Welcome back everybody to Sacking Growth, this is Cassidy. Carl, how you doing? Oh, we're doing Cassidy. How are we?
Good. It's been a while. It feels like I haven't been on one of these shows. It sounds like on holiday, you and Kaylee took over.
Yeah, man. Probably did a much better job than me being here. So it's going to be back. Oh, business almost.
We're fine lines almost just went away while you were on vacation. So actually, Will was, oh, we should introduce our guests. Will Aiken, Lavender, Legend, everyone here likely knows who he is. And if you don't, here he is.
But Will, you and Cassidy, I think we're in London, UK area, similar, I think you all maybe just crossed paths. Cassidy, when were you out there? That was a few weeks ago. You're asking me for specific dates.
That's beyond my ability to remember. But I think Will was working and I was enjoying time with the family. I did. It's just, you know, one could also call work as well.
The first three days I was working, the rest was a vacation because from that, I can probably guess. That's what most of my family are as well. It looked like I was on vacation from just all the videos and stuff. It seems like the Lavender team has a good time, wherever they go.
The drinks are sounding something. There's always a story. Awesome. Legend.
Well, great to have you, man. What I wanted to unpack today is hopefully here maybe a different angle of the way you can let we know. I really want to understand what, just organic. It seems like no one can really get it right.
A lot of companies invest in paid advertising. Every once in a while, you get these unicorn companies. You think of like, gong. More recently, you think of lavender.
You make a huge splash and you dominate LinkedIn. You all have dominated LinkedIn now for, I don't know how long. I mean, since the beginning, but I can definitely tell lately with your content, I mean, you've scaled it quite a bit. It's exploded, especially in the last six months or so.
What I wanted to do is just unpack that. Maybe let's just start in the beginning. What excited you to take the role over at Lavender? You got a bunch of different content folks on the team, like Jen and you get Mike involved and stuff.
What exactly do you do? Let's just start there. You were hired. Will said, Will, I want you to do this.
What is this? I said no, but I was well happy at sales. Making my own, making whatever I wanted. Then he hit me up again.
Many hi, Jen, who's good friend. Actually, we have a company that gave us a co-founder of mine. She paid for me and taking the chat and then actually took the chat and I could resist it. To give you the answer, what you just asked, what we will do.
Despite the fact that a lot of people on the team have personal brands, they're only real content creators whose job purpose there is to create content is myself. I create everything on the social side, which is anything customer-facing that you see coming from the Lavender accounts. Then Todd, who you obviously know very well, giving me his privacy refine labs, who's doing more of a backend, but also enabling the personal brands of everyone who works here to get an audience. With great insight, very special, which by the time Spark comes out will be launched, but with great and kind of like a Lavender Netflix, it's probably the best way to describe it.
Our own content hub with different series, different shows, different types of flavors of content we're helping sellers get better writing emails and other stuff too. So that obviously is sophisticated. Now, to be putting out a content hub, that's a level of scale that most companies never get there. I can only think of a few others that really do.
Clary, it feels like it's at a point where they've got a bunch of content going and they've got some scale, they've got a content hub. Again, back to the beginning, how do you get started with building an organic engine? Early early days, how do you get started and how do you think of growing and expanding the sophistication and the reach and the mix of things that you do? So I suppose as a company, I think it's a little bit different to how I personally approach it.
As a company, Lavender has pretty much been built on the back of Willalred's personal brand. He became a LinkedIn Top Voice, I think it's something close to 70,000 followers on LinkedIn. That really was a proof of concept that content in organic was a really good source for Lavender's attention, traffic, user growth. So knowing that, that's why they brought in this team to build out content and basically double down on that.
Because there's only so much, and as you'll probably know, the fact you're doing this podcast is only so much Blue White founder can do by themselves, right? So how do you scale that? You bring in more people who have the right mentality, you can bring something different to the table as well, because no one wants to be over the head with the same thing I've written over again. Now, for myself, I would love to show you how this intentional build out methodology of how I got about building an engine.
But the reality is I've been in these content roles now here at Lavender and previously at company called Sales Speed, under Vidyard, and almost all the content is geared towards salespeople. And that's where I came from, right? So I just think about what would I want if I was a seller to consume and then I'm going to make that. But I also keep in mind that a lot of the stuff that I would enjoy as a seller, too much of a good one thing is never good, right?
