Kushal: Hi there. Welcome to “On the Flip Side”, a podcast for anyone who wants to live their best sales life. We're going to be talking to buyers, sales managers, SDRs and AEs about things like, what does it take to be a great sales manager? Or how can you go home happy month after month? So let's dive right in. 

Hi folks, welcome back to “On the Flip Side” with Wingman. I'm Kushal, and today's show is going to be all about filling up your revenue pipeline with smart marketing, social selling and growth. Our guest today is Alex Boyd, the founder and CEO of RevenueZen, which is all about SEO, LinkedIn and growth. He's also a startup advisor. Alex, so great to have you on the show. 

Alex Boyd: Thanks so much, Kushal. Good to be here.

Kushal: To get started, Alex, we'd love to kind of hear about your journey to RevenueZen?

Alex Boyd: Yeah, it was kind of winding. I never thought I'd be running a marketing agency, never thought I'd be in sales actually. But when I… ever since graduating college with a degree in Moral Philosophy among all things, and first trying to work at hedge funds in Chicago, in New York, and then that not working out I ended up getting into sales, and then tech sales, and then sales leadership. And then finally realizing that I wanted to build my own company, because I wanted to build my own culture, that find led me here. And interestingly, when I started RevenueZen, and everyone thought they needed the most help with pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, and back then I had more experience in helping teams manage and close deals and ended up generating pipeline. But I thought, okay, if this, yeah, sure. I've built a team doing this in the past, let's do it and it worked pretty well. And then today, we look very different than when we started. And we still help people generate pipeline, but we do it in very different ways. And that's partially because we followed what works. And I've, to my team's delight and dismay, always changed that our offering in light of what's working the best, but also just the market. Different things work today than then did 5 and 10 years ago. And so we have to follow that as well. So it's been kind of a winding journey. But today, we help B2B SaaS and professional services companies grow their traffic leads, pipeline and sales. And we do that through an interesting approach to social selling that mostly focuses on the executives, not the company, and also through content marketing and SEO, and brand identity. So we help people understand their messaging and distribute it in front of people on social and Google. 

Kushal: That sounds like there must have been a lot of amazing moments along the way to building RevenueZen?

Alex Boyd: Yes, just like with travel, there are magical moments, as well as snafus and hiccups, and there were many of both.

Kushal: Got it. So maybe you could talk us through maybe you know some of your top say three learnings of running your own business. I know you come like you said, you know you've kind of had experience with sales as well. How did that sort of change? What did you learn that maybe you didn't know, even while you were doing sales earlier?

Alex Boyd: Keep your prices appropriate. I think he's the first one, I remember being at my last job where I was Head of Growth and we were designing pricing and trying to get much more specific with it and trying to get the sales team to be able to sell lower prices to some smaller customers. I remember the Head of Finance saying, I don't like the idea of charging less in any case, but I was so determined to help my team be able to close more deals. And now, today, being in charge of the bottom line for my company, obviously, I want to make sure that we do charge appropriately. And our early prices were much too low, they really still are probably too low, but they're in a much better spot than they used to be. 

And then having great partners is so important. And I think I didn't quite realize before at my last job, the importance of knowing who was going to be working with on the team, partially because it was a promotion to that leadership role. So I didn't really get to choose it. But knowing what I knew then and coming into this today, I was very careful to choose partners that I was going to enjoy and that I trusted a lot. I think trust is more important than skill in some cases, because you can teach skill, you can grow skill, but you can't necessarily grow trust, if it isn't there. And having a business partner is like getting married to somebody. So you can't untie it easily or… involves a legal proceeding if you want to. And…

Kushal: In some ways.

Alex: Maybe, having not been married yet, I actually don't know but I will. This is what my friends are telling me and what seems to make sense. And so maybe it will be more scary. So going through the journey with whoever you want to go through with is super important. And then another thing I've learned is that nothing ever happens as fast as you want it to kind of, like in sales too, right. You always want things to happen faster and then it happens on somebody else's timeline. And then for me, I've I feel like I've watched for example, the world's tried to do LinkedIn really badly for years and people have really caught on and you have these like late adopters who are saying, Oh, this is amazing. So you can automate all of your business development on LinkedIn, that's wonderful. 

