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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
From a scaling AdRoll sales team to 58 million to coaching Navy Seals through career transitions and traveling 150,000 miles documenting startup stories around the world, Jay Ryan Williams has lived the full spectrum of the B2B SaaS life now as CEO of Ant Eater Media. He's helping founders break through the noise and video storytelling that drives real pipeline. And today we're diving into a deep topic that I'll let him talk about. But welcome to the show, my long lost at Long lost friend who I haven't seen for long enough. Welcome to the show.
J. Ryan Williams:
Thanks, brother. It's good to see you too because it is way too long between breaks when I see you
Andrew McGuire:
And now we're recording a podcast, and this is actually, I think the third time we've done some variation of this, but it was flipped because last time it was you doing this.
J. Ryan Williams:
I've interviewed you more than you've interviewed me, so I'm ready for the tables to be turned. Let's have it.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Well, I would love to talk about what you're doing at Eater Media and why it matters in today's world of all the crazy LinkedIn videos and the feed that I'm seeing now where I feel like I'm on business. TikTok.
J. Ryan Williams:
Yeah. Well, I'd rather it be business Instagram than business TikTok personally. We can get into that one.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, I don't have TikTok on my phone. I don't. It's China security. I don't have it on my phone. I've always thought that they were watching me. Everybody's watching me, which is why I worked at all those security companies. It just felt uncomfortable.
J. Ryan Williams:
Somebody who's seen your media, who loves you from your public presence, who doesn't know you personally, asked me if I knew you for real, or if you were just like a LinkedIn guy that I knew and they go, oh no, I know, I know Maguire really well. And they said, well, tell me about him. And I go, the only thing you need to know about Andrew McGuire is he's had an RFID block in his wallet 20 years before you knew what it was. And this guy's jaw drops it. He goes, wait, really? He's that paranoid? I go, no, he's high energy and knows way too much for his own
Andrew McGuire:
Good. That's not, that's just doing things in
J. Ryan Williams:
Smart way knows too much for his own good faster.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, I will tell you a fun fact of what happened. So one of my clients is onboarding me as an employee because I need to access systems, right?
And during the security session, there's a site you go to and the guy that runs security says, alright, put your personal email into this box to see how much your email has been exploited across all this stuff. He said, our record's like 25 and four, I don't really know what the things are, but I plug mine in. It's like 38 and 12 or something ridiculous. And it's, oh shit, that's a record. I've never had anybody have that much. That's ridiculous. Well, how old is that email? Well, I tried to get Andrew at Gmail, but I couldn't. That's how early it was. It was like 2000 trying to get the Gmail address.
J. Ryan Williams:
Well, you should have Brad, I don't know Andrew
Andrew McGuire:
At Gmail
J. Ryan Williams:
Being easily hackable. Put that in the bio. Andrew McGuire. Easily hackable folks. Heard it here. Okay, so we got distracted immediately. But basically what I want folks to see, or I want folks to hear about this conversation is I started my career not in tech, not on purpose. Once I got into tech, I discovered that there was a really clear line between the people you trust and the people you don't. And because I had gone into sales actually not wanting to be in sales, it had me thinking a lot about how do I actually be valuable to clients, be valuable to customers. And I wasn't actually very good at sales, but the taking care of other people turned out to be the thing I was good at. So when we built the AdRoll team, I ended up kind the first sales manager there because when needed something to go build the team, well fast forward 15, 20 years, whatever it's been, and now my career as an executive coach, I've gotten drawn into this new media craze because clients are saying, look, we are trusting you to help us develop as executives, but now everybody wants to turn a camera on.
So in 2020, I had actually a coaching client say the hardest thing. I asked her, what is the hardest part of your job? And this is a chief revenue officer at a public company during a coaching onboarding session. She goes, the hardest part of my job is that I have to leave my face on from 5:00 AM to like eight or 9:00 PM
Andrew McGuire:
What does that mean? Leave your face on?
J. Ryan Williams:
Well, the women listening to the show will know exactly what that means. The I can't take my makeup off, I can't relax, I can't just be myself because there's always a camera on now everybody's work from home. The camera's always on. I got to jump in. I'm doing a team update at the end of the day so I can't actually relax and be myself. And if you think about it, the reason we trust people is because we feel like we know them. And so that's going to be the definition of trust and safety. Think about, I've got a little dog now, not on purpose. My wife got a dog for the kids. When did that happen? This is a couple years ago. And Elsie, she's two year adoption. Ary is next week. So I've been thinking about this a lot. She barks the heck out of my friend Matt when he comes over.
