Benjamin Ard00:55 — Welcome back to another episode of Content to Close. Today I'm joined by Nat. Nat, welcome to the show.
Nat Norris01:00 — Ben, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation today.
Benjamin Ard01:03 — Yeah, Nat, this is going to be fun. I'm excited to dive in. I think everyone involved in content and enablement, they're all focused on the same things. And I think we're going to dive into some really powerful lessons today. And I'm excited to learn from you. Before we dive in, though, let's get to know your work history background, just so the audience kind of knows a little bit about who you are before we dive into the subject.
Nat Norris01:24 — Hey, thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah. So Ben, again, I'm here in Indianapolis. I'm the VP of marketing and customer success here for a company called Model One. Model One is a commercial dealership. We're nationwide, and we sell things that you probably see every day. We sell everything from work trucks to cargo vans to school buses and shuttle buses. And so those are the things that kind of drive businesses.
My job, you think of it like outside of marketing and all areas of marketing — my group also kind of leads some projects around the customer and the customer experience. I've worked with product information and the product team. I've also worked with the customer care team and working on getting feedback, and then also helped create like an inside sales team for really lead qualification, as we talk about content that creates leads. I've been here about two years.
In my two-year time, a lot of the focus has been on improving the view of the customer, building that team, and just making something scalable. I'll say "something" because it changes quite a bit on a small team, as you can probably imagine. Big fan of data and connecting dots. I've been doing this now for about 17 years. Before coming to Model One, I've always been in the B2B space for equipment.
A little bit more e-commerce in a different life — really more data in that space. Worked with a company that was owned by a larger holding company, and now I'm in a space where it's owned by single ownership, right? A family. So a lot of dynamics there too when it comes to both politically and then shifting priorities. So I think I have a lot here to kind of share with you and how we try to maintain priority and just make content that works, if you will.
Nat Norris03:09 — And make some money at the same time.
Benjamin Ard03:10 — I love it. That's amazing. Awesome. Now I'm excited to have you on. I'm excited about the subject. What we were emailing about before we started recording today is the feedback loop between sales and marketing. And this is so important. I don't care if you're on the sales side, marketing side, anywhere and everywhere between. This is so important for business success. So to kick things off, let's talk about sales enablement — how that's impacting lead generation beyond just like the immediate sales pipeline.
Nat Norris03:42 — Yeah, that's a great question too. So thanks, Ben. I appreciate it. To give some context — I'll talk about sales enablement. For me, it's kind of that glue that binds marketing, sales, and the customer. It's focused on the customer. We try to get pain points, what the potential solutions may be, and then how do we solve that problem through our sales channel and our organization.
You mentioned it's easy to kind of measure the sales enablement if it's in the pipeline. I think you see this in digital — that space has a really good feedback loop. But when it comes to outside the pipeline, I see sales enablement being really the glue for those departments. It helps us align the company and our work.
Yeah, I think that's the right way to say it. So it helps us prioritize what's important. And in that, we decide these are the things that are important to the customer, this needs to be important to us, and then how do we go about solving that problem as a group. With that alignment, we're speaking the same language, we're making sure we're creating priority, and then we're also getting aligned on the storytelling. We're saying the same things and being consistent.
For the company, Model One, we've grown like crazy since the pandemic. Model One used to be a company called Creative Bus Sales, and then they had some acquisitions. So even throughout the whole organization today, we still have, I guess, fossils of those other locations. So trying to get that — it's like herding cats — that whole sales group together to say the same thing. That's where I see sales enablement has really a lot of benefits, outside of just filling up the pipeline. I think that's probably the best way that I can say it. It's all internal, it's all organizational.
Benjamin Ard05:26 — I love that. That's cool. Okay. So, you know, often the story that we have and are really experiencing is we hand these marketing materials to the sales team, but we need to improve it and make sure it's working for customers and doing all that kind of good stuff — make sure it's actually moving the needle. What does that feedback loop on content actually look like, to make sure that the right content is being created? And then also that it's being improved upon over time to make sure it's really hitting the mark.
Nat Norris05:53 — The last part is even tougher than the first part. Tough questions here, Ben. I laugh already because I can't even count the number of white papers and content, brochures, and everything else, whether it's gated or not, that just sits there and kind of collects dust. We've got a great trophy case of all this stuff.
How do we get that feedback loop going? I think validation is the right word here that we're trying to get to — how are we validating the work that we need to get done? For me, it starts with the data. I came in, there wasn't a ton of data, and Power BI was literally still fresh to this organization. The first step for me was to start incorporating some hygiene around it. It sounds pretty boring, but really just collecting it and asking, what are we doing with this data? And does that answer the questions that we needed to answer?
