How Trimble grew inbound pipeline by 3X in 6 months ft. Lindsay Kelley

What's the quickest way to build and execute a content strategy that will deliver big inbound lead gen results in a short amount of time?

This week on the Inbound Success podcast, Trimble Director of Demand Generation Lindsay Kelley breaks down how she and her team grew inbound deals from 22% to 66% of the company's pipeline in just six months with a content-driven strategy.

As Lindsay says, the company's website was "skinny" when it came to content. Upon joining, she immediately set about creating "cornerstone" content and then repurposing that into other assets. Her name for it is the "Thanksgiving Turkey" approach - meaning you break up big content pieces and make lots of other things out of them, just like you do with a Thanksgiving turkey after the big day. 

She also explains how she worked with her internal team to encourage cross-departmental collaboration on content and other marketing efforts.

Check out the full episode to get the details. (Transcript has been edited for clarity.)

Resources from this episode:

• Check out the Trimble website
• Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn

Transcript

Kathleen (00:03): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is my good friend, Lindsay Kelley, who is the director of demand generation at Trimble. Welcome to the podcast, Lindsay.

Lindsay (00:45): Hi, Kathleen. So excited to see you so excited to be here. And I love your podcast so much. And it's like a dream pinching myself to be on the podcast.

Kathleen (00:56): Okay. True story. I was thinking about who should be my next guest and I was thinking about people. I know. And I thought of you because I've known you for a really long time, and I'll say in a minute how we know each other. And honestly, when I first thought of this, I was like, oh, I already interviewed her. And this has happened to me a couple of times recently where I'm like, oh, I already interviewed that person. But then when I looked, I was like, wait, no, I haven't. So this has been a long time in coming. I met Lindsay. I don't even remember what year it was. It was at HubSpot's inbound conference.

Lindsay (01:29): 2013.

Kathleen (01:31): Holy cow. We just happened to sit next to each other, like during a big keynote. And the rest is history. We became fast friends, even though we were at competing agencies, but we never, I don't think ever thought of each other as competitors. And it's just been a wonderful professional relationship and personal friendship over the years. And man, I will, I I'll stop going on and on about it, but it's, I'm just so happy we finally did this.

Lindsay (01:55): I know me too. And you did ask me six months ago and I said, give me six more months because as I was new, newer to my role and I was still in building phase, I may say I don't have anything great to share yet. So you came to me at the perfect time six months later, almost exactly.

Kathleen (02:13): Yeah, I know coincidentally. Right. and now you do have some great stuff to share and, and it's no surprise to me because just for those listening, like Lindsay is she, is she used to be from the agency world, like I did, and now she's, in-house like I am. And I just have, I have a lot of respect for you as a marketer and how you think about marketing and your execution and everything. And so let's start by having you just tell folks who are listening a little bit about yourself, your background and where you are now and what Trimble is.

Lindsay (02:42): Absolutely. So I started my career in Baltimore in the late nineties. And I started an ad agency, which was a really great experience learned a lot. I was on the B2B side and so that kind of set the stage for my career. I spent my entire career in the B2B of the house. But fast forward a couple of years after some in-house, you know, marketing coordinator marketing specialist working your way up. I finally landed at a place in Baltimore where I met John Shea, who, you know, and John Shea and I went out and started our own agency and it was a sales and marketing alignment agency, and really learned a lot. There, had a great time wanted to grow a little more of the marketing side. So ended up he went sales side.

Lindsay (03:29): I went marketing agency side, joined up with another dear friend Darrell Amy. And I think you've had Darrell on the podcast too. And so Darrell and I were partners for about three years and we built an agency that was focused on the copier industry. So we would go in, we would help them build websites. We put the inbound methodology in place and, you know, we were HubSpot gold partners. So we were a little smaller. But it was a really, really great time. And you just learned so much when you start your own agency.

Kathleen (04:02): Oh my gosh. Yes.

