The Transaction

But by the way, were you serious about putting the baby being loud in the background?

I didn't hear a thing.

I'm like, is that like some Gen Z term that I don't know?

The baby in the background?

It could be, right?

I mean, it's happened to me before.

To be honest, I've aged out though.

I'm at least an elder, a mid-level millennial at this point, so.

I may not be privy to all the recent slang.

I get like bits and pieces of it.

I hit Craig with, because Craig called me this morning, and I was like, oh, Craig, very demure.

And he was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Well, that was just, yeah, I mean, that actually just showed my level of intellect, frankly.

Very cutesy.

But is demure, that's not a Gen Z term, is it?

No, but it's from a meme, yeah.

Oh, well, then, God, I made it out alive.

I mean, thank you.

Yes, I don't know.

I know the term Riz.

Is that not Gen Z?

That's my kids.

Oh, Lord.

Is that bad?

I know Riz.

I think that's Gen Z.

You know, it all seems to start on TikTok these days and spread out.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

By the way, I also know that I don't have Riz.

I don't know.

I bet people are you against that.

Yeah, I would, I would categorize you as a man with Riz.

Oh, well, I appreciate that, guys.

You're very welcome.

From ABM to PLG, from Meddic to Meddpicc, the world of business is constantly evolving.

We'll cover the who, what, where, when, why, and most importantly, how you get The Transaction.

I'm Matt Amundson and he's Craig Rosenberg.

Let's get started.

All right.

So should we move from casual Matt to business Matt?

Let's do it.

I haven't met business Matt yet.

There it is.

So as my lead in here, it's a really great story.

We were just telling Alec how we found him.

Then I found out I knew him, which is a different story.

But so as one of our more popular episodes was with Adam Robinson, who has just been destroying it on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

I mean, him, his company, it's LinkedIn has been the channel.

But when we talked to him, we started to realize, holy crap, there is this thing happening where LinkedIn domination is key to the founder brand.

Anyway, we did the call and we were just like, oh my God, that was amazing.

Matt kept saying, who was it that he mentioned?

That was his consultant that helped him get there.

I'm like, I think he was keeping it from us.

Because he kept saying, you know, and then I've got my guy who helps me do this and that.

He kept saying, he kept avoiding the name, but actually he did say your name early.

So I went through the transcript, found your name, reached out to you.

And then you're like, hey, man, I know you, we did a podcast with my dad.

But yeah, we were like, we gotta talk to this guy.

And then I honestly, Matt could tell you, I'm driving home, I call him, I go, I got the guy.

It's true.

Yeah, so basically the idea here, the story like, so as we said, Adam's killed in on LinkedIn, you have others, I believe that, you know, obviously that you work with that you've done.

But like we wanted to go to the source of, you know, a guy like you who advises folks towards building their founder brand and doing it on LinkedIn.

And we want that's, that is exactly why we wanted to have you on the show.

And so I'm going to let you just give a couple other tidbits about yourself because you do a lot of stuff it looks like.

But I just want to welcome to The Transaction Alec Paul.

Well, thanks for having me.

Yeah, I guess people know me as Adam Robinson guy.

You know, that would go against his whole work in public thing to withhold the, you know, the name.

He's got to tell you everyone he's working with and everything.

Yeah.

So I think a lot of people know me from that, from Adam, you know, the other folks that I've worked with that I can publicly mention is Sam Jacobs over at Pavilion.

We did a nice course together a few months ago.

You know, a number of other folks as well.

But yeah, I started, Craig, you know, my dad, I actually have a hard time calling him dad.

I usually call him Andy because it just feels too weird to say I'm dad.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's how I learned the whole LinkedIn thing when he was like 2010.

You know, he was pretty early to the whole podcast game, and you know, writing sales books, and like really one of the first, you know, trying to figure out like thought leadership thing.

And he was very early to LinkedIn, and we put a ton of time and content out, and he grew that incredible podcast, and eventually sold it to RingDNA, now revenue.io.

And then I was kind of like, I got brought along, it's kind of like an aqua hire, and they were paying me, and I had to like figure out something to do.

So it was like, okay, I think LinkedIn, like let's grow this thing on LinkedIn.

And that was just right.

It was kind of, LinkedIn was coming up.

And, you know, the classic, I don't know if you're familiar with Justin Welsh, that was kind of right when he was kind of, yep, explore, you know, really kind of giving everyone a sense of the power of that platform.

So I spent a couple of years just growing Andy's following, you know, with Andy, and growing that podcast at revenue.io.

And then I left and started doing this like kind of freelance consulting for, at first, sales influencers, because salespeople are just so early to that platform, right?

Like there's a reason Andy was able to do it.

It's like, they spend all day there.

They finally saw the power of, you know, creating content.

And then from there, kind of transitioned over to CEOs, executives who just seemed to have higher leverage on the platform, just they have full go-to-market machines behind themselves.

That's just like, okay, we can pour a ton of attention into the top of this.

Like, you know, we can make make a bunch of money.

I love it.

All right.

There we have it.

So here's how we start the show.

What is something that the market thinks that they're doing right, whether, you know, approach best practice and they're actually wrong?

What is it and what should they do about it?

That's how we start the conversation, Alec, to you go.

I think two, two things.

I think a lot of B2B executives think know they need a brand.

They know they need to put out file leadership.

They know they need to create content, but they think that's something they can outsource, right?

