Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: All right, welcome back to another episode of subscription Heroes podcast today. You know, Barrett, I think we're gonna have to get the profanity filter out for this one.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: We'll see if we can get some.
[00:00:13] Speaker C: Bleeps in there when we do the editing.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: I love it. We had Adam Robinson on from retention.com rb two b. You may have seen him on LinkedIn. If you spend any time there on LinkedIn and you're in sales, marketing, product, probably haven't been able to avoid him. Or if you listen to any podcast in the industry, he's been on all of them recently. And so what did you learn, Baird? What was your favorite takeaway?
[00:00:34] Speaker C: It was a lot of fun. He's at the beginning of a crazy journey, and I think it's always such a good reminder when you actually spend an hour with somebody that's starting to have everything's clicking for him, but it's not magic. It's a lot of really small tweaks and changes and experimentations over a long period of time that has gotten to where he is today. He talked about just some really small experiments that he did with his content before he even got started with rb two B talked a lot about pricing changes and tweaks that didn't work and then finally did work. And his just go to market strategy, matching up with his marketing, and all of the experimentation and iteration he has done for those two to find each other and all kind of come together, perfect time. It's a good reminder that everything we do, growing a business, is a series of small tweaks and experimentation. And I think he's got a really interesting view on the current state of outbound and go to market within b two B. It definitely feels like it's changing. And it was really great to get his perspective because I think we're all trying to adjust to a new world of b two B in the last year, and it doesn't seem like things are going to change. So, yeah, he's got a lot of really interesting views on where things are and where they're going.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah, really helpful. I mean, ten years ago, we talked a little bit about the book called predictable revenue by Aaron Ross. Like, that's basically the book that documented the BDR model and its earliest manifestations. And I think what we're finding, and what a lot of folks are finding now is that just the nature of email is changing. The nature of phone calls is changing, cold calling. You can't get ahold of people the same way, and so you have to get their attention.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: You're.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: You're fighting for attention. And you get attention not by pitching your product, you get it by empathizing with the problems that your target audience has. And that's the way to get them into your. Your orbit. And then from there, if you can align an offer of products, something that can help solve any of the pains that you're talking about, doesn't even have to be the pains that you talk about the most. But if you can solve any pain in their life or in their business, then you have a chance of creating a really, a really good business. It's just, I think it's completely different marketing strategy even than most people in b two b tech or b two c tech have been doing even over the past few years. Right. It's still very product centric.
[00:02:58] Speaker C: Yeah. What he's doing and what he's talking about, it's going to feel unnatural to a lot of people, but when you hear him lay it out, it makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, it's a good episode.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Very, very freewheeling. So hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, man.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Of course. Thanks for having me on. I think it's the best way to do this.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: You know, it's like, it's like it's so valuable to get in front of other people's audiences in the space and like, this is just a really efficient vehicle. What pisses me off is that LinkedIn does not want to distribute your podcast for you.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: No.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Like, it really does not. It's not good content for them.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: That's like, I never really thought about that.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that's super annoying because, like, if it actually was, then this would be like the best thing to do by far. But I still think it's like you get your go to audience who's listening to every episode. You know, you can get ten people to just sit there and listen to the whole thing, then, like, you got them, you know?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: I was just going to say, yeah, we very modest YouTube audience, but the watch time is insane how long people spend when they watch your content on this long form content. It's just been incredible for engagement, not just acquisition, but also just retaining our customer and just our audience in general.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: I just started exploring what making an actual YouTube channel would entail and I decided not to do it.
[00:04:22] Speaker C: What'd you find?
[00:04:24] Speaker B: So, like, this is just kind of a revelation that I've had about what I perceive that I'm doing as I observe myself do it like, I think that I am an edutainment company right now way more than a SaaS. And the channel for edutainment right now is LinkedIn. And I'm spending my whole life doing it. And it is just phenomenal what's happening in like, if I think about, you know, it's like, I don't think there's like info products stuff on LinkedIn very much, but like, it's just so much better edutainment when you're not trying to sell info products at the end of it because it's so much more authentic. And I think, like, it's one of the reasons why Hormozi stuff works so well out of nowhere. It's because he's not like, the whole trajectory of what you're saying is different. If you're trying to like, bait somebody into giving you three grand for something they won't. Whatever. Yeah. So through that lens, it's like, okay, how do I just amplify this, right? And it's like, oh, it makes sense to like, expand to another channel. And then rather than just being like, I'm going to take exactly what I'm doing and put it on YouTube, which I've been doing, I've been talking to people who really know YouTube and they're like, okay, you will be competing as this sort of edutainment person. This is what it's going to take. And basically it's like 520 minutes or 1 hour videos per week.
