In this episode of Search and Revenue, Daniel Horning, SEO strategist at Linkflow, interviews Amanda Schneider from Chronus, a platform focused on employee development through mentoring, ERG management, and purpose activation.
The discussion explores how Chronus leverages content marketing and innovation to differentiate itself in a competitive market. Amanda highlights the company’s approach to ungating certain high-value content to increase traffic and engagement, acknowledging the importance of continuously testing and evolving content strategies.
She also touches on the role of AI in content creation, emphasizing the need for high-quality, expert-driven content to stand out. The interview concludes with Amanda sharing insights on the cyclical nature of marketing strategies and the importance of continual testing to adapt to changing trends and behaviors.
Introduction – What is Chronus?
Hey, welcome to Search and Revenue, a series with the best B2B marketers in the industry covering SEO strategies, AI lessons learned, and CRO tactics that work. I’m Daniel Horning, an SEO strategist at Link Flow, and I’m joined by our special guest, Amanda Schneider of Chronus. Hey, Amanda, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to chat. We emailed back and forth about some potential topics. We’re going to be looking into kind of metrics and analytics and some strategic alignment, what that looks like for a B2B company, for a company selling SaaS and how to get buy in and all of those things. So I’m excited to get to the questions, but why don’t we kick off with you just sharing a little bit about what Chronus offers? What’s that software? What’s kind of the ideal customer? What’s the elevator pitch there?
So, Cronus, we are an employee development, employee driven development platform that focuses on mentoring, ERG management, and purpose activation software that helps organizations, usually large enterprises, combat the kind of organizational disconnection or disengagement crisis that’s going on in the workplace today.
Oh, wow. That sounds critical. So that’s going to be exciting to get into. What would you say your kind of ideal or like target customer base is. What does that look like?
You know, we work with kind of any and all organizations. We work with nonprofits, we work with academic institutions, we work with large enterprises, work with government. But what we’ve really found is kind of the ideal target is that medium to large enterprise. So anything with like a thousand employees and above. Not to say that we’re looking to turn away anyone, but it’s kind of one of those things. Where is there enough employees that we can really make a difference in. That software itself can really make a difference in this instance rather than, you know if you’re running a mentoring program with ten people, 20 people, you probably don’t need software to match those people. You can probably do it on your own and be able to report on the outputs pretty easily. But as soon as you get into 10,000 people, you know, you know 100 people, 200 people or into the thousands, it becomes a lot more harder to manage. And that’s kind of where we found our sweet spot.
We are pretty industry-agnostic. We are pretty industry-agnostic. But I would say that, you know, the financial sector, the healthcare sector, tech companies or the software SaaS industry to also kind of professional services is where we found the most need and where a lot of organizations are coming directly to us.
Key metrics for employee development success
Okay. So within that, then as you’re interacting with partners and bringing businesses in, can you break down kind of the most critical metrics that you guys are looking at for kind of success and engagement with a client?
I mean. We, you know, I think a lot of times people come in talking to us, they’re like, hey, I’ve got this mentoring program, I’m running this employee resource group, these ERGs, you know, and we just want to get more people involved. And, you know, I think that’s a great place to start because obviously, we believe that these things really can help employees kind of unlock their motivation and productivity and things like that, their development and things. But the big thing that we ultimately want to help organizations with is this kind of business objective-related metrics like how are we able to retain more people, you know, with these things at an organization, how are we able to help advance more people? How are we helping employees feel more connected to the organization, and also feel like there’s maybe a better sense of belonging? And all of these things are metrics which we have in our platform. So, you know, an organization like Amazon or Coca-Cola can track, like what is the retention of mentoring participants versus non-mentoring participants, or what’s the advancement likelihood of a mentoring participant versus a non-mentoring participant.
So there are things where they can actually get down to kind of the brass tacks of like how are we able to really help things that really meet the kind of business bottom lines rather than, than maybe just the, the cursory or initial metrics around like program growth and getting more people enrolled in the program and things like that.
