Here is a transcript generated by Otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with VeraContent’s Kyler Canastra and Jeroen Corthout, co-founder of Salesflare, on the importance of empathy in content marketing and sales:

Kyler Canastra 0:13
Hi, everyone, I’m Kyler from The Content Mix. And I’m excited to be here with you Jeroen Corthout, who is the co-founder of Salesflare, which is listed as the number one CRM system by Product Hunt. Jeroen is currently based in Antwerp, where he’s busy working with the Salesflare team. Salesflare is an intelligent CRM, which startups and small businesses love to use. It’s a zero input sales pipeline tool that thinks and works for its user, not the other way around. So no more manual data entry Salesflare fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the people you’re in contact with. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Jeroen. Thank you so much for joining us today and The Content Mix.

Jeroen Corthout 0:52
Yeah, thanks for having me. Super happy to be here.

Kyler Canastra 0:55
So to get the interview started, kind of want to learn more about who you are. So you tell us a bit more about yourself, and explain a bit more about your background experience. And essentially, how did you end up where you are today?

Jeroen Corthout 1:10
Long story? short story?

Kyler Canastra 1:12
into the long story. It’s fine, long story.

Jeroen Corthout 1:16
So I’m your core talent and co founder and CEO of Salesflare. I am 35 years old, I have a dog though. Like Kyler already said Salesflare is a CRM system for small and medium sized businesses. A CRM system that means like it’s actually a sales CRM. So it’s focused on helping salespeople or people who do sales, at least follow up their leads in a better way. And like Kyler said, zero input in the sense that most CRMs need a ton of data input if you want to get some value back, and Salesflare automates all that. So you don’t, you don’t have to fill it out constantly, and it actually helps you perform better. Now, how I got to doing this? I think most of it started when I was like 15/16. I was building websites. It was a, it was not a new new thing at that point. But it was sort of for me, I have been first playing around with geo cities. That was in the beginning, like a thing which you could build is very, very simple websites. And then I wanted to take a step up. And then I started, I built a website for myself first, which was mainly built with flash actually, which back in the day still existed. It was it was popular, and you could build anything with it and animated and make it interactive. It was amazing. It was it was such a step up over and over like normal HTML back then. And now the tables have turned but so I really enjoyed that I made one for myself first, then I made one for my mom who was an architect. And then I started making some from other people had I really saw myself like starting a business. Based on that. I was going to have a web design business. I think like many, many entrepreneurs that are in software business right now. It’s like the web design business was the dream back then. And then to make a very long story short, I studied engineering, first thinking that that would help me with my web design business. But also because my dad was an engineer and I was raised us to become engineers. I didn’t end up doing computer engineering or so I chose for electronical engineering with business management and then moved into biomedical engineering, I want to do something more with people rather than purely engineering job. I always really liked the aspect of creating something for people, not just not just the creating by itself, or the science or whatever. And actually, then when I finished my studies, biomedical engineering, I went to applying for jobs and it seemed that nobody wanted to give me anything else in a pure engineering job. So what I ended up doing after that was was business school. I wanted to get into quote unquote business and do something there and that actually allowed me after a year of business school to to get straight into a marketing role is completely different. But it was fun because my thinking behind that was like I want to put products into a market and what better experiences to be a product manager. It was at a pharma company for me because I came from the the medical backgrounds right. But you know, I thought that is a great idea, it would teach me so much I thought about how to do that. Now, in the end, the role that I ended up taking as my first job was very, very limited. I was basically making brochures based on international brochures and then teaching the sales team how to use them. And I also create one site, and other people come to me with their sites, which was cool, because I knew a lot about it, and nobody else sits around there. So and then, because I was so bored, you know, I always knew that I wanted to start my own company, I thought I’m gonna do it from here. And my, one of my ideas was to start a web business for pharma companies. But then, when I started looking at that, and I talked to some people, I actually found out that somebody I knew had a business like that. But like, at a totally different level. It was a marketing consultancy helping pharma companies to go digital, whereas they come from a very straight sales model, the world had changed and pharma companies had to change that there was a lot of work to do. And I ended up working there. I worked there for about four years, during which time I learned a ton about marketing. Specifically, like the new way of doing marketing, let’s say, not the old print stuff, and all some of that as well, but mainly digital marketing. I was also an account manager there. So my role was sort of double 40% of my time I would spend selling and taking care of customers and 60% of the time, I was actually managing projects. And I learned a lot about both. But during that time I, I went part time, I tried different startup projects. To make a long story short, most of them failed. And Salesflare is my my first successful one actually grew from another project, where we were selling business intelligence software. And after a conference, we had so many leads, we needed a way to close them consistently, we need a way to follow up well, and we tried different systems. And we just didn’t have the discipline to keep up with any of them, it seemed like all of these systems came with, with an expectation that we would fill them out perfectly all the time, huge amount of discipline, and we just didn’t have that. And now we figured like, actually, what we’re doing here is automatable, all of the information we’re filling out is already in our It’s already in our mailbox, it’s in our calendar, it’s in our phones, and social media, company databases, email tracking, web tracking, all this kind of stuff. And we can build a system that pulls it all together. And that’s, that’s that’s where we find ourselves Salesflare. We saw like this, like CRMs are supposed to do this. They don’t because nobody wants to do that. And we can fix it. And that’s the very, very spark for Salesflare.

