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The Tracks Nobody Sees, But Every Marketer Should Hear.
This podcast celebrates the hidden gems of marketing insight found across all professions—both within and beyond traditional marketing roles. Just as B-sides on a single contain brilliant tracks that are treasured by true fans, every profession contains marketing wisdom that isn't obvious at first glance but is incredibly valuable when discovered.
Tom Hootman (03:30)
Thank you for making time for me. I you and I have known each other for Goodness, I mean the park mobile days. So I mean we're on a decade plus at this point. Yeah
Jeff Perkins (03:37)
Not before that, PGI.
Tom Hootman (03:40)
Yeah, it's been forever. one of the things I wanted to like, it's the I think it's like the secret sauce for me, at least when I was at Brain Labs, I was always a guy who was on LinkedIn every day, but I was a lurker. And the most I got out there was reposting a job or reposting like a Brain Labs or Hannappin post and like hitting a little comment because you're fearful. And when I started Mixtape I was like,
Jeff Perkins (03:51)
Mmm.
Tom Hootman (04:03)
goodness gracious, I'm gonna build this website and the first thing everyone I know is gonna do is gonna look at it they're all marketers and we all love to be like pessimists. So I think the secret, like the thing people were scared of and I was scared of was like, how do I put myself out there? And I got great advice from my team and people in my network who were like, dude, just be you, man, like that's the thing. And honestly, you inspired me because you've been doing that forever.
Right. And I think you've got the right mix. And I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. You've got the right mix of business, personal, self challenges, things you're running into. So there's a bit of like, build it with me. There's a bit of like sharing great stories from like your family, as well as the fact that you've run way too much and you're constantly like challenging yourself. What made you start? Like, were you always like that? Or did you like, were you like me and you're like, this platform could be so much cooler. Here's what I'm going to do to impact.
Jeff Perkins (04:52)
Yeah, I've been posting a lot on LinkedIn for a long time. And I think early on it came out of a career necessity for me. So I was working at this company here in Atlanta called Auto Trader. I started there in 2007. Five years later, I think I had...
grown my career there a lot in that I grew the size of my team and my responsibilities and I had, you know, just great relationships across the organization and great exposure and they paid me reasonably well. But the thing that hadn't grown was my title. And so I started in 2007 as a senior marketing manager. And then by, you know, 2013, I was still a senior marketing manager. And at that point, I just realized there wasn't a path up for me. And
I I was heads down and I was just doing good work and the company, I think, recognized that and they kept giving me more responsibility, but they never ever sort of right-sized my title. And to me, I would look around at my peers who are now becoming VPs and CMOs and I was like, man, I've got a bigger team than they do. I have more budget, I have more responsibility and I'm stuck here as a senior manager.
And I just realized, I was like, I think I hit the ceiling here from sort of a path up perspective. And so either I had to get comfortable with the idea that I'm just going to stay here for my career and ride it out and I'm fine. I don't care about a title, but I had always aspired to be a CMO. And I thought, you know, this it's not going to happen here, but maybe I could make a move and get on that path elsewhere. And so I started, you know, put my resume together. I started talking to.
recruiters and I started dropping my resume for jobs and nothing was happening for me. And what I realized was I had the senior manager title, but I was going for a VP of marketing job and everyone's like, well, Jeff, you can't get a VP in marketing job. You're a senior marketing manager. I was like, OK, well, you maybe I'll do a lateral move and I'll go take another senior manager role, but there'll be more upward ⁓ opportunity.
And so I started applying for senior manager jobs and they're like, well, how much do you make? like, whoa, we can't pay you that to be a senior manager. And so I couldn't get a senior manager job because I made too much money. I couldn't get a VP of marketing job because I didn't get the title. And so I'm totally screwed, right? It's this crazy catch 22. And I was like, what do I do? And it kind of dawned on me at that point. It's the old saying,
Tom Hootman (07:19)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (07:28)
you don't define yourself, somebody else will. And I was clearly letting recruiters, hiring managers define me by my title. And the reality was I had five years of great stories to tell, business results to kind of ⁓ share, great projects that I worked on that drove real results that I could share. And I said, I just got to tell people like,
what I can do and who I am. But you can't just do that, right? You have to find forums for that. And so I remember I went on LinkedIn one day and I changed my title. I think my title was just like marketing manager at AutoTrader. I changed it to executive leader. Because I was like, all right, I'm a marketer. I need to reposition myself. And I started getting in the habit of posting content that
Tom Hootman (08:12)
Smart.
Jeff Perkins (08:21)
an executive leader would post about team building and leadership and business results. And I started posting a lot. And then I wrote a blog and I committed, was like, I'm going to write one blog post a week for a year. And so I wrote 52 blog posts. It's very hard to do actually, especially back then we didn't have chat GPT to basically generate tonnage of crappy blog posts. So I was actually sitting down. Yeah, it's like, what's
Tom Hootman (08:38)
It's impossible. No.
You gotta sit down and you gotta be like, what am gonna write about this week? Yeah,
you can't.
Jeff Perkins (08:48)
And
sometimes, know, like I always had to get like publish on Monday morning. So it was like Sunday night. was like, all right, I to get my 500 words done. What am I going to write about? So I started writing a blog and then I started reaching out to people who were organizing marketing events around the city. And, you know, I remember, because I would always get solicited, come see this marketing event that, you know, the AMA is putting on or that AIM is putting on.
And so I remember reaching out to the event organizer and cause it, they showed the event and the topic, but they didn't show who was speaking. And I reached out and I was like, who's speaking at your event? They're like, well, do you want to speak at our event? We're looking for speakers. I was like, is that how this works? I thought there was like, I thought there was like VIP list of speakers that kind of you, you call and, but no. And then I realized like a lot of websites have this call for speakers link on it. And if you want to speak in an event, you just fill out, you know, call for speaker and.