That’s interesting and really hard to do in a quantitative and qualitative way of like, you know, employee engagement, employee happiness, satisfaction. But you’re right. I mean, you watch things like churn and stuff like that it makes sense if they want to stick around and they want to support a team longer, that’s a good metric for that. So as you take the value that you’re bringing to clients and kind of the metrics that you’re measuring within current existing clients, how does that translate into like value props, kind of marketing messaging, and maybe even metrics and analytics kind of further out in the funnel to drive clients that are start out as leads into that funnel to take advantage of those benefits. What are the most critical metrics on that part of it to get them in the door?
I mean, there’s, you know, I think in some ways from the marketing side, our metrics are probably not all that different than we’re certainly using a lot of emotional appeal and emotional storytelling when we’re going to market of our content or any kind of messaging, ads, anything like that, in order to kind of connect people to that real value that we’re driving. So, you know, it’s kind of like, hey, do you want to help increase retention? Sure. Everyone wants to do that. But, you know, when we’re going out there, we need to be presenting a message that’s more about, you know, speaking to the individual HR leader or the organizational development manager or the Dei director who is really looking at not just like, I don’t want people to leave or I want people to come to the organization, but, you know, how are we actually going to get people involved in something that’s going to create a better, you know, help them feel differently than they did yesterday or last week or something like that.
So beyond that, you know, when we’re looking to our metrics, you know, we’re obviously trying to drive lead generation like everyone else we’re looking at. How are they coming to register for a webinar about micro-sponsorship or about the organizational disconnection crisis? Or are they, you know, downloading a report of ours or a white paper? Um, but at the same time, we’re also looking at how are those things making their way down the funnel. You know, everything we do from our team standpoint is really connected to how we’re driving pipeline for the organization. And so everything’s connected to like, what are those opportunities we’re able to get created on the sales side, what are those deals? We’re able to get created because we’re also a very like largely inbound organization still. And so it’s really important for us to understand how we’re bringing people, you know, from the top, you know, all the way down to the bottom of it and how we’re moving them along that, journey. So there’s, you know, obviously, like I said, the simple things about are we getting people to give us their information for some sort of, you know, collateral or activity.
But then there’s also the how are we getting them to ask for a demo of the software ultimately, or to talk to sales or contact us because they want to learn more about, you know, what kind of mentoring formats might be best for their organization and things like that. Okay.
Yeah, lots of touchpoints. So lots of key events, lots of key conversion steps to that final conversion to become a client. How often are you checking in on each kind of level of those conversion steps? How often would you recommend a SaaS company be analyzing its metrics? What’s the cadence there?
Probably the answer is like all the time, every day, everywhere. But is it realistic? I mean, I think keeping a pulse, I mean, we certainly do. I’m looking at certain things, you know, weekly, but I think we do as a team, at least a monthly check in or, you know, every or bi monthly check in on like where we are with the metrics. But we also have dashboards in Salesforce that are letting us know kind of on a daily basis, like how we’re tracking towards those ultimate goals. And like I mentioned, our ultimate goals are connected to pipeline. How are we driving those opportunities that sales has, you know, put their stamp on is like, yes, this is a deal we’re actively going after. It’s qualified. You know, we’re we’re trying to get it through the door. And so seeing kind of not only the number of like opportunities we’re helping to create but also then like what’s the conversion rate from one stage to another.
So from first touch to lead creation and lead creation to, you know, HI which we call Hard Inquiries or Demo Requests from HI to opportunity. And you know so far. So we’re looking at those and figuring out the weak points. Again when I say every day I’m speaking facetiously because I think there’s also somewhere you can get a little lost looking every day. It’s like, oh no, it’s up. Oh no, it’s down. You don’t want to get yourself whiplashed by looking a little too frequently or freaking out about, you know, something that isn’t quite a problem yet. It’s just a blip. So I think a kind of bi-monthly keeping a pulse on what you’re able to do and figuring out which of those maybe conversion elements is the strongest or weakest and kind of saying, okay, what can we do more of for the strongest? What can we improve upon for the weakest? And just understanding, you know, which part of your funnel is, is solid and which part of it really needs some more testing or some more work or, you know, some new ideas.