Kyler Canastra 8:18
Yeah, it’s very interesting, because I think would love the guests that we have in The Content Mix, a lot of them have similar story to you, they kind of have a passion. So you kind of started off with the website design, which led you to one thing to the next and kind of how you don’t really expect to get to where you are, when you started, you weren’t thinking, I’m gonna do this, you knew you want to start a business, but you kind of combined all of your passions together to meet Salesflare, which is seems like a very cool tool. I was looking at it before, it seems really, really exciting. But I guess my question now is, what’s the big differentiating factor for Salesflare, because there’s a lot of CRMs out there on the market. And I want to learn a bit more about why Salesflare is unique.

Jeroen Corthout 8:58
Yeah, like, like I said, we basically fixed the main issue with CRMs, is that you don’t use it because it’s just too much work. Somehow, people think it’s normal to give you a system in which you have to do a ton of manual work before you even get a little bit back. And then many of these systems are even. They’re not easy to use. They’re not fast, they’re not integrated into your workflows, you have to do all this manual data input. And when all of this, you overcome all these obstacles, let’s say, then it still doesn’t really help you. And then if you work in a team environment, your sales managers looking over your shoulder what you’re doing and saying don’t do this, do that, you know, so as a salesperson, you’re like, you really hate it. I hate the CRM thing. And we want to fix that because CRMs are supposed to actually help you help you sell and then bring some of these other good things to the company as well or the sales manager. knows what’s going on, where he can make forecasts, do some proper coaching, the marketing team knows what’s going on. You know, you can, you can probably say, properly segment your, your leads or your customers and gather insights from data, target them with new stuff. And all of that only works if if the very basics of it work, which is you keeping it up to date and using it as an actual sales tool.

Kyler Canastra 10:31
Right. So it seems like the tool itself is providing people with autonomy, but also with transparency. So people kind of have known they can work on their own projects without having that sales manager, which we all fear over our shoulders, but also, the sales manager is going to be able to and the whole team going to be informed about what’s going on and the status of certain projects. So it really seems like a great tool. Because a lot of CRMs, don’t do that it kind of gives full transparency, and you don’t have a lot of autonomy in the work that you’re working on. So I am interested to because I was looking at the content that you guys have on your website. And obviously this is The Content Mix. And this is our main topic. Yeah, patient’s content marketing. But could you explain to us a bit more about your content strategy at Salesflare?

