Justin Keller's Demand Gen Best Practices
Join us for this exclusive conversation with Justin Keller on his best (and people-first) Demand Gen practices.
Thanks for tuning into this exclusive edition of GTM News Desk presented by the
TAC Network. This show is hosted by me, Nick Bennett, and my co-host, Mark Kill
ins.
Now let's get to the goods on with the show.
Let's dive into the exclusive part of this.
We're going to talk about the proven frameworks that you have built.
First question is, what is a proven framework, strategy, question set,
et cetera, that would help people in this area of expertise that you can share
around
demand-gen? I think, spoiler alert demand-gen marketers, you have to act like a
brand
marketer as well for this to work. And I think it's super important.
And I think that starts in a couple of ways, but one, it's kind of really
understanding
what your brand is so that you can truly express it and, and accurate.
And like, you know, like I keep saying this, like giving your marketing a soul.
And I think that's two things. One is like the concept of a brand archetype.
Mark, you were working on this at Drift. When I, when I joined, I was like,
fuck, yeah, let's go.
Like these things are so important. If you're listening to this and you've not
read the
book, the hero and the outlaw, pick it up right now.
It is like, I don't love business books. I love this book.
It's just such a good North Star for marketers.
And the concept of the brand archetype is that there are 12 of them, you know,
and if you look
at any story in history, it's based off of Yale Carl Jung.
And he's kind of like, there are commonalities across cultures, across the
world,
but they all have 12 character types, right?
No matter what story from what culture, these are the totality
of the character types that could be represented.
Could be the hero, the every man, the outlaw, the rebel, the jester.
And your brand, whether you know it or not, is already one of these.
It may not be a very strong expression of it.
It may not know what it is itself, but your brand is already one of them.
And I think it is absolutely worthwhile for you to sit down and figure out
exactly
which one of these archetypes it is.
Because when you know that, all the sudden you get this clarity and it's kind
of like,
how should we be talking? What, what, what are the kind of like, you know,
when we want to be provocative, what does that look like?
How do we, you know, even like, you know, like build our website, like what
this be like?
It's a little bit abstract at that point.
And so what I have done that I've had a lot of success with
and who brought with me to everywhere I've been is take that one step further
and say, OK,
this is our brand archetype.
Now, what if our brand was an actual human being person, right?
What would he or she look like?
And I get super detailed and nerdy about this.
Just kind of like building, I don't know, I've never played that in the dragons
but I imagine building a bunch of the interactions characters like, right?
You should be able to answer, you know, what is this person's name?
Where do they live? Do they have a dog? Do they hate dogs?
You know, do they drink?
What, what are they wearing right now?
Like, where do they go shopping?
Like really, really questions that have nothing to do with marketing or your
brand,
but color in the spirit of what your brand is.
And that way, when you're stuck scratching your head,
like, what should this ad copy be?
Or you get a tough question where it's kind of like, yeah, I'm kind of amb
ivalent.
Like either those options seems fine.
You get to ask yourself,
what would insert name of person here do, right?
And all of a sudden you've got a filter for all of your decision making going
forward.
And as a demand-gen marketer who may have been reared in spreadsheets,
you don't have that creative instinct.
But all of a sudden now you do, you've got this automatic filter where you can
say it.
You can refract all of your decision making through the spirit of your brand.
And all of a sudden your decision making becomes crystal clear.
And nine times out of 10, it will amplify your brand spirit.
So much more.
And it helps you with that long game, like building that brand, building that
moment
and getting people to be curious about what's going on here.
I think that's at least my secret weapon for it.
We got some great resources and tack insider about this.
By the way, everyone listening, join tack insider to get these resources.
So your, your framework is build the, the, the heart, the soul, the mind of the
brand,
get good at that, enable people through teaching them about that,
letting them know what that means, getting them to feel it, getting them to
live it.
And then extrapolate that out through everything you do from marketing and just
go to
market standpoint.
Yeah.
And that's why I'm talking about like big, makes my tolerance, right?
They're able to, if you are super crystal clear about what this person is,
and you can, you know, enable what's going on that, then all of a sudden they
can
start to make their own decisions, right?
And the decisions they make are in the spirit of the brand and trying to make
this
brand feel like a person that's going to be saying before, before the break,
like
so much response to marketing is emotional and emotion is not triggered by
a list of teachers.
It's sponsored by it's inspired by like a human is telling a story.
I eat your brand telling a story.
Speaking of stories, what is one of the most successful moments?
Tell us a story, Justin.
So tell us a story of a moment when it comes to demand, Jen, that really
matched to how people like to buy things, enjoy buying things, forget like,
like
they enjoy this buying experience.
Yeah.
What was the campaign?
A moment, something, a story around that that you can share with the audience.
So they can kind of learn from that.
I spent a long time at a company called Sixtor, maybe one of my favorite jobs I
've
had.
And we did a really good job of turning Sixtor into a human being.
His name was Sean.
He had a Boston Terrier.
He was in every man archetype.
The nice thing about this was the marketers on the team felt a lot like
Sean too, right?
They don't have to always, but in this case it did.
And as we like built everything, I'm not a big brand consistency.
Like everything needs to be exactly the right font, exactly the right color.
I'm more of a the attitude and the emotion we're putting out there
consistent.
That's what I care about.
And so at Sixtor, we did a wide amount of stuff, right?