Key elements of a strong B2B SaaS brand to differentiate
That’s great. So it sounds like you kind of answered my next question, which was, what is one of the biggest challenges in turning that tracking into actionable Insights? And it’s really just staying up on it. It sounds like if you’re in it every couple of weeks, or maybe even every day, you’re going to see patterns, you’re going to see trends, gaps in the funnel. And that turns into actionable insights as far as those challenges go. Like you mentioned that you guys are largely inbound-driven. So as you guys are doing this marketing, you’re trying to stand out. Obviously, brand differentiation is huge. Like you said, everyone’s trying to go for leads. Of course, everyone wants employee engagement. So how do you kind of take on that torch of what are the key elements of a strong B2B SaaS brand to differentiate itself? Where do you integrate that into the messaging?
I think anyone who says they’re not learning and evolving their thought on this subject as they go along is probably lying, or we’re disconnected from something that they shouldn’t be. But, you know, oftentimes we’re usually trying to figure out, okay, you know, there are however many other competitors in the space and we’ve, you know, we’ve been around for 15 plus years now. So we’ve certainly come up against competitors big and small, from other startups to, you know, large kind of established corporations that are trying to kind of be in the space as well. So we’ve had to figure out, you know, how do you kind of stand out amongst all of those things? You know, I go back to kind of the emotional storytelling that we often do. I think even the same three softwares, even if you, you know, put three exact same softwares next to each other and there’s nothing all that different about them, but you put kind of the emotional peel into the sales conversation, the thought leadership, the marketing, the messaging, the email marketing, you know, all things like that.
You know, you’re going to get a different feedback by someone who’s being sold by those three different things. And so I think the way we connect our solutions to less about, hey, we have these solutions like, do you want to buy it? You know, what’s it going to take to get you into a mentoring program? It’s more about the idea that we’re really speaking to the challenges they’re facing and going a little deeper than just, oh, you have an, how’s employee engagement going? Good, bad. Otherwise, it’s like asking more of the questions and figuring out, you know, what exactly are the things below the oh yeah, you know, engagement’s a little rough right now. It’s like, what’s leading to that? Like, let’s be very specific about, you know, can you can you elaborate? You know, what are you seeing on a day to day? What are you seeing on a month to month. Which departments are being impacted, which functions are being impacted. So part of it is like the conversation and the way that we really believe in selling the product.
And it’s kind of putting that focus on the prospects and the people we’re talking to and figuring out what’s specific about their organizations. But the other things I think, you know, with our company, we’ve put a lot of focus on innovation. And I know, you know, being a tech startup, it’s like, oh, we do innovation. Great. Everyone does innovation. But what I mean by that, I think is a couple of very specific areas. So innovation for us is kind of first and foremost because we’ve been around for a while. We have one of the largest R&D teams. And so we’re able to kind of move very quickly and very agilely around product evolution functionality, you know, things like that. But part of that, that’s been the most important for clients is scalability. So when you talk about, again, a mentoring program or an ERG program that has 100 people, 200 people in it, that’s one thing when you talk about Amazon, who has 160,000 employees, you need to be able to have a platform that’s not going to go down when 20,000 of them try to log in or something like that.
So it’s very important for us to be on the forefront of that infrastructure side, make sure that we have the scalability that can really meet the enterprise need. And so that, you know, that’s been a huge aspect of our innovation and what’s kind of made us stand out from some of the competitors. The other aspect of innovation, I think, is just the fact that we’ve been able to evolve our product and product offerings, you know, very quickly, but also very kind of effectively in what we’ve seen grow in the market as kind of a bundle of what things people are looking to for, you know, combating this disengagement aspect. So we we kind of started with mentoring and that was our big stronghold for a very, very long time as of last fall, we introduced ERG software employee resource group software. Organizations might also call this affinity groups or ERGs, business resource groups, business networks, things like that. But basically, software that also, you know, helps to kind of bring that type of programing into the mix.
