POPULARITY
17 episodes with inmail
3 episodes with inmail
3 episodes with inmail
4 episodes with inmail
4 episodes with inmail
5 episodes with inmail
4 episodes with inmail
3 episodes with inmail
4 episodes with inmail
In today's episode of Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague sits down with LinkedIn marketing expert Jacob Lundy to unveil powerful strategies for clean energy professionals looking to maximize their B2B marketing efforts on LinkedIn. As the premier platform for business-to-business connections, LinkedIn offers unique opportunities for renewable energy companies to reach decision-makers and build meaningful relationships that convert to business.Jacob Lundy, a 10-year veteran of marketing with a focus on clean energy and founder of MarkEttergy, shares his expertise as LinkedIn's inaugural advanced advertiser for the LinkedIn Ads Show's fanatics program. Throughout this value-packed conversation, Jacob breaks down six proven LinkedIn growth hacks specifically tailored for renewable energy professionals, from developers and EPCs to OEMs and consultants.Episode Highlights:LinkedIn's B2B Marketing Power: Why LinkedIn is the essential platform for clean energy professionals and how it differs from consumer-focused platformsLinkedIn Follower Tokens: How to effectively use your 250 monthly tokens to grow your company page following with targeted industry connectionsManual Bidding Strategy: How switching from automated to manual bidding can save thousands in advertising costs while maintaining effectivenessText Ads Optimization: Leveraging text ads as "digital billboards" for consistent brand awareness with renewable energy decision-makersDocument Ads for Engagement: Using document carousel ads to tell your brand story and build trust before prospects click through to your websiteList Building for Renewable Energy: Creating targeted company lists with 100% accuracy to eliminate wasted ad spend on irrelevant audiencesEmployee Targeting Strategy: How to effectively reach decision-makers by segmenting companies by employee size and job functionsInMail Strategy: Best practices for connection requests and InMail messaging to increase response ratesListen now to discover how these LinkedIn growth hacks can help your clean energy business connect with the right audience and drive meaningful business results.#CleanEnergy #LinkedInMarketing #RenewableEnergy #B2BMarketing #SolarMarketing #CleanPowerHour #GrowthHacks #LinkedInAds #CleanTech Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.com Corporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Jesse shares how he is planning to navigate the uncertain times ahead and asks for feedback on what direction to take the show. Please reach out on Slack, InMail, or email jesse@salesplayers.co to share: #1 What keeps you coming back to the show? #2 What topics would you like to hear more about? For a few of you, I'll pay you for your time giving me feedback on how I can make Sales Players better. Thank you!SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Mutual Action Plan: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1br4CrpdOq-3ToypxCTWQ75Ea9DbKtpWSU_bTcKK_TiE/edit#slide=id.p• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap
Neste episódio, Pedro Caramez aborda de forma detalhada o uso estratégico da ferramenta Sales Navigator, uma licença premium paga da plataforma LinkedIn, projetada especificamente para profissionais de vendas que procuram maximizar a sua eficiência e resultados na plataforma. Pedro inicia o episódio destacando que, enquanto a versão básica do LinkedIn oferece filtros limitados, o Sales Navigator expande significativamente essas opções, fornecendo mais de trinta critérios de pesquisa. Estes incluem setores de atividade, tamanhos de empresa, cargos, localizações e até mesmo experiências acadêmicas e profissionais, possibilitando uma segmentação precisa e eficaz que aumenta a probabilidade de conversão de leads. Ele expõe também as duas variações do Sales Navigator: a Core e a Enterprise, sendo esta última voltada para grandes empresas com integração a sistemas de CRM. Através do episódio, Pedro salienta funcionalidades cruciais, como a organização de listas e pastas de contas e leads, a identificação de decisores chave dentro de empresas, e o fornecimento de insights valiosos sobre investimentos e movimentações dentro das organizações. Destaca igualmente a capacidade de enviar mensagens diretas para qualquer usuário do LinkedIn, independentemente de estarem conectados, utilizando o recurso InMail, mas adverte sobre o uso responsável para evitar práticas de spam. Pedro sublinha a importância de uma abordagem estratégica e fundamentada ao usar o Sales Navigator, mencionando que a ferramenta oferece um período experimental de 30 dias, incentivando os profissionais a explorarem e integrarem suas funcionalidades nas operações diárias para otimizar resultados. O episódio enfatiza que o sucesso com o Sales Navigator depende da definição clara de personas, da criação de listas organizadas e do uso inteligente das recomendações e alertas personalizados da plataforma. O episódio conclui com um convite para os ouvintes conhecerem a nova Mentoria Power LinkedIn, uma iniciativa renovada e mais estrutura que visa potencializar o uso do LinkedIn em 2025. Pedro incentiva os ouvintes a se inscreverem no podcast e deixarem suas avaliações, ajudando a difundir o conteúdo para uma audiência ainda maior.
In this Tactical Tuesday episode, Sam focuses on a topic we're surprised more people aren't talking about: the importance of utilizing LinkedIn InMails effectively.Aside from our belief that every recruiter should be employing a multi-channel outreach strategy (not relying wholly on LinkedIn), there's also the fact that InMails are expensive...especially when they're not being used effectively.Sam encourages recruiters to invest time in crafting personalized messages to maximize the return on their InMail credits, highlighting the unique feature of receiving credits back for responses. As always, the episode serves as a tactical guide for improving recruitment outreach.Chapters:00:00 - Podcast intro: Mastering LinkedIn InMails for better outreach01:55 - The cost of LinkedIn InMails: Plans and what you need to know03:08 - Optimizing LinkedIn InMails: Get the most from your outreach05:24 - Podcast wrap-upExplore all our episodes and catch the full video experience at loxo.co/podcastBecoming a Hiring Machine is brought to you by Loxo. To discover more about us, just visit loxo.co
In this episode, Jack and Jeremy dissect a standout cold outreach email that Jack recently received, praising it as one of the best they've encountered. They explore what made this email so effective, including its personalization and strategic content, and share insights on how to elevate cold outreach practices. Key Topics Discussed: Email Content Review Personalization and Connection Analysis of the Email's Body and CTA Discussion on Possible Improvements Impact of the Email To refine your cold email outreach skills and craft standout messages, explore our detailed course on cold email strategies. Start learning today at course.quickmail.io Struggling with cold outreach? salesbread.com uses personalized messages to turn prospects into qualified leads, saving you time and effort. About the hosts: Jack Reamer founded SalesBread.com – the lead generation agency that brings B2B companies 1 lead per day by sending ultra-personalized LinkedIn messages and cold emails. Show listeners can book a free, 15-minute lead generation brainstorm session here: https://salesbread.com/contact/ Jeremy Chatelaine founded QuickMail.com – the most performant cold email platform to get replies, thanks to industry-leading features such as Deliverability AI and Advanced Stats. Start your trial today here: https://quickmail.com
In this episode, Jack and Jeremy dive into a detailed teardown of a cold outreach Inmail aimed at real estate investing. They examine the message's effectiveness, discussing aspects like personalization, list targeting, and engagement strategy. Key Topics Discussed: Analysis List Building and Targeting Critiquing the Generic Introduction Call to Action Improvement Order of Content and Tone For more in-depth training on mastering cold email outreach, checkout our course at course.quickmail.io Struggling with cold outreach? salesbread.com uses personalized messages to turn prospects into qualified leads, saving you time and effort. About the hosts: Jack Reamer founded SalesBread.com – the lead generation agency that brings B2B companies 1 lead per day by sending ultra-personalized LinkedIn messages and cold emails. Show listeners can book a free, 15-minute lead generation brainstorm session here: https://salesbread.com/contact/ Jeremy Chatelaine founded QuickMail.com – the most performant cold email platform to get replies, thanks to industry-leading features such as Deliverability AI and Advanced Stats. Start your trial today here: https://quickmail.com
Host Matt Benelli and guest Mandy McEwen, a renowned expert in social selling and LinkedIn strategies, discuss the importance of building coaching cultures within organizations. Mandy shares her journey from digital marketing to becoming a thought leader in social selling, debunking common myths, and emphasizing the importance of consistency over quantity in content posting. She also offers actionable tips for optimizing LinkedIn profiles, engaging with prospects meaningfully, and leveraging video content. Takeaways: 1. Prioritize Personal Branding: Help your team understand and build their brand on LinkedIn. This includes optimizing their profiles to focus on how they can help prospects, rather than just listing their job titles and achievements.2. Consistent Posting: Encourage your team to post consistently on LinkedIn, but clarify that posting doesn't have to be daily. Twice a week is a good starting point, and the focus should be on quality and providing value.3. Leverage Existing Content: Train your team to utilize existing company content, customer success stories, and even industry-related posts. This can help in staying active without the stress of creating content from scratch.4. Humanize Engagement: Your team should focus on building relationships by engaging genuinely on LinkedIn. This includes personalized connection requests and thoughtful comments on prospects' posts as part of Mandy's 'Friendly Leader' method.5. Real and Authentic Videos: Encourage your team to use video content to connect with prospects. Authenticity works better than perfection, so don't overthink—simple and real videos can be more impactful.6. Avoid Spammy InMails: Discourage the use of impersonal InMail messages. Instead, advise sending personalized connection requests that mention something specific about the prospect to increase acceptance rates.7. Provide Valuable Resources: Make sure your team profiles include valuable resources like case studies, videos, and use cases. This helps prospects find everything they need to make quick, informed decisions about your value proposition.Quote of the Show:“” People want to be heard and they want to know that your solution is safe.”Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandymcewen/ Website: https://www.luminetics.io/ | https://www.modgirlmarketing.com/ LinkedIn Profile Optimization Checklist https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wizle-fQknBfnuxW5sFeOYDKjncYHsR3d9gHJcbZ3dU/edit?pli=1#heading=h.t6vztsdctiw5 Ways to Tune In:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yb1wPzUxyrfR0Dx35ym1A Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-build-a-coaching-culture/id1699901434 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2NvYWNoMnNjYWxlLWhvdy1tb2Rlcm4tbGVhZGVycy1idWlsZC1hLWNvYWNoaW5nLWN1bHR1cmU Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/fd188af6-7c17-4b2e-a0b2-196ecd6fdf77 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-5419703 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Coach2Scale CoachEm™ is the first Coaching Execution Platform that integrates deep learning technology to proactively analyze patterns, highlight the "why" behind the data with root causes, and identify the actions that will ultimately improve business results going forward. These practical coaching recommendations for managers will help their teams drive more deals, bigger deals, faster deals and loyal customers. Built with decades of go-to-market experience, world-renowned data scientists, and advanced causal AI/ML technology, CoachEm™ leverages your existing tech stack to increase rep productivity, increase retention, and replicate best practices across your team.Learn more at coachem.io
This week on the podcast, Lynne and Rachel are speaking with Cathy Anderson, a senior editor at LinkedIn Australia. Cathy shares her inside knowledge on how LinkedIn works, and how to make the most of the platform. It's a valuable and revealing conversation. We talk about: The special courses available for journalists through the platform How to increase your reach on LinkedIn How the LinkedIn news team works and what they are looking for How the LinkedIn Premium accounts work As Cathy explained, they are always looking for great posts to be featured by the news team as part of the Idea of the Day (here's an example from a journalist) as well as creator spotlights, which is where they send a notification directly to the person's post. These topics are really broad, such as cloning your voice via AI, corporate manners and work vs family. Connect with Cathy at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cathy-anderson-bb2648b4/ and Cathy is happy for people to InMail her their posts to pitch. The next ‘LinkedIn for Journalists workshop' is on Monday July 1 at 10.30am -11.30am (AEST). Experts will cover the latest product updates and guidance about how journalists can use LinkedIn as a tool for research, contacting sources, networking, building your voice on LinkedIn and more. If you are a journalist and interested in accessing these benefits, please fill in the attached form by 24th June. Don't forget about The Content Byte Summit from September 12-14, 2024 in Sydney. Sign up for updates for the Summit (or snap up tickets) at our website: https://thecontentbytesummit.com.au Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com Rachel's List www.rachelslist.com.au Thanks (as always) to our sponsors Rounded (www.rounded.com.au), an easy invoicing and accounting solution that helps freelancers run their businesses with confidence. Looking to take advantage of the discount for Rachel's List Gold Members? Email us at: hello@rachelslist.com.au for the details. Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co
When recruiters send InMails to candidates we're typically hoping to hook their interest in a role. If you implement these YouTuber viral tactics your response rate with InMailing will lift. Using a template for InMailing across multiple roles and locations DOESN'T work. Instead I want to show you how to split test an InMail campaign. This ep discusses:
LinkedIn does not allow promotion via InMail - a recent case (https://bit.ly/44y9YyB) vs Tetris tells us about targeting and the importance of social media platform policies.
EP 2947 An interesting question. I offer a provocative answer. ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS job search coaching and career advice globally because he makes job search and succeeding in your career easier. You will find great info and job search coaching to help with your job search at JobSearch.Community Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter Schedule a discovery call to speak with me about one-on-one or group coaching during your job search at www.TheBigGameHunter.us. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2900 episodes over 13+ years. We grant permission for this post and others to be used on your website as long as a backlink is included to www.TheBigGameHunter.us and notice is provided that it is provided by Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter as an author or creator. Not acknowledging his work or providing a backlink to www.TheBigGameHunter.us makes you subject to a $1000 penalty which you proactively agree to pay. Please contact us to negotiate the use of our content as training data. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nobsjobsearchadviceradio/support
42% of buyers visit your LinkedIn profile before making a decision. But don't panic – that doesn't mean you have to post carousels and have 60K followers.In this Daily Sales Show episode, you'll learn exactly what to leverage on LinkedIn to help you hit quota: concrete strategies for video/audio messaging, InMail tactics, profile optimization, and more. You'll Learn:What effective social engagement is (and how to do it well)“Fluff” strategies to avoid on LI–and what to do insteadWays to get creative with InMail, video, and moreThe Speakers: Jason Bay, Will Aitken and Darren McKeeIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join here:https://hubs.la/Q01yLCGf0Follow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their game:https://hubs.ly/Q01tLYNJ0Explore our YouTube Channel:https://hubs.la/Q01N39ks0
In this interview, Derrick chats with Jason Tan, the founder of Engage AI. They shed light on the strategies that propelled the platform's growth to an impressive 30,000 users in just three months. Jason recounts his journey as a technical founder and the challenges he faced in sales and marketing, which brought to explore alternative methods to building his business. He particularly emphasizes the effectiveness of engaging with prospects through LinkedIn comments. The discussion highlights the significance of personal branding, user-friendly features of Engage AI, and presents eye-opening statistics about the sales opportunities on LinkedIn. Through this interview, you're going to gain valuable insights into the strategies that drove Engage AI's rapid growth which you will be able to implement for yourself or your team, right away. #salesconsultantpodcast #linkedin #socialselling #founders #b2bsales #engagement #startup #growth #sales #marketing #leadgeneration #inbound #outbound #salesdevelopment Time Stamps:[2:40] - Jason shares his journey as a technical founder before launching Engage AI, having previously established another venture. Despite English being his second language, he, like many technical founders, found direct sales and marketing daunting. However, he discovered that engaging with his audience through LinkedIn comments was a passive yet effective approach. Actively participating in discussions and interacting with comments led to one-on-one InMail conversations, often progressing to Discovery Calls and acquiring new customers (the Commenting for Attention Strategy).[5:00] - When establishing a personal brand on social media, similar to not everyone being suited to public speaking, not everyone can be equally active and visible through writing and creating videos. Expanding on this analogy, even if one may not take on the role of the keynote speaker, they can still participate in the conference, networking with others as a means to generate leads.[8:50] - Derrick provides a brief overview of how the Engage AI Chrome extension operates in conjunction with LinkedIn, highlighting its user-friendly nature. He emphasizes that users retain control over the tool, ensuring that it doesn't post anything unusual without their explicit consent.[10:40] - Jason elaborates on how Engage AI prioritizes safety and compliance to prevent LinkedIn profiles from being restricted. This precaution is particularly crucial as the platform is vigilant in restricting accounts utilizing automation as an anti-spam measure.[16:00] - Don't be the pink-suit person where you get the wrong kind/unwanted attention.[19:25] - When you're connected to your ICP on LinkedIn and engage with other people's content with thoughtful discussions, your ICP is able to see this which creates an online fireside chat of sorts giving them a frontrow seat to your insights.[22:00] - Jason reveals an impactful strategy they've uncovered for capturing the attention of their ideal customer profiles (ICPs). They engage in thoughtful interactions by commenting and engaging with the ICP of their ICPs' content (their customer's customer). Through this approach, the intended target leads observe their meaningful engagement with mutual connections, establishing credibility and influence.[25:00] - We explore additional beneficial features offered by the Engage AI platform, including support for over 100 languages. We discuss how it tracks profiles to ensure you stay updated on your prospect's posts, and we highlight its mobile app, which streamlines the process of approving posts on the...
In this episode, Jeremy and Jack delve into a practical analysis of sales outreach emails. They provide a detailed tear down of actual in-mails, offering valuable insights and tips on how to enhance email engagement and effectiveness. The episode is filled with actionable advice, making it a must-listen for sales professionals looking to improve their email outreach strategies. Key Topics Discussed: - Detailed Analysis of Sales In-Mails - Importance of Social Proof and Authority - Optimizing Email Length - The Power of Personalization - Strategies for Low-Pressure Calls to Action - Improving Email Structures For those eager to deepen their understanding of effective cold emailing strategies, don't miss out on our comprehensive Cold Email Masterclass: https://course.quickmail.io/. It's the perfect resource to elevate your sales skills and achieve the results you've been aiming for.
Success Unscrambled | Blog Traffic Tips | Business Success Stories
Martha was desperate she started her business and she wanted to know how to get clients on LinkedIn. The challenge is that Martha was unexpectedly made redundant at her 6-figure job due to her company outsourcing to low-cost locations. Rather than adopting a wait-and-see attitude, Martha wanted to develop an alternative income source as soon as possible. Her 15 years working in business operations leave her with no choice but to promote her business and close sales, even if this is 100% new to her. Do any of these sound relatable to you? You've always used LinkedIn as an online resume Your current connections are not your ideal clients The thought of promoting your business to your connections makes you feel icky You have no idea how to use LinkedIn to find clients If only there was a simple guide to give you step-by-step instructions. In this resource, you'll discover 5 secrets to getting your first client on LinkedIn in the next 30 days. Why LinkedIn is the Best Platform to Find Buyers Have you ever wondered why LinkedIn is one of the best places to find clients or for lead generation of any kind? Well, let me help you with this aha moment. When it comes to social media platforms, LinkedIn is the only one that your potential clients volunteer to divulge their buying power. As a professional network, people are forced to complete details about their profession and qualifications. The only other platforms that come close are X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. Titles like VP, Manager, Director, President, CEO, Founder and COO scream to others that I influence buying decisions at this company. A person's LinkedIn profile also reveals information about education, interests, past experience and stability. The only difficulty you'll encounter is actually sending a 'cold outreach' connection request or sending an InMail. If you feel so inclined you can upgrade to the Sales Navigator subscription on this social media platform. Your Target Audience One of the first things that you'll need to do before reaching out to prospective clients is to figure out or get clear on your target audience. Do you know who that person is and where they hang out online? What about their problems or the pain points you are trying to solve? Ever wondered about where they are in their journey right now and what questions keep popping up in their heads each day, week and month? What keeps them awake at night? Having a really good understanding of your target audience is one of the keys to successfully finding and/or attracting your potential clients on LinkedIn. In case you are wondering why, I'll explain in greater detail in the next section. Let's look at the best practices for your LinkedIn profile. You do need a LinkedIn account for this to work. Your LinkedIn Profile Did you know that your LinkedIn profile acts as a sales page for your potential clients? I know you're skeptical about that statement but hear me out. When you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, especially if they don't know you the first thing they do is head over to your profile to 'check you out'. If your profile has a professional headshot, is optimised and speaks to your target audience then there's a high chance that they'll convert to a paying customer. The top section of your profile serves as a headline, sub-headline and summary of what you do and who you help. Below that you have a featured section which is a great place to add links to items such as lead magnets, testimonials and your lowest price offer. The next section is your latest activities, posts, articles and stuff you commented on across LinkedIn. Right below that is an about section, use this space to speak directly to your potential clients including the results you can give them. This is followed by your experiences showing your potential clients why you're qualified to help them.
This week on TRF: Heading home from RecFest, as luck would have it, Shelley was seated next to a famous hockey coach and legend here in Alberta, Darryl Sutter. Should she have offered to trade seats with Serge? The first DisruptHR Halifax was a great success with our friends Leah and Ilya. We could feel the energy all the way to Nashville. In the News There's an old saying, “Former Google recruiters dont stand in the unemployment line.” 100's are laid off and we are eager to see where they go next. Canada's job market appears to be slowing with optimism towards certain parts of the country to have the perfect landing. You can't make this stuff up! An HR Manager in Oregon sends an employee a chocolate male body part, in the mail with her return address on the box. From there it only gets more shocking. Tip of the Week Get active on LinkedIn. As recruiters if you have a dormant page, why would any candidate respond to your InMail? Recruiting Insights LinkedIn Recruiter's native interface fails to provide meaningful benchmarks to recruiting teams. You will need a custom dashboard solution for that? Unless you have 100's of seats, we'd suggest tracking successful hires. Top reasons to be a contract recruiter, along with some practical advice. SmartRecruiter wins top spot for best ATS from a surprising reviewer.
