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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Zach Roberts [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit, exit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
All right. Wherever you are, we're live. It is now 11:00 eastern. People are coming in from all over the world, I'm sure. I got Natalie here. I got Zach here. Since we're live right now, do me a favor. I see people rolling in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:29]:
Go into the chat, and I need you to do this as a favor. Go into the chat. This is for my speakers today. Also, go into the chat, write your name, write where you're coming in from. Okay? And then I'm going to ask you a second question. A second. So I'm going to Dave, Burlington, Vermont, and shout out to everybody in the future that's listening us on the exit five. Exit five podcast.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:48]:
We're doing an exit five live session today. Don't call it a webinar. If you call it a webinar, you immediately get kicked out. It's not a webinar. It's a live session. All right, so Kate is in Atlanta. Carl's in Newton, Mass. Zach is in Minnesota, more Minnesota and Madison.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:03]:
Let's go.
Zach Roberts [00:01:04]:
Yes. Madison, Wisconsin. Mexico.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:06]:
So for some reason, both Zach and Natalie are in Minnesota today. So we got Minnesota and Vermont represented here from the b two b marketing community. We got Knoxville, Tennessee, govalls, Omaha, Milwaukee. Woodstock, Georgia. See, people came in. Lisa's in Bel Air, Maryland. Some love for Monroe. All right, this is great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:24]:
So here's the deal. I'm Dave. I'm the founder and CEO here at exit five. I think we're building the best community in the world for b two b marketing professionals. And I have two great people to do this webinar with me. Oh, damn it. I said webinar myself to do this live session with me, myself, Zach Roberts, and Natalie Taylor. This is a fun one because each of these folks that you see right here is also an exit five member marketer in their own craft.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:50]:
You know, this is their craft. This is their job. A couple of weeks ago, I hit up the exit five community, and I said, hey, what do you want to talk about? So, a little bit different than the podcast traditionally, where instead of doing interviews, we do these live sessions where we bring in subject matter experts. We do a little deep dive on a particular topic. Obviously, there was a bunch of popular ones, but I had to pick the one that I thought would be great, and that was product launches. Talked to Natalie, talked to Zach. We're going to talk about some product launch stuff that each of them has done to their companies in the past. Natalie recently did launch at Capsule, which is more on the startup side.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:21]:
Zach is going to talk about a launch he did a couple years ago in the cybersecurity space, which a company. More on the enterprise side. And then we're going to hang out and we're going to take all your questions. So if you came here because you have specific product launch questions, you want to talk playbooks processes, what to do? Get advice for your next launch. We are going to help you out here. So real quick, before we get started, last question, last housekeeping item. Go into the chat one more time for me and I want you to put in, like, why did you come to this session today? What do you want to know about product launches? Are you doing a product launch of your own? Do you have a specific question? Just so the three of us can really quickly just get a read of the room and figure out why you're here, other than the fact that the three of us are just great people to hang out with for an hour virtually. So put them in the chat real quick.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:08]:
Lead it, like Caitlin said, leading integration launch with a super quick turnaround. Amanda says we're launching a new product in Q three. This is fantastic. We're doing a product launch next month. I want to apply anything I learned directly to it. So awesome. Q three launch. This is great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:21]:
Great timing. Look at screenshotting this and send it to the exit five team because this is exactly why we do these sessions to help you out right now. Here I am in here by myself trying to screenshot. So. All right, here we go. Last housekeeping for questions for us. You're going to use the Q and a feature here. This is Gold cast that we're using.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:37]:
You're going to use Q and a because it helps me keep a little bit more organized. And then also in the Q and A, you can go and upvote other people's questions so I can get a sense of what question is most popular that we want to ask for our guests. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Zach. Zach, give us a quick intro to yourself. We'll get your slides set up and we're going to dive into your whole launch. All right.
Zach Roberts [00:03:57]:
Yo, thanks, Dave. So, Dave, as you said earlier, my name is Zach Roberts, founder of Break into product marketing. It's a fractional product marketing service. I am based in San Diego, but I decided to fly over to visit Natalie here in Minnesota about roughly an hour away while visiting family at the same time here. So give me a moment to pull up my slides here. But team, I am so excited about this conversation right now and to give a deeper dive on this. So as Dave mentioned, we're going to talk more about an enterprise security launch at Dropbox. For anyone that's in marketing, specifically in product marketing, you know, influence hinges upon the numbers that support the business and these were their creative metrics that we aligned on specifically for sales alignment and velocity.
Zach Roberts [00:04:42]:
From meetings booked in the call blitz to the number of close opportunities that aligned from both the sales and marketing criteria, and ARR from a six week timeframe and by the end of the fiscal year. For context, this play was launched on April 12 of 2022. These were the actual results. And from what you see here, we blew it out the water from the lowest like percentage of 105% of goal, from the meetings booked, from opportunities and from revenue from the six week period, from the period of April 12 to the actual date as of October 29, 2022. What most people don't know is that the campaign designed for the initial product release, the enterprise security product itself, got delayed for several months. So with that in mind, the next question we're asking ourselves is like, Zach, like, how the heck do you build a successful b two B launch for a sales led.org without the product itself? What are we doing here? So one part, to better understand this question, I got to take you all back five years prior to this moment. And this is when I was in SDR at LinkedIn. During the photo here, I'm sitting down with our vp of sales at the time, Mike Derrison.