Like that it is something that you can outsource to a marketing manager, to an outsourced agency, and that you can sit down for once a week and once every other week and record a 60 minute Zoom with a bunch of canned conversation, canned questions.

They're going to hand that transcript off to some 20-year-old in Austin, Texas, and they're going to be able to master your subject matter expertise and your voice.

And it's like, it doesn't work that way.

Like it's too competitive.

It is too hard to gain attention.

Like the writing is the actual thinking.

So like we mentioned all these clients so far that I've brought up.

And like I think the big misconception is like I'm somehow writing their content is like no, like the writing is the thinking.

They're writing their content.

We may figure out how to make it better.

But like if you want to grow an Adam Robinson level or Sam Jacobs level, you know, audience or personal brand on LinkedIn, like you actually have to take the time to sit there and write and engage.

Like Adam responded to every comment for like 12 months.

Like that's the level of commitment that it takes to get to the top 1%.

And the difference between getting to the top 1% or 2% versus the top 70 is like astronomical as far as like the amount of attention you can garner, leads you can generate, the different ways you can use that brand in your go-to-market.

So I guess the thing, the one thing I think will get wrong is that somehow you can outsource this to someone else.

Like you can have help, and I think it could be advised to have like a sparring partner or someone to go back and forth on the ideas that work, that know the platforms and knows in and out of it, but like you cannot send it to someone else.

They are never going to have your subject matter, your expertise, your story, your personality, the things that actually allow you to build an audience where like people give a shit who you are, and will listen to what you say, and then eventually hopefully buy your software.

So like, I think, you know, I'll start there.

Okay.

But you said there's two things.

Did you get the two in?

I have one, that was one.

The two is I think people think it starts and ends with audience and brand.

I think the like, you know, inbound referral traffic, or we can drive a bunch of leads from all these posts and we can, you know, it's going to increase overall awareness for our offerings.

I think the actual unlock for all this is like, once you become the influencer founder, it's like you're going to start going outbound.

Like you have an audience, let know, like, and trust you on LinkedIn.

They're all within your ICP or some segment of other.

And like the major unlock becomes when you connect everything going on your business, everything going on on LinkedIn, that whole universe that everyone knows you, and then a message from your favorite influencer shows up at the right time.

Like you're going to respond at 80 to 90% versus some SDR, that's 20 years old, that's hits you.

Like you're not going to respond at 2% or whatever.

So it's like, it's those two things.

It's brand meant to outbound.

So I think those are the two people, but things that people don't get quite.

Those are both great.

By the way, the reason we had you do two before we jumped in was because Matt gets really concerned when people do a list to make sure that they quote unquote land the plane and bring home all of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I felt pretty comfortable with Alec saying that he had two.

It's when we have a guest.

It's like, it's five things and I'm like, oh, good luck with this.

We go back to one and like, in terms of what the market thinks, do we think that most people know that LinkedIn is the key platform or is it not for everyone?

Like, you know what I mean, like I do, sometime when talking about building thought leadership and explaining that LinkedIn is the platform where you want to win.

I think people know that or at least they should, if you're a B2B rev tech or anything adjacent, right?

I think those buyers live on LinkedIn versus, versus Twitter or TikTok or whatever.

I think that is the medium.

I also think like executives have outsized influence, like where the platform kind of wants that content, right?

Like they want the credibility of that content.

And it's still a professional network.

So like when you come in with that CEO title or that CRO title or whatever, like you gained outside attention versus on Twitter, you're a random nobody, you have to start from zero.

Like on LinkedIn, there are a lot more levers you can pull to build foundational audience and attract that kind of initial level of attention to get started.

So yeah, I think it has to be liked in.

If you don't know that at this point, I think yeah, you're kind of behind.

Yeah, I get, I get.

Okay, so like if I'm going to get started doing this, okay?

Like what do I do first?

I have to have a deep understanding of my audience, I'm assuming, but like just take us through the steps so that I can be effective writing.

And like, you know, where do I start?

You know, I take it back a little bit, like, you know, there's some foundational things about like, yeah, who do we want to speak to?

Right?

Who are our target buyers?

You know, and then you do like, oh, we got to refresh our profile and make that speaks to, make sure that speaks to our audience.

And I can walk you through all like the different little mechanical things.

But I think as far as like getting started, I think you have to have, you know, there's a Maxim on Twitter that was like, do cool shit and document it.

Like, if you've done things before, if you've grown your career from manager to VP to CMO, to CEO, to founder and like, you're going to go back and you're going to tell that story.

I think that's the best way to start.

The things you learned at the different levels of that journey that somehow apply to the audience you're trying to speak to today.

I think that's where you start as more of like a journalist.

Right?

That you say that a lot.

It's like you're not a YouTube content creator.

You're an active executive that's trying to tell your story.

Everything you do, everything that you have done, and everything you do on the daily basis from like uncomfortable conversations with a subordinate, or we had this big win, or pipeline is down, or whatever.

If you're selling into those spaces, like that's all content.

So I think it's like reorienting how you think about your life to like, the content all exists, you're not sitting down with a blank page.

You're like, where do I start?

It's like, go back through the beginning, start at the beginning, start at the big wins, the big losses, the uncomfortable board meetings.

Like, that's where I start, want to start pushing there.

They're focused, like really, I don't know, get started, I guess.

Okay.

So, so you mean they just, they should just start writing?

Oh, sorry, if you want to go like all the way back, you want to go through, like, we should update your profile and, and start sending connection requests and like, you know, let's go, we can go through that.