Show Notes: In this discussion, Joe Pope, the Partner and Director of Business Development at Hinge Marketing, discusses cold outreach. He explains that it is crucial to understand the key issues, topics, and channels that target audiences in order to effectively engage with them. The old method of folding dialing and outsourcing has developed a reputation for not seeing ROI or benefit from the time spent on it. Joe suggests that when developing an approach to cold outreach, it is essential to focus on understanding social media cadence, marketing strategies, the target audience's industries, key issues, and subject matter expertise. This will help avoid falling victim to the sea of sameness and ensure that the message is tailored to the specific needs of the target audience. Joe offers an example of an independent consultant who wants to expand their circle of clients. They have 15 years of experience in strategic sourcing and procurement. They may have already reached out to past clients and people they know but now want to expand their circle. Joe suggests making sure they know the title of the contact and ask questions around directly relatable topics and issues. Linkedin should be used for commenting and sharing on posts or connection requests. Connection requests should only be used if you can offer valuable services, but InMail messages tend to be a waste of time. Joe explains the type of messages and messaging that work and what doesn't work, including to avoid spam, use a slightly warm connection in your connection request, such as mentioning a secondary or third connection. If you're cold, make a reason why you're reaching out, such as having a secondary connection in common or being in an industry that you just created a presentation for or something of value.. Joe discusses reaching out to people to work together on content creation on email rather than InMail, but you should identify the value to them. It's also a good tactic to use connections from your college or business school, former colleagues, or other relevant sources to move the needle closer to potential clients, and likewise, following the same topic feeds as potential clients and commenting on posts they read. Joe talks about the importance of subject lines and email length in cold outreach, highlighting that they can lead to positive ROI. Subject headlines should be short, around six to eight words, and tied to a resonating topic such as events. This approach has been successful in generating responses and open rates. Short, personalized subject lines should avoid using emojis, as they may not resonate with the intended audience. Event-related subject lines can be used to reference specific services or resources that resonate with the target audience. For instance, a firm could send a targeted list of people in industries that resonate with database decisions or artificial intelligence. By referencing the company's name, the message is personalized and relevant to the recipient. For resource-based subject lines, it is important to focus on the topic and the information being conveyed. Joe does not recommend offering a guide in the subject line, but he does mention the importance of referencing something in the first outreach email to get conversations going and provide value propositions. He offers suggestions on how to encourage engagement depending on where the client is on the funnel. Email Content Sharing Tips Joe emphasizes that cold outreach emails are not the most effective for top of the funnel and/or sharing content because they make people take more steps than just communicating or responding to you. Instead, he suggests using targeted text messages with a focus on a specific topic or deliverable. He recommends setting up an intro call to discuss how they can help with the issue. He suggests using a set list of available times and blocking them in their calendar for the outreach process. Instead, the best use of content distribution is to spend that time and effort on areas with larger visibility range, such as getting the guide referenced in editorials or guest publishing. Best Time to Send Outreach Email Joe identifies the optimal wait time between emails, which is typically three to four days. The optimal time for sending emails is usually in the mid mornings, as it allows for better open rates for consistent content like research studies or webinars. The best time of day for sending emails is 9:30 a.m. or 10:00 a.m., as it allows for better eye screening and engagement. He touches on the importance of testing different email formats and timings to ensure they don't blend in with other emails. The second follow-up email, which should be a reply to the first one, has been found to have a better open rate. He also touches on the use of calendar links in emails, which can be overbearing and may hinder connection with recipients. He also talks about using a separate email domain to counter being marked as spam. Email Response Rate Metrics and Tracking Joe discusses the process of obtaining contact information for larger domains through data vendors like Zoom, Apollo, or Lucia. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the target audience and building profiles to ensure qualified responses. Meanings for response rates are important, as they vary based on the campaign and industry. Joe offers examples of open-rates and response rates from email campaigns. The number of meetings can be estimated by tracking the number of replies and meetings received. A good benchmark is 200 emails for one meeting. However, it's important to note that the number of meetings may vary across different campaigns. Email Tracking and Follow-up Processes Joe moves on to tracking and follow-up processes. If an email is opened but not responded to, it's important to follow up with the person. If they respond, they must provide a conditional or positive response. He offers examples of the best approach to engaging the reader. This data can be used for retargeting later down the road, such as using Google Ads systems or LinkedIn to target them with advertising. By tracking and following up with potential recipients, businesses can improve their outreach efforts and maintain a strong reputation in the industry. Joe discusses the importance of a campaign approach in email marketing. They emphasize that the campaign should be ongoing, with the same profile being targeted on a monthly basis. This approach allows for the development of new campaigns and topics that resonate with the target audience. He discusses the concept of re-engagement campaigns, which are designed to target specific clients who may not have responded to their initial email. He explains that these campaigns are not obsessive, but rather focus on specific services or needs that clients may not have initially. In conclusion, Joe emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive strategy in email marketing, emphasizing the importance of trust, reputation, and visibility in the decision-making process. Timestamps: 04:48 How to reach out to a niche market 12:28 How to reach out to influencers 17:49 How to use subject lines in your email 26:01 How to reach out to your audience 34:26 Should you send a follow up email 38:49 Metrics and response rates 44:33 Reaching out to potential clients Links: Website: https://hingemarketing.com/ CONTACT INFO: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/popejf/ Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com.
This episode is a compilation of answers to YOUR questions that were asked directly from my listeners who attend my weekly business education YouTube live webcast. Topics covered include: How to place boundaries at work, How to get a response after sending a LinkedIn InMail message, How to start a YouTube channel and more. Refer to chapter marks for a complete list of topics covered and to jump to a specific section. Download my free "Networking eBook": www.harouneducation.comAttend my weekly YouTube Live every Thursday's 8am-11am PT. Subscribe to my YouTube Channel to receive notifications. Learn more about my MBA Degree ProgramConnect with me: YouTube: ChrisHarounVenturesCompleteBusinessEducationInstagram @chrisharounLinkedIn: Chris HarounTwitter: @chris_harounFacebook: Haroun Education Ventures TikTok: @chrisharoun
Finding candidates on LinkedIn is easy but how do you get their attention and get them to a phone screen? Follow my approach and half the candidates you reach out to will have a conversation. Join the Free Facebook Group Free Resources for Solopreneur Recruiters
Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Illiana Acosta on LinkedIn Partner Hub Follow AJ on LinkedIn NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Youtube Channel Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. A great no-cost way to support us: Rate/Review! Show Transcript AJ Wilcox LinkedIn 's official marketing partner program. Who are these partners? And how do you become one? What are the requirements? We cover the LinkedIn partner program on this week's episode of the LinkedIn ads show. Illiana Acosta Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. AJ Wilcox Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics, you've heard us talk about how we're an official LinkedIn partner. And you've probably used the tools of other partners to manage or report on your LinkedIn Ads initiatives. I met Illiana Acosta , who's one of the senior managers of the LinkedIn partner team at the B2Believe event that was in November. We talked all about that event on episode 79. And I thought it would be really interesting to bring her on and talk to her all about the program. Many of you have asked me what it takes to become a partner. So this episode is for you. First in the news, Jae Oh, who's head of ads measurement and audiences at LinkedIn. He wrote an article this month, called What's New With the Company Engagement report on LinkedIn. For those of you who don't know, there's this report that if you go and click on any of your audiences that our company list uploads, or sometimes we call them our ABM lists, if you click on that Companies list, it now takes you to this report called the company engagement report. And this is so cool. If you're advertising to a list of companies, now you can get all of this analytics and demographics information about who is actually engaging with your ads. It's way cool. Well, Jae talked about all the new updates that have happened to it. And I wanted to point out the things that I thought were really cool. First off, there's this company segmentation feature. So now you can dynamically prioritize the accounts that you're going after in certain campaigns, you can actually create a static list of here are the companies I want to go into which segment. But what's so exciting to me is the dynamic segmentation, where now you can say every day, I want LinkedIn to go to my list and go just for the companies that have the highest engagement. And let's show ads specifically to them. And you can have another segment, that's all about low engagement. So now with your campaigns, you can show different messages to companies that maybe aren't as engaged so we can try something new. The static segment is actually just a snapshot of the lowest engaged companies. And it's not going to change. We've linked to that article down in the show notes. So go give it a read and check it out. If that's interesting to you. I wanted to highlight a review left by Craig Sea. And that's the last name is S E. A. Craig says, "Very insightful and educational. I'm so happy I came across this podcast, I've learned a lot from it. Myself, being a beginner, started listening to this podcast. I've also started AJ's course, which is giving me a lot of confidence to get started running my own ads. Great podcast five stars from me." Craig, thanks so much for heeding the call and leaving that review. I'm so glad that couple of our resources could give you the confidence to begin advertising. You get five stars for me as well. Thanks, Craig. As a reminder, I want to feature you as well. If you haven't already left us a review, please do. And I'd love to give you a shout out. All right. Without further ado, we'll go ahead and jump right into the interview. Let's hit it. Illiana, I'm so excited to have you here. For those who don't know, Illiana is a senior manager on the LinkedIn ads business. She supports the LinkedIn Marketing Partners. She's also the Global Co Chair of the Latino ERG at LinkedIn. Illiana, thanks so much for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm and welcoming me on your show. AJ Wilcox You and I actually just met at the B2Believe event not too long ago back in November. Yes. It was awesome to get to hang out with you get to know you a little bit. I was excited to have you on the show because obviously you know so much about this. So give us an introduction to yourself. Tell us about yourself anything that I may not have covered in the intro. Yeah. Well, I was Illiana Acosta Well, I was born on a Monday. Oh, wait, no, I won't go back that far. I have been with LinkedIn for about four and a half years and I have been supporting our channel sales business which is our LinkedIn marketing partners program since day one. So I've seen it since its let's call it infancy stages to now its teenage years where we are operating almost like a mid level startup, if you will, right. It's like this crazy, awesome, high growth team and business that's supporting so much of what we're doing in our ads business to grow our business, but more so ensure that we are driving value for our customers with our marketing partners. In addition to my day job in managing our enterprise partners ad tech team. I am also the global co chair, as you mentioned, our Hispanics of LinkedIn's Alliance ERG, which is really helping to pour into our Latino community within our LinkedIn doors, but also within the community at large. So I've been in that role for a couple of years now, I'm actually stepping away from the co chair role in a couple months and giving an opportunity to newcomers, which is a little bittersweet, but we've done incredible work. And I will continue investing in diversity, equity and inclusion in some way, shape or form within the organization. So really excited to be here. So thank you for having me. AJ Wilcox Very cool. I announced that you are part of the Latino ERG, we may have listeners who aren't part of large organizations who may not know about employee resource groups, can you share just a little bit about what these groups are? Why They Matter? Illiana Acosta Absolutely. Let's take a step back as an employee, right? Every single person experiences their tenure, if you will, with an organization in different ways, some more than others, some negatively, some positively. And so when we look at our workplace, we tend to say like, I want to go somewhere where I feel like I belong, or I want to make sure that people understand me, or that I'm seen and heard and valued in a way that I haven't before. And for that I need to find community. And so at LinkedIn, we have about 10 ERG is employee resource groups that go everywhere from Black, Latino, LGBTQ, plus the Asian community, veterans, etc, etc. There's so many incredible groups and communities that people can be a part of, as soon as they join the organization feel a complete sense of belonging as soon as they join day one, but also find people that they can relate to and build community with. And it's also an incredible opportunity for allies, to learn more about different communities and how they can be of support. Because at the end of the day, we spent so much of our time at work and working with individuals and colleagues. And all we want to make sure is that we're doing really great work for people who appreciate us who see us and understand that our differences are what makes us so unique and great together. AJ Wilcox I love that. All right. So switching gears here to your role there at LinkedIn, I would love to hear how you specifically are supporting advertisers, maybe those of us who are listening who may not already be LinkedIn partners. Illiana Acosta Yeah, absolutely. So our LinkedIn marketing partners, is a global community of qualified technology and service providers that help our customers, our marketers achieve more on LinkedIn, in simple terms, like on our own work about us, you know, we're great, but we're so much greater with our partners. With partners, everything is better, right? So if I can give an example. So today, customers are facing changing buyer behavior, right, for example, shifting to e-commerce, etc. There's growth in the tech landscape. We're seeing an increase in spending martech from advertisers. There is now more new and emerging channels, right? Like think about it, the average number of channels to make purchase decisions increased by 2x in the last five years. And so it makes marketers jobs that much more challenging to actually go get to their goals and objectives, right. And so our marketing partners, our LinkedIn marketing partners can help navigate and reduce some of these complexities. And so what my role is, it's really working with a team of great amazing high performers. And I lead a team that's working with our enterprise level partners. And those enterprise level partners are typically those partners that are working with our enterprise or global strategic accounts. So those bigger, bigger customers at LinkedIn. However, we have three different teams that support our channel business today. So we have our enterprise partners, which I just explained, are those bigger partners that are working with our biggest accounts, so enterprise and strategic accounts, then we have our skilled partners team that's led by my colleague, John Hall, who's total awesomeness in the West Coast. And he's working with these partners that are typically supporting our online sales or customers or small to mid level size customers. And then we also have our content partners, who are creating these custom content solutions and creative solutions that help enhance a customer's LinkedIn campaign on the platform. And that's led by my colleague, Ally Rash, who's based out in New York. And so we have a whole ecosystem of partners that can help customers address some of the marketing challenges that they have, not only for LinkedIn, but as a whole for their, you know, social media buying as a whole. And so these partners, regardless of their enterprise, or scale, what we classify them internally, they help customers save time, right? So that they have to go through a less of a manual process to set up or manage your campaigns. Like, seriously, can I get an amen for saving time? Amen. Right. I'm like, I love saving time, anything to make me operate more efficient, Sign me up. And so these partners allow marketers to do that. They also allow them to plan more accurately, or target for every stage of the funnel. And so now you can actually sync your marketing strategy, your campaigns optimizations across multiple channels, all within our partner platforms. And so when you're thinking about activating your ad campaign gains, you want to get the most out of every single dollar you're investing. And so they also allow for a more in depth understanding of the performance of your campaigns. So you can make better decisions, you can shift dollars, you can shift creatives, you can do things, and optimize on the fly and get so much more value out of your campaigns with LinkedIn, and across our marketing partners. AJ Wilcox So we obviously don't want to call out any specific partners. We don't want to give anyone a preferred treatment here. Can you tell us about what are some of the kinds of things that you can do through partners, I'm imagining some will help you create campaigns, some will help you optimize and manage some will help you report. What sort of categories am I missing? Illiana Acosta Yeah, there's a few categories. So one, there's a ton of value in using the partners just because, you know, they allow you to do so much more with us. Over 70% of customers today, with LinkedIn are already using one or more partners. And so everybody's coming to the party. And so they are tapping into a partner for planning. Right. So insights, helping you developing the right content and creating your campaigns, targeting the right audiences at scale. So planning, we have partners that support campaign execution and tracking. So whether that's page management or campaign management with LinkedIn, we also have partners that are supportive reporting and ROI. And lead gen, everybody loves a good lead gen campaign. And so there's so many ways that a partner is supporting customers needs. It just really depends on what are your goals and objectives, right, and let's start there. And then let's make sure that as a company, LinkedIn, we're doing everything possible to tap into our arsenal to address those challenges that you're having, but also allowing you to get to your goals and objectives. And sometimes that means, like, rockin out just with LinkedIn, right? But sometimes that also means tapping into a partner that can help you really elevate your campaigns and take your campaign further. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with that. Alright, so if I could, I would love to pull all of our listeners and ask them who is using a LinkedIn partner for their campaign management or for any part of it? But obviously, since we can't do that, I hear you correctly, you said 70% of LinkedIn advertisers are using a partner in one way or another? Illiana Acosta Yeah, over 70%. They're using one or more partners. In many cases, customers are using multiple partners for different use cases, right. And so one might be using a partner for reporting. Another one might be doing for lead gen, there's different use cases, everybody has their special sauce, you know, and so a marketer has the option to work with many partners in order to meet their campaign objectives and more so their marketing goals for the year for the quarter, whatever the case may be. And so yes, so a really good chunk of our customers are already using a partner for their LinkedIn campaigns today. AJ Wilcox Oh, yeah. All right. So this leads me to a really good question. How have you seen partners in one way or another elevate your customers LinkedIn campaigns? Illiana Acosta We're on a time constraint, so I can't even tell you all the stories. You know, again, I've been here four and a half years. So I've seen you know, across the gamut, small partners, large partners deliver so much value for our customers. And so if I think back to some recent real great wins, so we have metadata metadata, and I know we're not supposed to calling out but these are success stories, and you can find them on our hub. I'll give you the site later, but one of our partners metadata helped oyster with their full ABM strategy. And you know, we talked ABM at b2b believe in November, and so therefore, ABM strategy and execution of ad campaigns, I believe it resulted in 3x engagement rate on the campaign, and it's doubled their ROI in less than 12 months. And so I'm like, what is it that we did that right? It's like, okay, medicine is one of our enterprise level partners that one of my colleagues, managers, and then we have Zapier, who works with so many of our customers. It's like Zapier makes you happier, it's an inside joke on our team. But Zapier is real time. I know, it's so corny, but it's fun. They have a real time lead gen solution, and it worked with a customer harnessed.io to look at lead automation, and they were able to improve the accuracy by 99%. From campaign manager to market like huge Wow. And so it's kind of insane. And there's there's other stories of like, you know, teams have reduced their time by six hours per week. And while that might seem a lot take six times 52 weeks, like that's a lot of hours that you're saving a customer in managing their campaigns. Helping them operate more efficiently, helping them to do more with less especially now with this economic climate that, you know, we do have less resources, we may have less people. So how do you operate more efficiently when you're a brand that's activating 10, 20, 30, 100 campaigns in any given quarter? I would like to think that we're all super people, super women and men and people, but there's only so much we can do. So sometimes getting automated tools and tapping into the right tools more than anything, I think can make the biggest difference when you are executing your marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox I totally agree with this. We've had several episodes in the past that are a partner product spotlight. So if anyone's ever curious, they can go back and listen to some of those spotlights we put on partners and different tools. But to your point about saving six hours a week, I just think of this as a marketer. Yeah, it's not a big deal to save six hours. But think about it. This is six, super mundane and monotonous hours that don't need to be spent, you can now go and spend that doing the really high value stuff, digging deep into the account finding opportunities for scale or decrease costs. So this really is a big deal. Yeah, we shouldn't be doing the mundane. Exactly. And Illiana Acosta Partners make it more accessible. They have scalable tools, it makes your day to day job a lot more simpler and more efficient. And you can spend more time doing the things that really, really require the most attention being more strategic. But you know, when it comes to like copy and pasting things, right, like that, sometimes it's a really long time, if you're managing multiple, multiple