Zach Roberts [00:05:58]:
He decided to take the day out of his schedule to better understand the sales processes that we see on the front lines when we're talking to prospects, trying to understand, like, why would I even buy from LinkedIn even though I'm not really on LinkedIn? What is the problem trying to solve similar to a product launch, B two B sales, no different. The best ones, either a conversation or launch itself. Don't lead on a product. They lean on your buyer. And for some of us here who said lead with the product, with every launch, I agree with you. As long as you go in knowing your buyer first, there's a reason why there's no all vegan restaurants alongside the highway 90 in rural Wisconsin. So with that context in mind, let's learn more about what we're going to get out of this conversation. In the next several minutes.
Zach Roberts [00:06:44]:
We're going to talk about what to do first in a buyer focused launch, when a lot of the focus is on, like, content, collateral, tactics produced, take a step back to really hone in on what are the activities that are going to actually going to drive revenue.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:57]:
It's funny, a question that comes up all the time in the community is marketers, and marketers that are here in the chat. You can feel free to let me know if this is you. But we feel like we create all this stuff for a launch and then it's like, how do we get sales to pay attention to this? That is like the ultimate sales enablement question. I can't get them to pay attention. I got to do all this stuff. And so I'm interested to see where you take this.
Zach Roberts [00:07:17]:
I'm like, Dave, you're reading my mind right here. And to better enable sales and enable the organization, when you focus on the buyer, that makes it easier to get sellers on your side. So knowing that better research, what are the questions you're going to ask yourself to better refine that? And when you do that, what do all successful launches sit on? And when you do build that foundation, that makes it easier to implement this one simple fix of unused sales collab, which recently we had a conversation on a separate podcast for enterprises, that's about 1.2 million of unused sales battery each year. Like, how can we reduce that? And this is what we're going to do to help you out here today. And lastly, how much time does this all take to do all this? So for anyone that calls themselves a data backed marketer and has taken a data analytics course, the first thing your instructor is going to tell you before you dive into the data set is to ask yourself a question, an open question of what you are looking to explore, what you're looking to uncovered. What are the insights that you want to use to help refine your decision making? This is no different when we think about a product launch. And this was the same question I asked myself at the start of this campaign. Again, with the context being we don't really have a product, a new product to talk about.
Zach Roberts [00:08:33]:
So what's really great about this one single sentence here of how can Dropbox users reduce cyber attack risk by upgrading their plans, is that it breaks it down to three components that you are going to use to help refine what to focus on within the bioresearch first piece, who's our target audience? Who'd care about this most of reducing their cyber attack risk, that being the desired outcome? And then lastly, how does our product tie to that? Again, we're talking about Dropbox and cybersecurity. If anyone were to get hacked, no one's calling Dropbox to defend their security perimeter. So in the next few minutes we're going to talk about how do you create an open space in the mind to make it relevant to said target audience of why Dropbox might be relevant to their cybersecurity needs. So before I go over, you're going to look at this and you're going to be like, well, this is sufficient. Some your leader might say, this is sufficient. We have enough to know what our audience, what we want to do to launch this campaign. Let's do that. But one insight I took from my sales experience is this lesson from David Hofel.
Zach Roberts [00:09:41]:
The science of selling is that when you're talking to a buyer, there are six implicit questions they're asking themselves to whether, hey, like, does this make sense for me to make this purchase? And if we flip the script and ask ourselves this question, this does a lot of the upfront work within your product launch planning to make it easier to win the sellers overdose. So taking this question, this really helped me refine where I want to put my attention. What are the insights that I want to uncover and that better strengthen the content and resources that you're going to build with this plan right here. So walking through this really quick here, is that from the awareness standpoint, educating and selling on the problem. When we were talking about this campaign at the time, a few things were going on. Covid there was a rise in hybrid work and that meant asynchronous work, people sharing data from different areas. That kind of gave it teams a little bit of heartburn because that could raise the risk of a cyber attack. To then evaluation, like what's the best alternative? I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond.
Zach Roberts [00:10:45]:
So how do I position Dropbox to not be in cybersecurity, but in the space that we play well, which was remote collaboration and digital cloud storage, and show how our security capabilities stand out from the competitive alternatives. When we can answer those questions earlier on, it makes it a lot easier than then show why the product is the solution. And it takes a lot of that upfront burden away from the seller of justifying, hey, this is why we're having the conversation today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:14]:
This is great. I think it's easy to jump into the tactics and you're going to get to them and show us the actual launch stuff. But it is like, I really am a believer in this, in the how do you become a great copywriter? Oh, the way to become a great copywriter is to do good research. Right? And it's like if you rewind back and you really have to have something that people want is the ultimate key to a successful product launch. It's not necessarily like, oh, we did this video with this influencer and we wrote this copy on LinkedIn. Those are all things that are going to come from strong positioning and the foundation for this launch.
Zach Roberts [00:11:46]:
And that's right, David, I'm glad you brought that up in that, because that ties into what we're going to talk about next. Is that a few minutes ago I mentioned to you all, is that this question you see on the screen is that we're going to answer this question, and the answer to this question is going to be a similar approach that we see in all campaigns and which is positioning. And we're going to talk about how these two steps really help you create a unique point of view which we then use to partition the message across our entire campaign, across our collateral, and created a narrative that really supported what sellers were saying in the field. Like the comment that was mentioned earlier, Zach, this is no different than what we're saying in the field. What's really great now is that now we have content proof points and evidence to back our talking points. This is what positioning can do for you. Positioning can make you the big fish in the small pond. And this is how we were able to pivot Dropbox from, hey, this is a space where I store my grandmother's photos to oh, this is a space that's going to make it easier for me to protect our sensitive employee data because it's a tool that my employees use.
