Unlocking Start-up Marketing Success: Why Most B2B Tech Founders Fail to Stand Out—and How to Avoid Their Mistakes!

In this episode, Phill and Adam interview Steevan Glover, a marketing consultant and director. They discuss the importance of focusing on the outcome and value that your product or service provides, rather than just the features. They also emphasise the need to target specific customer segments and avoid wasting time on customers who are not a good fit. They discuss the importance of having a clear brand message and story, and the need to iterate and adapt as the business evolves. They also touch on the role of influencers and the importance of having a human face for the company. In this conversation, Steevan Glover, Phill Keaney-Bolland, and Adam Yaya-Durrant discuss the importance of having a figurehead for a brand and the potential challenges that come with it. They also explore the role of websites in B2B tech startups and the need for a clear objective and conversion points. The conversation concludes with a discussion on the value of networking events and the importance of being innovative and subversive in a crowded marketplace.

Key takeaways

• Focus on the outcome and value that your product or service provides, rather than just the features.
• Target specific customer segments and avoid wasting time on customers who are not a good fit.
• Have a clear brand message and story, and be willing to iterate and adapt as the business evolves.
• Consider the role of influencers and the importance of having a human face for the company. Having a figurehead for a brand can be both positive and negative, as it can attract attention and inspire, but it can also limit scalability and create dependency.
• Websites for B2B tech startups should have a clear objective and focus on conversion points, whether it's generating leads or providing credibility.
• Networking events can be valuable for building relationships and generating leads, but it's important to choose the right events and add value to them.
• In a crowded marketplace, being innovative and subversive can help a startup stand out and attract attention.
• The early years of a startup are the most crucial for being adventurous and differentiating from competitors.

Creators & Guests

Host

Adam Yaya-Durrant

Co-founder of Yaya

Host

Phill Keaney-Bolland

Co-founder of Yaya

Producer

Alexandra Pointet

Producer of the Cult Products podcast

Guest

Steevan Glover

What is Cult Products?

Dive into the essentials of start-up success with Cult Products, hosted by Yaya's co-founders, Adam Yaya-Durrant and Phill Keaney-Bolland. This podcast delivers sharp insights on creating revolutionary products, radical branding, and attracting a loyal following of early adopters. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, each episode is packed with actionable advice and stories from those who've built successful businesses. Join Adam and Phill as they help you transform bold ideas into start-up success.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:19)
Hello and welcome to another episode of our Cult Products podcast from Yaya. My name is Phil Keeney -Bolland, one of the founders at Yaya.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (00:29)
And my name is Adam Yahya Durrant also one of the founders at Yahya.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (00:36)
Good. So we are very, very excited to have a very special guest on our podcast this week. Somebody that for me has been very, very pivotal in helping me through my career and actually been a background. we met all three of us, worked at a B2B tech startup -ish.

called the chemistry group about 10 years ago. At the time, it was not going particularly well for me, I think, at the sort of deep end of figuring out how to market this business. And Steve came in and he was a constant source of mentorship and guidance and essentially helped me figure out how to do B2B marketing in the first place. So he's been a very important figure in my career, very excited that he's

joined us today and he's very, very worth listening to on the topic of B2B marketing and sales. So welcome to the podcast, Steve.

Steevan Glover (01:45)
Thank very much. Those are very, very kind words, Philip. It is pleasure to be here, pleasure to continue to support your endeavors. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that introduction, but it's nice to hear it anyway. I've been around the marketing world a long time, it feels now.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (02:04)
And just for the listeners, so at the minute you are working on various different things, I think. What are you up to at the minute?

Steevan Glover (02:14)
Yeah, essentially from a marketing perspective, am essentially a consultant marketing director, non -exec director, board advisor, generally helping businesses from startups to establish me with their brand marketing, their brand positioning and their...

I suppose you can argue value messaging. It covers a whole different array of elements, but essentially advising people how to start up or how to restart. And the restart one is actually significantly important as you go through iterations within the marketplace. It started with life when it was just good old fashioned standard marketing as you pervade.

pursued it through the nineties into 2000s, then it got overtaken by the internet, then it got overtaken by mobile, and of course now it's being accosted by AI. And at various stages along all those areas, I have been partly responsible for the output gibberish about what could be achieved, slowly hidden by what would be achieved. So I sort of end up becoming a poacher turned gamekeeper. So yeah, I do apologize in advance for anyone who's been at the end of the fact that I was one of the people marketing things that made promises that...

didn't quite deliver. But they always got promised and then five years later they actually became a reality. Luckily, luckily it's shrinking. AI is actually delivering far quicker on its pretend promises than any of the other previous technologies. brace yourselves for that.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (03:33)
Ha ha ha

Yes. So essentially, if people like the sound of what you're saying, which I'm sure they will, they should give you a call and you can help them with their marketing.

Steevan Glover (03:59)
Absolutely, I'd be delighted. Yes, get in contact and I'll help advise from both a strategic and a tactical element. One of the things that I like to say that separates me from people in similar position to me is I try to get everything directly related to a commercial focus rather than it be, an ethereal kind of comment about where brands ought to be. Brand's job is to serve an outcome. Marketing's job is to provide.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (04:24)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (04:28)
think we'll talk about this I'm sure later one of the great problems you have with businesses people are not sure what they actually want to achieve and muddies the waters terribly if you can get that bit right at the beginning actually you can probably save money on consultants down the line get them to do the work properly up front listen to them and then save money later

Phill Keaney-Bolland (04:49)
Well, we definitely get to that. that's actually a very good segue. So as regular listeners will know, we are working with a group of B2B Tech founders in the beta version of our Cult Products program. And that means that we've been talking quite a lot to them about some of the things that are on their mind as they're starting their businesses and running coaching calls. And I think one of the big questions,

I mean, logically, the first question really is, where do you start? And when you are a founding business, how are you going to find your first customers? What is the best sort of marketing strategy to employ? And how do you sell to those people? So we're going to start there as well. And yeah, so let's let's just kind of kick off with if you were starting a B2B tech startup today, what would be the first things that you would be looking to do to

kick -off sales and marketing plan.

Steevan Glover (05:53)
I would always start with there is no one size fits all. So each market area, B2B tech will have a different nuance in terms of how you go to market to a certain point. But there are some generic fundamentals that you want to make sure you get right. Focusing very much, as I said at the beginning on what the outcome.

result of what you're doing is what does that deliver for someone. Once you know that, once you know the value of what it is you're selling to the end customer, not what you do, but what they get from it, that's the basis of your brand. And then you can build on that and be prepared for that to iterate over time because your customer's needs will change and software will change. It's a fast developed world. So the simple point is you then got to tell people that you exist.

So yes, that is a website. Yes, that is a certain amount of marketing. You don't need to invest in enormous numbers of CRM platforms in your first iterations because they'll take your money and you just simply haven't got enough momentum at that stage. But as that builds, yes, you will need to invest in tools that will take you to the next stage. clearly defining what your brand is and clearly defining what the outcomes you are selling are huge.

And narrowing that down to the markets and the audiences that want it quickest is absolutely critical. People often go with the startup way too generic, way too wide, and actually they can afford to be very, very focused and say, these people have a problem that I solve. These people have a need for what I do right now and be very, very bold about targeting them. And you can be very bold in the early days because

Phill Keaney-Bolland (07:36)
Mm.