And I've told the story a little bit before, I think I did on a live show through my company, Social Social. My mum, when I was younger, we had no pair. The pair had to go back to Turkey because it was a family emergency. My mum was like a dinner for us.
And she wasn't the best cook at the time. So she made me my sister's like a kind of frozen chicken kev, like meal kit from the superstore. And she made it once and we all loved it. We feel this is amazing.
Chicken kev's the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the she is. The problem was once my mum heard that we liked it, she just started giving us chicken kev's dinner every single night. And those, you don't know, chicken kev's like a chicken breast bread, it's all, but some garlic and herbs and butter inside as well. By day five, we never wanted to touch chicken kev's every again.
And I still have a bad taste in my mouth about chicken kev. So when I think about scaling, a lot of that isn't just doing more content. It's increasing the variety of the content that you're putting out. So that means switching out between different formats, video, images, textbooks, different themes.
Is it funny? Is it educational? Is it motivational? Is it self-serving products, which has its place for sure as well?
So, um, my main thing is when I'm thinking about what kind of content should be used to grow a company, there's no one right answer. I believe the correct answer would be similar to a sales approach. There's like an omni everything, a little bit of everything, because that gives you the best chance of getting around the right people because everyone enjoys different stuff. Some people won't watch a video.
Some people won't laugh at a meme. But by mixing up, you give yourself the best chance of basically, uh, hang on, I'm run. Again, that's usually you're said than done, right? Because you got a team now, you got Todd supporting you, you've got, I mean, you're spending a lot of your spending millions dollars, you know, especially if you're adding like headcount, um, in this.
Again, back to the beginning, like where do you start? Is it just posting? I guess it depends on your ICP, right? You're probably going to say that.
Like where are they hanging out? Salespeople are on LinkedIn, so it makes sense for Will already to start posting on LinkedIn. But I guess like really early stage, like how do you get started and what do you feel like is the best mix or even, is it, you start with memes, do you start with a podcast organically? Like if you were to start your own company, um, and let's say it wasn't for salespeople, right?
You were going to market to some to finance people potentially or just something that maybe isn't like, you know, banging out posts every single day and wasting our time and missing quota. And I just spent my whole day on LinkedIn, right? What about other people who actually are doing their job that are harder to reach digitally? Like where do you start?
Yeah, that's a really solid question. And I'm glad you asked it because a lot of people think all this marketing content thing is just for the sales and marketing space and it's not. My first question is going to be like, where are these people? Like you said, are they spending time on LinkedIn?
I think I've got another place they go to. Now, I'm not going to go off the idea of I'm not seeing that many creators or finance engagement on LinkedIn. I'm not going to discount the platform. That could mean a green space that no one's happy into yet, which is again, very opportunity.
But I find the best place to look for when deciding what and where you're going to post is probably the people who are already doing it. Unless you're like a true innovator and the first ever company to ever think about making content for finance people, which I just pointed out from should not. I'm going to be looking for like the big organizations that are making a well known that space and that can come from having conversations with your customers or your potential customers, people in your network. I'm going to be looking for influencers and then I'm going to be looking at what types of posts have been doing really well for them.
And then maybe like what they're not posting about that I can actually then go and fill out an empty space with. So I think the first step for anything is pretty much research. Look at where you people are, who are they following, what are they saying, what are they not saying, what questions do people have in their like comments actions. This is a golden option that tons of people mess out on.
Like I went to this career on YouTube, his name is Patrick Dan. And when I started, I went from being able to talk everything about sales in my previous role. Now we're kind of very niche on email. So I don't know how much I can speak about email.
There's not that much I can actually say. And then I went to the comments section of this guy, Patrick Dan on YouTube. And he wasn't even answering his comments because he had like hundreds and hundreds. There's tons of insightful questions in there.
And every single one of those was a piece of educational content, like I can then go and basically fill a gap by someone else wasn't already filling it. So yeah, research, find rainmakers, people who are doing it right, and then do that in them or differently, should I say. Yeah, I mean, your intentionality, I know that to hear you say that, you're just like, yeah, I'm just looking at influencers and going to look at the comments section. I'm using their comments and questions or asking to like fuel content ideas.