I'm like 2016 is calling and telling you that this is no longer what you're able to do. And so people do things that work just enough and they keep going and they beat it to the ground like a bad joke. And I've tried to be on the other side of showing a new path but getting people to change is hard and it's like getting a buyer that you think should see urgency to see urgency and they don't. And you really wish they did, and you wish they had new priorities, but they just don't. And so that happens a lot with business too is you have to figure out a way to have the right timing. You can't be mistimed with the market, just like you can't have somebody buy a product from you at the right time or at the wrong time.

Kushal: Which brings me to my next question, which is around LinkedIn, right. Do you think it's already too saturated for people at least for newer people to sort of break into, or do you still think, you know, it's fertile ground in that sense?

Alex Boyd: I get this question all the time, I definitely don't think it's too saturated. The reason I think people see it as more saturated is that more people have caught on to the idea that if they post more, they'll get more likes and comments on their posts, but that's true of any social network. The thing is, with more content out there floating around, but people still using LinkedIn, the bar for quality just went up. And so all you have to do is be good at what you do in your niche and say things that are interesting. 

Now, I often tell people, we can't help you manufacture insight. If you come from a certain industry, you have to know stuff about that industry that people care about. And if you just post for the sake of posting, then you're… the world deserves better than that. Right? So the world deserves people who have subject matter expertise going on LinkedIn and everywhere else and sharing that, that's the purpose of this whole thing is to help everyone learn and get better and grow faster. 

But now you have a lot more people just posting for the sake of posting. I see a poll created, should SDRs still be making cold calls every day, like this is not helpful. This is just you reading something that said create a poll that will get you engagement and creating a poll. And so no, I don't think it's too saturated, I think you need to do two things, one, connect with the people that are in your audience in your niche. And don't try to just sell to them right away. Just make sure that you, if you have something in common with them, establish your relationship, try to take it offline if you can, and do actual networking. And do that a bunch every day. Like if you can talk to somebody new, if you're an entrepreneur or a founder, and this is part of your job, you can do it every day. It's not part of your job maybe once a week as you try to either launch your own company or change roles, but do something and I don't just mean hit the connect button and walk away, try to build a relationship and then post things that have value for people. And the marker here is, are they going to actually save it and use it in their job? Does it make them stop scrolling, is a little bit beyond the obvious? When I say beyond the obvious, I don't mean come out of left field with something that nobody understands. But nor is it squarely within things that are already obvious in the profession. So ideally, you meet people where they are and you take them one step toward your point of view. If you don't have a point of view, then don't talk about actually, if you don't have a point of view at all, don't post on LinkedIn, ideally, but so connect with the right people. Hopefully you do and develop one as you go. 

It's also okay to not know everything. A lot of people say why I don't want to post on LinkedIn is because there are so many people who know more than me at this. Well, that's also too far in the wrong direction. Just because there is someone out there who you think knows more than you it does not mean your opinion is not okay. So have a point of view. But you also don't need to be the master of everything either. Share your journey, share the learnings that you have, but also be humble about it. You don't need to be the, you know, most supreme thought leader of marketing to post about something that you learned doing your marketing job. Writing a question is just as valid, saying this is something I'm struggling with. And here's what I think, what does everyone else think? One of my favorite people to follow on LinkedIn is Reed Blackman. He posts about Ethical AI. He doesn't have all the answers. But he is really good at asking the right questions. And he consults with some really interesting companies that are using data and machine learning to find answers to do that. And so he was one person who told me back when he was teaching me in college, he was actually my professor, I remember him saying about a paper, he said, You shouldn't be writing the grand theory of everything, just find one small thing, make your point and then argue it. That's what I do on LinkedIn, I don't have all the answers, but I make one small point, I'm open to being wrong. And if you do that with your audience, and you connect with the right people, and you actually build relationships, you will see success with any social media platform, including LinkedIn. 