campaigns. So how can we collectively LinkedIn and our partners help to increase customer value, like, that's really why I'm even on this team and in this business. I want to help drive value, and I want to help make a difference, and how people are operating every single day. On our own, again, I mentioned, we're great, you know, we have amazing tools. But sometimes our customers need more access to different tools that our partners provide. And with our partners, they can do things simpler and more efficient, like day parting and auto optimization rules, and add flighting, and management, and creative optimizations and all the things that customers need to enhance their marketing campaigns with us. AJ Wilcox Yes, and I can't tell you how excited I am that there is now this partner ecosystem, because I kind of, quote unquote, grew up in the world of PPC. And there are so many partners out there, if you're running Google Ads, or Facebook Ads, there's so many different tools that you can take advantage of. LinkedIn hasn't had that it hasn't really been considered a tier one platform until what I would say is fairly recent. And now we have all of those types of things that you'd want to execute that you just mentioned, any of those needs you have, you can go out and find a partner who is doing this on LinkedIn. And I just want to say I think this is super powerful. I'm so proud of where it's landed. Illiana Acosta Yeah, you know, it's so funny, because like, before I started working here, I was like, B2B. B2B doesn't have to be boring, B2B can be fun, and really insightful, and really an incredible way to drive some meaningful business outcomes. And so we really have transformed over the last several years, I'd like to think it's when I joined the company, but I know that's not accurate. But it really has transformed into this platform that I am so proud to be a part of the growth of our LinkedIn ads business, the growth of the overall organization, what we stand for, and how we're so we are really doing everything we can to make sure that our customers, our marketers are getting everything that they need from us to be successful. And that is something that I am incredibly proud of. AJ Wilcox Oh, I love it. I know there's a lot to the partner programs, there's different tiers. Could you tell us a little bit about what maybe benefits are there for partners? Illiana Acosta Yeah, so we have different tiers of partners, depending on the tenure with us, but more so depending on the bandwidth and the use cases that you all support, right? Data linked, is a partner of ours, too. Yes, we know you're an OG, so this is good. Some other benefits include having a one to one relationship with a partner manager, depending on your level of tier. And that is incredible, because you have a trusted resource that you can literally work with every single week to help identify meaningful go to market strategies that are going to help to elevate and drive awareness around our value together as partners, and what we do for our customers together. And so that is powerful, because we have, you know, over 1000 partners in our ecosystem, but not every single partner is managed, and that every single partner is certified they're all on a journey. And so that's the journey that's the path to get partner certified and into the the level of tear that they're hoping to as they grow with us and they get manager or partner manager on my team or John's team or Bruno's team or Lara's team that I work with but, more so you know there's opportunity to tap into additional resources that we have to drive go to market together. There's opportunity to sync directly with our sales teams. There's opportunity to work directly with our sales leaders to identify leads, prospects, and more. So identify where can we drive the most value for our customers together, there's opportunity to be a part of our events that we have throughout the year B2Believe, Partner Connect, I heart ABM, there's so many different touch points that we can include here within, and vice versa, right. There's also an opportunity for us to show up for your events and be a part of any thought leadership, any webinars, any in person sessions. There's opportunity to tell stories together, I love telling stories together. Because together, we can really help make a big difference. And so how do we tag team on all efforts to really help again, elevate not so much our companies but elevate the value that we're offering customers, right, because if together, we continue to build solutions that will help address market challenges and marketers find value in it working with us, it's just going to be a byproduct of that, right? Like they want to work people that can help solve things for them. And we want to do that with our partners. And so So that's some of the benefits that you can expect to receive from our partner program. Working with our cross functional teams, we have dedicated resources on the business development side, on the partner end side, we have our B2B Institute, which is our think tank and is fully equipped with incredible thought leaders. We have a full partner marketing team that is ready and able to start on some really cool marketing concepts that again, can help elevate the value that we're driving for our customers. And so as we evolve this program and continue to grow, there's so much information that we disseminate through webinars and different methods. And so you can find a lot of that on the hub, which is our LinkedIn marketing partner hub. If you search on Bing, you can directly find that link. And I can also share the links with you, AJ, so you can share out to your followers, your subscribers on here. But yeah, so I think that there's opportunity for are always on marketing programs, which obviously you get visibility on our hub, which is external facing for all customers and marketers to visit. So that will give you free marketing and visibility for customers to come and learn more about you. That hub also houses our success stories with customers and partners. So that's another touch point that we can really have there. And then again, as I mentioned before, I think for us, it's really, really valuable. And we've had a lot of feedback from partners, that having that FaceTime with our sales team, either one on one or one to many, whether it be in a larger format or smaller, has been incredibly valuable globally. And so our marketing partners program is not just in North America, but it's literally across the globe. And many of our partners support our customers across the globe. And some are starting to really branch out into different regions as well, helping to have that global footprint, which is great. AJ Wilcox I love this. All right, here's a quick sponsor break, and then we'll jump back into the interview. Illiana Acosta The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. AJ Wilcox Managing LinkedIn Ads is a massive time and money investment. Do you want some of that investment back? Consider booking a discovery call with B2Linked, the original LinkedIn Ads performance agency. We've worked with some of the largest accounts over the past 12 years, and our unique scientific approach to ads management, combined with our proprietary tools, allowing us to confidently optimize and scale your LinkedIn Ads faster and more efficiently than any other agency, in-house team, or digital ads hire. Plus, we're an official LinkedIn partner, which after this episode, you'll know exactly what that means. Just mosey on over to B2Linked.com/apply. We'd absolutely love the chance to get to work with you. Alright, let's go ahead and jump back into the interview. So I have to ask what qualifies someone to be a marketing partner? I'm imagining because this is with the API. This means these are people who are building tools, right? Who else is able to become a part? Illiana Acosta It really just depends on the use cases that you support, right? What's your special sauce? And whether or not our API's currently support the use case that you're looking to really invest in with us. And so you know whether you as a platform can support a campaign management, reporting an ROI. We talked about this before, but audiences, page management insights, lead gen content and creative. So if you fall under any of those use cases that we are API support today, these are all specialties that our current partners do support. If you fall under any of those, you may have a good chance of becoming one of our LinkedIn marketing partners. So there is a developer website that you can visit to apply to become a partner and we will evaluate the use case that you currently support how you're looking to really plug into our LinkedIn API's. And if there's a match, and you fall under any of those specialties, then we can start working together. AJ Wilcox Oh, if there is someone out there who's creating a tool or wants to create a tool, what advice would you give them? What can they do to better help their case to have a higher likelihood of being prioritized or or being taken on as a partner? Illiana Acosta I think one be specific in your application, right? As you can imagine, we get a ton of requests, be specific on what's your special sauce, we want to hear about your special sauce to obviously, if you have customers that are asking for it, that's always a really great story to share with us. And so many of our customers are working with us, they want to activate their LinkedIn campaigns to our platform. And guess what, hey, we don't have integration with you. So can we work on that? And so that's a really great way, right? Because now we have customers asking for this integration to happen. And we can start having those conversations, we can start working with our business development team, with our partner interest team, with our product team and getting all our ducks in a row to make sure that happens. And total sidebar, I said, ducks in a row, and I'm looking out my window. And there's four ducks walking across the way by the lake. And it's so funny. AJ Wilcox That's amazing. Illiana Acosta Perfect line. Yeah. So I think if they do that, I think that will help build a case, right? Because whatever our customer needs from us, like, we want to make sure that we're accommodating that. And if one customer is asking for it, the likelihood of many other customers is very high, are also demanding that. Again, we want to work with customers in the way that they want to work with us. And if that's via a partner, let's make it happen. And let's make sure that we are helping to simplify the process and working with LinkedIn as much as possible, ease the transaction between customers, as partners, etc. To make sure that again, we help to simplify the process working with us while also delivering value, and really great outcomes for the marketer. AJ Wilcox Awesome Illiana. This has been fantastic. I appreciate you sharing all this information about the partner program. My last question for you is do you have anything exciting that you're working on professionally, and personally? Illiana Acosta Yeah, I'm actually working on a few projects right now. One, I just finished his voiceover workshop not long ago. And I really took the course just to try to do more public speaking because I really enjoy it, it really fills my cup. And then I started realizing, wow, this is a really cool like opportunity to tap into. And it's been really, really fun just trying to find ways to adjust my voice and work on different projects. So voiceover has been really fun. Also, I have a newsletter called Lost in Translation and sort of tapping into the diversity piece. But the newsletter focuses on highlighting challenges and limitations for historically excluded groups. And it's a focus on experiences that have shaped who they, I am, and how they and we and me I show up both in my professional life and my personal life, because based on our experiences that really shaped who we are and the way we show up at work. What else am I working on? I'm doing a bunch of speaking engagements around the power of authenticity and taming your inner critic, because you know, impostor syndrome is real. AJ Wilcox We've all got it. Illiana Acosta Oh, my gosh, even on my best days, I'm like, wait, I'm like, no, no, just go to sleep, go to sleep, girl go sleep. But you know, covering topics, you know, the power that we each have. We literally every single person listening on this and not listening, we have the power and influence to create more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable spaces for every single member of the workforce. And we have more power than we think. And so as you look at your colleague next to you, whether it be in person or on the virtual screen, I talk about how can we show up for others in a meaningful way. And even the smallest action and thought could actually make the biggest difference. And so I've been doing a lot around speaking engagements around that, because I think that, you know, the only way that we're going to change what this world looks like, for future generations is if we start doing the work now. That's some of the stuff I'm working on. AJ Wilcox So true. Is there any way that you want people to be able to reach out to you after this interview? Do you want them to reach out to you on LinkedIn or anywhere else? Illiana Acosta Yeah, tap into LinkedIn, honestly, crazy enough, my main social platform and more tech platform that I leverage on a regular basis, not because I work here, but I really enjoy being on the platform. I feel like it feeds me in different ways mentally, spiritually, and educationally and professionally. So LinkedIn, connect with me, send me an InMail happy to dialogue, you know, have some dialogue on there. And yeah, happy to answer any questions as well. AJ Wilcox Perfect. So we'll put a link to your LinkedIn profile down in the show notes as well as the link to the marketing hub. Yes. Ileana, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing of your wisdom. Do you have any parting words for us? Illiana Acosta Yes. I have parting words for everyone listening, whether you are a customer, whether you are a prospective partner, whether you are an existing partner of ours, ask for what you need. If you don't ask, you don't get right. We want to support you. We want to help you, in working with us in a greater way. We want to have long term sustainable partnership with our partners. We want to have long term sustainable relationships with our customers. And we want to make sure that we're doing everything possible for you to work with us, and that we drive value in the way that you expect from us and so ask for what you need. Connect with me and let's start the conversation. AJ Wilcox Perfect. Illiana Acosta ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. And please do everyone reach out to her shoot her an InMail make sure you're connected to her. She's a fantastic resource, especially for those who are partners or want to be partners. So thank you again for being here. Illiana Acosta Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. AJ Wilcox All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around Illiana Acosta Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. AJ Wilcox Okay, like we mentioned in the interview, we'll have a link to Illiana Acosta's profile on LinkedIn. So make sure you go and connect to her, send her a message, tell her she's awesome. She also mentioned the partner hub where you can go and find out all about LinkedIn marketing partners, the links there as well. You'll also see the link to the company engagement report that we talked about that was posted by Jae Oh, at LinkedIn. Now, if you're just getting started on LinkedIn Ads, or know someone who is I'd love it if you'd point them towards the LinkedIn Ads course on LinkedIn learning. I'm the instructor on that one. And I know I'm a little bit biased, but it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost LinkedIn Ads course out there. If this is your first time listening, thank you and welcome. We'd love to have you subscribe, so you can hear more episodes like this in the future. If this is not your first time listening, I would love to invite you to rate and review the podcast on whatever player you're using. Or if you can't find a review function, go over to us Apple podcasts version. That's where the majority of the reviews come in. We don't charge anything for listening to this podcast, obviously. So the best way you can repay us and say thanks, is by leaving us a review. I'd really appreciate it with any questions, suggestions, or corrections for this episode or the podcast in general, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. With that being said, we'll see you back here next week. I'm cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
Get Fresh Sales Plays From The Trenches In Your Inbox
If you want to prospect in 2023 - not 2022 - then you need to update your game. In this show, we'll explore the 3 key areas in outbound prospecting: social selling, cold emailing, and personal branding. You'll get practical, no-fluff tactics from senior sales pros that you can use right away and turn more first contacts into conversations and meetings.You'll Learn:Secret social selling tips to accelerate prospecting, from DMs and InMail to referralsUnique approaches to cold emailing that actually workWhat works best today for building your personal brandToday's Speakers: Caroline Maloney, Mattia Schaper and Thibaut SouyrisIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join here:https://hubs.la/Q01yLCGf0Follow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their game:https://hubs.ly/Q01tLYNJ0Become a member and never miss quota again:https://hubs.ly/Q01tLYRV0
Get Fresh Sales Plays From The Trenches In Your Inbox
How do you use InMail? What is LInkedIn InMail and how do you access it? We are going to be looking at some features on LinkedIn over the next few episodes - if you want to ask about a particular feature, then do get in touch. www.youtube.com/c/linkedinwithlouise www.linkedin.com/in/louisebrogan
In this episode, Marcus Edwardes speaks with Robin Choy, CEO of HireSweet, a talent acquisition platform built to empower outbound data-driven recruiting teams. He is the host of the A-Players podcast.Robin wrote an excellent guide for recruiters called The Definitive Guide to Sourcing in Recruiting (https://content.hiresweet.com/the-sourcing-guide/), which breaks down the process into four key steps: preparation, sourcing, contact, and closing.Listen in as Robin does a deep dive into all things sourcing as well as how ChatGPT can become a valuable tool for recruiters. He shares the importance of ascertaining your candidates' unique value proposition via the intake call, and thinking of outreach like a funnel.Robin gives his thoughts on finding the right balance between personalization and automation and what's working today (and what's no longer working) with regards to outreach.Finally, Robin explains how recruiters can best use ChatGPT as a powerful tool in their kit.What You'll Learn in This Episode:● [02:17] How to maximize your preparation as a recruiter● [07:59] Outreach best practices● [11:14] How to go about salary transparency● [16:58] Cold emailing versus InMail● [17:31] Considerations around personalization● [20:12] Automating connection requests and personalizing invites● [25:10] The importance of culture● [29:30] Crafting a great subject line● [33:57] The impact of ChatGPT in recruiting● [35:58] How to use HireSweetKey quotes:● “Preparation is key to productivity. If you don't look for the right person, you can be the best sourcer in the world and shortlist candidates, but they won't be the right fit for the hiring manager because you didn't spend enough time in the preparation phase.”● “If you send an email to someone, you should always send an invitation to connect as well.”● “ChatGPT won't replace recruiters. But recruiters who know how to use ChatGPT will replace recruiters that don't.”
In this episode, Marcus Edwardes speaks with returning Mark White, The LinkedIn Professional. He specializes in helping you unlock the value in LinkedIn—something he has been doing since 2009.Mark delivers customized training to students across the globe, from workshops to virtual classes to 1-to-1 coaching sessions.Listen in as Mark discusses how LinkedIn fared in 2022 and why he believes that LinkedIn's recruiter platform should coexist with an agency ATS. He also discusses the limitations of relying purely on LinkedIn filters compared to the level of specificity granted by Boolean strings.Likewise, Mark talks best practices regarding automation on LinkedIn, and where personalization always beats out taking shortcuts. Faced with more savvy users on LinkedIn 2023, he also shares how recruiters can stand above the noise and maximize their chances of getting InMail responses.Finally, Mark speaks on personal branding on LinkedIn and how to complemen your unique strengths and personality as an individual with those of the company you represent.What You'll Learn in This Episode:● [02:39] How LinkedIn fared in 2022● [05:36] Why LinkedIn isn't the “perfect” solution● [09:40] Filters versus Boolean strings● [14:12] Using automation effectively on LinkedIn● [22:52] Creating a cleverer outreach strategy● [27:05] The power of voice messages● [29:30] The secret to getting a response on InMail● [36:10] Avoiding LinkedIn scams● [40:00] Personal branding on LinkedIn● [46:23] What to expect from Mark's training programsKey quotes:● “If you're working for a company, always remember that the brand you're putting out shouldn't just be your own. Personal branding has to go hand-in-hand with your position within an organization.”
Is Linkedin Premium really worth it in 2023? What does the paid version of LinkedIn do, and should you buy it? The short answer is maybe - because it depends on how you'll use it. So, listen for an overview of top LinkedIn Premium features and how to use them.In this episode of The Career Rx we'll discuss:The top five reasons LinkedIn Premium might be worth the investmentKey Linkedin Premium features for job seekers that really can help!How LinkedIn Premium enhances networking, even when you're not actively lookingToday I take a deep dive into some of the most useful features of LinkedIn Premium for 2023. I discuss the best uses for LinkedIn Learning, InMail, profile viewing, the “featured applicant” function, and what you can learn from job postings with the premium features. If you're ready to get serious about a career transition, and you're on the fence about getting the paid version of LinkedIn, this episode is for you.In this Episode: [4:30] LinkedIn Learning - a treasure trove explained[7:35] How to reach out (and get replies) with Premium features[14:00] Highly valuable features within job postings[18:45] Hacks for making your profile even better for the jobs you wantLinks and Resources: Industry Insider - 12 hours of CME, learn exactly how to land a rewarding nonclinical career without a new degree, connections on the inside, prior experience, or a pay cut Support the show
In this episode you will learn the 4-step process to get the best out of your branding efforts. Social selling and the power it can provide - Tweaking your profile that tells the story you need it to - Your prospects and anyone to that you meet will be checking out your LinkedIn Profile - Aligning your message with what your product offering provides. Four-step process 1. Skills Gap Workbook – what do you want to accomplish 2. Review your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) for your business 3. Fully defined Target Market demographics 4. Recommendations to fill the gaps of what has been identified. This process is important for any business – small to large. - Ideation of where your business is and if it aligns with your mission and values. - New businesses will get a leg up in building a successful company. - Existing businesses who are developing a new product that is going to market. - This process will work with any industry focus. - Repurpose your content to attract prospects. Tools that assist you building your brand: - InMail feature in LinkedIn - Events on LinkedIn - StreamMart - Grammarly - Audacity for podcasts - Canva Connect with Grant via LinkedIn. This podcast is brought to you in part by MI Group: MI Group is a tech company that assists you with billing technology solutions, full-service digital marketing, and hosting and maintaining your digital assets. With over 12 years of experience and a team of over fifty passionate business professionals, MI Group is your key to taking the next step to success. Visit migroupco.com to learn how we can help you and your clients reach your business goals. This podcast is brought to you in part by mMessenger.co: mMessenger.co is the ultimate SMS software that allows you to send messages to people in over 100 countries across the globe. Notifications, alerts, or any message you want to send can be done from the comfort of one website. Visit mmessenger.co for a free trial and to learn how you can use SMS to reach more customers. This podcast is brought to you in part by MI Digital Hub: MI Digital Hub is the all-in-one digital experience to help you improve your digital marketing experience. Suppose you want to understand your current online positioning and how your presence appears. In that case, MI Digital Hub gives you a high-level view of SEO, performance, listing, social media, and any online presence that might impact your business. Get a free snapshot of your performance by visiting midigitalhub.com to see where you are now and where you need to go.