Unknown Speaker 11:15
Our golden strategy, basically, we offer software, and that software helps you take better care of your customers sell better, more organized, and all that. Now our software is only so much. It’s a it’s a system in which you organize stuff and automate things and control things and you know, collaborate. But around that, there’s a whole question of how do you work with it? How do you organize yourself more broadly, within sales? And then maybe other stuff, even like things that don’t have anything directly to do with Salesflare. You have all these questions like how, how do I run a business? Where can I get inspiration, all this kind of stuff. And our content strategy is, first and foremost. And at least over the past two years now, we focus very much on things that are very complimentary to Salesflare, in the sense that it’s really content around it. Whereas in the past, I think the one or two years before that, we were like writing anything that was interesting to you, because we just wanted to build up traffic. And then before that, we were actually our strategy was different, again, that we were like more focused on building up value and hype. So we’ve shifted a lot over time. But it makes that we have these very different sorts of types of content on our sites, some of it drives an enormous amount of traffic. But it doesn’t bring us a lot of leads, some of it is really valuable to our customers and prospects and drives as much many more leads. And other is is just things that you know, people look at and they share. And they’re like, Oh my god, this is amazing type of content. So the shareable stuff. And this is we ask the free also republish often. So you can see the different types of contents coming back. We spend a lot of time not just on creating contents, but I’m distributing and redistributing and optimizing making them better. Because there’s so much value in what already exists versus thing, new stuff we create.

Kyler Canastra 13:49
And how would you describe your target audience? Because I can, from what I can tell is you have some posts that really generate a lot of traffic to the website, which I’m assuming is SEO and all that, but also you’re trying to get leads at the same time. So do you have to think about how one content might be better for traffic, while the other one might be better for clients and potential leads? How does that work for you guys?

Jeroen Corthout 14:11
Yeah, our target audience, it’ll see it. Also, when you look at our content, there’s like a few things that pulled off traffic or things like startup conferences and startup podcasts and things like that. investor, we have a big investor list also, or on the other hands, things like how to build a marketing agency. And things around this kind of things like tools for marketing agencies and stuff. And now we have a lot of content around sales. So our target audience you already sort of guessed is like startups, at least historically, we focused a lot of startups more and more it’s it’s more like tech companies than it is startups because the type of companies and our software also But we have a lot of agencies mainly on the software. That means like marketing agencies, software development companies, consultancies, are very popular with these people. Did you have another question or surrounding this, or?

Kyler Canastra 15:18
Well, I was gonna ask you more about like the content and how it resonates with your audience. But I was looking at the blog before and I saw, like, there was a post about, I think that you did how to manage a remote team, I don’t mind making that up. But it was really cool. Like you’re providing also not just, you know, content about what Salesflare does, and how like, it’s gonna be beneficial. If you’re also giving content, it’s meaningful for people like in the agencies you mentioned, and how to manage the team. So it seems like really like a great place to learn more about certain work that we can do and our day to day lives as well.

Unknown Speaker 15:50
That’s actually from some of the content which that I mentioned is like, stuff, we do other things like, okay, we can share this also with the world, like how to manage a remote team is mostly around the learnings we had in the first months of the pandemic, how we adjusted ourselves, and how that helped us. I did a presentation about that at a conference and we turn into a blog post as well, because then other people can use it too. We’re not necessarily entirely married to the everything needs to be SEO and drive leads, although that’s where most of our efforts go nowadays. Because we also need to get some some business value from it. And of course, we still keep creating the same amount of business value for people reading it. But then it’s more more people reading it on a consistent basis, willing to Salesflare let’s say so.

Kyler Canastra 16:49
Right. And from previous like we did some research for the interview, and we realized that you don’t rely on copywriters, and you guys write it internally, from what I can tell. So why don’t you rely on copywriters? And what do you do instead? at Salesflare?