So like, if you want to get started on LinkedIn, I think, yeah, you need to figure out who you're speaking to first and foremost.

Like, typically with our clients, it's like the VP of Sales at a enterprise software company with, you know, 300 to 500 employees or whatever.

Right.

And well, you want to figure out, like, what are the things that we are selling them?

Like, what are the pain points of the VP's sales that we're speaking to?

Are they worried about pipeline generation?

Are they worried about this?

And those different pain points around that, we try to develop, like, different pillars of content that we can, you know, build around.

So once you do that, once we kind of learn what those pillars are, we'd probably, like, redo your profile to give you, I don't know, how simple, which level do you want me to go to?

Yeah, I think there's enough out there on sort of the LinkedIn file, but you are taking a different tact, which is in most cases, people have read about how it's your resume.

You're actually describing your LinkedIn profile in a positioning.

It's a positioning in a landing page, essentially.

Like, every single piece of content that you put out on LinkedIn is attracting people primarily back through that profile.

It shouldn't tell a story.

You only have, like, three spots you can really tell that story, right?

Like, the banner image, your headline, your featured section, I guess, a little bit of your experience of, like, I was at these roles, I'm an advisor at these companies, whatever.

And that's about it.

So, you have to be able to figure out how to tell your story within, I don't know, you know, those four spots.

I think it's valuable, right?

The profile to optimize all those things.

And we do it for all our clients to try to drive referral traffic to their websites or their demos or whatever.

But I think, you know, a lot of people are choosing whether to follow you, not based on your profile.

It's like based on the piece of content that they're reading and feed more than anything else, right?

So it's like that piece of content is what draws them back to your profile.

But I, you know, if they're going back there, they've already made their mind up for the most part, whether they're following you because you put out something interesting and valuable or whatever.

So, you know, it's table stakes.

You got to really optimize that profile, but I don't think it's the huge difference maker.

The difference maker is the content.

It's always going to be the content.

Yeah.

Okay.

But you so so I'm going to go through, I'm going to understand the VPS sales and create these.

When you said pillars of content, you're referring to actually posts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, it's like, you know, there's a reason I haven't scaled like scaled this thing a little bit, because every executive is a little different with how they operate and what they're comfortable talking about and what their market wants and how, you know, not everyone is Adam where they're going to open up their kimono and be like, here's all of our metrics and we made all these mistakes.

So I don't have an exact like, we do this first and then we do this.

A lot of it starts with like literally getting started and trying to craft the highest.

Like I'm not going to spend three weeks doing a position exercise or a brand overhaul.

It's like, I want to talk to you.

I'm going to understand your story and we're going to figure out some of the most interesting things about you that are loaded up with a lot of social proofing credibility, right?

Because on LinkedIn, when you get started, you put out that first post, no one knows who you are.

No one cares if you're going to give your three big sales tips or you're going to tell this story about the board reading gone wrong.

But if you say, I always had this major company, we're at this stage of growth and we're selling to these type of people, that's how you get people to start paying attention to you.

So I'm looking for content first more than, and my approach, which is not everyone's approach, I'm going to throw stuff out there and see what works.

And then I want to readjust versus spend, we're not coming up with a month of content ahead of time.

We're coming up with a week ahead of content because I do a month of content and it sucks.

Like I've already spent all that time to do it.

I want to do a week, I want to see what I learned, I want to see if the hook worked, I want to see if people are resonating with this in the comments and then I'm going to reverse engineer it and try to do it again.

So yeah, there's not as formal, everyone goes kind of through a unique process a little bit.

Yeah, when we were talking to Adam, the one of the things that he was talking about was the concept of content market fit and finding the appropriate voice for him that was going to resonate with his audience.

I wonder if we could talk a little bit about that, because you just mentioned, I like to try a lot of different things.

I don't like to get a big backlog, so we've got a month's worth of content in advance.

How do you think about that?

Is it merely as simple as being highly, highly metric based in terms of likes, comments, shares, follows, etc?

Or is there, and I'm guessing that the answer is yes.

Is there something that's maybe more scientific or maybe more esoteric to it?

You can see the depth of comments I think is really helpful.

I think it starts almost anecdotal.

I think LinkedIn, we start getting messages from people like, I read this post and this really resonated with me.

More so than all the views and the likes and the comments.

But when it goes to content, audience fit, which I do think is important, I think Adam will attest this.

We started with D2C content and he just could not speak authentically to that audience because he was not a D2C guy.

He was a B2B SaaS guy.

That's what he knew.

That's what he lived in the trenches for and had all the stories and the mistakes and the whatever.

So that is a very hard bridge, there is a really hard disconnected bridge if you don't have that.

Like if you're selling enterprise, this is why I think you're a perfect fit, like if you're selling enterprise SaaS to go to market folks and you came up as a go to market, like a salesperson and then Renee and an SDR and then a VP of sales, you have all those stores.

You have all that, like if you came up differently, it may be harder to connect to that audience.

So like I think that's the important part about content audience fit is like, you have to have the background and the credibility in those spaces to tell the stories or give the advice that anyone wants to pay attention to begin with.

Yeah.

I think about like the Delta that exists between a guy like Adam and a guy like the new CEO of Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy.

The guy will post something, Sridhar will post something.

It will get 700 to 800 likes and have eight comments.

Right.

It's like everybody's like, oh, you posted your quarterly earnings and they were successful.

Like.

