Episode Description
This episode tackles pressing issues of our times:
- Analyzing the current state of the economy and its impact on marketing strategies.
- Brainstorming innovative approaches to succeed with limited budgets.
- Strategies to keep your marketing teams not only on track but excited and motivated.
- Deciphering the mindset of the new age of buyers—what do they seek, and how can marketers effectively communicate with them?
- Exploring creative affiliate and influencer campaigns. What’s working? What’s not? And how can businesses leverage these for optimal ROI?
- The intricacies of GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy and its ever-evolving nature.
With expert insights and engaging discussions, this episode promises to be a must-listen for every marketer looking to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.
Summary: In this episode, Darryl shares valuable insights into the shifting B2B marketing landscape, emphasizing the creativity of marketers tackling current challenges. He discusses effective strategies for overcoming budget constraints and enhancing communication with today’s buyers. Expect candid conversations about the "what" and "why" behind effective campaigns, along with actionable tips for marketers to refine their Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies in an ever-evolving environment.
[Read the full transcript]
pharosIQ: Welcome to the inaugural inaugural episode of pharosIQ’s podcast. This podcast will come to you hopefully weekly. Um, I don't have a ton of planning in place, but you know, the, the goal off, off, off the start here is to hit you up weekly and hopefully you make it back again. Um, this will be an interview style podcast, um, where we'll be bringing B2B Marketing decision makers and leaders in every week, um, with the primary goal of inspiring you with their creativity and ideas, right?
Some of my best ideas to be candid have been stolen from other people's great ideas, changed a little bit, um, and, and kind of rolled through from there. So what we'd love to do here on B2B Boring is talk about the non boring sides of B2B marketing, right? Beyond the, the standard plain Jane, um, you know, Enterprisey look and feel, right?
I think the B2B marketing landscape is shifting significantly, and there's a lot of great marketers out there doing a lot of creative things, right? So each week we'll jump in. We'll talk, we'll talk, let's just some hot takes, talk a little bit about, um, what each individual guest is kind of up to or working on, or some of the challenges they're facing.
And then we'll jump into the, what. And the why behind campaigns, right? What was the creative campaign they ran? Did it work? Did it not work, et cetera, and pull some learnings back from there. So that's what you can expect to come each week. Um, this week we bring Darryl trail to our podcast. Welcome Darryl.
Darryl: I just, did you get that?
That's Darryl Praill. You said that with Sussex, you were tentative. pharosIQ is, you'd be saying we're bringing Darryl trail to the list with some, you know, You know, monster truck voice. That's what you need to embrace. I
pharosIQ: had that. I would, that's like my life's goal on my tick tock. There's somehow this, this, this guy with a bass voice who just reads quotes all day over and over again.
And he keeps showing up on my tick tock repeatedly. And he's like, that's my life's goal to sit like little, just record myself reading quotes and people watch me over and over and
Darryl: over. God, I would love that. Thank you, my friend. This is episode one of 3000. It's about to come before you give or take could be a rounding error.
I am thrilled to be here. I have to say I am as a professional one, you know, colleague to another freaking jealous of the podcast name B2B boring, or as you see it PharosIQ’s Podcast, PharosIQ’s Podcast almost what it looks like when you see it visually inspired. Where'd the name come
pharosIQ: from? Um, I don't know. It just kind of hit me one day.
I walk a lot, right? So I walk in the mornings a lot. It's kind of like my thing. I get up, do a quick workout, and I walk usually about two miles each morning. Sometimes I listen to music. Sometimes I listen to other podcasts. Sometimes I just randomly walk in silence, um, while the sun comes up. And it kind of hit me in the morning that, uh, you know, a lot of B2B marketing teams and campaigns and programs and websites are just boring.
And I'm like, Right. And I think there's a little bit of a movement that's trying to change that right now. So I thought, how could we, how could we get some of those bright ideas and, and kind of disruptors in the space out in front of the rest of the B2B marketing community? Um, and Do it on a weekly basis.
So, um, I would love to tell you that there was some massive inspiration, but there wasn't. It was just kind of popped in my head as a random idea. I did a couple quick Googles to make sure that no one already stole it or had it. And I didn't find anything. So if you do my bad, there's another B2B PharosIQ’s Podcast out there, but, um, you know, beyond a quick five second Google search, I didn't do a ton of research on that side.
So Darryl is here. The self anointed B2B SaaS revenue machine who currently sits as the CMO of social media software platform Agorapulse. Right. Um, quickly tell us a little bit about, tell us a little bit about Agorapulse.
