The Transaction

Craig Complains about the Cold
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[00:00:00]

Craig Rosenberg: By the way, I'm in New York and, uh, I walked a mile, which is what I like to do, and my face froze off, but I guess that's just because I'm a California, I'm California climate accustomed, but, uh, I think my face is coming back to normal, everyone. So we can do this. Um, yeah, it's nice. It's nice. So Matt, we get to talk some marketing today.

I think that's, uh, it's pretty exciting for us. You know, we talk a lot about how the playbook and how some of the things that have worked in the past aren't working and we're always looking for new ideas. Uh, which is how we found today's guest, right?

Matt Amundson: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the dream is [00:01:00] to, launch a campaign that goes quote unquote viral or that quote unquote goes viral. Uh, that's what everybody's CEO sort of demands of them. And Mac in the last, uh, year or so you've done it twice. So we're really excited to, to dive a little deeper into the virality of, uh, of marketing programs.

Craig, over the course of your history, have you ever been a part of something that went viral?

Craig Rosenberg: I don't think so. I think I've done every trick in the book to just get to first base of viral. You know what I mean? Like, it's I do what I can to feel good about what I did and I might be in the three Yeah. you know what I mean? So, so yeah, so that's a good lead. So, um,

Introducing Special Guest Mac Reddin!
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Craig Rosenberg: our guest today, by the way, Matt and I are just meeting today, which is new.

And the reason is because, uh, we were sitting there like looking for great ideas and, um, we'll talk about [00:02:00] this further. And Sam, our producer, is like, Hey, you guys gotta see what, uh, you know, these guys ComSor did. And it was, uh, it was right in my wheelhouse, cause I'm a Chicken Wings fanatic. And like, it was like, Oh my god, we gotta talk to this guy.

So we're just meeting today, but Uh, you know, our, our guest is a founder, like I, I work in venture, so like when I saw your profile, I'm like, this dude is a founder dude. He's a founder dude. Right? Lots of bootstrap businesses in the past. And now the chairman of dinosaurs or dinos at CommSore. And that's why one of my favorite things when I look you up a couple, you know, it's like every time I see it, it's like, want a fun fact about dinosaurs, DM me.

you know, you've been doing that. It seems like, you know, you know, four and a half, five years, and you've been, uh, doing some incredible stuff on the go to market and the virality side, as Matt likes to put it. And that, for us, is a big deal. We want new ideas, and that's why we're so excited to have you [00:03:00] on the show.

So everyone, our guest today, Mack Redden. Anything else you'd add? I just gave you a high level overview of you because you're just, I mean, like, you're a classic, man.

Mac Reddin: Well, I don't know how to follow up from that. Thank you. I think you hit the nail on the head better than I would have.

Craig Rosenberg: well, perfect. that's my goal. And Matt gives, it's one of the only thing Matt gives me some credit for is my lead in intros. I, uh, I take great pride in them. And, you know, usually I got to look through a whole, this was like, Oh my God, I know this guy. Um, so the way we like to start conversations is we're, we're, we're trying to find things where the market has a Traditional view, a view of what they think is right, a view of what a best practice is.

Um, and we're looking for, you know, where they're, maybe you could say where they're wrong. Like, they, they, you're not thinking about it in the right way.

Mac Reddin: Oh, I have so many versions of that.

Craig Rosenberg: we have, yeah, I know. When we think about having you on the show, I think the show epitomizes that. So start with that, [00:04:00] a reaction to that statement, and then let's go from there.

What GTM Teams are doing Wrong & Vibe-First Marketing
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Mac Reddin: I mean, my, my gut reaction to that statement is I think 99 percent of what go to market teams do is wrong or misguided today. Um, like

Matt Amundson: That is a hot

Mac Reddin: of it. And that isn't to say that 99 percent doesn't sometimes work. I just want to make sure that there's that distinction, right? I think we've confused working and good ideas sometimes.

They are not, they They can be mutually exclusive. over the last, I don't know, call it 10 years, 15 years, whatever you want to do, I think so much of marketing and sales has trended towards absolute measurement. Everything has to be trackable, everything has to be measurable, everything has to have a numerical goal to it. If I can't measure that I put a dollar in and I got two dollars out, it's a bad idea.

That's basically, it and it's like, trending towards automation, it's like, the human element has been removed. Especially in B2B. I think B2C is a little different, like, just that context we're talking, .

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Mac Reddin: I think like sales leaders, CMOs, et cetera, they're so [00:05:00] afraid to do anything that can't be perfectly measured.

And that creates this vicious cycle that people might not have realized for a while, because up until like two years ago, we had this ten year period of just like, shit was easy. If you just showed up and did the bare minimum in go to market, like, there was a good chance it was going to work. You could have a half decent product, a half decent ad strategy, a half decent outbound strategy.

And like, you are probably going to hit your goals and raise some more money and keep going. And we, we don't really live in that era anymore. Um, so when I, when I think about marketing ideas and when our team thinks about them, we tend to think from almost like a, I guess as cheesy as it sounds, kind of like a vibe first mentality.

We start to, we think

more from the perspective of like, how are people going to feel about this? And it's like, I don't really, I mean, I care about the numbers, obviously. I'm trying to run a business, not just like do marketing ideas for fun. But the numbers aren't where we start when we think about ideas.

We think about how people are going to react to this. Is it fun? Is it interesting? Is it exciting? Is it [00:06:00] zigging where others are zagging? Those are the sorts of questions we ask ourselves when we talk about ideas internally.

Matt Amundson: Love that. So let's, let's try to contextualize this into a real world example. You've got,

Craig Rosenberg: A vibe first. A vibe first. I love

Matt Amundson: this into a vibe. First example, you've got a marketer who's just started. That's like, Hey, I, uh, you know, I'm big on email, right? And there's all, you know, decades worth of literature on how to run successful email marketing campaign.