Steevan Glover (07:42)
People won't remember your early marketing. They really won't. You'll have plenty of opportunities to change and develop and explore new avenues. So be bold and be very targeted and go after them because you won't have huge budgets. You won't have the ability to spend 50, 60, 70, 100, 200 ,000 on lead generation campaigns. And frankly, you don't need to. What you need to do is know, here's a hundred companies I know that want this. I'm going to talk.

you and you talk to them. Start a conversation.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (08:16)
So Steve, the Olympics are on at the minute. one of the things that we speak about a lot is thinking about your kind of early days of the startup, like a hurdle race. And this, I'm afraid, is going to be one of those times where I use a sporting analogy despite obviously not being an expert in the hurdles. But I think.

Steevan Glover (08:18)
Yes.

You

Phill Keaney-Bolland (08:39)
One of the things that is quite useful about that analogy is actually you don't really need to be thinking about 10 hurdles ahead. You need to be thinking about getting over the one that's immediately in front of you. And I think

that as a way of thinking is quite useful because to your point, first of all, what is it that you're actually trying to achieve? There's no one size fits all marketing strategy, but it's led by that kind of...

That objective actually doesn't need to be how are we going to get 100 ,000 customers in three years time? It really just needs to be how are we going to get our first customers right now? And I think with that, you you don't need to get.

that to get your sort of first five or six customers is quite a different play to getting the mainstream out there. You're talking about early adopter type people, probably people that you, that we've talked about this before already know to some extent and have quite a kind of warm relationship with already before you go out and do kind of mass advertising and things like that. And I think with those types of people,

you are, I guess, like you're trying to calibrate what your sales message is and what your brand is to enough people to make your business viable. But it can and should change over time. You really just need to think about the jump that you need to make over that hurdle. And then the next hurdle, your approach to it could be completely different. Now, I guess we've gone totally out of the realms of like...

believable analogy within Hirtle's stickers. I suppose that is

Steevan Glover (10:28)
I think you probably you might have moved more towards steeplechase actually than hurdles you know it's a big leap then you've got a bit of time to run before you have to make your next leap it's a good analogy and it works because you're right you don't want to get too far ahead and I think again this comes back to my one size fits all and it's not it's not a simple thing because we're making an assumption in this conversation that it's not a volume sale that it's a high -end sale

Phill Keaney-Bolland (10:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Better, better.

Steevan Glover (10:57)
software piece. Equally you're working on the assumption if it's tech, you know, it's got some longevity. So I think from the commercial element, understand the commercial realities of your business. It is far easier to retain a customer and have a long tail of revenue than it is constantly to be in a cycle of net new. Net new is exhausting for a business and it's very hard to get started. So you've got to focus on what revenue will I get in the door and how long will it stay there as revenue.

and that's, that's a really key point. And as to your point, that becomes your hurdle. Get over that first one and you don't want to be pushing a whole load of sales through, which you then can't service or you have no mechanic to deliver it. Because what happens then is you make some sales, you then go, crikey. need the resource to service that sale. And now I need to keep feeding that ever expanding beast. which means I've now got to generate a sale.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (11:33)
Mm

Steevan Glover (11:57)
because I've got people servicing it and I have to pay for them. And that can very quickly get you into a stage where you're actually pursuing the less value client because you just need a sale. And so when I talked about rebrands and re -messaging, that's where a lot of businesses have suddenly found themselves, is they have suddenly started to take lower value work simply because it's a sale. And that's not a situation you want to be in.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (12:08)
Mm.

Yeah.

Steevan Glover (12:25)
So you can actually prepare for that at the beginning by saying, I'm very focused on what the value of a particular client is to me. And it is the hardest actual decision, I think, for many businesses is to look and say, do you know what? I want this win, but is this going to end up costing me more time and energy to deliver it than it's actually worth in my bank balance? And there is not a new business that has ever, ever begun that has not had that debate.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (12:49)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (12:54)
So, yeah, good financial modeling is probably quite important, is understanding where you actually make your margin and actually where that's found.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (13:04)
We, sorry.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (13:08)
It's a very tough thing, think, because even if you're talking about high volume sale, you do have to start.

somewhere and you know you're probably not going to be able to sell I guess like a million things to a million people on on day one you have you have to find a specific niche that makes sense for you and you have to I think try and capture as much of that market in an in a in the early days as as you possibly can I think I've definitely I would definitely agree with you see

a lot of businesses to try and get a toehold, find a customer, and then you're kind of designing around that one specific customer and catering specifically to their needs, one to one, or small group of customers. And I guess...

Steevan Glover (13:55)
Just.

The sugar daddy client is, it's affectionately an irony. You get this one massive client and it's like, yes, and you've serviced them to the nth degree because why wouldn't you? Well, then you suddenly look and realize, my lordy, they're 70 % of my revenue. And panic if that's the case, because that's an immediate indicator that you need to go out and rectify that situation. And again, being focused gets you there.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (14:01)
This shit gets out of control.

Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (14:22)
Yeah.

And I think this is where also the actual marketing, you know, we talk about that kind of first hurdle. I'm going to stretch this analogy even further. I think it's really important that, you you do get something out there. And even if you've got, you know, this sort of sugar daddy client that's paying the bills, is you need to pivot towards like what, you you would call a sort of one to many marketing approach quite

quite early on to broaden out from the reliance on just that person. And you need to figure out a way of generating leads and widening your pool of customers. think one of the things that we've seen and, you know, Adam, think you and I have also been, you know, in a spot where, you know, we've worked for

businesses that have done this is actually just getting something out there sometimes feels really daunting because it's not going to be necessarily perfect and it can feel like you're really nailing your colors to a particular mast and saying right this is this is what we're going to do and it sort of feels like a semi -permanent or permanent decision where actually it can change and it can pivot and so to stretch the analogy that maybe it's not so bad if that first hurdle you sort of smash straight through it as long as you

actually do get through it. And you know, take take a bit of a time time penalty, which I think is how these things work. But just don't don't kind of sit on it for for too long. And don't worry that what you might end up doing is kind of launching something with a brand or a value proposition that actually doesn't initially get

loads and loads of traction because seeing it as a learning process and refining it so that you ultimately do get traction is kind of the purpose of that early stage in the same way that product prototyping and everything in those early days is in a test and learn space.

Steevan Glover (16:29)
I agree and I think in the early days, I tend to find you two businesses. You have the ones that rush to get something out and it's not ready. The ones that wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait until it's perfect. Both are pitfalls. Timing is everything. But you can afford, you're right, you've got to get something out there and you need to have something that's in the market that you can then...

There is virtue in iteration. There is virtue in advertising that it's improved and it's a 1 .1 or 1 .2 or you know that you are constantly improving because that is a positive virtuous marketing message. As long as you're not trying to resell it to the same clients have a succession plan that says we've now got a free upgrade for you because again that's a story that you can tell about your service quality. So you don't have to be fearful.

I think so many people are terrified that they'll go out with something that isn't perfect and it will in some way be negative. When you manage that message, you get to control that narrative. And narrative is a word that's much, much more important in marketing in the last decade than it was in the previous decade. Narrative is a continuous story around a value and a message. And that's important. But you're right, getting something out and then saying,

it will only get better, allows you that scope, both to iterate a new version, but change your messaging as you go. And it's not seen as a, the first one didn't work, the second one's a bit better. No, the first one worked as far as it was meant to. Now we'll go to the next phase. It's all part of our plan. And then you just change the story.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (18:12)
Mm.