Jeroen Corthout 17:06
We don’t do that, because we want to actually offer value. What we see is that it’s great to have copywriters write stuff as long as they know the topic. As soon as you pick a topic and you tell a copywriter, please write about sales or sales pipelines, for instance, and they have no idea what it’s about, then what I signed up past is I would have to spend way too much of my time creating an outline of what I thought was was important in there, then they would write something, the feeling of the outline would be kind of fluffy. And then I would have to correct that and know that the writing would be great. But the content wouldn’t really be there. Because what happens basically if you say like, please write something about sales pipeline is as a copywriter, you don’t you don’t really know right? So what you do is you start googling, and you’re you read other stuff. Now the problem is that these things are also not written by experts. Most of these things are also written by copywriters, and it becomes a sort of giants. Can I say,

Kyler Canastra 18:21
as vicious cycle?

Jeroen Corthout 18:23
Yeah, so vicious cycle which is almost downwards, in the sense that it always gets more fluffy. Right, because copywriters read with other copywriters role to know and read what other copywriters wrote and then it just becomes more fluffy. So then in the end, the end result is that you as a as a as a person, you want to you want to learn something, go on the internet, and you read a thing. And you’re like, Okay, I just read something, but I had no idea I didn’t learn anything. And then you go to the next thing. We want to avoid that. And actually, the nice thing for us is then in a sea of fluff. It’s much easier to write something that stands out. Because Google will also recognize it if people end up in your article and don’t go checking out orders anymore. And then other things like that, right, Google’s Google knows, and you much more easily rank without needing like a ton of backlinks. It just the engagements. And just the fact that it seems that people found their answer, right. Google ranked you way quicker.

Kyler Canastra 19:35
It’s interesting. I did not know that. But it also I really like how not only are you providing accurate information to people about the sales pipeline on things that revolves around the product that you’re selling, but at the same time, you’re it’s kind of like where it gets to be an article by you. So it’s like we actually work with Salesflare. We’re going to be working with you and we actually have content that’s true and accurate and kind of coming. So that also that you guys care now about Yeah, I think that’s one thing that’s important. It’s the value behind it,

Jeroen Corthout 20:06
you can definitely and you asked like, how do we how do we done? What do we then do if we if we don’t use copywriters, right? We write indeed part of our content in house like if we feel that we, we know the topic and finding someone and getting someone else to write is going to take more time, then it just makes more sense that we just write it. But then for other things like we’ve done a bunch of master classes, for instance, like a sales pipeline, master class and Sales Automation master class and a content marketing master class for those were interested.

Kyler Canastra 20:44
Check it out.

And the other one is startup funding masterclass. And those, we just I come up with an outline. Make makes sense as a structure. It’s like a series of blog posts, right. But all of the blog posts separately, make sense? And are can also be a landing page for SEO, let’s say. Now, when you do a content marketing masterclass, that was easy. I have a friend of mine, she’s a content marketer, she writes really well. I mean, that sort of comes together in one package. That was really, really easy to have someone that’s really an expert, right? Well, and all that I didn’t have a lot of work without the startup funding masterclass, I was, I was very happy to have another friend who knows all about startup funding, and he doesn’t write too bad, I had to correct some stuff here. And there, you know, the issue becomes if you if you want to find people who know a lot about sales and can also write that’s really, really difficult. So for some things, this is this is easy. And for some that’s it’s less easy. But then again, if you if you make a master class, and you have it written by one expert, if you find that one experts, you’reyou’re you’re you’re set.

Exactly, and where can people find the master classes on your website?

Jeroen Corthout 22:11
Um, it’s on our blog. I think if you just type content marketing master class, you might find it and otherwise you add Salesflare behind it. And you’ll for sure find it’s your type content marketing masterclass. It’s the fourth post in Google, for me at least. But if you’re at Salesflare, it’ll be post number one,obviously.

Kyler Canastra 22:36
Everyone, definitely check that out. It seems like I’m gonna check it out after this, it seems very interesting. And also, in another part of our preparation for the interview, we learned that Salesflare search traffic increased by 70% for a period of three weeks. So how did that happen? And what did you specifically do to get those results in such a short amount of time?