Lindsay (04:06): I think one of my favorite stories was calling a friend one day and it was a Thursday and I said, it just hit me that I haven't showered since Monday. And if you're doing nothing but working and I'm like, and I can't remember the last time I had lunch, you know, it's ruling, but yeah, it really does teach you a lot. So when I when I eventually decided to go back into the corporate world, it was because my daughter was really having a hard time with me traveling. I traveled so much giving the inbound marketing workshops, traveling to clients since she was eight. So I said, I'm going to go agencies. I'm going to go out of the agency world and into corporate America, joined up with an organization called Telit. Had a great time there for about three years.

Lindsay (04:48): And then I was actually recruited away in the middle of COVID. So what an experience to interview and and go through that process during COVID, it was a very unique experience. And so the, the companies was originally called e-Builder. It still is e-Builder. It's a product. And so we have a SaaS tool that's designed specifically for construction owners. So we really kind of sit in the, in the arena of the guys that sit in the office and go, okay, I need to build 10 hospitals this year. I need a, a tool to manage that. So, so that's really the software that, that I focus on today and that's part of Trimble. And, you know, Trimble's made a lot of acquisitions over the years to really be able to build this connected construction strategy. And so we're kind of in the middle of it now, and we're, we're working on the connected scale.

Lindsay (05:40): So by 20, 25, we'll all be together. But I will say, like, I have had such a ball meeting all of these amazing marketing folks across the different sectors. So I feel really lucky that I found this and you know, my my team is I absolutely adore working with them every day. And so we've done some really fun stuff and they've all said, wow, this is, this is different than what we've done in the past and we're enjoying it and it's fun. So I think for them, it was a little bit of a new adventure. And they're, they're enjoying it. It's, you know, there's always going to be a little rough road, but we we're just, we're loving it and we're killing it.

Kathleen (06:20): That's great. I love that story. And I mean, your background is so similar to mine in that sense. Like I owned an agency for 11 years and then my kids reached a certain age where I was like, I need to be more present for them and left and went in-house. And so we've had really oddly parallel career journeys. Although I would say I've been at smaller companies, more series a startups, and you've been at some slightly larger companies. And so it's kind of cool to be able to trade those experiences. You know, you came into tremble and this is an established company. So this, like, I tend to come in and there isn't marketing. And so I build it out and I get to like do it out of whole cloth, right? I'm like, not, I'm not undoing anyone else's stuff or changing anything.

Kathleen (07:01): You have a different situation. You came in to a plane that was already flying. And so you have to like, you know, there's, there's always challenges you have where you maybe want to do some things a different way, or you need to tweak things, but you need to do it so that it doesn't take the plane down. Right. Like you've got the plane in the air, how do we keep it in the air, but maybe make it perform better. And so talk a little bit about like, when you first joined the company, how was it doing its marketing and what did it go to market strategy look like?

Lindsay (07:29): Yeah. And, you know, for, for a long time, e-Builder has been such a well-respected and known brand amongst all the owners that we serve. So really for a long time, it was just, you know, name recognition and, you know, people could pick up the phone and have a conversation. Oh, we build there. Okay. No, I've heard of you guys. This is great. And you know, how it goes said, competition comes into the marketplace and becomes a little more challenging. And the ways that you did it before, aren't quite as successful. Not that they're not still successful in a way, but they're not as successful as, as they could be in this new environment. And so, you know, with buyers changing the way that their buying habits are doing a lot more research learning online it was something that when I first came in, they were doing a lot of email marketing.

Lindsay (08:18): It was to an existing database. So they had, you know, a really solid, good, a number of contexts that they were able to reach out to that they had built up over the years. And, and so, you know, we had, you know, the customer marketing department, we had the demand generation and we had inbound and they all kind of worked on their own. And, you know, they were great friends. They had a really good chemistry, but when it came to the, the business side of it, they were pretty siloed. And so we spent a lot of time breaking through that to figure out, you know, how we could take it from, you know, the, the top of the funnel all the way through to the customer customer marketing. So that's been a lot of fun. The, the team has really enjoyed getting to do more brainstorming together and understanding more about, you know, the power of strategizing together and, you know, people coming up with different ideas and pulling them together and saying, actually, you know, what if we did this this way?

