Boosting Sales and Thought Leadership via Podcasting with CIENCE’s Eric Quanstrom

Lindsay Tjepkema: Welcome to The Casted Podcast. It's the destination for the most innovative and forward- thinking marketers in B2B, like you. Each week, I host conversations with brilliant marketing leaders on the tactics and tricks that they're harnessing to reach their revenue goals, rev their thought leadership engines, amplify their marketing voice in the marketplace, and ultimately drive real business results. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO and co- founder of Casted, and this is The Casted Podcast.

Eric Quanstrom: Hi. My name's Eric Quanstrom. I am the Chief Marketing Officer or CMO over at CIENCE, that's CIENCE without the S, an intentional misspelling, cience.com. And you can also catch us and our podcast live at Enterprise Sales Development, on all major platforms.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Lovely. I love it. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being here, Eric. I'm excited about this conversation. You are a CMO, you do a podcast, so that's as good a place to start as any. Why do you make time for it? You're busy, and podcasts aren't... They shouldn't be something that is super- duper quick, and takes zero time. If you do it the right way, and you book good conversations, and you have good conversations, and you put some thought into it, it takes a little bit of time. So why do you make the time?

Eric Quanstrom: Well, we decided a couple of years ago... We're encroaching on our 100th episode.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Congratulations.

Eric Quanstrom: Thank you. At the Enterprise Sales Development. Mainly we started the podcast with a lot of thought leadership, reaching out, building community, and ultimately furthering the sales development cause in mind. And that was a big focus of, " Why do a podcast in the first place? Why spend the time?" Largely because we think the voices that we have on, the experts, the people inside of lead generation and sales development, oftentimes have really interesting things to say about the craft, about how they run their programs, about how they've built their teams. Insights that they have from hard- won victories, as well as a lot of best practices learned from failure. And I think that capturing all of that in the body of work that is our weekly podcast is pretty interesting, to be perfectly honest, and something I look forward to every time I'm recording. We used to have a couple of co- hosts, they ended up being recruited away from CIENCE, and so now yours truly gets to handle the podcast solo.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Cool. And I think, how has it impacted things? I mean, nearly 100 episodes. I mean it when I say congrats. That's no small feat. That's a lot. How has it impacted the business? How has it impacted the brand? Must be good, if you're still doing it.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. One of the things that we find is that the listeners fall into a couple of different camps or target audiences. As you might expect, sales development leaders are a big focus of both the guests as well as the listenership. But we have our fair share of SDRs who are practicing the role, other company executives, especially in the sales suite, or sales department, and occasionally marketers like myself, along for the ride. That said, I think that I've heard a ton of folks kind of cite when we survey them, like, " Hey, I heard about you guys because of the podcast. I found your podcast interesting, and now it's in my regular rotation. I'm downloading it. I'm actually playing it for my team." A lot of different, kind of what I like to call dark social reasons for doing the podcast, and we're getting pretty decent validation coming back around on how well it's working.

Lindsay Tjepkema: That's great. So how are you using the show? I mean, you're recording it. You're publishing it. How else do you use it? What does that look like for you, and your marketing and sales?

Eric Quanstrom: If you think about the channels that it ends up, I'll start there. We record both an audio feed that ends up on iTunes, Spotify, Audible, Stitcher, whatever podcast medium of choice. And we're using a tool for kind of distribution there, and all the tracking that you would imagine. And then we're also taking the video feed and putting that on YouTube, so it's a regular function of part of our video initiatives, which have grown by leaps and bounds since we started doing the podcast. In fact, we were maybe derelict in our duty for not getting our video game up to par when I first joined the company almost six years ago now, and we've come a long way since. In fact, just in the last... I don't remember the exact video count, but we're nearing 100, 000 views. So not too shabby.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Awesome. Yeah.

Eric Quanstrom: Not that it's a volume game. For us, just knowing that many people are regularly downloading, listening, watching, sharing, and otherwise paying attention to our brand is the reason that we feel this is a necessary and worthwhile endeavor.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And all of those individuals that wouldn't otherwise, right? That-

Eric Quanstrom: That's right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: ...wouldn't be there if this channel didn't exist.

