Brewing Success with Content Monsta: How Content Strategy Drives Marketing Success

Today on The Pipeline Brew podcast, Matt Hummel welcomes A. Lee Judge, Co-Founder of Content Monsta, a content marketing, video, and podcast production agency specialising in the production of content that drives business.

Lee shares his journey from a DJ and photographer to a marketing entrepreneur, emphasising how his foundation and early experiences led to his successful career in marketing. He also talks about what inspired him to start Content Monsta and the story behind the name. 

Throughout their conversation, Matt & Lee discuss the ongoing debate of “Quality vs. Quantity” in regards to content and what strategies organisations should be taking. Rather than saying the two are mutually exclusive, Lee introduces the Quality vs. Quantity (QVQ) funnel strategy, outlining that it’s more important to target each stage of the funnel differently to have the most impact. 

Touching upon the crucial topic of sales and marketing alignment, Lee underscores the need for cohesive collaboration between these two departments to create a seamless customer experience. Read more about this in his upcoming book, CASH: The Four Keys to Better Sales, Better Marketing, and a Cohesive Revenue Machine. 

Later on, you’ll hear more about Lee’s personal life and what he drinks to avoid a hangover. 

A. Lee Judge is the Co-Founder and CMO of Content Monsta, a digital content agency. He also serves as Global Digital Marketing Manager, at Hexagon Geosystems. Previously, Lee served as Sr. Digital Marketing Director at B2B customer service software company Jacada, connecting the organisation’s Sales and Marketing Operations. Focused on B2B marketing for over 20 years, Lee is both a digital marketing practitioner and creative content entrepreneur. He is a leading LinkedIn video creator, Forbes Agency Council member, and engaging event speaker providing training on digital marketing, content creation, social selling, and sales enablement from the marketing point of view. 

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Pipeline Brew, the podcast that meets at the intersection of people and pipeline. We’re bringing you fun yet insightful conversations where you’ll not only hear from marketing experts, but also get to know them as well.

Matt Hummel: Hey everyone. Today, I am super excited to be joined by A. Lee Judge, Co-Founder of Content Monsta, a digital content creation company that partners with marketing teams to create inbound marketing content. Lee has combined amazing content with great marketing throughout his career, and he actually hosts his own podcast, which I’d encourage you to listen to called The Business of Marketing.

Matt Hummel: Welcome to the show, Lee. How are you today? 

A. Lee Judge: Doing great, Matt. Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here. 

Matt Hummel: My pleasure. Well, I like to start off each episode with a little bit of an ice breaker. Are you ready for that?

A. Lee Judge: I’m ready. Go for it. 

Matt Hummel: All right. So what is your go to beverage when you need a little pick me up?

A. Lee Judge: You know, I would say it’s just coffee, but it’s not just. After leaving corporate, I realised I was spending way too much at Starbucks every morning. So I bought a machine, but it took these special like soft pods. And so to order them off of Amazon, I had to order them from some German company. And so I’m drinking this coffee from these soft pods every day.

A. Lee Judge: And then I was out a few weeks ago, couldn’t order them in time, ended up buying some Folgers and guess what? The caffeine worked the same. So, I may not be spending money on the fancy pods anymore. It may actually be just, the best part of waking up Folgers in my cup.

Matt Hummel: Oh man, those, by the way, those were the days.

Matt Hummel: That was the best commercial, the best jingle, and I will admit I have not had Folgers coffee before because I think seeing it in my parents freezer, growing up sort of turned me off to that idea of that being considered a good coffee.

A. Lee Judge: But that’s exactly how I got back to it. I was at mom’s visiting mom and she had Folgers.

A. Lee Judge: And so I’m in the coffee aisle looking for those pods and I heard the jingle in my head. I was like, you know what, what the heck? I’ll buy some Folgers.

Matt Hummel: Maybe we need to start a new agency. Just jingles for B2B marketing companies. Maybe that’s the key. Their marketing is still working. Exactly. Well, awesome.

Matt Hummel: Well, great to have you on. Hopefully you’ve had your morning coffee this morning. Before we talk about what you’re up to today, I’d love for you to tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and your background. I know you’ve sort of always had this dual interest of creating first-hand content, but also aligning sales and marketing together.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, it’s been a strange journey, and some of the best marketers I know always had these not so direct, plan-to-be–marketer type journeys. And so, I’ve always been a creator, even before that was a title. Doing photography in high school. I was DJing. I mean, I was always an entrepreneur. And so as an entrepreneur, I had to run the business, promote the business, market the business, but I didn’t know I was marketing.

