117 Lessons Learned in Sales and Content Marketing with Matt Watson
“There’s so many go-to marketing strategies, and partnerships work really well. But I would definitely caution anybody that you should always have a Plan B for marketing.”
Matt Watson is the founder of Stackify and FullScale.io. He is a software engineer and entrepreneur who likes solving problems with technology. Before Stackify, he founded VinSolutions and then sold it to AutoTrader.com in May 2011 for $150 MM.
In this episode, we talk about:
The Lean Startup Methodology
Having your own content marketing strategies
Adapting to setbacks caused by ineffective marketing strategies
Having a Plan B for marketing
Matt’s experience with partnerships
Stackify’s content marketing strategies
Modern sales strategies
There’s a lot of things to learn about content marketing and sales strategies in this episode, so go check it out!
Having a Plan B for Marketing
There’s definitely a pivot on the journey for us. We thought we reached a big partnership with another company that was going to resell our product, and we thought we were going to be billionaires because the largest company in the industry wanted to partner with us and was going to resell our product. And we spent a lot of our time working with them, trying to train them, their field staff – I mean we magically had a hundred salespeople that was supposedly going to go out and sell our product.
However, they ended up selling nothing. It was a massive waste of time that we spent probably over a year, hoping that they would sell our product for us.
So you see, it’s so easy to get caught in that trap of finding a partner that you think is going to sell your product for you. But I would definitely caution anybody that you should always have a Plan B.
Why Content Marketing Works
We have over 1,000 customers all over the world, and about 60% of them are international. So in the early days of Stackify, we tried a lot of different marketing strategies, from pay-per-click to different display ads to social media – all sorts of different things – and really struggled with how to reach our audience. Our customer acquisition costs were very high.
But we finally came to the realization that there’s one universal truth in this world, that if somebody has a problem, they go to Google and they search for it.
And so we really put all of our effort into content marketing, and we published three to five blog posts a week, and we’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. That has created a monster amount of content and traffic for us. We get over a million website users a month, and 90% of our users now found us through all the content marketing that we do.
The Evolving Nature of Sales Strategy
Sales today is not only the stereotypical salesperson who’s sitting and waiting for the next customer to come in.
Sales today is all about putting yourself out there in multiple ways and having conversations with some customers, setting up funnels and content marketing for different types of customers and businesses. It’s actually a very fun time to be in sales. Having a traditional sales department may work for the type of business that you’re in, however, in today’s business landscape, sales can happen quite organically.