Do you want to learn how to tap into the full potential of Linkedin? You may be surprised to find out that Linkedin is not just for finding a job anymore. Used correctly, Linkedin connects you directly with your ideal customer and can help you grow your business. Today's guest is Adriane Simpson, CEO and founder of Linkedin Pros. Her expertise is in positioning brands to attract clients, employees and money all with one tool…Linkedin. With only a small percentage of Linkedin's 3 million users actively posting content you have the opportunity to access a huge market without much competition. Many businesses are wasting time and money on instagram, facebook and TikTok but Linkedin has superior features that allow you to tell your business's story. Adriane teaches you how to use Linkedin's Sales Navigator to market directly to your customers and create profitable opportunities unmatched on other social media platforms. If you want to become more connected, more influential and more profitable, listen now! Want to keep up with Adriane Simpson? Find details here: ► Website:https://www.thelinkedinpros.com/ ► Services:https://www.thelinkedinpros.com/smallbusinessprograms ► Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/TheLinkedInPros/ Want to keep up with Traffic Sales and Profit? Find details here: ► Podcast: https://trafficsalesandprofit.com/podcast ► Get your FREE Traffic Sales and Profit Book here https://freetspbook.com/tsp-book ► Subscribe to the YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/trafficsalesandprofit ► Upcoming Live Events: https://trafficsalesandprofit.com/events/ ► Join our FREE Traffic, Sales & Profit Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TrafficSalesProfit/ ► Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trafficsalesandprofit/ ► Follow Lamar on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lamartyler/ KEY TAKEAWAYS [00:00:00] Show intro [00:01:15] What you didn't know about LinkedIn [00:05:00] The benefits of contract work [00:05:40] How to be Strategic within Linkedin [00:08:20] Accelerating your progress with the TSP mastermind [00:09:30] If corporations are on Linkedin, there is money to be made [00:10:45] Linkedin is for branding [00:11:30] The biggest mistakes made on Linkedin [00:13:30] What type of content you should be posting [00:15:20] Be authentic because your audience is following you [00:19:40] Finding your target audience with Linkedin Sales Navigator [00:26:00] Any business can thrive on Linkedin [00:28:30] Sending sponsored ads with InMail [00:30:07] Do not let your past interfere with your future trajectory [00:31:20] Lead with the value that you deliver [00:32:00] Defining your brand with Linkedin Pros
I have been exploring a new AI tool that is allowing transcript creation while I edit the episodes. It's not perfect, but it's pretty great for those who prefer reading to listening. I plan on including transcripts of all episodes going forward.Also: Apologizes that yesterday's essay did NOT have more than 1-second of audio. I am still working through these tools. The audio should be live on that post now (I chose not to re-send it to your email) In This EpisodeFader and Nevraumont discuss Elon Musk's plan for charging $8/month for a blue checkmark (plus other benefits). What metrics should they use to know if it's working? Can subscription revenue compete with advertising revenue? What are the different types of Twitter users?Keep it Simple,Edward Full TranscriptEdward: So, Peter, do you have a blue check mark?Peter: I do. I'm so fortunate. Of course the question is how long will I keep it and what will I have to pay to do so, and what benefits will I get associated with it?Edward: How did you get it? Was there a process you went through? Did the school help you do it?Peter: No, it was actually through my previous company, Zodiac the one, we sold to Nike. That at that point the CEO said, You know, we ought to get blue check marks just to give us more credibility. It was a pretty simple application process, but you know, a lot of people who have been trying to go through it, who are at least as qualified as I am. It seems like there is, or at least was, something pretty arbitrary about it, but hey, I'm one of the lucky ones. ,Edward: You're part of the in group. When I was at General Assembly, the, my head of PR came to me like basically on day one on the job, and she's like, We need to get you a blue check mark.And I had to go and change my Twitter account was linked to my Gmail address and I had to switch it to my general assembly email address, and then she went to town and did her PR stuff to try. Get the blue check mark, but it never happened. Two years of trying it and never got the check, I even as a CMO of general assembly I was not renowned enough to get the check.Peter: That's exactly my experience cuz I think you honestly, in a position like that, deserved it more than me. I think maybe the professor thing helps, but there's plenty of professors with the big followings and great content who don't have it either.So maybe that's what the, All the musk nonsense will actually bring some order, some predictability to who gets a check or who gets which kind of check cuz there really should be more than one of them.Edward: There kind of is. So I guess for those who... I imagine all of our listeners know what's going on right now, but just a really quick summary is that Elon, there was a rumor that went out. Was it Vanity Fair or The Verge? It was the Verge last weekend that talked about how all the blue check marks are gonna have to pay 20 bucks a month just to keep it. And then yesterday we're recording this on Wednesday, yesterday, on Tuesday, Elon came out and said, No, it's gonna be $8 a month.And it includes not just the blue check mark, but a bunch of other kind of benefits, if you will. And then on top of that, really red down people like Joe Biden for example, will get a, not a blue check mark, but like an. A descriptor underneath them that says that they're authentic and real. Which was the original purpose of the blue check mark to begin.Peter: Right, right, right. Yeah. Really a validation, not just a status symbol. But if you look at some of the benefits that they're talking about, some of those benefits make sense for creators. Some of the benefits make sense for readers, and I think it's important not to mash the two together.That's why they really should be a different kind of subscription based on what you're using. Twitter.Edward: I guess so, so big part of this, it's interesting. The last essay I wrote for for marketing BS couple of weeks ago was all about paying for status. And this, it feels initially like this is paying for status and a lot of that's what it is, right?So you pay to get the blue check marks right now are primarily a status tool, although I know you have some features that us non-black marks don't have. But going forward this is going to replace that blue check mark you are paying for the status. But the benefits you get seem to be around production.So if you, the tweets that you produce are more likely to be seen by other people you're, you get listed first in the mentions. You get move to the top of the replies. And so there's a bunch of features like that. So you, the stuff that you produce is more likely to be seen, I don't think.And that makes sense. Yeah. And that's good for everybody in some ways too because it kills the spambots or if you're a spambot, you're not going. Verified, you're not gonna get the blue check. And so all the spam bot stuff gets pushed to the bottom. But so does everybody. So do all the non blue check mark.People get pushed to the.Peter: Now for me personally I, yeah, I'd pay something to keep the blue check, but I'd also pay something to improve my reading experience. I would love to have more control over the timeline. I'd like to get inside some of the curation algorithms and, tweak them to, to, to my benefit.To me that that's more important as a Twitter consumer than a Twitter.Edward: And, but now, so those benefits though, should, are those benefits that they should be charging for, because every social media platform has that, which is, hey, we want to show people the content that engages them, that they would enjoy.Why if you're able to do that, if you're able to show people better content, they're gonna use your platform more, and you're gonna make more money on ads, at what point would you be like, Hey, you know what? We could make this person's experience better, but we're gonna put that behind a paywall and we're gonna give them a worst experience.That just, it feels like that's not The Thing you want to be charging for.Peter: That's a big philosophical question, but you're right. That, that this is how everybody does it. So presuming that a Twitter's gonna follow that mold, the most obvious one of all is if I pay a reader subscription.Don't show me any ads, right? Just like with Spotify, give me, gimme the ad free version or maybe have, a new Netflix one where it's a lower price with some reader control but some minimal number of ads. So there should be something about that. But also if I'm gonna pay that I wanna have complete control over whether things are in chronological order or whether I want to trust their recommendations I'd.Do my own curation like that.Edward: That's fair. But you can do that now. It's Twitter's ability to produce things and new product features have been very slow. But right now I think your default is a algorithmic feed. But it's fairly simple to change that to a chronological feat if you want to. I don't think many people do but it, but the ability is,Peter: I find that it still does chronology in a weird way and sometimes then jumps back a few hours in time and maybe it's just me, I don't know.But they, they definitely can and should clean that up. But like I said, there, there should be different kinds of features for different kinds of users that would involve different kinds of subscriptions. And of course there'd be the grand subscription that would give. Everything for a super power user who's creating and consuming, get all those features.Some, bundled price.Edward: Nice. And so right now, I was I guess the question on everyone's mind right now are the screaming and shouting people on Twitter are talking about the fact that hey, the, like Steven King for example the writer. Went and posted something about how he's, there's no way he's gonna pay for this because Twitter should be paying him.And in some ways he's right. Because if you look at right now the new Blue Check mark program is gonna be, the benefits are not for the readers. I guess the little bit they think he said something about half the normal ads that you would normally see, but majority of the benefits are, hey, the status benefit and a bunch of production benefits, like your content gets seen more often.So it's producers that are gonna be charged for this, but at the same time, isn't it the producers that create the value for everybody else?Peter: Of course that's true with all social media platforms. I don't think Twitter's any different in this regard. And I think a lot of people are making noise about it.Because of who is in charge now. I think it's just a visceral reaction. Oh, it's Elon Musk. I think if Twitter had announced changes like this at another time, a lot of folks, I'm not gonna speak for Stephen King or some of the other celebrities would say yeah, it's about time that, that I get those extra boosts that I deserve.And you know, what, eight bucks a month I'm paying more money than that for a lot of other content subscriptions that are used far less.Edward: Fair enough. How what do you think, how, what percentage of Twitter's revenue then, if this, assuming this thing works and it's successful at all, like, how much revenue can you get from this subscription product versus the advertising model?Peter: It's a great question. It goes right into my strike zone, which is we could look at the next year o over the short run. They're so reliant on advertising that there's no way that they could come close to matching it with subscription revenue. But in terms of long run customer lifetime value, if they start to ratchet down the ads and focus on bonafide benefits to creators and readers through a different well calibrated subscription services. You give 'em a couple years and they could completely flip it and make it almost entirely subscription based. And that's the direction they should be moving in. Not only would that be steadier income, you'd have a better sense of who's doing what you'd have much better metrics to use for internal and external guidance. Right now, everything they're doing with monthly active users and daily active users doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not easily tied to, to revenue so that they can really improve the stream of revenue, but also the predictability the understanding of it. And that's great.Edward: So your prediction is, call it in three years, the majority, more than 50% of the revenue comes from subscriptionsPeter: If they play their cards right, and it's real hard. To be pro Elon. It's just unpopular position to take, but it's...Edward: low status. It's low status these days,Peter: ...and so I'm gonna avoid the personalities and I'm gonna avoid endorsing or critiquing some of the statements you've made. But just if you just look purely at the business decisions and the urgency that he's bringing to it, it's about.Edward: The only other social network I can think of that has this both model where you can use the network for free or you can pay to get effectively a blue check is LinkedIn. Like LinkedIn, you can become an in member or something like that.Peter: Yep, yep.Edward: But I don't think LinkedIn makes much money off the in members, do they? It's not significant, is it?Peter: I don't know. I don't know if they break that out, but I know I'm paying my $300 a year to, to get some of those benefits and so on. I don't use them all that much.But but sometimes it's really really valuable whether it's for some of the companies I'm running or the books I'm writing. I do it without batting an eye. Now granted, it is covered under my university, research and teaching budget. But I do it with without even thinking. And that's, I'm paying I think a good bit more money than I'd be paying for Twitter, which I use a lot more than LinkedIn.Edward: Yeah, fair enough. What, so what do you use the LinkedIn one for? So you're paying for the premium, like I've paid for it from time to time, mainly for recruiting purposes. What are you using it for?Peter: So a part of it is to have a little bit more control to both the get a better sense of who's looking at my profile. To have more control about being the block who sees mine being able to send, not that I do a ton of these InMail messages, but again, just sometimes I do want to do a bunch of that.I run a separate group and to have a little bit more control over there as well. So it's a bunch of little things. Again, any one of the things, the most important things I get out of LinkedIn would be far less significant than the benefits that I'd seek from Twitter. But I still do it anyway. I don't have a problem doing, so it's just matter of finding the right price point.In LinkedIn's case, they have a bunch of different tiers. I'm not even sure which what I have, and that's the direction Twitter will go as well.Edward: That's interesting. You're gonna pay for the Twitter check, and you're gonna expense it through your department?Peter: That's a good question. Whether I, I could do that or I guess so. I mean it's in some sense no different than LinkedIn and I certainly spent a lot of time talking about my research, my teaching, the books that I'm writing on behalf of Wharton, including a new one that just came out this week, The Customer Base Audit.Edward: So we should talk about That should be our topic next week. Next week our discussion gonna be your book.Peter: I'd love to do that, but right now it's Blue Checks instead of Blue books. So yeah I think I would do that and I would encourage others to do the same.Edward: That's an interesting point too. You got your blue check because of your work with your last company, you're gonna be able to pay for this next check with the expense it, I imagine the CEO of every company in America is gonna expense this and then the executive team and all the PR people. Right now it feels like the blue check marks are disproportionately journalists and authors, but is in the new blue check mark world become people that can expense it will just take over.Peter: And of course then there'll be a hierarchy of checks and there'll be clear criteria beyond money about what it takes to achieve one. You can't just purely pay for blue check. You have tweet enough. You have to show some credibility that there was. That application that you and I have both tried to fill out. And so if you start making it aspirational that in order to move up to, the next check you have to tweet a certain number of times, you have to engage and, do other things that are beneficial to the Twitter community. If we make it incentive compatible for people to, to lean in and participate, that's great. It's good for everyone.Edward: That's interesting. So you're saying $8 a month is not gonna be enough, $8 is what it costs, but you still have to, You have to jump through some hoops in order to be allowed to pay the money.Peter: That's right. Exactly. You have to, again, establish your credentials and you have to participate enough to really earn it.Edward: It goes back to the, what I talked about a few weeks ago, which is here you're paying for status, but if it's only dollars, then there's no actual status involved.So it has to be, you have to do a bunch of stuff. You have to be legitimate, and then you can pay for the status levels. It's, I did some math this morning. So right now if every single blue check mark on Twitter starts paying for it. And no, no one else does. Only the blue check marks pay for it, it's pretty minimal revenue. It's something like 50 million per year on a business right now is doing what, 4.5 billion? And so if that's all it does is he ends up milking the blue check marks. It feels like this is a bunch of noise for nothing. And so it only really works if he gets a significant percentage of the base.I think it was something like, If 10% of the base start doing it, it gets can't remember what the exact number was, like half a million dollars or something like that. He has to get a pretty high number in order for it to be significant against his advertising, at least at this price point.Peter: And that's exactly why it's a multi-year initiative. It, it's not gonna happen overnight. And again, with all these haters out there, whatever he tries to do, people are gonna declare it to be a failure a few months from now. But it is a behavioral change on the part of people to actually not only seek out the status and pay for it, but to change their Twitter habits to.Be a better member of the community. So I think as he changes, not just check marks and basic functions, but as he changes the nature of the way that, that people use Twitter I think people will start to see more and more value, more and more urgency to start doing it. Instead of feeling that that he's holding a gun to their head.Edward: What metrics should he be looking at? So he goes and pulls the trigger on this and some people sign up for it and some people stop using Twitter. What numbers should he be looking at to know whether or not this is going in the right direction of whether this is trending to the place where three years from now it's gonna be the majority of his?Peter: It starts to become the things that we really can measure and manage effectively, customer retention. So we can say, how many new people have signed up for a particular status? Of all the people who signed up last year how many of them have retained it? Things that are very easy to measure.You think about all these lawsuits, obviously the big one that more or less forced them to buy the company. There was another one last year that I was actually an expert witness on Twitter's behalf about measuring daily active users and monthly active users. It'll be great to move away from that to metrics that are harder to argue about and are more directly related to the health of the business.Edward: And measuring the growth of this thing is easy, right? So you can, How many people signed up and are paying $8 a month? What's your arr? How much revenue are you making on this new product? How many people are signing up per month? How many are churning out and canceling after one month? That feels like the upside, the revenue side is easy to measure. The downside of "Hey, because this is there, I'm Steven King and I'm gonna stop producing content on Twitter'" how does he know how much damage he's causing because of this?Peter: That's a great question, and of course we'll never know for sure from what people are saying. You have to run the experiment. You have to try it. Again, maybe with multiple tiers. I think Musk, I think to his credit, look, the fact that the rumor started at 20 and now he's saying eight. I think he's finding out what the market will bear. Both in terms of price and in terms of what features and functionality needs to offer.I think they're gonna find a pretty comfortable middle ground where serious producers will be compelled to stay with it, but will feel that it's worth their while.Edward: But what's, the metric? does he take number of tweets written by non-paying customers and track that on a day to day basis. Is he doing like an individual customer level model where he takes all his producers, everyone who's producing tweets and tracks them over time and. Use, almost like almost treats like a tweet, like a transaction to try to measure if someone's, if a transactor, a transactor, a producer is churning off rather than buying a product.Peter: I would love to see that. And if we think about that kind of behavior we see very commonly in, in different kinds of settings, like even for a lot of different non-profits. A museum will look to see how many people are going to the museum and how that relates to whether they renew their their membership. Companies are doing that kind of thing all the time. Again I've seen some of the insides at Twitter and they have not managed that well. They've had a lot of really ad hoc measures, some of which have been around spent, time spent on the timeline tweets post and so on. But they haven't come to agreement on it and partially cuz these measures they've looked at haven't been directly tied to revenue, which is engaging with.Edward: But it's interesting though, cause there's two parts of it. There's the producers and for them, whether they look at ads or not is almost not relevant. It's whether not they creating compelling enough content that's keeping other people engaged on Twitter? Because where the revenue's coming from is all those people who are just reading the tweets and seeing the ad spending to me it's being a daily active user and a monthly active user and time spent on site. That's the metric that's determining how well they can monetize is not?Peter: And, but I love the way a company like Spotify is doing this sort of thing. And now again, we can't call them necessarily a paragon of business success just in terms of raw profitability, but I think there's a lot of respect for what they do and how they do it in these terms, having the advertising based model, the subscription based model.And they know that when they're bringing a new artist on board they will look to see. Not only how often that music is listened to or downloaded, but the value of the customers who engage with it. And so they can actually start to put a price tag on an artist based on the value they're bringing to the platform. Of course, that's something that, that's negotiated, but they're doing it in a data driven way. No reason why Twitter can't be doing very similar kind of thing.Edward: Got it. So yeah, so they can put up like, Hey what, how much value is is Donald Trump bringing to our platform? How much value is Taylor Swift bringing to the platform in terms of driving other people to engage in that content and keep them on the site longer so that they can sell the ads?Peter: And staying with the Spotify or even Sirius XM model, there might be cases where it makes sense to pay someone, especially as other micro blogging platforms arise. And we hear a lot of talk about them, usually for political reasons. Sure. We might have bidding wars about about content creators. That would be a very healthy ecosystem, and at that point, they really have to deliver meaningful value to the creators and the consumers.Edward: It's interesting. Spotify is doing the reverse right now, and so everyone's getting paid to be like all the music, all the musicians, all the, every time a song is played, the musicians are paid, but they're allowing musicians to basically bid to have their songs played more often on playlists and so on. And effectively the musicians don't have to pay themselves, but they're basically bidding in lower. Lower royalties. "Hey I'll take a lower royalty in exchange for being played more often". And I think it's almost like Twitter's doing the reverse of that. If everyone's gonna need, everyone's gonna need to pay. But now, once I know the lifetime value, once I know that Taylor Swift is worth a lot, I can go and take that $8 that she's paying and I can discount that to her.Peter: Love it. I love it. Now, of course, Spotify has it much, much tougher. It's a much more competitive market and dealing with all those royalty issues dealing with the music industry. Oh the cost, the complexities, the limitations. Twitter has it easy. They really do, at least right now. And yet they still can't, punch their way out of a paper bag. I think if they really start to look at some of these other business models and practices and emulate the good ones, the ones that they can really capitalize effectively, I think the skies might be very blue for Twitter. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com
Hint: not with an InMail.Your prospecting plan requires more than just thoughtless outreach.You need creativity, courage, and a dash of zany. Stu Heinecke, the father of Contact Marketing, joins the show to discuss creative contact (outbound) campaigns. Join us for this B2B Power Hour workshop on:✅ How to identify the prospects that need you NOW✅ Working with high-level stakeholders✅ Bold, creative campaigns✅ A splash of Stu's deep archive of stories...and more!Join us to learn how to book a meeting with anyone!
How to research people effectively on LinkedIn and how to use what you find. Plus Finding people to tag in your posts Finding comment-worthy content LinkedIn conquer Germany Could the new focused inbox kill InMail? The story behind last weeks post of the week. A post of the week about branding
Did your ad account get banned? Don't worry... just buy a new one! Also: Meta joins the post-cookie party... how to get more InMail replies... the cameras in the sky that are watching your products... And the vote is in: Your brand's use of animated GIFs is cringe. ("Mesothelioma" mix by @thereiruinedit on TikTok)✅ VOTE HERE: How do you feel your company's Q4 will be, compared to last year's? BETTER or WORSE or THE SAME ✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed ✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form
From the Sarah Murphy's talk at the Supplier Summit! CEO of Mobile Bev ProsMindset CoachVisit Sarah on LinkedIn As a seasoned leader and leadership educator, Sarah has an extensive and prosperous tenure that involved climbing corporate ladders in several different verticals. Throughout these successful ventures, I found myself drawn to the notion that there is power in the knowledge I have acquired through my corporate trials and tribulations. Therefore, I decided to take the extensive business leadership experience that I worked tirelessly to achieve and teach future generations of leaders and entrepreneurs the processes of navigating through the entrepreneurial and corporate worlds with ease, grace, and preparedness. My primary goal is to challenge people to question the status quo so that they're constantly pushing the boundaries of “what is” towards the “what could be.” Successful businesses and business leaders of tomorrow are people-focused, service-oriented, and flexible. These are the tentpoles of my developmental programming. Additionally, I bring with me a senior track record as an unabashed, attentive, and results-oriented leader who prides herself on creating innovative, individualistic, and practical solutions that help people thrive. Having built comprehensive and successful leadership development programs at such international companies as Postmates and Bar Magnolia, I deeply understand the extensive and strategic planning needed to nurture team leaders into managerial candidates. Throughout this process, and many akin to this, I devised robust curriculums that emphasize team lead communication, decision making, and extensive coaching skills. While educating these professionals, I established a solid foundation in the six pillars of a successful and scalable business: marketing, sales, operations, client experience, profitability, and mindset. Furthermore, I helped driven and passionate business owners to hone in on their visions to find the apex where creativity, pragmaticism, and ingenuity meet. Through education and training courses, I hope that I can leave a permanent mark on my students, being the guiding force that helps foster individuality, a spirit of invention, and a confident sense of point of view through a marketplace. If you would like to connect or know more about my professional story, please send me an InMail message or email me at sarah@sarahmmurphy.com. ** WMR is the Ultimate Directory of Liquor, Beer, Wine and Spirits Suppliers. Find your Rep today for free at https://whosmyrep.net Who's My Rep on Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/whosmyrep Who's My Rep on Instagram: https://instagram.com/whosmyrep Supplier Summit: https://events.suppliersummit.com Jason on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jasonlittrell
Mat Sherman is a man on a mission! He helps startups obtain funding. In doing so, he is trying to disrupt the traditional business of Silicon Valley. Matt is an expert in angel investing and venture capital. Seedscout is a platform that helps modern professionals expand their network. Meet founders, investors, job seekers, service providers, & more through our online intro platform and IRL event network. Seedscout has thousands of founders, investors, job seekers, & service providers who are open to introduction requests from our Pro members. If you want to meet one of them, no need to send a cold email or an Inmail. Just request an intro via Seedscout!
Mat Sherman is a man on a mission! He helps startups obtain funding. In doing so, he is trying to disrupt the traditional business of Silicon Valley. This is part one of a two-part discussion between Matt and Kevin Black. Seedscout is a platform that helps modern professionals expand their network. Meet founders, investors, job seekers, service providers, & more through our online intro platform and IRL event network. Seedscout has thousands of founders, investors, job seekers, & service providers who are open to introduction requests from our Pro members. If you want to meet one of them, no need to send a cold email or an Inmail. Just request an intro via Seedscout!