Zach Roberts [00:12:54]:
The unique insight behind that that was uncovered in research is that for it, teams in the small, medium, business sized space is that they don't want to be a blocker to business. They want to help businesses win. But sometimes they're seen as the big bad wolf because they're putting policies in place to ensure the security is safe. If you and I like a tool that may not agree with it, we're going to still use it. And that was their number one challenge to protecting their security perimeter. And by showing like, hey, we know your employees love this tool. We know that you want to align with business outcomes. We have features that better enable you to protect that data and to better support your HR teams.
Zach Roberts [00:13:35]:
Related to like, the rise of regulatory state by state privacy information. Are you interested? So this is an example here of how this positioning hinged upon all the research and helped enable the content that we're doing. Before I show you that next fix, one question we're asking ourselves is that when we are being like tasked with delivering a launch yesterday, how much time is this going to take? And again, this is just an example just from a larger enterprise here. This may be different from you, but this was the components that we looked at was that looking from industry reports to working with our internal sellers and interviews like, hey, deals that were related to the features that we're looking to launch, really knowing who the buyer was, like why did they buy? What were they trying to solve to like existing collateral? One of the pieces of feedback that we got from our sales team is that hey, we really need an infographic to really set the stage, set the context. So that was one way of creating content and that was used by the sales team. The last piece here I want to cover here is that when you think of collateral, don't think of it as we need to get stuff out the door just to talk about our product. But like we said before, flip the script. Think about it from the buyer's perspective.
Zach Roberts [00:14:49]:
Ask yourself at what stage are you, what questions are you trying to help solve for the buyer? The example with the infographic that we spoke on was that it was really to show this, to educate and set context around the problem and set the stage and say, hey, from what you are feeling, here are some numbers to show you as to why you might be feeling this way. How does this resonate with you? It started a stronger conversation around the problem, then better position the product as the solution here. So overall for your next launch, these are the five takeaways to take from it. Is that before you dive into the activities, really take a step back and ask yourself the question like what are you trying to solve for? Similar to the approach that we take to like exploring a data set is no different for a launch itself. The six whys flip the script instead of looking at it from a marketing funnel, let's sit down with the buyer and look at it from their lens when they are making decisions like this. When you can do that, it makes it a lot easier to craft a positioning statement without a complex framework to do so. And then from there, creating content then that supports the positioning along the funnel and having questions are really assessed like hey, are we really answering this for this buyer? If not, how do we get them on board? And then lastly, when you're doing bio research like this, talk with your sales team. Talk like look at existing collateral.
Zach Roberts [00:16:11]:
What are the industry reports that you may tap into to better inform yourself of the market and to see what your buyers see when they're evaluating solutions like yours. So I'm going to stop right here. I'm going to pass back over here today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:23]:
Great job. Catherine says, I love that. Get out of the marketing mindset and channel your buyer. Alexander is in the Q and a saying, Zach, this is brilliant. We'll be getting access to your slides post event. Absolutely. We'll make sure everybody gets those. Quick question for you before we flip over to Natalie from Caitlin.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:41]:
When you've got two weeks to prep internally, where would you ruthlessly prioritize?
Zach Roberts [00:16:46]:
So the clarifying question is two weeks to launch. Just, it sounds like two weeks to launch the product, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:51]:
Yeah. Let's just make up an answer helper riff on this. Like, if you had two weeks to go, if you had two weeks and to get a launch turnaround, how would you prioritize some of this stuff?
Zach Roberts [00:16:59]:
Yeah, my first thing would be assuming that if it's like a sales organization, I'm talking to my sellers. I would ask them like, hey, like, what's working for you on the field? And then just prioritize on that and just better enable that and getting that out the door. If that's a new one pager, it really depends. But I would want to strengthen what the sellers are already doing. It's working.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:18]:
Love that. Great answer. I've been noticing a trend of, like, people want like, really sexy answers and like, they want to like, hear about very specific playbooks and tactics. But the more people that I've been talking to lately, it is all about going back to the fundamentals and starting with sales. Like, hey, this is for a sales driven launch, right? Natalie's going to talk about a company that has a little bit of a different motion, and so sales is involved, but it's much more of a self serve model. But let's start with sales. They're the ones that are going to be talking to people about this thing. Let's work backwards.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:48]:
I only got two weeks. What do you need to make this successful? I do think we spend a lot of time spinning our wheels in marketing, making things that sales is not going to use. I had Kira Federer on my podcast a couple of days ago and we recorded. She's done a ton of interesting launches for companies like Glassdoor and Reddit. And we talked about exactly this. How do you get sales to consume the content that marketing is creating? And she's like, well, the answer is you have to create it with them.
Natalie Taylor [00:18:13]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:13]:
If you make this together, if we can get agreement on what you need, then we go create it, and we're actually working together, collaborating as teammates. Then they're going to use the thing that, that you made them. So. All right, Natalie, let's flip it over to you. Zach, hang out. Feel free to, like, go get a drink of water, get a coffee, do your thing, hang out, and we'll, we'll have you come back on video in a, in a minute, and we'll do Q and A. But, Natalie, I'm gonna flip it over to you. All right.
Natalie Taylor [00:18:34]:
All right. Hey, everyone. Happy to be here. I'm Natalie Taylor. I lead marketing for an early stage startup called Capsule, which is an AI powered video editing tool for enterprise teams. So going to be focusing more on the very scrappy early stage startup. More like, you actually do have two weeks to launch something that's a very realistic timeline. So let me pull up my slides.