And they're like, Yeah, I'm gonna unfurl this narrative over the course of 12 emails. And Every couple is going to have, you know, a hard offer, like a demo request. Most will have a soft offer, like download this asset or, you know, join us at this event or whatever. So somebody comes to you and says that, where, where do you zag there?

Mac Reddin: You hit the nail on the head. You said there's tons of literature out there on how to do it. So everybody is following the same playbook. This is how to do an email [00:07:00] campaign. This is how to do LinkedIn ads. This is how to do outbound email. So without realizing it, you're just doing your own version of the same thing.

Everybody else is doing. Um, I like to use this line. This is more like sales related, but it applies to marketing as well. Where you can be the best. You have the best timing, the best messaging. The problem is, there is so much noise out there. It doesn't matter. You're still not going to sound out. You can have the best crafted email campaign.

Perfect timing of when to do hard offer versus soft offer. You've thought about it scientifically. I get a hundred emails a day that I don't read. I missed your email. It was perfect. It was perfectly timed for me. I hit delete because I get too many emails, right? Like that's the reality of these like perfectly scientifically driven ad driven algorithmic driven campaigns.

Like it just creates a bunch of sameness. So that's like, that's where it starts. It's like, how, what are you doing? That's different, right? If it's not looking at your competitors and be like, Oh, they're doing email marketing. Therefore I have to do email marketing, or this is how. I don't know, insert company email marketing six years [00:08:00] ago, so if that's the one to get inspiration from, it's like, by the time you see an idea posted on LinkedIn, that idea probably doesn't work anymore.

Because like, once it's reached that like, zeitgeist level of like, everybody's talking about it, everybody's also doing

it. So that's, that's the starting point, and it's, the unfortunate truth is, the problem starts with leaders, right? Not with marketers. So yeah, I get a lot of More, you know, junior to mid level marketers or sales people who are asking me that sort of question.

And the problem is it doesn't matter because their boss and their manager is expecting these Algorithmic measurable campaigns so they never get to the point where they're given that leeway To try things, to be creative, to be human first. So it has to start at that level.

Craig Rosenberg: What's an example of your most Well, it could be your favorite, because we don't necessarily It's not necessarily quantifiable in a sort of And by the way, I'm not mocking I love Vibe First. I'm honestly going with that. I just want to keep mentioning it. I realize you [00:09:00] don't know me and so I'm I'm just letting you know that that's, this is pure validation.

The Chicken Wing Example of a Vibe-First Marketing Approach
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Craig Rosenberg: So like what's an example of your favorite sort of vibe first campaign or thing that you did that was totally out of the box? How'd you get there? What'd it look like? I can't wait.

Mac Reddin: that the funny thing is that I don't even think it was that out of the box. It's just the bar is so low in B2B that people reacted like it was so out of the box.

Craig Rosenberg: Like us, we're like, yeah,

Mac Reddin: we sponsored Pavilion's GTM 23 event in Nashville last October and it was kind of a spur of the moment decision.

We're like, yeah, we're trying to get in front of more sales and go to marketing leaders. Let's do it. Let's figure it out on the fly. And then three weeks before the event, we're like, we have a booth at this thing, like, what are we gonna do at this booth? Like, we're like, ah, like, we're just gonna show up and, like, collect leads, or, like, we're gonna get a computer and have a demo of the product, like, like, that's just And a lot of it, we kind of went to our own thinking, was like, if I went to an event as an attendee, would that interest me? And that's, that's also like a broader thing here, is like people don't think about that. They think they're being different, but that's also not how they buy or how [00:10:00] they act with marketing. So we, our whole product, we talk a lot about like, you know, warm intros as a premise of our products. We were joking around like, oh, like warm pipeline instead of cold pipeline.

We ended up talking about, like, what if we did, like, a Hot Ones style show, which is like the chicken wing show where they have celebrities eat increasingly spicy wings, and we were like, let's say we're going to put the heat back into your pipeline. It was like, it was very much a spur of the moment idea. But what we did was we ended up framing our entire booth around that. So there was literally no traditional badge scanning, no place to get a demo of our product. Like, we actually had a, we had a professional film crew come in with three cameras and lights and microphones. So, right out of the gate when you walked into the exhibit hall, you're like, booth with a table, booth with a table on a TV, booth with a table, booth with a table on a TV, booth with a table.

Like all, and then it's like, lights and cameras and microphones and like, what is, what is going on over there? Um, so I think that right out of the gate. Caught people off guard. Um, and then we just, the entire booth was just us [00:11:00] filming little micro episodes of me interviewing someone as we ate five increasingly spicy wings.

But we went all the way. We got custom hot sauce, custom bottles, it was like the warm intro sauce, the SDR tears. Uh, I'm forgetting what the other ones were, but they're all like, they're

all themed.

Craig Rosenberg: man.

Mac Reddin: we had the

custom

backdrop. Like, we like, we went all in on it. And that's part of it, right, is it's like, we could have had a half assed idea, but we, once we had the idea, we fully committed to it.

And we had, I think over the course of, uh, it was a two day event. There was about 750 attendees. Uh, two weeks before the event, we actually put out a little mini website, and we kind of advertised we were going to do it, because we wanted to try to get some people to pre sign up. So we weren't just like trying to like, we didn't know how many people were going to do it.

We had a hundred and ninety people out of a seven hundred person event pre sign up to want to be a guest on this live show.

Matt Amundson: Amazing.

Mac Reddin: twenty five percent of the entire event were like, I want to come to your booth before they even knew who we were. You have to keep in [00:12:00] mind, we hadn't publicly launched like, what Comstar is today at this point.

We had no real like, following. Like, these are all people that were hearing about us for the first time. There's so many more details I can go into, but that I think is, of our more recent examples, one of my favorites.

Craig Rosenberg: That's brilliant.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: mean, Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: and, and just,

Mac Reddin: And we did it really poorly, too. Like, there's so many learnings on what I would do differently if I

were to do it again.

