Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to "Visionary Voices" the podcast where we dive into the minds of business owners, founders, executives, and everyone in between.
Each episode brings you face-to-face with the leading lights of industry and innovation.
Join us as we uncover the stories behind the success and the lessons learned along the way.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or just starting your business journey, these are the conversations you need to hear - packed with visionary voices and insights.
Let's begin.
So Brian, welcome to the Visionary Voices podcast.
Can you give us a top level view about what it is that you're working on right now and
your journey so far?
Yeah, well first of all thanks for having me.
variety of things that we're working on that I'm working on right now.
uh One and the biggest one is really how our
executives and organizations really rethinking what their AI strategy looks like for a
broader workforce transformation question.
There's so much new technology that's going on and frankly organizations and executives
know there's a lot of opportunity there but really aren't sure how to use it effectively
to not just decrease cost or improve efficiency but to improve performance and
productivity really drive top line within other organizations.
You know, that's what is I'm working on and advising executives about
right now.
Through my career I've spent a lot of time working in a variety of different
membership-based organizations so uh corporate executive board, Gartner, World 50 Group uh
and across all of that have really uh
spent my time in my career understanding how a membership-based business works, how do you
advise executives in it, how do you think about acquiring new customers, how do you serve
those customers, how do you renew them, but really understanding and leading a variety of
different membership-based organizations.
uh And it's just a different, really unique and interesting business model in the
professional services space.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
mean, tell us a little bit more about about that business model, right?
Because I mean, it's something that I am seeing, I think, a lot more of now, right?
A lot of these communities are popping up everywhere.
A lot of companies are building their own communities out.
So like, it's going to be that business model, like how have you managed to build out this
business and what's what's that look like?
Yeah, so uh let me first talk about what the model looks like and then why people are
attracted to it.
uh So within a membership-based business model, there's different forms and flavors.
There's a variety of organizations out there that have membership-based business models in
the B2B space.
But essentially, uh executives buy uh annual, maybe two-year, maybe three-year
subscription.
Within that subscription, they get access to research advice, networks, tools, services, a
variety of different things that can be provided to them.
And depending upon the membership organization, the exact set of product features will
vary.
So like in the case of Gartner, for example, uh it's access to the research there, the
advisory services that are there.
In a place like World 50 Group, it's access to the network that's there.
uh Different places will have different product features that go into those memberships.
The way that the business itself works is you've got uh a team that is out acquiring new
customers.
a membership development team, a sales team, it'll go by different names in different
places, but essentially people finding new logos to join the offering.
Then you've got a member services or account management team and their job is to uh serve
the customers that you have and the executives that you're working with and then renew
them for another subscription for a year or two years after that.
it comes to membership based businesses, there's a couple of metrics that are really
important to pay attention to.
The most important one is the renewal rate.
So how many people are coming back and buying the services year after year after year?
uh If you've got a renewal rate that is 80 % and above, it's probably a pretty healthy
membership based business.
If you've got a renewal rate that is in uh the low to mid 70s or worse, you're probably
struggling as a membership.
business and the reason why is in order to grow
you have to find new customers to grow.
And just to make the math easy, let's say you've got 100 executives that are part of the
membership.
If you've got a renewal rate that's 85, you just need to find 15 new to be flat and
anything beyond 15 is growth.
Again, oversimplifying the math a little bit, but if you've got a renewal rate that's 70%,
you have to find 30 just to be breakeven.
And so the difference between a 70 % renewal rate and 85 % renewal rate, you need twice as
much effort
your new uh membership film team, your sales team, just to be flat.
And that's why the renewal rate is the most important metric.
Now, second most important renewal, second most important metric I should say, is how
effective are you at getting a first sales call?
uh And that is becoming harder and harder and harder across all these membership-based
businesses.
you
And we can talk a little more about like how to, if this is sort of model you want like
what you can do to make that happen.
But that is the second most important metric I think.
Now the reason why people really like membership based businesses, there's a couple from
just a financial perspective.
One is on January 1st of any year, you probably know between 70 and 80 percent of what
your revenue is going to be.
So if you know 70 to 80 percent of your revenue on January 1st, you can manage the cost
structure of the business much more effectively than you could in any other
environment.
So it is incredibly predictable.
And if you're running a business, if you know on January 1st, 80 % of what your revenue is
going to be for the year, man, life is a whole lot easier than on January 1st.
was like, well, I know what my revenue might look like for January, but after that, like
we'll find out.
but that's why people are really attracted to a subscription based membership business is
because it's so predictable in terms of the revenue that you're going to have.
And that, that helps you on multiple fronts.
So if you're growing, you know, you can make investments.
you're shrinking, which you don't want to be obviously, but if you are then you can manage
costs more effectively at the start of the year.