A. Lee Judge: I was just trying to get the business moving. And so during that time as a DJ, built the business, marketed it, built databases to hold my customers. Moved to Atlanta, ended up getting a marketing job. And the first thing they needed me to do was to build a CRM for them. Now, given I didn’t know what a CRM was, I was just building customer databases.

A. Lee Judge: I did that for several years and then got into the tech industry. I was hired by someone and I had been actually avoiding jobs that said Salesforce experience required. Cause I didn’t know even then that I was building all these databases. I just called them databases. So got my first job in tech and was given Salesforce as my child to develop and to work with the sales team to develop a relationship between sales and marketing.

A. Lee Judge: And so that kind of kicked off a career of sales and marketing alignment where I was working between those two teams and the creative thing kicked in later on. That’s why, you know, the company Content Monsta came from.

Matt Hummel: That is super cool. And it’s funny, you mentioned photography. You know, doing that back in high school.

Matt Hummel: I assume that means you were actually working in a dark room.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, that dates me a bit, but absolutely. I’ve got all my yearbooks still from high school. And I explained to my son the reason why I’m in there so much, because I was on the yearbook team, but yeah, lots of time in a dark room, which gives you a lot more respect for what you can do now digitally and with AI. 

Matt Hummel: Well, spot on. And that’s my point. Exactly. I think, you know, now everyone has Photoshop, Photoshop has AI built in. It’s just gotten so much easier and everyone has an iPhone or an Android. And they take pretty good pictures, but I liken your experience in the dark room to your experience, you know, from your career where you’re actually having to go build things like a CRM and doing creation before creation was even a thing. And so I would imagine that’s given you sort of this foundation that a lot of modern marketers don’t have because you’ve lived and breathed sort of the true strategic elements of a lot of what you’re now helping others do today.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, I think that, that analog background applies to lots of careers. So I’ve done lots of audio and video production and all those things. If you buy a brand new piece of software right now, it’s going to have terms in it that refer to the analog days. Like, if you buy some audio software, you’ll see pan and pot and volume and all these things that had to do with knobs that we had when it was analog.

A. Lee Judge: If you understand the basics more, then it helps you work faster in the new. Another example that’s way more modern is Midjourney. I use Midjourney for images. For example, when I found out that I could speak camera to Midjourney and get much better results, I’m like, holy crap. You mean I can say, well, I want a 1.8 aperture, 24 millimeter lens. I want bokeh, you know, I could speak camera. I can even say the kind of camera and kind of lens and the prompt was that much better. Had I not had that analog experience. It would be much tougher to learn this digital new technology. So yeah, no matter where you’re at. In marketing or any kind of technology, having that baseline definitely gives you an advantage.

Matt Hummel: Right on. Well, I know we’re, you know, recording this podcast audio only, so our audience can’t see your sweet setup here at your home studio, but you know, outside of your own podcast, do you still dabble in some of that, you know, your analog day experience, whether that’s photography or other types of creation?

A. Lee Judge: Well, this studio was set up because I was still producing music at the time. So this is my home studio. It’s acoustically treated. And it sounds great, but it was designed for audio. And recently my son, I have a 14 year old who just got into music production. So we’ve loaded audio software back into my studio again, just to play with it.

A. Lee Judge: But, professionally, not so much, but for fun, yeah. And I still enjoy, in fact, I’ve not really edited much video even for our clients in about a year and a half, two years. And my staff always says, Lee, don’t do this. You don’t need to be doing this. This isn’t your job. Go do CEO stuff. But I enjoy it.

A. Lee Judge: I enjoy playing with audio and playing with video and editing. That’s why it’s always been a joy to create a business around the creativity, but also understand the business side in terms of marketing and sales. So I’m in a really good place to do both things, to do things that are financially responsible, but also just fun and creative.

Matt Hummel: Oh, that’s awesome. I mean, I forget who said it, but there’s that saying, If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. And I feel like you have struck gold in that.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, it can be a blessing and a curse. I mean, because there are some days when I start to do things that I enjoy more. Like, if it’s time to, you know, to do a competitive analysis, that’s not nearly as fun as making some AI video.

A. Lee Judge: So I have to say, wait a minute, Lee, are you doing what you want to do or what you need to do? And that’s the entrepreneur part.

Matt Hummel: That makes sense. All right. Well, I want to talk about your agency. So Content Monsta. And by the way, you mentioned you live in Atlanta. Now, Content Monsta, when I hear you say that. I work with a lot of people from Boston. That sounds like something somebody from Boston would say. So, you know, I want to hear about, you know, what led you to found Content Monsta, but also how the heck did you end up with that as a name?