Hint: not with an InMail.Your prospecting plan might use email and phone, but on LinkedIn it requires more than just a connect-and-pitch. You need a simple, effective process to warm-up the account quickly.And get that
Today Jeremy and Jack are doing a TEARDOWN episode! The duo dissects the good and bad from real email examples they've received. They give their expert input on how to take these emails to the next level. HERE'S WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODE: -2 SDR emails and 1 Inmail -Capitalization on the subject line -Email formatting (bold, italics, etc.) -Cutting down on fluff -Overcomplicating your emails -How to make your experience sound more believable -CTA mistakes -Are questions a good opening to your email -When it's okay to repeat emails -Viewing your subject line as a contract -What can make your emails sound fishy -Importance of being transparent and getting to the point -Bring value to your propositions -Send in your emails for a teardown episode! Want to boost your emailing skills? Be your own teardown master with our Cold Email Masterclass at https://course.quickmail.io/! Try it for 30 days risk-free! Have an email you want us to teardown? Send us your emails, cold emailing questions, and campaign examples at podcast@quickmail.io and it could be featured on the air! Happy Cold Emailing! Jeremy and Jack
Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Announcement about the left-hand navigation being reverted Offers Epsiode NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging, Message Ads, Sponsored InMail, Conversation Ads. These are the ad formats on LinkedIn that are most confusing, and also intriguing to advertisers. I'm about to demystify them on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. For years, I've been getting questions about the sponsored messaging ad formats on LinkedIn. And honestly, I've been waiting a long time to do this episode, I was waiting until I found a whole bunch of success with these ad formats. And honestly, I've been really disappointed. I was hoping to find a formula for what always works. But I've collected all of the opportunities for success that I've been able to find on this episode. And I'm excited to finally share them with you. First off in the news, LinkedIn has a little message across the top of every account that says we've temporarily changed the design of our navigation menu, learn more. You can click there to see the note in the Help section of LinkedIn, or just look in the show notes down below, I've linked to it there. And what they've explained is they've reverted the new left hand navigation experience that was released just in the last handful of weeks. And it's been temporarily reverted back to the old top navigation experience. I reached out to a contact at LinkedIn and I got the inside scoop. It turns out, they didn't revert it because of any bugginess or anything like that. It was actually the second order effects of it. They noticed that the new experience adversely affected advertiser behavior on the platform. I won't go any deeper into that. But just I expect that after they make some minor adjustments or improvements, we'll get it back, there wasn't a problem with the navigation experience itself. It's more about what us advertisers did after getting that navigation experience. Alright, with that, let's jump into the actual content. Let's hit it. So first off, you need to understand what the different ad formats on LinkedIn are. It's the whole class of ad formats that are pushed right to your messaging box. Rather than being seen somewhere else on LinkedIn. These are called Sponsored Messaging. And there are two different kinds of ad formats that fit underneath that umbrella, we have Message Ads, which used to be called Sponsored InMail. And then we have Conversation Ads, which are one of LinkedIn's newest ad formats. And it's that choose your own adventure kind of chat bot experience. And the way that they work is they show up directly inside of your message box when you're on LinkedIn. And the only way for you as an advertiser to pay is to pay per send. Now LinkedIn is only going to send these to people who are actively logged in. So thank goodness, you're not going to be paying for all of those inactive users who haven't opened their message box in a year or more. Now, I did get to use the message ads format back when it was Sponsored InMail back before it even came to Campaign Manager, it was when you used to have to work directly with a LinkedIn rep. And here's what it was like it was probably the worst investment I've ever made. It cost $3 per person you sent to. And so it landed in a bunch of inactive accounts. When I ran these years and years and years ago, it was, like I said, the worst investment that I ever mad and we promptly stopped as soon as we saw that there was just nothing good coming from these. But thank goodness back in November of 2016. It was released as an ad format that you could access within Campaign Manager. And as soon as they did that, they made it so it could only show up when someone was active, which is fantastic. They also lowered the price you could pay all the way down to I think I've seen as low as like 25 cents per person you send to. So those were the Message Ads. Then we got Conversation Ads back in March of 2020, when it was released on Campaign Manager as well. We were part of the beta. It's a really good ad format. But it suffers from a lot of the same issues that message ads do. And one of the things that I always talk about when I talk about this ad format is how these are the most expensive ads on LinkedIn. And a lot of people are shocked when they hear me say that because they think that it's one of LinkedIn's cheapest ad formats. So here's the logic around it. So an average cost per send of one of these ads might be somewhere if it's in North America between about 50 cents to $1 per send. So say for example that you sent these messages to 1000 people, that means that you'll be paying between $500 to $1,000 in total. And in this case, the average open rate is about 55%. So of those 1000 messages that you sent, you can expect about 550 opens. Now an average click through rate on these ads is around 3.2% And that's for message ads. Conversation Ads, it's significantly higher. But at 3.2%, that would result in about 17.6 clicks. So all of this calculates out if you do that division of 17.6 clicks with your $1,000 in spend, you come out to a whopping cost per click of between $28 and $57. It's pretty wild. That is per click, that is not per conversion. I will say though, don't let the possibility of the high costs dissuade you from using Sponsored Messaging because with the right offer, and it does have to be the right offer, that is the key here, you can drastically reduce those costs to the point where this ad type can even be more effective than sponsored content, or any of the others. For instance, we had a client who instead of getting the normal 55%, open rate, they were getting an 80% open rate, and instead of the 3.2% click through rate average, they were getting a click through rate of about 20%. And that means we were getting costs per click in between about $3 to $6. All just depending on how much you were paying per send. And of course, for sponsored content, most of the time we would kill to get costs that low. And that's why these ad formats are so special. If you have the right offer. If you don't know what I mean by offers, go back and listen to episode 10. We've linked to it below in the show notes as well. It's all about offers. But here's what you need to keep in mind for these message ad offers. It has to feel very much like a personal invitation is how I like to think of it. The reason why is when you send one of these ads, it's going to look like it came from a person. And it shows up as a message rather than just a banner ad, which feels a lot more invasive if it's spammy. But if it's not spammy, it feels a lot more personal and inviting. If you're gonna send one of these and just say like, click here to talk to our sales rep, or click here to sign up for our webinar. And these are to cold audiences, chances are these are going to be the most expensive clicks you've paid for on the network. It's not going to turn out well in your favor. If however, your offer is really good at either fluffing their ego with something like because of who you are in the industry, we want to offer you a sneak peek or early access to something that your peers are going to be jealous of. Or maybe it's an invite to an in person swanky event where you're going to get to rub shoulders, with important people in the industry just like you there's going to be hors d'oeuvres and drink served and all that, that works really, really well here as well. We've also found these to work quite well for hiring. You can essentially send someone a message that says, here's what we're looking for, you look pretty qualified, are you interested in applying, and we can get people to show interest that way. We've also found some recent success with offering something like a gift card in exchange for someone being willing to take a demo. So that's pretty cool, too. Hopefully, these types of ideas are getting your brain spinning. So you can be thinking about ways that you can utilize this. New offers you could come up with that feels special enough to be sent out through a Message Ad or a Conversation Ad. Some of the times that we've seen these ad formats work out really well. We of course had the one client I was telling you about the head 80% open rates and 20% click through rates. That was for an in person event that worked really well. We've worked with many of the largest hiring services on LinkedIn. And we also had a client who was offering a gift card through Conversation Ads that ended up converting really well. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the differences between Message Ads and Conversation Ads. 8:41 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaign and we would absolutely love to work with you. 9:19 Alright, let's jump into the differences then between these two ad formats that you get underneath the Sponsored Messaging umbrella. So first off, you have Message Ads, which is like getting an InMail message from a person and it'll say promoted or sponsored. It's a single message. It has both a headline and a body. But it doesn't work exactly like an InMail message would because the person can't actually send a reply back. The reply is all grayed out. It's basically like, click on one of these options that I'm giving you and if not, there's nothing else you can do and they just click on the next message. Conversation Ads, on the other hand, is very, very different. We talked about them being a choose your own adventure are more like a chatbot experience. They are quite similar, they show up in your InMail the same way, but they don't have a subject line. Instead, it's just the body copy opens immediately to multiple calls to action that you can thread together like a conversation. And then recipients can interact by selecting calls to action that you've put together. And then they receive an automated message back along with an additional call to action that they might want to select. The way you could think of this is like, let's say there's a big trade show going on in your industry, you can send out a Conversation Ad asking someone, are you going to be at this big trade show next week or next month? And if they say, yes, you could say great, come by our booth, we'll give you swag, and we'll treat you really special. Or if they say no, you can say well click here to get on our list for when we come back, we're going to be teaching a webinar all about everything we learned at this show this year, and about how the industry is changing and all that. So you can see how depending on someone's response, you can give them a different pathway that they might be interested in responding to. And we have found conversation ads to be about 30% more efficient than Message Ads. And I would chalk that up to basically a Message Ad, if you're not interested in the one thing that's being offered, you just shut it off, and you just move on to the next message. But a Conversation Ad, there are multiple chances to convert there. And the chances are a lot higher that you're going to find one or two that are actually interesting to this prospect. And so you'll end up with about 30% more conversions, which is great. That being said, they do take a lot more time to build. So keep that in mind, it's a lot harder to actually build those ads, but they do perform well. I mentioned at the beginning about how some people think that these are some of LinkedIn's cheapest ads. And the reason for that is definitely fixable. And I really wish LinkedIn would fix it. When you're inside of your Campaign Manager dashboard. And you're looking at one of these campaigns, the columns that you're used to looking at like average CTR and average CPC, these metrics are just going to be straight up wrong. And the reason why is campaign manager calls it a click when someone opens one of these ads. But I have a very different opinion on what a click actually is. In my mind, a click means that a prospect should be then presented with an opportunity to convert. But according to LinkedIn's definition of a click being an open, you can't convert right from there, you have to do one extra step. So here's what you want to keep in mind, you're looking at campaign manager, you see average click through rate and you think, Oh, this says 65% click through rate. That's amazing. Well, that actually is pretty good, but that's only your open rate. That means of all the people you send it to 63% clicked to open it. Now what we don't know, we don't know how many people click open, just to market is read so it's not standing out in their inbox as a message that needs to be read. So I don't necessarily think that an open is a high vote of confidence of whether something had a good headline or good initial like hook. You also look over and see average cost per click is 57 cents. Well, that is not what it is per click, that's your cost per open. So if under columns, if you move away from performance, which is probably defaulted to, and moved to Sponsored Messaging, some of the metrics in here are still wrong. If you scroll all the way over to the right, average CPC is still says the exact same thing as cost per open. But you will notice that there's a column there called sponsored messaging clicks. This is your actual clicks, when someone clicked on one of the calls to action that you put inside of your Sponsored Messaging Ad, you'll see your open rate was also called click through rate for before, but now this is the proper definition for it. And then you'll also see a column for click to open rate. That is your actual click through rate. That is the Sponsored Messaging clicks over the number of opens. So basically, if you're using this ad format, make sure that you are looking at it through the columns sponsored messaging, rather than just ad performance, because otherwise it'll throw you off. I've had so many people tell me that, oh, we're using these sponsored messaging ads, and we're getting like $1 cost per click, and they're way outperforming everything else, then we dive in and find out like as soon as we can see that their cost per conversion is significantly higher than any other ad format. And they realize, Oh man, I got tricked. My cost per click was actually $25 to $50 rather than $1. And we as advertisers should know this better. And I do think that LinkedIn should do a much better job of educating that and make it very, very clear for us. If you end up exporting this data. When you pull it out into Excel, you'll notice the column AO is called clicks Sponsored Messaging. And that's when generating a campaign level report. That's the one you'll want to use in all of your calculations for a click. Now, these are a very special kind of ad format, because they have incredible capabilities. The first one is that you can use what LinkedIn calls macros, or dynamic fields. That means inside of your message, you can insert dynamically, someone's first name, their last name, their company name, their industry, or their job title. So imagine you had a message like hi, first name, I see work at company name, we found other people with job title have found this really interesting, we thought you'd want to take a look. Something special to note is this is one of the ad formats that is eligible to be used in conjunction with LinkedIn lead gen forms, and we would highly recommend it. Because the cost on these are so high, you definitely want your conversion rates to be as high as possible while you're evaluating them. So you can make sure that it's it's going to be an ad format that works well for you, there isn't a way to preview these ads as you're writing them. So what you do is you can send a test message as you're crafting it. And that way, while the message is still in draft, it'll send directly to your LinkedIn account. And you can go look in your own messaging box to see exactly how it looks. I mentioned that it comes from an individual, if you work with your LinkedIn rep, they can turn on the ability for it to come from your company page instead. But I highly, highly want to discourage you from doing this. When it comes from a person, it generally gets a much higher open and conversion rate. When it comes from a company, it definitely feels like an ad. Something else special about these is that it will allow you to create a 300 by 250 pixel banner image that it says it's optional, but I would not call it optional. This is ad inventory that when someone is on desktop, and they open up your message, you get a free ad that accompanies your conversation ad. I think this is huge. Don't bypass this just because you think oh, I don't have the creative, it's worth it, go into Canva, create a quick 300 by 250 pixel image and be done. Imagine what this would look like if you sent someone a personal message. And then an ad for your top competitor happened to show up on the page at the same time, it's not a good look, you will notice that there are some limitations along with these ad formats. The most noticeable one is that there is a tight frequency cap. And this frequency cap is a person on LinkedIn can only receive one of these ads every 30 days. It used to be every 60 days, then they lowered it down to 45. Now it's 30. I wouldn't be surprised to see LinkedIn open this up to being once every 15 days in the future. But for right now, it's still one every 30. And that's not one from you every 30 days, that's one of these period. So no one else can send someone one of these, you've essentially monopolized their inbox for the whole month, which is kind of a cool feature. LinkedIn says that they do this frequency cap because they really care about their member experience. And they feel like if they sent any more than this, they would get annoying. But that seems really silly to me. Considering that people on LinkedIn who are popular, who are in high positions, they end up getting Sales Navigator InMails, like three, four or five a day, some of you may be getting considerably more than that. So one of these every 30, I don't think people can even tell that which ones are sponsored, versus which ones are sent by someone with Sales Navigator just trying to spam their inbox. A big downside here is that when someone sends you a Sales Navigator InMail, it actually sends a copy of that InMail to your email as a notification so that you can click to open it right there. But when you send one of these as a sponsored message, LinkedIn is not going to send an email to notify them, it'll just appear in their box when they're logged in. If you are a large advertiser, these are very hard to budget for because that inventory is unpredictable. You might run for three or four days with a large budget and say, Oh, this doesn't make sense at all, we're not spending anything that we want to. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of your inventory opens up from people who haven't received one of these in 30 days. Now they're open. And then in one day you spend 17 grand, that actually happened to us. So make sure when you use these, you're probably going to want to use them for a month or more just to make sure that you're taking advantage of all of your audience who may have already received one of these before and they're going to open up sometime during your campaign where you can send them. As you go to evaluate these, realize that there's going to be a lag in performance because oftentimes people will receive the messages and end up opening or clicking on them. days or even weeks after the initial send. So you don't want to run this for two days, look at the performance and say, Oh, this obviously isn't gonna work for us, because it still could. Give it some days for those sends to mature into opens and clicks. Unfortunately, these don't have any sort of retargeting that you can do, except for just lead gen form opens, I really wish we had the ability to exclude someone who had received multiple of your sponsored message ads without opening them or without clicking. I hope we get this kind of functionality in the future. We mentioned that you can't really respond to these, but if you are sending these in mass, there are going to be people who want to respond to you and want to get in touch and have a real conversation. So tell the person whoever this is coming from their account, that they might expect additional people sending connection requests, sending InMails, and maybe otherwise trying to get in touch. And here are the specs for these. So first off, we have Message Ads, where the name of your ad, because you can of course name most ads on LinkedIn, you get 255 characters there. You get to select from any sender that you've gotten permission to send from their account. Your subject line gets 60 characters, but it's truncated on mobile so I would suggest going shorter than that, if you can. The text section will let you have up to 1500 characters here. But again, if it's a giant wall of text that's daunting to read, chances are people are going to just move on to the next message. So I would recommend keeping these really shortened to the point. You can put links, you can put a main call to action that's up to 20 characters. You can put hyperlinks inside of your actual text, and you can't insert anything like video or other types of media. I would absolutely love it if we could put like animated GIFs and embedded audio into these, hopefully in the future. Then we have Conversation Ads, and again, these have names that are up to 255 characters, the same options with adding senders and having that 350 by 250 pixel banner image. Your intro message is shorter, it can only be up to 500 characters, then it will show your calls to action and each one of those can be up to 25 characters. You can have up to five buttons per message. So what I want you to take away from this episode is I want you to understand that these are ad formats where if you have a special, a VIP, a personal invitation kind of offer, then these are the right ad formats for you. If you don't, they're probably going to be too expensive so I would still recommend test out your offers on Sponsored Content first, maybe even text ads and dynamic ads, and come and test into Sponsored Messaging when you have an offer that you feel like could work really well. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around 23:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Okay, here are the episode resources. First of all, if you go down into the show notes, you'll see a link to the announcement about the left hand navigation being reverted. So you can go and read LinkedIn's whole answer in their help section. Also, check out our episode on offers, episode 10 if you haven't already. It's one of our tried and true episodes, it's definitely one you're going to want in your toolbox. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, definitely point them towards the link that we have down below for the course on LinkedIn Ads. This is one that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's about an hour and a half long and it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost that you'll have for a LinkedIn training. Look down at whatever podcast player you're using and hit subscribe if you haven't already. Please do rate the podcast on whatever player you're using. Please, please, please, and I mean you, please go and review the podcast if you like what you're hearing. People reach out to me all the time saying that they love the show, but I'm not saying the reviews come in and that will help more than you know. So please, please, please, I'm begging, leave a review. With any comments suggestions, questions for us about the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.
Feeling like your email or InMail campaigns are going almost nowhere? You're not alone. Key topics:✔️ Most sales & marketing jobs (staffing & recruiting definitely included) will attract people who want to pose and posture: "Oh, my business is great! Every sales email I send out gets a response." Bull
Book Your Free Revenue First Podcast Strategy here!Get Your Free Dial Session here!Want Your Reps Hitting Quota in 2022? Get Your Wingman Free Trial HERE!HIGHLIGHTSFrom skateboarding to marketingKeeping the creative juices flowingRyan's unique strategy in prospectingUtilizing call out videos and surprising resultsTips for creating prospecting videos with low resourcesThe formula to prospecting videosQUOTESRyan: “A lot of the times I'd come up with a good idea. I'd repeat the same idea, I would just change the inputs.”Ryan: “Make a whole campaign around it, grab a list of top 10 accounts to try to break into, come up with one really good idea and go repeat it 10 times and personalize it a little bit more about the person than your company you're offering and work from there.”Ryan: “Let's face it, you can write the greatest email in the world, and you're only gonna get a certain open rate.”Ryan: “You have to do more than one step. The whole reason you're doing this is to make your cold email, your social follow up, your InMail and your cold calling, all that stuff more interesting. If you do the first thing, something really cool. All the other parts just kind of fall into place.”Ryan: “If you can find something that you have in common with the prospect, you'll have a much higher conversion rate in response than if you just randomly pick something that's about where they work and their role.”Learn more about Ryan in the link below: LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/ryanmoharaWebsite - https://leadiq.com/Twitter - ryoharaLearn more about Collin in the link below: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/collin-saleshustle/Also, you can join our community by checking out @salescast.community. If you're a sales professional looking to take your career to greater heights, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a call with Collin and Chris.