I'm sure you get a question a lot of like, how do you come up with new ideas? That sounds like a treasure trove there. I tell I post on LinkedIn, I'll post some super comment. 50 people will like it.
And I'm like, all right, I guess that's a post, right? And but there's a lot of intentionality there that for some reason companies like they skip over that step and they go straight to like posting or reinventing, you know, the wheel. But so I guess to get and go back to the beginning, like how, when did you learn? Like when do you feel like you cracked sort of the code?
Or maybe you just always knew from the beginning, like the right thing to do. But what was like a learning process like to like discover shit, I should be looking in the comments sections and following these influencers like you kind of laid out a, you know, kind of a bare bones methodology there for standing something up or at least understanding the space, the competitive landscape of for this particular like, how did you get to be enabled? What was the learning process like for that framework? I think it was probably a little bit post-mortem because I wasn't even the way I described it makes it sounds more intentional than it was.
I was just a big consumer of sales content when I was in an IC role as an account executive. So when I started making content, I kind of knew what I liked and what people were talking about and the way I grew my personal brand was by doing things totally differently. Back then, not many people on TikTok and I started making humor videos, right? So I can't be like this untapped niche beyond a couple people I could think of, Oliver Squire's corporate bro.
I was doing it in a different way, right? But I realized that my content was never good when I was dry from inspiration and the best place to find inspiration wasn't from what was already inside me and the questions I was asking myself was actually from consuming other people's content. Now I have a leg up because as a content creator creates content for sales people are being a sales person. So I already kind of know what people want.
I think that's a big part of what a lot of content teams are missing is someone who's done the job. If I was going to start creating a content strategy for financials people, if I was selling a finance software or finance services, I 100% wouldn't do that unless I had a resource on my team who knew their stuff about finance, right? It'd be crazy to start creating content you think they might like when you don't know yourself. And I just find a lot of the time when I was seen marketing content that skates towards an audience, you can almost tell when the creator hasn't done that job.
You know what I mean? It sounds like a sore thumb, but in humor and in advice and tips because they don't go very deep, it's very superficial. So yeah, it can feel forced sometimes, like a humor might be forced. Yeah, I don't think people in those positions often try humor because it's a bit risky.
But there's definitely companies out there who are doing this for other industries outside of sales and marketing. There's a really interesting person called Alex Sue and he is a TikTok and LinkedIn creator, but he works for a company called Ironclad. He's a head of the community, like an evangelist type role. And he grew up following creating content for Loyce.
He's been a sales rep, but he's also been a lawyer. And he started creating content. He has a legal law degree. He started creating content for Loyce.
And this is what I'm talking about. I think there's a lot of opportunity in these niches that aren't sales marketing because not that many people are doing it. And therefore, you can do what I happened to stumble across a couple of years ago, where I started making TikToks for sales people. No one else was doing it at the time.
And that made my job a lot easier because I was doing some new fresh people, which meant I got more engagement, I grew faster. So if there was a finance company out there, I'd be like, heck, go and find a funny finance person who's reliable, knows their stuff, and make them a marketer. And that might take some convincing for them because it took some convincing for me. But worked out.
One of the things I'm hearing too is that there could be potentially a mistake. Because I mean, I think the objection, right, let's take about a traditional CEO that might give to you, like, why might I hire a finance person or will, I've got all these subject matter experts internally, right? And so I think one of the first, I don't want to call it mistakes, but one of the first steps at least that it seems like companies do is like, Hey, can we just find somebody internally just to kind of do this? And I'm pretty critical of this on LinkedIn, right?
I'm like, lavender hired people to do this. It's not, it's not will I can side hustle to post on LinkedIn. It's his main hustle, right? It's not like he's got a quota.
And he's also just like posting, sometimes when he can, it's more intentional. But a lot of companies really struggle to like just bring in that hire that is specifically for doing this, right? Like a gen out and I don't know, Jan Allen carries a quarter or not. So I'm making things up.
But tell me about like, how do you, how would you consult, I guess a CEO or an executive team or an executive marketing leader to say, Hey, like, you need to bring this person in if you don't, because it's more than just subject matter expertise, right? You maybe have some subject matter experts internally, but it's more than that. You got to find somebody with first way to invest in the role, and you got to find somebody with, you know, that's funny, right? That's strikingly handsome, right?
