using psychology to build better b2b content

Rai Hyde Cornell, founder of Cornell Content Marketing and former behavioral therapist, joined us on Digital Banter to explore how psychology — yes, real clinical frameworks — can radically reshape your content strategy. Rai breaks down how the Stages of Change, the CBT Triangle, and her own ELITE Method help marketers go beyond the funnel and speak directly to a buyer’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. We challenge the idea that B2B must be rational, unpack why most messaging fails, and show how a psychology-first approach can make your content actually move people.

Podcast Transcript

You are listening to the Digital Banter Podcast, the show where we tackle the challenges of B2B marketing head on and aren’t afraid to tell it like it is. Join us weekly as we talk to industry leaders. Explore opportunities that impact the bottom line and rev your company’s marketing engine with actionable insights and tips.

It’s time to burn the old B2B playbook and build something that makes an impact. Here are your hosts, Andy and James.

Welcome back everybody to another episode of Digital Banter. Today we are talking about something that is super interesting to both James and I, um, and joining us to talk about that topic is Rai Hyde Cornell, who’s the founder of Cornell Marketing, uh, Cornell Content Market, I should say. And what we’re gonna be diving into today is using psychology to build better B2B content now.

Rai, I think you come at this as a, from a very interesting perspective based off of your background and your past experiences. So one of the things that we always like to kick an episode off with our guests around is understanding how they even got. Into B2B because it’s not like you, uh, graduate college or are growing up and automatically think, oh, I wanna be a B2B marketer.

So tell us a little bit about your journey and what you wanted to be when you grew up and how, how the hell you grew. You, you fell into B2B marketing.

Yeah. Yeah. So kind of a weird twisty, turny road to get here. Um. You know, I was raised by two police officers. My dad was a traffic and beat cop, and my mom was a gangs detective, and I was fascinated by psychology and the, the criminal side of why do people do what they do?

And so when I grew up, I wanted to be a counselor in the prison system, and I was headed there. I got a match. A Bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s in [00:02:00] Professional Clinical counseling and Marriage and family therapy, and another master’s in criminology. And I worked in a drug rehab facility, uh, working with probationers and parolees mental hospital, community counseling center, running group, uh, substance abuse programs, and, uh, individual couples counseling.

And all the way I was paying my way through school and this career path that takes tons and tons and tons of training and pays you very, very, very little, uh, by being a freelance writer. And so early in my, you know, figuring out where I’m headed in my life, I was writing content, uh, for the web, doing a little bit of web development, doing a lot of, um, content production for funnels and.

By the time I burned out on the mental health world, uh, just the revolving door of it all, the bureaucracy, the red tape, the, you know, trying to help someone with both hands tied behind your back. I decided to throw myself full-time into the marketing world, and I initially started in, um, B2C in the subscription industry, and I quickly realized [00:03:00] I hated it.

It was so impulse driven and manipulative, and there was all this fomo and peer pressure and scarcity tactics and just plain old lies and. I had the opportunity to work with a few B2B companies and just absolutely fell in love with it because they were providing actual solutions to actual problems, and it was so much more honest and transparent, and that’s what I wanted to be a part of.

So, interest like, uh, it, it’s, the reason we ask that question every time is because everybody has a completely different background. Yeah. We had one person come on who was in school to become a minister. We had. Basically everything at this point. Yeah. It’s just like, I don’t know. I think that’s what I like about B2B a lot is that they’re, everybody has this like different thread and background that brought them here and I think that like even also like on the outside looking in, I always make the joke that me and Andy were both, [00:04:00] uh, marketing students in college who studied marketing and then got our first jobs in marketing and then have worked into marketing up until this day.

And I. S Frankly no. Like nobody else does that. So like, I’m almost like jealous that like I don’t have a cool story. Um, which I, I met with somebody, they were time once that they were trying to bring out my story and I was like, it’s really struggled with it. So I always find it like super fascinating.

Yeah. Well,

you know, all of us who have these weird. Backgrounds. We’re all jealous of you. Because anytime somebody asks me like, oh, do you have a degree in marketing and business? I’m like, no, actually, sorry, I don’t, you know, and I have to go

into my whole explanation of how I got here. So, but we both took a consumer behavior class where they taught us how to apply psychology to marketing the one course, and you have.

What, two master’s degrees in it and wrote a book on it. So I guess that’s why we’re here, right? Yeah. Um, so maybe you can help us [00:05:00] out. Uh, what is, what are some of like the connections that you make in the psychology world to content strategy and marketing and kind of like how have you started weaving those together?

Yeah, so when I was working, uh, specifically at a drug rehab facility in San Diego, um, and working with probationers parolees who had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and personality disorders, my specialization was behavior change. I had to help people change deeply ingrained behaviors that sometimes stemmed from childhood.

And the thing that I found most fascinating was how even with some of the most challenging personalities, these. Like basic psychological models like the cognitive behavioral therapy triangle and the stages of change model from trans theoretical, those now are the main pieces that I use in the marketing strategy and it it works because it’s all about changing buyer behavior.

It’s all about interrupting thought patterns and [00:06:00] introducing a new internal experience that’s going to yield a new external behavior.

So let’s start with C, BT. ’cause I think that’s the one that I am the most familiar with. Sure. So, CBT, let me know if I’m wrong here, is essentially the triangle between thoughts, feelings, and actions, right?

Yes, yes. Um, I feel like in the B2B world, like we’re probably like pretty fixated on like what’s the action we want them to take Is the action is we want to take them to buy. I know it’s not. Like that would be the wrong way to think about it, I think. So can you kind of explain how you interpret that model and kind of how you can interrupt?