Lindsay (09:14): So I think for them, it's been a lot of fun. But they, they really were very heavily relying on email marketing some paid sponsorships and events. The events person had just left right before COVID hit and they hadn't rehired the position. So we actually just recently rehired the position because we really, you know, we were trying to figure out what it was going to look like when there were no events. So so heavy, heavy reliance on email had a couple of pieces of content that were, that were very well put together. Product marketing was solely responsible for all of that. So when I came in, I said, well, what goodness? And like, be like product marketing has so much to do. They really you know, really should have some, some assistance for them. So what we did was we said, all right, sales, foot sales, friends, how do you sell what does it look like?

Lindsay (10:08): What does that journey look like for you guys from start to finish? And so, you know, a couple of the guys had some really nice well put together slides that really showed, you know, the, the biggest challenges that these guys were going through. And I'm realizing this really isn't represented on the website. The website was, was I call it skinny. It was skinny content. So it really didn't say enough about the benefits of, you know, bringing in a product like e-Builder, because they really hadn't had to in the past, everybody just kind of knew who they were. So, you know, we really kind of, for the first six months, it was just fast and furious let's build content. So we, we had started a blog. We were able to put at least one piece out a week, if not two, we had white papers that we produced.

Lindsay (10:57): And really the biggest reason that I did this dirty little secret is they hadn't spent the money in the first six, six months of the year. And it's one of those use it or lose it. So I'm like I got all this money, let's hurry up and get some, some really nice pieces of content put together. So we kind of changed the process of how content was created and started bringing in some expert writers. Some that I've used in the past others that, you know, they had used in the past as well. And so we have a nice little mini arsenal of freelancers. So all we do is we put these freelancers together with the product marketing team, because they're the ones with the message, the go-to-market strategy, but years and years of construction experience. And we were able to come up with some really nice pieces of content. And it was funny cause we did a very poor job for the first six months of really putting it out there in any real form or fashion that was valuable to anyone aside from just putting it on the blog. So we were in go, go, go mode. So we created as much as we could. And then at the end of Q4, we started saying, okay, what are we going to do with this stuff? Yeah. Okay.

Kathleen (12:01): Before you go down that path, hold on. I'm going to stop you. Cause I know you're getting to the good part. Okay. So, okay. So table setting, you came in, the website was skinny with content. You had this opportunity because of the budget to go out and all of this and quickly create more, which I love. And, and you, you sort of alluded to this, but this, this was a different way of marketing for your team. Like before you joined, there was a lot of email marketing, et cetera. There wasn't a lot of content creation and you, you are a part of a large enough team that, again, it's the flying, it's the, it's the flying building the plane while you're flying it. Right. So when you come into a company like this and you have product marketing, you have you know, events or you don't have events or, but you have all these different people on the team who are used to doing things a certain way. It can, I know from experience, it can be very disruptive and sometimes like you can really shoot yourself in the foot by trying to like change it too fast if you don't manage that process. Well, so can you just talk a little bit about how you manage that? Cause it sounds like it went really smoothly with your team and they were really happy with what you came up with, but I'm curious to know how you, how you ushered that change in.

Lindsay (13:17): So the team today looks a little different than it did when I first came in. So, you know, we, we did have a couple of folks leave. And we did, I had a great opportunity to bring my team together to interview for filling these roles because culture is such a big part of, you know, not only the e-Builder culture, but you know, the Trimble greater culture. They were very, very well aligned, which is why the owners were happy, you know, when, when the acquisition happened, cause it very similar cultural values. Part of what we had to do was really just start breaking down the why, so why are we going to do this? Okay. Because we've always done it this way is a very standard answer.