So how do you help a team kind of get over that hump and invest? I do think it depends. Lavenner is a very big franchise. And the fact that we have 20 employees and five of our team are marketers.
And almost all those people are creators as well. Even a video editor has a separate personal tick to tick to tick to count, but it's very, you know, get to a personal life. But that's a creative mentality that we've purposely gone after. Because I think that's even regardless of whether Jan Allen isn't creates her as a job, her job is not making content, it is creating partnerships, events, and running a community.
The content naturally gets us in front of the right people at the same time as well. Most companies who are going down the founder, Lead Growth Path have actually kind of kicked us out. A lot of the time the founders and CEOs of these companies are rain makers themselves. They are creating content building awareness of their brand online themselves.
But there's only so far that can take you. There's only so far a CEO posting. I'll take, I'll use using myself, all right? Chris, Chris can't do more, you know, he's got a job.
That's where you might start doing other things like this podcast, like your self, like bringing awareness to nose. And you can see the benefits of it. But because you've seen success through the founder, Lead Content Path, which is what we saw, but it's almost up until recently, Lavenner hadn't didn't use any ad set at all. And now we're turning off because we're like, it's not working as well as organic, we may as well hire another person to develop the content.
Not that we're going to do that. But look at the spend, it just wasn't making sense when you look at the organic reach. Before we all joined, every single way, where do you hear about us? Linked in, will or ends post.
I saw you, I saw you talked about on Twitter. I saw one of your tweets, it's all from that. So doing seeing that enables it makes it much easier to then say, okay, this makes sense to do more of. But a lot of companies don't have that.
Yeah. So therefore, can't justify because it doesn't happen overnight, because everyone's so obsessed with attribution and metrics and things you can measure. So unless you listen to this and hearing this sounds great, I believe will. It can be hard to bet on that if you haven't seen the success already.
But I think a lot of smaller companies can probably be dabbling with that founder's brand. And then once they see success, I can go and say, okay, how do we do more of this? And that's what you might be suffering in creatives or subject matter experts from that field that you're selling to. That sounds so I agree with that.
I think everybody sees this notion of a founder-led brand and then building content off of that. I love your perspective on what if your founder's not the right founder to do that? That could either be your early stage company, or maybe going after a market where your founder's not the expert. Or maybe you're a Siri C, Siri's D, later stage company, and your founder's gone.
But yeah, you're still trying to figure out what's my organic content strategy? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, I do have some thoughts on that. Well, that's what my last job was.
So before I joined Lavender, I was working at company called Sales Feed, which was a media brand founded by VITIAD for this exact purpose. The CEO, Mike, Michael Lit, doesn't really, I mean, I didn't listen to this and get offended by this. He doesn't really have that much personal reach. He doesn't consider himself a sales subject matter expert and video self-to-sales, but right?
A lot of things he was doing was talking about more about PLG motions, which frankly, most sellers who need a video to don't really care about PLG motions. It's more a marketing topic or a founder topic, should I say. So instead, what he did was he had a leader on his company, the inner steam, who was that creative creator type, who does talk, who creates content. That was Tyler Sardev, he was marketing a video art.
He said, I want to create an immediate company. And that's when Tyler was like, okay, to do this, we need someone who's done the job of the people who's already understanding creating content. And that's why I brought me in, right? So they're a series de-company video art.
And what they decided to do is instead of trying to make it work, it's only the twin I found it and built it internally by bringing the right people in. So that would bring me my strategy. If you think that's an untapped market for you, social community, go find someone to build a team to do it for you. And that's a, I mean, the one regret I think I had with that while I was there was that we didn't label it as heavily on the video art as we cut off, because we've got a whole lot of impressions, you know, we talk with millions and millions of views on TikTok, millions of views on LinkedIn.
And I feel like by creating a separate media brand, some of that may have been watered down from video art. And I since left, they've started combining the two brands more and actually now sales, we've just basically become video art's content team as a whole. So it has definitely changed since then. But yeah, that was, that pretty much would be my advice.