People where they’re at right now to get, and kind of walk us through like what some of those desired behavior changes actually are.

Yeah, absolutely. So when we’re talking about the cognitive behavioral therapy triangle, you’re exactly right. Most marketers focus on one piece of that triangle, which is the behavior, and they think, okay, [00:07:00] how do we get people to book a call or book a demo or.

Whatever the case may be. And, and all they’re thinking about is what can we offer them? You know, what, what word should we use here on this button? You know, should we call it a free consult, a free demonstration? You know, what should we call it? And that’s where they get hyper fixated. Now, if you zoom out and you look at the entire CBT triangle we’re talking about.

Your thoughts driving your inner emotions, which elicit a certain behavior. Now, if you wanted to apply that in marketing, you know, an example might be if we have this old thought of, um, you know, I’ve worked with cybersecurity company, so that’s the example I’ll use here. So if someone is thinking, shoot, I hope we never have a cybersecurity breach.

That’s the thought. Then the old emotion is fear, dread, worry. They’re, they just. Don’t want that to happen, and they get stuck. And so the behavior is paralysis by [00:08:00] analysis. So now instead of just thinking, oh, how do we get these scared people to click this button and book a demo, if you reverse engineer the process and you go back to that origination thought and you introduce a new thought, which is, Hey, everyone experiences breaches and it’s about how you handle them.

Suddenly the new emotion that you’re eliciting is actually. Hope and this can-do attitude and this curiosity and this us, me, and this potential vendor who’s helping me feel a little bit better versus the cybersecurity threat, the predators, and then the new behavior is actually shopping for that proactive cybersecurity solution.

And who’s gonna come to mind first? The one who made them feel that relief emotion as opposed to being stuck in the fear emotion.

Got it. It’s so true. The, I would say almost every. B2B company tries some sort of like, I don’t wanna say fear tactic, but like Yeah. It’s always like, like in, in like our kind of content [00:09:00] model that we work with, like pain points is like one of the main things that we focus on.

And it’s always like, it’s everything. Every client is like the negative pain associated with whatever their product feels and like does. And I feel like nobody ever moves out of like. It’s those negative emotions that you just get, like stuck it in. I feel like that’s why a lot of B2B ads like don’t resonate or land is because there are just so much of, like, we always make the joke like save time and money or like,

yeah,

in the case of what could go wrong if you don’t have this?

Mm-hmm.

and there really aren’t a lot of brands that are bringing a more positive note. To content. And I think it like makes one, it makes their ads very dry and their content very dry.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and you have to understand those fears in order to speak to the internal experience that’s going on to make sure that people know that you understand them and you are.[00:10:00]

Really comprehending the struggle point that they’re starting with. But if you linger too long in the fear, they get uncomfortable and they go away. So why are you gonna base your entire marketing funnel on eliciting more fear? They already have the fear. They don’t need to feel more of that. They need to feel relief.

So lean into the relief and that’s where you’re gonna end up getting. Those hits of dopamine and oxytocin and endorphins that build that no leg and trust factor that actually brings someone closer to you because you are the brand that’s making them feel good. And ultimately, in B2B decisions, what? What is the main driver behind closing a deal?

It’s someone has confidence that you can help them. Someone feels safe with you, and most importantly in B2B, they trust that you are going to help them do their job better and make them look good professionally. Yeah,

so it’s, I don’t know. I, I find this all like very fast. So give it, do you have any example, so again, we talked about like focusing on the [00:11:00] pain a lot, but any examples of like different emotions that you can help people feel other than.

Paint. I know you just gave that one, but I feel like any more examples there would be like super helpful.

Yeah. So, okay, so in the B2B world, and there are a lot of things that would apply differently to B2C marketing as opposed to B2B. So if we wanna go into B2C, lemme know, we’ll go there, but my focus is usually on B2B.

In the B2B world. People want to feel a sense of one pride. So if someone is charged with making a big business buying decision and they’re looking for, I’ll stick with my example of a cybersecurity provider. And if you’re the person within a company deciding on that cybersecurity provider, you want to feel proud that you made the right decision.

So how can you tap into pride in almost like [00:12:00] ego stroking to say something along the lines of, you know, you’ve worked hard to get here, now you’ve been tasked with more responsibility. Help, uh, let us be the ones to make you look even better as you climb that ladder and. Aim for higher goals. You have to think about the situation that that person is in, not the situation that the company is in, because it’s the person who’s gonna bring you into the company.

And if you don’t open that door, everything else is gonna be shut down to you. So usually in, in the B2B world pride, um, security, um, things like ambition and. Saving time, and I know that’s something that a lot of features and benefits try to say, but if you speak to it more on an emotional level, like we understand you’re juggling a lot, we understand you wanna have one throat to choke, we understand, you know, you have to have that empathy layered in to show that you’re going to save them time.

Not tell them, don’t tell them you’re gonna save them time, show them and help them get to that conclusion by sparking those emotions.

How does that kind of then build off of, let’s kind of change models here a little bit when we think about like stages of change, right? Mm-hmm. Because in B2B, we are inherently very metric focused, right?

Yes. So to your point, like saving time, money, how many times do all of us see X amount of time saved in hours or X amount of money saved, right? That lacks that emotional connection. But if you tie that back to. The stages of change as far as behavioral change is concerned of getting to that point of realizing that?

Mm-hmm. Like how do those two frameworks kind of start to tie in together?

Yeah. So when we’re talking about, oh, we’re gonna save you time and money, that’s very low in the funnel and a lot of mistakes that I see B2B companies make is that’s where they start. They start low, and by the time you get there, you should have already have won over the hearts and minds of the people who are gonna make the [00:14:00] decision.

