Latest / The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast / Stop Being Your Own Sales Team with Anthony Blatner (stage 4) - Ep. 391

Transcript

Stop Being Your Own Sales Team with Anthony Blatner (stage 4) - Ep. 391 · The Start, Scale & Succeed Podcast

• 0:00
  Scott Ritzheimer: Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again
• 0:03
  to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that
• 0:05
  grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a
• 0:08
  founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and if you've built
• 0:12
  a company, you've built an organization and you've built a
• 0:15
  team, but you're still the only one closing just about every
• 0:19
  real deal. If you're the only one who's really filling the
• 0:22
  pipeline, you know how exhausting that can be. It's not
• 0:26
  just the work, but it's the weight of the world that's
• 0:29
  resting on your shoulders. But it's not just that either,
• 0:32
  because it's probably costing you a lot more than you think
• 0:35
  because you don't scale. And if you've built the other parts of
• 0:39
  your company so they can, there's really just one more
• 0:42
  piece that has to fall into line and to help us figure out how to
• 0:45
  do that and how to build a scalable sales system. I have
• 0:48
  with me today, Anthony Blattner, who's the Managing Director of
• 0:51
  speedwork social, a firm that helps B to B Tech and SaaS
• 0:54
  companies amplify their customer acquisition on LinkedIn. With
• 0:58
  more than a decade of experience in LinkedIn advertising. Anthony
• 1:02
  works directly with founders, CEOs, CMOs and market leaders to
• 1:07
  help build high impact campaigns that convert based in Austin,
• 1:11
  Texas. He also hosts a podcast, LinkedIn ads radio check it out,
• 1:15
  where he shares actionable insights and tactical best
• 1:18
  practices for the LinkedIn ads ecosystem. So before we get down
• 1:23
  into LinkedIn ads, because you've worked with founders,
• 1:26
  you've worked with rapid growing companies, I'm wondering if we
• 1:29
  could, for just a moment, dive in Anthony on the shift that
• 1:34
  needs to happen and how these leaders think about building
• 1:37
  truly scalable sales systems.
• 1:40
  Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so truly scalable sales systems start
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  with like, what are the channels you're going to use, you're
• 1:44
  going to use, and how are you going to leverage your voice so
• 1:47
  that it goes from just one to one sales to one to many sales.
• 1:52
  That's the shift that needs to happen when you're a small
• 1:55
  business or just getting started. You're probably going
• 1:57
  one to one just to reach out to people, to strike up sales
• 2:00
  conversations, but that you're not going to be able to do that
• 2:03
  forever, that's only going to get you so far. So the next tier
• 2:06
  up is, how can you go sell at scale? So LinkedIn is one, one
• 2:12
  of many great channels of doing that, but there's lots of
• 2:14
  channels out there, lots of ways. But to be able to take
• 2:16
  your voice and take what you're doing and do it at scale, you
• 2:19
  need to start switch from one to one to one to many sales.
• 2:23
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, I really like that language because it's
• 2:27
  the opposite early on, right for folks who start at the mistake
• 2:31
  that I see early founders make is to go many to one at the at
• 2:35
  the go, and never really get one to one working. And so when,
• 2:39
  when you go in to work with a company and they've already got
• 2:43
  one to one working. Well, what advantage is that for you as an
• 2:46
  advertiser?
• 2:47
  Anthony Blatner: Yeah, it kind of proves the model first.
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  There's lots of startups out there, and if you haven't been
• 2:53
  able to sell your product on your own, it's very hard for
• 2:57
  anybody else or to be able to scale it until you've proven the
• 3:01
  sales model there. So definitely having sales, some sales under
• 3:06
  your belt, is very important before you go try to scale it.
• 3:09
  Otherwise, you might waste a lot of money before you've really
• 3:12
  proven out who are you selling to, what are you selling, and
• 3:15
  what are those important points that are going to get them to
• 3:17
  buy. You might have some hunches of that going in, but really it
• 3:20
  is kind of getting the reps in of doing those sales and really
• 3:23
  proving it out, then you'll really understand and get a feel
• 3:26
  for those points that do sell. And then that's the ammo that
• 3:29
  you need to go, take to a platform like LinkedIn to go
• 3:32
  scale it up from there.
• 3:34
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, I love that, and I think that's what's
• 3:36
  so powerful about it. But it's also some of the assumed
• 3:39
  constraints or head trash that folks have. Oh, I tried that
• 3:42
  right back when they didn't have one to one working. And I've
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  seen a number of folks who have used various ad strategies
• 3:49
  before. They really had a proof of concept before they could
• 3:52
  even sell, and then they kind of get stuck thinking, Well, that
• 3:55
  didn't work then, so it's not going to work now. So how do you
• 4:00
  help folks? Let's kind of dive into the actual work of using
• 4:04
  LinkedIn ads, and I'll come back to this question. But first off,
• 4:07
  why LinkedIn ads? Are there companies that it's the right
• 4:12
  platform for? Are there companies that shouldn't
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  consider using it? How do you help folks figure that out if
• 4:17
  it's the right channel for them?