And then, you know, we had a recent acquisition this spring of a company called Imperative, in which we are now looking at activating purpose, which I know that sounds very heady. And it’s like, what is that? It’s up in the sky. Basically, this idea of how employees better understand their own purpose and motivators, and then how do they unlock or activate that within the workplace in order to, like, get more fulfillment, be more productive, be more engaging with their with their colleagues and things like that. So the innovation side is also kind of been part of us evolving our seeing the need in the market for like it’s not just mentoring anymore. There’s these other things that are becoming more of that, you know, modules within the platform that are also trying to to help people with those overall challenges and aspects. And in the last piece of innovation that we often talk about is like being on the forefront of of those kind of trends and what’s upcoming. You know, mentoring 1 to 1 is not a new thing.
We did not invent it. People are very familiar with it as a whole. But things like, you know, reverse mentoring, where a junior colleague is kind of the mentor and a senior colleague as a mentee, or flash mentoring, which can often sound kind of like speed dating, but it’s this idea of connecting quick moment to learn a certain skill or just get connected or, you know, learn a soft skill or something like that. It’s just a very kind of quick and time. It’s not a 6 or 9 month relationship. So being also at the forefront of those types of things have also kind of kept us leading the way in the market, but also trying not to rest on our rest on our laurels. And, you know, think that one type of mentoring or even one type of, of ERG is going to be enough to kind of keep us at the forefront. We have to kind of constantly be evolving on those aspects.
That makes a lot of sense. So I mean, you basically have to innovate not just because it’s a buzzword, but like true innovation. And then even on top of that, because you guys have been around a while, you have to innovate on your innovations. Like you have to think outside of what you’ve already had your R&D team do and go, hey, what else? What are what are our clients? What are our customers doing?
I was gonna say, I think there’s like a great quote that always sticks in my mind. I don’t know who said it, so I apologize, but it’s kind of the if you’re not competing with your current self like someone else will. So if you’re not paying yourself, what you’re doing now is you’re kind of current competition and iterating on that, then you’re just waiting for someone else to do it.
Innovation and staying ahead in SaaS marketing and content marketing
Yep. No 100%. That’s true. And that second point of innovation you were talking about with defining purpose resonates because with the self development movement, just personally in people’s personal lives, that’s one of the biggest questions that keeps getting asked by thought leaders is what’s your why? Right. You know, why are you doing this? What is your purpose? And that’s presented personally on the weekends to kind of figure out. But if you can bring that into the company culture and help a company ask that question for a person’s career and tasks. It gives so much more meaning. So that makes a lot of sense that you would innovate into that. So it sounds like there’s some really exciting aspects and tool sets and abilities within this. Do you guys carry that into your content marketing? Like how do you present that? What’s your what’s kind of the role of content marketing as it evolves in your landscape?
Yeah, I mean, I think certainly as director of content communications, it’s obviously a huge thing for me. And I think, you know, we’re always trying to remind ourselves that, that kind of like need for innovation on that front, because it’s very easy to get stuck in sort of the what you’ve always done and knowing that, like what you’ve done before that got you to this point will not be the thing that like, gets you to the next point. So we’re always kind of looking at like how we’ve been thinking about content, because that’s also been such a pillar of why people like how we’ve built our brand to this point. You know, we have a lot of, you know, existing historical Content on, you know, whether that’s blogs or ebooks, white papers, case studies, anything like that, that people have come to for, for a resource. But we can’t just kind of rely on those things to be pushing us forward. So the way we’re thinking about evolving some of that content, either with like interactive elements like, you know, calculators or we’re kicking around an idea around like assessments or quizzes that we could kind of do that, bring more of that active mind work into kind of the things that people are already coming to us for and in the development space.