And so when we layer stages of change on top of the sales funnel, it, you know, typically sales funnel is brand awareness, interest, decision, action. You know, I like to think there’s a fifth stage, which is retention as well, but most. Marketers, they focus on that interest point of lead capture and then they go down from there.

The stages of change model expands the top of the funnel. So brand awareness not only gives you a more, uh, a longer runway I should say, but also it breaks it down into what you need to say to that person to move them towards interest, where you’re actually going to capture their contact information and turn them into a viable lead.

To answer your question about how do, how do we start talking to them with the stages of change prior to getting to this point of being able to talk about saving time and money in a way that is actually going to be heard and not just Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what everybody says. [00:15:00] The stages of change model.

The reason I like this is because my adapted version actually captures someone as soon as they enter the ICP. So the first stage of change is. Pre-pro, meaning they don’t have the problem that you solve. They’re not in your ICP, but you need to be aware of what that person looks like so that as soon as they cross that line into having the problem that you solve, which is, um, sorry, this is where I’m drawing a blank.

’cause I have too much stuff in my head to hold at the same time. So we go from pre-pro to pre-pro awareness. That’s where they have the problem, but they’re not aware of it. That line. Is where they become your ideal fit client. And this is where you can start capturing those people long before your competition does who they’re waiting until the whole features and benefits, lead capture stage of the funnel.

So if you start educating these people about what the problem actually is, how much it’s costing [00:16:00] them, and giving them hope that there is a solution, that’s where they move into problem awareness. And that’s where they really start to get hungry for information and hungry for those dopamine hits. And that’s where you’re most likely to form that strong bond so that when they bring a short list of companies to the decision makers within the company, you’re at the top of that list of three options.

Yeah. Because what is, what is the stat these days, right? It’s a buyer’s. Are, they’ve already weeded out what, 75, 80% of vendors before they even reach out, something like that, right? Yeah.

The one I’ve heard is, um, the B2B buying process is 70% completed before someone’s willing to talk to a sales rep,

right?

Because they’ve already done all the research, they’ve already compiled a short list, they’ve already been having internal conversations, and you wanna be in those closed rooms before they’ll open their doors to you.

I’ll add another one since there’s a million stats on this. 90% of B2B buyers. End up purchasing with who they thought they were going to purchase from [00:17:00] initially.

Right. And why do you think that is? Because people want to justify the decision that they were already feeling like they were leaning towards. Everything else is just rationalization. So I love that you said that because I. Early on in the process, that’s where they become aware of you and they go, oh, I like this company.

Oh, this company’s making me feel good. Oh, even feeling like this company knows their stuff. And then they have to do their due diligence and go find out a couple other companies to put on the list. They bring the list to their bosses, but who’s the company that they’re gonna advocate to choose the one they spent more mind share with?

The one that they felt better with, the one that made them feel emotionally good before all the others gave them the. Logical rationales that frankly all look the same on paper.

Yeah, that’s it. My favorite quote, people buy an emotion and justify with logic. That’s like exactly the basis of it all. And it’s like, I mean, it’s so true too.

Like, I’ll give an example of stuff that I’ve looked at like Clay. Clay is a company that’s kind of like taken off recently. I’ll be honest, [00:18:00] I thought they were cool way before I even knew a damn thing about what they did.

Yep.

just because of like the social presence that they’ve created and kind of.

The brand that they’ve built. Yeah. But like, I mean, I’ll be honest, it’s not like we do have a need for what they offer, but like there’s an emotional connection already there. And to your, to your point that you made, like, I haven’t made the decision of whether or not it’s a problem that we have yet. But like, I’ll tell you what, when that does happen, like.

Who’s gonna be at the top of my list.

Yes, exactly. And that’s the thing is if you follow the stages of change model, you’re educating people about a problem that they’re either not aware of yet or maybe they don’t have yet. And that’s why Pre-Pro is included in the whole process. Because there are companies that I’ve met recently that I’m just fascinated by, enamored by, and I’m looking for reasons to buy from them because I like them so [00:19:00] much.

That’s what you wanna create.

Well, that’s a DI mean, that is a D two C thing. At the end of the day, like, you know, unfortunately, B2B is not necessarily impulse purchases in the same way. So there is a lot more justification that goes into it. But for all of those brands out there that don’t invest in, I’ll call it top of funnel awareness, demand gen, whatever you wanna refer to it as, like, it shows that like, this is where the, the value is.

The value is not capturing a search that. Somebody’s already in the buying process.

Right.

So I wanna jump ahead with a question a little bit then, is when we, and we all are in agreement here, that everything that you just described, Rai, is a necessity to actually growing the business. Mm-hmm. To new heights, but with all the pressures that surround marketing and needing to drive success and budgetary constraints and things like that.

If I am, if I’m in a position where I control the [00:20:00] budget purse strings and the decision making, like what’s, what is the justification or how, how, how do I get influenced to expand into those pre-pro stages when I’m being measured on M qls SQLs pipeline and the through line of those early stages to end results could be extremely muddied.

Right? Yep.

Yep.

What does that look like as far as kind of creating justification to influence for somebody to take that step?

Yeah, so it’s all about your priorities and frankly what I’m talking about, this expanding the sales funnel, using the stages of change, capturing people long before they’re even gonna be buyers.

That’s not for everybody. Some companies are like, no, we need leads yesterday, and that’s all we have money for, and we need to pour into ads and lead capture and cold outreach. In that case, like I’m gonna send ’em to you guys, and I have a buddy who does cold outreach exclusively. That’s all [00:21:00] he does. I send ’em there.