A. Lee Judge: Well, first the name, and it’s funny you mentioned Boston because I was giving a talk in Boston at a conference soon after the launch of Content Monsta.

A. Lee Judge: And when I said the name, people lit up. And then someone later on said, I love the name of your company. You must be from here. And I had to think about where I am. And I was like, no, I’m like, yeah, Content Monsta, you must be from Boston. It’s probably a horrible accent, but still, the point is that I had not thought about that. The reason it was called Content Monsta is because when the company was just an idea, the domain name Content Monster was like 6,000.

A. Lee Judge: And you don’t buy that kind of domain for an idea. So that was the name. Now the company came from, I was a marketing manager at a company, a software company, and I needed some video of our subject matter experts to talk about this new software we’re launching. Since I enjoy creating audio and video, I was in a time crunch.

A. Lee Judge: I said, you know what? I’ll just do this myself. I’ve got the camera. I know what to do. So I created the video and I think even included my time, probably it might’ve cost the company maybe 2,000 worth of time and effort. So I took that video and I sent it out to other video production companies because I wasn’t going to do this every week or every day because I had another job.

A. Lee Judge: The quotes I got back were ridiculous for the same one or two minute video. I was getting quotes for like 10,000 and up, and it didn’t make sense because I needed fast video that could show our expertise that we could do regularly. I guess this was at a time when even now businesses don’t understand the difference between timely informative video versus the Hollywood production.

A. Lee Judge: And so when I sent this video out and asked for quotes, I noticed one of the people quoting back. On their website, they had a picture of this big box truck, like they were going to shoot a new film or something, hot lights and big cameras. I was like, no wonder why this guy charges 10, 000 for a one minute business video, because he’s not doing business videos.

A. Lee Judge: He’s doing. You know, car commercials and movies. And so I realised that there was a gap there in terms of what the market needed. I was a marketer who needed video, who didn’t have a 10,000 budget, who needed to do more than just one video a month that we could afford. And about the same time, another company emailed me and said, Hey Lee, was this video that you all put on LinkedIn?

A. Lee Judge: Was this done in-house or was it an agency? I said, well, kind of both. It was in house. And so I had enough confirmation then that it was worth starting a business. And so they became my first customer. There wasn’t a conflict of interest, a different industry. And so I launched Content Monsta to begin creating content for businesses at a faster pace, better economy.

A. Lee Judge: And the main thing was I was the customer. I knew what we needed. I knew that it wasn’t about being super, super artistic and making this blockbuster commercial. It was about, can I show off the expertise of our company? Can our sales people make a sales video in a way that they can be selling? When they’re in bed at night, when they’re asleep, right?

A. Lee Judge: So if your subject matter expert can convey the value of the company, if your founder can convey the value of the company and what they do in a conversational way, you could capture that for much less than what they’re doing. And even today, we have to convince businesses, don’t blow your budget on one video every now and then, create what we’re doing like right now.

A. Lee Judge: We’re having a conversation and there’s so much more value in having authentic real-time conversations where people aren’t scripted and they’re showing what they know as opposed to planning it through some marketing campaign.

Matt Hummel: I love that point of view, and I think it’s kind of a perfect segue into a topic I wanted to get your take on.

Matt Hummel: So, really around how should modern brands, you know, think about content strategies? I think it’s easier nowadays, especially with Gen AI, to create content faster. But we also know that fast content doesn’t necessarily mean good content. And we know good content is what fuels demand, which is really when you, when it comes down to B2B businesses, the ultimate goal, right?

Matt Hummel: It’s all about pipeline, building the brand, which they go hand in hand, right? So how do you think about, especially with your value prop around creating more scalable content with still an emphasis on quality? How do you think about finding that or striking that right balance Quantity and quality of content as it relates to, uh, you know, the B2B brands today.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, that’s a question we get a lot. And the thing is quantity doesn’t mean you have to lose quality. And fast doesn’t mean cheap and low quality. And the biggest part is when we talk about quality, we have to define that because you can have a video that has quality in terms of what it says, what it conveys, who it reaches, who it touches.

A. Lee Judge: And not be the highest quality in film grain, you know, and so that’s where we mess up a lot. I’ll give an example. This is a real life example. We had a client recently who had done a couple of years ago, they’d gone into a studio. And done some green screen video and then put their company wall behind them.

A. Lee Judge: So they came to us to do some video as well. And the problem they had was they had different executives in different places and they only had one day that they would be in the same place. And we were familiar with that because before we used to do a lot of those, Hey, there’s a conference and all the executives are in one place.

