Building Customer-Centric Content: Brianna Valleskey's Approach

Happy to be here, Harshit. I’m excited for the conversation.

Yeah, great question. Starting my career in journalism, my first job out of the gate was working in financial media, and I ended up producing an online stock market radio show for that organization. And that was my first introduction to taking my background in storytelling and journalism and fusing it with strategic audience growth and engagement. I helped grow our daily radio show and audience by 100 %. And from there, I was poached by a tech startup to work in content marketing. I’ve been in B2B SaaS marketing ever since, but that background in journalism, even before my work in that financial media company, really shaped almost my entire marketing approach. For me, being a marketer is like being a beat reporter. I know my topics, I know my audience, and I know how to connect them. This applies to almost any audience that I’m working with when I’m in marketing, whether it’s my prospects, my customers, my partners, my investors, or even my internal team members. I have a great appreciation for effective storytelling and narrative design, as well as a deep understanding of how to create content that’s going to resonate with any given audience that comes from that journalism background.

Even on top of that, I just have a background in communication. Of course, that helps with corporate comms and marketing, but even things like internal marketing. I’m a really big fan of marketing your marketing internally, educating your entire internal organization about how marketing works, why we’re doing what we’re doing, how it’s going, how we’re going to improve, and just giving them a peek behind the curtain of how that revenue magic happens. So they’re bought and excited about it, too.

It always starts with customer research. For us, customer research isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing, consistent motion that’s in our marketing and our entire revenue strategy. We’re always talking to our customers, listening to their stories, deepening our understanding of their pain points and jobs to be done, understanding what content they consume and where through what channels, events they attend, and search terms they use to find Inscribe. And truly, we build all of our messaging, positioning content, and overall marketing strategy based on those insights. So that’s the core aspect of our entire content strategy. We just try to stay as close to our customers as possible. We try to meet with them in person where we can. We invite them to coffee. We offer them tickets to industry conferences we’re attending. One of our company core values at Inscribe is to know your customers, which means understanding our customers like you would your team members or maybe even your friends. We care about them and about building these deep trusted relationships. Because of those deep trusted relationships and deep understanding of our customers, we’re We’re able to build messaging positioning and stories that resonate with them.

We take pretty much all of our content and messaging inspiration from our customers. We even have a product positioning principle at Inscribe, which is to use the words our customers use. And the same with their stories. We capture their stories, their success stories with and without Inscribe. We put them on platforms to share their stories with their peers and colleagues as well. So we just make them the heart and soul of everything related to our marketing and communications at Inscribe.

Yeah. I don’t think we do anything ground-breaking. We’re very committed to having strong fundamentals in our marketing strategy. Nutrition, exercise, meditation, sleep, just making sure we got all the right things in place. It all starts with our metrics. I work closely with our biz-ops manager to create a revenue model with real estate goals based on our marketing investments and historical data on the return of those investments. In terms of pipeline generation, we focus on quality account-based demand gen over quantity volume-based lead generation. Not to say that one is better than the other. We’re just a SaaS business. We have very strong relationships with our customers in longer sales cycles, and we have a really strong ideal customer profile. Of course, high-quantity volume lead gen can work more in B2C for other products. We measure ourselves on the pipeline set against sales-qualified opportunities, not just leads. We’ve tossed over the wall to the sales team. We’ve spent a lot of time fostering strong sales marketing and customer success alignment. We have a well-defined ideal customer profile and lead qualification processes that we’ve aligned with our sales and customer teams. We, as a company, as a whole company, work hard to deliver continuous product innovation and discover new ways we can provide value to our customers, our community, and our industry.

What we found is that the most successful and highest converting touchpoints for us are in-person engagements. But I guess one nice unlock that we did have this year is that we found that we didn’t need to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on big trade shows or event sponsorships. We’ve gotten really into just customer road shows and deal acceleration tours. So we’ll send our customer success and our executive sponsors to the East Coast, and they’ll just try to hit some of the primary cities where a lot of our customers are located. And we don’t even try to do VIP dinners or throw our mini event We just tell our customers we’re going out there. We say, Hey, love to see how are you doing. Can we take you out to lunch? Can we take you out to dinner? Can we take you out to coffee? Just that nice personal touch point has not only deepened our relationship with our customers, but also enabled us to understand even more ways that we can help solve their problems and ensure that we’re innovating on our product and building a product that captures more of that workflow, but also gives them the insights and levels of automation and artificial intelligence that they’re thinking about right now.