Eric Quanstrom: That's exactly right. And the devil of the details, especially for marketers like myself, is really not relying too hard on attribution when it comes to all of the multimedia that gets out into the world, and becomes a little bit of a... Seth Godin used to use the phrase" idea virus," and I think it's actually a still warranted turn of phrase, largely because when you can affect somebody, the way they think about something, where they're getting information, perhaps a trust anchor or two thrown in around, " Oh, if they're saying really smart things, or they have really smart guests," or, " Wow, this was worth my time, and I actually benefited from listening to this show," then ultimately there's a brand halo that's associated with that, not easily attributable to a linear kind of view of a marketing funnel.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. We were actually talking about that. I was talking with someone about that just this morning, about looking at, " How do you measure the success of a podcast?" And I'd love your insights, but I think the quick thought that spurred for me was, yes, you do have to look at all the metrics. And I mean, Casted provides all of those metrics, and whatever you're using provides a lot of those metrics, and you do have to look at those. You have to watch what's working, what's not working, what topics are working, what shows are resonating, what type of guests. All of those are extremely important. But you also have to look, you have to zoom out, and you have to say, " Big picture, how are we using this show across other channels? How is this show driving overall brand lift?" And you have to draw some of those correlations of, " Because we're having these conversations, because we're publishing this content, what are some of the other implications of this show? And beyond the anecdotal feedback, is it delivering the overall value that we want, expect, and need?" And so to that point, what do look at? How are you answering the question, " Is this show driving value to the business?"

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. My favorite metric to trap it down, and number one on our correlation metrics, if you will, is direct traffic to our website. So oftentimes you'll see dark social led by things like podcasts, led by videos, be the source where you can attribute, in our case, tens of thousands of people coming to our website every month. So when that direct number is rising and increasing month over month, and for us it's been a fairly steady up and to the right motion for direct traffic, we know we're doing something right, and we strongly suspect that a lot of this, " Hey, I can't attribute someone going to www. cience. com, because they heard a podcast, and that was the behavior." " Hey, I'm going to check these guys out." We know it's happening, especially when we see on our forms, so this I guess would be source number two, most all of our conversion forms have a question, " How did you hear about CIENCE?" And what we get is fascinating, and could be the source of its own podcast, I think, largely because there's so much there. Almost always, we see a steady flow of people telling us, " Oh yeah, I heard about you," or, " I watched a video," or, " I listened to you guys, and that's where I came from."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. We hear that a lot. We hear that a lot from our own customers, a lot of the conversations that I have here. That's important, and it's important to listen to. And I think especially, I mean, you are a CMO, right? So you are leading marketing, and there are a lot of individuals that it's more of the bottoms up. So there's a marketing manager, or there's a content creator that has gone rogue and started a podcast, or was charged by some leader somewhere in the company to say, " Go start the show. Start a podcast. Figure this thing out," and then they are on their own waving the flag of, " This thing is working. I think this thing is working. I feel it in my gut, it's working, and number of downloads are going up." I think it's so important for leaders like you to sponsor it, if it's somebody else's to own, and to get into the details, and get into the metrics, and also to use the different vantage point, and the different perspective, and the different access to data and other leaders in the company, the marketing leaders, whether it's VP or C level have, to really see initiatives like podcasting and video series really through that marathon. So what would you say to... Let's start with the other marketing leaders that might be listening, about podcasting, and about the role that they can and should play in an overall marketing strategy, and why your peers should take note and listen?