So I don't think it's too saturated. But you have to do it right and you can't be lazy about it. So that I think is the minimum bar for at least these days in about five years ago, you could be lazier with it and have more success. So maybe the bar for effort has gone on, but it's nowhere near out of reach, it's still very much within reach. And I encourage people who want to do that to go for it and to just start.

Kushal: So I think LinkedIn, like a lot of other social channels when it comes to these, it's sometimes hard to sort of attribute a lot of traffic directly to it, right. And you know, data attribution is one of those perennial problems that marketers seem to face and seem to talk about as well. Since you leverage social selling so heavily, how do you sort of explain that to you know, your clients, your customers, and what is it that you think marketers could kind of learn from that to convince their leadership as well?

Alex Boyd: How do I explain it, unconvincingly unfortunately. There really is, now LinkedIn does not make it easy to get that data out and usable. I think mostly because LinkedIn is designed to get your eyeballs on the platform and to sell ads and recruiting solutions and all sorts of things, right. But it's not necessarily designed to do the absolute best job at helping sellers and marketers do what they do organically. After all, if you're using LinkedIn organically, you're not necessarily spending on ads. So they don't necessarily need to make it easy. What I do in practice and have been doing since the start is if somebody is sourced from LinkedIn organic for me, so they see my post, and they write me an email, or they see me post them, DM me or see me at the post and or comment, and then fill out a form on the website saying, I've been following your CEO on LinkedIn for a while, we have a lead source in Salesforce that just says LinkedIn. And I know that's what it means. And I just go in, and I total up all the invoices from accounts with the lead source of LinkedIn, and I can see, you know, seven figures of money from that. And if I look at people, accounts that were sourced from referrals, and those referrals were sourced from LinkedIn, that's even more. And some of the earliest big clients we have came from people who I still have the emails they wrote, and they said, I saw your post on LinkedIn, I wanted to reach out for blah, blah. 

And it's truly amazing, where if you actually just look at that, and then you log it in CRM, you'll have information. And ideally, you're also able to, you know, analyze that and do more of it. We are actually building in our SaaS slowly, because again, everything happens slower than you want it to, and more attribution for LinkedIn. So getting people from comments and likes into your CRM, for example, if a prospect likes one of your competitor’s posts, and then comments on your post, those activities will be synced to your Salesforce account, this isn't built yet. So I'm speaking in advance of that feature being live. But ideally, right, that's what we would have is we'd have this whole universe of if I need to know who to call today, I should probably call people who have engaged with my content and my company's content. I can't do that, not easily. I have to have an assistant go through and told them. So what I tell people instead is, here's how you can start to do attribution, I encourage your sales team to log things, and then you're going to hear about it time to time, but you kind of just got to believe and it sounds terrible, telling marketers who live and die by attribution to have faith in something but more and more CEOs are getting that, they're getting that if you just speak to your market, and you know that you're speaking to them. So your prospects are there, they're engaged with the content, you know, that they're seeing it that you don't need to have a direct, I collected this email address attribution to verify, they just know that if they're given their prospects minds, and they say their piece, and the messaging is good, that will eventually have an effect. It does. And when they… if somebody doubts this, I ask them I'm like, name a coffee shop company you've heard of. He goes Starbucks, why did you say that? Because you know the brand, or whatever it is that they like, if they're into sports, I'll ask them to name a shoe, or if it's in tech, you know, you can… name a CRM Company. Well, at the end of the day, people have gotten in your head. And if they’ve gotten the message in there, you can do that you can do that on LinkedIn, too. And because that data lives in their head, right, like, how do you know, to click on the organic search result versus the paid one? Well, you just have it in there, right. 

Attribution can't get in the head and pull it out. That doesn't exist. And so you won't ever have perfect attribution. And if you are, so I'm gonna say insecure about your marketing that you have to rely on for direct attribution, you will lock yourself out of the best marketing tactics available, because you'll do things that everyone else who's operating from that mindset is doing. And that is very saturated, paid advertising is getting more saturated. And if you don't, if you step outside of that, then you will have access to things that people who are really good at marketing do. We think about B2B, we think about everyone's heard of Dave Gerhardt. And he doesn't have an attribution dashboard. We see Sarah Pazyryk, Gong's posts, she works really well with this. And I'm sure all those people would love attribution, but they do it anyway. Not having it. Why do they do it? I encourage everyone to call Sarah and Dave and Chris Walker and everyone else and people like me and say, why do you do this if you don't get perfect attribution? And we're all going to look at our bank accounts and show you the reason. And we didn't need attribution to get us there. I know, that's a leap of faith, but I encourage people to make it.