That’s what I would say is our biggest unlock has been those in-person relationships and either making sure we connect with them anytime we do go to a trade show, we always reach out to our most meaningful customers and see if we’re going to meet with them at the event, and we’ll even offer to buy a ticket for them to attend the conference so that we do increase our chances of having that in-person interaction.

Yeah, I have a lot of feelings about sales and marketing alignment. It’s something I’m passionate about because I am very anti-blame. And even at Inscribe, we have a zero-blame culture. We’re very much not the type of team that goes, Oh, marketing gave us crappy leads, or, Oh, sales isn’t following up with our leads. I don’t think that blame has a place in a successful thriving company. It’s one revenue team, one revenue dream. I know that’s cheesy, but that’s really how we feel. And especially as a marketing leader, I consider it a critical part of my role to ensure we’re working as one team. One of the ways I do that is I trying to take total ownership of ensuring our frontline reps have the pipeline they need to hit their revenue goals. Everything from inbound to cold outbound, win back, raise the dead, on facilitating those customer road shows and deal tours that I mentioned before. That, of course, doesn’t mean they can’t generate their pipeline. I’m more than encouraged that, but I’m also still going to make sure that they have the pipeline they need to hit their quotas and our revenue goals as a team.

I try to let them know that. I make sure they know I’m their team member My job is to help them succeed. One of the challenges we do face is just being a remote-first team. Our GTM team is dispersed across the US, and we also have team members in Europe as well. That can be a bit challenging because one aspect of being in the office that I do miss is as a marketer being close to the sales floor hearing SDRs give their cold calls and see what they’re pitching, hearing sales reps give their demos, and discovery, and even when they’re reaching those end of deal negotiations, really listening in on how they’re doing it. Of course, we use tools like gong for that now, but there’s nothing quite like hearing it live when you’re on the floor. But we do try to still put a lot of effort into connecting people remotely, building that trust and camaraderie throughout the team. I also stay closely connected with our sales and customer success leaders. We build a lot of stuff together as a team. Pitches, pricing, processes, pipeline programs, and I will help enable them in any way possible.

But also I try to ensure that I’m not overstepping. I trust our salespeople. I trust our customer success people. I trust their instincts. I know that I don’t need to write a step-by-step playbook for them because they’re learning and understanding what’s working best for them every single day. Then, yeah, just ensure also to create that team camaraderie, which is also a challenge in a remote work world. We do focus on a lot of weekly GTM sinks with everyone for marketing, sales, solutions, engineering, customer success, and rev-ups. I have regular check-ins with GTM folks who are on the marketing team. I think of street camaraderie as not just this fun soft thing that you do. I see it as a key element of our success as a team because the more our team members trust each other, respect each other, can our team collaboration and overall teamwork are going to be successful because those are the key ingredients for teamwork, collaboration, and overall integrated success. Then, of course, we also do fun team-building events together. We’re doing a virtual aromatherapy class later this month which I’m looking forward to.

Yeah. Sales, marketing, customer success, alignment, as I mentioned, being incredibly data-driven, that’s huge for us. Understanding my revenue funnel, my conversion rates, and my return on investment. I am passionate about data and analytics, even though I am passionate about the art side of marketing storytelling, and design. I’m also really passionate about the site. And data is really at the heart of our marketing strategy and decisions as well. I believe that all marketers and marketing leaders of the future need to become data scientists in a way. So whether it’s looking at revenue metrics funnel metrics acquisition metrics market demand signals, customer feedback and insights, or win-loss analysis. That’s the stuff that pretty much every day I’m deep into some data analysis. Sometimes I’m looking for insight or understanding. Why did this work? Why didn’t this work? What do we do differently? Sometimes I’m focused on really making sure that our leading indicators are showing that we’re on track to hit our revenue and pipeline goals for the quarter. Then the last one is just AI. As a team, we’re very interested in seeing and learning all the ways AI can be unlocked to achieve efficiencies and supercharge our efforts.