Do you think that's the kind of, guess, you know, when we, talked to people in the group and people who started businesses, I guess they're really nervous about getting that story right from, from the off. then as you say, the likelihood is that you're not going to get it right. I guess making sure that message is as clear as possible. And, and, and I think it's, it's really important still from, from day one, probably more so than I guess, you know, the look and feel of

actual brand itself. think the message and what you're actually selling and the problem you're solving is still the most important part of that process.

Steevan Glover (18:49)
Yeah. And I think that that's an excellent point, which is I think people, because they're very focused on what we do, they then get really terrified about that story. I mean, we, we've all sat in brand meetings and brand strategy meetings where you can see people are very, very focused on what we do and who we do it for and not why we do it and what it will achieve for them. Now, the moment you, you, you shift your mindset to saying,

Adam Yaya-Durrant (18:58)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (19:19)
It's not about what I do. My outcome is that's a much, much more generic story. And it allows you to play around and make mistakes and still have a brand narrative that's strong. If you're fixated on what, you I've gone out and all this money on what I do and it's changing. Well, but the outcome is likely to be the same, but just better. You know, I'm selling time or I'm selling efficiency or value. Well, you're still doing that.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (19:42)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (19:47)
And we'll come to this point, I'm sure later, but knowing when you from a B2B perspective, what you're selling to someone and then how it benefits them and their customers. If there is that long chain, that is critical because actually if you stay focused on that, then your, your why is much, much, much, much more valuable. And it allows you that freedom to sit back and say, okay, I can make mistakes, but I don't have to present them as mistakes. I present them as learnings.

because that's what they are. And you say for everybody I've interacted.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (20:17)
Yeah, I think just to wrap

to sort of wrap up the story point, which I think is sort of linked is there's being fixated on what you do. But I think that can almost feel like being fixated on what you do right now and telling a story that is like a retrospective. it's like gather around the campfire and I will tell you the story about my business as if the story has finished. And actually, I think it's better to think about it as a like narration of what is actually happening, especially with

the startup because know things, there's not that much story to tell.

that most of the story is kind of ahead of you. And it's okay to tell a story that is, we have a vision that we're going to get to this point over here. And by the that vision isn't a product that has all of these features. It's a product that enables you to do something and adds a load of value that isn't existing on the market right now. And I'm going to tell you the story of how we're going to get from where we started to where we're going. that sort of...

I feeling like it's a continuous rather than a finished story when you're thinking about your brand and your proposition and all of those kinds of things. That for me is the right way to think about a B2B tech startup as opposed to thinking about this is a product that has these features in because these are all the things that are done right now. And I think one of the ways that that kind of manifests itself is, you know, when you think about

We need to explain what we do is, well, we need to think about it as if that's a decision that we've made and it's going to be true for a long period of time. But because you're only really attracting a small number of customers, in relative terms, if it's high volume, that small number of customers might be 100. If it's really high value stuff, it might be one. You don't really need to worry too much about making a defined

choice that is going to last for a long time. So if you say, right now our product does this and there are people out there who want to buy this thing right now, that's what we are. Our vision is bigger and different and bolder and it will change and it might change in three months. But right now the first hurdle we need to get over is we need to get some customers. We have a thing that we can sell. It does this. Those customers want this thing. Right now we are this.

when we are ready to transition into something else, we will do that and the story will evolve. And also, we don't know where the story actually ends right now. We just, have a direction of travel and a place where we're going to go destroy this ring, but what's going to happen in between that isn't quite figured out. And we're embracing that, we're comfortable with it and we see it as a thing that is a living.

breathing thing rather than a sort of history.

Steevan Glover (23:25)
Yeah, and that's right. Invariably, think founders of tech businesses don't come at it from a marketing or a communication background. They invariably come from a tech background. They come from a solution situation. They've identified a need. They've created a solution. And then they go, aha, right. This person needs it, but you

Adam Yaya-Durrant (23:25)
Yeah.

Steevan Glover (23:50)
why and what's the other benefits for it. So you can be very fixated on it does this, okay, to what end and as we've said is that then outcome becomes important. My experience of B2B tells me that for a large element is what B2B solutions tend to do is save two major things or delivering two major things, a benefit in time, a reduction in the time it takes to achieve something and it's money.

It will save you money. Now it can be not necessarily our product is cheaper than X or Y. That actually doesn't matter for a lot of the time. What it can be is simply it saves time in your process. Now this will save you time, which invariably will save the customer time with their customer. And that ongoing benefit chain is something that you can leverage in that story. So therefore the output is efficiency. When you start relating time and money,

you get a more efficient process and that immediately speaks to margin. And the moment you start speaking to margin, everybody on a board that you're talking to starts to pay attention because the biggest hurdle you'll have from a B2B perspective is it's a great idea. The person wants to buy it. And then the CFO looks at it and goes, and makes that noise. And then you're to get into this whole world of content production, which is about overcoming objection. Okay. Well, you can overcome objection by actually selling.

the outcome for their customer right at the beginning. If you can find that way of doing that, you're great. It's absolutely fine. And don't worry that you're a challenger brand. It's good to challenge the status quo, especially if the status quo is very focused on what they do, not the outcome for their customer.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (25:22)
Mm

Well, that's a good point. And I think you've kind of mentioned a little bit around kind of being a challenger brand and being bold in the market before, because I think all the brands that, majority of the brands that we've created at that early adoption stage, of the kind of brand strategy, positioning, personality is very in that kind of creator archetype. But also kind of, they need to have that kind of elements of, I guess, trust and that element of innovation. It's kind of like a balance between the

Steevan Glover (26:04)
Mm.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (26:12)
I guess the sage and the creator. What's the kind of getting that kind of right? How important is because you've got you've got to speak both sides. You've to get people excited about a proposition, especially if it's a new one. But also you've got to, you know, you've got to bring them along and and show you know, bring that kind of trust, I guess Yoda element to it as well, which is kind of like the two at play always find that early part of the curve.

Steevan Glover (26:39)
Yeah, I mean, it's not an impossible balancing act, but it is one of the, it's certainly one of the biggest factors is knowing kind of when to accelerate and when not to. It's always good to have another voice in the room for any tech business and any tech founder. And if the founder of that business is predominantly technology and

finance and logistics driven, then they need the opposite voice in the corner, challenging everything and saying, we don't have to take the safe route, we can go down here. And if you find that fabulous balance, that's, and they trust each other, that's, that's where you that's where you'll find the weird union. My classic example of that is, is George Moskvich at Apple, you know, it's, that's what you actually want. But you

You start with the product, you start with the solution, you start with what that is because ultimately you're selling that outcome. If that will carry you most of the way in that first hurdle, then you can worry about the presentation of it because the presentation of it has to start to differentiate once the product no longer purely differentiates on its own. So that's when it gets slightly more complicated. It's a couple of years down the line when you're not the only one doing it.

because you will, know, success breeds imitation. know, however successful you are, you will not be there alone for long. That's guaranteed. So then you've got to think very, very carefully about how you then actually say your message differently each time. And that then becomes much more focused on market segments and segmentation and sector differentiation. And yeah, then it becomes a machine that you've got to be careful. But...

don't lose sight of what your original concept was. I mean, if you think most of the great big tech software companies started by solving a problem and then have evolved over 20, 30 years into a megalopolis of different solutions, Microsoft started life out as a word processing package and look where it came. Huge number of stumbles in the middle, but it picks itself up and it does itself down.

oracle the same. You look at where they start and where they end up, it's because they were prepared to iterate each time. But fundamentally at the heart, they solved a problem. And everybody was very, very acutely aware of what that was. And don't get me wrong, those two examples also are benefiting from being in the right place at the right time. But that is business. When you have a clever idea, your idea is good because it is the right thing at the right time.