Tim Fetzer in 2022 staffed a talent within 10 days from 1st call to signed contract. Speed, attitude, persistency & relationships are crucial in sales recruiting - like in sales. Actually, recruiting is “doing sales twice a day” - 1x to the candidate & 1x to the company. Here are 3 key insights I learnt from Tim having him on our Europe's B2B SaaS Sales podcast. 1️⃣ Hire for attitude & speed. You need people who are willing to go the extra mile and make team successful. Stock options & equity are becoming more valued by sales reps, “everyone is asking for it”. If the attitude is there, strive to hire “start to finish” within 1-3 weeks. The hiring managers need to “play along” with this, trust the process and make time. 2️⃣ It's a marathon at a sprint pace right now. Lots of companies are looking for hunters with 3-5 years of experience in SaaS. Candidates often get multiple offers every week with double-digit InMail per week. Companies are often impatient but unaware of the degree of the war for talent. 3️⃣ Hire the right team leads (like @Ben Bauer) Sales reps join - and stay with - team leads who help them get to the next level. This also enables more affordable hiring to hire young hungry talent and develop them. #podcast #startupsales #b2bsaassales #startup #salesplaybook #salesrecruiting
Mitch Sullivan; Trainer/Coach, Copy Writing for Recruiters | Riderflex - Recruiting & Sourcing Mitch Sullivan is a successful recruiter with over 30 years of experience. Mitch utilizes the power of great copywriting to produce his job ads. These powerful and well written ads drive hundreds of potential candidates to the jobs that he's recruiting for. Mitch is a trainer and coach for people looking to also be successful as a recruiter. In 2016 Mitch and Jackie Barrie joined forces to offer classes and programs of study for recruiters to learn the art of job ad copywriting. Copywriting For Recruiters is where top recruiters turn to learn how to make their copywriting more appealing to draw in the best talent. At Copywriting for Recruiters, you will learn how to write effective job ads. Job ads that stand out because they're more interesting to read. And job ads that are more likely to get noticed by the right people – even those passive and hard-to-find candidates. How do you make your job postings, emails and InMail stand out so that your target candidate audience wants to read them? By knowing how to craft better job advertising that will help you reach more passive candidates, attract the right responses and filter-out more of the time-wasters. https://www.copywritingforrecruiters.com/ Recruiter, Mitch Sullivan and Copywriter, Jackie Barrie will show you. The training has been road-tested since 2015, and includes: • Basic principles of marketing and advertising. • Psychology that underpins good copywriting. • Four-step formula for effective job ads. You'll be able to implement your new skills immediately and use them forever. Watch the Full Interview: https://youtu.be/I98Bc4b4_k8 On the Riderflex podcast, CEO Steve Urban interviews some of the most successful entrepreneurs, CEO's, and business leaders. Hear them tell the "REAL" stories of what it's like to start and lead businesses. Riderflex is a national, Colorado based, premier headhunter, RPO and employment agency; recruiting and searching the top talent for staffing your teams. Top Executive Recruiting Firm - https://riderflex.com/ Podcast sponsor: Marketing 360 is the #1 platform for small business and it's everything you need to grow your business. marketing360.com/riderflex #MitchSullivan #CopyWritingForRecruiters #Recruiting #podcast #interview #entrepreneur #ColoradoRecruitingFirm #TopExecutiveRecruitingFirm #staffingagency #employmentagency #headhunter #recruitingfirm #staffing #staffingfirm #Denver #Colorado #National #Riderflex --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/riderflex/support
Businesses and public sector organisations around the UK are being warned to be extra vigilant when it comes to cyber security as the threat of an online attack sparked by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensifies. The National Cyber Security Centre issued guidance, saying there was a heightened risk of malicious cyber incidents overseas which could have an impact on UK institutions, services and systems. It did stress there was no knowledge of any current specific threats to UK organisations. Visit NCSC on Linkedin and Twitter for more information. Fascinating insight from a socialmediatoday.com survey which asked Linkedin users the most annoying thing about the platform. With 33% of the vote, the top answer ‘unwanted messages'. Premium LinkedIn users are able to send ‘InMail' to others who they don't know and aren't connected to. No surprise, it caused annoyance - it's the modern equivalent of a telesales phone call. But it's interesting to see just how many people it annoys and I think it's something Linkedin needs to take a look at, but..removing that paid for feature would hit Linkedin in the pocket. Finally, a handy product whether you live stream, play games or just multi task with your computer - the Elgato stream deck lets you set up hotkeys and shortcuts, letting you do several tasks at the touch of a button.
Ryan sits down and talks with Adam Weitzman who does Commercial Sales at DocuSign. Adam was also a long time rep at LinkedIn and Salesforce. In this episode, we chat about InMail, social selling, cold calling into Canada, and some of the best things Adam's learned working at several large tech companies.
Welcome back to the Accelerate The Pace podcast. I'm so glad you tuned in today. I don't have a guest lined up for today because I wanted to address a critical issue most professionals have when it comes to their online presence. We have this powerful platform that many fail to properly utilize. I'm talking about LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest business-oriented networking website geared specifically towards professionals. A LinkedIn presence allows you to create an online professional brand which can help open doors to new opportunities by connecting to targeted individuals and companies. We can showcase our expertise and knowledge, but many people still underestimate the importance of LinkedIn. The platform is viewed solely as a job search or product-pushing platform when instead it should be viewed and utilized much more widely. LinkedIn helps people in the job search or selling products but it's the way we go about it that's completely wrong. Leveraging the power of LinkedIn can give you greater insights into who to connect with, what's important to them, their challenges, and how you can provide solutions for them. All these benefits go hand-in-hand with your job search, connecting with potential buyers, or crafting key messaging. But in the end, we should view LinkedIn as a relationship-building tool. We all receive those pushy InMail messages that state, “We can deliver 10x ROI for your business. Here's a link to my calendar.” These messages are sent through automated services and the sender hasn't even looked up your profile, business, or even knows anything about you. Imagine walking into a networking event and immediately saying to the first person you met, “Hey! I've got this great product. You're an idiot if you don't buy.” That's essentially what's going on in the LinkedIn world. The biggest challenge sales reps and executives have with their LinkedIn presence is posting valuable content regularly. Coming up with content ideas can be a challenge, but it's critically important to showcase you as a thought-leader and keep you top of mind for your audience. Some content has become so awful, a twitter user by the name of The Best of LinkedIn @bestoflinkedin has created an account with a profile describing himself as “dedicated to highlighting the heroes and influencers brave enough to share their stories in an effort to inspire others.” Sounds like an account that will inspire your own LinkedIn presence, right? Not quite. It's actually a parody account that showcases the worst of LinkedIn posts. There are other parody accounts out there, but I only follow this one because they take the steps of hiding the poster's identity. I'm not into online shaming. Here are some of the best:So let me get this straight. A global pandemic has ravaged our economy, put an overwhelming burden on the healthcare system, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in our country, and this guy is trying to say this is a good thing? Just an absolutely horrible, horrible post. Quoted tweet: “Hot take coming through!” Ok, this guy is eliminating a possibly qualified candidate because he has a long beard? Scott's line of thinking is out of touch with the reality of today's world. The best of linkedin replied with: “Scott, a boomer who hasn't updated his picture in 25 years won't hire you if you have a beard.” While I give Scott credit for having a professional photo, by the looks of it, I have to agree with The Best of LinkedIn. It looks like a glamour shot photo that was scanned in. I would love to have read the comments in his post. I'm not sure what Garland does for living but comparing a leadership lesson to the death of an unborn child is terrible. I truly hope he deleted this post as soon as he realized how bad he missed the mark. Quoted tweet: “Everybody gets hangry sometimes” #madeupkidmonday How many times can Denise say adult in one post? Adulting is hard, but this post is not appropriate for LinkedIn. Her post provided absolutely zero value and wasn't even slightly entertaining. And then to hashtag the post with #loanofficer and #alwaysbeclosing? How do these hashtags remotely relate to a nonsensical post? Quoted tweet: “This feels very Live, Laugh, Love” Okay, so this guy is attempting to set up some kind of big reveal in hoping that you sit on the edge of your seat waiting for his next post. Brandon is sitting across a boardroom table from what appears to be two younger subordinates. And he has earbuds in, with his book in plain sight easily readable by the camera angle. Do y'all remember before smartphones when we had those flip phones and you would see people clipping them their belt? They looked completely ridiculous. Earbuds are today's version of the flip phone clipped to the belt. I thought The Best of LinkedIn came in with a hilarious tweet response: “Airpods in a meeting (check), Self publishing book visible (check), Biggest douchebag on LinkedIn (check). These are some hilarious examples of what not to post on LinkedIn. Listen, we never hit the mark everytime, but some posts that sound good in your head just need to be thought out a little bit more before you hit that post button. Before we dive into what you should post, we must address some general rules of what should and should not be posted on LinkedIn. You should post:· Ideas that connect with your target audience, wither it's related to work, life, or anything that provides value· Special occasions that allow your audience to celebrate a success, such as a milestone or transition in career· Advice that exemplifies your knowledge in your industry· Post that show your human side or provide insight into what guides your actions· Lessons learned that are informative to your audienceThis is a wide-range of topics that you can have a lot of fun with. What you should avoid:· Spam – stop spamming your potential clients. It is a major turnoff.· Politics – unless you have a narrowly defined audience that is of a certain pollical mindset, stay away from posting anything about politics. Also, be careful not to post anything that may turn political in the comments section. · Shameless self-promotion – you should be posting valuable content that engages your audience. It's too easy to get caught up into shouting “look at how great I am”. · Hard-selling approach; Only posting with a call-to-action to buy What should we be posting?Here are some ideas of what you should post.1. Advice and commentary that showcases your knowledge in your industry2. Posts that show your human side, but be careful not to get too personal. You want you audience to know you are human just like them. A good post would provide insight into how you or your business operates and what guides your decisions.3. Ideas that your audience can use to help them in THEIR business.4. Highlights of lessons learned that are informative. These posts should be useful for your audience when they are faced with similar decisions.5. Repurpose your company's content and provide your unique perspective.6. Trends and statistics. Everyone wants to know what to expect before it happens, so sharing what you think and why will show your knowledge and confidence.7. Answers to common client questions. Chances are, your potential clients have had the same questions as your current clients. Why not provide answers up front?8. Explain a misconception in your industry. It may be informative to anyone in your audience who might not have thought about it.9. Articles and industry news. 10. Polls. When done correctly, you can ask your audience questions that might be on the top of minds of others. Be sure to socialize the results and provide your own thoughts. If you want a great example of a thought-leader, look no further than Stephanie Stuckey. Stephanie si the CEO, and granddaughter of the founder, of Stuckey's Corporation. If you're from the south like me and you've been around long enough, roadtrips were so much more fun when you got a chance to stop at a roadside Stuckey's off the interstate. Stephanie recently acquired her family business and is working to bring the brand back to life. Her posts are entertaining and inspiring. She is completely transparent about her journey and how she is rolling up her sleeves to build the Stuckey's corporation. There are a few things that stand out when I read Stephanie's posts.1. Most of her posts include photos. These photos are generally of her in front of the Stuckey's logo, their product, or the process of creating the product. Including herself in the photo humanizes the brand and makes it more relatable.Some of her photos include rundown Stuckey buildings. Just the sight of those old, unique buildings take some of us back to when we used to stop at those roadside retail stores.2. Stephanie is an outstanding storyteller. She tells her story of why she is where she is or how she got to this place. Her storytelling ability makes it seem like you are a part of the journey.3. Her posts are real, authentic, and imperfect. Some videos she posts are probably recorded with an iphone in a warehouse showcasing the products. Sometimes her videos don't go as planned, but that makes them even more relatable.4. Stephanie educates her audience on moments in history and ties it back to the Stuckey's brand. The history in her story makes you even more compelled to follow and crave more. Who knows where the Stuckey's brand will be in 10 years or so, but her efforts on LinkedIn have people taking notice. As of today, she has over 64k followers. That's a large audience to speak to. I encourage each of you to follow her on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll get some inspiration for your next post. We each have a unique story to tell. I encourage you to create meaningful engagements online and use the LinkedIn platform the way it was intended. That's it for today. Thank you for turning in and I hope you join us next time on the Accelerate The Pace podcast.
In this week’s episode If you find content writing for your website a painful and slow process, you’re not alone. This week Paul has a great 5 step process for easily creating original content Also on the show this week, should you use LinkedIn’s InMail or Messages to contact prospects? Plus there’s a great book suggestion all about how your people can drive your profits and a special guest explains why you need an ‘Entrepreneurial Operating System’ Show notes Out every Tuesday on your favourite podcast platform Presented by Paul Green, an MSP marketing expert In talking about what kind of content to write, Paul mentioned the brilliant book They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan Register for a free copy of Paul’s book Paul’s special guest was Rebecca Finken from Traction 4 Success talking about Gino Wickman‘s ‘entrepreneurial operating system’ and why you need one (also check out his book Traction) Here's a link to the book Paul mentioned ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘ by Michael Gerber Thank you to Stephen King from GrowthForce for recommending the book Take Care of Your People by Paul Sarvadi On May 18th Paul will be joined by Bob Layton from Digital Defense talking about how to demonstrate value with cyber security protection Please send any questions, ideally in audio-form (or any other feedback) to hello@paulgreensmspmarketing.com Episode transcription Voiceover: Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Greens MSP Marketing Podcast. Paul Green: Hi. Hello, and welcome to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week. Rebecca Finken: A lot of entrepreneurs, they run their businesses on egos and subjective emotions, which doesn’t always give you the real true picture. Paul Green: We’ve also got a great book suggestion later on about how looking after your people better can actually help your bottom line. I’ve also got an opportunity for you to get a free copy o
EP 2062 Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter answers a question that is quite surprising to him. Support for today's show comes from Skillshare. Skillshare provides a buffet of choices, both professional and personal, for you to learn from. Support also comes from TopResume. They do a great job of writing resumes at a fair price. ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 2000 episodes. Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us Quick question? Get it answered with a 3-5 minute video at https://thebiggamehunter.us/videoanswer. Want to do it live? https://thebiggamehunter.us/live Learn to interview like a pro. "The Ultimate Job Interview Framework" www.TheBigGameHunter.us/interviews Kindle and print versions are available on Amazon. Classes On Skillshare https://thebiggamehunter.us/Skillshare Become a freelancer or hire one on fiverr.com https://thebiggamehunter.us/fiverr. I use it and I may wind up hiring you! Join Career Angles on Facebook and receive support, ideas, and advice in your current career and job. Connect with me on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/thebiggamehunter Mention you listen to the podcast or watch my YouTube channel. Job Search Going Nowhere? "Diagnosing Your Job Search Problems" for Kindle on Amazon and receive free Kindle versions of "No BS Resume Advice" and "Interview Preparation." If you are starting your search, order, “Get Ready for the Job Jungle” on Amazon Watch my videos on YouTube at JobSearchTV.com, the Job Search TV app for Roku, fireTV or a firestick or Bingenetworks.tv for Apple TV, and 90+ smart tv's. Subscribe And Give This Video A Thumbs Up If You Found It Helpful. Thinking of making a career change and need some ideas that fit you. CareerFitter offers a free test and if you want more you can upgrade for the paid version.https://thebiggamehunter.us/Career --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nobsjobsearchadviceradio/support
Guest: Oliver Jay - Head of Global Sales & Partnerships @Asana (Board Director @Grab; Formerly @Dropbox, @NEA, @HBS) Guest Background: Oliver Jay is the Head of Global Sales & Partnerships at Asana. Prior to Asana, he scaled the Dropbox sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Previously, Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) where he invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, cleantech and enterprise SaaS companies. Oliver earned his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School. Guest Links: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - Top Talent: 4 Hiring Criteria & Step x Step Recruiting Process - The International Expansion Playbook - Upstream: Product-Market Fit to Freemium to Enterprise - Building Sales Engines - Self Serve, Online Sales, Enterprise, Partnerships & Channel - 3 Criteria for Picking Horses (the Right Hypergrowth Companies) - The Role of Unit Economics for Sales & Marketing Leaders Full Interview Transcript: Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Oliver Jay on the show. OJ is they call him. OJ is the Head of Global Sales at Asana, a $1.5 billion valuation company, a Unicorn with $213 million capital raised. Prior to joining Asana, he scaled the Dropbox Sales team from 20 to 100 people across multiple geographies. Dropbox IPO in 2018 $9.6 billion valuation. Previously Oliver worked at Morgan Stanley and New Enterprise Associates, NEA. We invested and worked alongside entrepreneurs in consumer internet, clean tech and enterprise SaaS companies. OJ is also on the Board of Directors for Grab, who has a $14 billion valuation and $9.1 billion capital raised. OJ earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Harvard Business School. Here we go. Naber: Oliver Jay, awesome to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Oliver Jay (OJ): I'm so glad to be here, Brandon. Naber: Excellent. Thank you. It's July 4th. I'm sure you don't have anything better to do, so I'm really glad that you're spending it with me this morning. and I really appreciate your time. So we've got a lot to talk about. We're lucky enough to know each other personally and professionally, so I get to talk about some of my favorite things and hear about your story personally, and we'll hop into professional as well, hop through some of your career journey and ultimately, spend the bulk of our time in your professional journey, talking about a lot of the strengths, experiences, and ultimately superpowers that you've built up over time, that you've been able to study about, but also execute on that at several different, really, really high growth businesses. So let's start with on the personal side, little bit about you growing up, a little bit about what you were like as a kid. I mean, Hong Kong, Concord, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Sydney, San Francisco 2.0, been all over the planet. And I'd love to walk through you as a kiddo and talk about some of your interests, some of the things you're interested in, and then your journey through school. And then we can get into some professional stuff. Maybe in five to seven minutes, et's talk through what was OJ as a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ): Awesome. Yeah. Well, so I grew up in Hong Kong. My parents are still there. And, I think even as a child I was always, I was the Lego kid, I was the builder. I was a total nerd throughout. And I excelled in math and science. Not a surprise. And it got to a point where my parents were , okay, math is only going to get you so much here. So they then sent me to boarding school in New Hampshire. Naber: And that was St Paul's? Oliver Jay (OJ): And that would be St Paul's. So I went there. That was my entry to the US was a ninth grade. Naber: Nice. Excellent. So, what were some of the interests you had or the hobbies you had when you were a kid? Oliver Jay (OJ): My main thing was tennis. Tennis was my major hobby growing up. And I think a lot of who I am came from just that sport, because that sport, just like any sport, requires you to be excellent. You just have to be, continue to grind away. A lot of, how I think actually came from that sport and competing, learning how to lose graciously, learning how to stay calm when there's, when it's things are looking rough. When you're down a set, what do you do? I'm thinking about how do you change your tactics in real time? That all comes from tennis. Naber: Absolutely. Especially in an individual sport. We have to be so iterative. Where you do things a thousand times in practice, and it just becomes a transaction when you're in the actual match. That makes a lot of sense. So when you moved to St Paul's, and you were in Concord, New Hampshire, out of your comfort zone, tell us about that transition. And then let's talk about some of the things that you were interested in when you were in New Hampshire and high school. Oliver Jay (OJ): Boy, so the interesting thing was Saint Paul's is one of the top high schools in the US, and that's pretty much all my parents knew. And my parents said, you're very strong in math and science, but your English sucks, and it's just really bad. And they're like, you need to supercharge that. And so they looked at the list, I think it was a US News and World Report list. And they had a couple rankings and some names that people have heard of, Exeter, St Paul's, whatever. And then so I applied and got in. And I mean St Paul's is a real school, in that it's academics is intense. And it's in the middle of nowhere. I mean, you're literally in the woods. I grew up in Hong Kong, I grew up in the heart of the jungle, a concrete jungle, and then I'm literally moved into a jungle. The school had, I think 200 acres. And I mean, it was nuts. But I learned to adapt. I learned about the American way. Yeah, it was tough, but it was certainly, also the best four years of my academic career. Naber: Nice. Very cool. And did you play tennis when you were there? Or what were some of the activities that you were doing? Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah, yeah. I was on the tennis team, I was captain of the tennis team there. We were decent, we were decent. I did that, and then I was just lots of part of lots of clubs. But honestly, high school was tough for me. I didn't have that much spare time. Obviously, it should be clear, I have tiger parents, right? Obvious. So I did play a violin as well, but I was terrible at it. But I did the orchestra thing, but I was, I was so bad, so bad. But I survived, and I was okay. But I mean, I just, I worked so hard because my English level was far, far, far, behind my peers at school. Naber: That must have been so challenging. Learning all that curriculum at such a high level, while you're learning how to master the English language yourself. That is immensely complex. Oliver Jay (OJ): It was crazy. It was crazy. But, it changed my life. Because when I went to college, I studied philosophy, politics and economics. I went to Penn, right? So I didn't go to Wharton and just do a bunch of math and talking about strategy. I mean it's funny, I'm in business now. It's so easy compared to a career, or studying old philosophy texts, and debating, and writing papers or why you disagree with Socrates. I mean that's...But if I didn't go to St Paul's, and then of gotten out of my comfort zone, I wouldn't have done that. Naber: That's cool. That's actually a really good way of looking at it. The most challenging class I think I've ever had in Uni was my logic class, my philosophy class - deductive reasoning, and logic, and going through all those different frameworks, and squaring everyone from old philosophers, and folks that...it's just almost, it feels it's impossible with their life experiences to contend and debate with. But that's, that's really interesting. You moved to U Penn. Why did you decide to choose U Penn? Oliver Jay (OJ): Actually it was specifically because I really liked this program. So PPE, philosophy, politics and economics, is the most popular major in Oxford, in the UK. And Penn was one of two schools that adopted this program. It sounds fancy. Sometimes when I tell people that, it sounds I tri-majored. It's not true. It's more than one, but, it's this integrated curriculum of three disciplines that I think are really, really tied together. So that's why I went to Penn, for that program specifically. Naber: Got It. So I won't tell anyone you didn't tri-major, but it sounds really, really stimulating. So you were at U Penn, What were some of the things you're interested in at U Penn? Before we get into your first job. Oliver Jay (OJ): Like I said, Saint Paul's really opened my eyes to the world of humanities, and that's why I really loved that. But my interest had always been in business. You grow up in Hong Kong, you're going to be in business or you're a doctor, right? Or maybe a lawyer. It's just what you do, and it's in my blood. And so even when I was in high school, I was reading Peter Lynch books on how to invest. And so I've always been interested in business, but I took a couple of business classes and I was like, especially the management ones, and I was like, this is ridiculous. I'm not gonna pay this tuition to learn how to work as a team. Not to dismiss it, but I'm like, I don't think I'm going to have a chance again to, to read about Immanuel Kant, and how he thinks about the world. So in college, what I did was I spent most of my time academically on humanities, and then extracurricular was where I got scratch my itch on business. And my biggest thing there is I started the Wharton China Business Society. And back then, it was 2000. China had just gotten into the World Trade Organization, this was before China is the China we know it as today. But you knew it was going to be big. And it's cool, that society is still running now. I'm still getting their emails. Well they keep asking me to for donations. Naber: That's how you know you made it. All right, cool. So you're you go through UPenn, you tri-major, obviously we talked about that. And you're interested also in studying business. I know you've always been interested in studying companies. I don't know if that's at the cost of studying people, but I know you've always been interested in studying companies. Is that when that started? Or did you get more practical with investing at Morgan Stanley, at NEA, at Harvard, before you started studying companies a lot? Oliver Jay (OJ): I think the turning point was Morgan Stanley. I mean it was probably that summer internship. I just find it really fascinating. So when I got to Morgan Stanley, and I picked Morgan Stanley because I always liked tech as well. So I've always been a geeky, nerdy guy. And so at Morgan Stanley, I joined the tech team. And I ended up joining team that covered hardware. So companies Cisco, Juniper, and all the companies that died, Nokia, Motorola, they don't exist anymore, Nortel. But I just found it so fascinating to think about how a lot of these companies basically sell commodity hardware. A Cisco router is not that much better than Juniper router, or vice versa back then, at that point. Naber: That's like a nightmare for software, I mean you're selling on features and pricing. Oliver Jay (OJ): Exactly, exactly. And, but you were able to see very, very different trajectories. A lot of these companies no longer exist. A lot of them are still strong today. And that's just because of a different strategy that companies took. And I had the opportunity to go really deep. So that's why I joined equity research as opposed to a lot of my colleagues that joined investment banking to work on IPO's and deals. Because, it's probably my humanities background in education that I had led me to want to dig in deep, as opposed to more of a transactional finance job. And that's why I ended up in equity research. And through that experience I've really got to learn how to dig into companies. Naber: Yeah. Very cool. That's a great transition. So while you're at Morgan Stanley...What's the top thing you learned from Morgan Stanley? The top learning you had, before you moved into NEA. And then we'll hop into NEA after that. Oliver Jay (OJ): Ooh, top thing from Morgan Stanley. I actually, I have two things in my mind. So can I give you two? Naber: Give me 10 if you want to, I've got time. Naber: Yeah. Yeah. So the first, is I think of all places, I was extremely fortunate. And I had two great Managers at Morgan Stanley. They were my first bosses. And they say your first Manager really impacts you and your career, more than any other, right? I was just so fortunate because normally you don't get that on Wall Street. Naber: Yeah. Statistics aren't on your side. Oliver Jay (OJ): And I got placed with Scott Coleman and John Marchetti, and they were up and comers. And they rose through the ranks, and so they know what it took to move up. And they just had a very empowering mentality from the beginning. So they just pushed me, and I always asked for more. But every time, they just really gave me great feedback, pushed me, I learned so much. And they empowered me so much that by the second year I was they put me on stage at the Morgan Stanley tech conference, interviewing tech CEOs. And I was like 2 years out of school. And I think that was a very formative experience because I got to benefit from that, and I know what that did for me, and my career, and my confidence. And we'll talk more later about building teams and managing teams, but I've taken a lot of that philosophy from them. I was so lucky. I mean, that would be the number one thing. I will give you that, that was my number one thing I got from Morgan Stanley. Naber: Nice. That's great. I mean, you're going to talk us through NEA. I mean you've worked for incredible companies, and you're on team building. Let's talk about that. Hiring great teams. One of the things that I know is your superpower from hearing from other people, from talking to you personally, talking to you professionally. But the result speak for themselves. You've hired incredible individuals that I know, because I used to work with them, or I know people that used to work with them, are just the best at what they do. And you consistently do it time, over time, over time. What's I'd love to hear is one, what's that hiring philosophy that you took away from those guys, as well as any additional things you've applied today? And then we can talk a little bit about your actual process. Because clearly there's something you're doing in execution that is better than most, if not better than almost all. So what is your philosophy around hiring that you took away from those guys as well as how you think about it? And then we'll talk through the process like, candidate profiling strategy, how do you attract and recruit, how do you close? So we'll talk about those things as well. So, what's on your mind? Naber: I love building teams. I mean, it starts there...let me start with why I care about it. And I think for me, that's literally why I think...That's where I find meaning in my life. Bringing in high potential talent and seeing it grow, and creating opportunities. And I've always thought of myself, on my deathbed if I'm seen as the Y-Combinator of talent, I'll be really, really happy. And so because of that, I think that it impacts what I look for, because I really look for people who I believe we can go on a journey together, and they can learn from me and I can learn from them, and we're going to achieve great things together. That's the high level mentality that I have. I really don't look at...no matter how senior or whether someone's a fresh-out-of-school graduate. I think I can learn something. If I can't learn something from you, then I don't think you're a good fit. But that's how I see it. And so it's interesting, at Asana, we recently distilled down what are our Sales attributes, the hiring profile, not profile, but what are the attributes or values, depending on how you define it, that we look for. And I was very, very involved you can imagine, because in many ways I think I codified the things that I really value. So there are four pieces that I really care about in every single person that I hired. No matter, again, fresh out of school or you're going to run EMEA. The first is someone who really "pursues excellence". What I mean by that is, I want to see evidence that someone knows what excellence means. Because in high growth companies, you're growing 100%, 200% early on, 300% in the super early days. Every knows...information is everywhere now. So you can imagine you've got great competition. And so, you gotta go for people who really, really...Well, if you're not excellent, you don't even have a chance. You don't even have a chance to survive. And so, if you're fresh out of school, and I'm digging into your profile, and I don't see one thing...And I don't care, it could be a violin. If you've gotten really good at violin, I'm like, oh yeah. And this is sometimes why I think some of my best hires have been teachers. Because, gosh, if you can teach, especially if people from Teach for America, if you can teach math to inner city kids who have no interest in math, okay, you've pursued excellence here. And I think in this world, you either get it or you don't. You've either seen excellence, and you know what that means, and what it takes to be great, or you just don't. And it's very binary, and you can tell very quickly. So someone who does that is something I value a lot. The second piece is, we're calling it, you "lead with empathy". And in Sales, of course, if you don't have empathy, you're not going to understand your customer's needs, and you're not going to relate to them. You're not going to build a good relationship with them. But I think a lot of this is also empathy just in terms of how you work together, right? Like in Sales...you never win because of Sales. This is a huge thing, where a lot of times I've talked to other founders and they're like, oh, okay, it's time to monetize, but I need to hire some Salespeople. Those Sales people are gonna fail, right? Because Sales is just a part of a bigger engine, because you've got to work together. And working together is fricking hard. It's really hard. So if you don't lead with empathy, you're not going to know how to work together cross-functionally. In Sales, what do Sales people say all the time, every single Sales person, every single Sales leader, I need more leads. Marketing's not developing more leads for me. I'm like, okay, great. Tell me more. How could they be developing more leads for you? And why? Most people can't answer that. If you can't answer that, just like with a customer, you're not going to be able to partner with Marketing to generate the leads that you actually want, right? It's not transactional. So anyways, so leading with empathy I think is something really important. And really behind that, what I'm looking for is self awareness, right? In a fast growing company, you don't have the time to coach every single person. You really don't. I've got some Managers right now who are managing 14 people because we're just growing that fast. And I couldn't hire Managers fast enough. That means that of the 14 people, honestly, they're not each individually getting the top quality mentorship that, say, I got from two guys at Morgan Stanley. But, if I hire people who are self-aware, they're going to teach themselves. They're going to look for ways to learn. And that combined with pursuing excellence, you're going to get good people. The third piece is what I call, someone on our team defined it as, "do the hard". And this is simple, this is like, you've got to grind. I mean, no one has achieved excellence without grinding away. And Sales is really tough. I mean, literally it is the definition of a grinder job. But also, do you take shortcuts? Sometimes the hard way now is actually the easy way long term. And that's what I look for. Are you willing to do, the hard work today so they easier for you later. And the last thing we call it "ascending together", which is your ability to work as on a team. It's like, thinking like an owner, right? That's something LinkedIn, I think it was one of Jeff's big things. It's one of my big things too. I remember when I was Morgan Stanley, that's what John Mack said when he was running the company. Now this is a big bank, Morgan Stanley. When he first said that, I was like, yeah, how am I going to change the trajectory of Morgan Stanley as a first year analyst. But, I did think that way, I really did, and I love that. So, those are some of the high level qualities that I look for in anybody. Naber: Nice. That's awesome. One follow up on that, that was really well articulated, thanks. And the one follow-up on that...Do you have a particular process you go through? Let's talk about hiring directly on your team, your team, your directs. Do you have a particular process you go through around candidate profiling, attracting that candidate, and you reaching out to them either personally, or the message that you craft? Going through the recruitment, and interviewing process, and then closing. Do you have any tactics that you think completely set you apart from, maybe what other people do, just based on the results that you've gotten? You know that they work. Oliver Jay (OJ): I don't know if it's differentiated, but I'll tell you how I approach it. I think the first step is you really have to understand the nuances of the role that you're trying to hire for. This is a mistake I see a lot in companies. Especially early stage companies, at some point they have like 10 Salespeople, they're hitting quota, kind of. And then the Board's like, you need a VP of Sales. And then they go and the hire some kind of recruiting firm, and they load them up with VP Sales candidates, and they just hire someone to do VP Sales. And that happens every day. And, I think there's so many nuances to the rule. What kind of Sales? How do you want to build it? And, what types of talent would you want this person to bring in? And, so I am a big believer that you don't know how to hire for that role unless you've done that job yourself, for at least a quarter or two. I think as you get better, you use pattern matching and shortcut. But in the beginning, you have to do it yourself...in the Sales world, so you know what type of companies are you really, really going after and such. And so that's my first step. Because even though I'm desperate for bandwidth, and I would just love to hire someone right now to just take the job, if I don't dig in myself, I don't think I'll hire her right, the best person for that job. So that's first, and I think that helps a lot downstream, and I'll come back to it. Second is, I leveraged my network. So I leverage my network, and I go talk to people. You and I have talked. I'm like, hey, I'm looking for this person. And now I know what I'm looking for, right? Who's the best two people you know? And I don't need to recruit them, but I want to talk to them. Naber: You do this a lot. You do this a lot. To the point where sometimes I know you're in the market for someone because either I'm close with someone that might be one of the best in the market, and I'm hearing that you had a conversation because he or she and I will talk, and hear that, OJ had a conversation. You do this, it is perpetual, it is in your nature, perpetually to do this all the time. Oliver Jay (OJ): And I think part of it is, I find it interesting, right? It's like, you get to learn. It's free education, why not? And so I constantly do that, that's true. And then I get referrals. I remember when I moved out to Australia to run, to start Dropbox APAC, and back then LinkedIn when you were there, LinkedIn was one of the top SaaS organization. Smaller than Salesforce, but the talent was super high quality, right? I canvas the top three layers. I talked to every single person across Sales, Marketing, Talent Solutions, everybody...and that's how I met great people Gareth. So, that's step two. Step three is then obviously building that list and talking to people. And I think this is one where, I don't know if it's different, but I do it myself. I do it myself. I reach out. I mean, I'm looking for a Head of BD right now. I'm the one who's InMail'ing people. I don't outsource it to a recruiter. And I think that makes a big difference. Because if you're a top talent, you want to hear from...you want your best shot at this person, right? So I do it myself. And when I get in touch with these people, and I think this is where having done the job yourself for at least a quarter to really, really make a difference, because then now you can talk about the role in a much more sophisticated way. You're not like, I'm just hiring someone to run east coast...Someone is interested it when you're able to map the distinct qualities needed for someone to be successful in a certain role, and why that candidate is a perfect fit. Naber: There's something ultra sexy about that. There's something ultra sexy about that from a candidate perspective. Oliver Jay (OJ): Because the candidate, people have choices. There's so many great companies out there. And what candidates want to know, ultimately no matter where and who, is that they're going to be set up for success. And so I think that comes across when you actually know what you're looking for, and then you can talk about why that person...Hey Brandon, I'm talking about you, and you specifically, because of XYZ, and that XYZ is exactly what I'm looking for. And that makes it a lot better. And then I also think a lot, again, you gotta develop that relationship, especially if you're hiring General Managers...If you treat it as just a process, that's where I've seen these things fail. I mean, I've seen bad hiring practices, even at Dropbox where I was, where you meet a lot of hiring mistakes. It was when you make these critical roles that you just rush through a process. I'm gonna go find an executive recruiter from, they're gonna bring me 20, and then I'm going to whittle it down to three, bring people back onsite, pick one. Those almost never work out because you don't have that trust developed, or you can't close. Because that trust has not been built up throughout the process. Oliver Jay (OJ): Those are great. Those are great. All right. I feel people are going to be furiously writing down notes in audience, much slower than you can talk about this stuff. All right, let's move into NEA...So you're at Morgan Stanley, you make the jump to NEA. Why do you make that jump? What are you doing there? And then I've got a couple of questions for you. Naber: Cool. NEA was the world's largest venture capital fund. And back then they were, they had never hired pre MBA analysts before, so I was a guinea pig of the first class. Essentially all of these partners just wanted people to do their work for them. And fast forward, now NEA I think has 20 analysts because it's like, wow, that's great to get people to do great work, do all that work for them. NEA - why did I join NEA? Well, first why did I join venture, go into venture capital. And when I was in equity research, I got into the business of studying companies, and giving buy, sell, neutral ratings on every stock, right? You go to CNBC, and there's someone talking about their stock, that was me. Well, that wasn't me, I didn't go on TV, but that's the work I did. Behind that analyst on TV, there's some baby, junior OJ who is crunching numbers. What I realized about my job that I liked was actually understanding the company, the strategy of companies, and the technology of companies. Back then, that was right when iPhone came out. And I made a bad call, by the way. I was like, Blackberry, RIM, remember Research in Motion? Blackberry is for consumers. Remember this company called Palm - PalmPilot remember? Palm is for prosumers. When the iPhone came out, I was like, this is for consumers. Don't worry. Buy more Blackberry. Buy, buy, buy. Obviously I was wrong. But anyways, I love that analyses. What I did not care about was the actual finance. I can do the job, but whether Cisco is going to trade to 35 or 33, I just didn't care. It was almost too easy. It was like, okay, I can look at a stock chart, after a month be like, okay, it's going to pop back up. Naber: Humanities OJ comes out again. Oliver Jay (OJ): I think so. It's just not for me. It wasn't fulfilling. if I made a really great call, and I helped a client make a ton of money, I just didn't find that rewarding. So, venture sounded interesting because it sounded it was like, okay, I'm still leveraging some of my analytical background, but I can dig deep into strategy and technology. So that's why I learned to venture. And there was a really a crazy adventure where I got to work with a great farm. Also, so fortunate work with some such great Managers, who empowered me and challenged me. And that's when I got closer to entrepreneurs, and founders. And my job there was due diligence for deals that came in. NEA got great deal flow because it was one of the best firms. So the pressure was more on diligence, and then working with companies, which is great. And then as I worked more with companies, and if we fast forward, that's why I ended up working as, becoming an operator. I was like, wow, that seems fun. It was funny because it gave me that kind of exposure. Naber: Nice. I read a quote that you had mentioned, in a couple places, that you saw the fun the operators were having, and you wanted to hop on that side of the coin. And I think it's well said. So when you were there at NEA, I've got two particular things that over your career, you've been good at...But since we're on NEA, and you've had a ton of exposure to a lot of different types of companies and deals, it could have been one of the places where the seeds were planted for these two things. The first one is around picking horses, picking the right companies that are going to take off, and understanding the process you need to go through in your mind for one, picking that business, and two, evaluating as to whether or not you would want to hop on board. You've done an amazing job with evaluating them for the companies that you've joined, Dropbox and Asana as an operator, as well as a bunch of businesses you've helped, either been a Board Observer, or you've been a Board Director on a bunch of different types of companies. So when you're thinking about picking horses, what is the criteria you think about for joining a company? And like you said, people have options that are the best...that it being worthy of one, you looking at it, and two, you hopping on board? Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah, it's I absolutely learned that from venture. And as a result of that, I look at everything from a investor lens now. When it comes to picking horses, I think...two of the most legendary investors in the valley, Dick Kramlich was a founder of NEA, and Forest Baskett who is still a GP there and just incredibly smart. Basically, when Tableau was founded, he worked with the early founders in the NEA offices to start Tableau. And I asked them, hey, what's what's the secret? Because there are some venture investors that are just clearly better than others. What's the secret? Naber: Yeah, top quartile year over year. Oliver Jay (OJ): What's the secret? I mean, when I asked them, I was amazed...Dick was like, find companies that are going after really large markets. And you're like, okay, duh. Naber: Let me just write that down. Oliver Jay (OJ): But as I've matured, and I've looked into different companies, and how markets have matured, I can't tell you how many times I've told people on my teams who want to go to some company gave them some VP Sales job, and it sounds great, but the category is just not that big. And I think that's number one, you have to pick a company that has an exploding market, and most importantly is timing. Is the market about to explode now. Let's take a couple of examples. Let's look at Zoom and Slack, two examples recently. Zoom was one of the best IPO's of all time. I mean incredible IPO. Messaging, I mean, I remember the days in 95 when we were using ICQ. I don't know if you ever used ICQ. I still remember my ICQ number, right? We were messaging. Slack versus ICQ, or later MS Messenger, is honestly not that different. And then there was Skype in the middle. So, why is this so different? Do I really believe that the UI is so amazing that that's the reason. Like, okay, maybe, but I don't know if that's a $20 billion difference. It's just that somewhere, in the B2B world around 2014, the market tipped. There was a need in the market for more dynamic communications because the pain of email was just too high, for that use case. And CIO's started believing in it. And that's when it tipped. And that market, the enterprise messaging market, basically tipped in 2014 to 2016, I would say. In those two years the winner, it's a winner take all market...There's good research that shows that when a category tips, you get a flood of competitors, and then within two years, 18 to 24 months, the leader ends up taking I think 78%, something that, call it 80% market share of the market. But if the market is huge, you can go into a big market and you'll still be okay, right? Remember there's a company called Jive, right? And remember Yammer? Remember there was a Chatter? All the still did okay, but if you want the get the $20 billion market cap that Slack got, you have to be the winner during that window when the market is ready to tip. And I would say the same thing about video conferencing. Zoom...this is nothing new. I mean, that's how my wife and I developed a relationship, right, over video conferencing, over Instand Messenger - AOL, by the way, another messaging tool. And look, somewhere between 2015 to 2017, maybe even later, was when the need really, really tiped, and now you see Zoom taking off. And you and I now, we're doing this podcast via Zoom, and we use it all the time. Same thing with file storage. Dropbox, is generating $1.4 billion in recurring revenue for file sharing. Naber: Fastest company to $1 billion for a SaaS business ever? Is that right?...ARR. Oliver Jay (OJ): That's right. That's right. And they didn't invent file storage. I remember when I first used Yahoo in 1995, I got to upload a file into Yahoo, and then download it when I was in the library. It was life changing. Yeah, it was amazing. So it's not new. Cloud storage wasn't new. It's just that the market tipped at that point where people were starting to move away from servers. And in 2013 to 2014 was when mobile adoption in the enterprise had hit a certain rate, and that's when you needed cloud storage. Because on mobile, you can't access files anyway. So number one, you've got to pick a huge market, and most importantly, you've got to join that market right before the market tips. And so you have to make a call. I joined Asana when people were like, what is this project management thing? I don't know what it is. Forrester and Gartner haven't written reports on it yet. But I asked the most progressive CIOs, what's next? They're like, well, I just put in Slack, and now all my work is fragmented even in more places than before. I need something to pull it back together. So I'm going to look into this project management, work management space. And I'm like, oh, interesting. So I developed this hypothesis that the capstone of the new modern collaboration stack is going to be something like Asana that pulls things back together, at least for the things that I really did matter to that company. And I'm seeing that market...we are in the heart of the race right now, that 18 to 24 month window. So that's number one. Number two is obviously what people generally look for which is technology, right? If this market is going to tip, does this company have the right technology to win? And this is very much a venture thing, where you need to some make some calls on the architecture, how they built it. What are customers saying about the product, right? That's when you get some feedback. So the second thing is, does this company have the right product to win the market. Because I do think, especially in the B2B now, SaaS more and more, is dictated by the end user and what they use. So you gotta make sure you're the one that people are gonna pick. And then the last part is, do you have the right team? Does this company have the right team that you're going to back? And that's probably the number one thing, besides the size of market, that venture capitalists bet on, is the people. Because early stage you don't really have much of a business yet. Or even a product. And I think in terms of picking companies to join, same thing, right? Let's say you join a Series C company, what is the management team? What are the dynamics? When things go south, which always happens, how does that management team work together to solve them? Or is there finger pointing? 