Tom Hootman (09:27)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (09:40)
you could actually, you may get selected to speak at the event. So I was like, well, I like that. That's a great way to sort of get out there. So I was writing a blog, I was speaking at events and I was posting on LinkedIn and really within, you know, just a couple months, I started noticing recruiters calling me because they had heard of me or they'd seen something I posted or someone referred them to me because they saw me speak in an event and
And it was like eye-opening. was like, okay. So, and they weren't calling me because they were looking for a senior manager. They were looking for an executive leader as I called myself on my LinkedIn profile. And yeah, but it's a great example. And I tell a lot of people this, if your LinkedIn kind of reads like your resume, you're kind of doing it wrong. LinkedIn is sort of a branding positioning tool for you as a professional.
Tom Hootman (10:14)
It's amazing. Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (10:31)
So if you want to just be known as senior manager at Auto Trader, yeah, you can put that up there. But if you want to really tell people who you are, what you're all about and what you could bring to a potential company, you got to go a little deeper than that. You got to really build out your profile and tell people what you've done and make it a narrative. That's one thing. If you look at my LinkedIn, it's a narrative story of my jobs, not just, you know, I was at this company. Yeah, here are my responsibilities. Yeah. And so that
Tom Hootman (10:54)
responsibilities. ⁓
Jeff Perkins (10:58)
That changed a lot of things for me. so then I really always, I kept doing it though. I kept just posting on LinkedIn and it was amazing because, I really grew my network and it's helped me, it's helped me hire a lot of people. It's helped me find jobs when I've needed jobs. It's helped me get ideas for things that I could be doing or should be doing. That'll help me get results. I found it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a, you know, an unlock for me as a professional having that resource and
You know, there's a lot of cringe stuff on there too, and it can be annoying as a platform, but on the whole, it's a great professional resource. I think it really, ⁓ and if you go in and you contribute a lot to it, you'll probably get a lot back in return.
Tom Hootman (11:38)
Yeah, I so I love that I have so many thoughts on this number one you changing your title or your your header.
I will tell you, I founded when I jumped out and started this, I'd been reached, recruiters had reached out to you, because you're in agencies, they're always looking to hire. And I found that like the same thing, recruiters would come to me and they kind of wanted me to rewind eight years earlier and do that again for someone else. And they were like, you would be the great head of growth, we want you to run new biz for this agency. And I had, I did that, I was like, I did that already. Like, even for more money, like that doesn't fill my cup at all.
I always wanted to be in the C-suite. I always wanted to move forward with my career. And it was the same exact sticking points where you're like, was like, they were like, how much do you make to do that? And it's like, yeah, I know. That's why I'm not leaving. But you don't, but you've never, we want someone who, don't know how many times I heard a recruiter would talk to me and I'd be like, here's what I want to do. And they'd be like, yeah, well, we're really looking for someone who's done that before. And I swear to you, Scouts honor. And I was never a Scout, but anyway, Scouts honor.
within two, three weeks of me just changing my title to CEO and agency founder, which I am small agency, but still, I had three legitimate reputable recruiters reach out who were trying to place executives at large global agencies in their regional offices for the role that I'd always wanted based on and I was like, you and it was funny to me because I was like, I just changed my title and my like headline.
And you obviously didn't look at any of my posts to see that I like I've started an agency like swooping in to see if I'm miserable already, I guess day four. It's awful. Isn't it? Come back. Right. And it was just like a weird experience. And I think that's there's a lot of LinkedIn. think I think it's almost like people are ingrained. Like it's a resume. It's not like it's how it's how LinkedIn started. But remember, Twitter started with like eating my breakfast. Right. Like how it evolves as a platform. I think the
Jeff Perkins (13:16)
Hehehehehe
Mm.
Tom Hootman (13:34)
Like the content helps dictate that and the more people that are authentic and real and help push out, you're always gonna have the cringe, but help push that out and make it something that people actually want to like use as a source to engage with other people on.
Jeff Perkins (13:47)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. And, you know, I'm a fan of, you know, at work, I bring my whole self to work, right? And most people do. Most people come to work and they're not just all business all the time. You know, you come in, you may have a coffee with your coworker. What do you do then? You're talking about your family. You're talking about what you did on the weekend. That's all part of your professional life. That personal part.
Tom Hootman (13:56)
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Perkins (14:13)
And so I always think, well, why not share some of that on LinkedIn? now LinkedIn's not, it's not Facebook or Instagram. You have to be careful with it, right? You can't just, you know, can't, but, you know, I like to show my personal side. I like to get people to know me a little bit beyond just I'm a, you know, CEO of a company. actually, you know, I have kids, I like going to concerts, I run. And I don't even need to,
Tom Hootman (14:22)
Big beer.
Jeff Perkins (14:39)
always tie it back to business lessons. Sometimes it's just wanting to share a little bit more of myself with the community that I'm a part of. And there's, there's nothing wrong with that. And so, you know, I think, I think the, the key is just, it's probably some, some moderation of it. Like how much do you do? You don't want to just see LinkedIn become, you know, a stream of, you know, puppies and kids, right. but every now and then, you know, I, I think of it as just sprinkling it in.
Tom Hootman (14:46)
Yeah. There's that.
Jeff Perkins (15:06)
Right. It's like, want to, you know, the majority of my posts are about business. Either what's going on in my company, what are trends I'm seeing? What are leadership lessons I'm learning? But then every now and then, you know, it's, kind of, it's a little bit of a pattern disruption, right? It's like, there's, there's my kids or there's a puppy I'm fostering or it just, breaks it up a little.