But when Adam posts something, it's like hundreds of comments and then his responses and then people jumping in to the comments within the comments.

And so like the depth of engagement of a post like that is so much higher, even if like the metrics around the number of people, quote unquote, liking it may be, you know, may skew more heavily towards the CEO of Snowflake's post.

Because Craig and I both know sometimes how it works.

I think LinkedIn.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

You're delayed.

You're delayed.

That's why Alec and I keep jumping in.

Well, I am.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's hilarious.

You just did it again in answering whether you were.

Yeah, it was awesome.

It's okay.

We'll take a pregnant pause.

Like we'll wait.

What if you go through, make sure it all comes in and it will answer.

Alec, go ahead.

Sorry.

Yeah, I think you can look at the depth of comments and like the more threads there are in those comments of people engage in actual back and forth conversation.

I think that's probably the strongest indicator of content that's resonating.

I think it's what LinkedIn likes the most, right?

They want that back and forth.

You can see posts with lots of comments, like 200 comments that are just like, congrats, like you got promotion, like that is not going to do very well.

It's like when you get the actual back and forth, then people are arguing with each other.

It's like it's still a social media platform, maybe a B2B social media platform, but like there's still some of the same incentives of like, yeah, when people are arguing or like disagree, and or it's like getting a little heated because you have like a take on a wedge issue or whatever, like that's where you're going to see like real, I think audience growth come.

Matt, should we test your mic?

I don't know, am I still super delayed?

Alec, is he delayed to you?

Yeah, he was delayed to me, but I was just I was I was here.

I've seen him speak and then I was waiting for the words.

We can make it work, Matt.

We're just when we watch you speak, we'll wait for everything to come out.

So what do you please produce who do not cut this part because I'm enjoying it.

I'm enjoying it.

It just show it look it shows this is a freestyle and this is how we get to where we want to go.

So it's hard.

So like how like Adam does five days a week.

Let's just take him for example.

Is that what you three to four?

If you're just like looking, I think it changed a lot.

I think you look at someone like Sam, he posted twice a day.

Every weekday and once on the weekends for like a year, like that's how much content he was putting out.

Right.

So I think the platform has changed.

I think it is more of a quality versus quantity game, whereas three posts that do 300 likes or two posts that do 300 likes is worth exponentially more than 10 posts that do 50.

So it's worth more effort to, it's worth more time to put in the effort to like figure out how you can make it work and make it the best version of itself than just trying to put out content for the sake of content, which I know people love to do.

Right.

I don't think that really, that really helps, at least doesn't aggregate outside of like a little bit.

So yeah, that's what he was doing, like three to four.

Some clients do five, some do two.

It kind of depends.

There's no right mix to it, I guess.

But that's, you're always trying to match the executive of like what they can produce and not get them burned out.

You know what I mean?

Like you're the CEO of a $400 million company.

How much time do I get from you a week to do this?

And I want the most out of you to get the most views or whatever.

So we're always trying to balance them.

Yeah.

Matt?

I don't want to be delayed, man.

I feel bad, it's not like a thing.

It's not your personality.

I mean-

It might be.

All right.

Well, I had a bunch of questions specifically around.

So Adam is incredibly transparent.

Is that?

And you sort of mentioned in the start where it's like, can you start with, you start people off on the content side with having them just talk about experiences that they've had leading up to this, which is, you know, depending on how you present that, that is authentic, right?

I mean, it could lead you down that path.

But like the the it's almost like in many ways, there's Adam for me, I'm just let's just take him just because he there's other folks we can.

Sam did seem to always have the same amount of words on every one of his.

I don't know if that's true, but it did seem like that Adam, it was like he had either these like hugely transparent admission of mistakes.

That's like his thing.

He gets a lot of commentary on that.

But then the then he's also incredibly controversial, right?

We know, you know, where he'll go at a certain company or thing or way.

Is that it does matter?

Is that like a best practice or is that just him being him and someone else could take another attack?

You nailed, you nailed it.

I get a lot of people coming to me who want to, this is what's worked for Adam and we want to try to do it.

But it's like, you're not Adam.

Yeah.

I mean, like you have to be, you want to learn the best practices and like hook writing and, you know, different forms of engagement or writing, like interesting copy.

And you want to try to do that, but you still need to be the most authentic version of yourself.

Like, and that is Adam.

So he can do that, right?

So I think other people who try to do it, like you'll see a lot of people in the wake of the, it's called the sixth sense thing, you know, try to do a similar type approach, like pick a battle with a bigger competitor and beef a little bit.

And it's like, some of them were okay, but a lot of it felt like really inauthentic because you're just doing that for that engagement.

And it's like, that's not you, right?

So there's a lot you can learn from the work in public stuff and like giving real numbers because I think people see the whole startup world is a little opaque and like what's actually happening behind the scenes and how does a CEO think about their business?

And I think all that is really, obviously clearly resonated with a lot of people, but not everyone's going to be posting their bare metrics dashboard and talking about fire or laying off people or the biggest mistakes they made, all that stuff.

So you have to find what works for you.

There is a way to do it for everyone, but it's going to require a level of vulnerability that a lot of people are a little uncomfortable with.

Yeah.

See, it's the vulnerability thing for me as a difference maker, because I cringe when people think we're not picking up that they're advertising themselves or their company in their quote unquote helpful content, or patting themselves on the back.

Adam now can pat himself on the back, because we've been through his struggles on social.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Matt's back.

You're in good shape.