Craig Rosenberg: of course, yeah, but if you didn't do it, none of us would know. Like, yeah, I mean, it's a great idea for all of us. Um, that's amazing. And so you filmed just like a mini episode, the eight, and this, Matt's going to punch me for that. I just got it because I like really spicy wings.

Was the fifth wing, like a knock you out, like type of spice, because that's really important to

Mac Reddin: we did some quick testing, and originally the fifth one was like, you're gonna be on the ground crying. Sort of like, not talking for an hour. And then we realized, like, People, when we're at

a live event, might not really love that if we're taking them out of [00:13:00] commission for the rest of the event after they come do this with us for that day.

So we ended up toning it down. It was still like, we got reactions, people were like, we had someone like, someone swore at me, they took a bite and they were like, fuck you, and I was like, whoa, and they were like, this is just too spicy, and I was like, alright, sorry. Um, I really like spicy food, which is also good because I, I had 132 wings over two days.

And like

they were They were spicy. The bigger issue was actually just like the amount of wings I ate. I kind of underestimated that problem. And then of course the second day, that morning, I actually gave a talk at the event and I'd eaten 70 something wings the day before, spicy food and all that. I'm standing up on stage at 9am and I'm like, oh, I'm not exactly feeling too well right now.

I gotta like, like, I got the heat of the light. It's like, oh boy, I'm going to stumble through this talk. It's not going to be pretty.

Craig Rosenberg: That's amazing. What'd you do with the episodes in the video and like how'd you release

them

Mac Reddin: So we haven't released them yet. I guess that's one of the learnings of where we kind of messed up. We, uh, we messed up on [00:14:00] editing them and there's a whole long story there. So actually, by the time this episode comes out, maybe they'll be live. Because they're going live in like a week or two. Um, and what we're doing to keep the campaign going is we actually ordered more of the custom hot sauce.

So we have about Uh, there were five different bottles. We got a hundred of each bottle, so about 500 total. And we're doing a whole campaign where, um, we're going to release the episodes, have a little mini website where you can actually buy the hot sauce for yourself if you want, or the idea is like put some heat back into your pipeline and send a bottle to a prospect who's ghosted you to remind them of like the heat that they're missing.

Um, so we're framing it as like a, you should send a bottle of our hot sauce to one of your customers. Just spend ten bucks, send a bottle. We're not, it's not structured for us to make money. It's really just a, you know, cover our costs thing. Um, so we're going to kind of reactivate the campaign, bring the hot sauce back, make it accessible to get your own bottles, all that sort of stuff.

Matt Amundson: That is so cool. I love it when a brand has legs like that, when it transitions from being, you know, an [00:15:00] activation all the way through to a larger scale campaign. I think that's so cool. Uh, I gotta tell ya, like, you know, when I first saw the video, I was like, this is so cool. And I was like, I mean, that's just an amazing way to run a booth at an event, but I had no idea of the legs.

Like, really well thought out. Like, I can, uh, I get a very good sense for the vibe.

Mac Reddin: There

Craig Rosenberg: Boom. There

Matt Amundson: there we go.

Yeah.

Mac Reddin: We had people like, we had people coming by our booth we were like finishing up on the second day and people were like, Can I film? Can I film? So, to give you an idea of how successful our booth was, At 4pm the second day, the event was over. By

5pm, all the other booths had packed up, they'd gone home, they'd like full, like, That also tells you how simple their booths were, right?

That in less than an hour they were packed up and done. We were there for four hours after the event ended, Filming episodes with people staying behind, waiting in line to be a guest on the show.

So our booth outlived the actual event by multiple hours.

Matt Amundson: [00:16:00] Oh. my

Mac Reddin: They had like

crews coming in like taking down the signs and all like the, you know, the stuff of the event and we're

like still there filming. yeah.

Matt Amundson: you're like, yeah, it should be time for me to get out of here, but that's

Mac Reddin: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: No, not, not what the, that isn't, that is, okay, that, that show surprised me even more. That's amazing. I'm sorry to say that show, that, let's call it that campaign, that, how you handle that show. Um, I would just, like, for me, it's incredible because I was trying to think, like, back to what we were trying to talk about in the start, which is like, If you want something where the mark, I, you

How Commsor’s Booth Compares to Traditional Event Marketing
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Craig Rosenberg: know, I don't know, Matt, if I would say like the other booth people would say that they, this is what we do and that's why they did it.

I, I, I just don't know that they, everyone sort of taken a step back and said, you know, how can we disrupt,

Mac Reddin: It's because they're there, they're there for a metric, right? They're there for booth scans. That's what they're being measured on. So they're building for that and they're [00:17:00] activating for that. But I don't know about you, but when's the last time a booth scan actually led to a deal? Like, I

Matt Amundson: I mean, it could be a touch point on a customer journey, but like, I think you're right to assume that it's never going to be the tipping point for why somebody goes from, I'm completely unaware of this brand to now suddenly I'm buying something from them. But I think when you When you push it to the limit the way you did in Nashville, you actually can create an experience like that.

Now, I wonder, uh, just, you know, prior to my life working in tech, I worked in consumer packaged goods and trade shows in that world, whether it's, uh, you know, food and beverage or, you know, Any other commoditized product like those trade shows operate on a significantly grander scale. They think about experience and booth.

I think you're right to point out earlier in the episode that on the B2B side, everything's just a little bit dulled out, right? And, and highly, highly metrics [00:18:00] driven. So you're going to Dreamforce. You've got the. X precious metal level booth. Your expectation is that you're going to get, you know, 1200 scans a day.

You're going to book X amount of meetings, derive X amount of pipeline. And so you sort of, you do like the very traditional work back model of like, Hey, how much do we expect that we're going to book from this show? And so how many leads do we need? How many qualified leads, how many meetings, how many opportunities, et cetera.