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. I think the first thing that I would say is a little bit of a challenging statement. I don't think it should just be for the marketing department. I mean, I think if you're only looking at it from through a marketing lens, you're really cutting or selling what a podcast can do for your brand short. So I'll give you two other areas where I think podcasts really make a huge difference, and I should also preface this by saying that I am one of these people, in my professional role as CMO, I believe that marketing serves sales. And so I've long held that belief. I think that it produces fundamental alignment and better outcomes when you have that philosophy. Marketing is not an exercise in and of itself. It is almost always to an end goal. In a B2B sales cycle like we're in, our marketing team, department, activities, resources, all serve sales. That out of the way, I think the sales department is a big beneficiary of our podcasts. I think the ability to drop into a sales cycle, " Hey, customer X," or, " would- be customer X, check out this podcast, because we talk exactly about the thing that we're going to do for you on the show. This is best practices, and outbound, and here's one of our guests talking exactly about that." The halo that comes from, again, thought leadership, I use that term loosely, because I don't really love it, but for the most part, I think it applies, having it as part of your sales cycle, part of your brand, can deliver wins in ways that you never expected. Because ultimately, when most people think of a brand, it's an empty bucket that they fill with associations, that they fill with conceptions of, " What should CIENCE stand for in the mind of the would- be buyer," right? Should it stand for, " Wow, these guys know what they're doing? Oh, I could trust this company. Oh, they're an outsourced services vendor, or a software vendor that does X." All these brand associations matter, and where do they come from? Well, a lot of times the stimulus, or the messaging, the content that we're putting together. So sales department is one. The other that I think is really relevant and maybe not that obvious is what it can do for recruiting, and retention, and your current employee base. So one of the regular listeners that I care most about for our podcast is our own SDRs. The ability for them to learn tips, tricks, best practices, from the leading lights in our field, and internalize those, put them into practice in their own day- to- day, have regular listenership. It actually tickles me pink when I get feedback from our own SDRs. " Love that show, totally thought this was amazing," so on and so forth. And then our HR department, putting that into practice for hiring next SDRs, and again, brand halo type stuff, around, " This is kind of what we do here at CIENCE." As a good example, you can use it to recruit and have an edge there as well.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh, for sure. For sure. So it sounds like from your vantage point, as CMO, you see value in podcasting, and podcast and video content, because it's so much bigger than your marketing team. It really is impacting the company as a whole.

Eric Quanstrom: It is.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Fair.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So if you are, I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a marketing manager, or somebody who is not a senior, doesn't have the vantage point that you do, but sees the value in this sort of content, and is trying to secure budget, is trying to secure buy- in, what advice would you have for those individuals who are coming to perhaps their CMO or their CEO saying, " This is a thing we need to either start doing or keep doing"?

Eric Quanstrom: Well, I would say that measure twice, cut once is probably a good place to start. Thinking about starting a podcast, I don't know. The major podcast sites are filled with a bunch of one and dones, people that started a podcast and then couldn't sustain it. And I don't know that that kind of effort, if you got really excited about it, and then began it, and then that excitement waned, and you gave it up or abandoned it, would be, I think, a waste of time, and wouldn't show any ROI. I think that there is a certain amount of sustainability that has to go into any decision making process, from the managerial level up, to defend the choice to allocate resources here. That said, podcasts are not terribly expensive to produce. They're not terribly... How can I say this? There's there's millions of podcasts in the world today. Now the barrier to entry is not that high. So I would also advise the marketing teams that are thinking about creating a podcast as like, " Hey, this is yet another marketing exercise that you should be thinking as much about promotion, as much about where those podcasts will end up, what channels they're on, how people might consume them, the basics of marketing, as part of not just getting the podcast done, but then moving it forward and letting it work for you to help people be exposed to your brand." And then that would be the last place that I would end up as part of the strategy of podcasts. A podcast is a public face to your brand, or public voice is probably a better way of putting it. Therefore, there's deliberate choice that should go into every podcast. Who is it for? Who should be on it, guest- wise? What should be the focus? What format? How long? What tools to use to enable all of this? So that ultimately once you're crossing all those Is and dotting those Ts on the to- do list, you've done so strategically, and you can maybe even defend those choices saying, " Well, the reason that we're doing this is X," like you asked me at the outset, and what we're hoping to drive from an audience perspective, and some of these other channels of maybe KPI measurement, although hard, and I would disclaim a lot of my own podcasts here, if you've listened, if you're looking for a direct one- to- one of like, " Hey, I did a podcast and it led to a sale."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Add to cart.