Yeah, it's bananas, right? So I think I have a tiny audience of people who just watch the LinkedIn shit and they like it or whatever, but to really go at it and compete in that world, I'm just going to have to have a lot more, you know, I think it'll make sense in a couple of years. But like, I think I can just do so much more with LinkedIn alone in that the concentration of the audience is so much better and it's so much more valuable, then I'm going to just like, try to post more frequently, try to start running thought leadership ads, try to amass a community of UGC lead gen agency content creators, which are super effective for us, and try to really nail this weekly live event, actually make it a good show, and then understand the tasks that are related to promotion, show running and follow up and just get that thing dialed and that'll to nail all of that stuff. It's going to take a year for sure. And the good thing is it's already working. But I think to be like world class at all of those things. It'll take a year, and then maybe we'll have faster do some other stuff.
[00:06:55] Speaker C: So I took over marketing here at Cherokee a couple months ago. I was doing sales for the past year and a half. Two years before that, I had run some more consumer focused SaaS products. So this is my first foray into b two B marketing. And it seems like I'm just really interested in what you're doing because I think a lot of b two b marketing is so ROI. Okay, what channels and how much investment am I putting in there? How many users, how many leads? And running through that full funnel, it seems like you're looking at it from a higher perspective of growing the audience and not specifically driving directly to one of your products. How do you think about that as far as justifying the effort to spend the time?
What's your take on that?
[00:07:40] Speaker B: So I wrote a post about this last week, or maybe the week before. I think this is just a really interesting thing. Some of the pushback I got was that I can only approach it this way because I'm actually the CEO and I don't have anyone to report to. But, like, how do I say this? It's like. It's like, not that metrics are like, not a part of what I do at all. We certainly, like, look at how posts are doing relative to other posts to sort of come up with ideas or whatever. But the philosophical orientation I am taking is nothing like I'm using a lot of video, which gets deprioritized by LinkedIn. And the reason is because I feel like it creates a deeper human, human connection than text alone. I just am highly convicted that if you can get people watching video of you talk over time about things they're interested in, they will literally feel like they're your best friend after a while. But if I was trying to maximize my subscriber count, I would not be doing that. If I were trying to maximize my subscriber count just ruthlessly, I would be posting about like, job interviews and like viral tweets and shit like that. If I were trying to maximize it, even within this universe, I would be doing text posts, mostly about sales, probably about BDR or whatever, because there's just more salespeople on LinkedIn. So when you write something a hot take about sales, it will just get more reach than a hot take about ABM, for instance, which is a more valuable audience to me because ultimately the marketers are the buyers, the salespeople are the champions. I still need to placate them, but the marketers are the most valuable. And then I have this other audience of earlier stage founders, which those are the people that are just like Russell Brunson said this. Hes like the most magical alignment between, you know, a founder content creator of a product in the target audience is if you're like the future version of them. Right. So that's kind of where I am for these earlier stage founders. They would love to have a bootstrapped 22 million ARR startup and a second one, they're starting that, like, got to a million ARR in 15 weeks or whatever. And I'm literally like, just sitting there telling the story of every single step. And by the way, like, I know the content's super valuable because five years ago, before I started retention.com, comma, I was dying for it. I'd been stuck at 3 million ARR for four years. Anybody who was way ahead of me doing anything, I wanted to read every word of it because I wanted to know what they were doing that was working for them. I mean, what I didn't understand is I didn't have product market fit, and the only reason the stuff they were doing was working is that they did, but still, just understanding the thought process behind why more experienced people were doing what they were doing, I would have read every single bit of it. So that's kind of like one of the drivers of all this stuff I'm doing. You know, there's two major goals. One, I'm trying to, like, maximize human to human connection. So cast the widest net possible of, like, people who feel like they know me in this ICP, and then I have this great luxury of, while I'm telling the story of this journey that I'm bringing people along, it's so tightly intertwined with this product that I just launched three months ago that people will inevitably go check out my LinkedIn or, you know, hit RB two, B.com and see what we do or whatever. And then another part of it is I structure intentionally made the offer viral as well. Like, you know, freemium for a product like that is just kind of unheard of, right? Like, it's nothing like anything. It's like the product is, like, better than what was ubiquitous, and then you say and free, and it's kind of mind blowing or something. So, yeah, I'm just getting really experimental with all of this stuff, you know? And I just don't think, like, if I were hired to be the CMO content creator of RB two B and I were reporting to somebody, I don't know that, like, there's always the danger because, you know, it's expensive, and it, like, on a minute to minute basis, people look at it and they're like, why? But. But then you step back in aggregate, and you're like, yes, that's working, right?
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: So, yeah. And if you optimize for metrics, the whole machine would just look different.
[00:11:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: You know?
[00:11:53] Speaker C: Yeah. I wonder if the lesson there is seems like you're giving yourself freedom to explore this marketing approach and doing it from an authentic place and then looking at the results afterwards versus trying to design a system that is driving leads. And sounds like that approach gives you a lot of creativity and freedom to kind of explore it.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Adam, if it wasn't driving signups for you, what would you do differently?
[00:12:19] Speaker B: I mean, now it would just be demoralizing if it wasn't.