But we’re also looking at like different ways to change our philosophy of content. So, you know, historically, we’ve done a lot of gated content as, as a lot of people have done because that’s how you get the leads. You, you know, you tear it out and they come and they want to give you your information for it. But we’ve also been experimenting with this, like gating aspect of our content to where not only are we still creating things, but we’re we’re taking away some of those barriers to entry. And I know that a lot of companies are starting to kind of play with this idea as well. There’s a lot of scariness to it because you’re like, well, if I take this gateway, you know, sales or the CEO says, like, why are we not having more leads? You’re like, wait, we also did it with kind of in a testing function first to say, okay, let’s pick these certain assets and, take the gateway and then let’s figure out what, what the actual performance is around that.
And the theory obviously is that if you take away the gate, but you’re offering enough value that people eventually when they get to a gate, know whether that’s a request demo or maybe even something registering for a webinar or something they’ll have more interest in and willingness to give, you know, to give their information to you. And you’ll have built some sort of foundation of, of trust and loyalty. So that is kind of a big piece for us. And so far we’ve seen from the way we’ve been able to kind of cobble the performance understanding around it, whether it’s looking at different things like bounce rates and session numbers to other pages and how we’re seeing the pathway to certain pages grow. You know, for us it seemed to be productive and beneficial for us. So we are taking that as we will and kind of leaning into that a little bit more. So taking some more of the gates away and leaving less of that behind. But we’re also kind of thinking, you know, in the world of AI everywhere these days, too, like people kind of ask, like, do you feel like part of your job is irrelevant?
And I’m like, do I feel irrelevant? No, that’s a I mean, much too meta a question for, to be asking this early, but I think, I don’t think it’s made content irrelevant. If anything, it’s made good content all the more relevant because you can produce such generic elements out there that it’s been more important for us to either, you know, find ways to bring in more experts into our content or best practices that we’re actually learning from our customers or, you know, having our customers be the ones giving the examples or tips and things like that in some of our content. And that’s helped to build a little bit more of that credibility, I think, and also hopefully make us stand out from from the generic piece that you could pull off of ChatGPT if you just dropped the, the topic and the outline into, you know, into their generator. I mean, that’s kind of the things that and we’re looking to continue experimenting. I do not pretend that we have come to the end of our learning escapades. So we’re always looking, to figure out what’s the next thing that we haven’t tried or we’re not sure how to try it, but like, how do we get started with it and things like that in the content realm?
Nice. That’s awesome. Going back to the gating and gating, I mean, that is a piece of advice we give a lot link flow working. You know, as a SaaS SEO agency, we work with a lot of of SaaS companies that have a lot of gated content because it works for conversion. You can’t read it until you give us your email address. And we understand, I mean, CRO is one of the biggest parts of what we consult on for SEO, because we know that for a B2B company, you have to drive revenue, you have to drive leads. So our advice is not always just on gate everything, because we know those forms have to be there somewhere. But we also see a lot of results in on gating some of the thought leadership content and some of that really helpful, just exceptional content in boost and traffic and rankings that then kind of outweighs if there is a bit of a step down in the CRL in the form fills. But you can, you know, double, triple ten x your traffic to some of the content, then additional leads will come through some of those other forms.
Have you guys seen any of that with your ungated stuff? Just additional total traffic to those pieces of content.
Yeah, we have I mean, I think some of that it’s a little newer, so we’re still waiting to see if we might see more of it. We’ve actually been working with Link Flow, with our team at Link Flow to bring some of that content on the page. I think that’s a great thing about gating is like if you don’t need the gate, then the content copy can actually start working for you in a different way that it wasn’t doing anything for you in the past. So I think that’s something that, you know, the benefits that we’ve also seen, which maybe we didn’t think of or expect at the beginning, but it’s kind of the output of this strategy. And so putting, you know, one of our previously, you know, gated ebooks onto the site, as you know, ROI of mentoring or something like that. You know, we’ve seen, oh, this is getting a lot more interest. And,it’s now able, able to bring more people to the page than that, like very short resource page that we used to have with the gate on it.