Natalie Taylor [00:19:01]:
So the launch that I'm going to talk about, this is a feature that we launched in February. And before I kind of dive into it, I think the important thing, again, is, like, really understanding what it is that you're offering, what is actually valuable to people, and what's the story and how you're going to position it. And so it's a startup. I'm very integrated with the product team. Our CEO is very integrated with the product and marketing functions. And we have these different features that were slated to come out over the course of a few weeks, a few months, and our CEO realized like, hey, we have these audio features. We should just sort of bundle them all together. Let's rearrange a few things and have these three audio features come out at once.
Natalie Taylor [00:19:43]:
And we'll have a big audio launch, which I think is a great idea. So that's kind of the step zero, before you get into the actual launch is making sure that the features are compelling enough and ideally can kind of work together to tell some sort of story, whether that's solving a specific pain point or just addressing a challenge. So the two areas that I'm going to focus on that helped us create a successful launch campaign were a launch video and then working with influencers and creators as a distribution channel. So the first one is our launch video, and I'm just going to play the first 20 seconds in the last 10 seconds just so you get a sense of it. Hey, it's Natalie from the marketing team.
Zach Roberts [00:20:29]:
Today, capsule is launching three incredible AI powered audio features that are going to.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:33]:
Help you level up your videos in seconds. First, voice magic. Voice magic is your AI sound.
Natalie Taylor [00:20:40]:
Okay, I'm just gonna skip to the last 10 seconds so you get the little highlight summary.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:44]:
I was waiting. I was waiting for someone to go in the chat and be like, the audio is not working for me.
Natalie Taylor [00:20:51]:
The irony, you have it voice magic.
Zach Roberts [00:20:54]:
To make you sound great, soundtrack to help you find the perfect song and auto mix to bring the two together to make perfect sounding videos. All of this is available for free. Try it out at capsule video.
Natalie Taylor [00:21:07]:
Okay, so how many signed up for.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:10]:
Capsule, by the way?
Natalie Taylor [00:21:13]:
Hopefully a bunch. Hopefully a bunch of you just signed up for capsule. That's the point. So I really like starting with some sort of anchor asset. And the reason I like doing a launch video is a, we're a video editing company. We have to have good looking videos. But b, I think video is sort of like the ultimate format. You've got audio, you've got visual, and you kind of have to condense everything into like under two minutes.
Natalie Taylor [00:21:38]:
Like what are the key points? What's the narrative? It's just like a nice way to package everything up. And then from there it makes the rest of the campaign really easy. You've got your main story, you've got a lot of visual and audio assets that you can use in different ways. And then it's really easy to write the emails, it's easy to write social copy. So I like starting with the launch video. That's step one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:02]:
Wait, can we pause on that for a second? I think that this is how I would be launching products today, no matter what. Enterprise, startup, medium size, mom and pop business. Video is the language of how all of us communicate. My wife and I communicate more by sending each other like tiktoks and Instagram reels than like text messages. Right. This is how we communicate. We share videos. So I think it's like the create the great asset for the launch.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:26]:
I love that play. And it also forces you to like nail the story, nail the narrative to get it. It's hard to do a one. If you've ever tried to write a script for a 1 minute video, you'd be surprised how very quickly that 1 minute video is. Like three minutes and 45 seconds. And you're like shoot. And so I think it's a great forcing function. It gives you guardrails.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:45]:
Also talk about sales enablement. The best sales enablement collateral is going to be a 1 minute video, forget a PDF. And so no matter what type of company you are, I love the forcing function of like, let's create a launch video for this.
Natalie Taylor [00:22:57]:
Yeah. And that kind of goes into the next part. I'll talk about, but it's really thinking about what is the end experience for the audience we're trying to reach. Again, like, we're mostly consuming things via video. This is going to be the ultimate format. We want to have this type of asset because that's how people are going to consume the message we want to get out there. So the next piece to this is also thinking about how are people going to consume this? I think the future of distribution in a lot of ways is around creators and influencers, people who already have established networks and audiences and leveraging those. That's how I consume it again, it's how I consume information a lot these days is through my LinkedIn feed, when I'm trying to learn about new tools or just what's going on in my work world.
Natalie Taylor [00:23:44]:
And so we worked with these nine wonderful folks to not only distribute to their networks about this launch, but also they created their own videos. So not only did we get access to all of their followers, but we now have like an asset that we can use across other channels as well. And bonus point is, I also, again, we're a scrappy startup, don't have a lot of resources. So I created a video as well. I was like, I should be an influencer too. I'm like starting to grow my LinkedIn audience, like, I should be part of this campaign too. And my video got, but was like one of the highest engaged videos of that campaign. So that was another little hack was just leveraging my own network as well.
Natalie Taylor [00:24:26]:
And so I'm going to spend a couple minutes just going through the process of how we worked with these creators, because I think influencers in the b two B space is still like fairly new people are still trying to figure it out. So I'm going to spend a couple minutes walking through that process. One thing I learned is that I kind of developed a lot of sales skills in this process because you're having to make a list, you're having to like, cold outreach people and pitch them and get them bought in and want to partner with you. So that was a fun side note of this whole experience. So first thing I did was just create a list of people that I wanted to work with that I thought would be good distributors for getting this message out, and we're good content creators as well. Then I send them a cold DM and flatter them and tell them why I would want to work with them and give them a little sneak peek of what we would do together. Then I set up an intro meeting. I pulled together a slide deck.