Darryl: Agorapulse is the classic, you know, marketing boilerplate. Agorapulse is a leading social media management platform that serves the marketing community.
Having been established in roughly 2011 and serving over 30, 000 customers, we make the lives of social media managers, technicians, and generally overall marketing leaders way easier by consolidating all your social media interactions, schedules, posts, measurements, analytics, all in one single platform.
So you can reach every single network you want to like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, the list goes on and be responsive and proactive measures improve. The ROI of your organic social and paid social efforts at Tagorapults. com. How'd
pharosIQ: I do there, Mr. That's fantastic. Can you make, make sellers in the selling organization be creative and witty on social media as well?
Or is that more,
Darryl: it's funny you say that we can now we couldn't, you know, six months ago, we have a cool thing we call writing assistant. And so your social people can, your sales, your sellers can write their little posts they want to. And then you can use the AI writing assistant that can change the tone.
It can change, you know, I want to be serious. I want to be funny. It can change the audience. It can change the length. It can make it shorter, smaller. So yes, now through the power of the writing assistant, the AI powered writing assistant, even your sellers. It sound
pharosIQ: as good as you. Funny enough, your social media software, a lot of folks listening to this podcast.
There's, there's hundreds of thousands of them. I can already feel it on this first episode. Um, our B2B marketers, what I've found is that B2B marketing, uh, practitioners and or leaders are some of the most unsocial people ever. Again, they do it for their job. They don't, right. So like, how would you recommend B2B marketing folks out there to get more active and get more social and proactive with their own personal brands?
Darryl: So I'll tell you a story and I'll give you the answer. All right. At least a answer. And then you can correct me or you can, you know, edit it out and insert a better one. So, uh, True story. So more, I've been at Agorapulse for roughly 18 months. Uh, before that I was the chief revenue officer owning sales and marketing at a sales engagement platform called VanillaSoft.
Why does that matter? VanillaSoft sold sales tech and primarily sales people. And then of course, Agorapulse sells marketing tech primarily to marketing people. So. When I went from Vanillazoff to Agorapult, the thing that shocked me was twofold. One, marketing people are way more into, I got to have the right camera.
I got to have the right gear. I got to have the right glasses. I got to have the right tats. I got to have the right accent color on my screen. I have the right lighting. I got to look good versus salespeople. They don't give that any consideration. That said salespeople way more active on social way more engaging than marketing people.
So it's not how you feel. So it's not how you look. It's how you come across. I don't know, but it's remarkable the difference. So you're right. Marketers, generally speaking, run away from social media. And I don't understand it either. But. You shouldn't be doing that. And what blows me away, this is what just boggles my mind.
Is that one of the core tenants of any good marketing demand gen program, which sales loves to leverage is the content. So marketing is producing. Boatloads of content, nonstop, like podcasts, blog posts, eBooks, et cetera. Uh, plus they're doing a lot of user generated content, case studies, et cetera. All of that becomes dynamic and incredible and impactful social media posts.
Today. I learned, did you hear, do you suffer from this problem? Here's the top five things I learned, uh, from this customer. And they're not doing it. So. It's as simple as get off your ass and do it and and stop making excuses. Stop being afraid. Stop saying you've got a face for radio and therefore you suck on video.
It's just stop it. It's it's it's like in selling. What do we say? We say just pick up the phone and start dialing. Yes, you're going to stumble the first little bit. But then you'll get better, you'll get your rhythm and you'll learn from your mistakes. And then it becomes natural. Get over yourself. It's the same in marketing and they don't do it.
And I don't get it. And it's dumb.
pharosIQ: I think, I think you hit the nail on the head, right? You are, you are a classically trained marketer with your beautiful camera setup, lighting, right? Et cetera. I am a switch switch. I am a, I'm 49 microphone. Um, stuck it on my portable desk and here I go, right there, you know, so like,
Darryl: You bought a microphone.
Yeah. It's 49 bucks. And my microphone is 10 times that price. Don't worry about that one. I'm just trying to compensate. The fact of the matter is you understood that you needed to buy a microphone to sound a little better because if you sound a little better, you sound a little more credible. The risk level strops, the credibility goes up and people are listening to you because you have that beautiful resonant NPR voice.
All because of your 49 microphone. And when I post
pharosIQ: on social media, the picture of me has this fancy mic in front of me, which gives me instant credibility. It's what all the cool kids do these days. So it's
Darryl: totally true.
pharosIQ: The
Darryl: problem with that though, total sidebar is that when you're in, you know, Google meets or Microsoft teams or zoom calls or, you know, Slack, uh, Is that I'm constantly switching from, you know, what are my settings?