And so it's just so much more predictable and that's why when you look at the companies
that are membership-based businesses they just command a better multiple.
from an investment perspective.
And I've been talking a lot about it through membership-based professional services
businesses, but uh lots and lots of places are moving to subscription services.
So software as a service is a subscription service.
Anything that says as a service, it's trying to be a membership model or a subscription
model because of the predictability that's associated with it.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, it sounds like such a great business model, right?
Because ultimately your margins are higher as well than a traditional business as well.
And I love what you said about the predictability with the revenue.
do you guys build then, you know, once a year for, as you said, like a two, three year
long package or orders annually?
And why is it built that way rather than, I guess, month to month?
And how does that affect sales as well, do you think?
Yeah, so when it actually comes to the billing, ideally you're selling a multi-year
membership upfront.
So two years, three years in a perfect world.
There's some that can even get to four or five if they're really established customers.
The majority of the time for new customers, it's a one-year membership across all of these
different models.
What you want to do as a business is collect the cash upfront.
And from a finance perspective, if you've got the cash upfront and then you're serving
that customer across the course of the year, you have the advantage of having better cash
flow as a business.
Now,
When you're working with different customers, they may not be able to pay you upfront.
So you do split invoicing, you do other stuff like that.
But ideally, you're collecting it all upfront just because it creates much more
predictability in the cashflow part of a balance sheet becomes a lot easier.
The reason why you don't want to do it monthly or even quarterly or semi-annually in lot
of cases uh becomes a transactions cost question.
Mm.
the effort that's associated with collecting money every month or every quarter for the
price points that you've got just tends to be inefficient.
So if you're, uh, like an Accenture, for example, and you're selling a, you know, $3
million engagement.
You're willing to spend some effort to collect that three million dollars on a monthly or
quarterly basis.
Like that's okay.
A lot of these subscription businesses in the professional services space, the price
points are much lower.
So the price points will range from, you know, $20,000 per year to 70, $80,000 per year.
So if you've got a $20,000 product and you're trying to collect it every month, you're
collecting, what is that?
Like a $1,500 per month or something like that.
My math's not quite right, but in that range, it's just a lot of effort to collect a
relatively small amount of money from a time period.
And then the other reason why you don't want to do it is um in a lot of subscription
businesses the value is received unevenly by the customer.
So they don't create they don't get the same amount of value every month.
So like if you've got a subscription to um a magazine you get that magazine every month
and so you kind of conceptually get you know the value of the magazine every month.
um
uh or like a new service you get value every day.
In a professional services subscription business you get value when you've got a question
that you need the...
subscription that you're serving and responding to and buying from uh when you do it.
So it could be you get really no value for two or three months and then a lot of value in
one month.
No value for two or three months and a lot of value in one month.
And if people are being charged every month then as the company that's providing the
membership
know, it's like, hey, can you give us money and the customer is like, but you didn't do
anything and like, but next month I might, you know, it's, it's, that's a hard story to go
after.
So for those reasons, like ideally, you're collecting uh money once for multiple years.
Yeah, yeah, it reminds me of something I heard recently about the payback period.
you know, whenever you're billing a client or, or something like that, as you said, right,
they're going to dictate whether or not they should spend this money on the, the time
between that last billing period as well.
Right.
So if it's a two years, three years, then they can look back and be like, you know what,
across that three years, was a ton of value month to month.
Yeah, varied, but they look at it on this totality rather than the individual month, as
you just said.
And so for them, becomes an easy decision for them to make.
about renewing or going for that service.
I'll tell you that one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making on the renewal
part of it is they say, well, this is an executive that we've been working with for a long
time and they've got a lot of value across the last year.
So therefore they should renew for the next year.
But in the executive's mind, they paid you on like January 1st, 2024 for the value you get
in 2024.
The decision they're making on January 1st, 2025 is what is the value they're going to get
across all of 2025 and then same.
So the executive is making the decision on the value they're going to get in the next
year.
And the value they got in the last year gives them confidence that they should get more
value the next year.
But
The mistake that a lot of account managers make is, well, they got a lot of value last
year, so they should pay us for next year.
And it's a subtle thing, but it's important thing.
If you're trying to renew people, need to say, here's all the value that you got, but
here's what you're going to be working on next year.
And here's what we're going to do for you next year.
So you do have to resell every year rather than just assuming past value guarantees
renewal.
Past value gives you the right to ask for future renewal.
And it's a subtle, but important thing.
And that's where I really see the difference between an average account manager and the
best account managers.
The average account manager assumes that they got value.
they'll renew the best account manager.
approaches it with they got value so I've earned the right to ask them for renewal and I
have to prove that next year will be valuable as well.
Yeah, yeah.