But the companies that want to. We’re in 2025 right now. The companies that wanna set their 2026 up to be easier to take the pressure off of their sales reps to make sure that marketing is doing marketing’s job, which is getting leads 80 to 90% pre-sold before they talk to the sales rep. Those are the companies that are gonna come talk to me.

No, it’s not gonna happen overnight. It’s not even gonna happen in three months. Usually we need six to 12 months to build this out. Now when you are able to layer these things together, like what you guys do married with what I do, that’s where we’re able to move much faster because we can test messaging and learn way quicker to iterate this process to get results sooner, but.

I’m never gonna tell somebody who comes to work with us that we’re gonna have results for them in three months or 90 days or something like that. That’s just not going to happen because content and learning, the psychology of your buyer, if we’re gonna do it right, we’re gonna do it well. It’s [00:22:00] not gonna happen overnight.

Yeah,

you’re building momentum. Yeah. Like Andy, we’ve seen, so we, we do a lot of the, have done a lot of demand capture, lead gen type activities. Um, we like to do all the way starting to where you start all the way through, but as you said, it doesn’t always happen that way. But Andy, you can attest to this, we’ve worked with small brands that nobody’s heard of and big brands that have, uh, you know, a following and a good amount of awareness in the space.

Call it market leaders versus. Challengers, like what is so much easier to drive leads for

the bigger brands, you could have two brands, bigger brand, as long as there’s clarity behind what the bigger brand actually does.

Yeah. There’s, we’ve had two clients in the engineering space, right? Uh, one of them was a startup and one of them is a billion dollar company.

Um, the one that is a billion dollar company, if you were starting from scratch, is a hundred times easier to get [00:23:00] a lower cost per acquisition from than the startup because, and how

did they build that? They had to build the brand recognition. They had to build the runway, they had to earn. That spot as one of the instantly thought of companies to put on that top three short list.

That’s another, it’s another reason why I really don’t believe in any industry benchmarks too, because if you’re looking at a category like the market leaders are gonna have an easier time doing it than others. Like,

yeah,

look at, look at us and look at directive. Directive has a lot easier time running ads for themselves than we do because they have thousands and thousands of dollars to invest.

Mm, yeah. Like you can get more data faster.

Yeah,

so we talked about two frameworks, and now the last one that you’ve developed, Rai, is the Elite Method. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so my elite method, so I’m very, I’m very systematized. I’m very methodical and organized, and so I. This method. I built this out [00:24:00] because what I often saw B2B companies doing is skipping steps or half-assing steps, and you can’t do that.

If you really want to form these emotional connections with your buyers and you want to position your company in the best light, there’s not a single step that you can skip over. So the first part, examine, that’s the first E. You have to take a good hard look at yourself and what you’re saying and what you’re doing and how you’re.

Being perceived by your market. And that’s often really hard for companies to get behind doing because it’s the whole, what did I say? Um, you can’t, when you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label. And sometimes people wanna, don’t wanna see how scuffed and holy and messed up and ugly their label is.

That’s where you need somebody who’s gonna be totally honest with you and say, Hey, look, you know, you guys are perceived as this, and. You actually wanna be perceived as this? You know, I worked with a um, M-S-P-M-S-S-P hybrid company for quite a while, [00:25:00] and we ran a survey at the beginning of our work together and we found in the survey that everyone thought this company was a cybersecurity company, but what they were trying to sell the most was managed services.

There’s a huge disconnect. You have to know those things. Otherwise, how are you going to course correct? The next step is learn. You have to learn the. Inner workings of your ideal buyer’s mind. And this is where we go really, really deep. There’s many layers to this step, including the cognitive behavioral therapy triangle, where we wanna understand the thoughts and emotions and the behaviors that are being yielded from those thoughts and emotions.

And where’s our best place to intercept and where can we make people feel good with positive psychology and motivational interviewing? That’s where we really hone in on. Who are the gatekeepers and who are the decision makers? Because that’s the other thing that a lot of companies fail to realize is they focus so much on decision makers, C-suite individuals.

Those people don’t come into the process until the interest [00:26:00] and you know, we’re about to make a decision stage. James, I see you laughing. I know,

because our framework is literally the same, like

Yeah.

And because it works. Yeah. ’cause you, I mean, we see that problem all the time in advertising. Is that, yeah.

Everyone makes a list of decision makers and they just wanna serve ads to the CTO. Like, like

no. Who doesn’t care about what they’re about to view besides either getting, yeah, I got way

bigger fish to fry. Like, yeah, it doesn’t

care. It, it’s, it’s, you make, Hey gatekeepers, you make the decision. Come to me.

Tell me why you’re making that decision and I’ll tell you if I approve it or not. That’s how it goes. In B2B, the the C-Suite, unless you’re targeting startups, the C-Suite is not involved until much later down the process. And if that’s what you’re banking on, you are losing 80% of the opportunities that are out there for you.

Sorry, we cut you off for Oh no, that’s okay. I mean, [00:27:00] I, I

just, I could dive into this stuff all day long. So the istep, this is implement, this is what most marketers are used to. This is where they’re most comfortable and familiar. This is the build process, but the problem that I noticed in the marketing world is most marketers say, okay.

We think we should run LinkedIn ads. They start with the mechanism and then they say, so who do we wanna reach these ad with ads with? They go to the audience and then they say, okay, so what are the ads gonna say? Then they go to the message. They’re doing it completely backwards. You need to, when you’re building out your actual funnels, you need to start with your audience.