A. Lee Judge: Let’s go record. But we left that model behind for the most part, because we realised now we can do things remotely. So this particular company we pitched to them is look, we can capture all your executives where they are remotely. With high quality, the way we’re recording this podcast now, and video. And they said, well, no, you know, we did this studio and we liked the studio thing.

A. Lee Judge: So let’s do a studio. They were stuck on, that’s what quality is. So we said, you know what? Okay, we’ve got studios near you. We’ll pull you a quote together that includes studio. Of course, the quote went through the roof because you have to pay for a day or a day part at a studio. And if you don’t show up, you’re going to pay because you canceled.

A. Lee Judge: So there’s all those complications, right? So the price went up and they didn’t hire us, but then their client needed five videos of executives around the country. So they hired us to do videos for their client and we executed on creating those five videos for their client. Their client was thrilled and then they came back to us and said, okay, we get it.

A. Lee Judge: Now we understand you don’t have to have this studio, but the problem was they were just stuck. They were stuck on old school thoughts of what quality was now given. No, we didn’t have a red camera on site. You know, we didn’t have a truck full of lights, but for business, That was not what was needed. What was needed is a message conveyed clearly and edited in a way that gives you the message quickly.

A. Lee Judge: Uh, the branding was there. The message was there. The right people were there, the thought leaders or the executives who need the, needed to convey the message. That’s what was important. The green screen in the studio wasn’t important. Right. The consumer was not going, wow, that new tech company with that amazing software is only amazing because they have a green screen and a fake background.

A. Lee Judge: You know, that isn’t how it works. So that’s our challenge right now is helping companies understand. You know, we’ve had companies come to us where their competitor has a podcast. And they have YouTube videos. They have TikTok videos, Instagram videos. They’re cranking out one or two clips a day. Meanwhile, they’re putting one video a month because they’re thinking, well, you, we want it more polished, but the problem is our competitors are beating the crap out of them because of volume.

A. Lee Judge: And so to put it in summary, quality doesn’t correlate. It’s not the same thing as. Uh, visual quality. It’s about what is the quality of what you convey? That’s what it comes down to.

Matt Hummel: I think that’s such a great perspective and probably so important for so many people to hear and understand. And there were two things you said that really stood out.

Matt Hummel: One is, I mean, it’s kind of the summary of what you just walked through, which is Quality is not production value. It’s not flashing lights and big cameras necessarily. It’s really the, the quality of content. And it makes me think about my kids where, you know, I’ll turn on cartoons from when I was a kid and they’re just enamored.

Matt Hummel: They love them. And it was great storytelling. They were funny. They were authentic. The production value was terrible, right? Um, I feel like I could probably create those. Nah, I couldn’t, but you know what I mean? You turn on some of today’s cartoons and. You know, my opinion, they’re just bad. I think the writing is bad.

Matt Hummel: They’re not funny, but they’re great visually, right? They’re stunning. They’re all in 4k, blah, blah, blah, great animation, so on and so forth. But my kids just don’t enjoy it. And so I think it’s a little bit of a silly example, but I can certainly relate to what you’re saying. The other thing I wanted to touch on that kind of sparked my interest when you were talking about was how competitors are beating companies who.

Matt Hummel: Are not focused enough on the quantity side. And my question for you is, why is that? Is it because the companies producing at volume are getting higher SEO value, or is it because they’re addressing deeper into the funnel? Walk me through, you know, sort of what’s causing that, that challenge for companies who aren’t putting out the right volume.

A. Lee Judge: So to answer that question and kind of come from what we just talked about, we developed this term called the QVQ content funnel, quality versus quantity, because it’s always a debate. And what we found out was, as we talked with customers, as we created content, that if you visualise the funnel going from the awareness stage and then interest and then consideration, then action, what we found was most companies were creating video at a level that began at the consideration stage.

A. Lee Judge: So if you’re creating one video a month, that level of quality of video in terms of what you’re spending, right, it’s for consideration and you can’t do that at a high enough volume to reach more people for the awareness stage. So let’s look at it like this. You start off quantity is more important. You need to have more and more volume.

A. Lee Judge: Now, again, High volume doesn’t mean crappy video because technology allows it to look good. And if you focus on the message, then you can make the quality of what you say and do, and even the people you capture. You don’t have to have that executive flying in for a video shoot because he has a phone with him.

A. Lee Judge: Or you can do a remote video production. So you can get the right people, the right message and the right level of quality. But at the top of the funnel, you want quantity. And then below that, when you get into interest, then you can start turning up the quality a little bit. Quantity is still very important.