As you're saying that, you know, I'm thinking in relation to the model that I operate in,
which is the agency model, right?
And about whenever we come up for a time to, for the client to renew, because we build on
a quarterly basis, you know, we're always saying, hey, about all the results that we just
got in the last quarter as a reason for them to renew, right?
But I think one thing we're missing, the mark on, as you just mentioned is, yes, we have
all that, but also for the next quarter, this is now what you're going to get, right?
you're selling it from that point in the future, let's say, rather than just the past
results, which of course is important.
As you said, it gives you the right to ask.
means that they have in high confidence that this is gonna work for them again.
But it's also saying what they're gonna be getting over the next payment period rather
than that dropout previous.
yeah, and because the thing that I see some account managers forget is there's a whole
army of other competitors out there that are knocking on that same person's door saying,
hey, we're going to deliver more value for you than what you're getting right now.
And a lot of those messages are compelling, you know, and they're good salespeople,
there's good marketers that work at other organizations.
And that's why you have to
You've earned the right to ask for the renewal, you have to prove and create the vision of
the value that you'll get going forward.
Definitely, definitely.
I guess on that note, it's a good segue into, you know, within this business model itself,
how do you provide value, right?
Because when I look at my agency model, for example, like we can generate them actual ROI,
let's say they get these set deliverables, which are, you know, made for them.
But on your side, how do you create value within this style of business model?
And what does that look like from your perspective?
Yeah, you know, in the professional services spaces, uh there's value that's created and
then there's value that you, or then there's activities that you can measure that you
believe should create value.
And those aren't necessarily the same thing.
So the value that is created is when you're helping executives solve their uh biggest
problems.
And this is something else that I've learned through time with all these business models
that's really important is a 10 % better solution or advice on their number one or number
two problem is an order of magnitude better for them than a hundred percent better answer
on their number six problem.
So the most important step in providing value is understanding what their problems are.
And those problems can change very quickly from uh month to month, quarter to quarter.
But in order to provide value first, you have to make sure you know what is their number
one or number two problem.
And because you've got a membership or a network, you have to try to figure out what is
the number one or number two problem across that network, realizing that that's not going
to be everyone's number one or number two problem.
being on their top, a better answer than they've got now on their number one or number two
problem is an order of magnitude more important than having a hundred percent better
answer on their number six problem.
It's just like a real fundamental thing that's there.
So that's the first step.
Second step is like, well, what is a better answer?
or what is better value that's there.
uh That can vary in all sorts of different places.
It can vary based upon, you know, do they need advice on something?
Do they need a data point about something?
Do they need a connection with someone else?
Do they need a shoulder to cry on?
But it tends to fall into a couple of different categories.
It is uh functional effectiveness.
You've done something that helps them run their function more effectively.
It could be uh about their personal professional effectiveness.
uh So you help them kind of navigate a difficult conversation with their CEO or something
else like that.
Or in some cases, it can be about their personal uh benefit.
And one of the things that uh some of these organizations miss is...
uh
executives also need personal value and that personal value can be helping them with their
career.
It can be helping, you know, getting their kid an internship somewhere.
It could be all sorts of different things, but that personal value one is another way to
think about it.
you know, number one or number two problem that's either functional, professional,
personal, and making progress on that.
That's kind of philosophically the way to think about creating value.
It is super hard to measure.
is uh the getting a specific ROI on it is really hard.
So the mistake that people make running these um memberships is that, and not necessarily
a mistake, but the translation that they go through is to say, well, they consume
services, therefore those services should be good proxies for delivering uh one of those
components of value.
So uh they came to our website, they downloaded material, they came to a meeting, we had a
conversation with them.
those are reasonable proxies for value because it's hard to help them with a functional
problem if you never talked to them or they didn't access your material and things like
that.
So like that, that makes sense.
And so in order to create the opportunity to provide value, there has to be a consumption
moment that occurs.
uh But...
consumption moment doesn't guarantee value, it creates a window to have value, an
opportunity to deliver value.
So if you're measuring the consumption, like I said, did we have a conversation with them?
Did they come to a meeting?
Did we have a call with them?
Did they do something with the services that we offer?
That's in many ways a necessary condition to provide value, but it's not a sufficient
condition to provide value.
so where people make a mistake in these types of businesses is just assuming that they
came to the meeting, therefore they had, they got value out of it.
They might've come to the meeting, said they loved it, given us a good score on our net
promoter score, all that sort of stuff.
But at the end of the day, when they're sitting there saying, should I spend another
$50,000 with this company next year?
Yeah.
Like, and, uh,
the best account managers for the executives that they're working with and the companies
they're working with, they can say with crystal clear confidence, this executive's number
one problem is blank.
We did this, that and the other to help them on their number one problem.