Eric Quanstrom: That's dangerous, and I would even say misguided, because that's never the point, right? If you do a podcast, and all of a sudden you've raised awareness amongst your target population that would have never heard of your brand otherwise, that's a rip- roaring success in my opinion.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yes. And I think that's underlined, italicized, and bold from your role as a CMO doing a podcast. Because that ties it all together. You know and I know, leading teams and leading business, you have to drive results. You have to. There are the KPIs, but understanding that things like podcasting help make that happen. They are not the final conversion that ultimately closes the deal, usually, sometimes.

Eric Quanstrom: And word to the wise, one of the other things I've seen podcasts use as lead generation as well. We don't tend to do it that way ourselves, largely because personally speaking, I've always wanted to have it where a guest appearance is just a guest appearance, not a quid pro quo into a conversation. If that happens organically, and evolves from there, and people get interested in something that we're up to over at CIENCE, great, but that's not the reason for it being done. That said, I think that one of the things I would advise people that haven't started a podcast, those marketing managers out there that are contemplating or selling this up the chain, if you will, at their organization, probably the biggest bulk of work is that kind of guest. If you're going to have a podcast that isn't just you talking about industry, your industry, or your products, or yourself, that is where you probably will spend the most of your time. Securing guests, building out your schedule, getting people to say yes. Believe it or not, it's not as easy as you would think. People are busy, they're oversubscribed. Oftentimes they haven't heard of you. It becomes easier the more proof points you have. " Oh, here's our podcast. We've been doing it for X amount of time. Here's some of the other guests. Here you go." And that greases the wheels for the next people that want to be on the podcast. And frankly, there's tons of people out there that will solicit you once you start having a podcast, and want their people to be on, so to speak. But guest choice is definitely a thing.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It is for sure. And going back to what you said about lead gen, that's something that has really given me heartburn for years, which is like, " Hey, think of all the people that you want to have be your customers, and invite them onto your show." Cool, if you want to build a relationship with them. Not cool if the reason that you're having them on your show is to ultimately hook them afterwards. And I think actually that that's one of the things that's making it a little harder year over year to get guests, is because it's like, " Well, I wonder if they're just going to try to sell me something." And so if that is something that you're doing now or that you're considering doing, I echo your sentiment, which is like, yeah, do it to build the relationship. Do it to say, " Hey, just wanted to know you," and maybe to get on their radar, and to build the relationship. But let's not start doing that. Let's not make that a thing. Let's not make that a reason that people don't want to do podcasts. I'm totally with you. But I wanted to ask you, so let's talk about you. Let's talk about the world that you live in, which is CIENCE, and we've worked with CIENCE in the past, and you're fantastic. I want to use your words, not mine, but is it safe to say outbound, outbound marketing, outbound prospecting, outbound is the world that you live in?

Eric Quanstrom: Yup.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So tell me how podcasts fit in, how you feel like they should fit into the world that CIENCE lives and breathes in, and how you see that working together.

Eric Quanstrom: Well, I just gave a flavor or a lane that isn't necessarily that favorable in my opinion, I share the same as you, when you're using it for intentional lead generation. Now, that said, I do think that there's a strong component, again, of building brand, around... Most companies aren't Nike, aren't Microsoft, aren't Google, where I say those names, and there's an immediate series of images, or full buckets of associations around what those brands are, could be, how they relate to the listener. In fact, most companies, I would argue, especially in the B2B space, are fighting the battle of awareness and brand building always. The more associations, the more familiarity, the more you can attach to that story, the better off you are. And one of the things that we know is true in outbound, because we do it every single day, the more familiar you are, the more brand awareness you have as a brand, the easier it is to secure meetings, and ultimately start sales cycles. It's almost axiomatically true. In fact, the biggest brands that we work with are almost always on the leaderboard of total number of, say, appointments per month, per team, that are set up with our company.

Lindsay Tjepkema: There you go. So let me see if I'm getting... And I think I totally agree with you, so I want to see if I got this right, see if I'm summarizing your perspective. So while both of us think it's not super cool to bring people on your show as guests with the goal of trying to sell them, agree that podcasts are an incredibly powerful tool for raising brand awareness, to, sure, building relationships with your guests, and ultimately equipping your sales team, people who are doing outbound, with more awareness of who your brand is, so that as they're doing that outreach, people are more familiar with who your brand is, and more likely to take that call, and more likely to take that meeting, and also perhaps lead to more inbound, where people are understanding who you are, seeing your content, wanting to learn more about you. You think that's where this sits? And is that where it sits in your strategy as well?