Tom Hootman (15:24)
Yeah, mean if you're only ever sharing Here's the latest PDF insight from my team that we built on the industry it becomes noise right, but if every once in a while There's a human interaction or there's a post that's about you. It's The transparency is good. It's a you have to have the EQ though to know the balance between puppies and children all day long versus something and also I do believe that
Jeff Perkins (15:34)
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (15:48)
there's a lot of on the agency side, are lot of there are a lot of executives who are very like they I see it all day long. And they're they're brilliant, amazing people. But in their heads, they think they have to post subject matter expertise at like a platform level. And there's a lot of posts that are like, here's like a really specific descriptive LinkedIn campaign we ran. And it's like, you, I don't think you run like your team, like someone else did that, like
It's okay to be the executives. They hear something cool. My team did. And I mean, I asked, ⁓ I asked our director of growth marketing about a month in, I was like, can I start talking about what we do? And I was told, no, it was like, everyone knows what you do. Everyone knows what Mixtape does. Every the second you pivot to like anything specific or tactical. It's not you. Like people are going to stop and watch your content about like, because they're interested to know.
Jeff Perkins (16:26)
Yeah
Tom Hootman (16:38)
what the business does, how you're doing, build it with me, here are the things that an agency founder runs into. And I think similar to that, your content, even when you post about work, has a human element to it that's like, here's what I see and here's something that means a lot to me in my seat because they don't get that from a CEO normally. Like it's really easy to turn your job into press release central.
Jeff Perkins (16:42)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. And I worry a lot that I sometimes I do that if I'm just constantly, you you just can't be, you can't be a shill for your company 24 seven on the platform, right? People will just get worn out. It's not that interesting. And even if you are promoting your company, I always try to do it from a lens of like, okay, if I'm sitting and like just looking in the feed, is this going to be interesting to me if I assuming I don't work at the company?
So I always try to take it a step further and not just look at this press release about this thing that we launched. No, it's like, it's kind of going a little bit deeper into what I like about it and why we built it and a little, kind of giving a little bit more context and flavor than you just get out of a media article, right? And then shout outs to the team that built it. And so then you're, which is always nice to give.
Tom Hootman (17:46)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (17:52)
attaboys in a public setting to your team that's worked hard on some of different things we're working on.
Tom Hootman (17:57)
Yeah, I mean, my personal favorite is when my team posts something that they're proud of that they've done. I love reposting it because there's an element of like, awesome, I want to talk to you for a second. And also you wrote it for me. Like, thank you for writing this because I can add three sentences because I don't want to go on and on and on. I want to be like, Elliot and Taylor are amazing. Look at what they did. I'm so proud of them. And I can hit post and be like, OK, cool. I'm cool for a couple hours and like move on from there.
Jeff Perkins (18:01)
Mm.
Hahaha
Yeah. But
unfortunately, LinkedIn does not do a good job surfacing those posts. That's a major complaint I have with the platform is that if you repost somebody else's content, it never gets engagement. It never shows up. And for some reason.
Tom Hootman (18:28)
What?
Is that?
Is that recent? Has
it been like that forever? I don't, I can't remember.
Jeff Perkins (18:41)
It's been like that for a long time, because I've tried everything with LinkedIn and generally I always tell people don't even bother reposting. You're better off taking a screenshot of the post, uploading it as a photo or a PDF and just be like, and writing your own post about it just because for some reason.
Tom Hootman (18:53)
and posting it.
Jeff Perkins (19:01)
the LinkedIn algorithm as it sits today, it devalues reposts, which makes you question, well, why do you have reposts if you suppress it and don't serve it up for people to see? But I look a lot at the analytics of my posts and generally, one, generally, there's no gaming the system. I think the system is so random that you don't really know. mean, unless you do an extraordinarily hot take that
Tom Hootman (19:22)
That's true.
Jeff Perkins (19:26)
you know is gonna have a little bit of controversy to it. Or you do a celebration type post. Those are the two, hot take and celebration, you will get a lot of engagement on. Everything else, I don't know. It's all a crap shoot. Like sometimes I post something, I think it's a meh post and it gets 12,000 views. Other times I post something that I'm really thoughtful about and it gets 500 views. My all time highest impression.
Tom Hootman (19:32)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (19:49)
It was just a random, like on some days I like to try to do a little humor. And so I get a lot of people that come to me, come up to me and they either say to me, who do people tell you you look like? Or they say, or are you this guy? So there's a guy, I don't know if you can guess who it is or maybe you saw my post about this. Okay, okay. It's Scott Galloway, he's got a bunch of podcasts, NYU professor.
Tom Hootman (20:02)
Nice reference.
I saw your post. can't remember who you said it was though. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeff Perkins (20:14)
He's another tall guy, bald with glasses. ⁓ Great marketing insights. And so I did a post and I put a picture of us next to each other. just wrote how I've been able to track the rise of his celebrity and success based on how many more people come up to me and ask me if I'm Scott Galloway. And it was just a cute post. was like ⁓ I posted on a Friday. Fridays usually I reserve for more humorous or just like lifestyle type posts. And like right away,
Tom Hootman (20:17)
With great marketing insights, by the way, you and him.
Jeff Perkins (20:40)
It went up to like 10,000 impressions like right away and people are laughing and they're like, yeah, I always think you look like Scott Galloway. And so it got some good engagement. then Galloway comments on it. yeah, so he comments, goes, he goes, people are always coming up to me and asking me if I'm Jeff Perkins, mystery solved. It was a really good response by him. And then once he commented,
Tom Hootman (20:52)
I was gonna ask, yeah.
It's a great comment.
Jeff Perkins (21:05)
The thing just went crazy. mean, at last I checked, it was over half a million impressions on that post, several hundred comments. I mean, my whole LinkedIn inbox was flooded with people trying to sell me Martech and SalesTech and accounting software ⁓ after that. But it was fun. I've never had a post that had that much engagement before though.
Tom Hootman (21:19)
Yeah.
How do you, I mean, one thing I realized is that my volume of posts was zero and now it's maybe 100 versus zero. You have to get, how do you stay on top of it? You have to get so many requests. And I'm starting to turn into one of those people who is like, if I don't know you and you're very clearly trying to sell me something, I'm sorry, but I've got to filter my, I want my network to be genuine.