That’s great. That’s awesome. And the other interesting thing to watch across the next several months is, does do the AI suggestions and search results start to pick up some of that thought leadership, feature it with citations, and does that also drive some more like brand interest? I don’t I don’t know, I assume it will. That’s some of our theory is if, you know, if you share that with the AI monster, I might then share it with readers and traffic that then becomes, you know, purchasers later.
Some level of generosity from the robot who is supposed to not have any real, feelings.
Closing Thoughts
Right? There’s probably some math in the algorithm that reciprocates generosity with, you know, its appetite for words. It’s got to it has to reprocess and repurpose something. So if we feed it, maybe it’ll feed us back. Very cool. Well, let’s chat through. I mean, we’re kind of at the end of time here, but I have some closing lightning round questions and then a big closing question. So these first three are just kind of shoot from the hip. What’s your like gut reaction on these things. What’s one martech tool that you couldn’t live without.
I’d probably say.
AHrefs. And that’s where I find myself in the most starting ground for either experimentation and new planning, or it helps me reaffirm, like, did we do this? And did was it done correctly?
Nice. That’s one of our go to’s. How about favorite book on marketing slash business slash branding?
For this one, I’d probably say it’s ‘Challenger Customer’, and it’s a bit of a business book, but I or it’s a maybe more sales oriented book, but I think it’s really one that helped me early on. Think through this idea of like selling to a committee, which B2B oftentimes is you’re selling into multiple personalities, kind of into one, you know, one big picture. So this idea of like how you think about fortifying your messaging so that it meets the needs of the, you know, the aspirational people, but it also meets the needs of IT. And like these other kind of maybe more analytical minded people that are like, let me see the proof before I’m gonna, you know, sign off on this. So I think that one was probably not the only one, certainly, but it was the one that kind of initiated that thought process for me.
It’s on my TBR now. ‘Challenge your Customer’.
Challenge your Customer. Yes, there’s like a challenge sale book and this is a challenge customer book.
Great. Last question on the Lightning Round. Favorite podcast, influencer, speaker or channel or other?
I think the ‘The Exit Five podcast’ is one that I tend to go back to and was turned on to, actually from my colleague, director Mike Kang. He showed it to me, and now I find it a place where I go if I’m like kind of stuck in strategy or if I feel like I got to get out of my usual methods and think about something new, or hear about a new trend or something like that. So the exit podcast is one that I go to.
Very cool. All right. And then the big closing question, which you can plead the fifth on if you prefer, but what’s one key marketing insight you know now that you wish you knew five years ago?
I’d like to say that maybe knowing this would have changed some things about what I did, but honestly, I don’t know if it would have. I would say no. Remembering the idea that everything is cyclical. Like, everything kind of comes around again. So no matter how many times you tested, Wednesday was the best day to send that email. It’s been more than a year. You probably test it again because people change, trends change, behaviors change. And so it’s always good to kind of keep testing, even if you think like, oh, we already did that. It can change over time. So nothing is kind of set in stone. So everything is cyclical. Keep on testing.
That’s really smart. Nothing. No marketing channel, method or strategy is ever the final method, marketing strategy or channel?
Yeah, and that thing you tried four years ago may just be the number one thing that you should try next.
And yeah. Bell bottoms came back. Right. So Marketing strategy from ten years ago could work. Today
Against our better judgment. Low rise is back. I don’t know
It’s true. Well thank you Amanda, this was super insightful and really just encouraging to look at kind of the world of doing marketing with a SaaS company and, you know, the importance of some of those, some of those considerations around data and KPIs. And then also kind of carrying in those the storyline right of your brand of how do you differentiate? Well, you bring the value and the story of the customer and the customer need, and you talk to them on their level. That was really smart. So yeah, thank you for sharing that with us. I hope we get to chat again soon.
All right. Thank you Daniel. Appreciate it.