A. Lee Judge: And then once you get past interest, that’s where it starts to flip. That’s where you want to have more quality, not as much quantity. You just need to have more quality. It makes sense because you’re spending money now on people who have shown interest in your company. They’re more likely to buy. So you can spend 10,000 on someone who is likely to buy.

A. Lee Judge: You don’t want to spend 10, 000 on someone who’s just in the awareness stage. It doesn’t even make sense. And even if you did, you couldn’t do it enough to gain enough awareness. Yes. So at the top quantity is more important as you get down to consideration and then action, that’s where you get more quality.

A. Lee Judge: And even at the action stage, you can get as finite as doing one video to close that one big deal, right? So the quantity is really low at the action stage, and it can be very high quality because you’re looking to close that big deal and it makes sense to spend more money. So. The QVQ quality versus quantity balance is not about quantity versus quality.

A. Lee Judge: It’s about what part of the funnel you want to aim that budget and effort at.

Matt Hummel: I see that. It’s so interesting. I’ve been out in market the last few months meeting with customers and obviously, you know, Pipeline 360 is in essence, a content activation firm. So we take great, you know, marketers content and help activate it to drive engagement in their target accounts.

Matt Hummel: But there’s been a lot of debate around. That whole QVQ, as you coined it, which I like, by the way, marketers, we love our acronyms. So, but, but there’s been debate around the need for quantity versus quality at the top of the funnel because a lot of organisations say, my message isn’t changing. And, but maybe that’s where you, to your point, you start to get a little bit further down the funnel of the consideration.

Matt Hummel: So if you think about the need for quantity at the top, understanding it’s a bigger audience, is the need for quantity driven by you’re trying to find the right hook that’s going to engage a buyer that is not yet in the buying process? Or I guess, how do you determine there’s a true need for quantity at the, at the top of the funnel?

A. Lee Judge: It’s driven more by. It takes so many impressions to get someone to move. Right? Got it. I mean, it’s called the awareness stage. So how will I be aware of you if I don’t hear about you? And you, you may have to take 10 shots for me to even notice your brand. Right? So if you’re looking at your social scrolls, whether it be, you know, organic or paid, your visualisation, your content may not show up every time you put it out there.

A. Lee Judge: I mean, I’ve got 20 some thousand LinkedIn followers. If I post something, maybe a thousand see it, but that’s 19,000 that didn’t see it. So maybe I post it two, three times to get maybe even then up to 5,000 people. But still not 20. So companies tend to waste their content. If you only got one video, yeah, you’re going to get real tired.

A. Lee Judge: And you’re going to think that you’ve posted it too many times. Like, oh, well, this is one video. I mean, I’ve been there. I’ve been that marketer, spent the big budget, get the one video, put it on YouTube, put on a website by next week. I’m tired of seeing it and it no longer gets pushed. So the, the step beyond that is even if you’re only doing that one piece of content a month, post it multiple times.

A. Lee Judge: Right. Your website in your articles on YouTube, all your social channels. Get the most ROI out of that one piece of content, but you’re still behind because you are posting that one piece of content and at some point it gets old. It gets fatigued.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. It gets

A. Lee Judge: fatigued. And, and typically the marketing team and sales team, they get fatigued long before the customer does.

A. Lee Judge: The customer hasn’t even seen it yet and you’re tired of it.

Matt Hummel: You’re so right. I’ve been preaching that for a while. We get tired of our own messages before the market does. Yeah. No doubt. One point of clarity, because I can see a lot of marketers scrambling as they’re hearing this thinking, well, crap, I have one piece of content a quarter.

Matt Hummel: And you’re talking about one piece of content a month. When you think about content, can you have a single piece of content, but you’re creating derivative assets from it so that in essence, you have 10 different pieces of content, but it’s all around the same core theme or message. In your mind, is that helping solve that, that quantity piece?

Matt Hummel: Yes.

A. Lee Judge: Perfect. That is the first step. Because if you know, at this moment, you’re only creating a minimal amount of content. The key is creating the kinds of content that is designed to be repurposed into smaller pieces. So when you have an interview or a podcast, the marketing team should say, look, we want to get these five soundbites out of this interview.

A. Lee Judge: Be sure to mention these things and mention them briefly so we can make a biteable piece out of it. Right. So yeah, the first step is if you’re only going to create those one or two block buster pieces a month or quarter, make sure you repurpose those. That’s the first step. At least you have more than one piece of content.

A. Lee Judge: The next step is to purposely create short content from that. You know, this is fresh reason why I kept saying a month. Cause it was so fresh in my mind. Consulted a company last week and when we looked at their content, which was that one video, they were so proud of that one video per month. And two things, one, they spent a lot of money getting people in house to do these fake interviews.