Jeroen Corthout 22:58
It’s a very basic thing. But it’s only shows that some things that you might ignore for a long time are really important. What we did was we fixed some performance issues on our blog. Literally, it’s to be precise, we replaced some bigger images with smaller ones, which made our pages loaded quicker. We lazy loaded some stuff. We had some Java scripts moved from here to there, you know, all this kind of stuff, too. If you if you do a Google page insights, thing, check what’s there solve these things. And then additionally, we also had this issue between our, our hosting provider and CloudFlare, where basically, the hosting provider was often blocking the calls from CloudFlare with their spam filter, because they often came from the same IP, which then would would create all kinds of issues. Once we solve all these things. All of a sudden, we were very surprised as well. Just our ranking started started skyrocketing. And we’re like, why didn’t we do this earlier?

Kyler Canastra 24:09
And were you able to maintain that growth after that?

Unknown Speaker 24:12
Yeah, no, it’s I think it went from what, at least an H refs, it went from like something like 12 or 13k organic traffic to one but they count, right? They have it’s not it’s not super accurate, but and then it went to 70 Gate fell a bit back and now it’s, it’s it’s back to that level, I think. And it’s even increasing, so maybe it will go higher than last time. We’ll see.

Kyler Canastra 24:43
That’s great. So everyone, make sure you check your hosting and make sure everything is put into place. So make sure your traffic grows.

Jeroen Corthout 24:51
Yeah, technical SEO and performance definitely, definitely. Particular SEO. We have done already performance. We’re sort of like okay, All, it’s difficult to fix this, and then you just

Kyler Canastra 25:03
kind of forget it, don’t do it. And you have a lot of experiences we learn at the beginning of the podcast, in different fields, marketing, engineering, web, design, all these great things. But I want to ask you, in your opinion now, in 2021, where are the most important skills, we’re marketers nowadays, to have to kind of navigate this crazy world that we’re living in?

Jeroen Corthout 25:29
I think sort of the necessary empathy. But it’s just it’s, it’s, it’s probably more of where you apply your energy than just the fact when you can empathize. It’s more that you do an effort to do that, right? You know, we live in a world where a lot of things happen at scale, especially in marketing is basically sales at scale, you could say, right, and it’s, it’s, it’s very easy to forget who’s on the other side, you know, people turn into numbers instead of actual people. And just thinking beyond that, thinking, like, okay, we’re not going to focus on one of the people that comes on our site. And I am that person. And I imagine like, what am I seeing here? What do I expect? What is the best possible experience? How can we make it even better? How will I feel respected? What will? What will sort of Wow, me and all these kind of things, right? Just going the extra mile there makes a big difference. And that’s not just in marketing. It’s even in sales nowadays. Like, there’s a lot of Sales Automation going on, for sure. And, you know, he gets in all kinds of emails where you you read the manual? Like, how can anybody think that this is going to work on me? You know, yeah, with almost every email I like,

Unknown Speaker 27:03
okay, that doesn’t

Jeroen Corthout 27:05
make sense. If that person would have would have actually applied some empathy, like on the person to person basis, like felt like, Okay, how would I approach a friend about this or something right? Then Then these kind of messages could be so much better. And it’s a general in general, and marketing, any other share?

Kyler Canastra 27:25
I think as technology improves, and we’re kind of moving into this world of instant gratification, we want things done quick and fast. It’s easier to forget the human part of it. As you mentioned, maybe it’s so important that when you’re producing content, or you’re in sales, or marketing, that the other side of the receiving end of this information is a person. So it’s really important to remember that, you know, if you receive that email, would you respond to it? Make sure yeah, questions like that, to really don’t beg, listen, the most important thing is, what you said is that don’t forget that the human aspect of it, that’s what makes perfectly good. And as we come towards the end or interview, we always kind of ask our guests about some recommendations that they can give to our listeners to improve their professional and personal life. So I think nowadays, we’ve heard a lot about habits especially with lockdown, like they need to have good habits, daily habits for success and to make sure we stay sane. So for you Do you have any daily habits that you would recommend that you think make you more successful in your daily life, um,