Kushal: Change Nike's logo from just do it to ours which is just do it anyway. And then you can see what it sort of leads to. So if we zoom out from social selling, I think that might not be directly attributable right, to kind of a larger universal marketing. What do you think are maybe the largest levers to pull when it comes to inbound marketing that companies should be taking advantage of?

Alex Boyd: I think, saying more education is a little bit oversimplified, but it's really with not trying to skip the right parts. A lot of people try to skip education awareness, brand and go straight to lead gen. They'll even just say, like, they'll refer to a scope of work and say, yeah, we don't want to do the brand and concept pieces, let's just do the lead gen part. But what do you think happens when you don't do those things and then you ask somebody to take a meeting with you? It's not going to work. And people will see that and so they'll run lots of ads. They'll say I want people to get a demo. If they… if we're helping them write outbound copy, for example, and they say, no, I don't want to have that CTA just have people go right to my calendar link. Well, if they've heard of you already, they might do that. If you've educated them in the past, they might do that. Yeah, sure. But if you haven't, you're just some random asking them take a meeting. 

And so I think our excessive focus on dashboards and pulling these levers with everything outbound, everything SDR, everything paid ads, everything is like, pushed toward the bottom of the funnel, because marketers are squeezed because sales is squeezed. It starts with that it starts with sales teams not hitting quota. And more and more this year SDR and AE teams are not hitting quota. And they're hitting less quota than last year. And so the whole profession is squeezed and then that bleeds down to marketing. Because marketing is now trying to hit bigger and bigger goals. And so they're less able from their exec teams to focus on the longer term, which works better. Anything longer term pays off more, but people have less patience for it. So they do short term things, they skip the brand and skip education, they go right to lead gen and it doesn't work. 

And then they try to do more of it. And they think well, how can I reduce my advertising costs? How can I just send Wait, can I just send more emails? How do we make sure we just send more emails? It's like that is the wrong, we need to break the vicious cycle, this relationship has become toxic, and you need to break that cycle. And so if you're able to do things that pay off in the long term, you're actually gonna get short term results. We've written LinkedIn posts for CEOs that get huge opportunities in the first few hours. Well, sure, LinkedIn content marketing is a long game. But that paid off pretty quick and often does. If that same guy had just randomly cold emailed his whole network, it wouldn't have worked as well than writing a really good post about where he is in a story, or writing his network where he is. The same thing goes for AEs too, if you are able to play the long game, rather than trying to hasten your sales cycle, you can do a lot better, and people are overly focused on the process and they're clinging to it, because that's all they know. My quotas are low and performance is low, you cling to the process and you can't break free from that even if it hurts you. I remember an AE who just made me get on a call to review a proposal. I was like, I don't need to get on the call. I know the value, just send me the proposal. This was for payment processing. I was like, when I got on the call, I was just angry. I was like you have annoyed me, I am less inclined to buy than before because you are sticking to your process. And I don't like it, but they do it anyway. And marketers do the same thing. I don't have the answer for how we can break that cycle apart from leading by example. But that's the problem with changing whole marketing at once, that's tough.

Kushal: Got it. So let's say a company is sort of in it for the long term, right, you know, they have their marketing and sales kind of lined up nicely. They understand the value of doing long term things. They understand, you know, that long term also means you know, better benefits over the long term. What would you advise these companies to sort of focus on then from that lens given that they have the patience?