Figure out who you’re talking to and what is that person’s motivation. Then you go to the messaging, then you go to the actual mechanism, which is. Where do these people hang out, and where are they already mentally primed to hear our message and be open to a new idea? That’s how you need to choose your mechanism.

Otherwise, you’re just doing this spray and pray [00:28:00] method where you’re mostly speaking to an empty room.

Nailed it.

Like I’m preaching to the choir here because you just came out with like a great acronym to, uh, like I, I I feel like a lot of our process is exactly the same segmenting. That’s why

we’re talking. Yeah.

Uh, influencers and decision makers. Like that’s like step one is like audience segmentation, who they are messaging then channels.

Yeah. Because we get like, I mean, we get the same thing, like we get a lot of times from clients, like, I’ll say like, we get. Content that’s just like handed to us, that is like a, a regurgitated sales guide or something because they’re like, oh, like we made this thing, what? What can we do with it? Rather than saying like, so to an extent, like I understand where people are coming from as far as starting with some of the channel distribution strategy.

First be, you should never start with the distribution strategy first. It should always be audience first, but then you do have to mold [00:29:00] in like. The messaging piece to fit the platforms a little bit because like you can define your audience and then find out, you know, maybe we can’t necessarily target them on the channels that we expect it to.

So like you do have to take that into consideration. But other than that, like I think you’re like spot on when it comes to like audience messaging, then distribution Yeah, rather than distribution. Messaging audience. I’m not even sure how other people do it. They, they always figure,

they think about the how first, and you can’t do that.

I mean, I think Simon Sinek is the one who famously said, start with why, why? Why is this person gonna be open to hearing what we have to say? Why are they interested? Why is this relevant to them? Then go into, okay, how do we talk to them about this? And then how do we connect with them through the actual mechanism?

So that’s the implement portion. And then that’s where most marketers live. But if they don’t do the first two pieces, the examine and learn, everything in the middle is [00:30:00] gonna fall flat. And then also, a lot of marketers are scared to do the next steps, which are. Transform. This is where we start taking data and metrics and you know, as a psychologist, and you know, with my history in behavioral sciences, I am very empirically minded.

So even though psychology tends to be very much thought of as like a soft skill and, and you know, talked about emotions and feelings and all that gosey stuff, you always have to come back to the data. So when you’re looking at things collectively, and you guys have great insights on human behavior data from the metrics that you collect, what are you learning from that?

How can you feed that back into the top of the funnel to make sure that everything that we’re doing is more and more effective month over month? And this is. Qualitative and quantitative. So we wanna make sure that the language that we’re using, the visuals that we’re using, those qualities are landing and that we are actually driving.

This is why I say a [00:31:00] lot of marketers are afraid of this ’cause there’s this scared kind of handoff between sale or marketing and sales where. We wanna make sure that what we’re doing isn’t just making the brand look good. It’s not just a branding play. It’s not just for fun, but it’s actually driving revenue.

And then the last step is enhance. And I’m a huge believer that. Your marketing is only as good as your internal communication. So I like to set up internal feedback loops between sales and marketing and customer service and marketing, because the funnels that I build, they’re not just demand gen. We do demand gen, sales enablement and retention.

And in order for those other two pieces to be successful, I have to know what the sales teams are learning. I have to understand when they’re talking to prospects and they get pushback, they get complaints or they. Thing that I love is when a sales rep tells me, oh, this person is having a bad experience with their current provider, and they just went off, awesome.

Give me that transcript. I wanna know all of that. They have all the juicy material and so does customer [00:32:00] service. We wanna make sure that when we’re marketing something and we’re making that promise, it matches what’s delivered. And so we have to have these communication feedback loops to enhance everything that we’re doing.

And when you couple those qualitative, experiential anecdotal insights with the quantitative metrics from an empirical standpoint, that’s when the magic really happens and you get this steep climb of improvement.

How early on in your process do you create that hopeful buy-in? Because I know for us, we always start off our strategic development process with stakeholder interviews across those three segments that you just described.

But also leadership because nine times outta 10 they aren’t talking to each other. Or the first time they’re gonna talk to each other in months is when we bring ’em onto a call together. Um, yeah. And they have competing priorities and things like that. So creating that buy-in upfront just creates, to your point, like more qualitative insights that are gonna power through.

Yes. Yeah. First two weeks of working with a client, we talked to all of the stakeholders because when I’m [00:33:00] putting together a strategy, I’m not just putting together the psychological strategy and the messaging strategy and the creative plan. I’m also putting together the transformation plan and the enhancement plan.

What data are we going to track and how are we going to improve this? Because I think a thing that often happens is in B2B is the C-suite leaders. The CRO, the C-F-O-C-E-O. They think these metrics are important, but then. The marketing department, the CMO thinks these marketing or these metrics are important.

You have to come to agreement on that. Otherwise you are, I was gonna cuss, I’m gonna try not to ’cause we’re alive, but you are in for a big headache later on.

Oh, we hard. We try to keep that rain. You’re in for a shit storm.

Yeah. How do you, so we kind of touched on this before, but like. A lot of these frameworks come across as being potentially inferred as too slow for [00:34:00] the ever-changing landscape of especially B2B.

Hmm. So

how do you kind of, how do you manage those expectations to a degree, but also how does this apply at scale? Across, you know, varying sizes of organizations. And also, you know, you, this could be super all over the place, but I mean, I’m, in my mind I’m thinking about things like, oh, we have a new product launch coming into play.

How does that fit into this? Right. Or, Hey, we have an acquisition that’s now coming into the portfolio. Kind of the same thing as product launch, but um. You know, there’s all these aspects that come into things and you, you don’t want to change your process, right? At the end of the day, it needs to be integrated into that, but helping people understand how those get incorporated, I feel like is the, is one of the biggest keys to the kingdom at the end of the day.