Jeroen Corthout 28:29
I have a lot of daily habits, but maybe to pull it over focus on a slightly different thing. Because most most people on the podcast probably talk about some daily habit, we actually take this up on a company level as well, in the sense of that we saw is like, if we put goals like we want x, more traffic, everyone’s so much more conversion, and you know, those kind of things, it’s all cool, but it doesn’t really motivate us over the year. And we tend to not reach the goals if we don’t translate that into habits. So we basically for 2020 plan, our 2021 plan, we set results goals, and then we transform those into habits and that’s what we focus on during the year and then the goals you know, we can measure them in school right? And we see Oh, we’ve been successful, but if you don’t focus on these habits is never going to happen. So we we set out things we do on a monthly basis for instance, we create x features onboarding improvements, growth improvements as your articles visible outside our own audience and we have all like measures for all this kind of things. We track what do we actually reach these these habits so that we on a on a consistent basis sort of have that input and then the output follows which is first we’re much more likely to hit our goals. And secondly, it’s also much easier to stay motivated. Because these goals are sort of the long run, we would like to get there kind of thing while you do anything, you see you check it off and boom, you’re not

Kyler Canastra 30:16
exactly that’s as much cooler. I think one of my I’ve looked I’ve read in the past year, which I loved is called atomic habits. A lot of people have heard about it, it seems like that’s what you’re doing. I

Jeroen Corthout 30:26
read it also, I

Kyler Canastra 30:26
think, yeah, it’s great. If you haven’t read it, read it. But basically talks about how habits, he set these big goals. And then we kind of lose motivation, because it’s overwhelming. And I think that’s what you have in your companies, you have these goals, but then you’re breaking it down into smaller things that seem more tangible. And that people, you know, and then so by breaking it down, people are actually going to reach their goals, because it seems like more realistic. I think we get very overwhelmed, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. And we have like, okay, by the end of this quarter and the end of this year, we need to have this, this and this. And then we kind of spiral as humans, I think it’s a natural reaction. So I think it’s really cool that you’re

Jeroen Corthout 31:02
definitely that’s how it happens. And we’re taking sort of a next step now, or one of my, one of my colleagues, I was like, Okay, I have this habits and stuff. But I would like to have them better defined, better tracked and better. Because she saw ads. She’s way more motivated, motivated, if she sees like, get kicked off. So we’re just we keep improving on that. So there’s, like you said a bit earlier, we have all this instant gratification, it’s a sort of more instant gratification in that sense, then which is exactly.

Kyler Canastra 31:37
And I yeah, we get overwhelmed. And then we don’t get overwhelmed, you’re not going to make a good habit. And you have to kind of start small to go big. And I think that’s also fine in general. Okay, if you want to start a business or you want to do this, okay, you have a goal, but you have to focus on the journey and how it’s going to be in certain phases. It’s not going to go in once and I think change takes time. So I think that’s really, really cool thing.

Jeroen Corthout 32:01
That’s that’s really a big point as well, I actually I used to be way more frustrated, like, okay, we didn’t reach this huge goal yet. And then I would be like beating myself up like, Oh, my God, we didn’t reach this yet, and then find another way and find another way, instead of just consistently adding effort. Because that’s in the end, realistically, what’s going to get you there,

Kyler Canastra 32:22
for sure. And in Do you have any professional role models that kind of act as a source of inspiration for you.

Jeroen Corthout 32:30
I’m not particularly I read a lot of books. And recently, it’s it has been more of the opposites. Like I’ve read books with like the sort of stories that went wrong, like I read the one about WeWork. And then I read an older book about long term capital management’s. I don’t know whether you know that one, but it’s sort of like, I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen the documentary about Enron is sort of the same thing. But then in a hedge fund, like people that think they’re really smart, and they do stuff like this, and that and the culture turns like this, and then things first go really well. And then they go terribly wrong. Right. And that’s, that’s more of my source of inspiration right now. But if you if you want to have more of a positive story, I think the one the biography of Phil Knight, Nike, which is called “Shoe Dog” is really amazing.

