How Do You Build a Content Engine That Actually Drives Revenue?

Pritesh Vora (PV) (00:02) Can we deliver enough value to be called or to earn that authority to earn that tag? That's the first thing I would recommend people do, like start identifying what are those promises that you want to make and reader promises from the lens of reader. Ben Ard (00:40) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Pritesh. Pritesh, welcome to the show. Pritesh Vora (PV) (00:45) Thank you so much, Ben. A pleasure to be here. Ben Ard (00:47) Yeah, pre-tash. I'm excited. This is going to be a fun experience. This is going to be a great conversation. I love your background. I love your work history. Just to kick things off before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you a little bit. Let's get to know your background. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about yourself, that'd be awesome. Pritesh Vora (PV) (01:05) Sure thing. So I'm an engineer by education program for the first few years and was bit by the bug of growing a business. That's when I entered the startup ecosystem and I've been there for the last 13 plus years now. I in between I moved from business development to business growth to starting my own company, which was acquired as well. And then helped two companies grow eight to 10 X and 30 X in the last two stints that I've been. I'm generally like to call myself like I'm a revenue engine builder. And I help companies build revenue engines and primarily cutting across which essentially where I can leverage different levers of growth in the business and then help them scale, either build or scale their business growth. So that's what I love doing. That's what I keep doing. I love orchestrating the business, the growth story of an org. I've always been in B2B. And my last stint was also Sprinto, where I joined them, which was less than very early days, like a handful of customers. And I've seen them grow to, helped them grow to thousands of customers now across the board, taking them from slightly less than 300 odd K revenues to multimillion dollar revenues today, where they stand. And in the process also build a team of 50 plus people. which was more than just marketing. Marketing was my anchor, but I helped build a lot of other systems like BDR partnerships, operations and other pieces under me. Yeah, that's pretty much what I love to do. I can keep going on, but I'll take a pause here and we can move on. Ben Ard (02:41) No, this is fantastic. Pre-tesh, what I got from that is that you know what you're talking about. So I'm excited to hear your insights, pick your brain. This is going to be a ton of fun. What we're going to talk about today for the audience is how teams can build a content engine that connects strategy, quality, and real outcomes. So to kick things off, Pre-tesh, when content teams plan their quarters in advance, what should they focus on before anything else? Any advice there? Pritesh Vora (PV) (03:07) Yeah. So before I go there, right, I would love to share my primary POV or belief on content, which will then probably help answer the next one as well. So I honestly feel that, and I have a firm belief that that content is the central energy API of the company. You know, it's a fabric that cuts across marketing, sales, products, CS, even getting good talent, hiring. So with that belief, the first thing I do is define a model compass. And I've realized this after several failed attempts that the guiding compass for me is, we making a real human's life. Now I have to use a real human in AI, but a real human's life better or adding some value for them, even for five minutes. That's our moral compass. Our first job is to deliver delightful, genuinely helpful reading or viewing or content piece. Then if that's a moral compass, then you can layer everything on top of that. Like you can call SEO, GEO. or GPTO, distribution revenue, everything on top of that. Content for me is not an also do, but it's a core revenue driver. And that's how I like to think and measure as well. So, but the challenge is when teams flip that order, that's when they burn trust. And then they end up writing for Google or someone else. But when they get the order right, Content stops being just about blogs, but it becomes a serious revenue lever that touches across the board. So that's my core belief. That's my compass when it comes to content. with that, to your question, I strongly believe that when content teams want to plan their quarter, the first thing that they should focus on is What is the, who are we serving? What do we want to change for them? The second part is more important. What do we want to change for them? What is the promise that we want to deliver? Not keywords, but what is the promise, you know, the famous hub and spoke model. You can think of that. By the end of this quarter, our ex-ICP will become the go-to place for this. If not in a quarter, at least we move in that direction. That's the promise that we talk about. What is the promise that we want to deliver? Can we deliver enough value to be called or to earn that authority to earn that tag? That's the first thing I would recommend people do, like start identifying what are those promises that you want to make and reader promises from the lens of reader. The second pieces like tying each promise to a revenue moment. They need to live together. They cannot be separate. So for each of whatever buckets or promise that you pick up, we need to ask, we should ask, where would this show up in revenue in reality? Is it more qualified leads? Are we helping unblock? certain momentum during a sales process if something is stuck. we helping accelerate that? Are we helping enable higher win rate for a segment? What are we trying to do? So each promise that we pick up should relate to a revenue moment. And that's the second aspect of this. The third aspect of this, is often under looked, but having a no-go list, essentially. What is it that we aren't deliberately not going to do this quarter? It's very easy to, in today's world especially, right? If you go by keywords, it's very easy to pick, okay, let's pick 50 keywords from 10 different streams of conversations that we can have. And that potentially may work for some companies, but I feel we are not our moral compass is not justified in that. We are not aiming to deliver value to our readers, but instead to the machines. So having that, that's just an example, but having that like what we are not going to deliberately do this quarter will have a deep impact in how you plan. The last is you need a way to be able