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. I think so. And I'll even give one other, kind of when it applies, maybe in an exception case, but you can use podcasts in reverse. What do I mean by that? If you really want to understand the personas that you sell to, a podcast is a damn good way of getting a half hour or 45 minutes of what would otherwise be super busy, over- scheduled, people that wouldn't give you the time of day. Frankly, vanity plays a role. Ego plays a role. Podcast guesting is a thing, and if you use your podcast to figure out, " What are these personas all about?" That can be really effective. And then taking those learnings directly over to your outbound team and saying, " Hey, pretend for a moment that we're targeting CISOs, and we have a cybersecurity solution. If I really want to learn how a CISO thinks through cybersecurity at their organization, having he or she on a podcast walking me through," not in detail, because they would never break NDAs and give away the goods, but you would get this really rich, vibrant treatment of how those personas think. And so using podcasts in reverse is a very sustainable strategy, in my opinion.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I agree. I totally agree. I learn a lot from our guests, and I think that we're able to, any time you're able to get directly into the brain of your audience, and people your audience cares about, that makes it easier. And for the marketing team, and the people who are doing outbound, it equips those individuals with a way to be more of a conduit, think more journalistically, as opposed to having to step into the seat of the expert, and try to pretend that you already know all of the things. Instead, you can point to the person who does, which lightens the load as well.

Eric Quanstrom: Well, and if you truly are deliberate, and that's the word I would literally lean into and emphasize, if you're deliberate about that kind of a strategy, it should find its way out to all of your other marketing communications, the way in which brand yourself, or use messaging to the personas that you're getting to know inside and out, because we can all argue that I think different departments have different types of people, and different kind of personality types inhabiting them. And CIENCE ourselves, we have three predominant personas, if you will. Chief amongst them is the sales leader and often the marketing leader, which is our third, rarely see the world through the same lenses. Is what it is.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's very true. Yeah. Okay. So I think we both agree podcasts are pretty great. They're a vital part of a marketing strategy today. I want to talk about some of the nuances of that today. So we are in the midst of some interesting economic times.

Eric Quanstrom: You've got that right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Call it a recession, call it a downturn, call it a rainy day. Marketers especially are feeling this, both in their budgets, in their teams, in the resources that they have available, so that they have less to work with, and because of the economic climate, they're oftentimes being asked, right along with sales, to deliver more, or at least the same amount, with less. And so tell me what you've seen there, in your shoes. I know you're serving that market as well. What are you seeing? And then again, how do podcasts, how does video content, how do conversations like these possibly help today?

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. I mean, commenting on the macro, and we're recording this at the start of May in 2023, which is probably the most uneven economy that I've ever seen. Most people that work in tech, and we're a software and services company, so I consider us a tech company, and we've served a ton of tech clients over the years, and currently it's a decent portion of our client base. At any rate, there's no one in tech that I ever talk to these days that doesn't feel like we're already in a recession, but no one in the macroeconomy is calling it that. So they keep saying, " In the coming recession." I'm like, " It's already here." Yeah, and it has been here a while. I mean, I would argue we've been in it for basically a year. And one of the biggest indicators for me, too, is watching what used to be a foundational cohort of our buyers, the venture- backed startup or the venture- backed series C, D, E company, just not evaporating, but literally missing in action on the landscape, in the same numbers they used to. Especially if you juxtapose probably the higher watermark, which is 2021, up against'22 and'23 thus far, we've just gone back to a way different environment, a way different world, and those players are just not in the game at the same levels.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. It's wild. It's hard to explain to anyone not in it how extreme today is from two years ago. Two years ago at this very moment. It's wild.

Eric Quanstrom: At the same time, the interesting counterpoint to all of this is especially with marketing departments, no different than others, more with less, recessionary playbook. We are living through a time that scares the crap out of a lot of people, but also offers the benefit of, hey, AI tools now are a great mitigator for doing exactly that: More with less. And we've, at our company, at CIENCE, we've invested heavily in both building out our own kind of LLMs and AI tools, and leveraging best of breed tools across the board, literally every employee in our company type of stuff. It hasn't been kind of like a, " Well, if you want to use this AI tool." No. It's like, " You are using it, and it's mandatory now."