Don't give anybody a hard time for doing that. That's like saying, the only reason you won the 100 meters is because you're quick. Yeah. Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (29:41)
Yeah, I think, I think so. The point that you've just made, I think is, is, is really important, which is when you're creating a brand and selling a product, there are layers and layers of complexity that you could create. I get a little bit frustrated sometimes when you know, you're doing a brand project, we've talked about that.

brand onions and the different levels of brand ethos and brand spirit and brand personality and how all these things interact. I don't know whether it feels like it keeps a bunch of consultants busy and also makes it quite difficult to do.

do branding, there is, I think, in my, if I was going to say which, which bits of all of those are important, it's knowing what problem you solve and who you solve it for, and what the, what the value of solving that problem is. And I think everything else needs to come after you've worked that bit of the, of the proposition out. I think then you can sort of layer things on top and

Steevan Glover (30:39)
See.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (30:57)
I'm interested, know, which bits of these you think, you both think are kind of particularly important. So you've got things like brand personality. You've got things like, when you spoke, Steve, you said, you know, there's basically sort of time, money, efficiency, security, those are the reasons that people buy B2B tech products. There's another layer to that, which is why do individuals, you know, buy

things and what's their motivation and this idea of what's the status change in those individuals that they experience by buying your product and how does that relate to, you know, the sort of the classic headings there are kind of health, wealth and relationships. Are you competing on cost? Are you competing on relationships? Are you competing on innovation? You you could, you could sort of create levels of depth around branding and strategy and sales and proposition and messaging.

I mean, I could probably spend months coming up with more and more frameworks and workshops that we need to do. But beyond just the value proposition, which I think we're probably all agreed is the foundation of everything. In a startup where you have limited amount of time and resource, what are the other bits that are really essential to focus on?

Steevan Glover (32:16)
I think for me it's the biggest lesson I learned as a young marketeer was sell to people who you want to sell to and who want to buy from you. Don't sell to those who won't.

And that sounds really obvious, but actually a lot of people go very generic, very early and they're like, I want everybody to love us, but they're not going to. And use your marketing to filter the people who are not interested as much as you are targeting the ones that are. Because if you can identify through marketing, and that's why a lot of companies go quite diversive. They almost want the 50 -50 split. They're in the route, they're Marmite, to use a wonderful cliche. Because what you immediately do is you don't waste any time and any effort.

trying to hunt down people who have no interest in where you are. Now their lack of interest might be stupidity. It might be an intrinsic lack of trust in something new. mean, there are a myriad of reasons why. Find out what, don't waste your energy on them immediately. It's like, know, you're trying to chat someone up when you're younger, you know, read the signals, get the, read the signals in the room, you know, don't chase, you know, a lost cause. And it's the same in business.

you find a lot of people get quite fixated on a market and you're realizing, why are you hunting in there? Actually come out, just ignore it. It might be somewhere, but put your ego aside, don't go there and focus over here. And if you spend your energy and your time and your budget in areas that share the same principles and values as you, so brand personality, okay, yeah, let's read another book and write another term for the same things.

If businesses are like human beings, you share a connection, people get on with each other, brands get on with each other, they share the same holistic values, they say the same idiosyncrasies and you go, do you know what, I like working with you, because ultimately it's still a human to human conversation. Right, you are still a salesperson or a brand talking to another brand and there's two people in a room or over Zoom nowadays.

But you are still at the fundamental game. I share a similar set of ideals to you. I like what your business is. I make personal choices about brands I don't want to work with. I carry those over in business as well. A very, very large supermarket chain that I once pitched for asked us, excuse me, what's the supermarket price? Pardon? Well, we don't pay that. Now, it was the biggest thing I ever did in my younger.

whereas I stood up and went, well that'll be that then. And we walked out. Because their demand that because they were who they were, you don't share the same values, you have no interest in paying the appropriate amount for a product that's quality. That tells me everything about your business and I don't want any part of that. Now that's a big decision, but...

Phill Keaney-Bolland (34:58)
Hmm.

I did hear a story once about somebody trying to sell a well -known Irish drink to a supermarket and them saying, we don't want to pay that. So, you know, we'll just stop selling this. I mean, that's Guinness, right? it's not like things like, we're not gonna sell Guinness, we're gonna sell, I guess, like,

Steevan Glover (35:40)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (35:45)
Murphy's. Nobody wants that. They want Guinness, right? Guinness drinkers, drink Guinness. And they were prepared to sort of quibble to such an extent, they're like, we'll just not stop that then. So I mean, that's a, that's interesting in the kind of world of supermarkets. I, when you were saying that, I was sort of reflecting back on our early days. And one of the challenges that we thought we had as a business, which was, we would talk to, we'd get into conversations with

Steevan Glover (35:47)
Danish.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (36:14)
IT directors in relatively large businesses and get into a conversation where they were like, I don't really understand why we need to do any product design. Do we not just do a spec and then like our engineers will just build it? And so for a while we were sort of fixated on how do we convince these people to buy this thing that they ultimately don't want to buy and to understand and actually a better strategy and the strategy that ended up being more successful for us is actually just find the people who

Steevan Glover (36:34)
you

Phill Keaney-Bolland (36:44)
not necessarily know that this thing is what they want, but are actually open -minded that that could be a good way doing it. And an example of that would be when we speak to a lot of tech founders, the conversation might start with, we need to build an MVP. And very quickly we'll say, actually what we need to do is a brand exercise here because we need to understand what the value proposition is. And we need to understand how we present these ideas in a way that

you matches up to the experience that you want people to have of your brand. And so I definitely agree. think identifying personas that you're targeting, identifying the problems that you solve for those people, identifying the value that you solve for those people, that's, that's really fundamentally important. Identifying the people who are the sort of anti personas who you don't want to sell to, you're not going to waste time spinning your wheels on. It's, it's maybe hard to do off the bat.

because actually I think you probably have to meet a few of those people and identify the traits that are like, these people do want to buy this, these people don't want to buy this, and there's enough of these people who do want to buy it that means we don't have to pivot to catering to the needs of the people who just fundamentally aren't the right customers. So I think as a practical step, having been conscious of that as a founder is great. I'd also like to throw in, I think, and I think you sort of touched on this a little bit.

Steevan Glover (37:46)
Right.

Any

Phill Keaney-Bolland (38:12)
Having a customer comparison chart, knowing these are the people who our customers might go to instead of us. And these are the specific ways that we're different and the specific ways that we're similar to those people. I think that adds a lot of value because if nothing else, it says, are you different enough from the people who are out there in the market right now? Or are we just doing the same thing? And as I think we've spoken about quite a lot.

If you're just doing the same thing and claiming that you're doing it better, you're the flip side of that coin is we're just doing the same thing and we're doing it cheaper, which is not a space that you want to be in.

Steevan Glover (38:52)
Not necessarily not for longevity. You know, if you're purely trading on price that will that will that will bite you eventually. You can ride it for a certain period of time because there is always a section of the market that want to buy cheap and cheapest. But actually, we all know that that's not a long term strategy that works because it's very hard to then reverse that and suddenly put your prices up because everyone goes, but the reason I'm buying for you is because you're a value. you're your value. You're low. Right. I think it's interesting.

a lot of people sell minimum requirements in this field, this space, as if it's some kind of benefit and you're going, if everybody's doing the same stuff, you've got to set that bar as the minimum requirement and accept that. Except that is the basic level and the basic standard that everybody expects. So rest assured client, I give you everything that you can get from everybody else. So no problems there. okay, good. Right. So we can immediately have a conversation about other things.