I don't know. It's so hard to imagine this having not worked, because it's just so obviously, not to brag or whatever, but I talk about this a lot. It's like, we had this first genius pricing theory, and we got 2000 sign ups, and 13 people bought the worst free to paid conversion ever. And then we changed it once, and it was clearly the wrong thing and changed it again 24 hours later. And now we're getting a 9% free to paid conversion with no touch. I've never heard of anything like that. It's bananas.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: Individuals. Five to 7% is great with individuals doing that in b two b is crazy.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's 9%, and we don't even have a salesperson yet. He's starting on July 1.
Things like that are just giving me so much energy to, like, wanna even go harder at this that I can't even imagine what it would feel like to have none of it working. You know? Like, I just don't know that I would have the energy to keep pushing.
But what content creators tell me is, you get a similar type of energy, and I do. It's like, I'll go to an event and, like, just people walking up to you and being like, I love your stuff. It's helping me so much. Like, whatever. Like, that really gives you a lot of energy to keep going. And then reflecting back on, like, how valuable I would have thought this stuff was five years ago keeps me going. But, like, you know, there was a guy, like, not even at a business event. I was. It was during south by Southwest, and I just, like, was at this party at my friend's. He owns this place called the Museum of Ice Cream. So, like, he had a party at south by Southwest, and this dude walks up to me and he's like, bro. And I'm like, I think I know where this is going, but, like, I'm not sure. And he's like, this must happen to you all the time. I'm like, not really. He's like, you are the most inspirational person in my life. Wow. He's like, yeah, I live in New York, and this was in Austin. He's like, I live in New York. I have a 1 million ARR startup every single. You know, I just respect so much that you're bootstrapped and you're still grinding, and, like, you know, it's not this vc bullshit, and, like, you're telling it like it is, which no one else does, and, like, whatever, it's, like, everything I try to do. So it was, like, really flattering in that regard. And, like, you know, the other thing is, like, how amazing is it that core marketing function of our company is doing that to some people? Right? Like, a consequence of it is, like, it's really fucking helping. You know what I mean? Like, in a not delusional way. Like, these people are just like, dude, this is amazing. Right?
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: So there's so much positive tailwind that, like, it's hard to imagine it being deflating. And I think also LinkedIn is, like, a more positive platform for creators than most of them. Like, the comments you get, it's, like, not much shit talking. It's not much like you're an asshole. It's not. You know what I mean?
[00:15:21] Speaker A: So if anything, it could use to be a little bit of. Have a little bit more of an edge. But.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Well, yeah, but. But by the way, that's what. When you're willing to do that, it really makes your stuff stand out, as I have learned a lot.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Little.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Little contrarian goes a long way there. And the. The biggest thing on LinkedIn, I've been active on LinkedIn, like, real active on LinkedIn since, like, 2019, and I haven't gotten to where you quickly blew past where I am on LinkedIn. But, like, the imbalance of creator, people creating content to people consuming content is still off the charts on the totally. Like, it's way imbalanced. Like, what do they say, 1% of people create content?
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe it's up to two, but, like, if you think about Twitter, it's probably 75%. You know, like, who's on Twitter? It's people who tweet. Right?
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Like, that's right.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: It's. It's not really just like you're there, you know, doing whatever. So that brings up this question that I get asked a ton. I'm sure you're not surprised. It's like, well, should I try to do what you're doing since it's working so well for you? Yeah. And my response to that is, I think, as I sort of alluded to before, I have this magical alignment and for a little background, we didn't start selling to b two b companies until March 1. I didn't start writing content aimed at a b two b audience until Labor Day of last year. I spent twelve months trying to get e commerce people to book demos with us by creating content on LinkedIn. And we started on LinkedIn instead of Twitter, where more of them are because of the creator dynamic that you described. The idea was like, get 1020 thousand followers on LinkedIn, learn how to create content in general, then go try to crack Twitter. And just as it was all, like, the try to crack Twitter game was going on, our company was in a position to where Santosh, my coo, he was like, dude, now's the time we got to go see if we can, like, make a b two b product. Because if it's working selling a $100 shoes, it's going to work selling $20,000 software packages. So, like, we just got to go see. And I told my LinkedIn consultant, Alec, I'm like, dude, I want to see if I can point this gun at b two B. He's like, oh, man. With what you're willing to say and, like, how committed you are to this, I will be able to get you on the phone with anybody. Because he has this motion where it's like, Sam Jacobs is one of his customers. The CEO of Cognism is. So they basically are like, best in class content leads to inbound connection requests that they then filter and only accept the ICP connection requests. They shoot them a little note that's like, you know what caught your attention? Wait for 60 days, that person gets sent your content, and then by the time you reach back out, you're a celebrity. So, like, that's their whole model. And he's like, dude, I just know because I'm working with three other guys in this space, tangentially, like, you will rip it if you do that. So that was the original plan for rb two B. We were going to do like an sort of influencer, but sales led motion. And then it started working so well that I was like, you know what we really need a free offer because then you have this benefit of scale on the content side, benefit of scale on the product side, and the virality of both can kind of like interact with each other. And now I just, I view myself playing this like, attention game and it's like, what can I do to just get people talking about this, right? It's like, yeah, introduce a product category that people are going to call me an idiot for introducing. It's like, great, go argue about it. Like, please, you know, like, call me an idiot. Yeah.