Because you also get people who say, hey, do you know this person? And I go look them up and I'm like, no, they tried to sell me something like six years ago. How do you manage all of that noise that comes into you when you wake up every morning? I'm sure you're like, goodness.
Jeff Perkins (22:01)
Yeah, it's, I really, if you're in my LinkedIn inbox, you're not getting a response. It's unmanageable as ⁓ a tool. it boggles my mind they haven't done a better job helping you filter through messages and figure out source, you know, servicing what's important. And I'd say when people try to connect with me, I mean, you're probably, it's probably under 10 % of the people who send me a connection request I actually accept because it's all just random.
people who want to try to sell me offshore, know, engineering services, HR, yeah, yeah. It's just, it's, and you know, so I like actually I was flying back to Atlanta today and an activity I sometimes do on the plane is I just clear out my LinkedIn inbox invites. And I had 250 and I kind of got it down to zero, but I think I accepted maybe
Tom Hootman (22:31)
Resourcing, remote exec admin, yeah, every day.
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Perkins (22:55)
Maybe 10 to 20 of the 250 that had wanted to connect. Yeah, it's just a mess.
Tom Hootman (22:59)
Yeah, I actually,
I followed up with someone who got lost in the shuffle. Someone who I legitimately knew and wanted to like talk to, who I hadn't talked to and for some reason we hadn't connected and I was cleaning out my inbox and I was like, ⁓ holy shit. And I was like, I am so sorry. Like there's so many of these, let's talk next week. And it was like, you know, 10 days old. So it was like very.
Jeff Perkins (23:19)
Yeah, happens
to me all the time. I feel so horrible.
Tom Hootman (23:22)
And you're just like, I'm so sorry. It's, it's, it's
literally a dumpster fire over here. And I just, and I, I've started telling people, used to tell people hit me on LinkedIn. Cause that was easier. Cause it got more of my attention. And now I've turned back into an email guy where I'm like, I use my email as an inbox to a certain extent. If you email me, I will not delete it and I will snooze it. And then you can nudge me on it. And like, I will probably follow up on that faster than I would on the LinkedIn connection request, which is crazy. Cause that's the opposite of how it was a decade ago.
Jeff Perkins (23:32)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, I'm happy to connect with people on LinkedIn, but yeah, it's just, it's a horrible messaging platform. ⁓ Even, I've tried lots of different campaigns on LinkedIn, they've never worked. It's just, it's not.
Tom Hootman (23:58)
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right about like,
yeah, you're right about the algorithm though. You're right about like the three week old posts coming back like and the fact that if you repost something like those are sticky things that like, someone maybe eventually will address but also with all the noise I see and all the activity, probably not a real high priority right now because they're, LinkedIn's getting what it wants, right? Like.
Jeff Perkins (24:26)
Yes.
Tom Hootman (24:27)
Views and impressions and interactions and connection requests. They don't care
Jeff Perkins (24:31)
Yeah, I mean, it's it's on the whole, though, I think it's a great platform. It's a great social network. It it's very positive, which is very different than a lot of the other social networks too which I enjoy. And I like that there's no anonymity to it. You know who these people are for the most part. You can't just set up a LinkedIn profile without, you know.
Tom Hootman (24:48)
That's a great point.
Jeff Perkins (24:52)
just as a random, ⁓ which is great. And even, mean, I really try to keep my LinkedIn pure when it comes to political, what I call incendiary political type content, because there's plenty of places to get that. All right. And so every now and then what happens is somebody likes something that was political and it shows up in my feed and immediately that guy's, he's gone from my network.
Tom Hootman (24:55)
Yeah.
Yeah. Somebody.
Jeff Perkins (25:19)
because I'm just not having it. ⁓ So my LinkedIn is very pure. It's great, it's all business related stuff, leadership, how to grow the company, how to be a better team member. I just get a ton of value out of it every day.
Tom Hootman (25:20)
That's a good rule of thumb. Same thing.
Yeah,
I think of it in terms of like business Instagram, like I like Instagram because it's like, ⁓ awesome. You went to a destination wedding and cool. Like I love your pets and like your kids look amazing. Then there isn't really a like the diatribe hasn't sunk in. Like there's some of that, but it's really easy to be like, no, I'm done. LinkedIn is a bit of the same way where people are, it's the first place someone goes if unfortunately they're in a position where they're looking for a new role.
Jeff Perkins (25:41)
Yeah.
Tom Hootman (25:57)
And I see people all the time and this is crazy time in the market where there's a lot of people in in marketing who are looking for roles and I've made it a mission to try to like help as anyone I can and because it's like more genuine than it's like these are genuine interactions and people who legitimately need help. It's not someone bitching about something they don't agree with in terms of the government. And it's like the incendiary is a great term for it. I haven't seen very many like straight incendiary You have to kind of like
Jeff Perkins (26:18)
All right.
Tom Hootman (26:24)
Okay, there's some subtext and you're trying to you think you're being cute and subversive. We know what you're trying to do here. I'm not going to interact with this and this is going to go away.
Jeff Perkins (26:32)
Yeah, no, I've seen some of the same stuff you would see on Twitter has made its way over to LinkedIn. But if you're not following or engaging with those people, it's not gonna show up in your feed. And so that's the big thing there. And if it does show up in your feed, I found there were like three people in my network, three of my connections that liked a lot of that stuff.
And so it would end up coming in. And the reason it would come in is because it would just get very, very high engagement in that part of LinkedIn where people are posting things like that. So I had to unfollow those people. And once I did, that content totally went away. I haven't seen anything political at all in the last several months. And if I do, I always make sure I'm going to, who's the one that liked it?
Tom Hootman (27:20)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (27:25)
or
comment on it that's in my network and that person probably has to go because it's just not what I'm here for.
Tom Hootman (27:30)
Yeah, I mean, I think the theme of like the first like this conversation is like you have to curate your network. Like you get what you put in garbage in garbage out. And like if you if you do unfollow someone or you remove the connection, it's a pretty pure platform that way. Like you're not going to see that stuff again. You said something.
