6sense’s Chris Hutchins: Great Content Needs Journalistic Integrity

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In the late 1990s, a freight train plowed into a truck just outside of the city of Lexington, Kentucky. Chris Hutchins, then a reporting intern for a local newspaper, raced to the scene.

“The truck was beaten up,” he recalls. “Either through the impact itself or because the truck was dragged a quarter-mile, the tires blew out.”

He included that detail in his story. The cargo train had slammed into the truck with such force that its tires burst in an explosion of rubber. However, when Chris’ editor read the article, he wasn’t happy.

“Did you ask the cop if that’s why the tires burst?” asked his editor.

Chris admitted that he hadn’t.

“Well, then it’s got to go,” his editor said. “It’s a good detail, but you can’t verify it. It’s just color.”

That interaction stuck with Chris. It taught him the importance of verification, of only reporting facts he could prove. Throughout Chris’ career as a reporter, he made sure to back up every statement he made with a verifiable fact or quote.

Today, more than 20 years later, Chris heads up content marketing for 6sense, an ABM platform. I caught up with him to learn about his journey to content leadership and whether his devotion to facts has survived contact with the marketing world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You spent the bulk of your career as a writer, reporter, and author. How did you feel about swapping journalism for managing a content team?

When I made the pivot to management in my content marketing career, I felt like I'd sold out. I knew that I was going to make more money managing people, but I felt outclassed by the task. I'd much rather be writing. But through dumb luck or adaptation or because the company leadership saw something within me, I found myself leading people. I rose to the occasion. Now, I absolutely love it.

I made peace with my role by no longer associating the value of everything I do with what I made with my own hands. How many blog posts did I write? How many blogs did I edit? How many infographics did I create? How many, how many, how many. 

Instead, there is a ‘gray matter’ component. The stuff that you know is impossible to quantify. It’s your decades of experience that provides value.

From a people management perspective, I have things to share. Now that I’m of an age and a certain level of experience, I can be a mentor for my team. This is the second stage of my career. I'm happy to share what I know—all the best practices and hacks that I acquired as a writer and editor. Being able to share those things with younger writers is a joy.

Before you joined 6sense, you were at a company called MotionPoint for 15 years. You rose through the ranks from writer to editor-in-chief to senior director of content marketing. What prompted your move?

I hit a level of seniority and felt like I didn’t have much more to learn. I suspect that the business felt they couldn’t teach me any more, too. In instances like these, we should all put on our grownup pants and have a meaningful conversation about development.

You have to say, “I don't know if I'm learning as much as I used to. I think I’m capping out here.” Most organizations will have an amicable, forthcoming conversation. That can really make a difference in a person's career.

In my experience, I'm glad that we had that plain talk, because it encouraged me to seek opportunities someplace else. It was a very amicable parting. I’d been with the business for nearly 15 years so you could say it was well overdue… but I have been chronically conflict-averse throughout much of my career.

I was the same. For the first seven years of my career, I didn’t have an experienced manager. When I joined Campfire Labs, I had a veteran newspaper editor grilling me.

I bet they beat the snot out of your copy, right?

Every day! It was deeply uncomfortable at first, but I improved—fast. I grew more as a writer in six months than I had in six years. How does your background in journalism influence your work as a marketer?

The most successful storytellers understand that there is a skepticism in a reader's mind. Readers are always trying to do the math, even though they never consciously know it. We're all seeking answers. We’re always questioning what we're reading. We’re asking critical questions. When a reader’s mind hits some copy that feels like flimflam, they notice it.

Say someone writes, “Company X experienced stratospheric growth”—what does that mean? The human mind will snap onto that like a fish on a hook. Now, say someone writes, “Company X experienced stratospheric growth, increasing sales by Y percent.” That proactively addresses their skepticism.

Journalists are trained to address that skepticism because you cannot present your opinion in pieces. You are only allowed to state what is verifiably true. You introduce skepticism and immediately resolve it through facts or a direct quote. 

The scrutiny I bring to everything I edit makes the content better. It makes the reading experience better. It has revelation or ‘aha!’ moments. It’s proactive writing and reporting. I believe it’s underrepresented in a lot of marketing copy. But it's something that we try to do at 6sense.

Riva-Melissa Tez wrote a great article on Silicon Valley’s “problem problem.” She says tech companies don’t think about skepticism. Instead, they inflate the pain point they’re solving until it’s totally disingenuous.

It undermines the quality and credibility of a lot of the content on the web. Within that macrocosm is the hot take—publish first, publish exactly what's on your mind right now. I understand that there are business reasons for that. Being first means more clicks, more ad revenue, blah, blah, blah. But it creates a sense of hyperbole. When everything is an emergency, nothing's an emergency. When everything is a problem, nothing's a problem.

Something we try to do at 6sense is temper that urge. We’ll write stories around current trends, but never at the expense of oversimplifying a topic. It’s worked well for us. It's a tightrope walk between being brisk and being responsible.

Are you ever worried that a competitor will outperform you by being dishonest? They can tell stories you can’t. 

I've worked in companies where we had competitors that punched down or played dirty. While there is indeed a short-term gain in playing dirty, there is also a medium- and long-term benefit to keeping it clean.

In the end, the facts will bear themselves out with further scrutiny. A clickbait headline that sends you to a competitor who’s playing dirty will generate traffic. But if a buyer is worth their salt, they’ll check out their options and go to other sources of information. If the clean competitor is delivering smarter, more useful, and revelatory content, they’ll win. 

Looking back over your nearly one year at 6sense, what’s the one thing you're most proud of achieving?

I'm most proud of the content team we’ve built. The team is astonishing. They thrive under pressure, they love what we're doing, and they’re eager to learn.

We have a senior editor who’s got lots of business writing and newspaper editorial experience. He’s great. He was born to do this stuff. Same goes for our writers. They’re super collaborative and curious.

Finding people like that requires having a clear vision of who you want to work with—their skills, their experience, whatever it is—and then being like a dog with a bone and not letting it go until you’ve found who you’re looking for.

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Perspectives is a weekly series interviewing the best marketing leaders. Subscribe for interviews straight to your inbox.