And that's where I always come back to.
em You need to know the problem.
consumption is uh a necessary step to deliver value against that problem, but it does not
guarantee that you've delivered value against the problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, what I love about this is that you've operationalized or create this process around,
you know, around them getting value, right?
It's really cool how you broke that down about cool.
have this, you need to create this consumption window, right?
Or that moment where they can consume some value.
But as you rightly said, they also need to actually get value in that moment as well.
Right.
That's quite a big difference between the two.
I mean, something that I use a lot within my agencies, we plotted out within our service
because it's
pretty much the same service every single time is that there's these like magic moments
that occur during like this process that we have.
So what we find is that if we can increase the amount of magic moments that occur within
the client where something clicks, something happens, right?
And they can see the value very, very clearly.
The more of those we stack up naturally the higher our renewal rate, right?
You know, all these different things are as well.
So I love the way you broke that down into operationalizing that.
That's really cool way to look at it.
Yeah, you one of the things that um I've learned through time that's really um to that
magical moment part, uh the more that you can understand the calendar of the customer
you're working with, the more likely it is that you can deliver that magical moment at the
right point in time.
Because like here's a really good example.
um If you're working with executives in a professional services space, knowing when their
budget season is.
When are they going have board presentations that they have to do?
uh When do they have meetings with their CEO?
ah When are they going to have to make talent decisions?
Whatever it may be.
The more that you can know, and I'm making this part of it, but let's say they're um on an
annual budget cycle.
So they have to have a new budget by January 1st of the year.
That doesn't mean on January 1st you're like, how can I help you with your budget
planning?
What you have to do is to say, well, that means they're probably starting budget planning
in August or September of the previous year.
So how do I engage them in August and September on helping them think through their budget
planning?
Can I provide budget benchmarks of what other people are increasing or decreasing their
spend on?
And so on.
Or they've got a meeting with their board that it's going to be in
you know, April.
It's not contacting them in April saying, hey can I help you with your board presentation.
At that point it's probably done.
It is talking to them in February saying, hey I know you've got this board presentation
that you're gonna have to do in April.
How can we help you with that?
So identifying the magical moments I think is really important.
uh But then also getting the timing right on them and being making the mistake of being
too early then too late on talking about that support is the mistake that you want to make
every day because if you're too early then they're like, okay, I'm not ready now come back
in like three weeks or a month or whatever.
The most painful moments that I've ever had running these types of businesses is when
you've got an awesome way to support an executive and you find out too late.
Mmm.
Yeah.
like, when did this board presentation?
It was a disaster.
What I really would have needed was blank.
And you're like, we could have done blank.
And you're like, yeah.
So the knowing the calendar of your executives and the customers that you're working with,
and then backtracking in that calendar, you know, a month to three months, depending upon
the thing, uh is one of the most important uh tools that you need to have.
to get the right answer to the right executive at the right time.
And at the right time is really, really important and often under appreciated when it
comes to running these types of businesses.
Yeah, definitely.
it's also got me thinking about sales and outbound, right?
Because ultimately timing and relevance is such a key component in that as well.
You know, as you said, right, you'd rather be early, build that relationship and
eventually when they're ready to convert, right, they're gonna come to you rather than too
late and they're already with another service provider.
But you're taking that, essentially that concept and using it within the business with the
customers you have already is like throughout that calendar year, there's certain moments
where timing is so critical, right?
uh
I guess linking it to the sales function that you guys have to grow these communities,
what have you seen, I guess, change and shift over the last few years when it comes down
to growing these communities and how has that shifted over time?
Yeah, let me just give like a real quick overview of what a typical sales process looks
like at all these membership organizations.
uh It starts with some sort of, this is the most common, not exclusive, but most common.
uh It starts with some sort of outbound messaging, either direct email, know, ads posted
on LinkedIn, something like that, but some sort of outbound.
uh From that outbound,
then you try to schedule a first sales interaction.
It'll be, you know, different places will call different things like a call one, a call A,
but first sales interaction.
Then from first sales interaction, you try to get to some sort of close.
Now, again, given the price points that...
that a lot these membership organizations operate at, you can't have a really long sales
process.
Because if the sales process requires, you know, five, six, seven sales interactions, then
the cost of selling is often greater than the revenue associated with that one year
subscription.
then you have to have a really high renewal rate to make it work.
But you have to have as an efficient as possible sales process.
uh
The thing that has changed the most across almost all these membership organizations is
that the outbound to first sales interaction, the effectiveness of that has been
decreasing pretty dramatically.
um You know, all sorts of places will tell you, we can write better emails for you, we can
put a better subject line in, uh we can customize it, we can personalize it, da da da da.
There's plenty of places that can do that for you.