Natalie Taylor [00:25:22]:
I even had my sales team did a demo for them, was like, okay, give me lots of feedback and critique on this. Am I pitching capsule? Well, give me feedback. So that was really helpful and then send over a brief and contract. And then on the actual launch day I created a slack channel with all of the creators and it's not necessary, but I think it is fun and makes the whole experience a lot better is I created a slack channel for all the creators and had everyone post a link to their LinkedIn post. We all posted on the same day and wasn't required that everyone engaged with everyone else's posts, but pretty much everyone commented and liked on every single post, which then continues to boost all of those posts. And it makes everyone feel like they're part of this launch and they're part of this team because they are. They are our distribution channel and we want them to feel like they are a big part of this campaign. These are just our campaign stats.
Natalie Taylor [00:26:20]:
We worked with nine creators and we also had three capsule team members. Me, our CEO, our customer success manager all created videos around this new product launch. We got over 65,000 impressions, 430 comments, a 53% increase in our average signups. But I think one of the coolest things was just seeing the fact that this is being distributed mainly on LinkedIn and through lots of different creators is we get to see a huge variety of positive responses and momentum. So this is just like a sampling of some of the comments that we got on these posts. Like, wow, thanks, this is super helpful. I love this feature. This is a game changer.
Natalie Taylor [00:27:03]:
That is super exciting. It was really exciting to see, just like this huge wall of comments from a variety of people across all of these different posts. So that is our AI audio launch, just to summarize. So the first thing was have a clear story and offer that came from our CEO realizing we should really bundle these features together and then building an anchor asset from that. That really tells that story for us. That's a video. And then using creators and partners to amplify your reach has been really effective for us in all of our product launches.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:39]:
A lot of positive stuff in the, I almost said the slack in the, in the q and a here. So let's first go back. I think the thing most people want to know about is this influencer play that you ran, Natalie. So let's talk about this. Want to unpack that a little bit?
Natalie Taylor [00:27:54]:
Yeah. And I saw a couple of questions about, like, how do you choose what platforms and channels like for us, we knew that we wanted to focus on LinkedIn. That's where our target audiences and that's where we've seen a lot of success. And so the benefit of me running marketing at capsule is that I am also a target buyer, a target user. So I started by building my list with people that I already follow and like, and I just reached out to them, and that worked really well. I don't have as much wonderful advice for finding influencers that you are not as familiar with, but it's absolutely possible. There's in pretty much every space. And so that's how I started to build the list.
Natalie Taylor [00:28:37]:
And then from there, I saw a couple questions about, like the brief, what are sort of the guardrails you give? I think that was our second creator launch that we did, or maybe third, actually, and we actually just launched our fourth two days ago. What I learned is to, you want to give creative freedom to the creators because that's what they do best. And with a few kind of like, these are the things that you need to include. It needs to be 30 to 120 seconds long. It needs to be posted to LinkedIn. You have to show the product in some way. We know that the capsules product is very different, and it's what sells itself is the product itself. So we want to make sure it's visible.
Natalie Taylor [00:29:16]:
Like whether that's a screen share, whether that's like you editing a video, that's a key requirement. And then you have to talk about this new feature. And then I also give some guidance around the overall capsule messaging and positioning just so that they have the context. And a lot of that's covered in that intro call when I'm pitching capsule overall and the campaign overall, so that they understand the overall positioning and messaging and how it fits in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:43]:
I think one of the things, just observing this, and I was one of the people that you had post a video, I saw one that you did yesterday or so with Christina Lee, which I thought was awesome. I think the key to making these work, and we've done a bunch of so, so I got a lot of outreach for this. Like last year when I was doing solopreneur Dave and like building exit five, a lot of people wanted me to post their product launch stuff, and now we're doing it a bit more strategically as part of like a bundle for exit five. So I'm not doing like a yemenite. I'm not doing like a one off sponsored posts anymore. Like, if I do a sponsored post on LinkedIn, it's going to be part of, like, a package bundle. Like, calendly is doing two webinars and sponsoring our event and podcast ads and a couple LinkedIn posts. And I think all of the content that really works well there is when you give the creator and you give them guardrails, but they need to write this in their voice, and they need to give away some of the freedom.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:33]:
And that's one of the areas where I find that marketers have a hard time, because we want to, like, perfectly control the message. But it's like, no, what's going to work in this channel is letting that creator talk. The same reason they you want to get in front of them anyways, because it's their own voice. They've built their own audience. You have to meet them where they're at and let them customize things and write it in their own voice. But give the guardrails that Natalie had lined up so you can still get what you need out of it as a company. The other mistake I see people make is we, as marketers, try to hold on to this too tight. And so you'll notice that in any of these launches that you've done, there's no UTM link here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:08]:
There is no. And click on this link, and Natalie is only going to be able to track and get credit for anyone that clicks on this link. And here's why. Anybody who knows anything about social media right now knows that. What? Social media platforms do not like links anymore. They don't like links. We all know that. However, when we're a marketer and we're doing something well, I'm spending money on it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:29]:
I'm paying Zack to write this post. I gotta know exactly how many signups I drive from that post. So, Zach, here is the UTM link we're gonna use to track Zach's posts. If Zach goes and uses that link, LinkedIn is going to deprioritize that post. And so you're gonna immediately kill the reach of that post out of the gate instead, because Natalie's smart. What they did was, there's no UTM link. They're gonna start doing things. And I actually just heard Rand Fishkin talk about this with Kip and Kieran on marketing against the grain, which is great.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:59]:
He's like, the smart marketers are going to go back to measuring things by, like, geographic based lift and time based lift. And so, okay, we did this launch on this day. We got a bunch of signups on that day. We don't know necessarily that 102 of those signups came from Dave and 116 came from Zach. But we know that we got a lot of signups that day. I can look at the engagement on Zach's post and Dave's post. I can kind of triangulate, like, which one drove more signups. And I just think that that's so smart.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:27]:
And I'm sorry for getting on my soapbox about this, but this is like, if you want to do social marketing well, if you want to do influencer marketing well, you have to understand how the channels work and you have to be able to do it and execute it in the right way. If you just want to have people post your UTM link because you want to measure it perfectly, it's never going to work and it's going to kill the reach of the post from the beginning.
