How To Use Founder Led Content To Shorten Sales Cycles

if your sales cycles feel like they drag on forever and the prospects that hop on calls with you feel like a nightmare to close this video is for you today we're going to walk through the three mechanisms that we use here at hive to build b2b video content strategies that help shorten those sales cycles i'm talking warmer prospects less objections and people who come to your demo already understanding your value rather than you having to try and convince them i'm matt celestio i'm founder of hive we built real content strategies for tons of companies in spaces like sales tech revops sas gtmes recruitments and agencies what i will tell you is this if you've tried content in the past and it didn't work i'm going to show you exactly why let's get into it all right so popping in here let's get into the meat and potatoes i want to start number one with a story okay uh it was my busiest week of sales in my entire life okay i just started out we were probably about three to four months into the company and as any young entrepreneur sees a calendar full of leads i'm thinking oh man what rolex am i buying i literally had i had a rolex and omega and a seiko uh in my shopping cart so that's what i was thinking however at the end of the week i closed zero deals and that was such a slap in the face like let me tell you when you do all that work and you get nothing in return you feel like you almost just wasted a whole week so anyone in sales i know you can resonate with that but here i am i'm thinking okay i had endless objections maybe there was unqualified prospects maybe that was the case and i've always found myself pushing really hard to convince the sale almost like push them over the edge to get that deal all right so i thought man i really either suck at sales number one or these prospects are just getting harder to close that's what makes me feel good you know just uh let's let's find another excuse that's not me so that's what i was thinking at the end of the week but it wasn't until my next week where i only had one sales call on my calendar one one sales call for the whole week okay when i hopped on it was a 5k deal it was paid in full and it was a 20 minute conversation it was the easiest sales call of my life and i'm sitting there thinking you know what the heck man how what happened here so all week i had this transparency from the week before and then or the polarity from the week before and then now where i got one sales call and i had zero than the week before so i'm asking what happened now when i onboarded the prospect the week afterwards i sat down with him and i asked him straight up i go dude why was that the easiest sales call ever like you didn't have any objections you paid in full i don't understand like it almost sent seemed like the call was a formality and what he told me was very interesting he goes well you know what man i watched a lot of your content before i hopped on i read a few of your blogs there's a couple good videos and your website looks really nice so i really liked what i had and it fit exactly what i was looking for i only had the call because i wanted to meet someone from the team and make sure you guys were good energy and good vibes So the call was almost a formality. And that's when I got to thinking, wow, okay, how can I replicate this over and over again? Because I hate taking sales calls, especially when it's a whole week and I don't get any return on it. I don't like that. So how can I either make my life easier? So when I do hop on those calls, the prospects close warmer. Okay. And that's what we're getting into today, folks, is the three mechanisms that we took from that story and that content infrastructure to pre-sell your pipeline without sounding salesy. So you can do the exact same for your business. Okay. For B2B though, this is where I've landed on. And I think it's the most slept on form of content I've seen founders. And if you're a founder, you're putting this on the back burner. I know you know this. It's YouTube. It's YouTube. This is the one where I have sat down and I've stayed with it. And I make sure that my clients also see the value in it instead of short form, instead of all the other brain rot content, YouTube. And for the reasons I'm going to share today, if you're watching this and the gap between your marketing and your sales motion is starting to feel a little more expensive than you thought, you're probably right. Most of the companies we work with, they come to us after trying to figure this out on their own and hitting a wall. So if you want to talk and figure out what closing this gap actually looks like specifically for your business. There's a link in the description to book a call with us. We work with only a small number of B2B companies at a time so we can actually build this properly. So the link is below and I'll hop onto the call with you. Now, before we do the three mechanisms, we need to get on the same page about one thing. This is what most GTM looks like today. If you're in GTM, if you're founder, GTME, if you're RevOps, whatever that is, you know that the old way of doing GTM was linear. all the way from cold emails to potentially a deal with all of this messy stuff in the middle and and this is a very i've lived this as well so i know this is quite accurate however the modern day is much different because these tech stacks are expensive as you know anyone who has got a clay subscription uh it's either we're having dinner tonight or we're running clay for the month it's a grind there's constant objections crappy prospects that are either broke or they no show and the biggest thing here is this outbound is burn and churn you can set up campaigns which is good for input output however there's no compounding over time you turn off the faucets outbound You're essentially turning off your revenue. That's a big takeaway. What I want to talk about today is that new era of GTM where things are much different. and this is what that looks like today buyers at the beginning self-educate via content and this is where youtube is such a huge thing as you're watching this video right now this is youtube content uh this is this is content that's designed to help answer buyer questions shift limiting beliefs educate and get to know me as a founder which is which is what this whole process of content is and based on whether this is good quality content whether it's content that actually answers buying questions or speaks directly to what they need to know they'll either qualify or disqualify you based on that alone so this is all before potentially they even speak to you so you don't even know how many how many deals you might actually be losing because of this this right here but they'll come to your calls pre-educated