He was just over last night. She went nuts. Why? He can't be trusted. She doesn't know him. There's some trust element. Now Matt is also a very large man with an enormous frame. And so for a five pound dog, it's like, oh my God, I don't know what to do with you. Yeah, he's huge. He's an elephant to this dog. But when you think about it, it's like I only trust people I know because then I know that I'm safe. Well, I met them through somebody. So as soon as I walk in the room with Matt Elsie's cool because she sees him with me and knows that we're in a safe place. The same is true at work. The same is true with our sales clients. The same is true when we are renegotiating something in our personal lives, buying a house or getting a car or whatever, it's Do I trust you, right?
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, sorry, finish your thought.
J. Ryan Williams:
I'm just saying. So extend that one step further. If we are only deal with people, if we're only going to trust people that we know, now we got to think about, okay, how do I really get to know somebody, somebody who can't relax, be themselves. I'm going to have a hard time trusting them. If that's my CRO at a public company, I'm going to have a hard time knowing that I can follow that leader unless they're given the space to really connect, which is what her challenge was, is like, Hey, how do I go make sure that I show up as my best self every day?
Andrew McGuire:
And I think part of the challenge too is because where I thought we were going with this conversation was trust in the sense of, we've joked about this, not recording, but building my digital twin. Drew and
J. Ryan Williams:
I haven't met Drew yet. I saw a little bit of
Andrew McGuire:
Drew. Well, yes, you did see a little bit. I'm not sure what to do with that because there was a post I think that Scott Alvaro put out talking about, I made a comment on one of his posts and his response to me was, yeah, Andrew sent Drew, he wasn't, or it wasn't worth his time for him to show up the human. So now we're going to have this whole world, because I'm really close to building Drew and I'm thinking about for all these documentaries that I'm doing, I can just put the script into Drew and have him read it, but I don't feel comfortable. He can't do any of this and have the animations and I actually feel like it's Andrew the human and then you,
J. Ryan Williams:
I'd love to see the prompt that you need to get the thing to actually bring your energy. I do not think a robot's capable
Andrew McGuire:
Doesn't do it. That's the problem. Right? So back to your point about trust. They may not, if they don't know me, they're not going to know it is ai. They're going to, but if you do, you will know. So then
J. Ryan Williams:
It's how will they know? They're going to know.
Andrew McGuire:
My point is the trust layer of being able to, one, trust people about what they're seeing on the internet, which is a whole other thing we don't need to unpack. But then LinkedIn specifically on video, and I'm finding the pipeline generation strategy, and I've had different flavors of this conversation that it's about trust and relationships. And that is the thing that now with the great ignore that I talked about with Mark Caso Glow, using video to build trust with your prospects, your employees on LinkedIn with video. So that's what's happening. And it can't be in the other layer is that AI twin, which we can put back in a box, but I'm just saying the video on LinkedIn is a thing that I'm finding with my clients that it's about long form text with images that show them plus video, carousels, infographics, all this other stuff is just more influencer. But if I'm using video and doing it in the right way, then I'm building trust. That's the underlying layer with it, right?
J. Ryan Williams:
There's a great resource I want to point you to, which is the book called Trusted Advisor by David Meister and his team, it's a book, I think they coin the term trusted advisor. A lot of enterprise sales reps run around and going, I have your trusted advisor about security software, whatever. But at the trusted advisor, they break down a trustworthiness score for the people we interact with. These guys were actually writing a sales book for lawyers. But what came out of it was a way that we can all go around and figure out why we trust somebody or why we're trustworthy.
And it was four elements actually. And it's really simple. One element is your selfishness, what are you doing, right? Why are you doing it? The other three are credibility. What do you know? Reliability. What do you do? Intimacy, how you make people feel. Okay, so now think about that. Yeah, we've talked about some, because I talk about a lot with coaching clients too, because what they're looking to do is build their career and take over bigger roles, bigger teams. A lot of times people call me when they're in transition. Well, the number one factor to whether or not you're going to be successful as an executive is whether or not somebody trusts you. And if you think about executive presence, it's just trust. So it's easy to go, oh, that person looks like an executive. They've got executive presence, or I voted for that person because this is how they come across to me. It's all about whether or not there's some element of why I can trust them. What do they know? Credibility, reliability, what are they doing? How do they make me feel? Do they laugh when I tell them what my problem is? You call a lawyer up and you're like, Hey look, I got this tax problem. If they laugh because you filed the wrong paperwork, do you feel safe? Do you feel like that vulnerability you created in that intimacy moment?