Natalie Taylor [00:32:47]:
Yeah, 100%. The other thing I'll add is one thing that the creators that we've worked with have told me is a reason that they enjoy working with capsule is because they are not given a script and that they choose to work with capsule because of that. A lot of these people get pitched to promote different products and brands and they're given, okay, this is exactly what you need to do. And they're like, no thanks, I'm not going to do that. So I think it is really important to let them, and I think it's valuable to have them share their perspective. And that's one thing that I encourage the creators to do is like, I really want to see how you actually would use this in your workflow. Can you please just like demo that in your video? I'm really excited about these audio features for this type of video I'm doing, and look how it transformed this video that I'm creating for my job kind of thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:34]:
Love that. A lot of people have seemed to ask about, like, how did you find this list? How did you come up with this list of influencers? You want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah.
Natalie Taylor [00:33:41]:
I mentioned earlier, like, I started by adding people who I already follow on LinkedIn, people I've been following for several years whose content I appreciate, people I. There were a couple new people I started seeing pop up on my feed who'd been creating videos more kind of like TikTok style. That was intriguing to me, and then I just reached out to them and then not everyone can or wants to work together after we kind of get into specifics. But one thing I did learn is number of followers does not equate to highest number of impressions or engagement on their post. So I think there's actually some sort of curve. I don't know exactly what it looks like, where once you reach a certain threshold, the number of impressions and engagement you get is not going to be ten x more than someone who has ten times fewer followers kind of thing. There were a lot of people we worked with who had like, 2000 followers and got just as much engagement as people who had 10,000 followers. So I think it's really important to look at the engagement metrics on their post and see how engaged their audience actually is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:48]:
Let's say you have a limited budget, right? I'm just going to make up numbers for Natalie. This is not her saying this, is me saying this. You're a startup. You don't have all the money in the world. You're not going to have 100 grand to go spend with the influencer. But maybe you have ten grand, 15 grand, 20 grand. Would you rather put all those eggs in one basket and have someone maybe like me in exit five who charges a lot of money and have one or two posts from those people? Or could you go and find ten people that have 2000 followers and get this one plus one plus one equals 50 type of approach, which is, I think, exactly what you did. I've actually thought about this play, and the reason why I have you on is because I think it's so smart.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:28]:
I'm like, man, if I only had ten grand, I would go and find ten or 20 people and I would say, can I pay you $500 to $1,000 per post? Because those are not traditional influencers. And so most likely you are finding someone who's writing on LinkedIn. Nobody's ever paid them to write a post, ever. And you're like, wait a second, you're going to pay me $500 to write a post on LinkedIn? That's like a third of my rent. Okay, I'll do that. And so it's very meaningful for that person. It's also not a big expense for the company. And then when you multiply that times ten or 20 creators on launch day, you get to build this amazing surround sound effect.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:03]:
And so I. I think it's super smart what you've done. I also think it just speaks to knowing your audience. I see this question that often comes up that's like, how do you find those people? Well, Natalie was super active on LinkedIn, and she's in that channel. And so she didn't go to some influencer database and say, like, find me a list of b, two b marketing influencers. She knew a bunch of people from being in exit five or just participating on LinkedIn. Now, I realize not everyone's going to sell to marketers or be in a niche where you are the ideal customer, but if you can find people who are and who know that world well and source influencers that way, I think it's going to be very effective. So like, yeah, that kind of answers Anita's question in the chat, who has tips or hacks for finding influencers that reach your ICP? One way is you got to be in the channel, like find the communities that they're hanging out with and you can pretty easily find that through Google search chat, GPT, perplexity, whatever.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:49]:
You could also use a tool like Spark Toro to do this, I believe. But let's flip over and ask this. This question is from Connor. Awesome stuff, you two. That's how I interpreted that. How do you balance talking about features ahead of when they actually release in the sales process, selling the roadmap versus current product? Zach, I don't know if you've had any experience with this in your past.