Lindsay (14:01): And I'm like, well, let's challenge that. So little by little, over the weeks when we had our team meetings, you know, I would start a conversation with them whether they really knew what I was doing or not, I'm not sure I'm giving it all away now. Now they're all going to go back and listen to like, oh, that's how she did that. But just kind of saying, okay, so, so, you know, you have this project coming on. So what, you know, what's another way that we could do that. What's another way you could engage the audience or utilize some of these materials or be here in customer marketing, so you don't have to recreate the wheel. And so we started having brainstorming sessions and they would get really excited because they really hadn't done that before. And having that kind of collaboration, I think helped excite them.

Lindsay (14:45): And they started doing it on their own without me, which was really the goal. And so you know, the team as a whole really came together and I think some of the, some of the new folks we were able to bring in as well have really helped with that cohesiveness. A lot of times, you know, it's a lot of times it's finding the right people that fit with the team that really helped the team come together. And so I had you know, a critical hire that came in who's my, my graphics and web guy that I brought with me from my last, my last company. And it's just, he's one of those people that has like a collaboration, it's his middle name. He loves doing that kind of stuff. And so it was a really great person to bring in so easy to work with.

Lindsay (15:30): And I think that honestly was a very nice glue that wasn't just me sitting there saying, Hey guys, why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? So I think that was a big part of it. I also had, you know, two really strong senior managers on the demand gen side and on the customer marketing side and they just wanted to succeed. And they saw how much we were doing with content. And you know, it was, it was a little challenging cause it, it went from, you know, demand gen and email, email, email, and demand gen is getting all the leads too, but all the exciting stuff that's happening on the content side. Yes. But take that. And now what can you do with it on the email side, on the paid side, what can we do with it? Give me some ideas. So it was kind of helping them get there on their own. And to be honest, like they, they did this themselves, they just, they just needed a little, a little bit of guidance.

Kathleen (16:24): And the raw materials, the content, you know, you got it. Yeah. You've got to have that there to work with it. Otherwise you can't, you can't, you know, multiple if you don't have any clay.

Lindsay (16:33): Exactly, exactly. And I think part of the, the really, really instrumental piece of this for me was my, my VP of marketing is so supportive. I mean, he, he very admittedly he's like, you know, demand gen isn't my, isn't my strong suit. So I had his support every step, every turn. He's been an amazing mentor and he's just one of those guys that you love coming to work and working with. And the whole team loves him as well. But you know, this team had been really without a leader for a year. And my, my manager, my boss was, was doing his best to, to keep them all together and keep the wheels on the bus. And he did a great job of doing that, considering all of the other things that he's responsible for. So I was given a lot of flexibility and freedom to bring these new ideas to the table and he supported me. And that really makes all the difference. And the fact that the leadership team was willing to listen, let me present ideas, you know, show them things that have worked for me in the past. And then given me that opportunity. So that's why I always get that.

Kathleen (17:40): Yeah. It sounds like an amazing place to work which is, is so wonderful. And I think coming into an environment where you have the confidence of the people above you to your job, you know, to just do your job the way, you know, it needs to be done. That is huge. So we were about to get into the part of this conversation that I love. Cause I got a little preview before we started talking. So to recap, you came in, you started immediately creating a lot of content. But let me ask you one question about that. Did you have any kind of like particular strategy or framework behind that content? Like what is it that you were creating?

Lindsay (18:18): Absolutely. And you know, I come from a HubSpot background you know, partners, you are a HubSpot partner. I was a HubSpot partner, you know, and one thing they do really well is they help you build the foundation of inbound and they, they teach you that methodology. So I brought that methodology with me. Even though we're not on HubSpot now, so they have that pillar content strategy. So that's, we sat down with sales and said, Hey, this is what we're trying to create. You help us feel like in your journey that you take the prospects through, we now have to digitize that because COVID is here and you can't get on a commune anymore. So help me help you. And we had a really instrumental sales guy being Mike who had a great slide. And it was literally like, like plucked from the pages of inbound. And he's like, it's kind of like this. And I'm like, nah, that's what we need. So that was really the framework for building these, these pillar pages, we call them cornerstone pages internally. And so, you know, they really,

Kathleen (19:18): These are like exhaustive really in-depth guides on a particular topic. Right?