Jeff Perkins (27:45)
Yeah, yeah, I've actually,
yeah, and I've reached out to people before, yeah, during COVID especially, there was a lot of conflict on the platform. There was more conflict on the platform, I think, just around what was happening with COVID. And it was very business centric. It was probably, it had a political element to it, but debates around.
you know, going back to work versus or, you know, should people wear masks in the office? I mean, those are those are business related conversations that we were having. And, you know, I remember someone was I had posted about a topic related to that basically around I was hearing stories of managers telling their employees and this is really early days of COVID where everyone was sent home. Right. But I was
Tom Hootman (28:28)
For two weeks.
Jeff Perkins (28:29)
I was hearing people telling me like, well, my boss is going into the office every day, but he's like, well, I'm gonna be in there. You don't have to come, but I'm gonna be in there. And I was like, well, that's not a good message to send to the team. Like if you wanna go in, because you just need a quiet place to work, I get it, but.
You know, I was hearing a lot of people posting about how the bosses are basically forcing people to come back to work, even though they weren't comfortable, even though some of them had pre-existing conditions, even though some of them may have had issues with other family members at home where they were concerned about maybe bringing the virus into the house. And this was a time when you just didn't know a ton. There were no vaccines. And I think I did a post about how managers need to be more sensitive and really, you
Tom Hootman (29:06)
You don't, yeah.
Jeff Perkins (29:14)
not force people who are not ready to come back and that was the gist of the post. ⁓ Well it got some level headed responses and then it kind of went down the rabbit hole of what is typical sort of like Twitter bile where people just yelling at each other and nothing was very productive.
Tom Hootman (29:19)
I'm sure it got a lot of level-headed responses.
Jeff Perkins (29:33)
But I remember there was a guy on the post who was just the worst and he was just trolling everybody and he was relentless. And I was like, who is this? I didn't know who he was. I who is this guy and why is he doing this? And it was like, doesn't he understand this as a professional platform? Like even if you're, if you have a strong point of view, be professional. know, this is, you know, LinkedIn is like being in your office. You're not going to like be in your office.
Tom Hootman (29:52)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (29:58)
going crazy politically about people, right? It's not how you would behave. And this guy was going crazy. And then I looked at his LinkedIn profile and guess what he has in his picture, open to work. And I reached out to him. was like, dude, listen, I know you have freedom of speech. I'm not going to shut that down. I'm happy for you to keep the debate going.
Tom Hootman (30:12)
Of course.
Jeff Perkins (30:23)
I would just advise you to be sort of like careful with what you post because you're looking for a job. Your perspective employers are going to be looking at what you post on LinkedIn. It's very public ⁓ and they'll kind of see the stuff and you know, even if they agree with you, they're going to probably think, well, this guy's kind of a jerk. He doesn't really fit our culture. We're going to pass.
Tom Hootman (30:42)
Yeah,
it's the first thing we do, right? When you're hiring someone is you look and see and you're like, okay, like it's a window into their day to day and their POV on business and work. So you sent this person a message. Did you get a response?
Jeff Perkins (30:51)
Yeah, yeah, I did, I did. Yeah,
he told me I was the censorship police and to go mind my own business and I posted it and so he has every right to, I was like, I get it. I was like, that's not what I'm saying. I was like, all I'm telling you, my friend, is you're looking for a job right now.
Tom Hootman (31:07)
Yeah, salute.
Jeff Perkins (31:13)
I would probably be a little careful with what you're posting on public forums because it could come back and it may hurt your chances to get the job you want. I mean, it's interesting. Another post that actually got a lot of ⁓ pickup. There was this trend where people were ⁓ recording themselves getting fired. ⁓ This was, know, and they're talking to the hiring manager on Zoom and they're recording the whole thing. And then they posted on ⁓ LinkedIn.
Tom Hootman (31:31)
I remember that. Yeah, they have like the camera down here and they're looking into the, Mm-hmm.
Jeff Perkins (31:40)
And I did, I wrote a post and I said, I totally get the pain you're going through getting fired. That is a terrible, like, like I've been fired. I've had to fire people. There's a ton of pain. It's the worst, but you are really going to harm your chances of getting your next job by, doing this. And a lot of people thought that was a bad take, like a lot of people. And I thought it was, I stand by that though.
Tom Hootman (31:50)
sucks.
I remember that post. I remember that post.
Jeff Perkins (32:06)
I mean...
Who would ever hire somebody who recorded their previous employer firing them and then posted that on social media? like there's liability with that as a business there. It would be very hard to actually make the case that you would want to bring this person into your organization. It's just too many red flags. you know that that one of the things I said in the post was like
Tom Hootman (32:24)
It's. ⁓
Jeff Perkins (32:29)
I get it, there's a short-term dopamine hit of everybody rallying around you and supporting you and all the engagement you're getting and stick it to the man and corporations are evil. I get it. But you are harming your prospects for getting your next job. I actually, one of the people that had posted the video
She went viral. think she was on the Wall Street Journal and like it was like there were tons of articles. It was really one of these things. It was like the Coldplay ⁓ concert guy. was like it just it took the business world by storm. It took that woman like but what happened people didn't really track that woman ⁓ after like what happened. It took her a very long time to get her next job. And I remember seeing a post where she seemed very she was getting very desperate. She's like I'm really having trouble.
And I would probably venture to guess that she over time, she probably regretted. She probably regretted that move because it's going to be just very hard to hire someone.
Tom Hootman (33:21)
Yeah.
I mean, you could have two fantastic, how many times have you had two fantastic candidates who you want to hire both of them and they're both amazing. And it comes down to these intangibles that you have to make a decision based on. And that's a huge intangible that separates you from being on the gold medal platform to silver. Unfortunately, you can only hire the gold medal and probably a wonderful employee who did amazing work.