Andrew McGuire:
One thing about a tax person, but that just happened to me. That just happened to me
J. Ryan Williams:
Recording February. And do you trust
Andrew McGuire:
Scale of one to 10, how much do you trust your tax person? Well, I have a different one now, but that one.
J. Ryan Williams:
Alright, so I want to dig into this and we don't have time, but I think everybody just heard your tone and knows what I'm talking about. We've all had that moment where something turns where that person you were going to trust, you don't trust anymore
Andrew McGuire:
And then it's all gone immediately.
J. Ryan Williams:
So I'm going to make a bet without knowing your personal situation with the tax person, that the number one factor that changes that is self-orientation. They said something that indicated it was better for them than you changing the cost, maybe changing how much they were billing you or why they were billing you or what you needed or showed you that they didn't actually know something that'd be credibility. It's going to be one of those two factors. But actually my bet is what was it that changed trust for you of those four elements we talked about?
Andrew McGuire:
I don't want to get into this.
J. Ryan Williams:
Come on, just tell me one of those things you think they're going to watch.
Andrew McGuire:
No,
J. Ryan Williams:
Blame it on Drew. Tell 'em that you're Drew. Be like, sorry, you saw my bot. My bot doesn't trust you. It's not my fault. Okay, but do you think the illustration,
Andrew McGuire:
It's reliability piece, sorry, the credibility of just it was they didn't know your thing to be a serious person, right? I'm laughing on here, but this is not, you're not my tax person trying to figure out how much money I'm going to have to for cover.
J. Ryan Williams:
Yeah.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. So trusted advisor is four things. Selfishness, credibility, reliability and intimacy. And when I think about those, I want to bring this back to LinkedIn because I started this podcast accidentally. You might think that this selfish of me, why is Andrew starting a podcast? Why is he being selfish about trying to capture more attention? And I just started recording stuff because I was having conversations with people anyway and I thought
J. Ryan Williams:
That were just too good.
Andrew McGuire:
So then a podcast popped out. And then the credibility, just being able to talk about this stuff and have video content. That's back to my point about trust and showing up every day. And that is the consistent feed of, I know I'm going to get something from this person on LinkedIn that is the leader. And then intimacy. I don't know how that one feeds into this, but
J. Ryan Williams:
I do want you to talk about story for you.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. But before we go there, can we talk about trust in the lens of what, because the video content that's working on LinkedIn is vertical videos that are less than a minute. How can you build trust on video on LinkedIn as an executive when you're short snippets like that?
J. Ryan Williams:
Okay, so a lot of people when they turn the camera on, they seize up and they think, okay, I don't know what to say. What am I'm going to say? What am I do? Take those four questions, actually take three. Intimacy, credibility, reliability. If the video that you want to record is about establishing your credibility, well what is it that makes you credible? I've worked with over 400 founders. I don't know very many other people who can say that. Now that's not just me, humble bragging two to my own horn. I just don't think the cohort of people who've actually done that much founder advisory, it gets to that level. I've traveled to 22 countries helping startup accelerators. So I've met a ton of founders in a ton of different situations. I think that if I can include that in my context, I give you for my answer when you go, what type of video should founders be doing?
I can say, I've worked with over 400 founders and most of them have a piece of their background that they're reluctant to share, but it's a thing that means they're the right person to start this company. You worked in security software, would you agree that the founders had something about their background in security that most people didn't know but should? Right? It might've been a brand like, oh, this person worked at Exxon or whatever. And that means that they know a lot of stuff. But usually I had a personal moment with this problem and now if I move that out to the forefront, that establishes credibility of I've had this problem you've had with sourcing tax people. So if you're working in that space, you are more credible about advisory because you've had these experiences, life experiences.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Okay. That helps clarify things. So I know we could just keep going, but I do want to try and wrap this up into
J. Ryan Williams:
Land the plane. No pressure,
Andrew McGuire:
No pressure. What do you think is the number one pipeline generation tactic that most people have wrong to help organizations just unlock this? What is the number one thing that they could be doing?