Lindsay (19:25): Exactly. They're like, call them meaty. They're the meaty ones, the skinny website that was there before coming from the vegetarian

Kathleen (19:35): Steak house now.

Lindsay (19:38): So so yeah, so that's really what we started from. And so the person who was in the role at the time, who since has gone on and I'm very happy for her, she got an amazing opportunity in a very similar startup world that you're in now constantly. But really, you know, she, she helped build the foundation of of this, this content strategy. And she went out and worked with all of our subject matter experts. She knew the, the framework and we, we worked very hard together on what that framework looked like and, you know, we were able to build and just build, build, build, build, build. So that's, that was really what we started with. And we got those on the website made sure that they were properly linked. We had an amazing SEO company called Amps Digital in Manhattan, and I've been working with them for years. And so they were instrumental in helping us from an SEO perspective make sure we are properly optimized going after the right terms and attracting the right type of the right type of folks to the website.

Kathleen (20:42): Got it. So you created some cornerstone content as you called it so that you would have some meaty pieces of content on the site. And then, and then what, so like you, you, you fattened up the website a little bit. What did you do from there?

Lindsay (20:57): Okay. So from there, we went into a strategy. I affectionately liked to call it Thanksgiving Turkey.

Kathleen (21:02): I'm seeing a theme emerging, by the way, were you hungry when you developed the strategy?

Lindsay (21:09): I'm a vegetarian, I don't even eat Turkey. But, but we call it Thanksgiving Turkey. And the premise behind it is after Thanksgiving, obviously how many different dishes can you make from this one Turkey with this massive amount of leftover meat that you have? So we take almost every piece of content and we chunk it into as many different pieces of content forms of content as we possibly can. So an example may be we'll have a webinar and it will be a 45 minute webinar in depth talking about, let's say document management and we'll, we'll have a client on and we'll have this, you know, amazing turnout of all these people coming well afterwards we'll take, and we'll transcribe that webinar. Then we bring in some freelancers, we bring those subject matter experts back and we say, okay what kind of a blog post can we get out of this one blog post two blog posts.

Lindsay (22:05): So we'll get two really great blog posts that fit. And then we'll publish those on the website. Then we'll go back and we'll say, okay, we have 45 minutes worth of footage here. So we'll Chuck it out into what we call snackables. And the snackables are really 90 seconds to two minute clips of a client answering a question. So it'll be a nice little video with the question that's been asked. So that's your thumbnail. And you put those on social media and it kind of attracts people in and then you can drive people to that webinar on demand. Then we'll, we'll also take these snackables, we'll create a web page, we'll put all the snackables on one webpage and each one has their little phone. Now the question and we put just a little bit of content on it, cause we don't want to compete with ourselves on the big meaty blog. So we'll take all of those pieces and put them on there really great asset for sales to have as well. So that sales is able to share that with their prospects and say, oh, well, here are some of the questions that you might, you know, might see in one of these webinars. And so they'll, they'll take and use that to hopefully they're using it a lot.

Lindsay (23:14): So little things like that, we'll, we'll do that all day long. We'll take the cornerstone pieces of content that we have and we'll we'll create web webinars from those. So we can either bring in a customer or we can have all of our internal experts and sit down and just talk about it, have another webinar there. We, we took one of our big long webinars and we chunked it into 15 minute, 15 minutes segments. And this was for our other product that's geared towards general contractors. We call it project site in a flash. Same thing, push it out on social. Did YouTube live every week? It's the same content, just repurposed in multiple different ways. And then one of the, one of the greatest things that we have so far, that's been a really nice lead generator for us is we took those six cornerstones and we created them as PDF white papers. So we repurposed them, laid them out sent them out individually, marketed them individually. Then we took them, we put them all on one page and call it the ultimate guide. And it's all six and you can download all six. And it's all in one page and it has a little tiny synopsis on each one. So we've Thanksgiving Turkey'd everything we possibly can.