But in my opinion, all that's really happening with all that effort, it's lowering or it's
slowing the rate of decay.
Traditional outbound methods are getting worse and worse and worse.
And it's really a question of what are you doing to make them uh not get as bad as fast as
opposed to what are you doing to make them better?
And uh
There's a variety of reasons for that.
One is everybody gets a bazillion emails.
ah There's such smart AI tools on people's inboxes that uh even if you send a bazillion
emails, more and more of them are filtered out into spam and other stuff like that.
ah Even if they get through to the executive, uh the executive ignores them more and more.
ah But.
the outbound to first sales interaction, the effectiveness of it across almost every
organization in the space has gotten worse.
just more volume does not equal more calls.
And there's some people that are like...
Well, for every, you know, in the past, for every thousand emails that we sent, we got 50
for sales interactions.
And it's like, and they're like, so we should keep that percentage.
And it's like, now for every thousand that you send, maybe you get one.
You know, it's, is, it's gotten really worse.
uh
the getting new companies to join, getting that new logo, getting that new executive join,
uh there's gonna have to be a lot of rethinking of uh the effort to get to that first
sales interaction because the old tools of direct outreach are just becoming increasingly
inefficient and just putting more effort against it is not gonna.
get you to where you need to be to run a profitable high margin business that ideally you
have in these sorts of subscription models.
Yeah, yeah, completely agree.
And of course, know, my stance on it, as you know about my business model and everything,
but completely agree with you there, right, is the effectiveness of cold outbound channels
just has been getting worse and worse and worse.
And, you know, I think everyone's feeling that right now, who is in the cold outbound
space.
And a lot of the agencies I've, you I've been watching grow over the last few years,
they've been making some big pivots in the way they're doing their outbound and things
like that, you know, different tools, et cetera, but...
Ultimately, as to your point is, it's just slowing the rate of decay, right?
A lot of these AI tools right now blocking your inbox, like fix.ai, I use all the time.
And I think in the marketing folder, there's like two, 3000 emails from the last like, you
know, two, three months or something, which I'm never going to actually see or open or
have a look at.
So, you know, if you're falling into that, no one's ever going to get eyes on you there.
But I guess from your point of view, then what you guys are rethinking in terms of a
strategy to...
to grow, right?
Or are you in that phase of figuring out, what is the next step we need to take here to
see the growth again?
Yeah, you know, everybody in this space is trying to figure out how to make it work.
um And uh there's uh an incredibly important reason to make it work.
So, you know, we're talking about the predictability of the model.
uh That works really well when it's growing.
uh because uh you build up more contract value.
So contract value is the people that have agreed to pay you who are still going to pay you
across the next couple months or you'll recognize that revenue across the next couple of
months.
So when contract value is increasing, the valuation of the business increases
dramatically.
You know, there are a couple of these companies recently that had...
uh
that you know publicly traded that reported decreased growth rates in contract value and
uh they just got punished massively on the stock market.
So it's a double-edged sword.
uh If it's growing it's amazing if you're shrinking then you get yeah it positively
negatively right.
uh So figuring out how and you can't catch up is the other problem right because once
you're behind
when you think about revenue for a year, uh the fact that you have predictability into it
is good if you're growing, you're shrinking, like, once that time goes by, you can't sell
like a million dollar project to make up for it, you're gonna miss.
That's just the reality of it.
growing that new business is an incredibly important part to grow the contract value
that's associated with it.
So nobody has figured out a magic bullet yet, but there's places where, and concepts that
are emerging that I think are really important to keep in mind as people are trying to
figure out uh what strategy they should be pursuing.
uh One important piece is uh you have to put more value into the sales interaction rather
than selling into the sales interaction.
And what I mean by that.
uh
You can't have a call which is like, hey, I want to pitch you my thing.
You have to have a call which is, uh let me understand your problem.
I'm to help you with your problem even before you're paying us.
So you have to make the sales interaction valuable.
And again, that could be, we help you with a problem.
We help you build your personal brand.
We do something for you that creates value for you as the customer in the sales
interaction.
That's there.
uh
The second, uh there's a reason why so many B2C companies spend a bazillion dollars a year
on influencers.
Because influencers are more trusted than companies in a lot of cases.
So even in a B2B world, uh what sort of influencers can you tap into?
So those influencers might be other senior executives to do it.
It might be retired CEOs to talk about.
you're doing, uh but some sort of influencer-based referral strategy I think will be an
important part of what this looks like.
And then the third thing, uh one of the things that happened with COVID when everyone was
working from home, uh we just bombarded people with emails and like all the companies in
space did it.
uh
But what we forgot, and what we used to do in all these cases is we went and visited the
customer where the customer lives, like at their office, and we'd have a meeting with them
in person.