[00:18:53] Speaker C: I think one of the hardest things on company number five now, and one of the hardest things is to get your marketing, your pricing and your onboarding all lined up in the same, going in the same direction, and that seems to be happening for you. And it's just, I've had it happen once. Well, twice. And it is just when it all starts clicking, everybody is just on the same page and everything starts rolling.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And like, my struggle with that pricing thing is like super real, right? So, like, we were getting no paying customers, period. Cause my original thesis was like, in order to make this low churn, I'm going to give away the leads and sell the HubSpot and salesforce integration and then give the slack push away for free. And the problem is people can take leads out of slack and do whatever they want. So that didn't work. And first of all, working in public with that theme was incredible because the quality of comments that I was getting from people, I couldn't believe it. I was like, dude, this guy, rapid fire product feature. This guy took ten minutes writing this and there were 75 of them, you know, and it was like giving me vocabulary for things that I, I didn't appreciate because this is my first PlG. Like, for instance, for example, like this idea, which seems intuitive once I say it, but like, over and over again, it's like, dude, I'm telling you, your free offer has way too much value versus paid. It's going to be really hard to keep stacking value on paid, especially given that weird dynamic where they can parse the slack block to where the free value versus paid will give people incentive to actually jump to paid regardless of what the price is. And we were noticing that, but didn't have vocabulary for it. So, like, there was like this tremendous willingness to pay before someone saw the free version. And then once they saw the free, they were just like, this is unbelievable. Like, I don't need anything else. Like, I don't even really care what else there is. Like, I don't need anything other than this. It was. It was a very strange thing. So they basically informed me that we should. I still wanted to give it away for 90% of the market. So it's like, charge for basically leads above that and then give the integrations with the paid plans. And then we had so this 24 hours period, our enterprise sales guy, which we have for the data sales business, he was working on this a little bit, and, like, he made the pricing kind of above 1000 records per month, which is like a mid market ish. Saasden. That that was for. The prices were just too high, and they were, like, kind of too high to products that kind of do the same thing for us. And I just noticed by how people were talking to us that it was just the wrong thing. And he's sitting there arguing, like, premium pricing, this, that, and the other. Like, I work just. I'm like, to your point there, it's like, that was not aligned with the whole rest of our go to market motion, a viral content freemium offer that's meant to fly off the shelves. If you hit friction in this sales thing, it's just not.
And then we fix it, and it's a 9% conversion rate, free to paid with no one touching it. Right. It was just like, immediately, like, holy shit. Unlock. Like, kind of thing. Like, you know, the same people who just couldn't even imagine paying $1,400 a month at 799, they were like, boom.
You know, like, we're loving it, by the way.
[00:22:14] Speaker C: We've been using it for maybe, yeah, at least over a month now. And I'm so surprised at how I scroll through it like it's TikTok. I mean, it's addicting to just. I just can sit there on my phone and that. I generally just do it through the slack integration, and it's just. It's also encouraging when you see, like, a really big name. Visit your website. Oh, Mandy, let's keep going. Like, yes, we had something, like a huge media publication with the right person that showed up, and it was just from the marketing operator in me. It's like, yes, let's do more. Come on, push.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: I had a prospect, just that I had a call with yesterday, our second call of this prospect, big software company. And today I noticed that one of their developers was on our website, which means he's investigating how to go integrate our product into their product.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Like, I mean, that's pretty cool. Exactly. It's things like that that are just amazing about it. And the funny thing is, the beta test version of this was we gave people a script and we were sending them a spreadsheet of these leads, and it wasn't magic, you know what I mean? It was a very lukewarm reception. I mean, very sophisticated. People were like, basically, it took a data team to even figure out if they could make it work, you know?
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: But then once you, like, put that LinkedIn URL with the headshot and the email address into a slack channel where these salespeople are, like, already operating, every person I showed it to was just like, you know, the questions were like, how do I get that? What does it cost? You know what I mean? It was just like, how do I get that on my site? Like, do you have a website yet?
It's funny because, like, it's such, it's, for instance, to an engineer, that's such a small change. It's like, okay, instead of, like, putting it in a CSV and sending it over email, I'm just, like, sending it through a slack integration, right? Like, the same information, but, like, the user experience of it was just night and day, right? Like, and we knew that, like, no matter what, if we. It's like, we were thinking about having a free version, but, like, keeping people inside of the app on the free version. And, like, the slack was so magical that we were like, that's got to be the free version no matter what. Like. Or it's not going to spread virally.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: You know, I think our trial expired last Friday, and we were all like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.
[00:24:50] Speaker C: Yeah, the LinkedIn feed stops. Stopped working, and everybody's like, wait, is nobody coming to our website?
[00:24:54] Speaker B: What is going on?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: Very professional. TikTok feeds stopped rolling through.