I think you see a lot of companies don't adjust their features and benefits quickly enough. It's standard. I've never liked the license model. Hey, know, for $199 you get these features and these two. It's all there. It's all there. What difference does it make to you whether I access it I don't? It's just a marketing ploy to get you to start here and then realize what you're selling is crap. So I have to spend more to get up there? So the moment I have to do that...

Phill Keaney-Bolland (40:08)
you

Let's take a quick break and then when we come back let's talk a little bit about the influencer space and a bit about the initial websites for startups.

So welcome back. And we still have Steve with us. And we're about to just dive into a question, which I guess prompted by when...

And when I started our business, we gave ourselves probably some level of gout, stomach pain and occasional hangovers, because a lot of what we were doing is we were going out and chatting to people in person. did a lot of coffees as well, I should add. It wasn't all kind of in the evenings. But I think what we've noticed is that post -COVID, a lot of people are now in London less or in other cities.

obviously sounds like a massive London anchor there. But basically people aren't coming into the office as much. And because people aren't coming to the office as much, they're probably not meeting up in the same physical spaces and networking is a little bit harder, which is one of the factors amongst many that has driven this sort of online influencer style persona thing that a lot of businesses I've noticed now have attached to them, a founder who is the face of the business.

particularly I think in the sort of smaller startup business space and in the very, very large, very established tech business space. Is that a change that you've noticed, Stephen? How important do you think it is that your company has a human face?

Steevan Glover (42:15)
It's certainly the working dynamics and the need to have a digital presence that is repeatable and consistent, which is true of all marketing by the way, but it's particularly relevant because you're walking down that digital pathway because we're much more of a hybrid working world.

That's a whole nother podcast, by the way, the change in hybrid working, is because I've got some views on that. Because the problem is not the people are hybrid working, it's how people manage that. That's the failure. needing a face is, yes, it's important. Does it have to be the face of the founder? No. But I think having an identity.

In the tech world, we're certainly used to having figureheads and people who are absolutely at the forefront of their businesses and everything hangs around them. And historically, we've gone through that quite a lot. We talk about Microsoft, we talk about Oracle, and then you talk about Apple, which are the big tech players over the years, and to a degree, Google. But it's less prevalent.

in some of the bigger modern businesses, but they're still there. And they might not be there in a general consumer public way, but they're certainly there in a sector specific way. So they become a guru, they become a legend. mean, put whatever title you want on them. And we like watching their soundbites. I particularly enjoy listening to Rory Sutherland, the ad guy from Ogilvy, I mean, I will never tire of hearing his intellectual rigor and philosophical musings on the ad and the market.

world. But do you have to be the face? I think it's important that the business has an identifiable face. You can lead with brand and have different people under it that will talk to a sector. But it's about providing veracity in your marketplace. It's proof that you know what you're talking about, that all the messaging that you put out in marketing actually has some heart.

personality behind it. So a founder may not want to be the face, but I think the business does benefit from having someone that's prepared to be a spokesperson. There's a lot of egos out there right now who are desperate to get on the keynote speaker circuit. Always be wary of that, I think, because that could become vacuous very, very quickly. Make sure if you do have something to say,

Adam Yaya-Durrant (44:53)
I

Steevan Glover (45:01)
and make sure it's relevant and pertinent and it's in tune with your brand life.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (45:04)
Is it?

We just come back to the same book. Is Rory Sutherland the guy that wrote the book about how non -logical ideas need to be more of a thing in business recently? Yeah.

Steevan Glover (45:15)
He may have been, yes. You can't miss him. He's kind of the chubby fellow with the red braces that you see a lot in memes. He won't mind me saying that because it's a literal fact. But yeah, and he's just very entertaining as a speaker. He's kind of, in the same way that lot of people have always enjoyed Simon Sinek and his TED Talks.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (45:24)
It's

Adam Yaya-Durrant (45:43)
It's, it's, it's, it's a bit of a double -edged sword, isn't it? Cause we know that from our experience that the founder being too much of the brand is quite a challenge to then how do you kind of scale and do that? How do you get past that when they are, and we've all worked with people like that. So it becomes impossible for other people within the business to talk about.

Steevan Glover (45:55)
move on from it.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (46:11)
brand and what you're doing because, you know, it's essentially it's an individual. yeah, it's quite a challenge. I think it's important, but I also think it has its kind of negatives.

Steevan Glover (46:22)
Absolutely. I mean, I think we'd all agree that there are huge positives to having a figure like Elon Musk at the front of your company. And there are some probably some corporate negatives to it at the same time. Won't dwell on that because you might sue me for not advertising on X. you, yeah. I think the key here is to differentiate the difference, I think, between an inspirational leader.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (46:37)
Yeah, he might do,

Steevan Glover (46:50)
and somebody who is then a marketing value. So on one side, you can have a guru -esque type character that is definitively different, a Dyson, for example. Here is a man who says, I am an engineer. I solve problems. I make wonderful products. I don't care. They're expensive. Now, his remit is, from a brand perspective, engineering solutions, innovation, invention. His is not there to walk out and say, I'm the world's greatest businessman.

Because actually, when he starts talking about the function of business, he invariably says something that's brand damaging, like, I'm going to shut down and move everything to Singapore. Not helpful.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (47:25)
Well, well, on that, I totally really loved the whole Dyson ethos and products and brand and all of this kind of stuff. You know, the Hoovies are great. I didn't buy this for myself, but I absolutely would now as somebody actually gave me the hairdryer as a present and it is a fantastic product.

Steevan Glover (47:50)
I think you're sporting it magnificently. know, know, that's it. there's a touch of the Timothy advert there.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (47:51)
Well, we can see.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (47:55)
Yeah. But I won't buy any more Dyson products because I think James Dyson is a knob. And that is the danger of having somebody who's so associated with the brand. Same with with same with same with Elon. mean, Elon Musk is a very unpopular person in this house. And, you know, any of the things that that he touches, I'm like, don't want anything to do with anything that gives

Adam Yaya-Durrant (47:58)
haha

Yeah.

Steevan Glover (48:07)
Yeah.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (48:10)
Same feeling.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (48:22)
money to that man. So you're right, it is a double edged sword. It hasn't made a huge impact, I don't think on Elon Musk's personal wealth or the success of his businesses or James Dyson that I personally don't do that. I guess, you know, there are, there is a risk and probably a much bigger risk for a much smaller business to having somebody who's so associated with the brand be out there. I think for me,

the sort of imperative for having somebody be the face of a brand isn't necessarily the force of personality so much as I think you need to be having, you need to have a voice as a brand. You need to have a point of view on the world. If you're a startup and you're trying to get, you know, you're trying to get a share of voice as they would say in PR.

you need to be saying something that's actually interesting, that's different, and that is a defined view of the world. And say, you've got a product which has a bunch of features, but the reason that you created those features is because you believe in a specific way of doing things, and you have a sort of ideology and a framework. Now, for that to cut through, it's much more effective for it to come from a human, ideally a likable human.

likeable obviously can mean different things to different people.