Yeah. So the thing I love about this whole process is once you have that strategy built out, which for us it takes about eight weeks, so usually companies are able to be patient enough for eight weeks once you have that in [00:35:00] place. Not only do you have this crystal clear plan for what you need to build as the foundation of your marketing, but also as you have mergers and acquisitions or as you have, you know, customer support requests that say, Hey, can you add this new feature, add this new feature.

You know exactly how to position it because you’ve done all of that work to understand the internal experience of your ideal buyer. And so it’s. Added too. It’s another facet of understanding the people that you’re trying to connect with, not just in the moment when they first start encountering the problem, but also through the life of their journey with you.

And when you have that mentality of we constantly need to be understanding the inner workings, that’s when you build out a marketing funnel that isn’t just. Top of funnel and sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. It’s actually creating almost like a lifestyle for your ideal buyer [00:36:00] that carries all the way through the retention aspect and saying, Hey, we’re a company that listens to our customers.

We’re a company that is constantly taking the feedback from our heaviest users, and we’ve created this new thing. And when you have a way to frame that up into the messaging that you have top of funnel. It only amplifies the efficacy as opposed to kind of like this, um, often desperate thing that we see companies who don’t have that foundational understanding of their psychological match with their buyers.

Where when they develop a new feature, it’s all they talk about and they’re like, Hey, we have this new thing. We have this new thing. And isn’t it shiny? And isn’t it pretty? And don’t you wanna experience it? It’s all me, me, me, me, me, as opposed to. We created this because we listen to people who are in your situation having this problem and this is how we’re helping them through it.

You can have that experience too. Here’s how

the iteration piece, I think is just like another under there. [00:37:00] There are a lot of campaigns that are created and then never iterated on or are created and are set to have a life cycle of three weeks ’cause they’re paired up with. This sales loft outreach campaign.

Like I feel like that’s something that we see all the time. And I think the, the reality behind that too, that people just don’t focus on. It’s like the market changes every probably three months. Yeah. And those pain points probably change every three months. So like, continuing that feedback loop is really important.

Like, you know, we, we stressed it a lot in the onboarding process because we need it in order to do our jobs. And I think that people under don’t expect it to continue in the way that it actually should.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I think, trying to remember where I saw this. It was in an email newsletter. I wanna say it was like.

GTM Monday or something like that where, um, someone said marketing is moving away from campaigns and towards [00:38:00] experiments. And the thing is, if you understand the way experiments are run in an actual empirical scientific setting, you know. It’s never a one and done. It’s always iterative. People have run the exact same studies and experiments over and over and over and over to find out is this replicable?

Is this, can we verify that these findings are actually still relevant for today? Or has something in society changed to the point where now we’re actually gonna find something different? You have to take that. That perspective of we’re never gonna be done if we want this business to grow and scale, we’re never done.

You are constantly having to go back and learn. I mean, things today are so different from where they were just a year ago. And if you take a one and done approach to whether it’s your marketing strategy or your campaigns, you are gonna be burning money.

Well, all of that. And what are you prioritizing as an experiment?

Yeah. Just changing the button text. Like you kind of let off today’s [00:39:00] conversation around Yeah. For something that’s actually meaningful. Exactly.

Yeah. There’s a lot that’s changed though, apparently what they said. Uh, my brain is 70% melted now from AI usage. I don’t know what’s, what’s who. I don’t know. I told you that the other day.

Yeah. There was a stat that said, there was a stat that said like, high users of AI are using 70% less brain functionality.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I was like, oh geez, I’m gonna delete tragedy. Bt,

I mean, I believe it. It’s everything that we do. Even something as silly as, you know, if you think back to, you know, what your grandparents might say about kids these days, you know, playing on their iPhones and not just laying on the grass, staring at the clouds, using their imaginations to come up with shapes.

There’s huge parts of our brains or creative parts of our brains that we’re not tapping into anymore. And I think that’s where when you can. Bring in this lens of psychology, you naturally have to layer in empathy, which automatically opens up that part of your human brain [00:40:00] that only you can do.

How does somebody approach any of those frameworks in the mindset of looking at their existing content and understanding?

What’s good and what isn’t as it relates to any of those frameworks. Pick one if you want. Um, yeah, but really kind of getting to the point of not just going nuclear and starting fresh, like they have content in nine times, outta 10 situations. Like what are we gonna just finesse or find or what is good enough to get started kind of on this journey.

Yeah. As a starting point, I love the CBT triangle because it’s simple and it’s something that, you know, the stages of change from trans theoretical model, that’s a, that’s a big beefy kind of thing. It’s huge. Whereas if you just focus on the CBT triangle and you, let’s say you go to a piece of your content that you really love and you ask yourself, okay, who would actually click into this and reverse engineer the process?

What has to be going on in their mind? For them to find this interesting. And then if you ask yourself, well. [00:41:00] Is that who we want? Is that actually tied to a shopping or high intent behavior? A lot of times you’re gonna find no, and then that leads you to the question of, well, the people who are high intent or shopping for the solution that we have to offer, what are they actually thinking?

And usually then you just have to make some slight tweaks to your content to make sure it matches and, and that’s the way to. Guarantee that you’re going to activate dopamine for the people who are landing on your content is they have a need. Does your content fulfill that need? If it doesn’t, you’re missing that opportunity to make their brain feel good.

You may need to make sure that you’re answering the questions they have, and this is where a lot of companies hide their pricing behind, you know, demos and then you know, well, you have to talk to a person before you’re gonna find out this information. Don’t do that. You are missing the opportunity to form that brain bond between that buyer and your brand.