Am I on this microphone? Am I on that pharosIQ? My, my headphones. So it always takes me like three minutes to actually start a meeting. Cause I never knew what my settings are at. So downside to having too many,
pharosIQ: you know, like the blurry background. Right. But then the mic was kind of like half in and half out.
So I just went this way, but, um, we are, we are in September, Darrell. Um, September, like you look down, take a deep breath and it's September and we're in the, for some of us, it's Q4 right around the corner, right? What are, what are you and your team working on right now as you approach maybe your Q4 or the end of the year?
Darryl: So marketing team as a whole, or shall we say the revenue team? Because in today, today's world, you know, marketing and revenue are so overlapping. It's scary. So should
pharosIQ: we say, should we say that
Darryl: the GTM team, the GTM team? I'm glad you said that. I can totally work around that. So what are we working on in Q4?
So it's, it's actually a really good question. Okay, so I'll set the stage and then the answer what we're working on will make a lot more sense. So here's the stage. The stage is that this year 2023 has not gone perhaps as forecasted. The economy has been a little suspect, people have been a little slow to buy, and generally speaking across the board we're seeing, uh, A vast majority, especially in the SAS world, a vast majority of us are either missing our numbers or just barely making our numbers.
And of course we have the pressure of the investors and the board and the CEO and the CFO hammering the revenue team, the GTM team to not only hit the numbers, but to exceed it. So we are in that exact same challenge. You know, my numbers could be better. We're doing well. I want to be clear on that.
Goropov's kicking ass, growing, life is grand, but are we hitting those targets? And I think I could say 80 percent of your people listening are not hitting them or they're like barely making it. And the other 20%, if they're making or exceeding it, they're probably making it by farming their install base as opposed to acquiring new logos.
That sets the stage. What are we working on? We're working on fixing that. So for example, we're knee deep into a whole GTM assessment around what are Our can we get consensus across all the revenue teams and the product teams Around what are our target icps? What is the total addressable market? What is the total relevant market?
Which means for those who don't know the difference addressable market could say the whole market's this big but relevant means only maybe five Or ten percent are actively looking for a solution right now. So that's the one that's relevant that matters to you. Um, You know knowing the icp is how do we sell them?
How do we target them? How do we how do we grow? You So clearly we can keep on selling to the install to the, the industries and the clients that we've been selling to. That's a given. How do we expand? How do we go up market? How do we get a bigger average deal size? So tons of pressure on that to support that tons of visibility happening right now for us on all of our metrics.
So like your example, I had a meeting this morning with our C F O where we've been going down hard on You know, how do we measure marketing? So for example, we've been doing a huge project on what is the return on marketing investment? So in other words, I'm going to give you this money. And it's great.
You know, historically we'd say, well, how many MQLs did you generate and how many of those became deals? No, no. Now we're going way deeper. What is the actual return on marketing investment as it relates by channel, by market segment? So we understand how you're progressing and then what is an acceptable cost for the MQL?
What's an acceptable cost for that SQO, that sales qualified opportunity, um, which means cause not every MQL becomes an SQL as you all know. All right. And then are we trending right? Okay. So. Massive visibility on M I worth the money they're putting into me, which then leads to lots of arbitrary conversations around, well, what percentage, how do you hold marketing accountable?
What percentage of my spend should be say, well, that's just branding. Therefore you can't hold me accountable for that. And, and do we, do we say 20%, 50% what? Or do we go and say, we don't care. We don't care if it's branding or demand gen. What we care about is what's the overall cost per meeting. So that's what's going on in a nutshell, huge visibility because at the end of the day, then they're gonna back coming back to me and say, we need you.
And this is actually what's happened to me over the next two to three quarters. To grow the lead volume you're sending us by 40 percent because we need, we have done the math on our GTM and what our sales capacity is based on historical numbers and our ability to hit the numbers, which means we don't have enough capacity in the sales side.
So we're going to hire more salespeople, which means you need to feed the beast marketing. And by the way, we need to do it in an affordable mechanism. This is a
pharosIQ: conversation. I
Darryl: never
pharosIQ: would have had five
Darryl: years ago, 40
pharosIQ: percent growth, but we're not necessarily going to give you a 40 percent more dollars.
Darryl: No.
In fact, they're taking money away from me. Why? Because in today's economy, the push has gone from growth to being positive. So they're taking money away from me and they want 40 percent more growth. So the pressure's really on for us to say, what are the new ways to grow? The challenge is we have the advent of AI.