A. Lee Judge: It looked fake, it didn’t look real at all because it was scripted, it wasn’t that great of content. And then they say, well, we want to be like them. I said, look, we look at their, their competitor, the them, their competitor. Had a podcast that was just blasting out all kinds of content. I mean, they would have had five YouTube shorts this week off of their podcast.

A. Lee Judge: Then the podcast itself, the full version, the shorter versions, all the clips from it, I think they had more than one podcast and they had interviews with experts within the company, The founder said some things here and there. So point being, they were at a level of awareness where if you Google that particular industry, if you Google that solution, not only did you find the other company, you found their videos.

A. Lee Judge: And so there was almost no way for this company we were consulting to rank the way the other one was because the sheer mass amount of content. They were feeding Google and now you’re feeding generative search as well. So you have to have that amount of content, whether you like it or not, you’re competing with your competitors who are creating much more volume and you just can’t compete with that one piece of quarter.

A. Lee Judge: It just won’t work that way.

Matt Hummel: No, that makes sense. I think it’s a more modern view of content where it sort of takes it away from the traditional, I need to create an ebook or this white paper and then I can start to create derivative assets from that. It’s sort of flipping it on its head and you’re not saying that long form content inherently is bad as much as it is.

Matt Hummel: It’s not the end all be all, and to keep up with the competitive nature, you need to be thinking differently around content creation from the get go.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, you need long form content, especially for the consideration and action stage, but you don’t have to leave it there. You can take that long form content and make shorter pieces, and the first pushback you’re going to get is we don’t want to make low quality content.

A. Lee Judge: Well, you know what, you can stick with that if you want to, but your competitor is doing what you call low quality, but they’re doing it at a high volume. And it actually is high quality to the consumer, right? While you’re saying, but it wasn’t in the studio, but it doesn’t have our logo behind this.

A. Lee Judge: You’re saying that your own company is saying the quality isn’t there. Meanwhile. Your consumer is consuming all of your competitors content, and they’re not judging it by the type of camera. They’re judging it by, did they move me closer to doing business with them? And that’s what your competitor is doing.

A. Lee Judge: 100%.

Matt Hummel: I love that. Well, last question on this topic, and maybe you’ve already covered it all, but again, just thinking about our audience hearing this, what advice do you have for marketers who aren’t necessarily operating this way in terms of how can they Not only, you know, catch up, but get ahead and in this highly competitive landscape.

A. Lee Judge: Well, you know, the best content you can make comes from your sales team. So I don’t want to leave them out. Right. So I just finished a book on the topic of sales and marketing alignment. Um, it’s called CASH, which is communication, alignment, systems, and honesty. And all throughout the book, I talk about how the greatest content a marketer can make comes from the stories and the experiences of the salespeople.

A. Lee Judge: Because they’re on frontline, they’re talking to customers more often. Now, given that nowadays, marketing is like 75 percent of the customer’s journey. Before they talk to sales are going to consume your content. Hopefully, if you’re making enough of it, they’re going to consume your content and make a decision long before talking to sales, but to fine tune that content.

A. Lee Judge: Sales and marketing have to work together as a revenue team to understand the customer, to understand what kind of content to create, to understand, you know, when does a customer move from awareness to interest? Like what kind of content needs to be there? And so a marketer will be a better marketer every day if they understand the sales process more.

A. Lee Judge: And so it’s great to be a good marketer. It’s great to be a good salesperson, but you’re going to be a better sales person if you understand marketing. And a better marketer if you understand sales. Right on. Well,

Matt Hummel: By the way, congrats on the book. That’s a huge accomplishment. So I’m excited to see that come out and I think it’s scheduled to come out later this year if I’m not mistaken.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, it’s with the publisher now. I’ve done my work for the most part. The next part is part that I enjoy. I get a chance to market the book. I enjoy marketing. Uh, writing was tough, you know, I could’ve got another MBA for the work it took me to write the book, but, uh, I’ve already gotten some good praise for the book.

A. Lee Judge: I’m excited about that. And, you know, the goal was to help marketers be better and help sell people be better and to help the leaders of sales and marketing teams build better teams. And, you know, my career is kind of unique in that I was stuck in this lane between sales and marketing for almost 20 years and I was given the job.

A. Lee Judge: of pulling these two teams together, um, and speaking both their languages. And you’ll see in the book, there are places where. I got a chance to work with sales operations in a way that my marketing manager didn’t understand. How did you get sales ops to do those things? I said, well, because I understand the language.