So just looking at it through that intent lens and [00:42:00] tracing back through the steps of the CBT Triangle can help you quickly evaluate each piece. And yeah, the first time you do it, it’s gonna take you a long time. Maybe an hour or so to really think it through. But once you’ve gotten there and you know how to improve that one piece of content, you can do that for dozens of pieces per week.

So I’m gonna throw a wrench in this conversation. How, of course, how do you, how do you help somebody or give somebody some suggestions on how to avoid. Bias and denial around content. Mm-hmm. Great example, right? Everybody, A lot of people, I should say, everybody, a lot of people think their content is the shit.

Mm-hmm.

But what you just expressed was you gotta take a different approach and lens to that from the buyer mentality. I don’t think people are, I shouldn’t say capable, but I don’t think they are up to the uh, ability to do that without having some self-reflection baked into that.

Totally. And that’s why.

That examine part of the [00:43:00] process. You usually need someone who’s a third party who’s unbiased to help you. If you don’t have that, or if you don’t have the budget to hire that, then find your most recent hire and give them that task of saying, Hey, before you were hired here, think back to. That state of mind, I want you to evaluate our content from a third party perspective.

You are not gonna get fired if you tell us all of our content is shit. You’re not gonna get in trouble. We want you to find the problems and be very clear about that. We want you to find the weaknesses and have them evaluate it. Or if you have, you know, everyone has family and friends who would do this exercise for them.

Do that because you’re exactly right. Bias is going to creep in. You know, I worked with, um, a gentleman who was working with this company that, uh, I was with for three years. He was with the company for 14 years. And as much as I have so much respect for him, but as much as he was very good at [00:44:00] being critical about what we were creating, there was an element of too closeness.

Two, everything that he had worked on within that company to be able to actually zoom out and see the whole big picture and, and evaluate it objectively for what it was.

So there is still value in agencies. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it’s like you had to go there, James. Really,

I mean, it was a great selling point, but, uh, no, it’s so true though.

Like I feel like that’s a, having an outside opinion is important. I have a question. Jumping back to your dopamine hit comment. Um, specifically, I feel like in the course of this conversation, it’s kind of felt like we were talking more around like log form content. How, you know, taking like your perspective, the shift, everything has moved to like short form content, short form video.

Like can you talk a little bit about potentially some of the [00:45:00] psychology behind that and some of the findings that you found as far as like the impact of different content formats?

Yeah, so it’s interesting that you say that because actually I would say so when I think about. Neurotransmitters, I think of them in the context of we’re trying to build that know, like, and trust factor.

’cause there’s zillion different neurotransmitters that you can try to play around with, but you don’t wanna do that. You wanna have a very specific purpose so that you have a very specific goal outcome. So dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins are the ones that we really try to hone in on. And when you’re. I trying to build.

So you, you can’t do it out of order. That’s the thing is they have to first know you and then they have to start to like you in order for them to trust you. And so with dopamine being the no neurotransmitter, that is ideal for short form. So when somebody is. Looking for something that’s gonna end up giving them a dopamine hit.

They’re looking for [00:46:00] answers. They’re looking for simple, clear cut answers. They wanna feel like they’re making progress quickly. They wanna feel like they are. They have this gap, this question mark in their head that feels really uncomfortable, and the quicker you can fill that gap. And satisfy that need, the faster you’re gonna activate dopamine.

So use short form at the top of your funnel. Then as they start to come closer to you, that’s when you wanna make sure that they understand that you, you get them, you empathize with them. So that like factor, that’s oxytocin, that’s using very emotionally charged language, that’s making sure that they feel like.

Oh my God, this company’s reading my mind like this company knows what I’m feeling because I’m trying to hit this KPI or achieve this goal or get a promotion, and I’m feeling stuck with the burden of this responsibility of my current role. If you can speak to those really emotionally charged experiences, that’s when they’re gonna start to like you.[00:47:00]

And that’s when slightly longer form content. So maybe a two to three minute video or having some kind of webinar that somebody can pop in on, or having an email series that’s gonna teach them something over time and make them feel like you’re right there alongside them as they’re trying to accomplish something that starts to get into slightly longer form content.

And then the trust factor. This is where you go into. Deep detail. This is where you have to focus on transparency, and that’s where you go into long form. So epic content, really rich pieces of content, uh, eBooks, white papers, sales assets that are more education focused than conversion. I mean, they’re all conversion focused, but if they feel conversion focused like, oh, this company’s trying to sell me something, that’s when you’re gonna lose someone.

So that’s where you can go into the depth and the detail, and that’s where you build the trust. ’cause they feel like you’re being very transparent with them.

That is like the best explanation I’ve ever heard of. Like why? Because I, we’ve, listen, we’ve always done it [00:48:00] that way, right? I mean, I don’t say always, but like,

yeah,

it’s always been like, oh, we’re gonna do short form at the top of funnel and it’s gonna gradually get in more depth ’cause more people get more information.

But that’s like the. The actual why behind it.

A lot of good marketers already do this stuff. I mean, you guys are doing a, like how many times in this conversation have you guys said, oh yeah, we already do that. We already do that. Yeah. A lot of good marketers already do this stuff. They just don’t understand why it works from that neurochemical and psychological level.

Yeah, and it’s so true. Like, uh, I think that that’s why like. Some of, like, the AI stuff is definitely like a dopa uh, a dopamine, uh, short form video on any of the social channels. Like, I mean, that’s why we sit there and scroll because we’re just like looking for the one thing that kind of, yeah. It gets that hit for us.