So for example, what does that mean on the marketing side? You know, one of my biggest drivers is my number two channel is, um, organic search, Agorapulse or Darryl Prail or his white beard or whatever it might be, and boom, they find us, but people are using AI now, which isn't search. So if I'm not in the AI data model, they don't find me.
So in other words, if my number two channel is search number one being direct, uh, how do I anticipate and offset the inevitable decline? I'll get in that organic search traffic because they're using AI. That's just one example. So you gotta grow, you gotta anticipate the changes. You gotta be held accountable.
You gotta know your numbers and you gotta be able to scale and you're going to do with less resources. And that my friend is what we're working on it. We
pharosIQ: are in the, we are in the age of the camel versus the unicorn, as they say. So many LinkedIn about that. Although I've always kind of felt the camel was the better play, right?
Unicorns are, you know, like, Hey, let's spend a whole bunch of money to grow with no real rhyme or reason behind it. Never really made a ton of sense to me. Right? Like I find it somewhat refreshing personally to see the focus on EBITDA and profitability. And, and, and that's, I think, I think what we're going to do in this phase is build a lot more, a lot stronger companies for it, right?
Ones that aren't, aren't running to their next round of funding, hoping to have an exit, right? So that's just my take.
Darryl: And I agree with you, but there's, there's two things right there, right? There's that whole, right. Running to the next round, the A, the B, the C, and trying to always stay ahead of the money that's running out.
That is a, that is a thankless job. Not to mention you churn people, not to mention the equity and the original people who started the company just drops, drops, drops, drops, drops. Uh, that's, that's, that's the negative, but it's good for the investors. So there you go. Um, but the other aspect there, you have to look at it.
It's just, you know, most of these companies get stuck in startup mode. And when you're focused on EBITDA positive, you really have to start to make that transition from startup to scale up, which. Which, which means you actually have to start putting in formal processes. You actually have to start having, you know, the kind of analysis that I just shared that before we would have, you know, just gone by the seat of our pants.
And, you know, what does our gut say? We're now, we actually have to understand, but it also means when you start doing that your ability to move quickly does slow down. And it also means you've got to upgrade your, your people, typically your leadership, because the startup leaders typically do not have the scale up expertise.
So it's all about. You know, it's not just the dynamics for me to be successful in GTM and marketing specifically, I need to have the company culture and the leadership acumen that's going to allow me to be successful. And that is a painful process on its own because some people figure that out. Some leaders figure that out.
You get coaching, they bring in people to help them out and others don't. And they struggle and that causes conflict in the organization. So often you can have a great solution, but your impact, your success is impacted because the culture of the company is not one that allows you to grow and achieve it.
Woo.
pharosIQ: Interesting times in 2023. It's, I don't want to say it's, it's not fun, right? Cause it's obviously tough, right? But I think, you know, the, the, what you learn, the processes you put in place and the growth that you can see, especially in sales and marketing during a downturn. Right. Or are some of those that will create foundational growth paths for the next, you know, what goes down eventually comes back.
It might not come back as strong. There might not be 200 X valuations in the next three to five years, cause money's so cheap, but it will turn. And when it does all the processes that you put in place during the downside will just become that much more valuable from a return perspective.
Darryl: It's huge. So the secret though, to that, everything you said is just true, but then the real, I guess, foundational skill you need to have.
Is communications. You can communicate to your board or to your investors to manage expectations. So they have a shared understanding because some investors, for example, don't care about that. They just want to know what's their return and it's growth at all costs, no matter what the impact is, no matter if you're burning everything else down.
So, and that's the, and the problem people have to understand this, especially if you're a senior leadership role. So for me, as a CMO, I need to recognize that my CEO is getting pressures that I'm probably not aware of, or I can't see firsthand from his investors or from his board and it's his natural reaction.
Or her natural reaction to, if that's, if you have a female leader, um, to, you know, we're just humans, we respond. And sometimes we bark orders or we have bad expectations. So the communication skill has never been more paramount, in my opinion, to get alignment. And what's crazy is we're here sitting here talking about GTM.
And yet what we're looking at is we're looking at a couple, you know, things we're looking at business fundamentals. I talked about Romy and, you know, cost per meeting. We're looking at, Um, leadership fundamentals, communication, all right, and we're looking at making sure there's alignment among the revenue team that you're all going in the same direction.
Sounds easy. It's a pain in the ass and it's hard as hell.
pharosIQ: Setting expectations is hard. It's so hard, right? Especially when the expectations aren't great, right? Like the hardest, the hardest conversation upwards or is to say, Hey, my job is to give you a realistic picture of where we're going. Right. And, and it's not pretty.