Kathleen (24:32): So I'm just going to stop and say, I love the theme here from skinny website to meaty content, to Thanksgiving, Turkey to snackables. So I love the whole food theme. We, I think we need to come up with an overarching name for this, like the culinary approach to inbound marketing or no, I think it's great. I think it's great. And I love how much you repurpose your content because that's that whole theme of doing more with less is really important for marketers in general. So tell me a little bit more than about what this did for you because you came into, as I said, a plane that was flying and it was flying pretty well. Like this is a company that was successful and getting good leads and had a steady stream of business. So, so what, what impact did this have?

Lindsay (25:24): So, so what we did was in the very end of Q4 in 2020, we started strategizing all of this, this content and we started building it out and optimizing it, making sure it was in the right place. So from a lead generation perspective, when I'm looking at our opportunities the opportunity value in January of the website and the conversions from the website was 22.43%. And last month in July.

Kathleen (25:54): So inbound represented 22.43% of your overall lead volume?

Lindsay (25:57): Yes.

Kathleen (25:57): Pipeline

Lindsay (25:58): Yes. Of our pipeline. And then in July it accounted for 66.67%.

Kathleen (26:07): Hold on, pause.

Kathleen (26:08): Okay. If you're listening that's in six months, you tripled basically the, you tripled the percentage of inbound leads as a percentage of the total pipeline. Like that's massive. From 20 something to 60 something percent in six months.

Lindsay (26:31): Yes.

Kathleen (26:33): Wow.

Lindsay (26:34): Yes. And that, and that allows us to also try to make better decisions as to, you know, we want to be good stewards of the money. So, you know, we're, we're utilizing money to, to drive really high quality content and you know, taking from other areas, you know, like we were talking about before, there's no events anymore, so I could take that budget and move it. You know, we're, we're still spending on media brand is so important. You know, being out there in the marketplace is so important. But you know, at the end of the day, if I have a question or if one of our owners has a question, they're gonna ask the magical Google search bar and we want to make sure that we're there, that we're coming up both organically, you know, and in, in PPC.

Kathleen (27:17): You mentioned when we were talking earlier that when you first joined almost all of the inbound traffic to the website was coming through branded search, correct?

Lindsay (27:25): Yeah. 95% of our inbound, our, of our website traffic was branded search. So somebody's physically typing in the word e-Builder,

Kathleen (27:36): An incredible testament to the value of your brand.

Lindsay (27:41): When we look at our search appearances let's see, July is up 66%. Non-branded.

Kathleen (27:53): That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, kudos to you. My hat goes off to you.

Lindsay (27:59): It's not me. It's, it's such a huge team effort. And, you know, if we didn't have product marketing and the, the rock stars that we have on that team, helping us drive the message the right way you know, demand gen needs that we, you know, we're not the stewards of all of the information and knowledge like these guys are so good at helping us craft the right message, put the right thing out in market and just knowing what to do with it, watching the numbers and, you know, working from there.

Kathleen (28:26): So what do you think if you had to narrow it down to three or fewer key things that were the drivers of your success with, since you've joined the company, like in, in, in achieving what we just talked about, what do you think those three things would be?