Lindsay Tjepkema: Wow. That's incredible. Okay. So I guess a good place to land this conversation is those three things. So AI, economy, and kind of rich, very human conversational content like this.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Taking those three things into mind, tell me a little bit about what you see coming over the next, I don't know, however long your crystal ball, however far out it can see. How do you think those three elements come into play, and what do you think we should be watching for and taking note of?

Eric Quanstrom: Well, in the longer long term, I think all these trends play themselves out. So if you think about what AI tools are really good at, and especially the way that a lot of people are deploying them in the business sphere right now, with having a personal assistant that's potentially smarter than you, able of pattern matching at a level that a human brain can't do, has already studied 175 billion parameters, if you're talking about OpenAI's GPT- 4, in a sense, those trends are going to only exacerbate, if not grow exponentially. So it's, in my opinion, a fool who thinks that they will be able to not leverage those tools successfully in the future, even more so than you're doing today. So becoming conversant at whether you call it prompt engineering, or understanding kind of how the tools work, where they can be applied, hint, hint, it's almost every activity in the marketing suite, means that you should be on board, and you should be investing in learning those new skills. Like, hell, I'm saying that as a CMO, who arguably mid- career, and is rolling up his sleeves every single day and using the tools himself, with just about every activity that I can. That said, because we're on a podcasting show about podcasts, I have a strong suspicion that the trend line of human activity like this to humans conversing only becomes more important in the future, able to be indexed on in a much greater way. And I see that trend line also being, I don't know if it can get exponential, because there's not a 25th hour in the day, but what I do think is that more and more, when we need to apply a human face to a brand, as we've been talking about, or an audio sound to a brand, that comes in the form of a podcast, this becomes much more of a need- to- have, mandatory effort type of scenario, than nice- to- have, " What's that podcasting thing? Why are you doing that?" Type of philosophy.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I agree. I agree, and I think you can be afraid of what's coming, and that's economically, that's technologically speaking, or you can embrace it. And then like you said, learning, getting into it every day, and saying how, " This is coming. This is happening. It can happen to me, or it can happen with me." And embracing the possibility that it can allow us to be more human. By taking some of the things away, the economy is forcing us to choose the things that are most important, and that means a lot of stuff.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And technology is forcing us to, or is empowering us to think about the things that only we uniquely as humans, at this point in time, can do. It's pretty cool time. It can be scary, or it can be really awesome. So here we go, right?

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. I mean, Clayton Christiansen coined the term" creative destruction" a while ago, and I think that we're at a time where that's happening. Usually, when you have eras entering, there always is disambiguity. There's problems that are created, but then there's also unique solutions and ways of moving forward that no one could have seen 5, 10, 15 years ago, that now become super relevant, and we're defining those terms as we speak. I like to think of it in terms of big shifts, and of business- wise or career- wise, I've gone through a few of them already. So the first one was the commercialization of the internet, which changed a lot about the way that everyone did anything. It also created the reality for marketers that the public website that you have is your face to the world, come hell or high water. I remember a day where that wasn't the case, where businesses didn't have a website or a meaningful face to the world, so to speak. I would add to that the cloud computing revolution, and the mobile revolution, as the two other kind of very big disjointive events. And from a marketing perspective, the ability to do everything in mobile or have a mobile answer for any marketing activity, hugely both additive and somewhat chaotic. Same with cloud. I remember, again, dates itself badly here, but I remember a day where all software was sold for a huge license, with 18% annual maintenance, and that was the name of the game. So now I don't even know that I've seen a software quote like that in the last five years plus.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Quanstrom: Does anyone do business like that anymore?

Lindsay Tjepkema: I don't know. I remember the first CRM at a company that I worked for that was cloud- based, and how everybody was freaked out, like, " Why would we put all this information in this, that doesn't sit in a server in this office?"