[00:24:58] Speaker C: Yeah, you're reminding me. Just think, when you're running a business or starting a business, you worry about the big things and stress over the big decisions. And sometimes it's the small tweaks, the small changes, the experiments that you run that you look back and you see these inflection points that you just couldn't have planned for, but they just happen organically.
I think it's the opposite of what some people think.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: I mean, the longer I do this, I think it's gotta be this way. For every entrepreneur, it just pounds humility into you. Like, I was just so wrong about, like, so many parts of this. I listened to the Lex Friedman Jeff Bezos interview, like, last fall. So awesome. And I'm like, I'm gonna try to write an Amazon six pager. So I, like, found an example of an Amazon six pager online. And I made one for this business before we started doing anything. And you go back and look at it now and it was just like, you know, probably like 20% of it was dead on and then, like, maybe like another third was so, so, but then the rest of it was just. Couldn't have been farther from what happened, you know? And that's after like twelve years of, like, doing this, right? Like, you just don't know, you know? And, like, you have these loosely held convictions, right, where you're, like, so ready to just let them go if the market tells you you're wrong, you know?
[00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that's the difference between an entrepreneur and operator, right? Is that you can get really passionate about an idea. By the way, I'm not an entrepreneur. I joined this company churn key after these guys have been running it for four years. Right. I'm an operator. But I can see the difference now that I'm so close to founders like these guys, because a founder is going to just go try things and validate their conviction very, very quickly, whereas an operator is going to try to get it perfect before they launch, and it's just, it doesn't work. Now, the one place that's taught me how to be more entrepreneurial is LinkedIn, because that's the way the content works, right? You put something out there to your point, you see what comes back in the comments, you see what kind of engagement you get on it, and then it gives you these other ideas and you see what really pushes people's buttons and gets their attention, and then you can double down on that. So.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Yeah, and they even let you do a thought leadership ad now, which is like, I'm going to just start. I'm going to start doing some of that soon.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: So to explain that for everybody, this is my understanding of it. And basically you can write a post, like taking one of your posts out there and then you can pay to promote it. So you're basically paying for distribution at that point. But it's not lead conversion, right? There's not demand.
You're basically doing more of what you're doing. You're just paying to get your attention spread further from the center.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: True. Yeah. So it's, in most cases, it's not direct response. But I think that, here's why I think it's amazing about it. So, like, just an aside of what I think is amazing about LinkedIn. So the type of content that works in that world, I perceive as like, quite deep thought leadership. Like, it's something that hooks a your audience.
And then the posts that do well, I find them to be long form, you know, the absolute best. You're like taking people on this emotional journey where you're agitating a pain that you share with them very articulately, in a way in language that, like, only one of them would know to write and could understand, right? And then at the end you like provide this takeaway or relief or whatever, right? And you let them out. And then I always wrap it up with something coy to try to cause a dopamine hit to get people to interact. Right. Without just saying comment or whatever. So that's what I think a great post is.
And if you think about, and I think you can put a CTA in, but I don't think, I mean, this is another reason why I think us having a zero friction offer is so powerful, because there's now a view, my website link in your header, and then people hit it and they're like, oh, that's what I want, and it's free, I'll just give it a call. I think it'd be just a different, I would have a different obsession with this if I were not in that go to market paradigm. But the amount of focus that goes to a thought leadership post versus picture a random ad that you would get served on LinkedIn by some company, right? Like rippling, showing you the five businesses in Austin, Texas, which I get served all the time for like Timia Capital, showing me five guys in yarmulkes. Like, I don't care about that. You know what I mean? It's like the amount, like the amount of attention that gets is virtually zero. So if you have the ability to create this great thought leadership content and you can just keep putting it out over years and years, versus a company that does not, like the community authority trust, like whatever this parasocial relationship that you are building that your competitors are not, is just unbelievable, but it's like not measurable, right? And like. So the reason why this thought leadership ad is so intriguing is because you can drop a post, wait to see if it's a banger. If it's a banger, you can put a direct response close, then you can put dollars behind it. And since it was a banger, LinkedIn actually wants to give you that ad unit because they don't want Timmy of capital going. I mean, give me a break, right? Like, it's a very new product. Everybody that I've spoken to has said it is like, infinitely more efficient to get traffic back to your site than any other way. And I kind of understand why. It's like in LinkedIn's incentive, if that product is used that way, only promoting banger posts to make that, to make those clicks incredibly inexpensive because it's so much better than any other ad for the user. Right.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Nobody goes to social media for an ad, right?
[00:30:52] Speaker B: People go, they go to help.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: And that's what most marketers, advertisers, they don't really get that. Cause the ads could be helpful if they wanted them to be, right. But they're paying so much for them that they think they have to convert into a lead.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: And for the problem.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: But hopefully this thought leadership product and then people broadcasting their success with them can open their eyes to something different. The problem is, I don't think what you're doing, what I'm doing is actually easy.