Right. But I can tell you from both sides of it, I've been the person setting the expectations. I've been the person receiving the expectations. Right. It's so much easier to, to run a business or to report to the board or to report to everyone has, you know, to the, to the, the executive team based on a foundation of just reality, right?
Cause then again, that allows, you know, your CEO has to set the same expectations. Right. And, and it's easier if you can get ahead of even there, even if they're, even if the projections are down, if you can set those expectations early and let people know exactly what to plan for. From an executive and board and investor level, it's just long term.
Everybody wins more where everybody's seen that iceberg thing where 4 percent of the, you know, like 4 percent of executives hear the real story, right? That's so true. Right. And if that was 50 percent businesses would run infinitely more smoother, but no one likes to deliver bad news, right? Like, They don't like to deliver bad
Darryl: news.
And for many people, they don't like to give up control either. Cause you know, communication and alignment often means compromise. Um, and it also means having a shared understanding of the market realities. Right. So for example, and you can see how this can kick you in the ass. If I. Uh, this is not a grub bolts.
I'm giving a hypothetical if I were to have gone to my board a year ago and say, I am so optimistic. We're going to grow by 50%. And they, and we commit to that and we do a hiring plan to do that, but then the economy sucks or whatever, or we underperform 20%. I set expectations around 50. So if I hadn't started communicating like two or three quarters ago, that I'm not sure we can hit that because of reason a, B, and C, and here's my proactive suggestions on how to adapt.
You are, you're screwed by this point in time, you know, three quarters, four quarters later, you're absolutely screwed and probably at the door. So communication is also about job security.
pharosIQ: And the killer and the kicker there, not killer, but the kicker there is, as you said, not just to bring the revised expectations, but also the plant, right?
I mean, I've always been in one of my, my, one of my favorite quotes or sayings is, you know, like, bring two solutions to every problem. Right. Like every, every CEO, every CMO, every board member, every investor team, right, that they're so used to people bringing problems, right. And then having to solve for them.
And eventually it gets to a point where you're exhausted. Right. But if you're the person who brings the problem, Oh, and here's the two ways I'm going to solve for it, which do you think is better? You're always going to be in more alignment going forward. Cause you took something off that person's plate.
Darryl: So that if we, if you take everything we just said here, folks, as you're episode number one boring. Um, is a couple of things. Um, we've talked really about the fundamentals of running a business and how it, how it filters down into the organization, how does that impact your buyers? So for me in marketing, historically, when I got here, we were primarily only Selling to the social media, what we call the technician, social media manager, social media specialist, what have you and nobody else.
So we did a couple of things. We started selling to the CMO because we knew the CMO was being held accountable for everything we just talked about here. What is your role? Me, what is your cost per meeting? You know, blah, blah, blah. And we started. With a message around social media, not as a feature and a function, Hey, you do new reels.
You can do carousels. You can do this really cool scheduling function. Start talking about the business impact of return on investment of your, of your social media and how it's an affordable channel relative to channels like paid ad spend everything else. But the second thing we started doing, we started doing massive education of the technicians to say, Hey, do you like your job?
You wish you had more respect, which is a common pain. It's not a feature issue. It's a personal career issue. You're sort of saying the reason you're not getting enough respect is because people don't know the business impact you're having on the organization. The reason your boss is cutting your budget is because they don't understand the business impact they're having on the budget.
So this is why you need to measure the impact, not just from likes and follows and shares, that's interesting, but from actual revenue that is attributable to your efforts on social. And if you can start to do that. Then all of a sudden you're going to see respect change and you're going to see your success change and your career path on a trajectory.
It's been remarkable over the course of the 18 months how that has impacted our buyers and identified us my point Now all this is is saying marketers salespeople just don't focus on features and functions focus on the person and their job and how they live it and the pains they go through and the anxiety they go through and their desires for the career growth or happiness or whatever it might be and you will have much success.
So, That's a, that's a corollary. I went off on a tangent there. Sorry, my friend.
pharosIQ: We are, I think we are nailing every boring topic you could talk about in marketing in the first episode of B to Boric, right? Like it's true. Numbers suck. I just want to say that. Communication. Um, setting goal, like all of this, all of the stuff that normally would be not exciting is where we're diving in.
But I'm to the point about speaking to the human, right? And this is what, like, one of my key learnings in the same period of time, generally, right? 30, 40 years ago, right? Culturally, you'd have. And again, like my father, my father's father. They'd started a job, they'd be at that job, 35, 40, 50 years, right?