And especially because we’re a super small marketing team, we’re just two people, we’re continuously finding ways to scale with AI because that’s important for us.

Yeah. We have a pretty lean tech stack right now. We have Marqado. Yeah. We have Marqado, which I do because it’s like you can build so many levels of… It’s a beast of a product, but also you can build so much customization in there, and you can get nitty-gritty in terms of audience cultivation, and behavior scoring. You can have all of your web forms and email tracking in one system and you can see that deep dive breakdown of the activity log of every single lead that’s come into your website what web page they visited and what led them to the demo request page. I love looking at demo requests and seeing the journey they took through our website and seeing what was their first touch, what was their last touch. We use last-touch attribution, but that doesn’t mean we ignore the first touch because I want to know where people are coming into our funnel. But I also want to know what was that exact conversion point that made them request a demo or reach out to our team. Of course, as a full GTM team, we use Salesforce. Again, it’s just a large beastly solution, but it’s great because I can slice and dice the data any way I can and possibly imagine and track custom fields and build reporting based on that.

So I love looking at Salesforce data to not only see top of the funnel but through to closed deals. Where did they come into our funnel? Where did they convert in their funnel? When did they convert in their funnel? What do our conversion rates look like? But on the more exciting side, we love using AI for content creation right now. So we use ChatGPT, of course, for basic content creation and recycling content, like turning blogs into various social posts and emails. We also use an SEO writing tool, which has been helpful for us because it uses AI to do keyword research, write an outline,, or create an outline for what the content should look like, and then I’ll even write longlong-form articles. The quality of writing is surprisingly good, honestly. Immensely higher than just… Yeah, just immensely higher than a generalized LLM, ChatGPT. Sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead.

Yeah, exactly. Content at Scale is huge.

Nice. Yeah. It’s also to Content at Scale thing. I’ll have it write four to five articles at once, and I’ll be watching it create four articles at once. It’s truly a magic moment. I’m passionate about AI and I’m excited about looking toward the future AI for marketing and AI for go-to-market is just AI agents. We’re already seeing customer service agents from Intercom, and AI sales development agents from Qualified. I’m very keen to see an AI marketing analyst or AI sales enablement agent. We aren’t using any of them yet because we’re still being patient and waiting to see what players emerge in the market and what agents end up becoming available by the end of the year. But that will It will be a line item on our 2025 marketing budget. How we plan to leverage them will depend on exactly how they work and also how expensive they are. But the beauty of AI, which I’m sure is that the innovation is happening so fast that a lot of these AI tools probably won’t be very expensive for very long.

I love my little document fraud report, so I’m so excited to talk about it. The first area that really gave me an inkling that this would be successful is just the general societal interest in true crime. I’m a big true crime fan. Obviously, there’s this It’s a topic that’s taboo, but also very interesting for people. There’s this desire to understand, especially for our realm, how fraudsters work. How do they think about committing fraud? How are they committing fraud? Then, of course, from Inscribe side, we’re on the side of what you can do to deter those fraud tactics. Just from that base level, I was like, there might be something here that could be interesting for our audience. The second part is that we are able to use our proprietary data insights. We have one of the largest databases of financial documents in the entire world. Because we work with so many companies within financial services, we’re able to identify and uncover types of fraud and also emerging fraud tactics that we’re seeing happen across our customer base. We’re able to distill those insights, such as what times of year we see the highest application fraud rates and what types of documents are most commonly manipulated by bad actors, and how are they being manipulated, and share that with our audience and the wider fraud fighting industry so that they can use it to inform their strategies and stay ahead of fraudsters.