Steevan Glover (49:47)
I

But I agree with you that that human voice is important in having something to say, either holistically about your business or about the innovation of your products or your solutions is absolutely critical because you can spend all the money in the world marketing. But at the end of the day, it's just you telling people that you're Okay, great. What you actually need and you will know this from my oft repeated advices PR, PR, PR, PR and PR now.

covers a real gamut of different elements from influencers to press to media to whatever. But the key is having third parties endorse and validate your views and opinions. The moment you sit on an award ceremony or a massive conference and event round table where someone else has made the decision that you are relevant, somebody else has already said these people are worth listening to. So therefore you immediately have validation.

So everyone sits there earnestly and goes, there is veracity in what they're saying because someone else has made that decision for them. That's a really simple process for a human being to work through. Now, if you then repeat that cycle, they've won awards for their product and innovation and design. they're up talking at this. look, there's an article about this person. And you do it across media. there's bit of Sunday Times Magazine and Guardian Supplements and then trade magazines. You start trade and you go out. It again depends on your business.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (50:53)
Mm.

Steevan Glover (51:14)
You want to be seen as a voice of intelligence and wisdom. Your brand does. It doesn't have to be one person. and it, but there are numerous ways that you can do it, but having a face when someone types your company name and their name, it comes to relevant pertinent SEO information that you want the world to recognize when they put those elements into a search engine is important. yes, 100%.

But do you all have to be Elon or Dyson? No. I like this. I think we should talk about Elon Musk more. think there's some things that you need to get off your chest.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (51:50)
No, on a very...

Adam Yaya-Durrant (51:50)
It's done.

Yeah. Yeah. That's one for the whole podcast, I think.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (52:00)
My very personal experiences with Elon Musk are probably not broadcastable. On a very tactical level, we've noticed this a lot, is if you take LinkedIn and you say, right, we've got two channels here, we've got our Brands channel, just say Yaya, for instance, or we've got Phil's channel, if I...

Steevan Glover (52:07)
you

Phill Keaney-Bolland (52:27)
post the same thing on those two channels, I'll get more engagement and reach and interaction from my personal channel. And the reason I think for that is because I don't have any real strong emotional feeling towards the brand, the faceless brand that is telling me this is what it thinks as a company about the world, which you can do if you're, no, if.

Steevan Glover (52:33)
Yeah, cool.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (52:51)
If you're McKinsey, for example, and you publish a report, it doesn't necessarily need to have a face because people just like quoting McKinsey reports in presentations. that's, that's, that's, that's cool.

Steevan Glover (53:00)
Well, least it's moved on from Gardner, but it's the same process. Still there? yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (53:04)
Gartner is still kicking around. It's still there. So on a practical level, I think the way that you're sort of rewarded for being a face as opposed to just like leveraging your brand, I think you can get more cut through that way. And you said something really interesting, Steve, which the people who are looking to be on the circuit really...

that is everyone, or at least it should be because it is actually probably the most effective way to go and sell a bunch of stuff. you get invited to a conference where all your customers, know, a thousand of them are sat in the audience and you're invited to spend 20 minutes basically talking about why what you do is amazing, that would be, it's not something that you can buy. The things that you can buy that are, you know, they come as sort of sponsorship packages to...

Steevan Glover (53:33)
Thank

Phill Keaney-Bolland (54:00)
these events are not really the same thing. It's a priceless marketing channel. really, I suppose everybody's ultimate goal is to get to that place and it should be and I don't think that is something that you can do without some real hard yards and years of building up a reputation and having a voice and all those kinds of things as an individual, as opposed to as a brand. But again, the exception would be

I could probably say, we need to get a keynote speaker for my conference. Let's get the most senior product designer from Google. Who is that? Because the name Google obviously is, is massive. If you're a startup, you don't have the luxury of doing that. Nobody's looking for who's, who's, who's the founder of this really sort of nascent startup and let's get them to speak. But they might look for, let's get that person who talks about really interesting stuff consistently and has, has their own kind of reputation and profile.

Steevan Glover (54:51)
And it.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (54:59)
and get them to stand up and pitch their startup.

Steevan Glover (55:01)
Absolutely, I mean, I think all of the social media platforms are based on the individual, not the business. And it being functional because that's the last human element to it. LinkedIn specifically was always designed to be a business networking tool and it's now just become a recruiting tool with some other bits thrown on the back end of it. So yeah, you can post all you like, but the algorithms within LinkedIn don't really allow company posts to generate much traction. You can get people to follow it.

But actually, if you ever look at your timeline, how often do business posts actually appear? Very, very little. Because it's a self -fulfilling prophecy, is that you want the most number of posts to be read, and so the ad revenue goes up. And then, of course, everything suffers from clickbait. Four or five times a day, you'll just suddenly go, I know this headline's not true. Do I click on it? I click on it? God. Right. What a load of gibberish. And you know.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (55:56)
done it.

Steevan Glover (55:59)
mean, have conversations with people. I mean, the validity of channels is actually becoming a very serious issue for marketers to look into. I now never recommend for business to use X Twitter because it's too diverse. It's just not worth the effort of having to monitor it and see what ends up being said in comments on your posts or to get off it. It's toxic, it's unpleasant. Why would you want to be there?

And I can totally understand that. And it's beginning to get that way on other platforms, but equally it depends who you're wanting to talk to and what you're wanting to aim to. There is some value in Facebook at certain businesses and certain B2B channels, but you have to look at it on a case by case basis. Very, very specifically.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (56:38)
Hmm.

Yeah. We're really bashing Elon Musk today, and I feel in the interest of balance, we should also say that I think Mark Zuckerberg's also a knob as well.

Steevan Glover (57:00)
I mean, I think, you know, everything follows Facebook. That was the cornerstone of how this industry works and where it comes from.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (57:04)
Yeah.

Steevan Glover (57:09)
You will see stuff on TikTok that other social media platforms won't show you. Be a star on TikTok. Any aspiring filmmakers or any media makers are looking at it and going, what's my trade -off value between it being seen versus what it actually really does mean? We are producing a lot of people that are coming out and saying, it's okay, I'm gonna learn my living as an influencer.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (57:13)
Yeah.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (57:14)
Hehehe

Steevan Glover (57:37)
maybe for the next decade you will but after that you're going to struggle.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (57:45)
Final thing for today, I wanted to talk a little bit about websites and obviously particularly websites when you are in the early days of a B2B tech startup. This is another thing where we've had conversations recently about what website do you need as a startup? And actually,

think when asked that question, our sort of question back was, you need a website as a startup? And I think the answer to that is probably where we started this podcast, which is that there's no one size fits all answer to that question. really does depend on.

what the first obstacle in your steeplechase is and whether you can sell stuff without having a digital platform, which if you can do that because it's much more efficient and cheaper and all the rest of it.

The reality is, think, as a business, you do need to have a website. The question is more what sort of website do you need and what's the objective for it and designing around that objective. So one of...

Steevan Glover (58:58)
There's two types of website. I think you want to say here at this point, there's a commercial website that's commerce based and B2B can still be relevant to that. And then there's a non -commercial website, which is fundamentally a presence. And my argument would be you need one no matter what, you need a presence on all your major social channels as well. Because if you're not, people won't think you're real.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (59:28)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (59:28)
For me, that is the most basic equation. I will go to Google or a user will go to Google, type in your company name, and if they can find nothing on you, you're a spammer, you're fake, you're not real. So if nothing else, your website serves to prove you're real and to provide the basic information that says, yes, they are functioning, they do do what they say they do, and the stuff they say over here is mirrored here, so I've seen it in two places.

So if your website does nothing else other than that, it serves a value.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (59:57)
Mm

This is a sort of persistent theme over the course of my career is there are within the second category that I think of websites you described, there are sort of subcategories. There are some people who we've worked with who, and I'm not challenging whether this is true or not, have sort of started a website project where they've said, the website isn't gonna make us any sales, right?