• 4:19
  Anthony Blatner: Yes. So that's a good question, and LinkedIn
• 4:21
  may not be a perfect fit for everybody, but where it does
• 4:23
  perform very well is when you are selling B to B, business to
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  business, or business to professional, when you're look
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  looking to sell to a very specific decision maker at a
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  very specific type of company. LinkedIn has that data that
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  almost no other platform really has to the level that LinkedIn
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  does. So on LinkedIn, you can you can go do searches. You can
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  set up your campaign targeting so that you can go after a
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  specific industry, a specific company size, and then a
• 4:51
  specific job title at those companies, to get very specific
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  into who you're going to be reaching. So if you want to
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  reach HR directors at financial companies. Is that's, you know,
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  you can just plug that right into LinkedIn. You'll find those
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  exact people any other platform. It's going to be very hard to
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  find, like, a very niche decision maker like that, you
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  know, they those people do live on every other platform, but
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  it's very hard to reach them on those other platforms. And you
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  might be kind of driving a lot of noise if you drive traffic on
• 5:17
  those other platforms. So LinkedIn, you can plug those
• 5:20
  metric, those items like that right in there and reach those
• 5:22
  exact people.
• 5:23
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah. What would you say? So let's say we
• 5:26
  decide LinkedIn is a channel we're going to go for it. We've
• 5:28
  got a history of one on one success, but but don't know how
• 5:33
  to scale it. That's why we're looking for someone who's got
• 5:35
  the experience like you all do. What are some of the mistakes
• 5:38
  that folks make before they bring you in.
• 5:41
  Anthony Blatner: Yes. So LinkedIn definitely carries the
• 5:45
  reputation of being a very expensive ads platform, and it
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  definitely can be if you do it the wrong way. And there's a few
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  different gotchas that can happen along the way to doing
• 5:54
  that most people have tried, maybe Google ads or Facebook
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  ads. And I'd say for most companies, most, most companies
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  most, most companies do try those platforms first, and then
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  they try a LinkedIn. And if they have had success on one of those
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  platforms, then they'll just kind of copy paste what they
• 6:07
  were doing on like Facebook or Google, and then try to copy
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  paste that to LinkedIn. LinkedIn works in a very different way
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  from those other platforms, just purely in like the technical
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  setup and and also down to like the business marketing funnel of
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  what's going to work there versus with other platforms. But
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  just for a couple examples, on on meta, if you're just going to
• 6:26
  set up your ad campaign, you're you're going to use the builder,
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  you're going to click through the setup wizard, and the
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  default settings are usually good for you. On LinkedIn, you
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  usually want to change a lot of those settings, because a lot of
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  LinkedIn tooling is built for big enterprise companies. So if
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  you're anybody other than a big enterprise company, you want to
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  change a lot of those out of the box. So a lot of people kind of
• 6:46
  fall into the trap of just using the default settings, which
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  aren't a good fit for anybody other than an enterprise
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  company. So they kind of get stuck with launching some
• 6:53
  campaigns but the wrong settings, and then they're
• 6:55
  paying way too much, not getting anything out of it. So that's
• 6:59
  kind of some of the most common issues that we see. And then
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  from there, it kind of gets into the content that people are
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  promoting. Lots of you know, if you're running Google ads, you
• 7:08
  can go very direct in what you're offering, because people
• 7:10
  are searching for you. But on a social platform like LinkedIn,
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  if someone's not actively searching out at that point in
• 7:17
  time, and they're not, they're in the social feed, then you
• 7:19
  want to go with more of a thought leadership approach to,
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  you know, draw people in, get their attention. That's what
• 7:26
  they're looking for when they're on LinkedIn. Is looking for tips
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  and tricks that they can take back to their job and to their
• 7:31
  company. So to be able to create content and serve that need and
• 7:35
  desire will then help bring people into your marketing
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  funnel, and then you kind of start the process from there. So
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  a lot of people kind of lead, lead with like, content. Like,
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  contact us or get a free consultation, but you might be
• 7:46
  jumping in way too fast, and people aren't ready to just sign
• 7:48
  up for that just yet. So that's where we start to build out the
• 7:54
  marketing funnel, using like, thought leadership and things
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  like that on LinkedIn these days.
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  Scott Ritzheimer: I really like that, because I think one of the
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  challenging parts of translating one to one into one to many is
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  that most of your one to one conversations have some intent
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  behind them, right? They're either a warm referral for
• 8:09
  someone or recommendation. They're someone who's calling in
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  and asking you to sell them. And when you go out into the wild,
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  that's just not true. That's not the case. And so let's talk
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  about what you've called kind of this thought leader approach.