They have some sort of pension. They have some, maybe some profit sharing, maybe that, but they, you know, like if you talked, if you reached out to. My father's generation and said, Hey, I can get, I can, my product will get your company a better ROI, right? They would be bought in because they're so bought into the success of the company and the ROI.
The modern buyer isn't exactly as tied to the company as tight. Most people have a tenure of three to four to five years, right? So you need to speak to that person, right? I will help you hit your goal. That will make you look good to get your promotion to get to the next phase of your career. Right?
That's why when, when outbound marketing or messaging or prospecting talks about ROI for the business to be candid, most, most buyers don't care. They want to look good for their boss. And if you can solve for that, right, you, you will win deals and win business infinitely.
Darryl: I'll go one step further. That doesn't just apply to your buyer.
And by the way, I've seen stats. This has been pretty solid for the last decade or so that on average, we're going to have 12 jobs in our lifetime of our career lifetime. So tell us exactly to pharosIQ's point. Exactly to pharosIQ's point, right? Um, but it also applies to your staff. So, it's not enough for me to connect with my buyers.
Obviously, I have to because I want to sell. You know, I'm being held accountable, etc. I'm being paid a good salary to achieve those outcomes. But I am dependent upon my staff doing their job, doing it well. So, it's not enough that I just pay them and say, you get money, therefore, do your job and shut up. I need to point to them, What you're doing now is going to line you up for your next job, which likely won't be with us and your next pay ban, which again, won't be with us.
All right. So I'm going to give you new, new skills. I'm going to coach you. I'm going to train you. I'm going to help you go gorilla. I'm going to teach you if you don't know in marketing, you know, most marketers don't understand finance. I didn't once upon a time. I'm going to teach you finance. I'm going to teach you all these wonderful things that you need to know so you can speak it up to a board.
Cause one day I think you could be a CMO or whatever. Um, if you develop your, your staff, so they're motivated. And in that site timeframe, they understand that if they stick with you, you're going to ramp them up for that career trajectory. Just like the buyer pharosIQ talked about, this staffer will go the extra mile and we'll kick ass and we'll make you look good.
And I think people are starting to figure that out now.
pharosIQ: Yeah, absolutely. So we have covered a lot, right? So let's talk to, things are tough. You know it's it's hard out there prospecting is it outbound is struggling all that right so let's let's talk creativity right what is historically over your you know long established career what has been the most creative.
Uh, marketing campaign that you, that you executed either from a demand or a brand perspective. I'll let you choose. Right. Um, uh, tell us about that and obviously, and whether it worked or not.
Darryl: I'll tell you two, but I'll go like twice as fast because two come to mind and it really depends on the size of your team and your budget.
So when I was at vanilla soft, much smaller team, much smaller budget, no budget, um, it was all about going gorilla. And so one of the things that we started to do, we, we, we, we recognize that our two biggest competitors at the time, who were companies you may have heard of one's called outreach. One's called sales loft had raised hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars.
We just could never, ever compete. I was never going to be able to outbid them on my own brand. I was never going to be able to, to outsponsor them on shows. So how do I do it? And we, well, we were not one. We went total social and influencer marketing, and we identified a variety of influencers who have broad reach to my target audience and that same audience who likely didn't know who I was.
So in the one case of Anil Asav, and this is back maybe 2017, 2018, we targeted a fellow named Daniel Disney. For those who don't know Daniel Disney, Daniel Disney is a British based guy. He's a LinkedIn expert. As of today, he has over a million followers. Back then he probably had 400, 500, 000 followers. Um, wonderful guy.
Salt of the earth and, you know, Daniel was, was on, um, you know, with so many followers, how to get their attention. And so what I started to do with Daniel was I followed him for a while, sort of engaging with him, sort of commenting and stuff, and then I waited for the right topic where he made some posts.
And I said, I agree with you here, but I disagree with you there. I think you're wrong here. And this is why. And because I wasn't one of the commenters in the social posts say, Oh boy, I love you, Daniel. Way to go brother. Uh, it stood out and he responded. And then we had a back and forth, back and forth, and others were chiming in.
And then I pinged him personally because I was already connected at that point. I said, Hey, this looks really hot. We should, it was good. We were actually disagreed with one another. We actually physically disagreed. I said, let's have a live debate. And he's like, okay. And so what I did was I went all out with video promotion and email blasts and paid ads where I was using Daniel's name nonstop.
And I was making these fun videos where I was like, I'm going to kick his ass. He's wrong. And I created, I knew I was the bad guy. All of his followers were to clearly take his side and they did. And we've got on the webinar, which again, cost me nothing, right? We had almost 1500 people. And we went for an hour back and forth fighting and was all said and done, as you might imagine, it was a draw.