Zach Roberts [00:37:08]:
Yeah, no, I'm happy to dive in this if this tends to be a hairy problem, because there's two arguments to this, is that sell the roadmap or sell what's on the cart. From my experience, like just on the field, I don't like selling the roadmap because then that means, okay, I'll buy when the features released. So, like, what I actually prefer doing is like speaking to the immediate problem first and then showing here are like enhancements that we got down there to further improve this experience for you. So, like, I prefer that you focus on what you got and really hone in on what the problem is that the buyer might be facing and then show like, hey, this is how we are continuing to enhance, like this on piece here. But Dave, Natalie, I'm curious what your guys perspective on this is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:54]:
I think it comes so first of all, there's like a, there's a little bit of gray areas. If you're selling something that is not ready yet, if you're saying like, pre order the cyber truck and the cybertruck is not ready yet, you need to be explicit about that, right? We're not talking about selling vaporware. However, I think this all ties back to, like the company vision. And I think having a strong company vision, you can get a sense of where the roadmap is going. So, like when I was at drift as an example, we ship very frequently every two weeks. We were creating a chatbot type of product. And we were able to articulate our vision. We were building this conversational marketing platform.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:27]:
And so when you have a strong vision and you can articulate that with your positioning, you might say, hey, we're just launching this. We're launching this right now. And someone says to a salesperson like, okay, but does it do this or when are you going to do that? The sales rep isn't going to say, well, that's coming out in two weeks. Maybe it is, but more so they can buy into the vision and say, oh, I see where this platform is going, and I'm going to buy in. And you know what, there are people out there who want to buy earlier products. They want to be early adopters. I'm going to buy capsule now because I see them shipping regularly. I believe in their vision, I believe in their story.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:01]:
And so maybe they don't do this thing, but I can share that. And it's why some sales leaders have butted heads with me on this. But it's why I liken that. Like sales, like initial discovery call where you're talking about the company. I like sharing the vision of the company. Hey, let me, before we dive in, I'm going to show you how everything goes. I want to talk about our vision here at company XYZ, and I want to tell you, here's what we can do today. But I also want to show you where we're going.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:23]:
Right, because people want to feel bought in. They want to see some of the vision. So I think that's a way you can do that. Hey, you two, any of the look in the q and a real quick, any of the questions that you see, they stand out to you that you feel strongly about answering? Because I can 1000% go through and pick them. But if there's one that you, that you see that you're like, let's do this one, let me know.
Natalie Taylor [00:39:40]:
You said it way better than I could have. About like vision versus what's available now and getting people bought in on the startup early stage before you're like a very established brand.
Dave Gerhardt [00:39:52]:
Thank you. You know what, Natalie, believe it or not, I'm more than just a thought leader. I'm more than just a bald head and a thought leader with lots of LinkedIn followers. Don't let people know that. But this is a great question for us. This question from Josh Britton, what's a good approach to understand what collateral sales team teams need? When you ask, you get a long wish list of one pagers, case studies, sales decks, et cetera, that never gets used. Is that the truest statement ever? We need all these things are never going to use it. And then when listening to sales calls, they don't use collateral.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:22]:
Have either of you dealt with this and how would you tackle this? How can we help our friend Josh here?
Zach Roberts [00:40:26]:
Yeah, I can dive in here really quick. When you do get that wish list, the first question you should ask, like the rep is, how is this going to help you book your next meeting and then just kind of stop and let them explain to you, like, what problems they are seeing. Because then what you might uncover is that, one, you might already have the collateral to help answer that question for them. Two, there might be a different way of communicating that message than what they actually need. And that creates more of, like, what, Dave, like you said here earlier, a partnership with sales of, hey, we're working together to help you unblock this area in the sales process versus being an order taker of, like, sales, telling you what they need and then you building it and then not using it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:13]:
I love that. I just thought of this. I'm going to give you this. I'm going to give the people this as an answer. My daughter is seven and make her lunch. And a lot of the times I make her lunch, anybody that has young, young kids out here, you might experience the same thing. You make the lunch, they get home at the end of the day, you clean out their lunchbox. Whole lunch is still in there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:30]:
I'm like, did you eat anything? She's like, dad, I don't want any of the things you put in my lunch. Okay, I got a solution. Let's make your lunch together. Let's make your lunch together. Let's pick out the things you want, the things you're going to actually use, and eat the things that are approved by me, the CEO. You can't just pack roll ups and gummies and all the nonsense. Like, we know. We have some guardrails here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:55]:
Let's create the lunch together. We co create the lunch, come home the next day, she smashes the lunch. Lunch is all gone, right? You have to do this. This is the no joke. Why do we do this? Where we go and create all this stuff? It's anybody that's been a manager. It's the same thing with being a manager. If you go and tell your team, this is the strategy, these are the goals. Go and execute on them, they are not going to do as good of a job for you as they are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:18]:
Like, hey, Zach and Natalie, I need your help. We hear our goals for second half of the year. I want to come in here and, like, let's build our plan together. It's the same thing. If sales is not using your stuff, don't get defensive. They're not using it. Nope. Stop.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:31]:
Go to the root cause. Say, okay, let's work on this together. All right. How can we co create these things? What do you need? How can I help you? How can I help us win together? Let's create these assets and collateral together. That's my answer.
Natalie Taylor [00:42:43]:
To be clear, that that's not comparing sales to seven year old children, right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:49]:
No, no, it's. I was very clear about that part. Now I'm gonna have to write those posts about, like, lessons, you know? You know how there's that meme that's like beating lessons from. From kids, like, from making lunches. Yeah. Oh, look at this. Jackson said, you can tell that analogy hit. Dave is testing this messaging in real time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:12]:
Oh, you better believe. I thought of that mid rant and was like, this is gonna be a great clip in two weeks. I'm going to go clip that after. All right, cool. Let's see what else he had. I'm going to share this one. So, this question is from Zeev. Are you suggesting not to use UTM links or not to use links at all and just give the product a shout out? Natalie, can you answer that one for me? How would you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:35]:
Let's try to come up, formulate an answer. We talked about this recently, but, yeah.
Natalie Taylor [00:43:39]:
I'm not saying never use UTM links. I'm saying I've never used UTM links for these types of campaigns. One of our creators also has a newsletter who was happy to include a link about this campaign in his newsletter and used a UTM there, which is fine. Great. Again, on social platforms, you do get dinged when you include a link. And so I encouraged people to either in their video or, like, write out in the caption. Here's a simple CTA you can include. Try it for free at capsule video.