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  What does that? What does that look like in the real world? We
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  have someone, let's say they're a software company in in
• 8:29
  financial tech or something like that. How do they move from,
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  hey, here's our software, here are all of its features, to a
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  more effective thought leading campaign,
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  Anthony Blatner: yeah. So this is kind of the big thing these
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  days on LinkedIn, is thought leadership and thought leader ad
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  campaigns on LinkedIn, which come with the recent, recently
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  new ability that now you can boost posts from people, and, in
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  a way, create your ad campaigns and your marketing funnel using
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  boosted posts from People. In the past, it would just be
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  running company page ads. Now you can boost posts from people
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  and thought leader ads sound really fancy, but it is just
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  boosting posts from people. But the approach is much more
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  effective because you're you're putting a person's voice out
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  there, rather than just a company. There's definitely
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  places for your company page ads, but these thought leader ad
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  funnels perform much better because you're putting your
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  people out there, front and center. So this is a perfect fit
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  for any company that is that does have a very visible
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  founder, or very vocal founder, or a founder who is a thought
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  leader. So you know, especially like in the startup space, a lot
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  of those founders are, like, very passionate people. They're
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  very vocal. They're really smart in what they do. So this is,
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  like, perfect for those types of companies. So for the example
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  there with like, you know, FinTech, you would have a
• 9:49
  founder talking about on LinkedIn. You know, there's lots
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  of topics you could be talking about, but it could be around
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  their usage of AI these days, into their software that they're
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  building, and how that's helping. Their customers get
• 10:01
  better results. So they're going to be posting on LinkedIn,
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  sharing stuff like that. Other people who maybe want to learn
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  those topics or are interested in that type of financial
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  software are going to stop and read his posts. So that's kind
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  of the basics of it. And then we start to build it into a
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  marketing funnel in a few different ways. First is, first
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  is thinking about a few different types of content that
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  somebody might be posting and that somebody might want to be
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  reading. And it starts with the standard top of the funnel type
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  of content. There's lots of stuff that can work well in top
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  of funnel, but what we see work across the board are case
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  studies. So this is where somebody could be sharing.
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  Here's how, here's how we achieved help this. Here's how
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  we help this company achieve XYZ results. So another company out
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  there who wants to get get that result is going to stop and read
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  that post. So case studies just do well across the board. So
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  it's a great just option for people to be talking about. And
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  it shouldn't be the we're so awesome case study. It should
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  be, here's how you can learn how to do this for yourself or for
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  your company. So an educational type of post, that's what people
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  are on LinkedIn to read and to learn. So start with that.
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  That'll get somebody to know who you are, you know, trust you,
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  because they're seeing your expertise and kind of that
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  starts the marketing funnel from there, so people who are reading
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  your case studies that you're posting on LinkedIn is the best
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  starting point. And from there, you can then go retarget those
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  people into a middle of funnel segment. What tends to work well
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  in the middle of funnel is then like redirecting or offering to
• 11:34
  those people a next step. Like an easy next step. What we like
• 11:38
  to use here is some kind of downloadable. Or what I think is
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  the best is, like, some kind of, like, subscribe. Type of option
• 11:47
  could be, you know, subscribe to my podcast, and then you're
• 11:49
  going to hear and get all the episodes that are coming out.
• 11:52
  Subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about, you know, this
• 11:54
  financial technology, or how we're using AI and stuff like
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  that. And then people will scrub, subscribe to the
• 12:02
  newsletter, and then get additional communications from
• 12:06
  that company later. So I like to use middle funnel as a way to
• 12:06
  get somebody on some kind of list, you know, offer them. Hey,
• 12:08
  here's our YouTube channel. Here's some interesting videos
• 12:10
  that we're posting there as well. Our newsletter, podcasts
• 12:13
  like that are all great. So that's what middle funnel is
• 12:16
  good for. And then finally, you can then go retarget those
• 12:18
  people with your bottom of funnel. And that's like the
• 12:20
  direct offer where, you know, hey, if you are interested in
• 12:23
  this, in this app we're building, you know, go here to
• 12:26
  get a demo, or go here to sign up for a free trial or try it
• 12:28
  for yourself. So that's kind of like building out the stages of
• 12:31
  the marketing funnel. At the end of the day, I will also say, if
• 12:35
  there is active demand for what you are selling, you don't, you
• 12:38
  kind of don't need to go through those stages. You can go direct
• 12:40
  to the offer. So for a lot of stuff AI these days, people are
• 12:44
  building new tools, and there's lots of active demand out there
• 12:47
  for AI tools. So sometimes you can go very direct. And you
• 12:51
  know, you don't really need to go through that whole funnel,
• 12:53
  but you can go just direct to posting about this new tool
• 12:56
  you're building and then tell people where they can go to get
• 12:58
  a demo. But that said, the bigger, the bigger your the
• 13:01
  larger your price point, the more enterprise type of things
• 13:04
  you're selling, then you will need to start building out that
• 13:06
  funnel on those stages for people to go through. So kind of
• 13:09
  depends on what you're selling, who you're selling it to, but
• 13:13
  that's how we're helping people build thought leadership ad
• 13:16
  funnels as a way to, you know, draw the right people in, get
• 13:19
  them on your list and then offer them, you know, whatever your
• 13:22
  core offer is,
• 13:23
  Scott Ritzheimer: Yeah, for folks who are used to get a deal
• 13:27
  close a deal that that very concrete, you know, next step,
• 13:33
  how do you help them to measure whether or not campaigns are
• 13:36
  working, especially in the early days of a new launch?