You know, it like, doesn't seem that hard, but like, to actually get the right person at a company doing this well is no small feat. It's a huge commitment and it like, doesn't really, you know, it's not as measurable as other channels. Right.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Like, it's not really repeatable then is the fear, right?
[00:31:46] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's not a machine. I mean, I think in aggregate it is, you know, over the course of a year it is. But like, yeah, it's just, it's just a daunting thing to start. And I think, you know, just like a startup, which you need product market fit. You need to find content market fit for it to really work for you. And then, you know, if you have this perfect alignment where like LinkedIn in particular, it's like if you're selling to salespeople, marketers, founders, recruiters, it is the dream place. If you were selling to e commerce stores, not so much like I found, you know. Yeah, like it was helping me in the ecosystem a lot. Like it was helping with our brand's authority. It was helping with partnerships, recruiting, investing. You know, if I was doing investing investors, but like, it wasn't like booking demos, like it wouldn't invite a free product over there. It wouldn't be leading to like signups or whatever. So, yeah, that's a tough one because like there's such a, with percentage.com comma, it's such a small slice of the ecommerce market that we can actually serve. So like, any marketing is almost like, how do you run it targeted? We just do field sales, basically like a very in affiliate motion where we have owned events and, you know, the math works. But, yeah, LinkedIn, to the extent it's working for me, and it would work for you if you're selling hospitals for elementary school teachers, it's definitely not like, oh, like 75% of my life's going to go to dominating this channel because it's so effective.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: I'm curious. So you talked about you and Santosh having a conversation about building this product.
Sounds like you started down the path of the content audience. Fit, I think, is what you called it before you design the product. So did you know you were going to build another product? Did you have the technology already and you were packing into it?
[00:33:31] Speaker B: Or we knew we could build that really crappy version, which I told you was just like a pixel that was sending people a spreadsheet very quickly in like five days. So before we even did that, though, I was like, I'm just going to see how the world receives my b two b content. And literally, it was like a seven day period where it was like, first post I posted about problems we had in BDR in 2023. Unsurprising, you know, it was like things people were afraid to talk about. Like, for me, it did not work at all. And then when I got rid of all of them, things sped up, you know, like, literally, like, yeah. And people are like, oh, Jesus, it's not working for me either, man. I would like to not have any of these guys around, you know, so.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Singing big yards who listen.
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no offense.
And then I made three more posts the next week, and they were all just like. And this was like, you know, I was getting 50, 70, 75 likes on a post, and that one got 3500. You know, it was just like, nothing. It was just the most.
So I was like, wow, okay, I think I understand why that was, like a hot post or whatever. So I did a few more and they were both like. And they were all three, like, bam, bam, bam. So then I was like, okay, I can write posts like this. I understand this machine now. I could do this forever. We're definitely making a product because, like, I have access to this incredibly valuable audience, and that's kind of like, what started the whole thing. And it was. It was actually amazing for discovery because, you know, these posts were so. It was just so, like, at the end of 2023 being like, whoa, what? You know, what happened? Like, this was all working and it's not. And, like, you know, this guy's like, kind of sharing his experience. So, like, in a way that, oh, my VP sales quit. We, like, you know, fired 15 of our 20 salespeople, like, you know, because he quit, we don't. So stuff like that. And it was just building so much trust that, like, we could get on the phone with anybody. So we had like 400 discovery calls between October and March 1 when we launched of just literally, like, I'd write a post and be like, dm me if you're interested. Kind of like the best call booking post ever was basically, like, I talked to 80 marketing leaders about 6th sense, demand base, and clearbit, and here's what they said about ABM tech. And it was just incredibly articulate things that people were frustrated with that don't get talked about. Like, yeah, the third party intent signal is a content consumption signal and not a buying signal, right? Like, that just doesn't get said. That's not in their sales deck. It's not in their marketing. But it's what everyone feels, right? It's what everyone feels. It's like, oh. Like, you know, and then I'm like, basically dm me if you want identity at the person level. And it was like, like, you know. Cause also, like, who's doing abM? It's like very high level marketers at probably series b and beyond SaaS, you know? So, yeah, it was just my favorite startup book.
Four steps to the epiphany.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, this.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: This guy is like, it's like, you got it, too. So it's like, yeah, somewhere his thing is like, how do you do this? Right? You, like, build audiences, you build product. And literally in the how to, he's like, well, you know, you like, make your list and you call through 50 people and I'll probably get you five meetings. It's like, we were having five meetings a day, you know? Cause. Cause this machine was, like, so prolific, so it was just really lightning in a bottle in, like, so many different ways, you know?
[00:37:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: I just feel so grateful to be part of it. Cause my other business is getting very fucking frustrating.