But what happened was our social influence blew up overnight. Cause we reached his followers. We had respect. People were checking us out, massive lead flow, massive new sales, but that was the start of, of putting our brand out there in the marketplace. And we were starting to be invited to deals. We never were before all because We use a little bit of cheap, free social influence and we were, we were brave enough to be challenging, but of course, Daniel was in on the joke.
He knew I wasn't trying to be, you know, disingenuous because he wanted the reach too. So it was a win win for everybody, but yeah, it was very much in your face, blunt conflict. That was the vanilla soft one. At Agorapulse, quick and dirty. Tick tock didn't have an API for the longest time. So companies like Agorapulse or Hootsuite or Sprout social or others, we couldn't support it like we could Facebook or LinkedIn.
And then last fall, maybe in September or so, August, September, all of them, unbeknownst to us, boom, press release, Tick Tock's got a new API. And here's Hootsuite. It's social by two biggest competitors in the press release supporting it. And we did not know a damn thing about it. We were oblivious. We had no idea this was even happening.
So you sit back and you do some reflection inside the organization as we did. And we said, how the hell did we not know? Like we're supposed to be elite. So that, uh, a leading vendor, so that caught us off guard. And then we scrambled, we had to scramble to get a contact inside TikTok. I don't know if you've ever tried to get inside Facebook or a meta, not the easiest, right?
And we were called on every single person that in the company who knew somebody who knew somebody at TikTok. And eventually we managed to get into connection. At the time they had over 400 partner applications. Post their press release that said that we have an API. So we had to use a lot of influence with our investors and everything else to say, give us some special love.
And they did, we managed to do that. That was the first part was, was about influence and personal connections. It wasn't about blind emails, um, to get that established. And then we had to go like a bat out of hell. So while R and D was developing the connection in the back room, marketing started saying, what was the case?
What was creative was our launch. So we have over 300. Ambassadors that we've signed up. All they get is some out of voice from us. They make content. We give them shout outs. It's a win win relationship. We do not pay them money. We started making funny videos. We've never done before. We started making bold, aggressive, sexy, animated videos about how this looks and feels a cool music, massive paid ad campaign.
We got everybody in the same campaign. And when the day came, we had pre pitched all the press. We had everything on the website. And we launched, it wasn't just us launching and we had TikTok launch, it was all 300 partners launching and all the embargo press launching. We had never done that before.
Nothing I said here, nothing I've just said is unique, uncommon, unheard of, and 98 percent of market organizations never do this. Agorapulse had never seen a launch happen this way before. Again, it sounds pretty basic. But doing that, the noise was through the roof. And suddenly we were everywhere, which of course, then you get all these silly, oh, you have tick tock support.
Well, then I got a shortlist you because I don't do tick tock now, but I'm going to do tick tock, um, evaluating my solutions. And I heard about you on LinkedIn, heard about you through this trusted person. I influencer I follow, I heard about you in the media, et cetera. So just having such an organized, orchestrated, creative, fun, um, Launch that involved all the different mediums and, and, but in the common thread between both of those creatives was the influencer community.
To get their reach out there, huge, huge,
pharosIQ: huge impact. That was going to be my follow up question. You mentioned, especially on the launch that the ambassadors, right. The non paid ambassadors, right. Which I think is a killer idea, right? Again, part of the value of having this podcast is so I can. You know, steal really killer ideas eventually on that side, right?
So, um, how, how did you go about building that? Was there somebody who was dedicated to just reaching out to users of the software and just having like handshake agreements? Was it a campaign? Did you, was it an inbound initiative? How do you, if I were to look to build an influencer community for my ex software, right?
What's, what's your best practice to jump into that?
Darryl: Okay. So this is exactly what we did. This is what I would stress. Anybody else do. All right. So we've been doing this for several years. You don't develop 300 people overnight. That will take you years. Um, but again, probably about five, six years ago, we identified an individual who was, who had done a great job as a influencer, as a solo consultant in this space.
Uh, they had written a book on everything you need to know about the unofficial book, uh, that you need to know, uh, for Hootsuite. So they weren't even an Agorapulse user. They were a big Hootsuite advocate. And then we approach them. We say, Hey, why don't you do what you did there, but do it for us. We'll put you on full time staff.