The Transaction is presented by Ringmaster, the go-to branded podcast team.

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So because, yeah, so he's sort of, he's been able to earn that credibility.

It's crazy.

You know, we've talked.

I was on a podcast once with your dad, with him, and then we did one.

Those are the only times I've talked to him.

But I feel like I know him, and it's because he's been so vulnerable.

Now, if he wants to go brag about the 20 million ARR, whatever that he did, I'm good with that.

He's told me all the, his openness is far outweighed, bragging.

The other folks, it's like, today met with the team and we reached this milestone, yay!

It's like, dude, I just want to die.

I mean, it's so bad.

It also comes with what comes after that.

Like there is, what's the ARR?

Like, oh, you know, Adam did a good job earlier.

It's like, if when he would did the big, we, you know, the update on the last month or whatever, it'd be like, here's what went well, and here's what went really bad.

Like, here's what we can improve on.

Like, there needs to be some narrative arc to, like, lead with a win if you want, but, like, tell me why it was hard.

Like, tell me what you actually did that's different than everyone else did.

Give me something.

That's kind of, a lot of B2B content is a little bit too boring.

There's no stakes to any of it.

Adam has kind of orchestrated this public drama, you know, almost, it's more like a, you know, telenovela or something.

Yeah, for sure.

And Matt, one thing, just bringing you back, as I think about there, and I just want to get at, first I want to get confirmation.

You've said this, I think you've said it a couple of times, which is like, cause Matt, by the way, Matt's a CMO.

Like he, he always says, well, you've got your corporate LinkedIn where you won't get, like, you're going to do classic corporate LinkedIn announcements.

You're not going to get a ton of engagement.

You still do it.

He, and he always says, what we're talking about though, is the humans on the team and the potential thought leaders, they're having a different conversation there.

And those are not the same things.

By the way, that the, you know, like in particular as we're talking about, like Adam, as he presents what's happening in his company, he does get some level of advertising out of it, but not like a forward of something that came out of the corporate webs, the corporate LinkedIn.

But Matt, I got that right, right?

We're talking about the splitting, yeah.

The two things, yeah.

So how do you talk to people about that sort of split or, you know, how they talk about themselves and their product versus, you know, what's happening in their world?

I think the master level to do it is to turn the, you know, if you can talk a little publicly about what you're doing is you want to turn the company more of a character into a character in your content in a way that you can talk about it authentically.

We were doing things here in our go-to-market motion was broken and we have this big things and you can naturally tag your company throughout it.

Like if you wanted to, for me, if I really wanted to grow a company page in this, you know, a corporate page, it'd be all based on the executives.

Like you get the executives get massive views.

You figure out a way to like thread the company narrative throughout their organic content and that will drive massive, you know, followership back to the company page.

You look at Adams, I think they have 10,000 followers on RBWB before they really posted anything at all because it just was tagged in these posts about the company and what we were doing there and all that.

So I think it's really hard to grow the company page on LinkedIn, especially like if you're sub, you know, if you don't have like a dedicated person or can master a unique voice or point of view similar to like what Gong did, I guess a little bit on the company page.

Like it's mainly like you're just dumping content there out of some sort of obligation or like we think we need to keep it up because some appearances, which you do, you should like, you should, you don't want to look like a dead company, but like it's not worth any resource I would put in that.

I'd move it all over to the executives and try to get them on, get them posting on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I mean, there's a thing that I think people miss when they're doing something like a product launch and they go to their corporate page and they're like, we launched this product and it does this and click here and read the blog.

Sure, that's fine.

You can do that.

But I want to hear from a company, I want to hear from their CMO, hey, this was the research that we did.

These were the conversations that we had with customers that led us to inform the product team that they should develop it.

Then the product leader has an opportunity to step in and say, hey, this is how we built this and this is why it was challenging, but we diverted resources off of this and put it over here.

People really want to understand the way the sausage is made in a way that I think either people are uncomfortable with or they think is boring, but all you have to do is look around at some of the best content, the best podcast, things like how I built this.

People want to know how people built things and why they came to the decision to make them, and not just necessarily, hey, we built a product, we launched it.

Now, go buy it, please, right?

Like, that seems to be the default setting for most businesses, whereas most people don't want to buy that way.

They want to know the people.

They want to know the motivations for the product that's been created.

They want to understand the challenges wrapped around how it was made or how the decision to make it was sort of orchestrated.

And telling that story can turn a product launch into something much more than, hey, our changelog just updated and we have this new product and it's for these type of people, please buy.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

I think the Sausage is Made thing I think is really important.

I think corporate social media gives you like an inside look of like what these executives are doing on a daily basis.

And we are all very interested.

Yeah, executives are quasi the celebrities of the business world, right?

Like they want to know what's happening behind the scenes.

Like depending on where you are in the organization, like your life may kind of depend on understand or your, you know, your life or whatever, may understand how these people think, or you may be selling to executives.

Like there's so many different ways that it's valuable just to lay out your thinking of how you came to a certain conclusion that it's been somewhat surprising how well it works, right?

Like I think just if you can get a really smart executive to put their thoughts down on paper and figure out an interesting way, I guarantee you like they didn't get to that level of success without being pretty smart.

And like if you can take that same brain and point it towards content and kind of like kind of teach them how to do that over the long run, like they are bound to like grow very, very nice audiences that have a big impact on the brand of that company.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

So if I'm, but but you get so like, is this about like, can a public CEO start now and do this or is this like is part of the secret that Sam and Adam built this from the ground up in many ways?