Jeff Perkins (33:45)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tom Hootman (33:50)
There's a backlash, which is unfortunate. You had mentioned something earlier, kind of pivoting away from LinkedIn for a sec. Your goal was always to be a CMO. so I found that humorous because you're a CEO, right? So way to shoot for the moon, right? You like very much like I want to be a CMO. You've blown through that. What is, it's like a two parter. What is the biggest difference or the thing that's different about being a CEO versus like the CMO?
Jeff Perkins (33:52)
Yes.
haha
Tom Hootman (34:15)
And the biggest, the biggest thing that's just different for you that you never realized in being in your chair now versus being but before you were a CMO.
Jeff Perkins (34:22)
Yeah.
I mean, it's a remarkably different job than being the CMO, being the CEO. I think probably the thing you have to be aware of as you're gonna come into the, if you take that CMO or CEO job and you, I mean, it's cliche, but it's lonely at the top, right? You don't necessarily have the,
Tom Hootman (34:27)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (34:49)
Like you have to make a lot of really tough calls. I was a previous company, my CEO came into my office one day and he said something that really resonated with me. And I don't always think about it, but he's like, he's like, listen, I know everyone comes in this office every day and they always give you bad news. I mean, basically you are the, you are the person that is the receiver of constant barrage of.
Tom Hootman (35:05)
Yeah, that's true.
Jeff Perkins (35:13)
bad news. The business results are off. There's an employee issue. We had a security breach. We're going to miss this deadline. The numbers are off. We've spent too much money. That's the life of a CEO is just this constant flow of bad news coming in and figuring out, what are we going to do about it?
And my COO came in, he's like, hey, I actually have good news. He's like, I want to some good news with you. We've made progress on this initiative and here are the numbers and it's really great. But yeah, I think you just have to realize in the CEO role, ⁓ you're just constantly getting punched in the face and it's all about how do you respond to that and what do you do? And I think people who gravitate to this role generally,
Tom Hootman (35:50)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (35:57)
We have pretty thick skin and we're able to kind of really power through a lot of the tough, tough stuff ⁓ on a daily basis and get on the other side of it. And I think, I think that's something as a skill set, I've always been pretty good at is that, I'm, know, you know, I don't get so down if things are going bad. I don't probably get so high if things are going good.
Tom Hootman (36:03)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (36:21)
I kind of maintain sort of a fairly level, steady demeanor throughout because, you you can't get too happy and you can't get too sad because, you know, tomorrow's a new day and new problems and you just got to keep pushing forward. And so that, that's to me is the biggest difference. Cause when you're in the CMO role, you're very focused on, you know, growth and customer experience and you obsess on it. And like, when's the new campaign going?
Tom Hootman (36:38)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (36:49)
Why, how do we eke out an extra percentage of conversion rate here and how do we improve the reviews we're getting on G2? You're just constantly thinking about all the parts of the marketing funnel and how do you optimize them and how do you improve performance and how do you tell your story in a more compelling way and how do you kick the ass of the competitors? I mean, that's all you're thinking about, right? Yeah, the CEO role, maybe marketing takes
I think about marketing maybe 10 to 20 % of my day, but the other 80 to 90 % I'm thinking about are people operations and sales efficiency. And I'm thinking about, how do we drive growth and improve our margins? You're just thinking about so many different things. And you got to be comfortable with that context switching. But it's a very, different.
Tom Hootman (37:39)
Yeah, I always had a theory. When I first moved into marketing, that if I was going to I was always a Head of Growth or Head of Sales, and you never want to report to someone to a CEO who used to run new biz, right? Just like if you're a marketing person, you never want to report to a CEO who used to be a CMO, because they have their idea of like how it should go. And you're trying to figure out what they would do more than doing your own thing. Do you
In your opinion, do you think like, have you struggled with that? Have you worked through that of like, being the CMO, like wanting to be like, everyone get out of the way, I got this and putting that hat back on? Are you harder on your CMO than your COO? Is it easier to be harder on them in your seat now?
Jeff Perkins (38:17)
⁓ Yeah, it is. Well, it's just because that's, you know, in a lot of cases, you know, the CEO comes up through finance operations, sometimes sales, but usually it's finance operations. They don't have as much exposure or experience on the marketing side. I've had different CEOs that I've worked for, some that just could care less about marketing. They just want it to work and they give you like a lot.
Tom Hootman (38:19)
Mwahahahaha!
Jeff Perkins (38:42)
free rein to kind of do what you're going to do. Others that are more curious about it, others that are very interested, others that see marketing as just a like a delivery mechanism for leads to sales. So I've worked with different types of CEOs that have had different types of perspectives on marketing. But yeah, it's going to be probably a challenge for a CMO to work for me because I'm going to be pretty particular about
Tom Hootman (39:09)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (39:09)
the brand, storytelling, the tactics, how we're doing. If I see a social post I don't like, I'm gonna screenshot it and send it to my marketing person and be like, hey, take this down or fix it. This is not great. ⁓ Yeah, so it's gonna be tougher working for a former CMO turned CEO for a lot of the marketing.
Tom Hootman (39:18)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jeff Perkins (39:34)
It's just going to be and I'm pretty transparent about that too when people come in is that, I'm not your usual CEO. I'm going to be in your business probably a little bit more. But at the same time, I need my marketing leader to be able to be really effective. So, while I'll probably be more tactical and have more comments on the brand and
advertising executions. know, assuming we build a strong relationship and there's a lot of trust there, that person will also have a lot of rope to go do the things that they think are the right things to do. I'm not, I'm not trying to micromanage marketing because I have enough on my plate. Yeah, sure.
Tom Hootman (40:07)
Well, and there's like you'd be turned into a mentor of sorts, right? Like,
let me help guide you and I'm gonna get in your, I'm gonna get in your shit sometimes and I'm sorry, but like also I'm here to help. And if you can develop that kind of relationship where you have that communication and be like, okay, like right now I don't need you to be a CMO. This is, good. Thank you. I got it. That's a good place to be, right? Like it's easier.