I think you just need a creator, someone who's kind of full stack. I want to say full stack like do a bit of everything. And let them run, but trust them a little bit as well, I think. Let me press on that a little bit.
And let's use that example. So you created a separate media brand and it went well, it was kind of disassociated with video or not as close as maybe you'd like it. Go back and let's go back and replay that again. And a different way.
Would you think you'd have the same success? More success? Maybe the media brand is not as big, but there's more revenue being driven. Like how would you think about playing that out again?
I think that the challenge was that by doing sales, we did not want to lose the identity of video. Video art is a seriously company has a brand to protect the set of things they can't say and they felt trapped and confined to the sales video topic. So by creating sales video, I'd like them to talk about anything to do with sales because when you think like video, really good example actually, it's kind of like salesforce and CRM. You think CRM, you think salesforce, you think sales videos, you think video, it's kind of like Kleenax when you think tissues, right?
So how could they break out of that? And that's the way they thought they could do that by creating a new brand. Because that would enable them to carry on doing the sales video, if they're not only that video, but also now reaching a new audience through sales video by talking about everything else, there is video sales like Discovery and other stuff, demos, code emails, cools, everything. Well, protecting the video brand because I put some pretty horrible, but edgy, edgy humor as well.
I don't think now we saw the success from it. I think they would have been happy with it. The bad comment and start doing the things I end up finishing doing at SalesView. I think they would have been worried.
I think that about brand, such a jarring direction of brand change. Because my job at both Lavender and SalesView doesn't primarily not being growing my personal brand. My personal brand is definitely fed into both those things. I own the company accounts.
So I'm like a subject. I like to joke about this, especially when I'm in a conversation that I don't want to be part of. I'm like, oh, what do I know? I'm just a social media manager.
That's kind of what I am in a very glorified way. But what that would subject matter expertise and my own personal brand, which can then feed into the main brand as well. But for the most part, my job, I believe my role is to grow the brand accounts more than my own personal brand. Because otherwise, I also, I do use my personal brand from my lavender, but it's not the main thing I do there.
Whereas the lavender account is all about education, entertainment, and then some some final conversion stuff as well. There's so much overlap there, because it's almost like the video sales feed example. It's like your sales feed, almost in that example where you as well, can sort of do things that are outside of out of bounds for lavender. You don't have to just talk about email.
And so you have that liberty to get weird with your own brand within some guardrails. And that also can feed lavender's brand, because obviously it's like there's association there. You can't like unassociate you from lavender. I could find me, but yeah.
I think it probably is. That we worked at Lavender, we're off for sure. But yeah, I think that's a really good analogy that you just put out there, Carl. I think in a way I was sales feeds like face and sales feed was video to face, right?
Now there's one less degree of separation, which is lovely to see and measure the impact a lot better. Yeah. Let's talk about this. Like, how do you measure what you just said was really interesting about like your personal brand versus lavender versus like branded or named accounts or whatever.
How do you measure that? How do you know like what you're doing is working in and above like obviously you're getting attention and so forth and so on. Like at the end of the day, how do you, what do you look at the determinants as driving the business you're not? That's a million dollar question, Cassidy, isn't it?
That's what I'm sure a lot of CEOs who has an about investing stuff strategy would ask. Well, I mean, that's the thing to add to that. Just will all red care. Like does he even ask that question?
Like, I'm curious to know if he even asks that. Like if you, I think, I think recently, probably a little bit more now we have investors, and they want to see updates and metrics and understandable growth looks like there is a direct link between impressions and number of page visits and about the number of signups we use. And to be very clear, I do think that this type of motion suits a PLG company a lot better than maybe some of those larger enterprise cycles that are coming in when price went like 50k. That's just my opinion, but only because I've done it in those two spaces.
So I can't say it would work for every company, right? In theory, it should, but I can only speak to PLG because that's what video I just, it's what I wonder is because I believe that someone going from a like to a user is a lot lower left than someone going from a like to a $50,000 deal cycle. Now like to use a $250,000 deal cycle does work as well because once we have three users, we can ping the VPS sales that company and say, hey, it's pretty clear your team might be struggling with email. Have you even if they're engaging in the content?