You know, we had 60 people. It's like we couldn't ever, no matter what we did, we just couldn't fix this churn problem. And, like, I came after talking to a ton of investors, I came to appreciate that there are just certain high churn product categories. And, like, that was one of them. In segments. Yeah. And we were selling this small business. We were selling intent data and leads to small business. Like, that's high churn, right? Like, it just is.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Well, I mean, there's some portion of that churn you will never get because those companies are going out of business, right? You'll never retain them. So there's. There's like, half of it right there, and then you've got, you know, I'm not. I mean, this is partially our specialty area, too. Like, it's interesting. Retention.com, man, we wish we had that domain name because of that one.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Yeah. But I spent a lot of money. It wasn't perfect for what we do, but it was close enough, and it was like a big word that I could buy. And our prior name was get emails, and we were just doing so much more than getting people emails that I was like, we got to change the name. And I just. I bought it for 800 grand. It was a lot.
But, like, dude, the authority. The authority is unbelievable. You know, it's like 40,000 people look at my LinkedIn profile every week, and it says, CEO of Retention.com, and every one of them thinks something very different than if it said CEO of get emails, right?
Like, it's laughable how much. How much better it is, right?
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Like, it is good.
[00:38:49] Speaker C: Adam, I got a selfish question before we take off. What are your thoughts on outbound here in the middle of 2024? It seems like it's really changed in the last year. Seems like as I'm taking over the marketing team here, I'm like, oh, yeah, well, we need bdrs. We need automated outbound. We've got to be doing all these things. And I am not completely sold on it, and I'm not entirely sure what to think of it, looking at everything with fresh eyes.
[00:39:15] Speaker B: So my belief, and this is another reason why the go to market motion that we have looks like it does. I think that there were a lot of reasons people got the shit kicked out of them. 2023, automation is causing so much more to go out, which is causing a reaction of spam filters getting better on every channel, and the response to lower productivity is higher activity, which exacerbates the entire thing. I cannot imagine that dynamic not getting worse.
Right? Like, yeah, if you ask me, are more emails going to be sent in 2025 to 2024? With absolute certainty? I would say yes, with absolute certainty. There is not a risk that less emails get sent. It's not a possibility.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: No way.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Like, automation's enabling that, right? So then it's like, okay, well, what about personalization? It's like, the problem with personalization is that if you can't even get your subject line seen, it doesn't work. Right. You could spend 7 hours on an email. But if you're part of this dynamic, where every single person that you're prospecting is getting 3000 other prospecting emails every day. What are you going to do? So that's a problem.
How do you solve that? Right? And by the way, some of my biggest posts have been like, the predictable revenue model. Died in 20, born in 2023, died or born in 2012, died in 23.
Aaron Ross hit me up and he wants to come debate this. And he sent over his speaking points today, by the way. So this is like some context about it. So he's like, what's that?
[00:41:00] Speaker C: Can we pay per view this? Get a live event?
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it's July 16 is the date at 02:00 p.m. central. So basically, even Aaron Ross, who's like, this is not dead. He's like, it doesn't work anymore as the book is written. Right? Traditional outbound. He's like, everybody is saying this, like, real intent signals and as many of them as possible are what is going to lead to successful outreach. There's one other part of it that I think is really interesting about this LinkedIn posting. So one thing that is powerful that I did not appreciate about becoming sort of a celebrity in this audience is that people are much more likely to open an email from me than if Pete, who works for me, sends it.
You know, again, if you sell into a space that it works on, LinkedIn, like, that is a huge benefit of trying to build a big audience. It's like you can actually do outreach. Right? Like, who are you going to respond to? It's like an interested person that knows or who's going to respond to you? So, like, in a zero response rate environment, who's going to respond? It is somebody who's actually interested and they know you.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: How do you deal with that? Like, you send emails from you, you can't take all these calls.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So, like another. There's another amazing thing that we learned booking these 500 calls or whatever. Like, I don't. Somebody was like, well, that's just because your account's huge. Maybe that's the case, maybe it's not. But like, if I drop Pete, our head of growth's calendly link, we were getting the same booking rate and show rate than when I was doing the calls. Which is wild, because interesting, because that means this profile is like scalable beyond the hours in my day.
And again, it could be because people were so interested in the product. It could be a lot of reasons, but that was the observation. And another thing that's wild about this profile is there's the real way to grow your audience, which is how Jay, we're talking about it, which is like, you make the best content, you make a hook that is sort of hot. It gets people talking, and then you write good shit and you have a good, good close.
The other way would be there's these things called engagement circles, where it's like people with a lot of followers are in a WhatsApp chat. They drop their post in, everybody comments on it, and like, that kind of grows an audience. That, to me, feels a bit like cheating or whatever, but it illustrates an important point about having a truly massive audience. So we have this ecosystem of legion agencies that are like, call them clay agencies. They're these guys who are making these automated outbound ecosystem, or they're making these automated outbound machines for people using clay. And all this enrichment. RB two B is incredible with it, because you can do a bunch of stuff, enriching website visitors and sending them automated emails with AI or whatever. The way these guys grow their business is by posting on LinkedIn about how they're ahead of the curve, tech wise, whatever. So, a, how to content does great on LinkedIn. B, they just make these loom videos showing the entire workflow with all the tech involved. I've seen that that does incredibly. And then when I engage with it, my following is so large and perfect for them that the post ends up doing like three times better than anything else they can post about. So your profile, in addition to getting people to respond to one on one outreach, it can actually lift an entire community's content along with you, which is a crazy thing that I had no idea about before.