We do that through relationships, do that through networking, we do it through other social media channels, we do it through events, do it, know, whatever the thing is, that is our primary focus as far as generating these. What the website needs to do is it needs to really not piss people off when they come onto it. So it needs to prove that we're real and provide credibility, but it also needs to not say anything on it that makes people not want to buy from us. You know, not ruining the goodwill that we've built up on other channels.

And, you know, as a, that is a valid strategy, as long as, as long as the, you know, it's predicated on that. Yes, we do just get enough, we get enough leads from events, we get enough leads from whatever all those other things are that we, you know, that is the role that it needs to play in our specific context within our business. And we've made a decision that, you know, yes, we probably could generate more leads from website, but we're not actually bothered because we, we have a, we have a perfectly valid approach elsewhere.

Steevan Glover (1:01:03)
Hmm.

And I think,

So therefore, if it's a content backup piece, it's like, okay, that's where you want it. That means that content can live in numerous places and consistently managing that is where you want to put your efforts, I would argue.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:01:38)
Hmm.

Steevan Glover (1:01:40)
If you are a commercial B2B website, i .e. it is your conduit to sell software licenses or sign ups or whatever else, that's a different beast. And they are invariably much, much leaner, much, much more sharply focused. And they work better because they've got a very, very defined focus.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:01:54)
Mm

Well, so this is where, you, let's put the websites to one side that are just sort of credibility pieces and then think about websites as a lead generation tool and it's pushing towards sales.

That is, I think, it requires a totally different way of thinking. And you need to think about conversions and different types of conversions. So if you're to do that, just purely having a book a demo button on a site, that will get you some people because the people who land on the site knowing what their problem is, knowing what solution they need and knowing by the time they

click on the button, that you are a person who can provide that solution, that there will always be some of those people. But you also then have to think about the people who don't know that they have a problem but haven't really diagnosed the cause of it. Know what their problem is but don't really know what the solution is.

who know what the solution is but don't really know anything about you and need a compelling reason to pick you over all those other people. then instantly you're starting to think about, well, there's a whole funnel of different people.

Steevan Glover (1:03:15)
your website's just grown by 40 % as you've done that example. I mean, that's how quickly it happens. I would say it's inverse. You should reverse that completely. All of that decision -making process should have happened with content marketing you had put out. And someone's read that, clicked on it, and had made their decision. The click decision has happened before they've hit the website, if you've done your marketing correctly. I .e. your marketing differentiates people from buy now, interested,

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:03:19)
Yes. Yeah.

Right.

Steevan Glover (1:03:45)
have no idea. That takes you to a different section. At every stage of whatever that journey to, and that's a really simplistic way of talking about a user journey or a UX experience, but that's fundamentally what it boils down to. I know people will overcomplicate it. But once they come into that section, always give them the commercial out with one button. Buy now, buy now. Boom, up, And it converts. But that buy now page for that journey is not the same as the one over here.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:03:47)
Hmm.

Mm

Mm.

Steevan Glover (1:04:15)
But those buyout pages are not seen unless you've come down that journey. You actually don't want people to come to your homepage. Fundamentally your marketing has failed if they land on your homepage. But if they do land on your homepage, you want them to get into a definable, measurable UX journey experience as quickly as is humanly possible.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:04:37)
So I think you've hit a nail on there there and that buy button thing I remember being one of the first things that we ever really talked about, as was not overcomplicating this. I think when you think, all right, we need to build up loads of stuff, loads of pages for loads of different sections of the funnel. I think what you really need is, you need a buy button or a book demo button, something that's very kind of.

you we're getting into a sales conversation. You also need something that's a softer conversion because realistically, the majority of people who land on your site, if you're, if you are marketing, effectively, they're probably not going to be that ready at that exact moment in time to say, let's, let's have a sales conversation. Like think about your own experiences. How often do you want to talk to us? They're like a sales representative, but it's only when you're really sure that you, you want to that. So, you know, whether it's a scorecard,

Steevan Glover (1:05:07)
Mm.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:05:32)
or a webinar or whatever it is that you need something that people can do that is just a little bit less of a commitment. And your website needs to be ultimately designed around getting people to convert in one of those as a minimum two places. And that actually is a thing that a lot of people don't do. It becomes very informational. And back to your point about talks a lot about what the product features are and all that kind of stuff. But actually it needs.

conversions need to be front and center. You don't want to have a section on your website that is conversions. You want conversion points everywhere and you want to give people stuff to do that. And your point about the homepage, I mean, every website project ever, the page that gets obsessed with the most by the project and used the least by the user is the homepage because I think...

it is perceived as the front page of the newspaper. So if you if you were a journalist, you've got I want my story to be the leader on this one, the headline on the front of the page to be my thing. And, the front or the back page, they're the they're the two sort of prime locations for putting information. And so what you end up with is you end up with a bun fight of different stakeholders who like this has to go in here, this has gone here, and suddenly you end up with this massive homepage. And this, as a designer, there's kind of two ways of

dealing with this. There's one which is push back and say that all you want to have on your homepage, and bear in mind that the people who come on your homepage have typed in the URL or you know, they they they probably are either organic traffic based off your brand, or they have come direct. So they know who you are. I would argue just say, are you looking for this thing? Let's talk about it. But just just have that on your homepage.

because you're not going to get loads and loads of cold leads coming to that particular bit of your site and you don't really need to do a whole education piece. Or you just accept defeat and say, yeah, let's just put it all on the homepage. It doesn't really matter. Hardly anyone's going to look at this page anyway. Let's focus our attention on the pages that actually are going to have more of an impact. But if you want to do this properly and you're sitting there and you're listening to this and you're a B2B tech founder and you're designing your website, recognise that the homepage

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:07:34)
you

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:07:50)
is not really the most important element of a website. It is a portal to different places, so you need to have very strong navigation, and it is a place to convert pretty warm leads, so you need to give them some incentive to get in touch with you or give you their contact details and then nurture them.

Steevan Glover (1:07:54)
I mean, it's...

And I would agree. And I actually think for the sake of the audience for this podcast, I would say do something really bold.

is one of them, but it's not the primary. It's you talking on a YouTube channel. It's you being on a podcast like this. You know, you're out there and saying, okay, these guys are I like this. I like what they're saying. I've read what they're saying.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:08:30)
if somebody becomes aware of you, and you've managed to basically fill the internet with your thoughts and, you know, content that you've created, and you know, you're doing a good job of articulating how you think about the world and why it's different to everyone else and why your product is, you know, is a good solution for those, those kinds of things.

that gives people stuff that they can binge like a a like a basically a Netflix series about your business. And so you could just because it's not the website doesn't mean it's not relevant, you can dig into it for hours and hours and hours and learn a whole bunch of stuff. And this is this is one strategy, it's not the strategy is that rather than like desperately selling, if you are a little bit

sort of more exclusive and kind of harder to reach and there's a bit of a sense of scarcity or it becomes a more desirable thing and people actually kind of want it more if you sort of counter intuitively, if you make it a bit harder to buy people want to try to buy it

it might just be a case of saying, you know, we work with a small number of businesses, let's talk and see if you're a good fit or, you there are lots of different ways of kind of framing that.