Right? And, and at the top of the funnel, that’s where you need quick, low effort. So it needs to be short for it. It needs to be immediately accessible. No paywalls, nothing gated. No. You have to book a call to [00:49:00] get this information. It has to be right there as they start to know you and like you, that’s when they’re willing to invest a little bit more of their time and effort.

That’s when they’ll fill out a form that has seven questions on it and you know, request access for that ebook or whatever it is that you guys are creating, you know? You have to match what their brain needs to your marketing funnel and give them the experience that they’re craving rather than trying to force them to do whatever behavior you want them to do.

Yes.

So Rai, as we start to come to a conclusion of today’s episode, we always like to end each episode by asking a series of fast five questions.

Oh,

and just to throw a cog in this wheel, they’re going to be different questions than what James originally prepared.

No. Okay.

I was not a. Fan of them. So, uh, we’re gonna start with the one, which is a softball question.

Okay. Uh, what is the one marketing trend that needs to die?

The word just, I hate this word because there’s oh, [00:50:00] exclusive offer just for you, or, you know, this was made just for. Shut up. No it wasn’t. You’re sending this out to thousands of people. Stop lying right off the bat. Stop it.

Alright. What is more important?

Demand generation or brand awareness?

Ah, demand generation, because the brand awareness is gonna come from that brand. Awareness isn’t necessarily gonna create demand generation.

Okay. Uh. What, what is the most memorable content that you have seen in the last week?

Ooh, we’re talking

about B2B and recall, so here we go.

Okay. Yeah. Um, you know, it’s a trend lately, and I’m pretty sure AI is being used to create it, but these cheat sheets that people are throwing up on LinkedIn, uh, whether it’s a. Cheat sheet for your content generation prompts for AI, or you know, whatever the case, those little cheat sheets. I have screenshotted so many of those.

I’m not going back to them, but they’re [00:51:00] memorable.

Not the Yeti AI videos. I.

Oh God, my husband showed me the gorilla one.

That’s the

one I’m talking about. Yeah. Oh my God. That thing. Oh, oh no, it wasn’t a, it wasn’t a gorilla, was it? It was the Yeti. Yeah. That was terrifying. But not, see, and that’s the thing is that made me feel weird.

Not good, weird. Like bad, weird. And so I didn’t remember it until you brought it up. The thing that I remembered is the thing that made me feel good, which is the thing that I screenshotted as, oh, when I am, you know. Playing around with chat GBT one day, I can use this. That’s, that’s gonna help me get ahead.

That’s what, remember I got,

I got served an ad the other day about, hey, all the Yeti videos that you’ve seen, you wanted to see, here’s the platform that’s used to create that was like, wow, okay. This is, that’s pretty smart. There.

Is this, what, is this what Tim’s make using to do like those, uh, astronaut videos?

Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t actually looked at those yet. Oh, they’re hilarious. Anyways.

all right, next question. What is the. [00:52:00] Most surprising channel you’ve seen work for B2B.

Huh? Most surprising Reddit. You know, I often think of Reddit as a a B2C lifestyle gamer kind of platform, but it’s really grown into a B2B, you know, um, entrepreneurial.

Yeah. Real strong community of people who are no nonsense, no bullshit, really just wanna help each other. And that’s been surprisingly effective.

We’ve seen the same thing. We’ve seen work. Yeah. Last question then. Uh, what is the one thing that BD, B marketers should start doing? I.

Stop looking at your screen. Sit there. Sit in your chair. [00:53:00] Think about who you wanna connect with and think about it’s Monday morning. What is this person doing? They wake up. Do they get their kids ready for school? Do they commute to work? Do they sit in their home office? What’s the first thing they do at work?

Are they having meetings? Are they catching up on email? Like actually. Exercise, that empathy muscle that we all have, that AI tries to mimic, but it can never do as good of a job as you can. Just sit there for 15 minutes and visualize the typical week of the person that you’re trying to connect with, and then make a list of all the things that no matter how small they seem, all the things that that person is struggling with, whether it’s.

Oh, I’m just drowning in emails, which might be completely irrelevant to the solution that you provide, but you can still, I guarantee you, you can still tie that into helpful content. Make a list of all of the pains that they might be going through [00:54:00] big and small, and just practice empathy. 15 minutes.

That’s all

reservoir acts, walks, Andy reservoir walks, reservoir walks. That’s not minutes. That’s longer than 15 minutes.

Hey, even better. It’s

like, I mean, it is very, there’s a lot of value of getting up from your computer for, that’s something that I feel like I’ve learned somewhat more recently than I should have.

Like there’s a lot of value in. Going for a walk and coming back and then writing everything down. Yep.

Yep.

 Yeah. Uh, TJ Powers has a great book called The Dose Effect, all about dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. And he talks about that, how you just need to get out and go for a walk away from anything digital and just tap back into the qualities that Nikki Human.

Well, Rai, thank you so much for joining us today. How can people, uh, learn more about Cornell Content marketing and, and kind of get in touch with you or follow you?

Yeah, the best place is LinkedIn. Um, I post a lot on LinkedIn, all kinds of videos and graphics and stuff. [00:55:00] Um, all about psychology. So find me on LinkedIn.

First name is RAI, last name is Cornell. Like the university. Yes, we are related. Um, that’s where you’ll find me.

Great. Well, awesome. Uh, thank you again, Rai, and we’ll catch you guys next time on the next episode of Digital Banter.

Thanks for listening to the Digital TER Podcast. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you don’t miss an episode. For more resources and to keep up with the show, visit dragon three sixty.com. Until next time.