We have like, oh, how many people view this, or how many emails open this — but does it really… you've got to pull that all the way through into the lead side of things to make sure it's really creating an opportunity for us to have a good conversation with the customer and then ultimately help solve that problem that they have.
It's a little bit different coming back from the digital space. I mentioned there's plenty of feedback there, but in this space of commercial vehicles, we do a lot of hand-to-hand combat. We have a lot of salespeople that go out. They really need to talk to people, especially in the government and schools, for the school buses and public transportation. We don't really get to see how that engagement happens. We just can't be on every demo or every sales call.
So for us, putting digital aside, we feel like we're pretty good about getting that feedback. For us, we have to get really — I'm going to say — in bed with the sales team. We're in the quote review meetings on a weekly basis. My sales team is organized in kind of a team of teams. I have different segments in the company, and then I have established leaders in my marketing team that will go and sit with the public group. Grant work, schools, what's municipalities doing. I have somebody that sits in the commercial side. So now we're talking about work trucks and cargo vans, the big fleets like enterprise. And then lastly, we have retail. Retail includes — you would consider them — like daycares or limo services or airport shuttles. All three of those have a little bit of nuance in terms of what sales enablement kind of resonates with them.
So I get my teams and I force them to spend time and sit with the sales group, and sometimes lead them. But what I'm proud of my group is that they've become really good listeners. They sit around and they just understand what's not working.
I think the biggest — there's two things there that I think have been helpful for us on the feedback loop. If you can hit a quote-lost or a deal-loss meeting — like, why did we lose that? That's great for marketing. That really illustrates where did we miss the boat. Sometimes you can't help them — they just didn't buy. But sometimes when they buy from somebody else or they buy something different, or they didn't buy our product, you really understand what was the customer's pain point that we missed.
The other one is, if you're not tracking that stuff in a CRM — and we weren't, and adoption is still something that we're trying to get better at — it's really tough for salespeople to put everything in a CRM. We have to try to get them to adopt, and try to help us understand and use the data behind it. Because then you can understand the size and scope, and then you can build priority on where are we trying to get our sales enablement to be better for that hand-to-hand combat.
So I hope that's all helpful there. It's like: get in bed with the sales team, understand why we lose — because we lose 80% of the time — and then find a way to track all that stuff. That provides a baseline.
Benjamin Ard09:46 — No, I love that. Well, I love also how you align your marketing team directly with the sales side of things as well.
One thing I love is that you guys are aligned with the sales team. You've got the individuals that — you've looked at the organization. Here are the three different groups of sales teams. And we have people on my team who are coordinating, who are becoming experts on that side. I also think it's cool — we're talking about feedback loops — where that sales team knows who to go to. They've got their marketing person. They can say, hey, I need your help, this is what I'm looking at, and they know who they are. They're in meetings with them. So I think that's incredible, just the structure of how you've done everything.
I also really love that you're talking about data. You talked about the data hygiene. You're talking about its validity. And also like how much effort — I mean, 100%, for sales reps to put in every little detail in the CRM, that's extremely difficult. Plus you have all the conversations, there's so much going on.
So let's say though that you have all the data, you're starting to collect it, you're starting to put it in your content. How do you balance the data story with this customer-centric story, the actual storytelling side of things? How do you mix and match those two things when you're creating content?
Nat Norris11:21 — Yeah, there's kind of a fine line there and how you walk that. Coming from an old product manager, you were tasked to sniff it out and really understand the product — kick the tires. I hear everywhere, "kick the tires," and you've got to know every spec and why that spec's important. So I fall in that trap. I know my team falls in that trap, just being around me.
What I've done in the past, and what I bring here to kind of help us mitigate that problem — I always go back to my old days as a catalog person. We had a catalog. We don't have one here, but we create a lot of paper brochures. In the catalog, we had a block and you had all this stuff, and they talk about square inch analysis and hero treatment and what needs to be on the outside and the positioning.
But the other thing that I kept is — they call it FABs. So Feature, Advantages, and Benefits. FAB. Every product has a feature, advantage, and benefit. The features are: you're commoditized, everybody's got it. Every TV's got a remote control — that's a feature. Then you get your advantages — like, oh, smart remote versus a dumb remote. There's an advantage there. And then the benefit really becomes: what does that mean to you? Like, you, as Ben — why is this smart remote great for you? Maybe it's got a kid lock on there so your kids can't mess with it and screw your TV up. Or something like that. Maybe that's a benefit that's helpful there. I don't know if that exists, but just as an example.