Steevan Glover (1:09:49)
There were iterations of the same theme, which is to strip that right the way back. And you could have a button that says, you do you want to see videos about what we do? I think they just go off to the branded YouTube video site or whatever. And not be worried that people are going to go on a journey that takes you away from it. You still can have beautiful design within this, by the way. You still can make it look incredibly compelling.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:10:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think weirdly, you know, we've had a lot of, lot of websites in our time as Yaya and lot of, especially a lot of interim websites, probably more interim websites than websites that we've felt were whole and full. I'd say probably one of our most successful ones is the one where we just had a bit of a show reel video, know, headline of what we do as a business, a couple of logos and a contact page. And we had that for, I'd say what Phil brought me about over a year.

And I think just kind of showing that snapshot of things that we do, people that we work with, people just generally did get in contact a lot more because they wanted to see more. It was a horrible phase, phrase, but we were just showing a bit of leg and people then wanted to kind of, we're interested in the other bits. So it's, it's crazy. my dear, we had some good legs.

Steevan Glover (1:11:01)
And you do have magnificent legs. I mean, for example, you know, again, it's the one size fits all, but I mean, let's say that you're one of your objectives is that you want to get people in a room to talk to you face to face. And this approach works because somebody who's prepared to them, make that call go, okay. And you know, you don't have to come and see us once in a while, but we're having one of these breakfast things where we do X, Y and Z. Let me give you a link to what they're like, not your website.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:11:05)
He is known for that in the Kent area.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:11:09)
Is that it?

Steevan Glover (1:11:29)
separate thing. okay. Do you want to come on to that? You can meet us, you can meet other people that have done it. There was always, we'll always mix a couple of clients with some prospects because, you know, it's nice to talk to people that are actually, with us. It's less pressure. There are ways that you can dilute that forced moment. But yeah, you could even go one stage further now because, you know, mobile phones apparently are not for making phone calls. I've learned this over the last decade. But

you can immediately say well do you want to have a chat on what's happening? Why not? Why not just because I don't have a chat bot. Christ poke my eye out with a blunt spoon bloody chat bot but what's happening?

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:12:05)
Mm.

making yourself available for WhatsApp chats and text messages is such an unusual thing that I think there's a huge opportunity there for businesses to just say, let's just chat.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:12:17)
That's good.

Steevan Glover (1:12:25)
You have to have somebody there to answer it.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:12:28)
Well, yes, I mean, this is is the thing if you're if you're the founder of a company, your time might be bit limited. But actually, if you're if you're you know, if you're in the early days, have you said to people, they just ping me a ping me a message. Here's my phone number. Maybe maybe there's some sort of qualification thing.

Steevan Glover (1:12:33)
Yeah, you might wanna...

I would suggest it's a public one. but you know, I mean, it's, it's, yes. I think being bold with, if you know your strategy is based on having a conversation with someone, is built on a personal one front level, you only want to talk to a hundred people. You can build a website front page that is only for that company. It's a link that you send to them and say here, and they come on it they go, so this is a conversation portal.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:12:49)
here.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:12:49)
Yeah.

Steevan Glover (1:13:13)
for my business and your business. Yes, why not? There is every capacity to do that. It's merely a WordPress template page that has a sophisticated backend. It doesn't have to cost you a fortune. There are so many ways that you can subvert the current way of doing things if you have the courage to do it.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:13:16)
Hmm.

That's an interesting saying, isn't it? As an objective, you're trying to do is subvert the current way of doing things, because the current way of doing things is noisy and crowded, there's a lot of people doing those things. Yeah.

Steevan Glover (1:13:42)
Yeah, it was ever thus.

But at the other time, it's a question of saying networking events, yes, they do work, I'm afraid. mean, I don't like them. I've never liked networking, but they are practical and they are good. But you've got to pick your networking events carefully. And if they're ones that don't work for you aren't out there, make one, create one, add value and invite people to do it. Don't let anyone sign up for it. Invite them.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:14:06)
Mm.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:14:07)
Mm.

Steevan Glover (1:14:12)
make it exclusive, make it feel of value and then for Christ's sake do actually deliver some value at that event.

I don't need 50 people there. I need five. And I only need one of those to buy. The relative investment in that is low, but the likely outcome is huge. You might have some near misses, but know, be pert and stick with it.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:14:22)
Hmm.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:14:38)
Yeah, and it's interesting, like the kind of music industry that we're talking about, kind of the the increase in kind of streaming meant that bands had to go back on tour again and actually perform live and it's happening in our world, you know, the kind of how saturated Facebook, LinkedIn, all this stuff is that now just having that kind of human thing is way more valuable.

Steevan Glover (1:14:48)
Mm.

And taking that byproduct of the music industry, what's actually come out of that as a result? There are no crap manufactured bands anymore that can't really sing and can't really play because they can't survive because there's no money in that mechanism anymore. So you have to be good at what you do. You have to be able to play. You have to be able to sing live. So that's the output. Weirdly, we are in a B2B world saturated by empty promises. So take yourself out of that.

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:15:14)
Mm.

Steevan Glover (1:15:28)
and say, come and see real promises and real delivery and meet people that have done it, because that way you can know it's genuine. You can, you think about it in those terms, it can be quite a powerful process. But it's having that courage and you will only ever have this courage genuinely in the first five years of your business. And that I do believe. That's the time you're gonna do your most adventurous.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:15:50)
Yes, it does become harder. think, I think not, not...

Steevan Glover (1:15:58)
play in the marketplaces in those first five years. It's when you are at your most innovative and it is when you are at your most high stakes. Once you become a 5, 10, 15 million. Yes.

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:16:09)
And it's when you have to do it. You can't afford not to. You can't afford to have a really bland generic message as a startup because people don't buy startups because they have a bland generic message. They buy startups because they are doing something they haven't seen before. And so your messaging has to sort of compliment that.

I think just to sort of wrap up this section then, would say, you know, what we sort of talked about your website, and in particular your homepage isn't going to do everything in isolation. It is a part of a broader journey that you really need to think about what the role of that website is. And if the role of it is to generate leads and to, you know, it's kind of account for a fair chunk of your...

revenue. That requires some thought on how you're actually going to bring people into some some sort of funnel. We can't be generic, we can't we can't be going out there with this sort of mainstream message, there does have to be something a little bit subversive about your approach and about the things that you're saying. And I suppose, you know, as with all of these things, it is about thinking about what do you what do you need right now? And what's your strategy for getting that thing?

as opposed to looking for something that's totally off the shelf. So I think I could very happily spend the rest of my day talking to the two of you about all of this stuff, but let's maybe just call an end to it here and leave people hopefully wanting a bit more. And of course, Steve, you are more than welcome to come back and carry on these conversations. Before we go, a couple of things.

Steevan Glover (1:17:31)
you

Phill Keaney-Bolland (1:17:51)
to plug from our side. if you go to cultproducts .yaya .co, you will find a whole bunch of information about the product we're currently in the process of developing. It is a program for startup founders to help them create their initial brand, website, and MVP. There's some very cool stuff on there, including an AI prototyping toolkit that will help you to create that for that first MVP.

And of course, as ever, please like and subscribe to this podcast. If you can please leave a review that really helps us to get a bit more reach. Steve, where can people find you? How can they follow you if they want to hear more from you and anything you'd like to plug today?

Adam Yaya-Durrant (1:18:38)
Yeah.

Steevan Glover (1:18:40)
My name is very unique. Just look at the spelling of it. Type it into Google, you'll find me. And it's stevenglover at gmail .com. It's that simple. I have eschewed a website, just so you know. And you'll find me on LinkedIn. And you know, yeah, talk to me, buy me. I'm delicious.