A. Lee Judge: I’ve been sales ops before I speak the language. I know that, you know, followers and likes won’t get you in the door. It’s gotta be something that ties to revenue. So I really enjoyed writing the book. I enjoy helping people become better at what they do. And I think this book is going to be that. The book is called Cash.

A. Lee Judge: Again. And it’s, uh, it’s for better sales, smarter marketing, and supercharging your revenue team.

Matt Hummel: That sounds awesome. And by the way, I have to give you credit, much like your QVQ. To come up with a book called Cash, which is the single greatest motivator for every salesperson I’ve ever met and worked with, shout out to my current sales team.

Matt Hummel: You guys are no different. So I love that. So kudos to you on that. Thank you. Thank you. Well, awesome. And I’m glad you brought up the sales and marketing alignment piece because that’s such a challenge for so many marketers today. And, you know, we don’t need to belabor the point, but I’ve not heard it positioned the way you just said it before, which is, You know, I think traditionally you hear, you know, marketers, you need to get closer to sales, could not agree more.

Matt Hummel: And by the way, everybody needs to get closer to the customer. But I think what you don’t often hear said is sales. You actually need to get closer to marketing and understand what’s going on in their world because by the way, they own. Whatever the latest stat is, 75 to 80 percent of the buying process before they’re ever going to talk to you.

Matt Hummel: So I think that’s a, that’s a really great perspective.

A. Lee Judge: And I’ve seen cases where a salesperson took a sales call and jumped into telling the customer things. That the customer already knew. Right. So imagine if a customer just read a white paper, went to a webinar, but sales didn’t look into the marketing automation platform to see what they just did.

A. Lee Judge: And they get on the call and say, Hey, let me tell you about this new offering we have. And the customer’s going to think in their head, like, yeah, I know. I just watched the webinar. I know all about it. That’s not a good experience for the customer, right? The customer has their own one journey. It isn’t a marketing journey, then a sales journey.

A. Lee Judge: They have one journey and it needs to reflect that. And so I actually made a test for people who realise they have some gaps in their sales and marketing alignment. And you mentioned the name of the book is cash. So if you go to takethecashtest. com at that address, takethecashtest. com, you can actually answer some questions that will tell you how well aligned your sales and marketing team is.

A. Lee Judge: Are there some gaps or is it not quite as aligned as you think it is? It’ll tell you about your communication and how honest are you about your KPIs? A lot of little things in there that’ll give you an overview based on the book, but also that score will give you some insights to how your team is actually working.

Matt Hummel: Well, super cool. And I love that you’re practicing what you preach because having that, you know, that separate website and it’s essentially another. Piece of content or touchpoint for your customers. So I think it’s super smart and I love that. Well, Lee, I love to talk to each one of my guests, not just about the work they do.

Matt Hummel: You know who they are, what makes you tick. So I’d like to jump into our final segment of our show today called what’s on tap. So at the top of the show, and by the way, it’s funny. So that our show is called pipeline brew my us counterparts. When they heard the show name, they’re like, Oh, pipeline brew. I love coffee.

Matt Hummel: My UK counterparts were like pipeline brew. I love drinking beer a bunch and sometimes breakfast and always dinner. So, but yeah, so what’s on tap so you can make of it what you want here. But, uh, you know, at the top of the show, we talked about what’s your sort of favorite pick me up drink and I’ll, I’ll flip the question around for you.

Matt Hummel: Now, what’s your favorite drink when you need to unwind?

A. Lee Judge: It’s probably a beer, like you said, about a brew. Uh, I’m, I’m definitely not a beer snob, so I can’t name any particular kind. And it’s funny because I, I do it so rarely, I almost have a drink for every occasion. Like when I’m at home and I just want to chill or to, you know, it has to be hot to drink a beer pretty much for me,

Matt Hummel: you

A. Lee Judge: know, hot atmosphere.

A. Lee Judge: But then on, when I’m on a business trip, it’s always, um, you know, like a gin and tonic with some sour in it that was acquired over time because. I used to always, um, drink whiskey sour, but then at an event, I got to speak the next day, brown liquor, whiskey sour doesn’t do great for the head the next day.

A. Lee Judge: Yeah. And then I was out with some executives and I’ll admit some younger executives, there’s probably about 10 of us rolling in a crew at a conference. And they were ordering up just like, rounds and rounds of gin and tonic. Now, I hate gin because I think it tastes like turpentine, even good stuff.

A. Lee Judge: But I found out two things. One, they were like, well, we can drink this and not be hung over tomorrow morning. Like how, cause I was like, how are you working functionally after all this drinking? So evidently the tonic hydrates you. While you’re drinking the gin that dehydrates you. And there’s also a chemical reaction that happens between the tonic and the gin that changes the taste a little bit to where I can tolerate it.