Natalie Taylor [00:44:10]:
They could include that in the video or the caption, and that's sufficient for us. That's what we do in all of our campaigns. All of our new product updates, whether we work with influencers or not, is just have a very clear, simple CTA try it for free at capsule video. So that's been our main one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:28]:
I think it works really well in that model when you have a free product and you can do this kind of time based correlation for when people sign up to me, it's specifically about using the UTM link. If you want to try using a link, you could do something like, I'll give you an example. So Apollo IO is one of our sponsors. At exit five, they have a landing page that is Apollo IO, exit five. And so you could give each person that you're working with a custom landing page. It's very easy to just create a vanity URL. If I did a thing with capsule, it could be like, go to capsule video, whatever, DG or something like that. I think that's another way to do it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:04]:
However, I think it still doesn't get at the point of like, it's not necessarily my rant was about Utms just because that's what marketers like to use. It's more like, I think the ideal situation would be no link at all because the social platform knows it's not necessarily that it knows it's a UTM link, it's just a link. And so your better example of that is going to be to drive general awareness to that company. And I think this all comes back to the offer. There's not a compelling offer. Nobody's going to go to the website and the attribution issue gets solved by having a good offer. And so in this thing, it's like capsule is a perfect example because you're like, hey, we just launched this new AI audio editor, by the way. It's completely free.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:42]:
Go to capsule.com dot video to sign up. People aren't dumb. They're going to go find the website and go sign up. They don't need the actual link to click on. So I got to think, you really got to think about what that offer is, right? If I say, hey, I created this amazing free guide about how to grow your career and b, two b marketing and blah, blah, blah, I could just tell people, go to the ex five website, it's there. They're going to remember. So you really got to think about the packaging and how the offer works there. This question is from Ryan.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:06]:
How do you engage cross functional teams with the to rally around the launch and manage all the work slash issues that unfold?
Zach Roberts [00:46:13]:
It goes from the frame of reference of bad writing. Bad writing assumes people are going to read what you write. This is no different when you're selling internally. As a marketer, I saw the point of view on marketing where it's like, hey, we shouldn't have to sell our launches. You should have. You should sell your launches because you're assuming that because it's a launch for the business that other teams are going to care about it, and they don't. One example I'm going to give is that when I was working on this launch specifically, I made an effort to really identify, like, who are the key influencers within the organization that are relevant to this launch that I want to get in front of and, like, who are the people that I want to get input from. So whenever there was a laundry list starting to build, I was like, oh, we need this, we need this, we need this.
Zach Roberts [00:46:55]:
I could come back and be like, well, actually, I spoke to the sales team, and this is what's more relevant for them. So I'm curious, like, what's your point of view on this? Like, what are you getting this information from? So I made it more of a collaborative information versus being like, a gopher of taking requests from several different teams and just extending the list, going in front of them and asking, like, hey, like, this is what we're looking to do. I see. This is one area where your team might be relevant to this. What's your thoughts on this? Get their take. And then the last piece I would always ask in my meeting, I'd be like, okay, like, how would you like to stay connected to this work? What's the best way for us to stay connected? And sometimes they'll tell you, they'd be like, oh, let's have a weekly meeting or just send me a slack update or email. So give them the choice of to decide the engagement level they want to be related to launch versus assuming that they're going to care.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:42]:
I think it also comes back to, just how early are you communicating about this? People don't like the, hey, we're doing a launch next week, and here's all the stuff. And then the sales leaders like, whoa, wait. We haven't trained anybody on this. The product leaders like, whoa, we're not ready for this. It's, we have a product launch coming up. The deadline is, this is the date we're working towards that. It's just like, how you would get new positioning done inside of the company. Like, you can't just, like, have new positioning and drop it on everybody.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:04]:
Like, surprise new positioning. But if you're like, hey, we have a launch coming up in the beginning of July. I've done this in the past where it'd be like, me and the product manager that's working on the product side. We would present cross functionally to. We would do a 30 minutes cross functional meeting. We'd have somebody from the sales team there, somebody from the product team there, somebody from marketing, somebody from engineering, somebody from customer success. And basically the marketer and the product manager lead the meeting. And we're like, hey, here's what we're launching.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:31]:
Here's the date. Here's what's in progress. Here's what we expect. Here's the list of the deliverables. We're going to be working on this for sales. This, this, this. Then you bring them in. I think people just need to know early, and you bring them early into the process.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:44]:
And then when you bring them in also, they're going to be more invested in it and more likely to rally around that launch first. Just like, God, another freaking thing. I got enough on my calendar already. Then we're just doing this launch and you want me to learn this the last minute before launch time is, if you can make time on your side here, that's going to be a good way to do it. Okay, let's wrap up. Fantastic job, you two. Thank you very much. Wherever you are.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:05]:
Let me get a round of applause for Natalie and for Zach. Exit five members for coming in. Tell them right now, thank you. In the chat. Do it, do it, do it. There's a hundred, over 100 of you still here. Go tell them. Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:15]:
Great session in the chat. Natalie Taylor, thank you for hanging out. Zach Roberts, go find each of them on LinkedIn. Send them in a connection request. Follow along. You'll see all the stuff that they're doing. I thought this was a great session. Tactical, practical.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:26]:
Got me all hot and bothered about making lunches. And we'll have this recording sent out to everybody. It'll also be in the exit five community and will be a future episode of the exit five podcast. Natalie, Zach, great to see you both. Enjoy the rest of your day. Hope you have a good weekend, and I'll see you all later. All right, thank you.
Natalie Taylor [00:49:42]:
Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:43]:
Good job. Bye.