J. Ryan Williams:
The number one thing that people have wrong is that they're doing outbound at scale still and they haven't turned that spigot. Or we think about outbound as a big faucet, right? I'm going to turn it on and just flood the market. But really we should be thinking about more like the nozzle of fire hose. There are times that you want to focus that fire hose and there's times that you're going to shoot abroad focus that fire hose and think about, okay, what are the two or three ideal customers? And now apply that to some of your mass marketing. What does that one exact perfect customer need to hear? How can I say something that relates to them, makes them feel safe, but shows my credibility where safe when we hear other people use language. So that intimacy moment of me talking about an experience I had and using the same language that my prospect has that is going to build that bond. Now if I do that on LinkedIn video, even if only five people see it and that ideal prospect may not see it, but other people who are in that same cohort have those same problems, understand those same challenges, they're going to see that. I think that is going to build the pipeline a lot faster than how many emails I can send. Which is a shame to say because when you and I met, we met in the high volume outbound world,
Andrew McGuire:
But
J. Ryan Williams:
It's just life is different now.
Andrew McGuire:
When that worked, it doesn't work anymore. And that's the problem. Kyle Poer today, so this is,
J. Ryan Williams:
I saw the post today.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. So today, I'm not going to drop the day, but he posted something that was basically, here are the top 50 plays to do scaled outbound and all the signals and all this data.
J. Ryan Williams:
Did you just comment like you're wrong?
Andrew McGuire:
No, I didn't comment
J. Ryan Williams:
On dropping a in there.
Andrew McGuire:
I just saw it and I am really BU sick and tired of seeing people talk about how doing building email infrastructure to do millions of emails is a good idea to get a 1% response rate. And I didn't think that this podcast would start out as the antithesis of what's going on with clay and mass emails and all this signal data. But it's turned into that. And every single episode that I've recorded so far, somehow it's come back to this is the way it's about relationships and it's about building trust with people. Every episode, no matter who it is, that's what's happening. And I feel like a crazy person because AI is coming and you're supposed to use it to make everything better and faster. But I've also seen Terminator too, and I don't like when everything burns up on the playground and I feel like that's where we're going. So shut it all off and let's just be humans believe
J. Ryan Williams:
It. I think. Well, I hear you on the AI stuff, but the truth is AI is making me a better human. And so I've set up a few agents,
Andrew McGuire:
But help me do job well. This is a different episode.
J. Ryan Williams:
Well sure that can be a different episode. But if we're talking about trust, I'm going to show you my credibility and I'm going to create that intimacy and that reliability by saying AI is helping me follow up with you. Now, if I'm sending an email to a whole bunch of people and it's like, take my meeting, click my link, this is my AI that doesn't do anything. But when I show you a customized video strategy that I was able to pull together because I got to know your content and I tell you that AI helped me do it, then you don't feel like you need to call me and say, you watched 394 of my videos. No, no, no. I use my AI tool to surface the things that were most relevant for where I think your brand should go. This is what I want to talk to you about in a coaching session.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, that's
J. Ryan Williams:
Now what producer do you trust?
Andrew McGuire:
Yes, sure. Making humans better, but don't just unleash shit with No, I dunno. There's a balance. Yes. And again,
J. Ryan Williams:
This
Andrew McGuire:
Is a different episode.
J. Ryan Williams:
I still dunno if I'm talking to Drew or Andrew, honestly,
Andrew McGuire:
This is Andrew.
J. Ryan Williams:
How are we going to know? Can't do that. I need to have an NFT. I need to scan your NFT to know that you're real.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay, we're going to end it there folks. And I appreciate you being here. And is there anything else you want to leave the audience with before we go?
J. Ryan Williams:
Yeah, right now I would love to connect to people even who are just mildly curious about if there are opportunities to build pipeline through LinkedIn video. I can make it as easy as being a guest on a podcast.
Andrew McGuire:
Alright, well you heard it here. Where can they find you?
J. Ryan Williams:
Oh, LinkedIn, where the party's at. I'm Jay Ryan Williams. Come see me there. Or click the link in the show notes.
Andrew McGuire:
All right, let's do it. Thanks again for being here.