It was dramatically less efficient of a sales process, but it was a more personal
relationship-based sales process.
Like I'm coming to you to talk to you person to person about what we could do to help,
rather than I'm gonna send you bazillion emails to talk about it.
um So the third part that I think...
uh
executives will have to or people in the space will have to go back to you is meet the
executive where they are and uh that's not meeting them in their inbox.
It is meeting them at the events that they go to, uh is meeting them where they are and
some of it's going to be back at the office now as more and more people are going back to
the office.
but it is meeting them in a personal space where they are.
So those three things I think are going to become really really uh important components of
any sort of strategy like how do you provide value to them in a different and kind way?
ah How do you meet them um where they are?
How do you leverage some sort of referral influencer strategy?
At the same time though, and this is where it's hard, none of those strategies
are well formulated enough where you can exclusively rely on them.
You still have to do all the cold outreach that you did even though it's getting worse as
you're figuring out these other approaches.
So when you're trying to drive new sales in all these spaces, you have to actually have
like five, six, seven machines that you're running rather than just one machine in one
spot because...
Right now at least, once you get to any degree of size or scale, uh one machine's not
going to get it done for you.
need to have a bunch of machines that are helping you run these sorts of businesses.
Yeah, for sure.
It's very interesting what you mentioned there about influencers, because for sure we're
seeing in the B2C space, but there's definitely a lot going on on LinkedIn around some of
these more LinkedIn influencers in the B2B setting.
And they're having such a huge impact on people's businesses.
And I actually had a transaction last year, which worked really well with an influencer.
So Adam Robinson, we had him on the podcast and actually we posted like a short form, a
bit of content on LinkedIn.
maybe 80,000 followers, 90,000 followers.
Obviously his network then saw it and you you get that borrowed authority effects as well,
right?
Because we had that interview up there and naturally his audience saw it, interacted with
it and we actually got a client through that interaction, right?
And it was just a simple clip that we had online, right?
Which is really cool.
So the power of influencers now is definitely very, very important to tap into.
But to your point as well is...
you can't just rely on one of these channels.
Now I think before you could just consistently be blasting out emails and it was very
predictable in the results you're gonna get.
But now you do need to have multiple channels all, I think interlinked, right?
They can all interlink to some degree, but multiple of these systems running.
And uh what we found to work uh from a value point of view, Even if it is outbound or even
in person, but value point of view is, I think it's two types of value you can give.
You can give...
your business value or professional value, let's say.
So from an agency point of view, hey, I can give you, know, 5,000 leads from this data set
that I have for free, for example.
Or then there's personal value, right?
So how can you resonate with them on a personal level, business aside, but what do they
need personally that you can tap into, right?
So if they want more exposure, right?
They want to share their stories.
They want to do all these different things.
How can we make that happen, right?
And use that as a way to get in front of them and get some engagement back, build that
relationship, as you said.
And naturally from there when you put out the relationship, can then move them to the next
stage.
So yeah, completely agree.
I'll tell you really interesting uh story that speaks to this.
There was one company that we working with that um wanted to increase the number of
veterans that they were hiring.
And that's a great laudable thing.
it's hiring people that uh have given service uh to their country, great, totally in favor
of it.
So they created this massive marketing campaign.
you know, amazingly beautiful collateral, really cool website.
The CEO came on and like recorded a video about how important it was for him to do this
sorts of stuff.
You know, the company was very much out front about why it was such a big deal.
Zero traction.
uh Zero, zero, zero traction.
And um then what happened...
is there were already veterans that worked at the company.
And so the veterans then just recorded themselves and put a bunch of videos up on YouTube
about why they liked working at this company.
And it was literally like them on the job site or, you know, just on their cell phones.
And the quality of the videos was crappy.
Like the sound was glitchy.
You know, the backgrounds were terrible.
Completely, you know, not slick, not professional, but authentic and real.
And those videos
had a huge change in the interest level of veterans that wanted to work there.
And the reason why is that the people that were veterans trusted the other people who
already working there, even in the of the clunky, non-slick ways that were the information
was being shared with them.
And it's because they trusted them more.
And so that's where I think the influencer part becomes really important is who are the
people that you as a company for the executives or the people or the customers that you
want to get in front of, who do they trust and how can you use that trust through other
people in a way that uh comes across as authentic and real, not pitchy because
most people nowadays are savvy enough to know is this person just shilling on behalf of
someone else or are they real about it?
And so by getting back to those videos from the veterans, like they would say on those
videos, this is what I like, this is the part of the job that's sucky.
And they would say what's bad about it.
But that created more trust and more honesty.
So as you're thinking about uh any sort of influence or strategy, you have to make it real
and say like, here's what's good, here's what's bad, here's how they can help, here's what
they're not for, whatever makes sense for you, but it has to be legitimate.