So that’s really nice union, a general topic that is widely popular within just consumers throughout society, but also our unique angle on that topic, which is our proprietary data and insights. And then how do I determine what content will be most effective? One, the continuous customer research that I mentioned earlier, but we also do a lot of story testing. We’ll test out different narratives and content in the form of blogs, webinars, or even speaking sessions. Then we measure the response both qualitatively and quantitatively. We’ll look at metrics like web visits and webinar registrations and attendance and conversion. But we also pay a lot attention to the engagement during those webinars. Are people commenting and asking questions about the content? Or do they come up to us after a session at a show and tell us that they really liked the content. Then we collate those insights to create a clearer picture of what content, what themes, what narratives are working and which ones are not working for us.

We have a lot that we’re looking forward to over the next 12 and 18 months time frame. Definitely, I have a goal of integrating at least one AI agent in either marketing sales or customer success by the beginning of next year. I really think it’s important that we start testing that out and at least adopting one or two other AI tools. Of course, we’ll go through very rigorous research and buying processes, so we’re not spending any useless money. I want to feel really confident about the tools that we’re testing and implementing. One of the reasons that I want to really see what’s possible in AI agents, AI copilots, is not just the scale, but I’m really keen to see if AI can help drive more reliability and predictability in our revenue engine and also help move us more toward best-in-class sales efficiency, 0.7, and best class ROI on our marketing spend. I would love to get to a 5 to 1 ratio on our marketing spend. That also helps us because as we really think of AI as not just something that we’re building and distributing, but as something that’s part of our culture and our mode of operations.

That’s something we’re really keen on seeing. The right AI agent that I want to adopt yet. I haven’t seen it yet, but if anyone has one that they think would be really relevant, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m I’m happy to take a demo. But in addition to that, over the next 18 months or so, we are really focusing on continuing to innovate and distribute our AI agents for risk teams. We’re actually also launching our own podcast in a few weeks. It’s going to be called Good Question. It’ll be a podcast about LLMs, AI agents and ChatGPT prompts. We’re hoping it makes people laugh a little and learn a lot. Then just continuously evolving and proving our account-based everything strategy. That’s another area where I’m really keeping my eyes out to see what AI analysts, AI agents, AI copilots come onto the market to help with the scale, but also do the things that AI does best, look at large quantities of data over a long period of time and help with faster, smarter, more successful decision-making.

I hope so.

For my personal life?

Okay, yeah. Then I’d have to say Instagram, I don’t do social media a ton in my personal life, but I think human beings are such visual creatures that seeing pictures and videos is a really meaningful way to not just curate your own story, but share your story with your family, friends, your wider audience. I’m not on TikTok. That might be me showing my age, so Instagram would be my answer.

Oh, my gosh. That is an impossible question to answer because I am fascinated by almost everything. But if I had to pick one, I would say science and specifically cosmology and astrobiology.

Oh, my gosh. Perfectionism.

The first one that comes to mind is actually one that we did at a prior company I worked with where we We created a marketing video where we had dogs reading reviews of our product from G2 and other software review sites. We did a whole campaign about it on National Dog Day, where we released the promo video And then the solution itself that I was working for was Sandoso, which is a direct mail gifting swag company. And so we had a swag store with Sandoso-branded dog items. So a dog blanket and a dog toy and a dog frisbie, We opened that swag store. We did a promo video. We did all this social media engagement just to get people excited and interested in not just what Sandoso does, but also dogs, another widely loved topic throughout society. We had a ton of amazing reactions and conversions through that campaign. People on Twitter were just blowing up about how cute and exciting it was. That one was really wacky. I wasn’t sure if it was resonating I don’t know it would resonate, but I was really excited to see that it did.

Oh, my gosh. Okay, this one is also a little embarrassing, but I wanted to create an AI playlist that then I’m going to use at Inscribe for our marketing, write a blog about it, send it out of an email to our database, and just I wanted a playlist that captured that retro, futuristic Daft Punk vibe. I asked ChatGPT to come up with a playlist of AI songs for me, and it did. I was impressed by what it put together. So keep an eye out because you’ll see that coming from Inscribe in a couple of weeks.

Honestly, it was my pleasure. I appreciate you bringing me on.