90% of the time it's fingerpointing. 90% of the time Sales says Marketing didn't generate enough leads. Well, no, let me start...Customer Success and Support says Sales as closing crappy deals. Sales says well, what do you expect? Marketing is driving these bad leaves? Marketing goes, well, what do you expect our Product is missing all this stuff. Product goes well, that's because design is a bottleneck, and it's not shipping. We're not shipping fast enough because design is not ready. Design is like, well, you know what, it's not my fault. I can't hire enough designers, it's recruiting, right? Recruiting..it just goes on. And when I say 9 our of 10, I think that it's 9.8 out of 10. And I made this mistake myself. Before Dropbox, I joined a company that I probably shouldn't have. So a lot of people look at the company profile, and the executives, and where they came from. Oh, this person was at Google for 20 years. Well, you know what, so have like 10,000 other people. And you've seen this at LinkedIn, not everyone's a star at LinkedIn buddy. A lot of stars. But, quite a few duds too. Naber: Totally. I mean, nature of large numbers like that, for every one of those businesses. Oliver Jay (OJ): Totally. Totally. Or they haven't seen the right stage that's relevant for your company. So, finding the right team that you think you can bank on just to get through the hard times is really, really important. Don't just look at the profile. Naber: Nice. Awesome. Great answer. Okay. So, we've gotten through NEA right now. At this point, I believe you jump into Harvard, correct? HBS. Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah. Naber: Cool. So take us through the reason you decided to go get your MBA. Why Harvard, which may be self-explanatory. And then take us all the way up through your decision to join Dropbox. So through that period, Scientific Conservation, Harvard, etc, up through the point where you're joining Dropbox. And then we'll talk about what you were responsible for there. And I've got some, a couple of questions for that. Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah, sure. So I decided when I was at NEA that I wanted to be on the operating side. So I was like, they have all the fun. I didn't understand how much pain they had either, honestly, but I was like, it sure seems fun. And, the short answer of why I decided to get my MBA...I was like, okay, well if I got into a great school, I might as well take a break because I'm going to make this career switch anyways. So I'll just do it. And that's literally the logic. And this was mainly...I remember one of my mentors at NEA, John S., who's a fantastic guy, fantastic...Remember remember there was this company called The Ladders? Naber: Yeah, of course. Yeah. The $100K+ jobs is their thing, right? Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened with them? Naber: They died. I have no idea. It was almost overnight. Because I remember, I mean, I did a lot of research on ladders for at some point in my career. Anyways, I don't know, they just died at some point. Oliver Jay (OJ): So we we're going to meet with The Ladders in New York. I remember this clearly. This was right around the recession starting, and John's just like, you need to apply to business school. And this was October, and the deadline was coming up in December. So I was like, all right. He convinced me that would be good. I mean, I might as well, I'm going to try it. John's like, you're probably not going to get in, and that's cool, but why not try? Because getting into business school, certainly getting into HBS, is a total crapshoot. It's a total lottery. Yeah. I got some friends who were way more qualified than I am and didn't get in. And I now know it's for sure a crap shoot. So anyways, I applied. And I only had time to apply to one school, and that was not the plan, but I just didn't have time because I had to take the GMAT, write the essays, get the recommendation, all that. I only applied to Harvard assuming that I didn't get in. And then I got in. Naber: Stop it. Hold on. This is unbelievable. Hold on, hold on. So you only applied to Harvard and you got end up... Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah, it wasn't because I had so much confidence or that it was the only school that I would go to. I was gonna apply to like five. But dang it, man, these essays, they take like...I haven't written these essays in a long time, and they go back to humanities OJ. It took forever. I just didn't have time. I think the the application was due January 1st or something, and I remember over Christmas I was writing these essays and I was just like, I don't have time for this. And I just applied one. I really didn't think I was going to go to business school, and then I got it in. And I'm like, oh, okay. I guess I'm going. Naber: No one can see me losing a right now. Laughing silently while I'm listening to this, and not believing it. This is a great story about getting into Harvard Business School. Such a good story. All right, so you're at Harvard, what's the biggest thing you learned there? And then take us through up to you joining Dropbox. Oliver Jay (OJ): Ah, man. Yeah. So Harvard was great. Naber: You must have met some really cool, interesting people. Oliver Jay (OJ): I met some amazing people. And people that I considered to be my best friends today. That's where I met the co-founders of Grab, I'm on their board now. I met a lot of great professors.Look, I think the thing about business school...A lot of people poo poo on business school. They're like, it's expensive, you don't learn anything, it's just networking. I mean, I call bullshit on that. Because I'm a nerd, I to learn. And so I studied. I'm like, wow, this is interesting. And I'll tell you at that point I was going through this big clean tech phase in my life. I was really interested in clean tech. I was doing clean tech investments at NEA. I was part of the environment group at HBS. I was super active. I thought I was going to build a career in clean tech. And now that I'm selling productivity software for the past seven years, it's given me a different kind of perspective looking back. But I was so into clean tech. And I met some great people through that, through other who have similar interests. But I'll tell you, so my first job was Scientific Conversation - they basically sell building automation software to help optimize the equipment in commercial buildings to optimize their energy spend. Think of it as HVAC optimization software. I would not have been able...and I took a Sales role coming out of school, which is interesting because very few people go to HBS to come out to be a Sales guy. It's pretty rare. And I sold to real estate developers. And if I did not take a real estate class at HBS, I wouldn't know how to speak that lingo. Cap rates, and TNI, and whatever. I mean it's just, there's different things. I learned that from school. And then what was really interesting was then Scientific Conversation went through a big period of restructuring. And I had to be a big part of that. I took this class called turn arounds, because it's a new topic, when you learn about - how to turn around companies? How do you learn about bankruptcy law? You learn about how to negotiate with your creditors so you can live to die another day, so to speak. And then I used those skills. I literally looked up my notes on bankruptcy. Because I would call our creditors, and it'd be like, hey man, we're about to go under here. I'm going to give you, I know I owe you $2 million, I'm gonna give you $2,000, or you can have a shot at bankruptcy court. Anyways, long story short, business school was awesome. I met great people, and I learned a ton, got great exposure, and I actually implement the things that I learned. Naber: Wow. That's great. Great Story. Okay. So Boston, Beantown, you leave. Scientific Conversationis next, you join in a Sales and Partnerships capacity. Every Harvard Business Schoolers dream, joining Sales right after that. Oliver Jay (OJ): That's why you go to HBS. Naber: That's right. #HBS. So what is the biggest thing that you learn at that business, and why did you join Dropbox? Oliver Jay (OJ): Well, a lot of my lessons learned around the people, in part, was what I learned at Scientific Conservation. It had on paper, all the things that most people look for, right? I said, oh, pre rocket ship, hot industry, a team that looked really, really strong on paper. That's what I went for. You know, hypergrowth. I remember Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Accel. Everybody was like, this is the next one, this is the next OPOWER. This is the commercial version of OPOWER. I thought it was the best thing. But you know what, just didn't have the right team to execute going through the tough times. and that's what I learned. That's honestly the biggest lesson I learned. I met a lot of great people. But that's where I really realized, wow, so much of execution is the people, and the chemistry of those people. And that's what I learned there. So why did I Dropbox? Honestly, I mean...we had to do a big turn around in Scientific Conservation. Within a year we went from 30 people, to 180 people, and then I had to play a big part in restructuring down back to 90 people, and then down to 50 people. I mean it was a year that felt 10 years. So Dropbox, I showed up, people on scooters, drinking from coconuts...you've been to the office. It was just a different world. I'm over here trying to make payroll, literally. There was a payroll period where I... Naber: And letting people go daily. Oliver Jay (OJ): Ugh, brutal. People always ask, what's the biggest done, whatever. I'll say the biggest deal I've done was in...I broke my lease, the Scientific Conservation lease with a real estate developer...Because we had signed this Embarcadero Bay Bridge View Office for a seven year lease, even though the company was making zero in revenue, so that tells you something. But thankfully, the one thing that went in our favor was the rental rates have actually gone up in SF. Far, far greater than our committed rate of increase in her seven year lease. So they way I made payroll was, I went to the developer and I said, I will break the lease if you give me x amount of money. Well, they didn't know it was how we were going to make payroll. It was hilarious. And then negotiation, at the end the thing that clinched the deal was office furniture. I was like, I'll throw in the office furniture. Naber: Stop it. I always find it mind blowing when in residential, someone rents someplace for like, a few grand more a month just because the furniture's included. And that was your deal with the developer. That guy has done tons of deals, tons of deals, and this guy closes over the furniture. Oliver Jay (OJ): Honestly, I probably would have gotten it done anyways. I was actually in my head thinking, I don't want to pay to get rid of the furniture. That was what was going to be my head. Naber: Oh, that's a good win-win. All right, so you join Dropbox. There's coconuts, there's cupcakes, there's all of it. So walk us through in one or two minutes, what you were responsible for and the jumps that you made at Dropbox. And then I've got a few questions around some of your super powers, okay? Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah. So Dropbox I went in as one of the first business generalists. There wasn't a role, it really just do everything. So, looking to our payments gateway infrastructure, looked into capital financing for our data center to help raise capital. I looked into real estate because they're like, oh, now you're a real estate pro from my background. So I had to try to figure out finding office space. Andthis was all in the first three months. We were moving so fast. And and then there was this business called Dropbox for Teams that was starting to grow really, really quickly. And the Head of Business, our COO was like, can you just take a look at that. Basically, do the Sales Ops work to see what's going on. And that's how I got into it. And then one thing led to another. So took that role on, started adding some visibility into the business. And then moved into actually managing part of it. And ended up running a lot of it, growing the North America Online and Inside Sales teams to 70 or so people. And then got the opportunity to co lead our APEC expansion efforts. Naber: With Tony, is that right? Oliver Jay (OJ): With Tony, that's right. And they're like, all right, figure it out. I mean, that was it. Figure out APAC, period. So then we did that, that led to both of us moving out to APAC for a year and a half. Started the Australia office, Japan office, I was gonna think about Singapore, but didn't end up doing Singapore. Also looked at Latin America, when the new CEO joined. He's like, well, there's another continent. Someone's going to look at it. And they just put it on our plate. And then did that for a while. And then when I came back to the US, transitioned into the Corp Dev team, so think about M&A at Dropbox. And then through that experience I realized I really missed building teams. Which is why I went back to the Sales world at Asana. Naber: Nice. After hearing your story, and I saw a lot of firsthand when I was working with teams at Dropbox and I'm working with teams at Asana, now I get that, why you made that jump. Or at least why that was the right time in your life, and in missing teams to want to make that jump. Wow. That's really interesting. Okay. So a couple things about Dropbox. There is a theme, and you've done this really interestingly coming at it from, let's call it the Sales Ops angle first, and then jumping into manage these teams. Which some of the best operators I know from a Sales and Marketing perspective, have come from the Ops side. I look at them as the Ying to my Yang. They speak a beautiful language and I want to hear all of it. So as you're doing that, you're building things from scratch. And you are building at one phase at Dropbox, and you go through a lot of different phases of growth in your international expansion playbook. You're also going through phases you've been in before at Asana, and planning for phases that are things you've seen before, and things you know a lot about. So let's talk about your international expansion playbook. As you're going through phase by phase, and one, making the decision as to whether or not you should do it in the first place - Expanding outside of, let's call it the US for now, into other markets? And then two, once you decide yes through that evaluation process, you want to go about doing it. What's your step by step process you're going through in order to expand internationally? You can use the Dropbox example or the Asana example, or both, If you just want to say, hey, this is what we did then and this is what we did then. But either way, what's your phase by phase and step by step approach as you're executing on this expansion playbook. Oliver Jay (OJ): So I think the first is understanding that international operations is not...Adding international operations is, honestly from management overhead perspective, it's the minute you go international, for every new region and office you add is equivalent of adding two, and the next one you add is like adding three. There's a complexity, the overhead is so much more, and sophistication is so much greater. And that's not to say it's not worth it, right? Obviously I do it, but it's something that I think you need to be really, really honest with yourself, with your teams on whether or when are you ready for that? Because honestly, one of the things that I think about is, most companies go international too late, right? I think Slack is a good example. Slack to me, and I have a lot of good friends at Slack, so maybe you have to delete this. But, international is only 30% of their revenue, or 35% of their revenue at this scale. And I think Microsoft got a jump on them internationally. Well Microsoft has a jump on everybody, but especially internationally. And so, you want to go fast, but you got to make sure you commit. So step one, before you commit 100%, what you can do is just play the digital game. Localize your product, localize your ads, localize your website. And I would say probably even in that order. Again, it depends on what product you have, right? But if you have a user facing product...and in Enterprise it starts with the product. In many countries you may have one or two people who aren't very comfortable with English, but the rest of the team may not be. And you're not going to get good adoption that way. So I think that's important, localize your product, as long as you feel you have enough confidence that it's worth the engineering investment. Because it's a big investment. There's a certain threshold where you're going to start seeing...Whether it's tickets that come in asking for your language, or your community, you'll get that ask. Yeah, I mean, maybe French and Spanish, the website, that's as an obvious one. But what's interesting is you can some good lift from just localizing the ads, in Dutch or Japanese, and it points to an English website. You're still going to get some incremental dollars there. So play the digital game. And then at some point, and you have to come up with a framework, and it's different company to company, and you don't have to be that Scientific. But at what point do you feel you're ready to go open an additional office? And almost always, you'll see English speaking markets adopt first - UK, Australia, are the next two, and Canada. Large markets that, for many reasons, and we're not gonna have enough time talking about them, but they usually are the next to adopt technologies. And so your next move almost guaranteed is going to be somewhere in Europe, right? And you pick between Dublin, Amsterdam or London and we can talk about which one, why, but it's going to be one of those three almost guaranteed, right? So setup your Europe hub. And then depending on the type of company, you can think about growing from there. So then the most obvious, next markets would be France and Germany in Europe. And so then you got to make that decision on whether you want to service those markets in whichever hub you've picked, or you go even more local. And I think that depends on the type of company that you have. We talked about Australia, that makes a ton of sense already. The minute you're looking into the UK, if you have the bandwidth, you should look in Australia as well. I would think that the market demand would be equivalent in terms of the time. And then Japan. Japan, people forget, is the second largest IT market in the world. And they're early in their cloud adoption. But for SaaS companies, it's really starting to take off. And so Japan is a market where investing in early can pay off dividends three, four years down the road. Japan is Slack's number two market. It's Salesforce's number two market. But it takes years to build up that market. And so you can start thinking about that. So the order of sequencing, I guess I'm not even...I guess I've done it enough now to just know the sequence instead. I mean the first time I did this at Dropbox it was like, okay, how many users do we need to see before we go green light here? How much revenue? How many businesses? How many domains we want to see? And, I've traveled so much in the last couple of years. This is the order that I would go in, Naber: Good one. Awesome. You know what's really interesting about that, is you mentioned you've looked at the data, and from the data side it says to do this, this, and this. What you're saying is don't necessarily do the work that everyone else has has done. This is an all likelihood, the chronology of the markets that you will go into next. And that's really interesting. Don't redo all the work. Do not reinvent the wheel. I have two follow-up questions to that. One is how do you know whether to hire local, even more local, versus doing it from a regional hub? How do I know whether or not I should sell from Dublin or London or Amsterdam into France, Germany, Spain, Italy, some of the Nordic countries, etc? Or hire local in that particular market? And by that I mean, when do I do it? And I'll ask the other question after that. Oliver Jay (OJ): Yeah. To me it all depends on your target audience. Who are you trying to go after and how? So if you're going after SMBs, this is primarily going to be Inside Sales function. You're not showing up. It's not a relationship sale. Then there is so much value in centralizing to the last minute that you can because you're still trying to figure it out. So Asana is small deals, we start with small teams and then we expand them. And, we essentially have a big machine in Dublin. Why? Because the French rep who has learned some new insight selling to Mid-market & SMB companies in France can share with the Nordic Rep, and those best practices when you're early in a region, you got to learn quickly, and you're gonna to learn from the field. And that information transfer is so valuable. And then eventually you go the other way. You launch a new product, you've got to enable the team. There's a lot of operational overhead to enabling lots of people in the field, versus you just fly into in one office, and you basically enable a team all at once. So huge, huge advantage to centralizing. However, if your Sales cycle and process relies a lot on relationship building, whether it's for bigger deals, whether it's a complex deal that relies on partners, then you need to go in the field. And that's where showing up makes a ton of sense. And what changes is the unit economics of that office, where if you open an office in Paris, now showing up at a mid-market opportunity of a 10K Pounds deal, normally is not going to justify a flight in, hotels, make it work. But now it's just, down the street. I mean not down the street, but now you can justify making that visit, and absolutely everything that increases the conversion rate. So there is benefit there too. But balancing operational overhead, learning earlier, I am a big believer that you should hold off as long as you can. Because once you're decentralized, there's no way you can centralize again. Or you can, but it's very painful. You gotta shut down offices, and it's really painful. So you want to wait as long as possible. Naber: Nice. Great answer. Thank you. And then, second question is...So you're going through this process of massive expansion, within Dropbox and Asana, and you're going through different stages of growth. One of the things that you need to constantly think about...which I don't necessarily believe that a large number of Heads of Sales and Heads of Marketing are very good at this. One of the things you need to constantly be aware of...and coming from VC, you've got interesting perspective on this, and not all the people who have gone from VC to operator and done it with the amount of, not only success, but the amount of speed that you've done it...So a Head of Sales and Marketing needs have the right mindset, with planning and execution, with unit economics in mind. So how do you make sure that you have the right mindset? What is your mindset when you're thinking about balancing, things LTV to CAC ratios, versus booking in revenue growth rate expectations, versus the growing pains of teams and the engagement of those teams. How do you think about incorporating unit economics into your approach? And how do you think about that as a Head of Sales and Marketing? Oliver Jay (OJ): Okay. So I would say there's a couple of things. First in terms of mindset, if you're leading Sales and Marketing, let's say your company is growing at 100%, right? My mindset, and I tell this to all my Managers, is that my job is to plan and execute as if we were 12 months from now. My Manager's job is to execute and plan as if we were six months from now. Your IC's are the ones who were executing to quarter to quarter. And I think that's something that I always drill into my team, and my Manager because most people manage to the quarter. And by the time you manage to a quarter, you've already forgotten about the next one, and you're basically accumulating debt. And I think part of what's challenging and exciting about managing in high growth, is you've got to balance executing and the job at hand, but at the same time develop the vision of where you need to get to - So if you're a line Manager six months from now - and you've got to do both at the same time. So as my leads, they got the quarterly number, that's great. I just assume they're going to hit it. I mean just tell me if you're not going to hit it, but I'm assuming you're going to hit it. What are the programmatic things you're building in right now as if you're six months from now? Because that is going to take time to build it. And then once you build it, boom, now you're ready. My job is 12 months. So right now, I'm thinking about what my team needs to be doing this time next year. Because, well, my team is getting pretty big now. It's hard to steer a big ship. And so if I'm optimizing for something for the end of the year, not to say that's I don't do that, I do that. But I also push myself to think longer because for me, and from my angle, what's going to happen in the second half of this year has already been shipped. Our performance, our unit economics, our, whatever programmatic infrastructure we build is going to be, it's already too late to change that. So I'm thinking ahead. I think that's important because, you mentioned about unit economics, your unit economics need to change over time. And so you got to work with your management team, your finance team, to understand what unit economics you need to have this time next year. So that you can slowly migrate there. Otherwise you're just hiring heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, and eventually you're like, oh, one day you wake up and finance is like, okay, you're going to get three heads next year, but you have the grow revenue revenue by 50%. So that's the high level mindset that I think is really important, to understand end state first, and work with finance to understand what that looks like. And so I know next year what my unit economics need to be. Now, I can start back filling. And then this is what I do to backfill. So what I do is, I ask my teams to now start thinking about, not unit economics first though, strategy. First strategy, then tactics, then numbers. So for example, my team in Europe. Right now, it's July, and it's the end of our quarter this month. The leads are going to come over to the US and present their strategy for next year, so basically the next 18 month strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Who's our primary customer? Who are we trying to win over and outserve everybody else. Why? And where are we going to focus? Because you can't go after everything. And when I think about Europe as an example, a microcosm of the world, the UK is very different than Germany, which is very different than Spain, and very different than the Nordics. So, if someone calls me and tells me this is my EMEA blanket strategy, I'm like, that's not a strategy. I want you to define what winning looks in the Nordics, and define what winning looks in Spain. Portugal, not as important to me, lump it into that region. Iberia, right? Or something. But, I think it's important that to have a view where you define success. Okay, this is what I'm trying to accomplish in Germany. Align on that first. That's a strategy. Then the tactics. How are we going to do that? Okay. in Germany we're going to go after this segment
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