Alex Boyd: I would instead of them hiring 10 SDRs. I would say hire six to seven SDRs and then hire one Community Manager. It could be even the same person that was gonna be an SDR but you got them in their better skill set and a subject matter expert, you may not call it that maybe it's a head of content or ahead of demand gen or somebody who is a subject matter expert and is working on not necessarily the one to one community engagement but the overall marketing. Here's an example of a great community manager, Dan, I actually never say his last name out loud. I maybe mispronouncing, I think it's said that the J’s probably silent anyway, he does such good things he I remember being confused because he bought sushi for me and my co-founder and didn't make us go to a meeting he just bought us dinner and I was like that's there are free lunches there, 100%. Or, if you give people free lunches, they will remember and be and wonder why and also be pleasantly if they had simply cold called me that wouldn't have worked nearly as well as a $45 sushi lunch box then.

Kushal: Time to think out of the box then.

Alex Boyd: If you give people license to think out of the box, which SDR is not given license to that a community manager. I have demand and their job is to think outside of the box. Well, hopefully, but more so than. And so I think if people can do that, and hang their hat less on just short term cold outreach, and more on how can we be interesting and really just delight our buyers. People have forgotten that if you just make people like you respect your opinion, they will eventually want to know what your product is. Because they assume if they like you and they respect your opinion, think you're credible, they're going to assume the product is well built as well. Great people build great products. We know this, we try to avoid people's products to who we don't like and we lean toward products that we do like we will give a lot of slack to people who we like even if their product isn't quite as good. And this happens in B2B too. I really don't recommend other calendaring solutions apart from sleep I've heard because of this and they have not actually they have never compensated me in cash. It's been you know, collaboration, a free lunch here and there which one could argue but at the same time I got a beanie, there's a nice mug on my desk. It's I've never been… there's no rev share. It's just like just build that community and I’m part of it, and do that with your market that will go a much longer way than hiring one more SDR. And that one more SDR got more expensive this past year too, because the good ones now cost more money. So it compounds the problem, resist the urge to hire one more SDR and try to be more creative.

Kushal: I love how you really outlined that shift. I think more of us marketers, really owners, people who kind of want to deliver on revenue need to make, right, in terms of the mindset shift, the capabilities that we need to build it out, the emphasis on creativity, and not just kind of doing things a certain way on building up relationships, rather than treating them as very transactional relationships as well. I think that's super key for all of us to do. I know I'm running out of time, Alex, this has been an incredible conversation, which is why it brings me to my last question for today, which is really around what's the number one impact that you want to drive on the world?

Alex Boyd: I want to reduce the amount of bad marketing in the world, I'm going to do that by helping people be incentivized to do more good marketing. And that's why I think things like trying to do a little bit better attribution for organic LinkedIn will lead more people to grab onto it, and at least start to play with it. I'm not changing the world. I want to be a little catalyst for something new. I want to get more people be able to have that good habit, if we can have one more SDR, like, [inaudible 00:21:15], while he's not necessarily more, but we're in his past, when he sets, you know, 60 meetings in a month with making no cold outreach, I want to help people do more of that. And if I can help one more SDR have a less miserable day to day, that will be a victory. And then one more and one more and more. If ideally, the world that we want to see is we enjoy being marketed and sold to because it's helpful for us. And I think it's probably a little bit more helpful than it used to be. But I'd rather see the days where advertisements were funny again, and where we wanted to watch them where, and I think some companies do this really well, but where salespeople are helpful, and they really are trusted advisors. And for example, my girlfriend got a call the other day from somebody who said, we want to work with this vendor, but we need you as the account manager, would you consider joining that company? They call her to sell to them to join the company? Like why would they do that unless you build up a fantastic reputation? So I want to reduce the amount of bad marketing in the world. And that includes bad sales. And most of that is irrelevant, customize, just sort of mass blanket generic outreach and content in the world. And I think if we do that, the heads of marketing and sales who are in charge of it will also have a much richer, better, more enjoyable experience. And that would just be great for everybody, including me, because I'm one of those people and I just have to they want to have a better life myself. So that's what I want to see. 

Kushal: That sounds incredible. That sounds like a good world to sort of live in. And yeah, I think a lot of marketers will find themselves kind of really living happier lives once they learn to kind of embrace being more creative overall. Thanks so much, Alex. I think this has been a wonderful chat with you today.

Alex Boyd: Thanks so much.