Enough. Hey, it looks like your team will look at email tips. That tells us that maybe there's this problem present that allowed them to get up solved. But to wind it back a little bit, the make ways we measure this, any kind of inbound leads, we give them an open lead form, whether you hear about us, we see LinkedIn is probably the primary one that we see, but beyond that, we also see mentioned personal brands and the content itself and different channels that we use.
And then as I mentioned before, there are certain things we can do to track performance of content against number of page visits. And when we see a spike on content, we also see a spike on page visits. When we see a dip in content, we see a dip in page visits. So that's one bit closer.
And then once we have the tracking in place, then see what they do on the gunner page, we can then measure the user outside of it. But if I went to an inbound channel right now, it would still be half of it is just saw your content on LinkedIn. And that's probably why we'll felt confident enough to hire this marketing team. Yeah, let me, that's super helpful.
We actually see the same thing. If we see a dip in our activity online, we'll see a dip in page visits. We'll see a dip in inbound. So very synonymous.
You mentioned earlier this idea of diversifying your content, funny, educational, video, by channel, etc. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you make that determination. But let me add on top of that. And that is, who are you thinking about in terms of your target audience, or do you think about the audience?
And I know it's, we can say generally salespeople, but how closely is your audience and your target tied to the target audience of Lavender? So like kind of segmenting down in sales, when you think about building content, or am I thinking, listen, I'm trying to hit the ideal buyer for Lavender, then I'll, they'll have fun. I'll be educational, I'll be funny, etc. Or you just trying to broadly hit sales on topics that you're interested in.
How how fine are you on that? How much thought goes into this? Or is it just diversified content, having a good time, be educational, funny, to a broad audience? I'd say all of our content is definitely kids, what's users and the user for us is sales rep.
Now, the funny thing about that is, that naturally attracts leadership as well. So what we see often is, and why I want to go to events and all becomes even because it's hard to envision it when you're in your basement, windows down here. Exactly what's happening out there. I go to an event like I went to sales assemblies, I read an expense Chicago 200 sales leaders there, no one with a VP title or below, could even attend, except for me, because I sponsored it.
But when you got there, I had to leave this walk up to you and go, oh, I share your content with my team all the time. So it's for users, they attract the attention of leaders at the same time. But our real goal of the content is to do that funnel, which is like as a PLG motion, awareness, become a user, have enough users, start with your cycle. And sometimes they skip steps, sometimes the leaders are content jump straight down to start your cycle.
That's okay as well. It's great. In fact, it involves less human involvement. But don't you question about how do I intentionally make sure our content is diversified and different?
Well, for instance, since I've joined, we've really made a big effort on diversifying the channels we focus on. Lavender historically has been growing on LinkedIn because we know sellers are. But I know from a previous role, sales be the largest following by far was TikTok. And that was all B2B sales orientated content.
And that got to 90,000 followers in my time there from a year. And it was nothing but B2B content. No one who saw that content would have got it if they went and B2B. Or maybe B2B or maybe at least a seller.
It might be one or two tips that would have applied to sales in general. So since joining, I'm like trying to break out of that bubble because it can feel like sometimes you've tapped out a certain channel. Like anyone who spends any real time on LinkedIn who's a seller, I don't want to make broad sweeping statements. But a lot of them heard of Lavender now, especially in the tech space.
And tech isn't necessarily the place we want to grow already further. There's a lot of tech companies laying people off still producing their budgets, not investing in new tools. So where can we go? That's probably why the new channels have been such a big focus for us.
And the one that I've probably focused on the most has been YouTube, mainly because I enjoy it a lot. But also I feel like there's a lot more value to give there. And out of all the platforms, it allows you to own your audience the most. But I also focus on Instagram and TikTok and should do it more, but Twitter as well.
That's the first one to drop if I'm slammed. But, you know, I kind of mean this morning about what we should do on Twitter. So we'll go back to that and do more there very soon. As for the content, the theme of it is it funny, it's educational.
I feel like you can hit both sometimes. But really, it's gut feel. I've been doing too many memes or stupid videos lately. Need to make sure there's some value in there.
I often find that the humor stuff gets the biggest reach. Like if I went to show you our top post over the past six months and so I joined, every single one of them has been a meme. But we also know that when those spikes happen in impressions, we don't see a spike in signups. The spike in signup comes when we give value.