Lindsay (28:41): Oh, well, the first, the very first thing is, I mean, it might be a standard answer a lot of people give, but it's, it's teamwork. You can't do this by yourself. You need all of these people to, to be bought into the process. So I would say that I would also say another key success metric is vulnerability. You know, you really have to be vulnerable with with some of the folks who you're, you're working with to help them understand, you know, this should work. I'm not going to promise you that it will. This has worked for us in, in different industries that we worked in. But I had to be really vulnerable with them to, to say this, this industry is new for me, that we could go in on this and it could flop. And they were like, okay, well, let's take the ride. So I think that was, was another, another big one. And I think trust, you know, I mean really like my manager, me and my team trusted me. And if they didn't, if they, if they weren't along for the ride, if they weren't bought in it, it would not have been so successful. You can't push a boulder up hill for that long.

Kathleen (29:54): The other thing I'd want to ask is you talked about collaboration and teamwork, and I feel like people use that word sometimes and everybody kind of tunes it out cause it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, teamwork. But I mean, I live this all the time, you know, we're, and we're not as big a company as you are, but having to collaborate between products and engineering and customer success and sales and marketing everybody, I think, does it differently, I'm curious, like how do you achieve that collaboration? And like, if you could be specific, like, is there a certain cadence of meetings or, you know, cause I think when it comes to teamwork and collaboration, it's very easy to err on the side of like death by meetings and talking too much and not getting stuff done. But then it's also easy to air on the other side of just like, screw it. I'm going to go do it all in my son, my own and I'm going to get it done, but then you're not, you know, you're not being collaborative. So what is your, how do you balance that?

Lindsay (30:48): That's a really great question, Kathleen. I have a cadence where I have a, a full hour team meeting every week and beginning of the week. I have one-on-ones religiously with every person every week for 30 minutes. And they, and I've encouraged some of my leaders to go out and I'm like, well, collaborate with so-and-so or collaborate here, see what you guys can figure out. Now they do it all the time. So I'm not in a million meetings anymore because they take it and they come back with a strategy. They work together. So that was a big part of it. I think the other really big part is just across all of Trimble. Different groups are starting to come together. We have like a little brain trust. That's all content people. We have a little brain trust. It's all demand gen people and we share and we share and we get ideas. And then my team gets excited because they learn something or they share something and there's so much positive feedback. So those are really big values. You know, for not only myself, but for the whole company is to foster that kind of collaboration as, as far and wide as we possibly can. And I love it. Oh my God. I love it.

Kathleen (32:02): Do you have any like set recurring meetings with other teams within the company? Like, do you have a meeting with your sales team or your customer success team or anything like that?

Lindsay (32:14): Right now I'm, I'm, we're working on getting better. Cause you know, as marketers, we, we do death by meeting. I'm getting better at meeting more with my BDRs meeting with the BDR leader. And so next quarter I've made a promise. I stayed there like they just promised two days ago. I said, next quarter, I'm going to make sure that every month both of our teams are sitting down and we're talking through this it's kind of like, you know, you're, I'm trying to chunk it out cause it doesn't get that.

Kathleen (32:41): I feel like I'm a professional meeting, goer. All I do is go to meetings.

Lindsay (32:45): It is, it's like, oh, it's back to back and back to back. And you know, and I often laugh because sometimes I have to take the laptop I'm in my shed, which is, you know, across the way from my house. And I see if had a bathroom in here, it'd be much more convenient. But you know, my husband will see me on the ring, the ring system, walking across the yard on a call with my laptop. Cause I just don't have time in between meetings. And I'm like, if this meeting's about to end then I'll have 30 seconds.

Kathleen (33:12): Yeah. It's, it's hard. It's hard. I mean, I love your story. I love that you have been able to affect the results you have in the amount of time you have that's so, so impressive, especially cause it's easy to do something like that. If you come in to a startup like I'm in, because you're nobody nobody's been doing marketing before, but it's, it's really especially impressive to come into a company like yours, where you have an existing marketing team and to achieve that level of results in a short amount of time. So again, kudos. All right. We're going to shift gears because otherwise we're going to run out of time and we could talk forever. I, I know we could. But I always ask my guests two questions and, and I want to make sure we squeezed them in here. The first being you know, the challenge I hear from most marketers is that it's what we've been talking about. Like doing, doing it all. How do you do it all? And one of the things that often falls by the wayside is like continuous education and staying on top of everything that's happening in the world of marketing. So I'm curious, how do you do that? How do you continue to educate yourself? And do you have certain sources of information that you rely on to keep yourself up?