But I think when you take an approach like yours, it's a swing because you could air ball it. It could be like people are like, we're all vegan. What do you mean chicken? Like, absolutely not. This isn't happening. Uh, but, but the, the upside potential is so much bigger. And clearly you left a lasting impression because I guarantee everybody who either didn't record on that show or, uh, didn't have an opportunity to come by the booth at the very least knew about the booth, right?

Mac Reddin: Yeah,

Matt Amundson: even in, in the sort of the virality of [00:19:00] how that Uh, how the imagery and, and sort of the videos of, of your booth went out into, into places like LinkedIn. Suddenly it was not 750 people that were just at a show, but it was like sort of everybody on LinkedIn taking a look at what you guys

were

Mac Reddin: it reminds me of like a good billboard, right? It's like the billboard, a good billboard doesn't get the impressions because you see the billboard. It's like the photo of it being shared is actually what is the goal. Um, and we haven't even released the videos yet. So like we have this long tail of like those booths, they put their money in, they got their leads potentially.

The end. It's over. We have 18 episodes of this show that we're going to start releasing over the next 20 weeks. That's like half a year's worth of content there, plus clips, plus the ongoing stuff. We've actually, we got invited to go to another event and they're giving us a booth for free. They're waiving the sponsorship cost for us to bring that activation to the event because they want it at the event.

So 000 booth for free because we're bringing an interesting experience rather than essentially an [00:20:00] advertisement to the event.

Matt Amundson: Oh man. Incredible. Incredible.

Mac Reddin: And the total

thing cost us, like, even with the sponsorship, the total cost was like 20, 000 for this event. Like,

Matt Amundson: Oh

Mac Reddin: dirt cheap in the grand scheme of things compared to what we could have done with that money.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah,

totally. And the Chicken Wing Market in Nashville just went through the

Mac Reddin: Oh yeah, and the theming of it working with, you know, being in Nashville, doing Spicy Wings, it was just like the whole,

it just fit perfectly. Which was kind of unintended, it wasn't because it was Nashville, it was just, we just rolled with

it.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. I had shorted chicken wing stock and got a real bone to pick with you,

Mac Reddin: I do

like

Craig Rosenberg: time to start buying.

Mac’s B2C Sources of Inspiration
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Mac Reddin: You mentioned your background in CPG and stuff, and I would say we take a lot more inspiration from, like, consumer influencers and consumer brands than we do from B2B brands. Like, my favorite inspiration, do you know Mischief?

Matt Amundson: Yeah, of course. Yeah, I've got a pair, I've got a pair of their shoes. Not the big red boots, but , [00:21:00] super

normals

Mac Reddin: are you gonna need, are you gonna need CommSource shoes

soon?

Matt Amundson: there. All right.

Mac Reddin: These are actual, like, these are actual custom shoes that we're making for a future

Matt Amundson: Nice. Nice. Well, you're, you're in, you're in Europe, so size 46.

Craig Rosenberg: Should I, should I be embarrassed that I don't know Mischief

or

Mac Reddin: Uh,

Matt Amundson: Oh, your, your

Mac Reddin: I don't, I don't know how to describe. They started as like an art collective doing kind of like art slash consumer stunts. Like the one that I think I first saw was they did, they launched, they released an ATM in New York City. They called it the High Score ATM. So it had a video screen above it and when you used it to check your balance, it took a photo of you and it showed the top 10 people with the highest balance who had used the ATM on the screen.

So they started by doing these sort of like, Art project stunt things and then they started doing product drops. They've done weird shoes They've done if they kind of like really moved into the sneaker market, but they did like they dropped cologne that smells like WD 40 They

did a couple other

things.

They're like

Matt Amundson: They, they, they, [00:22:00] they sold a car key fobs, multiple car key fobs to a single car. So you could buy this car key fob and then you could get the GPS location of where it was and all these people could just take the car and drive off with it.

Mac Reddin: They did one with, uh, with Mr. Beast, they did the Lamborghini one, where you was like, you buy a Lamborghini for 50, but, you know, 9, 950 of them are gonna be a little Hot Wheels Lamborghini. Uh, 50 of them were like a remote controlled Lamborghini, and one was a real Lamborghini, but you didn't know which one you were getting when you made the purchase.

Like, they've done lots of weird Fun stunts like that and I think, I think B2B needs more of that vibe and less of the like, I go to a booth, I scan a thing, I give you a gated downloadable and then I hit you with 37 emails once you've downloaded it until you tell me to fuck off and like, We need, we need more of what Mischief is doing and, and less of what B2B's been doing for the last 10 years.

Craig Rosenberg: for sure.

Matt Amundson: or or at the very least we need to come somewhere in the

Mac Reddin: Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm not saying that the B2B [00:23:00] strategies don't work, but I guess based on the success most companies are having, it seems like maybe they don't? Um, at least not the way they used to. Yeah, there's always a place for every strategy, of course.

Matt Amundson: Sure,

Craig Rosenberg: totally. But in particular, um, from an awareness perspective, a launch perspective, like, this was an incredible example here. Um,

Mac Reddin: Yeah, for

Craig Rosenberg: and, uh, oh my word, man. This is just like a win and a half. Um, and I'm gonna, I'm on the Mischief site so you, as Matt can tell you, you shouldn't have distracted me. Let me close this here so I

Mac Reddin: Sorry. Yeah, look at it when we're done. It's a great, it's a fascinating website. It's really interesting to spend some time on though.

Craig Rosenberg: So, I jumped in when we were talking about the million impressions. Is that a good topic, Matt, or am I going

Matt Amundson: yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, because you didn't just do an onsite activation that went viral. You also ran a social campaign that went viral. And everybody on the planet. [00:24:00] Here's what I'll say is like,

I don't know

how many people are.

Mac Reddin: say.

Matt Amundson: sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. sure, sure. It size still has the most views on on YouTube with Gangnam Style.

But most people are not on YouTube. Yeah, I think so. I could be wrong. Fact check me after.