So sometimes I think about educating staff as a prime to get people's eyes on us because typically what you see is when you have good performing content, it will lead to further positive performance with the rescue content. It's kind of like a karma situation. So if I can get a meme to get 600 likes and 100 comments, and it won't get so many signups, but it will mean that most of those people will see our next post because they engaged through our content and their next post is like a really tactical call email tip that they can use in their day to day life and they're going to want to tag their team in it and say like, check this out. Well, that's where we're going to see a level conversions.
So I like to just think about it like that. I've been a thing. It's normally around 50-50 down the educational entertaining path. And then there's probably 10% actually, so it's 45-45 10% of us.
That's good stuff. And I appreciate you dropping those insights. I think it's valuable information for this audience in terms of just how to think about channel, how to think about your target audience and kind of the fact that the management of your bottom's up motion also sees a post and in the split of I think that last insights gold and that is you get a bunch of awareness off of humor, but that doesn't necessarily convert. But it's a good lead into the type of content that I think that's obvious but insightful with Daniel Carl loves this.
I have a question then that kind of transition a little bit. What do we do? What do we do about Carl? So Carl's a great commenter on LinkedIn.
Once in a while, he has some good posts, all text-based. He's a seller to marketers. If he was a walk and talk every once in a while, we'll video content in there. We'll be proud.
Yeah, we'll stay on walk and talks from sales for days. It's Brian, but what would you do to spice up Carl? You know, like what should Carl be shooting for here? Or is he doing enough?
You tell me. Carl just sounds awesome. Definitely not doing enough. Thanks for sharing.
I don't understand Daniel. Do you think there's more opportunity for you to? I think Carl, here's what I think. I think Carl has a lot of potential.
As somebody who sells to marketers as a salesperson, to give the low down on kind of what people are doing. The sales, marketing relationship and kind of like how marketers should think about the relationship with sales. Well, I mean, it would be a good topic. I think the unique position of sales people is that they hear from a lot of buyers and hear a lot of people doing it and the challenge they're all facing.
So I think like that's why sales can make really good marks is because they kind of understand marketing to the same niche as who they sell to because they have these conversations, they understand their buys very well. So like a lot of LinkedIn posts tell these stories of like problem is that you sell it, right? So you go down the thought leadership route, right? I think Carl has a unique position to share like these unique problems that you hear from these conversations with people.
And therefore, because Carl's probably talking to more marketers, talking to marketers, right? So I feel like that's like an interesting thing for if you want to increase the reach in marketing space. But I also think that that Carl is very relatable to me as a seller. His common game is on fire and he has some very good insights for sales.
He has some credibility there. I think there could be like a little tie in there like by reaching sales people, almost making content that would make the sales people want to send it to their marketing team. You know what I mean? Like, that's good stuff.
When I think about content like growth, I was trying to ask the IS and I was like, okay, we use this new tool called common room. It shows us who's been engaging in our content and how much and like their impact score of how active they are engaging in our content. I was like, first thing we should be doing is finding either groups of people who are engaging our content from one company. There's five sellers following link, allowing us every post and they're engaging with it.
What's that tell us? Well, they're engaging with email tips that probably tells us they probably want to do better email. That's a great message you can then bring to the sales leader of that team and say, hey, your team, E-R sales tips up. That tells us that maybe there's a gap there where the sales sellers could have some better upskilling and this is a bad email by the way.
Don't send this exact thing. But that's the message we know because you're people are engaging with this. That suggests they want to do better or under as well as they could be. Let's chat about love them.
They're like, help, right? This is how other companies are solving that by using love and all right. So I feel like that's like a classic sales marketing company just don't see enough especially when you go down this content led path which I never find labs like talks about a lot. So I think there's a play there of how sales people because most sellers just got to count the amount of team doing.
They're going to make a rubbishy book. I'm not going to send to anyone because it's so biased that people will laugh at it by sending to them. Because it's basically like here's some data by our thing. No buy wants to read that.
But one seller's realized that you can capitalize on these marketing efforts. Like I can go on to LinkedIn and find people who follow Will Road and then sort by my ICP and find all people who follow Will Road who are also sales leaders. Heck yes. I tell you what, I told a little while ago I was making content for sales feed when I was working there and I did a live call called in session where I made it like 150 calls and every single person on there was one Canadian because I didn't want to get banned international fees for calling the US and I did it for my mobile.