• 13:38
  Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so a lot of it starts with like the
• 13:38
  initial engagement that you're getting on your posts. So
• 13:38
  there's a few different things. Number one is the initial
• 13:42
  engagement you're getting on your posts. When you're putting
• 13:48
  these case studies out there, for example, are people leaving
• 13:52
  comments? Are they asking questions? Are they DMing you to
• 13:55
  get more information? Those are the initial things that you want
• 13:59
  to look for. So that's kind of the starting point. From there.
• 14:03
  You can set up with as with any kind of advertising campaign,
• 14:06
  whether it's meta or Google or LinkedIn. You can set up
• 14:09
  conversion tracking. So then you can start to see, are people
• 14:12
  reading my content, clicking on my post and then going to my
• 14:15
  website to sign up for a demo, or whatever it is. Your next
• 14:18
  step is, could be a free trial or free consultation. So you can
• 14:21
  start to see if those actions are happening. So standard
• 14:24
  conversion tracking is possible with these types of campaigns,
• 14:28
  but otherwise, keep an eye on your engagement stats. Are
• 14:31
  people DMing you? Are they leaving comments? Those are good
• 14:33
  things you want to look for, kind of initially,
• 14:35
  Scott Ritzheimer: Got it excellent. Anthony, there's this
• 14:37
  question that I have asked all my guests. I'm interested to see
• 14:40
  what you have to say. And the question is this, what is the
• 14:42
  biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's that one
• 14:45
  thing you wish everybody watching or listening today
• 14:47
  knew?
• 14:47
  Anthony Blatner: Yeah, so in context of what we're talking
• 14:49
  about, while founder led sales is a very great marketing
• 14:54
  funnel. You don't have to put all that work on yourself,
• 14:56
  leverage your team and your people, and it is beneficial. To
• 15:00
  have lots of voices from your company, you know, conveying
• 15:02
  your message. So while you're the founder, you know, don't
• 15:06
  rely don't don't put all the weight on just your shoulders,
• 15:09
  but involve your team. People like being involved, and they
• 15:12
  like sharing on LinkedIn. I think a lot of what I hear is a
• 15:14
  lot of employees are also, you know, kind of maybe a little
• 15:17
  scared initially, to to put themselves out there and share.
• 15:20
  But if you encourage them and then help them find their voice
• 15:23
  and grow, it'll be extremely, extremely effective way to get
• 15:27
  you and your company out there and incorporate everyone's
• 15:29
  voices.
• 15:30
  Scott Ritzheimer: That's excellent, excellent, Anthony,
• 15:32
  there are some folks listening. They've been toying around with
• 15:33
  the ideas. They've been trying things that haven't worked, and
• 15:37
  they need to find a scalable sales solution. And they think
• 15:40
  LinkedIn ads may be a big part of that. Where can they reach
• 15:42
  out to you? How can they find out more about you and the work
• 15:45
  that you all do?
• 15:45
  Anthony Blatner: Yes, so I'm definitely on LinkedIn. You can
• 15:47
  find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Anthony Blattner there, but
• 15:50
  otherwise you can go to speedworksocial.com, and that's
• 15:54
  our website. You can learn more about LinkedIn advertising, and
• 15:56
  then you can schedule a call with us there, and then we do
• 15:58
  have the LinkedIn ads radio, podcast, if you'd like to learn
• 16:02
  more. And then additionally, our YouTube channel, we have lots of
• 16:04
  different tips and tricks and tutorial videos posted there. So
• 16:08
  those are some different places.
• 16:10
  Scott Ritzheimer: Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Anthony, thank
• 16:12
  you for being on today and sharing with us. Love the
• 16:15
  structure. The approach really broke it down, made it simple
• 16:18
  for us, and I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much
• 16:21
  for those of you watching and listening, you know that your
• 16:23
  time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as
• 16:26
  much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait
• 16:29
  to see you next time. Take care.