I don't know about for Sam maybe but like for Adam, like Scott Albrey, we had on a similar story like when you're talking about Adam, he had literally tens of thousands of followers before he even launched his company because he knew that this is where I need to sort of establish myself.

Like if Matt goes on his next CMO gig, goes to a $200 million company, it's been around for a while.

The CEO's thought leadership platform has primarily been speaking engagements, paid, made quotes in the press.

Like, can Matt go to him and see like, bro, we're going to make you a LinkedIn celebrity?

100%.

I mean, I think so.

I think so too, yeah.

Well, I thought you're asking me.

He was.

I'm just agreeing with you.

Yeah.

Matt either does an eyebrow lift.

Sometimes he nods like did just now.

And so like he was in violent agreement.

No, no, that was for you.

I was just pointing out that he agreed.

And I thought that was interesting.

I think it becomes a more delicate dance, right?

The bigger you get because you, how do you balance the authenticity with the, I don't know, maybe public fiduciary responsibility or whatever, and like the board and like when there's a public market involved or whatever, I'm sure it becomes a much more difficult dance.

Yeah.

But like, I definitely think as you grow out, like those bigger companies, it will be easier for them to do this just based on their natural built-in platform of having 10,000 employees or whatever.

It's going to give them this huge head start anyway.

So you can figure out the authentic way to do it.

That's not just like, I just spoke here or I did this or whatever.

And it's not going to be them posting memes.

And it's probably not going to be them posting like, here are the five biggest lessons I learned about, I don't know, go to market in the last 24 months.

There's going to be a little more heft or substance to it.

But I think it can absolutely be done.

And that's like the next generation of the next wave of this.

Okay, so Matt, like if you, if you had to, as you roll out another playbook at a, you know, as an operating CMO, is LinkedIn going to be a key part of your strategy or?

Yeah.

Does it depend?

Maybe it depends, but like, cause I don't think I'm going to join a public company.

In a lot of cases, public company CEOs already have like a pretty big brand in social, maybe too highly curated.

But the way I think about the CEO with a lot of followers and a lot of engagement on social is it becomes another channel for you.

It's like this really inexpensive, well, it's expensive depending upon how much time your CEO is dedicating to it.

But it's like, it's this really authentic, I would say, channel for communication or distribution.

And so like, yeah, we're releasing a new product and we're going to put out a press release and we're going to send an email blast to our database.

But if our CEO can speak about it really authentically on social, it's actually going to cut straight to the heart of our ideal customer.

It's going to be really authentic.

It's going to be highly engaging and ultimately probably drives infinitely more traffic than like a press release.

And so as we talk about like the way the old playbook falls away and the new playbook is starting to coalesce, to me, this is a cornerstone of it.

And in a lot of cases for small to mid-size businesses, like this is just an opportunity that's sitting there.

It's not easy.

Everything's challenging.

But if you can hit it right, and you're like, great, like every time I want to say something to people that I would like to influence or ultimately have become my customers someday, it's a great way to cut straight to that audience in a way that I think makes the audience feel like, hey, no one's trying to invade my inbox.

No one's serving me an ad that I don't want to see on espn.com.

It's just, you know, here's a voice of somebody that I value who's telling me this story, and that's much more compelling than other channels.

Yeah, 100%.

I also think it becomes an actual integral part of like, it's probably what we started to call like executive go-to-market, right?

Like they become an integral part of your go-to-market function when they have built this brand.

Like, they are now this public figure on LinkedIn, right?

They have all these followers within their audience.

There's all your buyers.

There's ideally your customers.

There's ideally prospects, whatever.

You can then use that brand, that executive brand, to multi-thread, to reactivate closed-watch opportunities, like through the LinkedIn inbox, because when a message shows up, it's coming from the CEO that you've been following for 6 to 12 months and you love this person.

So like, when a message shows up from them, so it's like on renewal, it's a red account.

Like if you can master their voice and you can kind of, again, they can't run this all themselves, but the brand exists for where it can be kind of leveraged and layered across all of your go-to-market functions in a way where your CEO doesn't really have time, but the CEO's brand has the time if that makes sense.

So like, I can't have the CEO of a $400 million company or whatever be multi-thread.

He doesn't just sit in his inbox and send the DMs and multi-thread or whatever, but I can certainly build the processes to connect with everything that's happening over there to make sure that the messaging that sounds exactly like the CEO starts those conversations, multi-threads those deals, reactivates close loss, talks to the newest prospect that comes in.

And those are now executive to executive level conversations.

That's one of the things I was talking about earlier.

I'm like, I don't think it's just the brand.

I think these kind of executive influencers become like the company's top salespeople, like just from their LinkedIn inboxes.

So I think that's where like the future of it goes.

Again, that'll be different if you're two to 10 versus a $400 million company.

But again, the brand and the power of it, like it's like having 10 of your best SDRs ever.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that leads to your number two, right?

And I, that resonated me in with me.

It didn't resonate me.

It resonated with me.

Like I thought, I don't know if like Lars Nilsson, when he's at Cloudera, you know, their number one SDR play was essentially, it wasn't their CEO, but they had one of the biggest evangelists in Hadoop out there.

And so they would literally, to top accounts only, send the email to their CIO from him, offering to take a meeting.

They sent it out of their own outreach, because this guy's reputation was so huge and could add value outside of the company to have that conversation, that it was converted so well, the guy had to tell them to stop, because he was doing so many meetings per week.