Benjamin Ard12:51 — I would dream of that. That's incredible. I love that idea.
Nat Norris13:06 — So when I look at a product and I want to tell the story behind it, the benefits are the most important piece. And if the product data can support the benefits, that's a must-have. You've got to talk about that level of the product. If it's a feature on the other side — let's bookend it — if it's a feature, it just needs to be available. You don't need to tell the story. If they want it, you've got to have it accessible, so it needs to be self-served. You push the benefit, you self-serve the feature.
And then in the middle, the advantage — it just really depends on the campaign and the story of where you're going. Are you the only person in the market with this as an advantage, or is it an advantage over a competitor, or is there something else? That part takes a little intimacy into the industry to understand, or into the campaign, to make sure you're making the right decision, and it can be tested.
That's kind of the framework I go with. I find that less is more, because even more today, most people don't sit around and read a white paper anymore. They pass it through — they get it scanned by ChatGPT — and they're pulling the most important points. So you've got to have those things there, but it also helps with the accessibility, because if it's on the bottom or the very end, or it is on a spec sheet, they can still find it. It just doesn't have to be something that they're messing with — the story, if you will. I hope that makes sense. I think I got complicated, but hopefully that makes sense to you.
Benjamin Ard14:27 — No, I love that. I mean, oddly enough, I've never heard of the FAB framework. It makes perfect sense. Everyone talks about features and benefits and all that kind of stuff. I like the acronym. I think that's super productive. I also love the data component in there. And I'm personally really passionate about data. I think it's really fascinating to talk about that.
So one final question, because we're running out of time — when you're looking at data and the feedback loop in general, there's a lot of collection. Your team is really good at being aligned. They're listeners, like you said. They're really closely with the salespeople. You've got better data hygiene now that you've come on, and you're starting to work with people on collecting the data. There's a lot of inputs. How do you know when you have enough? How do you know when it's the right amount, and then you take action on it versus, I need to keep digging? Any thoughts on that process?
Nat Norris15:24 — Yeah. God, man. I want to default to say there's never enough, right? I think that's just my economics background there. But you've got to get work done. So I'm pretty old school here. I look at two things, and I'll talk about how those two rules helped me here.
Big fan of Pareto — good buddy, 80-20 rule is a big piece of that. I'll talk about how you apply that. And the last thing — I guess I grew up with this — you never want to do anything bad that puts your name on the front page of the newspaper. So the worst-case scenario plays in my head too. I use those two as kind of some governance for me.
The 80-20 rule: we get all this data, and I feel like we go on tangents about the data. I try to go back to what the root cause was, or what's the mission, or what's the goal here. If I feel like we're close to 80, then I'll try to shoot holes into it. If there are enough holes in it, then we're obviously not at the 80. So I start to answer those questions — do we get to the 80%?
As I'm doing that, then I start to say, what's the worst-case scenario of any of these bullet holes that I just created? If it fails miserably, what's the worst thing that can happen? If it's not that big of a deal, hey, we're going to push it faster. We're going to go, and we're going to learn, and we'll ask for forgiveness later on. If it is a big deal, then I typically try to find some parachutes or safety nets for those bullet holes that are just so massive. If they're going to cost a lot of money, or they're going to set the company back, or even worse, we go backwards in technology and we have to redo something — those things are super high on the sensitivity.
I really try to get me — and then I try to make my team, because that's a hard decision, those are hard things to do in a silo — to shoot some holes in this. You've got to put some holes in this for me. And I also believe there's no such thing as a silver bullet — just a lot of brass ones. A lot of copper ones, or lead ones, if you will. So it's never easy to make all that happen. You have to kind of grind it out a little bit. But I stick with the 80-20, and I think about the worst-case scenario, and that kind of gives me some guidance — some bumpers there to make decision-making when it's not quite clear.
Benjamin Ard17:32 — I love that. I love that framework. That's amazing. Well, now we have run out of time. This has been awesome. I appreciate your insights and everything today. For anyone listening who would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Nat Norris17:44 — Yeah, that's a great question. Definitely on LinkedIn, so just under Nat Norris at Model One Commercial Vehicles. You can definitely connect to me on there. That's probably the best spot. I'm pretty responsive there. Definitely reach out. Love to chat about content, B2B, commercial vehicles, or even AI. Love all that space. Ben, it's been a pleasure being here. Thanks for the invite, and hopefully I can add some value to your listeners. Love to be back anytime you need me.
Benjamin Ard18:11 — Love it. This has been incredible. Appreciate it. Likewise.
Nat Norris18:13 — Yeah, have a great 2026. Thanks, man.