I would have never guessed that. Right. And there's one other thing, by the way. Like, once you have a bigger audience than everybody else, they all want you on their podcast. So, like, it's like you hit a certain point, and then it's like the whole content machine is sort of like an inbound thing or whatever.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: This is what you call inbound led outbound. Or.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: Hey, as long as you can just fight about that with other people on LinkedIn, you can call it whatever you want.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: But I mean, the point is, you're doing outbound. You're just doing it at massive scale. Because outbound, to me, is nothing. It's really not much more than what attempts to be personalized marketing. You're trying to get somebody not got interest in intent to come check you out. You're trying to entice them to come do it. Just a much, much higher cost profile, and today it doesn't work as well as it did ten years ago. So exactly what you're saying is true, in my opinion, which is, I think, as it's written in Aaron Ross's book, is wrong today. It does not work anymore without some kind of air cover at the content level, at the mass market level, which you're doing.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: And I think that's where a lot of rookies like me screwed up. In 2023, you had two bdrs sitting there and it worked or appeared to be working, and you scaled it to ten, and then they were booking one more demo than the two guys. And the reason is you actually kind of need somebody there to capture the demand. But in order for, to scale that team, you need to scale where the demand is being originated in the first place, which is like, things like this, right? Like the air cover, as you say.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: So, yeah, to answer your question, I would be very reluctant to just scale out a team of outbound sales reps thinking that they are actually going to, like, scale results. Like, you need to. You need to build out the entire machine as you build them out. You know, I was thinking a lot.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: Before this call, and my main goal as we were talking is just to get a better sense of what the B two B SaaS buyer is like today.
And I'm, I don't know, just curious on your take on this, and just kind of, as I hear your whole story and your whole journey thinking I, and how outbound hasn't been working for us, you're basically giving large parts of the market the ability to self select to be interested in what you're saying and what you're selling. And then when you reach out to them, it feels natural because they've already made the decision. They're like, oh, I like this. And they've almost kind of mentally made the decision.
I'll give attention to this, but if you haven't done that legwork before, outbound, even, like, paid ad strategies are just not, they're gonna fall flat because buyers are so inundated with attention. Inbound. Just kind of an interesting thought, by the way.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Like, that's some of the magic of being able to create good, organic social content is. Right. It's like any channel that is paid or accessible to anyone. I mean, you just have to assume it's gonna be ruined. Right. But they're gonna be on these platforms wherever I, that stuff's going out. So it's like, if you have this power where your stuff's good enough to, where people are choosing to actually read it and engage with it. I just couldn't imagine a more efficient way to build that top of the funnel. And then just the next step that I took was just like, okay, assume response rates are going to go to zero over the next three years. How do you sell software? It's like, well, if you make it free for 90% of the world, then theyre going to sell it for you. Its not for everybody. If youre already at 30 million ARR going PlG freemiums going to totally you like, I wouldnt. You know, you cant do it. But thats just I was starting from zero thinking, what is a future proof go to market motion for this exact opportunity? And my opinion was organic social led influencer, led freemium Plgdev. If nobody answers a cold email ever again, that will thrive.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Yep. Love it.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, this is great, man. We do this partially just to learn ourselves. And so you're an open book, and we appreciate you, you being that and spending some time with us doing this. We got to get you on turnkey because at some point, you want to make sure you keep all those customers that you've got coming in.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. We're willing to swap with you if.
[00:49:14] Speaker A: You want to try it.
[00:49:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I would love to understand. Totally. I'd love to understand. I think we're using, like, the Dunning product at profit well or something. I don't know exactly what you did, but it looks like from the email, but I'm happy to do it. Check it out.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Sweet.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: I don't have any allegiance to them.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: We didn't bring you on here to sell you either, but, yeah.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: All good, man. Cool. Well, I got to get back to.
[00:49:36] Speaker C: Scrolling my rb two b.
I've got.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: It up right here.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: I just keep an eye on it all day, refreshed.
[00:49:43] Speaker B: I remember the first time that, like, big one. It was like, like, maybe like the. It was like the CRM in retention person from Allbirds was on the retention.com site, which, like, always been my dream brand. Perfect title. I was like, Diana, look at this.
Who's contacting this person? Like, not me. Like, somebody needs to hit them up right now, you know?
That's funny.
[00:50:08] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Our chief product officer literally just commented on that channel about the great traffic we're getting today. So we love it. Appreciate what you're doing.
[00:50:18] Speaker B: I am glad.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Appreciate what you built. Thanks for spending some time with us, and we'll let's keep the conversation going. For sure. True.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: We'll do when we publish this all righty.
[00:50:28] Speaker C: Awesome. Thanks, Adam.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Take care, gentlemen. All right, man.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Talk to you soon.
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Bye bye.