Lindsay (34:18): Oh yeah. No, there's so many, first of all my team and I were about to do a, an exercise in values and one of my core values that I shared with them was education. We do a quick 10 minutes of what did you learn last week? Every single meeting. But I love digesting Chris Penn's Almost Timely News.

Kathleen (34:40): I love him.

Lindsay (34:42): Love him. And he's a, he's a Baltimore guys and Maryland guy like us. But I, his stuff is absolutely phenomenal. So I, I do a lot of that. And then I do a lot of books on tape, like just listening to things. I mean, in right now I'm trying to focus a lot on, you know, leadership qualities and capabilities. Cause I'm now leading leaders. So, you know, I'm trying to make them the best leaders that they can be. So I'm really digesting a lot of Brenee Brown right now. It's just, there's, there's so many different sources that, that I love. Chief MarTech. Scott, Brinker. Love his stuff. Keeping up with the technologies that are out there and the processes that you put in place for those. So those are some of my top ones right there.

Kathleen (35:28): Those are some good ones. And I love the Christopher Penn shout out. He was a guest at one point. He was my last interview of the year, I want to say two years ago. He closed out, maybe it was 2019. I'll have to look but great guy. Great guy and super smart. All right. Second question. Along these lines. Of course this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual right now that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to setting the bar for being a great inbound marketer?

Lindsay (35:59): Oh my gosh. I always go back to this and I can't help myself, but myself and my team, we just read and we just devour everything that HubSpot puts out. And you know, even though we don't use HubSpot internally, their methodology and you know, what they're doing is just spot on. But lately one that's been taking over HubSpot for me is Drift. Nick Sal has really done a lot for that company along the lines of education, certification teachings and trainings that he's putting into place there. And I'm loving them. I'm digesting them like candy. It's amazing.

Kathleen (36:40): Because people who are listening probably don't know, but Nick Sal is a former colleague of mine. We worked together for two years, one of my favorite human beings on the planet other than Lindsay Kelley. Of course. So now I'm gonna, I, it's funny, I don't know if I've interviewed Nick Sal, so maybe he's going to be my next guy, but you're right. He's amazing. He was in HubSpot for many years was like one of their leading HubSpot Academy professors, you know, and now he's back in, in a role that really allows him to show his incredible skills at Drift and another amazing Boston-based company. So love that name.

Lindsay (37:19): Yeah. Yeah. Really, really great stuff. I highly recommend checking it out. It's not just like conversational marketing sales. They have events certification for virtual events and it's, there's just so many nuggets of wisdom in their Insider's club. It's absolutely phenomenal and it's free to join the insiders club.

Kathleen (37:37): That's so great. Okay. I'm definitely gonna gonna go do that after this. Lindsay, if somebody wants to learn more about what you've talked about and connect with you online, or ask you a question, what is the best way for them to do that?

Lindsay (37:50): Definitely LinkedIn. And I am the super easy one, linkedin.com/Lindsay Kelley. So I'm there. I'm listed as a Trimble employee and I would love to love to connect.

Kathleen (38:06): Great. And I will put a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So had there, if you want to connect with Lindsay and if you're listening to this episode and you liked it or you'll learn something new, which I hope you did, I certainly did. Please take a moment and go to apple podcasts and leave the podcast or review. That's how people find us. That's how we acquire new listeners. It would mean so much, especially if you're a loyal listener. Who's been listening to the podcast for a long time. So head there and leave a review. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork and I would love to have them be my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Lindsay.

Lindsay (38:49): This was a ton of fun. Thanks for having me.