It has to be real, it has to be honest.
And when it's uh pitchy and slick, it doesn't necessarily have the same lift.
Because it's like,
everybody sees this, it's like, it's super awesome, I don't believe you, right?
But it's like, it's pretty good at this, not good at that, and it's like, now I trust you.
And that, think, is really important distinction.
Yeah, for sure.
And to your point that I think it's, it's relevance, right?
It needs to be, if you're to go down the influencer route, that influence, influence, and
needs to be relevant to the ICP that you're trying to go after for that, for that thing
there.
And it's interesting what you mentioned about, you know, also saying the good, yes, but
also the bad, and then it becomes believable and trustworthy.
And as you saw this on LinkedIn, someone had in their bio, instead of saying, hey, the
number one, you know, whatever agency in the world, was
We're number two.
And suddenly I was like, yeah, like that seems more believable, right?
You're not saying I'm the best.
It's, I'm number two.
Probably not the best, but number two.
And it was an interesting one because it definitely caught my eye and it got me to click
through and have a look.
But yeah, I think to your point, definitely going through and being honest about it is
interesting how it works.
Yeah, I'm still waiting for someone to have the courage on the LinkedIn profile to be
like, know, when you looked at any of those, they're all, you know, grew this thing, made
this thing awesome.
I'm waiting for the person who writes like grew this thing and did awesome.
Totally screwed up that thing and cost the company a lot of money, but I learned a lot in
the process.
You know, I just wonder if that is going to be a better profile at some point than
everything is awesome.
Yeah, no, definitely.
Definitely.
guess, uh, changing things a little bit, looking to the future then with AI and all this
technology that's coming out now.
I GPT-5 came out, I think earlier today or last night, which is quite exciting.
How are you guys using AI in the business model you have now?
And how do you think it might impact as well?
Like the community-based model, uh, and membership-based model as well.
Yeah, I think a lot of these community-based models are at significant disruption um due
to AI.
And here's why.
If you're a community-based model that is dependent upon, that delivers research, for
example, um
One of things that AI is really good at now and will get better at going forward is being
able to summarize what all that research looks like.
So, and a lot of that's in the public domain, whether even if you have it behind a
firewall.
So people can get an 80 % good answer and while you might be able to provide a 95 % good
answer, an 80 % good answer for free in a minute or two is, you know, some cases better
than a 95 % good answer that cost a chunk of money that takes a while to get to.
So there's going to be more of that which I think is problematic and at risk because of
JNI.
I think if it is more of an analyst advice based model, it's the same problem.
where, um and perhaps even worse, because uh if you're providing advice, then, you know,
Gen.
AI tools can say, well, you know, what advice can you give me on these different things?
And smart users of those tools will actually give it different prompts and say, well, how
would, you know, an executive in the financial services industry think about this?
How would one in consumer products think about this?
And you can actually name individual people, say like, how would the CFO at company X
think about this?
How would the CFO at company Y think about this?
As more and more of that information is available in public and as know chat GPT and other
tools get better and better, they're not only be able to answer the question and have a
point of view, they can answer that question from different perspectives, which I think
will be really interesting on the advice base.
uh Similar if your product is a network solution or you're connecting to someone else.
You know you can use tools to get
Again, a pretty good answer, fast and cheaper than a better answer that is expensive and
time consuming.
What we're starting to see is a variety of these organizations are trying to build their
own GenAI tools to put on top of whatever database they have in place.
The problem is...
There's competitors that are going to do it too, so they don't do it themselves, they have
to do it.
But the margins on that are a lot worse than the margins on the existing membership-based
businesses.
So for me, the question is going to become across these organizations, how do you
differentiate on different and kind types of services?
How do you differentiate based upon uh personal things that are there or not?
ah There's going to be a big question around
Do we end up in a world where there's thousands and thousands of AI agents that their
effectiveness is defined by a very deep set of data that they're working with that is
somehow firewalled off?
Or is it a world where there's a handful of really big winners that are all pulling from
the same data set?
There's a over two or three that are there.
And depending upon how that plays out, it'll be interesting.
But from a customer experience,
delivery and a customer delivery, it has the potential to be really disruptive uh in these
spaces because like it or not, uh a variety of these tools are getting to be really good
and what I know with certainty is that they're not going to get worse.
People have all sorts of idealized things about how they can do stuff.
I'm not smart enough to know it's going to get this much better this fast at this point in
time, but I can tell you a certainty tomorrow they're going be better than today and a
year from now they're going be a lot better than today.
Right?
And if you are not asking yourself the question, how will AI disrupt your current
business?
Someone else is and will do it to you.
