you look at other folks and you're like finance communities are the same way. Maybe the retail community is more of that way than we realize. Maybe there's et cetera. And you start going down the line and we've done 50 series with all sorts of different subject matter experts that have their own followings on LinkedIn and other places. It's like anecdotally, we've seen that over and over again, but you look at like how well evangelism does work. Obviously, Salesforce has rolled out tons of evangelists over the years. And I think a lot of people say company X has a lot of money to burn and you're like, "yeah, but they continue to invest in it." That's the thing that is interesting to me. If it was that stupid of an idea, they probably would have cut it. And I think the heroes of this user generated content world are getting a lot of benefits.
0:26:09.2 Ian Faison: Therefore you need to have a strategy that encompasses how human beings from your team or evangelists or [0:26:14.9] ____ external to you are going about sharing your stuff because it is valuable. So you just have to have some type of strategy for that. All right, let's get to our next segment, the dust up where we talk about healthy tension, whether that's with your board, your competitors or someone else. Do you have a healthy dust up in your career, Liam? I guess it could be unhealthy too, if you want to say that.
0:26:37.4 Liam Barnes: I've worked with a couple of companies who were like, "hey, we should run some competitive ads. We should do some competitive content." We've gotten a couple of non-seasoned assists of like, "hey, take our name off your website" type stuff. And then usually the response is, "hey, if you want to fill out the same chart that we have and send it to us, we'll make sure that it's accurate. Just send us the documentation so we can confirm." And that's usually when they ghost. So I think a couple of instances that I probably can't name, but I am all for public competition when it comes to talking about doing content about et cetera, about competitors, because it goes both ways.
0:27:10.0 Ian Faison: And ultimately, if both of the parties are truthful about what's going on, about the tech, about what they do, about the position in the market, et cetera, then really let products speak for itself. And if your product is better and people need to know that, how else to tell them then compare it against a competitor that you're going after. So it happens behind closed doors. Trust me, there's battle cards, especially at the past two companies that I've worked with. There's battle cards of this is everything that people judge a tool in our space about, this is what we do. This is what they do. And this is what we don't. And this is what they don't. And then in sales meetings, they pull up the battle card and go, what do you care about? Well, here is everything that they do. And here's what we do. The gap that we cover is this, and we think they're better because X, Y, and Z. So if you can healthily and do it publicly, I think it's worth it. The best instance of this is how metadata did it with Sixth Sense. They basically were like, look, we get compared against Sixth Sense all the time.
0:28:10.8 Liam Barnes: We don't overlap in very many ways. Here are the few that we do. But oh, by the way, we use Sixth Sense as well kind of play, right? I think that's a really great one. And I think we're going to probably do it at some point. We have some integrations coming out where people who we are selling to are like, "oh, you're like this company." And we're like, "no, actually they're our customer. We're their customer. Our tools align really well." And so public content like that is usually really useful as well.
0:28:37.5 Ian Faison: I love that. All right. Let's get to our final segment here. Quick Hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Just like how quickly Qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly start sales conversations quick and easy, just like these questions. We love Qualified. They've been with us since the very beginning of Demand Gen Visionaries, and they'll be with you forever too, because they're the best. Go to qualify.com to learn more. Liam, are you ready? Quick Hits.
0:29:05.6 Liam Barnes: Yep. Ready. Let's do it.
0:29:06.5 Ian Faison: Number one, do you have a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
0:29:10.2 Liam Barnes: I'm pretty good at skateboarding.
0:29:12.7 Ian Faison: What advice would you have for a first time head of Demand Gen who's trying to figure out their strategy?
0:29:17.4 Liam Barnes: Go talk to three to four different Demand Gen people in different industries and ask them what they did, why they did them, how they were successful, why they were successful, and then go align with everybody else in your organization as well.
0:29:33.8 Ian Faison: Liam, it's been absolutely awesome having you on the show. For our listeners, go to bionic.ai to learn more. They have a bunch of sweet stuff on their website, cool resources to check out, some really cool videos. I love the Bionic Uncensored videos. They're really fun using whiteboards and stuff. So yeah. Go check out bionic.ai to learn more about the company and check out their marketing. Liam, any final thoughts? Anything to plug?
0:29:55.5 Liam Barnes: I have a podcast that I used to do. You can go and listen to if you want. But honestly, for the people listening, if you haven't invested in a podcast, I would second guess yourself because I think it's probably one of the most underutilized piece of content out there. If you haven't checked out Caspian Studios, go do that. If you haven't checked out Qualified, I went to Qualified and chose them over a competitor that a lot of other people use. And there's a reason why, so you should go check them out.
0:30:19.0 Ian Faison: I love it. Thanks for the plugs, Liam. Have a great day.
0:30:22.6 Liam Barnes: Thanks, Ian.