Don: Matt was... INCORRECT. "Gangnam Style" by Sigh is currently 10th in all-time views on YouTube with 5.09 billion views since 2012. It is far behind the more than 14 billion views accumulated by Pinkfong's "Baby Shark Dance".

Matt Amundson: I think most people are not necessarily game for Hey, I'm gonna really roll the dice at this booth at this big event, right? Like it takes real, real like sort of gumption do, campaign that. But

How to Create an Influencer Campaign to Conquer LinkedIn
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Matt Amundson: most people would tell you that they would love to be able to create content.

On LinkedIn, that's getting more than like the typical branded 40 likes, mostly from the employees, three comments, mostly [00:25:00] from the employees, you know, four shares, mostly from the employees. Like, and you, you ran a campaign that went extraordinarily well. And I'd love to, to double click into that and just learn a little bit more about that from, you know, in the same way we talked about the booth, right?

Like, how did you come up with it? How did you execute? And, and what were some of the results that you saw?

Mac Reddin: I think for starters, a lot of the success of that started in part with the chicken wings. Um, and, and so there's like a, there's a broader theme here, I think, which is a lot of like, not just vibes, but a lot of our marketing and our strategy is built around creating authentic connections with our market.

It's not just like, it's not just like, hey, do you want to buy? No? Okay, cool. Hey, do you want to buy now? All right, no, cool. Like that's what most go to market strategies really are, if you really boil them down to their simplest form. So once again, if we were just a normal booth, yeah, we might've talked to some folks, made some good relationships, gotten a few leads.

People wouldn't have remembered it, they wouldn't have gotten to know us, they wouldn't have gotten to know us as people, there wouldn't have been this human element. So, when we, when we kind of [00:26:00] publicly launched New Commsor about a month ago now, um, we went to all the people who we'd built relationships with over the last 3 or 4 months, including people who'd come by the booth, people who'd been guests on the booth, and we just said, hey, do you want to help us spread the word?

We're going to do this fun little activation. Um, and we had like 150 people say yes. And actually, one of the big learnings was I didn't ask some of the bigger names because I was like, there's no way this person is going to say yes. They charge money for posts. And then on the day of, they were like, why didn't you ask me to help?

And I was like, I kind of assumed you would say no. I should have asked. Um, but because for the three to four months leading up to this launch, We had been focused on this like, authentic connection, vibe based, get to know people, be humans first, not a brand first. People were very willing to be like, yeah, I love you guys.

Of course I want to help. Like, I'm not even a customer. I just like, I like what you guys did. It was really fun. Thanks for having me on the, you know, the Hot Ones show. It was, it was, it was a blast. So there was like this, there was like this social capital that we built up over three to four months. So when we asked people if they would be willing to do something, a [00:27:00] metric shit ton of them said yes, at least relative to our size and our, and our scale.

So that was step one, was actually like creating the environment in which people wanted to be a part of what we were doing. And that's the thing, I just don't think a lot of marketing creates something that you want to be a part of. I mean, if you think about the best consumer brands, as a quick sidebar, people say they're kind of like cults, right?

Nike, Apple, folks like that, like, they've transcended the product. Like, I'm part of Apple, I'm an Apple fanboy, or I'm a Nike fanboy. B2B doesn't do that because they don't market in a way that creates something you want to be a part of. Um, so we, we put this together. We had a whole plan. We did some really good video content that we filmed together as a team.

I think one of the reasons it worked really well was we didn't ask everyone just to post the same thing. And I think a lot of companies when they do these like influencer LinkedIn activations, They get everyone to post like the same image, but with their photo changed out and it's like the same copy.

And they're just like, they're just trying to flood LinkedIn or the internet in general with the same [00:28:00] message. Instead, we asked people to share. We gave them kind of three different, like, prompt starters. Like, our whole business model, we call ourselves the House of Authentic Connections. So we wanted them to share a story on how their network or authentic connections have had an impact on them personally and professionally.

So suddenly, each post was unique and a personal story. And like, yes, they all kind of ended with the same message. But they were all different, unique posts that enabled it to actually not feel like it was just copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. So each post became a unique thing to engage with. It wasn't like once you'd seen one or two, you're like, oh my god, oh my god, another person, just scroll past, another person.

So each individual post got more legs, which meant each individual post was seen by more people. So it had this whole compounding effect. Um, and it just felt a lot more natural. Um, it didn't feel like we'd just gone out and paid a bunch of people to parrot the same message. There was an element of like, their own personality and everything. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: but they, so the, so the, this was like, uh, an [00:29:00] influencer would do a video and a post related to your launch. And you did it on a sequential basis, or did

you send them all out at once?

Mac Reddin: one, it wasn't, I wouldn't really even call it traditional influence. We didn't spend, we didn't pay anybody anything. This was just us asking that they wanted to participate and they said yes. A lot of people, there were some like, snarky posts that day were like, Oh wow, like, look at CommServe blowing their marketing budget, paying people to talk about them.

And it was like, We didn't, we spent zero dollars

on that day.

Craig Rosenberg: Got it. So you didn't use the Kardashians. I

Mac Reddin: no, no, no. It was, it was all, it was all people that were like, kind of like in our ICP. It was like sales and marketing people. And so Um, and basically what they were, they just ended their message with like congrats to CommSore on launching the House of Authentic Connections.

But leading up to that was like their own personal story or kind of related thing to what we've been doing. Some people recorded videos showing off how they were using the product already without us asking them to. Some of them just kind of did a story on like what their network means to them. Some of them just shared a story about like [00:30:00] how they met our team and loved our team and why they were supporting us.

You got all Different types of stories, um, and yeah, we obviously we can't see every impression on everyone's post, but we estimate we got between 1 and 1. 5, 1. 6 million unique impressions that

day.

standards is like, is a

lot.

Craig Rosenberg: that's was the total number of participants that you had?

Mac Reddin: Uh, about about 150, yeah.

Matt Amundson: Sheesh.