A. Lee Judge: Interesting. So I began my business, if you meet me on a business trip, I’ll be drinking a gin and tonic because I can actually function the next day and it doesn’t hinder me. I’m still hydrated. And because I missed the sweetness, I have a splash of sour in there. So maybe it’s a new name, maybe it’s a Monsta.

A. Lee Judge: I don’t know. It’s a new drink for me. But yeah, that’s, that’s my go to. A ginsta. A ginsta with an A on the end. There you go. A ginsta. Yeah. That’s a gin and tonic with a splash of sour.

Matt Hummel: Well, I love that. And, you know, going back to the big name of the show around Folgers, which you nailed the tagline on that.

Matt Hummel: I feel like you could have a similar one for the ginsta. You know, a ginsta no longer tastes like turpentine. There you go. There you go. All right. Well, I’m going to stick to podcasting, not comedy here, but that’s good

A. Lee Judge: though. Well, you’re in marketing, so that’s a great, uh, a great jingle there. Right on.

Matt Hummel: Well, I know you’re a fellow parent, which is awesome. So I’ve got tons of stories, good and bad, that I could share, but I’d love to hear from you. Do you have any great stories, good or bad, any advice that you’d want to share with us today? Yeah. Particularly because, you know, you mentioned your son, I think you said he’s 14, and you’ve sort of reset up your, your home studio to bring back music editing, which is super cool.

Matt Hummel: So you probably have a bit of a, a marketing, arts, What are some great stories you could share?

A. Lee Judge: Yeah, well, both. Funny on the music side, you know, my son was taking a digital music course in like eighth grade. And I kept trying to tell him like, dude, you know, your dad was a producer. You have access to things your, your students, your fellow students don’t have.

A. Lee Judge: It never clicked. Until one day he asked, Hey, can you help me set up a studio? I go in the closet and I bring out a new MIDI keyboard software. He’s like, how do you know this? I said, look, I’ve been trying to tell you, son, you have an advantage here of a home studio, it’s just in the closet. So that’s one thing.

A. Lee Judge: I mean, they, my son is definitely taking into production, but on the marketing side, though, I ruin my kids. Life in terms of branding, in terms of content buying things, because to me, I inadvertently kind of let them see behind the curtain that whatever they’re buying, whatever they want was probably programmed in their head.

A. Lee Judge: I didn’t realise until one day my kids who were 10 and 14, they’re sitting at the table and my 10 year old daughter is talking about how she loves or wants a Stanley cup and my 14 you didn’t even want a Stanley cup until your little friends told you about it. And that’s the truth. I mean, you know, how do you get a 10 year old girl to want an industrial size mug, right?

A. Lee Judge: It was amazing marketing from Stanley and a few viral moments as well. By him saying that was a sign that, yeah, I’ve made my kids look behind every reason they want to make a purchase. They realise that somebody has a job to program them to want the thing that they’re wanting to buy. And so, yeah, that’s, that’s our internal thing.

A. Lee Judge: We pixel peep at commercials and we, we pull things apart and we watch TV and. We listen to jingles and stuff and like, why is that stuck in my head? Yeah, we definitely are a marketing family.

Matt Hummel: I love that. And it reminds me of something my kids said at one point when somebody’s like, what does your daddy do for work?

Matt Hummel: And he goes, Oh, he makes people buy things that they didn’t know they needed or wanted. Exactly. That’s exactly what my kids think I

A. Lee Judge: do. Yeah.

Matt Hummel: That’s awesome. Well, right on. Well, last question for you. So as a fellow podcast host, what, what are some shows you enjoy, whether professionally or personally?

A. Lee Judge: Wow.

A. Lee Judge: So, um, I definitely check out this old marketing by my friends, uh, Joe Polizzi and Robert Rose, partly because I know them and their personalities, but also because it’s great marketing update news of what’s happened recently. Also Paul Reutzer’s AI podcast, I listen to too, as well. I tend to listen to podcasts that can keep me up to date on what’s going on.

Matt Hummel: Yeah. Yeah. Well, good stuff. Awesome. Well, Lee, this has been an amazing conversation. I, uh, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. And I, I have no doubt that our audience loved all the insights you brought. So thank you again for joining today’s show. Thanks, Matt. It’s been fun. Well, thanks again to Lee for joining us on today’s episode of Pipeline Brew.

Matt Hummel: I hope you all enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Please leave me a comment. sure you’ve subscribed to the show so you’ll never miss an episode. Once again, I’m Matt Hummel, and I’ll see you next time.