Kyler Canastra 33:29
I definitely check it out. And also Federation, you mentioned a book called “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, and I was curious, do you think sleep so important, but why is that that’s important to you.

Jeroen Corthout 33:44
I think if I would ever write a book on how not to fail as a startup company, or as well, mostly a startup company, because that’s where it’s really critical. I probably in the first chapter, talk about the importance of sleep, the importance of eating well, exercising, staying balanced, these kind of things, influence your productivity, it influences your moods, how stable you are, how well you can think, and it all starts from there. If you don’t respect that, and you go with the sort of hustle night and day kind of philosophy that this while at least used to be very popular in startup world, then it’s it’s not going to be sustainable. And you might more work really hard for a bit but then everything comes crashing down.

Kyler Canastra 34:38
Exactly. And I think as an American, that’s something that’s really ingrained in our culture, at least is that you have you can’t like you can have to work or you have to sleep you have to there’s no balance. And I think we kind of, you know, you’re more productive when you’re working all night long or crazy hours. I think we’re just like brainwashed in that way. So it’s really refreshing to hear like I it’s something that I’ve incorporated in my own life and to hear from some Unlike you and from other guests that we’ve had, it’s really important to have a balance in terms of, it’s not all about work, you need to take care of yourself to be more productive, be more successful, for sure. And we’re coming to the end of the interview. But before we say goodbye, I do want to ask, if you have any final takeaways or parting advice that you’d like to give our audience or anything that you know, you use in your, your work, life or noon, that you think would be really good for them to take from this interview.

Jeroen Corthout 35:31
Yeah, I think maybe wrapping up from some of the stuff I said. And it’s gonna sound cliché, but focus a bit more on quality than quantity. Improving rather than running faster and doing more. That’s really important when it comes to whatever, including content marketing. It’s not necessary to churn out an enormous amount of articles. You can, you can even cut back, remove the ones that are not great, update the ones you already have, re-promote them, see whether you can optimize the SEO title so you get more traffic to them, whether you can optimize the beginning of them, optimize the CTAs, optimize the performance, all this kind of stuff. There’s often way more value in taking a step back and improving stuff rather than just running forward and doing more whatever.

Kyler Canastra 36:28
Reflecting basically, you know, and making sure every action has a reason behind it. Rather than

Jeroen Corthout 36:33
taking a moment to reflect. We have ingrains a lot of that in our in our way of working. We have like bi weekly team meetings in which we look at the good and the bad of the last two weeks. And the bad we fix and the good stuff we learn from you have monthly one on ones we have. every three months, we have a growth ideas meeting where we think about all kinds of stuff we can improve to make our growth better. And we have the support approach proven stuff. And we have a lot of things like that, where every time is like, okay, we’re doing stuff, but how can we do it in a better way?

Kyler Canastra 37:08
Because there’s there’s much more to win there than just doing lots of stuff, for sure. And for our listeners who want to get in contact with you or kind of follow you on any social media platform or anything. Where can we get in touch? Yeah,

Jeroen Corthout 37:23
if it’s about the company, checking out Salesflare salesflare.com, you can find out about software, try it and stuff. And if you want to get in touch with me, LinkedIn is probably the best place. You can find me by my name, there’s no water you’ll cut out. Send me a connection request. But don’t forget personal message. I get a ton of spam every day. And if you don’t differentiate yourself with a personal message, then just assume it’s spam. But if you do then I will get in touch with you and we can have a chat.

Kyler Canastra 37:55
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much Jeroen for taking the time to join us today. Our perspectives on content marketing. Make sure to tune in to our podcasts with content experts across Europe and check out our published episodes at veracontent.com/mix. See you next time. Thank you

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