Craig Rosenberg: still that number. Yeah. It's like the million or a million five numbers to the layman. That's huge. And it is, but like 150 contributors based on where you guys are as an organization. That's a huge. number.

Mac Reddin: Yeah, especially, once again, like I can't emphasize, we didn't pay anybody anything. Nobody posted because they were being incentivized to, and I think once again that's why it's important. It's a result of the way we'd been marketing leading up to that point. Like,

The Impact of Consistently Building Strong Relationships In Your Market
---

Mac Reddin: we wouldn't have been able to just like do this campaign in a vacuum.

This was, while it might feel like an overnight success, and [00:31:00] yeah, it was like a week of planning to put it together, it was four to six months of build up to make it possible.

Matt Amundson: So when you talk about that four to six months of buildup, can we, can we unpack that a little bit? Just because I think, you know, there are lots of people who have, you know, awesome customers and You know, they want to, you know, sort of bring them into the, the, the brand, bring them closer to the brand, but like, you know, they can't get on a plane and fly to [00:32:00] each one of them, take them out to dinner, take them out to lunch, learn all that stuff.

So, so there was some level of scale to what you guys were doing while also maintaining a level of, uh, of one to one personal connection. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's fascinating to me, even in addition to what you did, uh, through the campaign.

Mac Reddin: I think it's, it, I don't know if I have like an easy, clean answer to that, because it's like, it's a lot of immeasurable vibe y stuff,

right, that, that went into it, but a lot of it came down to, I think one of the biggest problems right now when you go to market is that everything is built on the assumption of a binary outcome, right?

Marketing and sales are built on the assumption of a closed won or a closed loss deal. That's it. In reality, though That's just, that's just not the way it works, right? Like, maybe you're, maybe I try to sell to you now, but you don't, but maybe in a year you're a different role, or you end up being, you know, someone who refers business to us, or a partner, or we end up hiring you.

Like, there's so many possible outcomes. So, our approach was [00:33:00] basically, how do we foster a network of people who give a shit about what we're doing? That's the simplest way to put it. And that's customers, that's friends, that's partners, that's fans. It's a mix of all of them. Um, I think it comes down to, it's a combination of our team's approach to marketing and social strategy, which has always been more of like a conversation rather than a broadcast.

I think most marketing is like, I have a thing, look at my thing, push it out there, push it out through posts. And that's where you get those examples of like the social posts with 40 likes and 3 comments. Why do I, as an individual, give a shit about that, right? So, approaching it in this like conversational manner, I think not taking ourselves too seriously.

I mean, my title on LinkedIn is like El Rey del Dinos, right? It's like it's, I'm clearly not trying too hard. Even though it's like I am, it's like a, it's like

a, it's a different kind of, Um, and then a lot of it's just been like conversations. It's like a lot of doing things that don't scale, talking to people.

[00:34:00] Cause it's like, a lot of it was like we were doing early customer research. We were doing early demos. We were onboarding beta users. So like we were, there was product and business value while we were doing those conversations. But we didn't just treat it as like, Oh, you're not going to be a customer right now.

All right, I'll come back to you later. We like, we just, it was, it It was like, how do we keep that conversation going? It was like, some of those people joined a Slack group. Like we've got. We've got a couple hundred people that are not customers yet that are hanging out in a Slack group designed for our customers, just because they want to hang out and talk to our team. Like, that's

Yeah.

how most marketing ends up working.

Craig Rosenberg: I have a, I have a quick question that might be a diversion, but first I just want to ask you guys, I actually saw it, I guess technically I have two. So one is for Matt, and for Matt, video.

How B2B Marketers Should Think About Video Content
---

Craig Rosenberg: How, as a B2B go to market organization, how should I think about public video? Cause honestly, I love it in snippets I'm like a, I'm worried I'm becoming like a TikTok amount of attention, but I do. I really [00:35:00] like quick video, but like, I don't know, is that, am I, is that basically the reality? Am I the reality, or how should, how else should we

be thinking about it?

Matt Amundson: Yeah. I mean, you're falling into what everybody else has already fallen into, I'm just late, you know, I'm I'm a late adopter, laggard.

no, no. no. It's, uh, yeah. I mean, you

know, there's people that probably

adopted after you. There might be four or five, but, um, yeah, it's people consume video. They like it. You know, they, they like video with text laid over it.

They want to see it. They want to read it. If they have an opportunity to listen to it in real time, they'll listen to it. But like they want things that are quick and we know, you know, just from the long form written content, transition to blogs, transition to microblogs, transition to posts, transitions, tweets, right?

The same thing is true for do you really want to sit and watch somebody's hour long presentation or do you want the highlights of it? Right. And like part of the reason why podcasts work so well is, you know, uh, and. especially this one, the transaction, please like and [00:36:00] subscribe, uh, is that, you know, people can play this in the background, right?

It's like a way for them to get content, uh, in a very, you know, sort of efficient manner. And I think the, the rise of podcasts, the rise of short form video all have to do with people's inability to have lots of time for specific types of attention that they, that they grant to things. Uh, I mean, like how many of us watch TV?

But we're really working while we're watching TV or looking at something else. It's just, there's so many things that are, that are demanding our attention that there's just not time to look at long form stuff anymore. So video is a great way to get an idea across in a very short way. And then, you know, obviously with the subtitles, people have the opportunity to say, Ooh, there's a video.

I like video. I can't really listen to it cause I'm sitting at my desk at work, but I'll read along. So, what I see just from posts that we put out that are largely text based versus posts that we put out that are video based is the video based get way more engagement, way more shares, way more comments, uh, it's just, [00:37:00] it just grabs people's attention much, much more efficiently.

Mac Reddin: Yeah, I agree. I think also, if If you're trying to build an authentic brand that puts the people behind the brand first, video is, a must, right? Because that's how you get to know the people, right? Like, if I write a text post, like, you can realistically, like, take most text posts and, like, just change the name of who wrote it and, like, Yeah, I've got my own style, but like, text is, there's only so much uniqueness you can get across in text.