But to your point, because of that reputation, as a resource, that person becomes like their outbound value, their parachute in value, the offer to have a meeting with them.

You know, at Topo, those guys use me all the time.

And by the way, this sounds like a humble brag.

I just want everyone to know, it's not, it's just interesting.

We filled Topo Summit for four years.

We had a kid who was, we called him Craig AI.

He would go take all of my contacts and email people from me.

We invited literally 90% of the Summit invitees, like personally for me back and forth.

I mean, I remember I would go to the Summit.

People would be like, Craig, thanks for that deal on that ticket.

Yeah, no problem.

Like, you know, if you didn't reach out the other day, I wouldn't have come.

Yep, got it.

But it was because like I had that, like it was non-threatening too in many ways, just because, you know, there's all these things I can talk about that were different than just, you know, hey, like, let me demo this and see if this will fit.

As a matter of fact, I couldn't, I probably couldn't have pitched in like the sales people.

So I love that.

Like Adam now can probably get meetings he would never have gotten before.

Like, Sam is at this point now, where if he can reaches out to a CRO.

Now look, they're busy.

But you know what I mean?

Like he, they would be like, they would love to meet him and learn from him because he adds value in the LinkedIn feed every day.

And, and like on some of these tech guys, like the I've been meeting, I've been spending a lot of time with CISOs, right?

These, these influence at these security companies, these guys are like the master hackers that are on the vendor side, but are still like, first of all, those guys would never sell over the top on anybody, but they become the asset.

They are the people that everyone wants to talk to when they want to do a dinner and they're there, they're going to get the best CISOs because this guy's, you know, one of the best hackers in the world.

So to your point on that second point of yours, which is like, you transition this reputation into outbound value, it's huge.

There's so much you could do with it, right?

There's so much you can do.

I mean, it's not, it is a channel.

And ideally, we've seen it's like a channel that your team will fight over because it becomes so powerful, right?

Yes, it's event invites, it's podcast invites, it's multi-threading deals, it's net new opportunities because there's new people, you know, it's ABM more than anything, right?

Like you have the VP of Sales at the top 50 account comes in through your connections and they've engaged with a lot of your content and we know they just fill out a demo thing on the websites, but the salesperson can get in touch with them and then boom, there's a message from the CEO.

So it's like that level of coordination across, I think, all those different levers with the big lever being the, as you said, the brand or the notoriety of the CDO, essentially.

And it works really well.

Oh, no doubt.

Yeah, because that's the thing too, Matt.

I know you're not going to go to a $400 million company, but does it have to be the CEO?

Not necessarily, right?

Like there's expertise in the building that can be leveraged for this.

We've always said that, but frankly, we always translated it into blog content or white papers when in reality, what we're talking about here is getting them onto the proper social platform and also delivering in many ways something a little less polished than that you might see in something, right?

Professionally done as part of your sort of old school content strategy.

Yeah, I think the best influencer in your business is the person who may ultimately be the buyer of your product within your customers.

So, I think back to my days at Marketo and Phil wasn't the most influential outspoken member of that organization.

John Miller was, right?

Our CMO, who was out there sort of proselytizing what we were talking about to other CMOs.

He can speak their language.

He understands their day to day.

He empathized with their challenges, and he was able to find that audience market fit for the content that he was creating before.

We weren't necessarily, you know, anybody was necessarily thinking about it in the terms that you think about it, Alec.

And that was a big portion of our success.

That was a huge portion of our success.

So, I think that's a great point.

You have to have had that, you have to have felt that pain or that experience.

So, to anyone to believe the things that you're writing about, otherwise, it comes off as corporate more, you know, corporate speak, essentially.

Yeah, that's a great point.

So, let me ask you this, because you're also a podcast guy.

I mean, are we talking, like, is there more uber category here on like, because LinkedIn, there is a technique to it.

That's what we want to spend a lot of time on.

We did, but like, I mean, you've had a lot of success in the podcast channel.

Like, tell me, like, are there other things we should be thinking about in conjunction with the LinkedIn strategy that sort of play together that might be newish that, I mean, or even not newish, but you know what I mean?

Like, as part of this build out of the brand is there are others?

It all goes to, like, I think when it comes to the podcast, most people, this is my thoughts on podcasts, I think it's incredibly valuable.

Like, you can in the same way, you can get three smart people.

I mean, the same in them have a great podcast, right?

It's like three smart go to market guys.

They're like, they have banter, they have a relationship.

You feel like you're listening to three friends, like you feel like you're a part of it.

I think those type of podcasts, you know, that it does very well and they have guests as well.

But like the problem I think people have with podcasts is still like the distribution element, the discoverability element of it is because when I was promoting like podcasts, like going back, we're talking about A&E, I would take one podcast and I would spend like an hour going through that transcript to find the one thing.

Like there's not 15 clips in there that are interesting.

There's like there's one story in there that's interesting.

There can be a really good hook, there can be a really good post, there can lead subtly to a call to action, like for someone to go listen to that full episode.

Like when I'm promoting a podcast, you don't know it's a podcast promotion until you get to the last line of that post, because you start with that, people know they're turned off, they know you're trying to get them off platform or whatever.

I think the problem becomes people just don't know how to promote those podcasts.

You have to create the podcast and repurpose that content for in-feed consumption on LinkedIn.

How do you turn that podcast into the best LinkedIn post possible, because that's what's going to get your listeners back to the podcast.