Eric Quanstrom: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And here we are. So yeah, it's interesting, and it feels like this one is happening fast, faster than any other in my life, which makes sense, because technology just keeps moving fast, and it's going to be a really interesting, especially for marketing, and for MarTech, and for the space that we live in, it's going to be an interesting couple of months, even.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It's happened fast. Well, okay. So to tie it all together, what would you leave our audience, what would you leave them with about podcasting, and how it fits into strategies moving forward, or how it should?

Eric Quanstrom: Well, I would say by way of summary, we've touched on a lot of the different angles, and a lot of how you can leverage a podcast platform for success. And I think that leverage comes with a lot of forethought, comes with a lot of understanding of where any of these trends are going, and again, how you want to apply them directly into your business and your corner of the world, so to speak. Because here's the thing. Not doing anything, you won't see, A, any results, but you won't learn anything, either. That's one of the great other things that I guess we didn't talk about, that I believe to be true for CIENCE's own podcast. I think we've learned a ton. I think we've got a body of knowledge on tape that is, I think, super relevant to the work that we do, the industry that we're in, the space that we occupy, and a lot of, again, true experts in our field that have graced us with their knowledge and presence. And that corpus of data, it's funny, we were going off on a little bit of a tangent here, but we built this tool called CIENCE Go Expert AI, and we're just now rolling it out to all of our clients. Client zero was ourselves, so CIENCE built Go Expert AI for itself. And one of the things that we use to train the model as part of our large learning model, or LLM, was all of our podcasts. So literally it became fodder for all the things that we do in the sales development sphere, where we just took the transcripts from all the podcasts, essentially fed them up into the tool that sits on top of OpenAI or ChatGPT-4, and voila, we now have a chat client and an AI tool that is informed by all of those conversations, amongst other things that we use to vectorize information and feed it to the model.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I'm so glad that you brought that up, because that's going to be a really interesting evolution that's going to happen pretty quick for podcasts, which is one, and we've been doing this since almost day one at Casted, just transcribe all of the audio and video content that goes into Casted. It just happens. It just happens. One, it makes it all searchable, and two, it makes things like AI a lot more applicable and powerful to your podcast and video content, because now you have the ability to put it all into a pool from which machines can learn from, and therefore your team and your audience can leverage. So I'm glad that you got that. That's really exciting.

Eric Quanstrom: It's really interesting too, because, and you can see an example of this at goai.cience.com, and you go there and it's basically your familiar chat box, but you ask it any question about CIENCE, and it'll give you arguably a really damn good answer, like sales approved, marketing approved. We've been trying to stump it for a while, and it's super on point.

Lindsay Tjepkema: The beautiful thing is that it came from your own original content. There was nobody in the background being like, " Here's the answer to this question." It wasn't some poor marketing manager trying to come up with answers on their own. It's being fed by hours and hours and hours of really rich conversations that you would love for people to leverage, and machines too. So that's a really great takeaway. I like it. Well, okay. Well, with that, let's wrap it up by telling everybody where they can find your show and other content that you want to share, and we'll let you get on with your day.

Eric Quanstrom: Yeah. So if you're interested, I don't know how much overlap your audience and our audience might have, but Enterprise Sales Development is the name of the show that CIENCE produces, and again, we release every Wednesday, so you can check that out. Again, your podcast platform of choice, Enterprise Sales Development. And then of course our business address is cience. com, Science without the S.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Awesome. Well, Eric, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your breadth of insights on all things not just podcasting, but B2B marketing, and sales, and outreach, and all kinds of good stuff. Thank you for sharing it, and thanks for being here.

Eric Quanstrom: Lindsay, my pleasure. Thanks.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Hey, that's our show. Thanks for joining in. I'm Lindsay Tjepkema, and you can find me on Twitter, @ CastedLindsay, and on LinkedIn. You know the drill. If you like this show, you'll like our other episodes too, so consider subscribing, sharing with others, and maybe even leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice. And if you're ready to harness the power of podcasting for your brand strategy, make sure that you click the link in our show notes to subscribe to the Casted newsletter, and to all of our shows. You can also go to casted. us for the latest content from our team of experts to yours. Until next time.