And you're going to have to be willing, I think, to change how you run your business, even
if it means worse margins, uh because it's not going to be easy to keep doing what you're
doing without realizing that it's going to massively disrupt all of these industries.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think that's a very realistic view, right?
Of what's gonna be happening of, you know, all these industries are gonna be disrupted in
some way, shape or form.
It's interesting what you mentioned about, you know, how the data sets work and, you know,
are all these AIs pulling from the same data set or do you have your own unique data set?
know, potentially you could, you know, leverage that as more IP, let's say.
And I think Cloudflare, was watching a talk by the CEO, you know, a few weeks back and he
was saying they're building...
essentially like a countermeasure, right?
To stop AI scraping sites to get that information.
And so it's gonna be interesting to see how this evolves, you what is actually, you know,
IP, let's say, versus not.
And if the AIS can pull that IP, is that infringing IP, for example, and will they not be
able to then do that at a later point?
And then it becomes a case of, you know, from a membership point of view model, then it's
great, right?
The value still there because there's gonna be information which...
can't be accessed by these wide AI.
So I think the evolution of this is gonna be very interesting for sure.
well, 100%.
One of the things I would caution people, though, is um there will be legal challenges
around IP protection and who owns what and where it plays out and all that sort of stuff.
Technology is fast, legal systems are slow.
And so if you're waiting for the legal system figure out or for governments to put
regulation in place,
There are all sorts of companies that using, that's gonna take years to fully get work
through.
In the meantime, you've got companies that are scraping or doing other stuff or disrupting
your business and you're losing revenue today in hopes that will be a legal resolution two
years from now.
Are you gonna make it two years doing what you're doing?
Super awesome, you find out two years from now your competitor's doing something illegal,
but you've lost tons of revenue in those two years.
Like, who's going to give you that money back?
Like, nobody, it's gone, you know?
uh But this, think, is one of the real interesting fundamental questions is, are we going
to live in a world of lots of narrow AI agents that have tons of expertise?
Or is it going to look more like the internet in that there's a handful of super large
players that uh oversee everything?
I don't know, but
paying attention to how that plays out, think is really interesting.
If it's a world where there's a lot of super large players, it's going to be much harder.
If it becomes deep expertise creates much better AI, then I think there's a lot more
opportunity uh for different organizations that are there.
We'll see.
um But I think that is one of the key uh things to be paying attention to as an executive
is what does that look like?
Now, if you're to talk to like the PE and VC folks,
They're hoping it's a world of a future of a handful of really large players and that they
happen to be invested in one of the ones that becomes.
So, but we'll see.
But it'll be really important on how that plays out.
Definitely, definitely.
Okay, amazing.
So one of the final questions we will always ask guests on the show is if you can go back
to your 18 year old self and only take three lessons with you, whether it's some
philosophical knowledge, some business knowledge, whatever, it could be anything.
What would those three things be and why would it be those things?
uh I'm going to narrow the question and say there's one thing.
Because there's one thing that I think trumps uh everything else, but it has a couple
different forms and flavors that come out of it.
uh It is go work at a growth company.
Take any job at a growth company.
And um there's a couple reasons why.
uh One, uh you learn more being at a company that's growing really fast than you do at any
other company.
Because there's brand new problems, brand new challenges.
And they don't have the people or solutions yet in place.
So when you go work at a growth company You are going to learn more faster because you
know if the company is growing at 20 25 percent per year Even if you're stagnant, you're
gonna grow at 20 to 25 percent per year and ideally you're gonna grow faster than that To
you're gonna get promoted faster So you're gonna have better
career and financial trajectory by working at a growth company uh because they need more
people and they're making more money.
So they've got uh more to give you and a rising tide lifts all boats in that sort of
situation.
So you're going to learn more.
Your career is going to get advanced from a title comp perspective.
And once you get ahead, then you can stay ahead.
If you're behind in a place where your career is not growing, then boy, is it really hard
to catch up later.
uh And then three,
you're going to have the best stories to tell because you're going to be able to have
stories to tell on that next interview.
Uh, when you're working for your AI master and your AI manager or whatever it be at some
point in the future, uh, about how you contributed to that growth and what every company
is looking for is how are we finding people that, can help us grow the business.
and then the last thought I've got is by working for a growth company, whatever first job
you take, there's so many opportunities that emerge.
you'll end up working on three or four different things.
So what I would tell my 18 year old self and any other 18 year old is uh take a crappy job
at a growth company than an awesome job at a company that is flat.
That's the best advice I can give you.
Yeah.
That's some, that's some great advice.
Well, thank you so much for this conversation today.
I've definitely found a lot of value in it and hopefully our listeners have as well.
So thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thanks for having me.
Would love to come back at any point in the future and we can talk about some other stuff
too.
Thank you very much.