Jeff Perkins (40:19)
Mm.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I'll be honest, one of my favorite marketing leadership jobs is I worked for the CEO who he wasn't a marketer, but he was just a brilliant entrepreneur. And he knew exactly what he wanted all of our advertising and marketing to look like. And he would come into my office and he'd whiteboard. He's like, we need an ad that's going to do this and we need to do this. And
You know, for some marketing leaders, they'd just be like, you know, I'm out. I'm not going to just be the order taker for the CEO. But what I found, and it was that when he would come with a tactical idea for marketing, he was not necessarily saying, Jeff, do this, but he was really saying, here's the problem I'm trying to solve. And here's my idea of how to solve it. But...
If you have a better idea, bring it to me and let's work on it. And so I used to take his executional direction as more of like a creative brief. Like, okay, I get what you're saying. Let me take it back, think about it, come to you with three ideas that really accomplish what you're looking for, but maybe do it a little bit better than you even thought it could be. And it's similar, I mean, you're an agency guy. It's similar with clients. Clients will come, know, Tom, we need...
Tom Hootman (41:24)
Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (41:40)
We need an ad that does this and shows this and is side by side demo and blah, blah. And you just have to take it as inputs and you take that input and you say, well, this is what the client is asking for tactically, but strategically, this is really what they want. And let's deliver on that with some new thinking, some new ideas that are gonna, that's gonna blow the client away. That's the way to approach it.
Tom Hootman (42:02)
Yeah.
Yeah. It's, I mean, the secret to like being a good employee, a good team member, or a good agency, in my opinion, is being able to translate or decipher the like the directives, the to dos from the brief. And I've had I've reported to CEOs, one person comes to mind who used to say,
Think about how we can dot dot dot. And it's a very soft, brief related, like here's let's brainstorm. And I realized pretty early it wasn't like that's a to do. Like that was just how that person phrased their to dos. Think about how we drive more outbound to get more active early stage prospects, higher funnel. It sounds, it's just, it's like a to do described as a brainstorm.
versus when the nomenclature they'd use when it was truly a brainstorm. And I think that like, that's the key to being like successful and being happy and having psychological safety as an employee is figuring is like deciphering the difference between the two because it's really easy. I don't know how many times you lose a client or clients unhappy. And they're like, well, like here's what we, they say, like they say, this is what we asked them to do. When in reality they said, what we'd really like to see and what I'm thinking about is,
Jeff Perkins (43:18)
Hmm.
Tom Hootman (43:19)
And you have to be able to like, okay, that's, that's not a pebble in the shoe. That's a medium sized rock. That's, that's the thing we got to work on. And I think there's a bit of translation on both ends. You have to work out both as an employer and an employee, in my opinion. Um, I'll, I'm going to ask you one last question. Then I promise I'll let you have your Friday so you can run or go to a concert, probably run knowing you, cause you flew today. So I'm sure you've already got to run in you at some point. Um, every, every single pitch.
Jeff Perkins (43:24)
You
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
Tom Hootman (43:47)
and every single discovery call that we're on with a CEO, CMO, VPs, leads with what is your approach to AI and how can you help us solve this scary, scary world we live in and make it more comfortable. From your seat, how has AI impacted your business and what are you worried about when it comes to AI when you talk to your team or to your vendors or to your agency?
Jeff Perkins (44:10)
Yeah. What do I worry about with AI? I don't know if I worry about AI that much. What I worry about more is do we have the people that understand it and are taking advantage of it to drive more efficiency and effectiveness throughout the organization? I think that's probably the way I think about it. The AI tools out there are
just so insanely powerful today. And I think back earlier in my career of how dangerous I would have been if I had some of these tools, man. I mean, really, you know, early on when I was at the software company and we decided we were going to do a webinar program. And it was like,
All right, we got to build the content for the webinar and then we deliver the webinar and then I'd have to like it send out the video to get transcribed. And then I'd have to spend a, you like a week in iMovie splicing up the best clips of the webinar that we could push out and then writing the blog post and the ebook and the sales emails. And you're just doing like, like, and I was, I was really hard on myself. like from, I want all the assets from a webinar.
Tom Hootman (45:13)
All by hand.
Jeff Perkins (45:20)
done within a week. And so we can start to like leverage those through our sales team and our marketing campaigns. And it was a lot of hard work to get that done, you know, because you're writing everything from scratch, you have go back and watch the webinar, you got to it was it was really hard. Now, there's a tool called Goldcast. I don't know if you've ever used Goldcast, but it's a webinar tool. And basically,
Tom Hootman (45:38)
Mm-mm.
Jeff Perkins (45:42)
As soon as you finish the webinar, it gives you five video clips, a blog post, a sales email, an ebook, an infographic, all just puts it right, it's like right there in front of you. I was like, man, I could have been so dangerous. We could have done so much with these tools back in the day. So I mean, I'm really bullish on all the AI tools. I think it's just supercharging so much great work that agencies can do for their clients.
Tom Hootman (45:52)
You would have you. Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (46:06)
Yeah. So I think, I think it's, it's really bullish. I don't, I don't worry at all about, you know, I'm not concerned about it, but I do think, you know, companies have to become experts or you either have to hire experts or you have to hire consultants to help you build some expertise in how you could kind of fully tap the potential of these tools in your organization. cause we're really just scratching the surface of I think what
what we can do. So I think that's the big thing. I'm hearing more and more people are there hiring like the AI czar for the organization. Yeah, I just think it's something we're all going to have to do because these tools are so new and so powerful. And I also think if you're if you're someone if you're an agency or an organization that really goes all in on them, you'll have probably a competitive advantage on agencies that maybe don't.
And are still kind of like, you know, just, just dipping their toes a bit, or just, you know, stuck on just chat GPT to, you know, help with, you know, copywriting. There's so much that you can do within an organization to get more efficient and more effective. And I think it's, it's just, it's really like as a CEO, that's a big thing for me. I I'm pushing, was like, what are we doing as a company to, to really understand these tools and.