But the second thing is every single one of them was followed me because it was a hack because I wanted to I knew there'd be at least a couple people like, wait, you're Will Eakin? And I kind of wanted to I knew in the video I wanted to capture that moment. It happened like seven times after 15 people who picked up, right? We could apply that same concept to my leader or even me today.
Just like use the people that's low hanging through right there from my marketing efforts, from my content from Will Road's content. They could then go and capitalize on because sometimes content won't confide people and they just need a little bit extra, which is sometimes an SDR or account executive giving them a buzz, dropping the message saying, hey, we saw this problem, it looks like you might be facing it because I noticed this and this. It's not a message that says, hey, you liked my bosses thing, let's chat. It's like it's still a good message by itself, but you know that person's probably gonna have a high chance of going to go out and because they are aware of you, your brand or your marketing team.
So yeah, that's good stuff, man. I'm just based on a good easily filled because you talk about a lot of the content. They don't add any more stuff to my plate, man. All right.
I just, okay, we're gonna open up those okay artists, Carl. I'm adding to that post and every day. Yeah, I think another, another like piece of content or pillar, I guess you want to call it or theme that I've thought about is just like, because I talked to so many marketers all the time, I like hear their mistakes when they're buying in general, right? Like, and then salespeople have a lot of insight into that.
They can see where like buyers don't know how to buy stuff properly, right? They ask you on questions, they don't evaluate or make these decisions properly, you know? And that doesn't mean they always have to buy from me, but you can kind of get some of those trends be like, hey, you could be a better prepared marketing team for an evaluation or something. I don't know if that's too niche, too boring, but I've always wondered like, man, I can teach people how to buy a little bit better because most folks like really struggle to buy and make a decision.
You know, they're kind of like a deer and headlights, you know, and they're and imagine it's like, they're not just talking to me, they're talking to other people, right? They're selling or selling or so. It's very difficult. So I don't know what you think about that content pillar, but maybe we'll turn the edge off.
I'm not about to go do it in the middle of the lake in a frozen lake, like your YouTube channel. Yeah, but yeah, that's interesting though, because like I do see a lot of marketing and spending wasted, especially as marketing budgets you know, like tech budgets and sales budgets are generally headcount and tech. The tech evaluations take like, you know, six or 10 weeks in some cases, right? Depending what it is.
For a marketing spend, you're going to sponsor a event sometimes that decision is made in a week because it's more fluid budget and you don't need to go through lines of approval because you know you're going to spend on ads or event sponsorships or community sponsorships or anyway, just a thought there. I think there's a lot of money that gets wasted there. So that's a good point. Yeah, I agree.
And I wish I could close a deal in 10 or 14 days on a little bearie of a spend there. I'm sure Cassidy can appreciate that, but I see a lot of media experience sales people don't always thrive in a more sass sell because it's very if people have media spend this night. Yeah, it's a line item. It's asked sometimes is not right.
Like there's no line like lavender or like an email like tool that can help you write better emails faster. The reason I want to apply is not a line that doesn't say that on a budget. So it's no, no, no, no, no, no, and that's why Mike is the best that there is. So anyway, well, man, it was awesome having you, appreciate you for joining us.
It was also to hear a little bit a little bit of backstory and kind of some of the strategy and some of the frameworks. I know you're saying like, you know, it's kind of Lucy Gucci, but I think you've got some frameworks in there, man, that I really appreciated it. And I know, I mean, all of our customer base would appreciate. So you should get those, you should get those documented in a sweet ebook, get it and run a little paid behind it.
I feel like that's kind of your style. So I really would encourage you to run that play and let us know how it goes. Okay, I'll do an ebook and get away for free. And just ask for a fair rest of our sales leaders so I can actually go in and do what I want to do, which is talking about sales.
Love it, man. Thanks for coming on, dude. We really appreciate you. We love lavender team and excited to follow along with what you're up to and excited for the big, you know, kind of release of what you guys have come in next with your content home.
Back out, you giants. Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks, Will. All right, route.
Look at these are going to help me as well.