We'll pay you a very good salary. And your whole job is to go and build up this ambassador community, this VIP event, and then be the conduit to bring people, those experts to us for our content for, whether it be an ebook, a blog, a live stream, a podcast, a webinar, whatever it might be. Um, and then you're going to keep on doing the, the, the, the tour, uh, of all the events, and you're going to do a lot of public speaking, uh, and you're just going to be the thought leader on social media.
And, uh, and so he went as a, as a single consultant guy, he's like, you mean, I get a regular paycheck. That's crazy. And then we went one step further and we said, as long as you do your day job, we don't care what your site, you want to do side hustles, you would keep on doing what you do. We don't care. So he's got a whole bunch of masterclasses still on the side.
He does to this day. He's really, really good. And that's what he did. So he goes around, cause he has a personal relationship. You see the common, whether it's an influencer. What do they bring to the table to bring the personal relationship with the key players out there? So he was able to go to make all these connections nonstop.
He brought to the table and then he continued to grow for his public speaking and then bringing them to us for all of our content productions. So then our 30 plus thousand users see these people's names all the time. So then if they need an Instagram expert, they're already seeing some of these key leaders through us.
So it was a win win relationship. Uh, at the same time. We also had him launch an affiliated program. So an affiliate program in the straightest sense was, Hey, if you want to refer us, you can, it's non exclusive. All right. We're exclusive to you and vice versa. And we're going to put a few pennies back in your pocket for every person who signs up.
So again, we're not paying them. In other words, it's not money out of our pocket. That's a cost. It's a commission. Like I would pay a sales rep no differently, if you will, and, uh, go to market, if you will go to market, if you will, that go to market. So it became a win win relationship. And then we included them on our advisors and everything else.
So what these people saw was they saw they got a lot of visibility. They got a lot of great content. We promoted the hell out of them. And we only make a handful of asks for them throughout the year. And really all they have to do is they're already talking about their craft. Hey, when I'm on Instagram and I want to do this, this is what I do.
They will then say, well, this is how I do it in Agorapulse. I could as easily show you a HootSuite and HootSuite's got the same feature. It may look a little different, but you get the idea. So those little subtle plays are what's in it for us. On the case of the TikTok launch, they knew we had a lot of money and buzz behind this.
So for them, they were keen. So one of the things we did in one of our video, our launch video was, I bitch, I had 50 of my top influencers on one screen for like five seconds, where these people are all like talking about it. And then they were able to say, Hey, I'm featured in the launch video. Isn't that cool.
Makes them look credible. It's an easy claim, stupid stuff like that. It's a win win goes massive, but short answer. We hired somebody. Yeah,
pharosIQ: I think, I think the real, the real connection there is win win, right? There's a lot of, there's a lot of folks out there looking, you know, like we're, we've reached the, you know, that, that phase of business where folks are looking to be solopreneurs and things of that nature, right?
And there's a lot of those, there's a lot of those folks who, who can, you can find win wins to kind of grow your business on that side. So really killer ideas, love them, right? I think, you know, especially. Yeah, that head to head, right? Leveraging influencers to kind of break into a target market, right? Um, with a dissenting voice, right?
Um, a little bit risky. Gotta have the right vibe. And I think you do. And I think every company could probably find somebody inside their arsenal of humans who have that right vibe. But I think there's a ton of, ton to take away and a ton to learn. So, Darryl, thank you for joining us today. Um, I think it's been really, really fun for the first ever episode of B to Boring.
Um, many, many more to come and come back again, right? But let's do this, let's do this more often than just once on the first run, huh?
pharosIQ: Subscribe now, click the bell. We'll be back soon. There's many of those things I have to learn. This is just my first one. So yeah, hit the button, subscribe to the Spotify.
However it is that you do come back and talk to me each and every week where I'll have a new podcast. B2B marketer talking a little bit of marketing, kind of what's happening in the space, but also sharing one of their cool creative or killer ideas that help them stood out that, Hey, you might be inspired by, you might be able to steal.
You might be able to make some headway worst case scenario. You can reach out to all those folks, Darryl. Um, if folks want to reach out to you to just connect, toss some ideas around or maybe partner, how can they best reach you?
Darryl: LinkedIn. com. I'd say LinkedIn. com slash in slash Darryl. Prail, very cryptic.
pharosIQ: the third page. All right. Uh, the Canadian killer himself coming at you for marketing. Um, I, I definitely appreciate you joining. It's been fun. We probably went too long, which we always do, but Hey, it's the first one, right?
You know, the first one people can hang around and stick with us the whole time. So thanks again for joining. Um, and, uh, look forward to doing this again soon. All right. Take care. I'm gonna hit stop recording now, if I can find it. Yes. Yes.
Tags:
