Episode Description
Steve discusses the power of personal branding, spotlighting LinkedIn’s role in boosting professional visibility and networking. He also emphasizes the synergy between sales and marketing teams, highlighting the importance of collaboration and effective communication for successful campaigns.
From exploring misconceptions about account-based marketing (ABM) to sharing lessons from campaign experiences and discussing the impact of various social media platforms on professional branding, this episode is packed with practical insights and stories from the forefront of B2B marketing. Tune in for a blend of personal anecdotes and expert advice from industry leaders!
pharosIQ: right. Welcome, welcome to this week's episode of pharosIQ’s podcast. I said this week, cause for the first time, I don't actually know what episode we are on, which means that we've made it far enough that I stopped counting. This week is brought to you from my house at my kitchen table, because all of the offices that I work at are currently under construction or in a different state.
pharosIQ: Hence the blur in the background. Welcome to my home. If a dog barks, that's how we're rolling on beta boring these days. And I actually can't edit that out. So this week we've got Steve B, head of demand generation for Google cloud joining us from, I believe Colorado, correct? Yes, that is right.
Steve A: Yeah. Boulder, Colorado area.
pharosIQ: And I'm sure you probably guessed if you're seeing us on video, given the flannel, some sort of hiking t shirt and elk pillow in the background that Steve is bringing to us from Boulder. I don't think it gets any more Boulder than what he's putting out into the market right now.
Steve A: No, I'm bringing the fall vibes a hundred percent. I'm watching the leaves change outside my window, just fully embracing fall at the moment.
pharosIQ: Are there leaves in Boulder? West Coast usually. Do you get the full multi season effect? I know we do in the Midwest, but we get the misery of the summer too, but you might get a little of that too.
Steve A: We do. Yeah, we're hot. We're high desert here. So we're a little bit of both. We've got the sunshine of the West coast, but then we have since we're in the mountainous range, it's all Aspens and those trees actually, they turn bright, bright yellow. So it's pretty cool. Actually. I've it's been new for me, but I've enjoyed it.
Steve A: A lot of people around this time, instead of, if you're in new England, you go apple picking, right? The people here, they go Aspen viewing, they drive up into the mountains and they try to find areas of huge Aspen groves and just. Take pictures and put them on Instagram, that whole thing.
pharosIQ: I know pumpkin spice, latte Aspen viewing. They take the kids out and I'm sure the kids love those. That's something like like a mom plans or like a Saturday, we're going to do a thing and go Aspen viewing and the and the kids just make it a miserable experience.
pharosIQ: Like in a mat, like same thing for what would be apple picking in the Midwest as well, where we have the usual where we go and every time we go Apple picking. My, my wife has massive ambitions to turn the apples into something. Apple pie. Oh yeah. Something. It's been 12 years, Steve.
pharosIQ: I've got I've got no apple pie. What else do
Steve A: you do with 400 apples? You
pharosIQ: throw them away. That's what you do. You go through an entire season where they sit on your kitchen table or a counter in a large basket of something of that nature. And then eventually you throw them away because no one does anything.
Steve A: Yeah. Welcome to apples here. But we've got the pumpkins there may or may not be some plans. To take the family pumpkin picking this weekend, which is similar, right? You go out to the field, but now you're hauling back this giant pumpkin. And my eight year old wants the biggest one in the farm.
Steve A: And they go, dad, I want that one. And it's Oh, okay, Henry, I'm gonna have to deadlift that. I might hurt myself, but I'll do my best to get it on the truck for you.
pharosIQ: 600 pounds later, four by four feet. They take no issues with making you feel like a terrible parent about it. Like ever have those, like the year where you just don't get to it.
pharosIQ: And it's like October 27 and the kids are like, we haven't carved pumpkins yet. And I'm like yeah, guess we're not doing it this year.
Steve A: Kids. Yeah. Yeah. Still going to head
pharosIQ: out, like still going to go, you're going to get some candy. It'll be a great season. So
Steve A: yeah, it's easier with my three year old cause she has no comprehension of.
Steve A: Calendars and times and dates. So she has no clue that Halloween's coming, it's pumpkin season and the holidays, but yeah, the eight year old, he's he's got, yeah,
pharosIQ: he's catching up and you'll migrate right from that, right into help on the shelf season and that's all over from there.
Steve A: Yeah, there you go.
Steve A: Yeah. Yeah. Then you're then it's January and it's Oh, got to get back to work new year, new goals, new targets.
pharosIQ: Awesome. Speaking of all those things, new years, new goals, new target. Let's talk marketing. So I see you've been quite the celebrity, on the linkedins and the interwebs these days.
pharosIQ: But I've been talking a lot about personal brand with in, in the B2B space with different marketers. Some are all about it. Some are like, ah, it's not my vibe. And especially, marketers tend to not be as active socially as other folks online. You're quite active, what's your thought process there?
Steve A: Yeah it's a new thought process for me. So I'm sure this will evolve as I get more into it, but I. Used to, and I still do hate social media. Like I don't like it per se. It's not, I'm not an avid social media user in my personal life, but then this concept of, Oh, it's a tool that I can use in my professional life to build a network.
Steve A: I can learn, I can connect with other leaders. There's a lot of value. That I think you can get out of it as a professional, but I think some folks that are, if this is your day job, I have to imagine, let's say you're managing social for a company or even just in digital marketing, is that really what you want to do outside of work hours and just more and more of that?
Steve A: Like I don't clock out and then, go upstairs and obsess over marketing metrics and ABM strategies, right? There's a personal life and a work life too. So this has been fitting into my work life and it's been fun, actually.
pharosIQ: I you stress a little bit after work about those things, right?
pharosIQ: You don't end up being the head of demand gen for Google cloud by not stressing a little bit about the metrics after hours.
Steve A: That's fair. That's fair. You do it. Yeah, you certainly have to care. And I'm overcompensating for my easygoing approach to things, deep, deep down like a duck, deep that the legs are under the water and I'm freaking out about hitting this quarter's target.
Steve A: But on the surface, I'm like, yeah, we're cool. I'm good.
pharosIQ: One of my, it's one of my favorite analogies ever is just so perfect. The duck with the water. And it's, it fits in any situation, speaking of metrics goals, you mentioned yesterday, we were supposed to record this yesterday and you were joining a call with sales to talk about pipeline.
pharosIQ: And one of the most common threads that we talk about in B2B and in marketing is obviously that relationship with sales. So I assume yours is fairly close if you're joining calls and going through that. Tell me about that.
Steve A: Yeah. Yeah. Then this is the thing that I've been talking about because I also feel this is, this has been a gap because it was for me.
Steve A: So I essentially learned this the hard way. Rewind a few years ago and I was that quintessential. Upper funnel marketer focused on cost per lead, focusing on just MQL vanity metrics and got to the point with sales and essentially getting called out by sales that, Hey, none of this is really sourcing any demand.
Steve A: You guys aren't actually creating anything incrementally new for us. And that was a bit of a. Aha moment of, man, I if I'm going to pursue what I think I'm doing in demand and doing a good job, I've got to figure this out and it wasn't, Hey, I need new software. I need to redo our processes or any of that stuff, which I think becomes easier to try to implement it was.
Steve A: I don't have a good relationship with sales right now. Of course, they're calling me out because they have no idea what I'm doing. We're not sharing what's going on. We're building these programs in a silo and then we're throwing it over the fence and we're hoping that sales is going to do something with it.
Steve A: And that's, so that's really where it started. We can get into that and how it's progressed over a few years, but it was really that first aha, that. Oh man, it's nothing I'm doing in the programs themselves. It's more of just I'm not being a good steward of marketing and building that bond with sales.
pharosIQ: It's a good point. I think that the gap between sales and marketing is really in that layer right there. It's not tactical, right? Most sales leaders or sales reps are never going to tell you that you're doing something wrong. But they just want to know why right and I had a really great conversation with our sales team Here and it's something and it came from the last podcast and this concept of demand capture Versus demand gen and I keep coming back to it because it's just really great and a lot of times they'll be like, why are we doing a podcast and white papers and content and all that?
pharosIQ: And i'm like, hey, that's demand gen that's us. That's us building up the foundation for the long term, right? This bucket over here You know paid search some hql work, you know some of that's demand capture Those are folks that we're pretty sure are in market right now, and we're going to try to scoop them but there's only so much of that right so After we reach our limits there.
pharosIQ: Would you rather have us do nothing? And just hang out or should we try some things that can help build the future funnel? And then once I had that conversation, it was Oh, okay. Carry on,
Steve A: go forward. Yeah. It's how you present that. And I think even having that concept is great.
Steve A: Now you could be a marketer and have that concept and be walking around thinking, this is great. I'm doing the right thing. But if you've never talked to sales about that, does it even matter? It's like you're, yes, you're doing the right thing based on whatever the best practices of marketing are.
Steve A: But if your sales team doesn't know that and agree with that, then great. You're still going to have that same friction at, at the handoff point. And that was for me, what's been really eye opening and now having these conversations with sales it's almost an opportunity to educate them on what marketing is what demand gen is, right?
Steve A: Like you're saying, and in the role that it plays, it's not just demand capture. If we could do that if marketing could go and just buy SQLs that are a hundred percent qualified, ready to buy. We would write, we would, it's just not that simple. So we've got other things that we need to prioritize.
pharosIQ: And it's the biggest gap for sellers and executives too, right? Like most sellers think that it's like, Oh, there are all these leads out here and we're just refusing to purchase them because we're cheap or we don't have the budget or whatever. It's just we're just. We don't like it's all on you sales.
pharosIQ: And I've been there. I've been the sales side of it. And it's really just like there's only so much in market. And after that, you have to really push yourself to create next, the next level of it market. So it's really, I think it's, there should be like, I, part of me even thinks there should be like a liaison position, if you will, like a sales and marketing liaison who just spends all of their time communicating. The value back and forth just asking sales. What do you what's wrong? What do you think? What do you think and then just having those conversations? So
Steve A: If somebody creates that role That would just be fantastic.
Steve A: It's almost a it's a problem solver in between the two roles, right? Because one one once the floodgates open and you start having these conversations between marketing and sales, now you're in problem solving mode because the problems are going to come to light and you're hopefully actively working on them, but then that takes away from their core role, right?
Steve A: A sales manager that I'm usually talking to. They've got a role. They've got to manage sales. They've got to manage pipeline and quota and stuff. And I'm coming to them and saying, yeah, here's the marketing calendar and here's this target account list that we built, and here's all the tactics we have in market now.
Steve A: They've gotta understand that world as well, and then, vice versa. So it's an interesting idea. 2024, the year of the marketing and sales, the concierge, yeah.
pharosIQ: Like the liaison, if you will. Yeah, you just mentioned target account list, so it popped into my head, right? A BMI don't, I don't know if you're feeling the same thing.
pharosIQ: I am. I feel like it's losing, its losing its luster a bit, right? , I don't like, it would be. A year ago, two years ago every event, every webinar, every LinkedIn live, every something had ABM in it in some form or fashion. And I feel like that's moving away. Is that because it's just now it's like a stable that everybody's doing.
pharosIQ: So there's no point in talking about it anymore. Or is it because do you think marketers like yourself are using it less?
Steve A: I feel like that It, it just hasn't been applied. I think like ABM was this buzzword and then people look at it as, Oh, ABM is this tactic and then they refute it and they're like ABM is expensive, or, Oh, it's really complicated.
Steve A: You need a lot of tools and stuff, or, Oh, it wasn't scalable for us. And I think when I see that stuff, I can't help, but think you probably just didn't. Really lean into it and do it right and so for me abm I remember when I when we like at google brought this concept in it wasn't hey, we're going to do abm It was this is our philosophy for how we're going to generate demand We're going to do it through this account based view and then that sort of Dictated everything we did from there, right?
Steve A: And so the target account list, obviously that was going to receive account based messages, and we're going to do account based followups and really customize personalized stuff based on the tiering of those accounts. And so I think if you just come at it and you say, okay, We're going to do ABM. It doesn't feel like you've actually committed to it.
Steve A: It's Hey, I'm going to try out some display ads. Does that mean that we are, this is our strategy. It's no, you're just trying that out. And so does that really matter? Yeah, I feel like marketers have gotten lost along the way and it's even become a thing now that you can just.
Steve A: Prescribe as a fix to write is, Oh, your demand's not working. Try some ABM. It's it's not just the, it's not like a little salt that you sprinkle on top. It's the thing that you do. It's the structure and how you run your demand team and how you operate.
pharosIQ: And it's, there's a lot of, there's a couple of vendors in the space who spent a whole lot of venture capital money trying to convince the world that ABM is a software.
pharosIQ: Or or display or tactic or something of that nature. I think that's had an impact too, right? And I, it's really the concept of identifying a target list of accounts to focus your marketing resources on with a different propensity across that targeting has been around forever. Somebody just put something to it.
pharosIQ: And then obviously the software. The software gods got their hands on it, decided to turn it into a thing. But I've made the joke for too many years that, I've been doing ABM for 17 years. I just called it sales. Yeah.
Steve A: Yeah. No, that and is it, is this a, this is funny because is it the marketers that, that sort of took this concept and ruined it for everybody?
Steve A: It's because in the spirit of, Oh, how do we scale ABM? My original understanding of ABM, whenever I encountered it eight or nine years ago was it's not scalable. It's something that's very high touch one to one, account to seller to mark, you're customizing all that. Yeah, it's curious to hear the sales perspective of, when a marketer is walking around, Oh yeah, we're doing ABM.
Steve A: Like what does sales think? Are they just rolling their eyes and that's the problem.
pharosIQ: It's sales fault, right? Because what happens is You do, you have a targeted list of 10 account and true one to one ABM, right? Really hyper focused creative custom shit that the marketer, maybe an events person, a seller.
pharosIQ: So everybody's just attacking them in this perfect. Organized unit. And then guess what happens? It works. And it generally works well, because that's one of your highest target accounts. So the payoff on it working is usually substantial. So then the VP of sales, CRO, and God forbid CEO or executive gets their hands on that.
pharosIQ: It's we need to scale that up. And then, okay, it's not, you can't like, you can't. Give someone that cuss. It's there's a reason why, you know, a, there's a reason why a Rolls Royce costs 500, 000 and a Ford costs 50, right? Because it takes six months of handcrafted meticulous maintenance to build one.
pharosIQ: And it takes 37 minutes and some robots to build the other.
Steve A: So
pharosIQ: yeah. Yeah. And it's just like that with ABM, I think too.
Steve A: Yeah. That, that's a good analogy. And I think back to the software situation, right? If you. Our marketer and you're saying, 2024 is going to be the year of ABM. But before we get ready, we're going to go purchase and implement all this software.
Steve A: You're basically building the Ford, but looking for the Rolls Royce results. And you're not going to get that. And it's going to be, it's going to be depressing. You're, you're. God forbid you go and present all of this to the leadership team and they're all bought into ABM and then you've got to go to that monthly pipeline meeting and present how is the ABM doing, that's a problem.
Steve A: That's another thing I don't really talk about internally. Oh this is, Our abm this is demand gen right abm is the way we structure it And it allows us to work well with sales because we connect on that target account level We connect on building personas and then we've connected on the follow up from the demand that we've actually created And they've gone through our sequences and whatnot and now they're at sitting on for sales, you know We're trying to connect that whole experience To the account, trying to scale it as well.
Steve A: I'm guilty of trying to scale this stuff like every other marketer, but there's also a piece of that puzzle, which is still that one to one it's the executive round tables, it's, the personalized invites and stuff and getting your sellers right in front of those buyers, those buyer groups, it's, and it's podcasts,
pharosIQ: right?
pharosIQ: That's a nice tactic too, right? There's just so many different unique angles to play with that, that it's, I think it's still there. I just, I think it's coming to its next phase of maturity, right? I think what's old becomes new becomes old, direct mail's coming back, except, like I, I really think that ABM in 2024, if I'm going to predict, it's going to get back to some of the real creative one to one touch stuff, right?
pharosIQ: You're going to see the link, you're going to see the LinkedIn post with someone that sends me like this, someone sent me this personal thing that was so personal. Personal to me that connected to me and I took the meeting and I love them now because of it because it's just that's where I think we'll get back to because resources are thinner.
pharosIQ: You have to make the biggest impact on. The biggest accounts in the quickest way. And I think that's where marketers will get to just my prediction.
Steve A: Sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. And then having to be able to articulate the ROI of that, cause everything, like you said, is getting squeezed. So now it's more emphasis on the ROI of those tactics.
Steve A: And so if you've got this big bloated ABM program with a lot of waste, it's not going to look good when you go and report that way,
pharosIQ: Oh, yes. Waste costs. Platforms that you know so much going on there. So Campaigns right that we are we have reached that moment, right? You are the star what everybody's been waiting for right the non boring creative, you know executed campaign From Steve and bringing it to the table so we can all learn from either your wins or your, in some cases, mistakes.
pharosIQ: Not every campaign is a home run, especially the creative one. So in be the boring fashion, hit us up with your big end of podcast campaign idea.
Steve A: Yeah. All right. So since you opened the door to it being a failure, I'm going to go with a failure because I think that's where we learn.
Steve A: I had a mentor, that was big on failures and was like take risks and don't be afraid to fail. I was working on a basically a point solution product. This was a while ago. Not many people would know that this existed, but drive enterprise, Google drive enterprise at one point was offered as a standalone product.
Steve A: Right now you can buy it through workspace and that whole suite, but it was offered as a standalone product. And I was the growth market. I was the only growth guy on the program, working directly with product, the super fun experience, and we got we got a data point. something around security about how there was an indication that files within an account wouldn't be secure.
Steve A: And so we use that data point to create a, ABM campaign very personalized out to the it administrator with this message around security. And did you know that some of these files could be at risk? And we wrapped it up in a a personalized message for you? From a kind of expert we, it was basically coming from our SDRs, but it was an expert as a security expert and we sent it out and we thought me included, I forecasted this thing at, like a 20 percent conversion rate, I'm like telling the product team, the sales team, this is going to be brilliant.
Steve A: I've never had a data point. This good, all the emails are crafted really well. And let me tell you, crickets just crickets. And that was like maybe my biggest failure at Google. And I had come off from working in cloud for a couple of years and, these big, huge numbers that we were dealing with.
Steve A: And then I go into this drive enterprise experience and I'm, I've got a chip on my shoulder. And this was really the big first thing I did in front of all of these senior peers and it failed. It just failed miserably. Nobody responded. Some of the responses we did get were actually.
Steve A: Angry, like why are you reaching out to me? And this is garbage. What are you doing? And Yeah, it was alarming. It was a wake up call and you know ever since then I do not Put much emphasis in my own personal forecasts. I'll or predictions. i'll make sure somebody more capable is able to do that
pharosIQ: or it's just best to let it roll.
pharosIQ: How's it gonna go? It's tough to predict Yeah, you never know how a campaign's gonna go, you know As soon as you say because as soon as you say this is oh, I'm this is gonna this is gonna just rock and roll It's not I don't know what it is about it, right? And it's the ones where you're like Oh, I didn't think that would work at all that you're like, oh damn that one really hit
Steve A: Yeah.
Steve A: So that, that was Steve from four years ago or so. And I'd like to think I've learned a bit since then, but yeah went in there very optimistic thinking, yeah. Oh yeah. Everything we do is going to drive growth but no, it doesn't.
pharosIQ: The it space is a fickle space too, like a b, like a buying group is.
pharosIQ: I've never met a more fickle buying group either. There're, I'll never forget you. This is years and years ago, right? There, there's ave there is a vendor in the space called Spiceworks if Davis, but at one point it was called Spiceworks. And I worked there boo. 13 years ago so a millennium ago, right?
pharosIQ: But, I don't know when, it was just after I had departed a while back, but they rebranded and they changed the logo, right? And the new logo of Spiceworks at the time, it looked like a sun. It was like a thing but the negative space of this new logo looked like a duck, right? And this team spent Months on this rebranding message and months on all of like month like all of this work and research and the big ad Agency and the whole thing and this whole story and this whole like just like a usual Big rebrand and it one cut one comment in one thread of the community said Man, can anybody else not unsee the duck?
pharosIQ: And after that, hundreds of comments followed only focused on the duck, right? And like those, and those things you legit can't predict in marketing, right? Those moments.
Steve A: Yeah, no, like who, who catches that, right? Who, who in the brand team is going to catch that? Because they've got their blinders on, they've been working on this thing for months and months.
Steve A: And I, it's funny, I think of examples like that. And I like to think that maybe there was a. Someone junior, like an intern or something somewhere who had that thought. They're like, man, that looks like a duck, but then they didn't speak up. And had they spoken up, maybe that could have been their promotion right there, so moral is see something, say something, say
pharosIQ: it, just say it.
pharosIQ: Cause somebody with, especially if you're targeting it decision makers, they will take every opportunity to try to prove that they are smarter than you. And every fast, especially if you're marketing to them, that is my one. And I'm sure you felt that at some point in your career targeting to it.
pharosIQ: That's just like the if you mess up, they love to tell you about it.
Steve A: Oh yeah. Yeah. Actually before Google, I was at a content marketing startup and we were mostly responsible for producing the content, but we also got into the world of distributing the content and this was early days. Of course, the idea was, Hey, we, there's a ton of these it people on Reddit.
Steve A: Yeah. Let's go on Reddit and just start basically pumping an RSS feed of content into the Reddit channels. And we got lit up. We, they let us have it and that was a quick, pull out of there and learning that, Oh yeah, we should have done some research and understand that community a little better.
Steve A: One of the toughest communities
pharosIQ: To market to like, just so tough but all, but so powerful though. If you hook it if that's one where if you're, if you actually figure out that puzzle, then the stars align and all that they could open up revenue streams and a community like that, that you wouldn't even fathom.
pharosIQ: Oh, yeah. So much risk. But then again that's a very one to one thing too, right? Again, that's not something that's scalable. You can't RSS feed that. It's, it has to like, you need something like a passionate human who just does that and figured and navigates it. So
Steve A: yeah. Yeah. No, it knows that, that crowd and and can hang it's, it, I get scared about Reddit.
Steve A: It's
pharosIQ: I can't tweet. I don't do Reddit. I barely understand Instagram. LinkedIn's kind of my one medium that I somewhat get. I watch a lot of TikTok. But that's like my, that's like my, my, my brainless release from all day. And it's just just. Just keep doing that, right? But the one thing that I absolutely don't get, and I have teenage children, I'll, now I say teenage, but my daughter's 20 and my son's 18 now, so they're almost not teenage, but Snapchat there's triangles, there's happening there, there's that, I admit, whoa. I'm out.
Steve A: I tried saying that many years ago for personal to connect with my like 18 year old cousins and stuff. I don't get it. I actually thought they went out of business. I thought I read something. They went out. I was like, Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. If I couldn't figure it out then yeah that, that tool sucks.
Steve A: But yeah, apparently it's still rocking. They'll do when
pharosIQ: it's thick,
Steve A: they'll do this
pharosIQ: thing. Like I, it's, but yeah it's interesting that so many of us are social. And then not social, right? They are like, we're like almost consistent. And as I said, another point that I made, I was talking to, I can't remember who I was talking to, but lots of marketing decision makers and marketing folks I found are massive lurkers.
pharosIQ: They love go, they love going onto LinkedIn. They love reading stuff, but they're just not posters. They're just not content creators as an aggregate.
Steve A: Yeah. Yeah. That, that was me. I up until few months ago, and it was just, I don't even have a real reason for it. I just was, Hey.
Steve A: I'm lurking and I'm reading this stuff and it is cool. And Hey, why don't I give this a try? And it's become a bit of a creative outlet, but I really wonder if marketers have this aversion to it because like maybe they're scarred from their career somewhere. I like, I remember when I, this was. Many jobs ago, I was like the digital marketing assistant or whatever.
Steve A: And it was when Facebook was now launched advertising and coming out. And it was just like thrown on my plate. Hey go figure out this social media thing. And at the time it's like what is this? This like user generated content thing. Do I go into groups and start asking people for feedback?
Steve A: What if they rip apart our brand on these posts? And, it was the wild west. And that, that definitely scarred me a bit. To the point where I avoided social for a long time.
pharosIQ: One mistake, right? It's the one mistake thing. You're the marketing person. You're the face of the brand You know, you're that and again if you say the one wrong thing that gets the one wrong comment It could be a pr thing and i'll like i've been experiencing that a bit lately in my new role Right where I have to just be a take that extra three seconds before okay, don't post you can't don't post that I know like you just gotta be a little bit more, you know a little bit more You know, a little bit less reactionary to life in some facets, because even though it's my personal brand, I still am, I still represent the company and thing and we all do, right?
pharosIQ: Especially on LinkedIn. I love people that, people tend to say this is my personal brand, but the reality is, unless you're a consultant or a contractor, you're generally reflecting the company that
Steve A: you work for. Yeah. It makes sense. Yeah. And then, that's maybe why some people.
Steve A: Can do maybe avoid it, they're like, I just don't want to deal with that. I don't know, but I'll sit here and lurk and engage. But Hey I'll take the lurkers too. At the end of the day if you read what I'm saying and you find it valuable, then that's a win,
pharosIQ: I wish I just wish LinkedIn.
pharosIQ: It's a simple ask, and I don't understand why. I just wish they would take your post and make sure that your followers or those people who are your connections see them. I just don't I can't, I just don't understand why they can't make that connection. Like these folks that we've decided to connect, which means that there's some interest in seeing each other's content, but it never happens.
pharosIQ: I'm seeing rando other content of people that I've never met, heard of, or whatnot, and the people that I'm connecting with, I don't see in my feed regularly, which is baffling to me you just give me that. That's all I want.
Steve A: Yeah. Yeah. That's why you start, right? You presume that, okay, I go on this platform.
Steve A: I connect with other people. I see what they say. They see what I say. And yeah, that's how it works. But then we decided that our LinkedIn decided we need these algorithms in the middle to make it complicated so we can throttle it up and down and sell ads and all that stuff.
pharosIQ: I read recently that less than.
pharosIQ: Less than 3 percent of your actual connections see your posts on a regular,
Steve A: on the regular. Wow. Wow. That's low. 3%. Yeah. Who are you talking to? It's you can look at your connections. You say, okay, I'm going to write this idea. I think it's a great one. And nine people are going to see it,
Steve A: That I actually would benefit from it.
pharosIQ: Yeah, but it's, but one post a day, two posts a day times, nine people of posts. It adds up. It adds up over time, but again I pray to you LinkedIn. If you are out there, just simple. Yeah. Like the people who are connected with you, they've chose to hit the button that says, because you can't do it with so they have to be sure you can send out automations to ask people to connect with you.
pharosIQ: You can automate all that, but the one thing you can't is the other person has to choose to follow you or choose to connect. There has to be that engagement. So if that happens, then why can't we just make sure they see a feed that, prioritizes that.
Steve A: That they selected, right? Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
Steve A: That seems fair at least to have an option, right? You can toggle in and out of the feed versus
pharosIQ: curated versus just my connections, right? I would, I give people the option there. It's not too much.
Steve A: I see. Simple ask, you know what? Get a petition going. We'll get some signatures, let's see what happens.
pharosIQ: I'll send a LinkedIn poll to my connections and 3% of them will see it. We'll add,
Steve A: use a different plan. Maybe this is where TikTok can come in. You create a real funny video discussing this, and then you use TikTok as a feeder to get my balls.
pharosIQ: Alright, good sir. That we have reached our time for this week's podcast.
pharosIQ: Thank you so much for joining it's been really fun. We could probably do this forever And we have we do this frequently where we just randomly connect and talk about marketing and life and all of that But we just happen to do it in front of a group of people this time So yeah, love to have we'll love to have you back on let's target early 24 just to see how your 24 is shaping up.
pharosIQ: I look forward to working with you guys over at google google chrome and we can rock and roll from there. All right
Steve A: Yeah, that sounds great, pharosIQ. Appreciate this. It's always good to chat with you. We'll catch up in next year and see where the ABM predictions landed. Exactly.
pharosIQ: I'm going to hold you to yours.
pharosIQ: We're going to hold, we're going to do we're going to come back and follow up on it. Report
Steve A: on that. Oh, all
pharosIQ: oh boy. And we're good.
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