Video, like I've found that like, so we, we're investing even more in video than we have. We have a full time video producer who joined our team in January. Like, it's a big part of our strategy for the rest of this year and moving forward. And the videos we've done so far, um, our video editor calls it, she calls it anti editing.

Where it's like, it's not the quick paced Mr. Beast style. It's more You know, the editing isn't quite as obvious. There's lots of editing going on. And I've noticed, uh, she, she leaves in my weird, like, Oh, oops, that was a dumb thing. Don't say that. And people love that. People love the

whole, [00:38:00] like, Get to know Mac as a person, not just Mac as a

message. Uh, I think that's really, that's what video lets you do. That text doesn't.

Craig Rosenberg: Got it. I forgot my second question. Here's one comment, though. Sorry about that. That was interesting. I thought I'd just throw that out there, but that, that, it is important because I think people do say, well, like, you know, how should we, you know,

Founders That are Active on Social Media are a Secret Weapon
---

Craig Rosenberg: as we think about new playbooks for content distribution and those things, videos, uh, is clearly one of them.

I think one of the things that ties back to what Mac led with is to do, so Mac is a founder, or the chairman of Dinosaurs, or El Rey de Dinos. And, uh, that's, you know, for most marketers, uh, to be able to take leaps like this, it is hard. Like, you, it has, you either have to be extremely empowered, um, but more likely you need a founder or CEO that's willing to think differently, right?

I mean, in order to, because you [00:39:00] do have to think differently here. And you do have to believe that in I, I, I, I'm lucky that I

Mac Reddin: like, doing weird marketing. Like, that's It's also, it turns out it's something I'm apparently pretty good at, so it's a nice little competitive advantage. But I have, I've spoken to a few marketers who've pointed to some of the things we've done, and like, showing that it's worked.

And they've, they've been able to get some leeway internally, because it's, you need to have, for most people, when you go to your boss, you need to have something you can point to, to prove that your idea's gonna work. They're not gonna let you take a full leap of

faith in the dark. Like, when I'm the founder, I mean, no one's gonna stop me.

I can, I can do it, right? It's a different dynamic, for sure.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. And I think the other thing that's true is, you know, when a CEO leads out in front. Uh, you get way more engagement, way more engagement, right? Like, hey, this company's CEO is doing this is amazing. Like, uh, you know, like

Craig Rosenberg: a

good point.

Matt Amundson: let's just, let's just think about things like, like at a very high level, like do any of us know the name [00:40:00] of the best marketer that's ever been at Apple?

No, but we know Steve Jobs and we know Tim Cook, right? Like these guys are leading out in front, right? Like we don't know the marketer at Facebook, we know Mark Zuckerberg. We don't, you know, we, Craig and I know a lot of the marketers from Salesforce, but Mark's at the forefront of everything, right?

And so like having a CEO that's willing to, be the face of the organization, participate in the marketing. Do things like videos, write a lot of content online. Like, that is a marketer's secret weapon. And it,

Mac Reddin: I, I will say, by the way, that does not come naturally to me. Like I'm the,

in high school, I'm the, I'm the, I'm the kid who was like, I'm gonna, like, I can't talk in front of the class. Like I, if, if you told me 10 years ago that I would be doing podcasts, recording videos of myself, speaking on stages, writing on LinkedIn.

Craig Rosenberg: Right.

Mac Reddin: Absolutely not. And it was a conscious decision about nine months ago to start taking, it started by taking LinkedIn from a written perspective seriously. And it's kind of snowballed into all this other stuff we're doing. [00:41:00] Um, I would say most days it doesn't feel natural. Um, so I think, I just say that for like, you know, I speak to a lot of founders who say the same thing.

I don't have this, like, natural extrovert bone that you have, Mack, and I'm like, I am not an extrovert. I, like, this feels deeply unnatural to me. Even, like, sitting on a podcast, writing a LinkedIn post, recording a video, like, I do it because I can see, one, I'm starting to learn to like it, I'll say, and I'm, it's becoming more natural and it becomes a bit of, like, a sixth sense the more you do it, but the first six months of it was pure just, like, forcing myself to do it because I believed it was the right thing to do.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. So, that is a key point though, Matt. And, so, even though Matt doesn't find it natural, he's made, you know, he's tied to the authenticity of the brand and like, part of I wonder if there's data, by the way, that tell Because you're like, it's better, it's a secret weapon for the marketer, but I wonder if it's table stakes

now.

Matt Amundson: I

Craig Rosenberg: Especially with [00:42:00] everything happening on

LinkedIn,

Matt Amundson: Yeah. I mean, if you,

Craig Rosenberg: founder out there.

Matt Amundson: If you just looked at it through the lens of LinkedIn, Take a look at a brand, any brand, Look at when the brand makes a post, From the, from the, the brand's LinkedIn, And then look when a CEO makes a post. Right? Like the brand post, if you're lucky, is going to get 100 likes and a dozen or so comments. The CEO, if they are active on LinkedIn, is going to get hundreds of comments, hundreds of likes, like, or maybe not hundreds of comments, but dozens of

Mac Reddin: More than the

Matt Amundson: of likes. Yes, by a significant amount. We're not talking 2 to 1, we're talking more like 10 to 1.

Mac Reddin: Because it people care about what people have to say. Yes.

Matt Amundson: It

cannot be random.

Mac Reddin: And It

has to be consistent, Yeah.

like the first three months of me taking LinkedIn seriously didn't move the needle at all. Like, nothing happened, right? It's like, and then suddenly it starts working and now it's like, oh, it's like, it's working more consistently.

And it's like, I would say, six months ago there were more days where it felt like it wasn't working than working. Now it feels like there's more days where it's working than not [00:43:00] working. You know, it's, there's always the algorithm game, and there's always days where it works better than others. But, it, that's the other thing that I think a lot of marketers, CEOs, leaders are scared by.

With like, whether it's the personal brand stuff, whether it's the vibe based stuff. It's not just the lack of measurement, it's also the, the time it takes. But it's,

I, I, I've used the analogy before that I think a lot of marketing strategies or sales strategies are like, Every time you want a vegetable, you go to the store and you buy a vegetable.

So it's just like, I want a vegetable, I pay a dollar. I want another vegetable, I pay a dollar. Versus like a lot of what we're doing is more akin to like growing your own garden, right? It's like you pay once, you plant it. Yeah, you gotta nurture it. Yeah, it's gonna take a little bit longer. But once it works, it's cheaper, it's faster, and it tastes

better.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Craig Rosenberg: to,

Being Intentional and Consistent with LinkedIn are Key
---

Craig Rosenberg: when you say I took LinkedIn seriously, just for the other, like we're just kinda on this theme here, what did that, what does that mean?

Mac Reddin: I think maybe the better word is intentionally rather than seriously. Um, I would say up until about nine months ago, to give you [00:44:00] an idea, I didn't have a LinkedIn account when I started CompStore until an investor told me it was kind of sketchy to invest in a founder who had no online presence and I was like, Fine, I'll make a LinkedIn account, dammit.

Um,

Craig Rosenberg: are, man, jeez.

Mac Reddin: I, I, I have no, I have no Facebook account. I have no TikTok account. I have no Snapchat account. I am not a social media native person. I am not like the average person my age when it comes to that, for sure. Um, so I had the account. Had it for like four years. Um, and of course, you know, we would post, you know, probably once every few months, oh, here's a product update, or we're announcing we raised a round, like the classic stuff you see, like, founders do on LinkedIn.

And they're like, yeah, you get a little bump of engagement and then nothing, and just because of, like, the title, you get people connecting with you, so like, yeah, you get to a couple thousand followers without really doing much work that way over, over two or three years. Um, But taking it intentionally meant that I was just, I guess I started publishing content is really what that means.

I started actually putting things out there that weren't just, hey look my company has news to share.

[00:45:00] Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: That's great.

Honestly. I mean, I don't, uh, you certainly did not disappoint me today, man. I'm glad I figured out how to get on this thing. Yeah, I mean, this is really great and really interesting. I think uh, I think the world's changing. What I actually think one big takeaway for me was that even though you're doing these remarkable things And yes, there was work, but you're still, there's still this agility.

There's still like, you know what I mean? And like, you guys just still made it happen. Like we don't, there's no story of hiring this multi million dollar agency to come in for ideas. Like it's, and it's all, that's one, right. There's like, when someone comes to

me and says they can't do it, I

Shoutout to the Team Behind Commsor
---

Mac Reddin: shout out to our awesome tiny scrappy team. Our entire sales, marketing, our entire team that's not product engineering is only four people for reference. Myself and three

others. So it's

Craig Rosenberg: But you guys rallied or, yeah, you rallied around this, this [00:46:00] thing that you did. It's just. It means, you know, it should be for everyone that you, you can do it. A founder and CEO who wasn't even on LinkedIn is now a influencer on LinkedIn.

I mean, these things can be done, right? These things can be done. I think that, I think that's I mean, the ideas are really important and incredible and blew me away, but the fact that they're doable

Mac Reddin: I think that's another, another kind of benefit related is that What we're doing is also fun. Which means the team gets behind it more. The team has fun with it. It's creating an environment where it's like, you should see some of the stupid ass ideas our team suggests. We're just like, yeah, some of the ideas we've talked about, yeah, we can never do that.

That's crazy and wild, but you need that sort of mentality for the good ones to be uncovered. And, uh, yeah, it's just more fun. It's a lot more fun than being this like, I'm gonna do programmatic SEO, or I'm gonna schedule email campaigns and be purely scientific. For some people, maybe that's right, but for our team, giving them that creative [00:47:00] leeway has also, like, they show up and get more done, have more fun with it, they're happier employees, like, it's just, it's better internally and externally.

It goes both ways. And that compounds on itself, too. Better internally means, like, I had someone last week say, they're like, I can so tell that your team is having fun with what they're doing.

Matt Amundson: That's incredible.

Mac Reddin: some stupid video that was like, I don't remember what it was, but like, I think most B2B companies would have been like, terrified to make a post like that, because it was like, kind of, it was very stupid and like, meme y and whatnot, but people, people just want to know what they're buying from, it's like, they want to buy from real people.

They want to know who you are, they want to get to know you, they don't want to know you as like, Mac the salesperson who's going to like, bullshit you to get a sale done. There's just like, put some humanity and creativity back into what you're doing. I mean, that's, that's where you got to start. Yeah,

Craig Rosenberg: you're you're like, I mean, the team's rallying around this thing is a culture building exercise and it's like, Uh, it's not just the [00:48:00] traditional, Hey, end of quarter, let's do a Coblet's Day. This is like something really fun that brings people together. It's a, it's, that's a, that's an amazing add on there.

And benefit, for sure. Yeah, love it. Alright, man. I mean, this was

Matt Amundson: blown away, blown away. Incredible. Uh, we're such fans of yours, even more so now, uh, which sometimes I meet people and they're like, Oh, I'm a, I'm a fan of yours. And then after the conversation, they're like, not anymore. So, uh,

Mac Reddin: Whew, I'm glad

that's not my case.

Craig Rosenberg: Like, like, like me. No, no, I'm just kidding. Yeah,

Mac Reddin: It's like the more he records podcasts with you the less of a fan he is,

right?

Matt Amundson: It's true. It's true. It's true. Well, outstanding. This was so much fun. Thank you so much. We know that you're in a completely different time zone, so we appreciate you for joining us today. And as I said earlier, just as a closing call to action for everybody, this is the new feed. Please like and subscribe and listen for more guests like Mac on the [00:49:00] transaction.