Whereas most people use LinkedIn as a dumping ground for their podcast clips because they think that's what they're supposed to do.

It's like all that other type of thought leadership content, I'm always thinking about it from the lens of how do I turn this into the best LinkedIn post possible because that's where the actual distribution is.

If you can't do that, no one's going to listen to my podcast anyway.

It's like everything I'm looking through the lens of how do I get maximum eyeballs on this in an authentic way on LinkedIn.

Same goes for episodic video or you see people more doing these docu-series or whatever.

It's like, how do you get people to watch it?

It's like, are you going to blast your email list?

Are you going to upload it directly to LinkedIn?

So like people can just watch the full thing versus gaining it behind some kind of, you know, I guess I'm just trying to fight that, play that attention overall.

It's so hard to get attention.

So it's like attention over everything at this point.

What's the, this may seem like a random question, but it does feel like even though you're way farther along than anybody else in understanding how to play LinkedIn, what are the things you still don't know?

Like what still vexes you about LinkedIn?

I never know what they're, you know, I think a lot of, too many people worry about the algorithm, like treat the algorithm like an angry god.

There's nothing you can do.

There's nothing you can do about it.

It is like you're going to wake up, the sun's going to, you know, whatever, they're going to get angry about this.

Don't worry about it.

You should try to learn how it works or whatever, but don't spend a moment every day being stressed about the algorithm, like, you know, it's like being stressed about the weather or something.

You can't do anything about it.

But the thing I guess I don't have figured out is where's the level of like where it, where does it stop working, right?

Adam and Sam are like at a certain level, right?

Like it obviously works.

Like if I can get 40% of those results for someone, does that still provide a meaningful, you know, benefit to their business?

Like where does that cut off to where it doesn't work?

That's what I was trying to figure out.

Cause I, he just like personally was trying to very choosy.

I only tried to work with people I really think it would work, but like it's still valuable to someone else.

If I can't get them to 80,000 followers, like probably it's just, it's just different.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

For me that just, I don't have any idea what the LinkedIn feed monster likes or doesn't like.

I can't for the life of me, I can't figure that out and I've actually given up trying.

I just try to deliver, you know?

Yeah, that works.

And that's the other question for you since we primarily use snippets from the podcast on LinkedIn.

Is that, is it better to write?

I think you would have asked me if I were four weeks ago, it'd be a little different.

Like LinkedIn is now rolling out their LinkedIn video app.

Like they have their equivalent of TikTok.

I don't know if it showed up on your guys' feed.

And like they seem to really be craving video.

And like five weeks ago, if you would have asked me, I would have said video is additive.

Like you want a long, it's a text-based medium still.

You want a long form text post that hooks people in and that video provides additional context, right?

Or provides a visual element for them to bite into.

But like, if you don't have a good text element, no one's going to stop.

Within the last month or so, they rolled out this LinkedIn video app, which seems to just be really want short form 16 by 9 or 9 by 16 video, similar to TikTok or Reels or whatever.

That doesn't necessarily require a huge text component.

You seem to be more, there's no rhyme or reason yet about why LinkedIn is choosing certain videos to put in that app.

But it seems to be like if it's 916, it's kind of like a TikTok, it's possible you get picked up in this LinkedIn video app and you'll end up getting 50, 100,000 views.

It remains to be seen whether that leads to actual audience growth because on your in-feed content, like on your normal content, that's consumed primarily by your first and second degree connections who are pretty much within your ICP or ICP adjacent.

But when something gets picked up on this new video app, it's shown it to surfers and Australia engineers and Nigeria, like just people, it's the whole world.

So you're getting all these views, but is it actually having a meaningful impact on your business or will it help you grow your podcast?

I don't know the answer yet.

But yeah, just keep that in mind with the video.

That was a great insight.

Awesome.

Right.

Did you know that one?

Yeah, no.

Yeah, the video is interesting.

It goes a little bit across purposes for me because I still want the CEO of Coca-Cola posting on LinkedIn and he's not going to dance around in a TikTok video.

You know what I mean?

So it's like, or probably not.

So LinkedIn always seems to have a bit of a two steps forward, one step back.

I'm never sure why they're doing exactly what they're doing.

They're putting timestamps on comments for a few days and taking it off or all of a sudden you're only seeing content that's four weeks old or whatever.

I trust they'll figure it out, you know?

That was actually the perfect insight to snip and put into our feed for LinkedIn.

So I appreciate that.

Yeah.

And I got to be honest, I'm pretty sure we could talk about what's happening on LinkedIn all the time, right?

And things are changing.

So I hope once we learn a little bit more and you learn a little more, we can have you back.

But that was incredibly interesting.

That was exactly what we want from The Transaction.

So absolutely.

Absolutely.

On the next one, I have a partner named Kyle Williams, who's this outbound wizard who's helped to build this whole executive go to market, what we're calling the part number two that we talked about.

I'm happy to tell you a little bit more about that offline, but I'm sure we'd be happy to talk about this.

I think you guys would find it fascinating.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

I love it.

All right, man.

Well, that was the Transaction.

That's exactly what we'll try to do here.

So I love it.

No prep call.

Did not tell you what we were going to talk about.

Brought you on and you crushed it, man.

So I appreciate it and keep up the good work.

We love to watch it.

Thanks.

All right, guys.

Thanks, everyone.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of The Transaction.

Craig and I really appreciate the fact that you've listened all the way to the end.

What are you actually doing here?

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