pre-sold already understanding your value as the story i told you at in the beginning of the in the video this all happens in a very messy scattered way However, when you have all of these assets and this content infrastructure that helps you pre-sell and become part of that buyer journey, that's where you're going to separate yourself way more than your competitors. And then over here, we'll end up closing the deal. Not every time. However, we're doing a lot of the things that we know would help get that deal much more as a, as a warm sale. Okay. What can you expect from this? Very straightforward, very simple, warmer demo calls, shorter sales cycles, better close rates, all because your prospects have lived in your ecosystem. If you're a business owner, i know you know alex hermosi the reason any one of you if alex hermosi sat down with you on a sales call i guarantee there's no way you're saying no to that guy guaranteed because number one he's good at what he does but number two you guys have watched hundreds hundreds of hours of content from hormosi that's a lot of trust that's a lot of relatability that's a lot of um being able to like him and then also him giving you value where you're like okay if this is what he's giving away i i gotta work with this guy he can clearly sell an implementation so i want you to burn this into your brain that content is not a nice to have it's one of the highest leverage things that you as a founder can do and i'll swear by that forever okay so let's get into it i've done enough all right um number one i want you to stop posting upper funnel fluff and what do i mean by that okay if you've tried content in the past and it didn't work this is the reason why you were stuck over here in this top of the funnel we understand there's different stages of awareness that go all the way from unaware to the most aware and ready to buy but everyone sticks in this territory right here upper funnel content but what is upper funnel content what does that mean This is very surface level things like educational, entertainment, and informational content. You know, five cold email tips for 2026. How to build a prospect list step-by-step. Behind the scenes at our Miami event summit. This is content that can be valuable and bring awareness. Because I also think this is such a important part of the entire content ecosystem. Because not everybody's going to be searching small niche video topics or topics and queries. which is which is understandable this content should be designed to be that layer that pulls people into that funnel and attracts them and then you sell them on the bottom and rest of the funnel but the problem is most people just stay up here they just stay up here all day long and they never push the prospect down in the sales cycle or in the digital sales cycle with content so that's what i'm talking about upper funnel content using it positively and negatively i want you to remember that okay And again, upper funnel is good only for awareness. I just said that. But it doesn't help move deals closer to a sale. It's good to get people to know you like you trust you. However, if they don't know what you sell, if they don't know what you offer, if you don't know or if they don't know how you can help them or how you've helped others in their situation, they're not going to buy from you. I've followed this one guy one time and he was a fractional BDR, which was really cool. I only know this, though, after having a conversation with him in person because most of his content was just around education, but also like founder life's content. which is good. I was like, yo, this guy's cool, but what does he actually do for work? I didn't even know. So you need to be able to have that upper funnel content, but also talk about your business in a way that makes sense for your buyers. Okay. Now there's also a deeper issue with upper funnel content. All right. People's feeds are crowded with it. We'll get into the other three. It's content designed to consume and move on. It's noise that doesn't help your prospect make decisions. And if it's bad, it actually trains your prospects to ignore you. Even when you're posting upper funnel content, it's very noisy and it's very entertainment based so if you're just posting things at the top and again you don't have that bottom funnel people are just going to consume and move on to the next person and this is where i also want to focus on on if it's bad it actually trains prospects to ignore you i've been littered with ai content on my feed all the time even though it's upper funnel even though it's designed to bring in awareness i know it's ai so anytime i see you on the feed now i already know that i'm not gonna read this you've actually trained me to ignore you this is like a pavlov's dog thing if i see your content every time and i know it's bad if i know it's gonna be the continual same thing all the time i'm gonna bounce i'm gonna go to the next guy so making sure your content is high quality on top of this upper funnel that helps people pay attention when you do post so you don't get ignored okay so action nugget here i want you to audit your posts go back to your feed whether you're on youtube or linkedin if you don't have youtube that's totally fine uh just make sure you go to linkedin and see how much of your content is actually upper funnel so if you are going to pop into youtube eventually don't make the same mistake that you were previously making and then see what would actually help move a prospect to a deal does it answer a buying question does it pre-handle an objection does it actually shift the limiting belief look at all those things that help move the bottom of the funnel not just the top all right This determines what's good for traffic and eyeballs versus what's just noise. Again, needle movers. Now let's get into mechanism number two, and this is your content's three biggest jobs in B2B. Now, so back to your content's three biggest jobs in B2B. Some teams understand that content in GTM in 2026 is a must. However, here's the issue we see, and everyone knows this term of silos, sales and marketing lives in separate silos and when constant saying one thing your outbound is promising another it's going to make the prospect number one confused but there's a term for that called cognitive friction psychological principle when you are promised something in a cold email or a cold call or a cold linkedin dm and then they go over to your website maybe that has video content maybe they go to your social profiles and the offer and the promise isn't the same they're gonna have this disconnect i was just promised one thing over here But then they're talking about a whole different unrelated topic or something that doesn't help me actually make that decision. That's what we call a confused prospect. And they're going to bounce to your competitor who has outbound and content saying the same thing. We need these two to talk together. So how do you do that? That's a big question. And there's three things that is entailed for that to actually unify this ecosystem. All right, let's get into it. They have or the content has to shift prospects limiting beliefs, pre handle common objections and create psychological. buyer gaps what's very important about these three things is that all of these can be pulled from your sales they can all be pulled from your outbound they can all be pulled from your campaigns when you are having multiple demos as i know some people are having like 10 15 20 calls per week that is so much data that you can transform into content or number one and number two here these are things you can mine from the sales calls and i'm probably going to touch on this a bit later in the slides uh to explain it a little bit more too but these two things need or these two things unify what's being said in outbound and the sales conversations so when marketing goes and drops that on the feed you can essentially have prospects have that through line okay they told me that you know this will work for my specific industry because that might be a limiting belief they have with whatever service you provide and they've addressed that in the content so when they come the call they can even say or they can educate themselves and say you know what you told me that this would work for my business can you tell me a little bit more about that that's a different conversation than if they came to the call saying this doesn't really work for my industry those are pre-handled their shift the limiting beliefs are shifted prior so that's very important as well any psychological buyer gaps this is where you can paint the picture in your content psychologically from where they are today and then where they want to go and that bridge between that area is where your service or your expertise will help them bridge that and that psychological buyer gap in the content will allow them to show up to the call already pre-sold because they've either seen other clients that you've helped in their past situations get to their desired angle that's one way of doing it but also just explaining the transformation so what that looks like you know the same way i'm telling you guys how you can show up to calls with pre-sold prospects warmer conversations shorter sales cycles that's a gap that's a gap i've just created by just saying it because you know where you are today with those crappy sometimes sales cycles or those prospects and then where that dream state would be ah i just want to hop on close a 5k deal paid in full in 20 minutes that's the gap and i just said content is the gap or the bridge that helps you get there see how that works there it's really it's really nuanced however when you when you unify sales and marketing that's what can happen with these big three things why are these three things important now i love this question because i want you to get into the mind of your prospect What's your average ticket size? Is it 3K a month, 5K a month, 7K a month? Understand what the actual ticket size is and what you're asking your prospect to give over to you. It's not just a simple sales call as you might think. They have risk on their side. They've got intentions that they want to show face in their company. What they're saying or bringing to their company is their reputation on the line. So imagine all of that in their brain when they're looking at your content. first and foremost. Okay. When a buyer is making a high ticket decision or an investment with you, they don't need pretty content, which is that upper funnel fluff all the time. It's important, but they don't need it. It just brings in their eyeballs. What they really need to know is, is this going to work for a specific business model? Is this really worth the investment? Can't we do this internally? And this is another big one. Why are these guys different than the other six who emailed me? When your buyer is making a big decision like that, you need to have content in place that addresses all of these things because these are burning questions that your prospect will have. And without it, they're just going to bounce because they don't have all of that infrastructure to help them answer those really, really important questions. are what they need to say yes to a deal when they're in research mode they're not looking at cold email tips they're comparing vendors they want to see are there faqs and is there a founder or a face to the brand that bridges that trust that the same way that i'm showing up here on the camera looking you directly in the eyes even though you're not in here with me that's building trust whether you know it or not whether i know it or not that connection right there is what's going to help them move closer to a deal and that's why i say content is such a high leverage output that founder or sorry input that founders can do on a daily basis all right now let's get into mechanism number three as we get to the end of this number three silent pipeline i love it okay customer acquisition cost is increasing every year every b2b team knows this ad costs software costs more competition and the barrier to entry with ai dude it is so sloppy the amount of garbage linkedin dms and outbound that we all get people are bombarded with this so even if your email or your linkedin is good and the dms are good there's just so much fluff and generic people because of the low barrier to entry that it's hard to differentiate sometimes, even if you're super, super clear with that. You can still get results, as I know a lot of people do, which is really impressive, but there's just so much noise. And this is the biggest thing where we're talking about pipeline, and we wanna find that silent feed to it. And plus, we gotta talk about the fact that how much time you're spending on demos. follow-ups multiple sales calls like that sales cycle again is such a headache sometimes for most people and your team is manually moving these prospects from unaware to problem where solution we're ready to buy this is where the sales cycles come in maybe call number one call number two call number three call number four like it takes a long time that's like four hours minimum per prospect if you can get them on four calls number one if your sales cycle is long or if people need to make lots of decisions and and there's a bunch of corporate hierarchy that's a bunch of bs and they just need to close a deal in a long time your team is manually doing that your sales team is grinding all the way from a to b and we don't want that all the time because your content can do that the same way think back to the story at the beginning of this video if the content that moved that prospect from a to b when he showed up he was ready to buy okay And I'll give you an example. This is one video I posted a while back. The screenshot is a little bit old, so it might actually be more now. But I talked about AI SEO. Is Google dying? Such a high-level topic. But at the same time, shifted a lot of beliefs in that in the way we structure the content. Look at the views. It's nothing crazy. 600 views. But it got 34 hours of watch time. 34 hours. What would that cost you to put your sales team on 34 hours of calls? How much? that's a lot of money it's a lot of dough however this video one video got me 34 hours of watch time so theoretically i have spent 34 hours with my prospects in one video and i was probably sleeping i was probably out i was probably having a good time i was probably relaxing working on the other side of the business and growing it and i wasn't buried on a sales call so your content can do that heavy lifting especially when it has all of the factors that we talked about today as that nice mix of an actual video so back to here your content will do this and this is what we call the gtm video content engine it's designed to move prospects from unaware to ready to buy every single day year after year because youtube is an is a search engine everyone everyone sleeps on youtube as geo or ai seo who owns youtube google google that's a search engine in and of itself so why did they acquire youtube because it's a search engine as well make sure your content is designed to be in that search and then also answer all these questions there's so many layers to this um which is why i absolutely love youtube and something instagram and tiktok could never compete with never on a b2b level so let's look at a real example here as we talk about some of the examples from unaware all the way to ready to buy so i just pulled some of my old content so you can see that the angles we take in each video and all of the examples we looked at today with objections and all that good jazz how that actually plays out on the feed so unaware this is what i would call an upper funnel content piece in the b2b space so i'm answering the question why your best gtm outbound campaigns still fail and in this video i introduced the fact that as outbound and gtm gets harder what most people don't realize is that they need that content layer to help pre-sell and and qualify and warm up their audience that they're reaching out to after they go check them out after the email because people will check you out so in that video i introduce that there's a problem and solution and that's where we talk to the next video the content strategy that converts and no one's talking about it so that's when i talk about hey Content can be used by X, Y, and Z to get the result of better outbound or better GTM or better sales or better prospects. And again, we move them down over to the solution and most aware. And I say, okay, let's look at this exact B2B content marketing strategy designed for SaaS founders. And this video was targeting SaaS founders in this solution and most aware stage. And then all the way over to after this, we're. we have a straight up video that's it's almost like a vsl but disguised as organic content i say here's why most video agencies waste your time and what we do differently that prospect that's over here after going through one two three and four what is that that's like 30 that's like 30 ish minutes of content they're already spending with me in a way that's low barrier there's not a lot of sales pressure there they're watching content by the time they get to this video and i explain why other video agencies waste your time why we do x y and z way better those are all the elements of a sales call that we've just scattered around and built into an indexable and searchable content machine and imagine what this could be like for your content you got your face plastered all over your feed you're spending hours and hours with your prospects without having to be on the calls with them so when they show up you get that 5k deal paid in full Because they love you like the same way you love Hormozy. You have to build the engine and you have to build the content infrastructure to make all of this possible. It takes time, which is why we're able to do it with our clients. This whole thing we can do in one month. It takes us about two hours of a shoot. We batch it. And then we get this entire infrastructure month over month. So it really compounds. It's really, really nice. and i want to answer i want to go back to that question how much time would this save your team by them not having to focus on convincing but rather selling because their content or your content did the heavy lifting okay so folks those are the three mechanisms that i wanted to touch on today align with your buyer journey use content to pre-warm your pipeline and stop upper funnel content these are the three mechanisms i want you to take and either implement yourself or i want you to figure out how we can help you so if you want to see how we would actually build this end to end for your b2b company i've linked a video on the screen right now that goes way deeper into the full content infrastructure that we put in place for our clients so there's like real examples finer details the whole thing so just click on the screen right now and keep watching But if you're ready to talk about what this actually looks like for your business, specifically, the link to book a call with me is in the description. And we stand this up in 30 days. We handle everything from topic research, on-site filming, editing, publishing, and all you got to do is show up for two hours a month and we take care of the rest. So to bring it back, the most reason B2B content doesn't shorten sales cycles is not because video doesn't work. it's because the content was never connected to the sales motion in the first place when these three mechanisms are in place your buyers show up to your calls already educated they're trusting the person they're about to speak to and already most of the way through the decision your sales team will stop spending half of every first call laying groundwork they can start the conversation where it should have started which is the actual sale that's the difference between content that looks good and content that actually does something

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If you are running a B2B agency and your sales cycles feel longer than they should, this is for you.

You are leaving pipeline on the table by not using YouTube as a founder led marketing asset. In this video, you will learn how to build a youtube sales funnel that actually closes deals before the call starts.