We would throw a party.
So we have really remarkable success with content.
We do silly shit.
Like, you know, if the character from the Office of Freezier product, what
would
it look like?
We did kind of banana stuff, but it didn't really have a brand A to it, except
that it felt like it was coming from one place.
And that I think was super powerful for Sixtor's growth and ultimate
acquisition
was it all of a sudden became this thing that everyone identified with.
They like there was a decimate vibe that I think we gave off that was super
recognizable and the brand impression that it was so big that to this day,
people are still searching for, you know, Sixtor is now defunct.
People are still searching for it, right?
Like they're still organic command.
I'm still somehow an admin in Arlington page.
We're still getting followers every week because it just reverberated that much
And I think that is, you know, a bit of a lightning in a bottle situation, but
also feel like it's because it followed this playbook.
I agree with everything you said.
Game record.
Yeah.
Well, and you can you can blame some other folks that have had his bosses in
the
password on brand consistency.
The idea that brand and demand have to work together is probably the ultimate
takeaway during this exclusive segment.
Like you cannot create great demand without great brand today.
Forget it.
You're done.
If you're done, if you don't have a brand, you're dead basically.
Agreed.
And I will go as far as saying that we're branded to man coexist.
Doesn't mean your demand is on land.
Right.
It's that there's a brand essence to it.
Cool.
All right.
Let's get into this last question for you because there's a lot of, you know,
CMO CEOs listening.
And so what advice would you give to leaderships who are really looking to up
their game around demand, Jen?
And like, don't be afraid to hold back because you've seen it, you've
experienced it.
You've had a lot of success.
And there's a lot of people doing shitty marketing out there.
So what advice would you give them?
Do we, when they listen to this episode, when they sign up for tech network
and they give us their email address to subscribe, hit them with something
that will blow their mind.
Wow.
It's a big, that's a tall word.
I think I don't know if I'm going to meet the brief here, but what I would
recommend, and this is something like, so I grew up a punk rocker, right?
And my definition of punk rock was basically as soon as something is cool.
It's no longer cool, right?
Like as soon as something is popular or mainstream, it's over, right?
And it's like punk is the next thing.
And I think it's taking someone that went to business school and has read
like all of the business books.
Just walk away, go the other direction.
Like if you see something, that means someone else already did it.
You need to find something new and original.
And that doesn't mean like you have to come up with the idea of yourself.
I always say, and this is not my quote, I forget who said this, but
creativity is the art of concealing your sources, right?
Don't steal a campaign from another B2B company that your friends with.
Go wavy.
Look, research, you know, Mongolian throat singing or go, you know, read a book
about something you've never done.
Go to places that are completely unexpected to find your ideas and figure
out how to translate those into your next big idea.
Because if someone's already posted about LinkedIn, you're too late and, you
know, maybe you'll get lucky, but the odds are it's not going to be great
because it's not, you know, it's over.
Now there's out there.
I love that.
That's how well I was going to say, you know, a funny point about LinkedIn.
It's like so many people read LinkedIn and they think of that as like,
the source of truth.
But like you said, I mean, it's already been done.
It's played out and it's like, you, I mean, you could try to replicate parts of
it.
But I mean, just because you see one company do it and they see massive success
doesn't mean you're going to see the same types of success.
And it's, you know, why can't you go a little bit deeper and try a little bit
something that's crazier?
So yeah, I'm on board 100%.
One more question, bonus question.
How do you do that?
Like, what's the practical step to do that?
Do you think?
First of all, I think like, yeah, I think, you know, make what you said, like
is an echo chamber, right?
And for whatever reason, they tuned into the algorithm to be like that.
I think it is, I mean, literally just kind of like don't look for marketing
tips.
Full stop, go look for.
And this looks different for everyone.
I don't know where you live or what you read, but whatever you're doing,
stop doing that.
Do something else.
Like really just kind of get out.
He's not even getting out of your comfort zone.
It's like, there's getting out of your comfort zone and then just getting to
his
own where you're like, oh, I didn't even know this zone existed, right?
And it's not uncomfortable there.
It's just like, oh, what is this?
I've got much to learn, right?
And so I think that is almost the equivalent of them.
This looks however it looks for you.
Throwing a dart at the map ending like, let's go there.
Don't know what I'm going to find there.
Don't know if the people are going to like me or not, but go there and like go
with a spirit of saying yes to everything and just see what happens.
And, you know, keep in mind your business sounds is like, right?
Yeah, we got to keep our jobs and make our companies money, but be like, OK,
what can I learn from this?
How can I translate this into something that turns into a new way of
expressing my brand and, you know, creating new and exciting demands?
Define guardrails, not rules.
Yes.
I love the rules.
I like, I used to.
Yeah, that was not work for me.
If you know me neither, guardrails are great.
Sure.
And, you know, that's the other thing, like, you know,
drawing a box around something, giving guide rules, guide posts, guide
reels, whatever, creating some amount of constraints creates better creativity,
right?
So many ideas would never come up unless you're kind of forced to
I don't want to say it away, but like you've got some parameters to work with.
You have to.
That's I 100% agree with you on that.
Justin, tremendous, tremendous person, tremendous marketer, tremendous
guest today.
Thank you so much for the time.
Thank you so much, gentlemen.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you for joining us for this exclusive edition of GTM.
Newsdesk.
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