Tom Hootman (47:15)
Yep.
Jeff Perkins (47:20)
how they could impact our business. just launched a couple of new tools recently. So one of the in our business as a music licensing company, we have 58,000 audio tracks in our library. And so when we talk to our customers, what's the biggest pain? What do they want? They're like, we want more music. You can't have enough music in your library. We're like, all right, we have 58,000 audio tracks. But they're like, what's the biggest challenge in using music? It's like finding music is the biggest challenge.
Tom Hootman (47:45)
Yep.
Jeff Perkins (47:46)
They want so much music, but then it's really hard to find it. And it's, in some ways it's very soul sucking, I think for, for these, um, for the guys who are trying to figure out, right, I got this great video and you, I need the perfect track. And I have to spend five days of my life listening to song after song to try to find that perfect track for my project. Um, so we, we leveraged AI, you we created the, an AI music supervisor. So instead of just using kind of a generic search and saying, show me, know,
Tom Hootman (48:02)
done that. Yeah.
Jeff Perkins (48:13)
happy songs or searching by genre, you actually go, yeah, man, but you go into this AI ⁓ music supervisor and you say, all right, I'm doing an ad about dog food. It's meant to be happy and upbeat. Give me some options. And then it'll start to kind of curate songs in our library based on what you say. And then it'll say, that sounds great. Do you want more of an EDM vibe? Do you want more acoustic? Do you want more rock? And it'll prompt you. And as you kind of fill out the prompts,
Tom Hootman (48:15)
Old school hip-hop-esque song,
Jeff Perkins (48:40)
it changes the songs that are surfacing. And then you go back and be like, actually, you know, this isn't quite what I expected. Let's switch it up. Give me more like hard rock vibe. Maybe that'll fit the project a little bit more. And you know what? I actually have a picture from the project. I'm gonna upload this picture and it'll start to match songs to the picture you uploaded. ⁓
Tom Hootman (48:59)
So you could upload like
a still from the actual like video you took. That's cool. That's really cool.
Jeff Perkins (49:02)
Yeah, yeah. And
it's this really, it's this nice back and forth, but it's a great AI use case for us because man, could, what used to be sort of this like really hard, like, you you type into kind of a Google search, you know, cinematic songs, and then you filter based on maybe the key or beats per minute or the instrument. Now you just kind of like talk to somebody. Basically, you talk to an agent and the agent's going to
serve up the perfect song. And we see in our metrics that people that use this solution, they're getting to a download much faster than people who are going through traditional search. So it's really adding a lot of value to our user base and helping them find the right song faster.
Tom Hootman (49:45)
It's amazing to me. I love that. That's really cool. That's really fucking cool. Pardon my language, but like, because I did this for our launch video and I days, maybe like a couple of weeks trying to find like the perfect song for the launch video that no one else was going to pay attention to but me, right? Like, and what I love about this is that it's, we've moved so fast when like, if you think 30 years ago with search engines.
to type in what you want, what's my intent, here's your results. And we got away from, that's an automated old school approach. We got away from, I'm the person who's gonna help you pick the right music. Because we automated everything into a search engine or search engine based search engine on a site. And we're adding back in with AI the ability to have this concierge, this curator, which resonates to me, because we're all about curation and customization and helping make the
the scary world we're in simpler. And it's I think there's like this cottage industry of brands like yours, businesses like mine, who are this concierge of this crazy world we're in, because what we're seeing is so many more companies rise up, who promise the moon and stars and want to deliver something that's and everyone's AI based of like, almost like a personal shopper of like
Jeff Perkins (50:51)
Hmm.
Tom Hootman (50:59)
I'll be your personal shopper and we're gonna work in your best interest to help you figure out what's best for you. And I think there's that element that scares people about AI from using it initially. And it's like the first step's the hardest to take, the second hardest is like actually landing on something you're happy with at the end. And it helps find you that last step and the first step. Like it's someone to help kind of shepherd that process along. Because everyone I know is either all in on AI and they won't shut up about it, or they're like,
And I use it to refine an email and there's too many dashes. We're still trying to figure out the in-between. Similar to when I knew Reels was gonna be a thing was when I was at my mom's house several years ago and I was like, what are you doing over there? And she's like, I'm just scrolling Reels. And I was like, if moms are on it, it's over. We haven't gotten to that stage yet where moms are all about AI. Once we hit that stage, it's full bore, folks, it's over.
Jeff Perkins (51:29)
You
Yeah. But it, goes back to sort of the basics of, marketing, right? Which is understanding your target audience and understanding where they're, what's their pain point. And then saying, all right, well, we have this new tool called AI. How do we use that to solve the customer pain? Right. And so I think that's really interesting because you could, you could solve.
much more complex customer panes today using AI than you probably could a few years ago. And that's what we're really leaning in. We want to make sure that, you know, if you're doing videos and using audio, we want to understand where the, what the friction points are, where the bottlenecks are, what's hard about that process, and then say, all right, there are ways that you could implement, you know, smart AI through that process.
to make people's lives a little easier. And if you do that, chances are they'll like your service and they'll continue to stay with you.
Tom Hootman (52:44)
Yeah, it's exciting because it's turned from a content creation proofreading engine into a true engine for finding solutions faster, which is exciting.
Jeff Perkins (52:52)
Yeah, 100%.
Tom Hootman (52:53)
Jeff,
thank you very much for your time as always. And I appreciate it because for anyone listening, this man traveled and had flight delays and had to book a hotel and then figure it out. And then I was late. You've had the patience of the pope, my friend, and I appreciate it. Thanks for making time. It was great to catch up. It's been too long.
Jeff Perkins (53:08)
All right, Tom. Yeah, great to see you. Thanks for having me on the pod. Look forward to hearing the episode when it drops. Yeah.
Tom Hootman (53:14)
Appreciate you. Take care.