to define success and success can be in revenue. but also in terms of audience. At the end of the day, if you're writing something where your intent is to help the readers, you should be able to measure if your reader thank you for what you've written. Are readers grateful for what you've written and are they coming back to consume what you are writing? And that's measured by audience. And audience is an extremely good measure of the quality of content that you would write. and beyond the business metrics of SQLs or win rate or cycle acceleration, et cetera, So that's how I would like to think of it. If you can fit these things in a slide or a short note, I think that's perfect. But if your content plan looks like a Wikipedia or a Notion Wiki, then you're probably working on something else. Your alignments are different. Ben Ard (07:55) Okay. There's so much to dissect there. So many good points. And one of the things I want to double click on that I have never seen anyone talk about, let alone do it is what you said about specifying exactly what you were not going to do that quarter. I feel like there is a lot of teams that are good at prioritizing. They can go out there. Like you said, and here's all the things that we want to accomplish. Let's pick the big ones. But I think it's really important for teams to be comfortable to say, here's everything we are not going to do. And I think it helps people align around, okay, this is what we're going to accomplish. This is not what we're going to accomplish. And how did you come up with that? How do you execute it? How do you actually share with the rest of the organization what you're not going to accomplish? How does that look? Cause again, I've never seen this in practice and Pritesh I'd love to learn kind of how you got to this and how that works. Pritesh Vora (PV) (08:54) Yeah, so I mean, it came out of inherent. situation that happened, which is. Content is often treated as a... ⁓ What's a delicate way to put it, but anyways, they're often treated as everyone's asset. Like anyone in the org can think of dumping something on content team and saying, yeah, let's help me generate this, help me generate that. And that typically leads to chaos. And that's precisely what happened. Everyone is running in different directions. Everyone is running helter-skelter trying to meet those requirements or those deadlines. which also meant that we aren't really, we are making progress, but it's just incremental in nature. We are not really moving the needle for on one specific dimension. And that also means it's going to show in your business outcomes. And that's precisely what was happening, like being pulled helter skelter in different directions. So the need for prioritization began from there, but also Especially relatively if you're a smaller team, it's easier to get the leaders aligned on what the priorities of the org are. That's why I feel like OKRs are a beautiful structure if implemented across the org. And OKRs at the company level help define what needs to be executed or prioritized at different levels. And then... You know, you can always look back at the OKR and say, this is my priority. This is what I'm going to do. And this is not the priority, which I unfortunately, if I have excess time, I'm going to get to it, but not in my priority list. And I'll have to deprioritize this for now. That's one way. But the other way, you know, you can plan all you want, but it's only as good as until executed. So Although the OKRs are well planned, the intentions are all good, but there are always going to be scenarios where you need to still do things outside of OKR. And that constantly comes up. And so having an agreement amongst the key folks in the the org of the focus for the quarter makes it easy to say what we are going to take up and what we are not going to take up. And once that list or that agreement is finalized, it can be distributed across the teams. And it is each leader's also responsibility to take it to their teams. But if there is a defined agreement, you can always point to that agreement and say, this is what we are going to focus on in this quarter. It makes it easier with any request that comes in. You will never deny those requests, but You know what order of priority to work on. And that allows you to maintain, okay, this is what we are going to do, what we are not going to do. A very rough basic framework, Ben Ard (11:23) So are you putting these like, So are you putting like the here's what we're not going to do. You said like an agreement. Is that living in your OKRs? Is it a slide in a presentation? How are you actually like getting people to say, okay. And you're actually getting people to say, yes, I agree. We are not going to get those things done. So I'm not going to bug you about them. Is that kind of how it works? Pritesh Vora (PV) (11:34) So it's a document. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So to the team, especially see the team needs to feel also needs to aligned on this. They also need the assurance that there's not constant chopping that's going around. And so an agreement of any sort is helpful because you can always go back to that agreement and and then take a call. Is this something that is legit or not legit? And so an agreement can live anywhere, but as long as that agreement is an agreement between two parties, or let's say between me and my team, and we've agreed to something, I think that's good enough. Working, whether it lives in the OKRs, whether it lives in OceanDoc, somewhere else it doesn't matter. Ben Ard (12:21) love that. That's amazing. Well, Pritesh these episodes go by so quickly. There's a lot to pull out of this one. This is fascinating. I love your process. I love how you tie content to revenue and then look at specific levers about this content ties to this specific motion in the revenue cycle. All of it's so fascinating. I love this concept of here's what we're not going to get done and here's what we are going to done. This is so cool pre-tash for anyone listening. who would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Pritesh Vora (PV) (12:51) LinkedIn is the best bet for me. Pritesh Vora or T-H-E-V-O-R-A. Like if you search with that, that's the handle on the URL. That works as well. Ben Ard (13:02) Perfect. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. We will have a link there to connect with Pritesh on his LinkedIn profile. Pritesh, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really appreciate it. Pritesh Vora (PV) (13:12) Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ben, for having me.