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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:
Today we're joined by David Walsh, the CEO and founder of Limelight, who's revolutionizing how B2B brands and creators connect in the digital space. If you're ever wondering why B2B marketing often feels disconnected from where real conversations are happening, you're going to want to lean in close with over 40 years of combined B2B SaaS experience. They built Limelight, the first true B2B creator partnership platform with backing from $2 billion a UM venture funds and strategic angels who've seen it all in the tech world. David and his team are not just building a platform, they're creating a new category in B2B marketing. Please welcome David Walsh to the go-to-market snacks where we take small bites of insights to unlock your pipeline strategy. David, welcome to the
Dave Walsh:
Show. I have to say what an entrance I am excited about the conversation and thanks for the energy. I think we've got a lot to chat about and I'm really excited about work in
Andrew McGuire:
A short period of time. This is just a snack. We want people to still be hungry at the end of this, but the goal is when I was looking at what you're doing, it's incredibly impressive and I'm really jealous of the fact that you were able to put this together because it's clear this is obviously a problem and there's so many creators that have these audiences and the traditional methods of generating pipeline don't work anymore. I was just talking to Mark Sallow about the great ignore and what operator's doing and that LinkedIn is the place that people can stand out and be able to capture the right attention. So tell me a little bit more about why you created this and how Limelight's able to unlock this pipeline that
Dave Walsh:
We all need. Yeah, it's really exciting. I'll start with very high level how I think about the world and the future of marketing, and I really think that it's personality led, meaning brand marketing is more challenging than ever and a company or an individual does not want to follow a brand. They want to follow a person. So personality led growth is the future, and I made this bet 12 months ago when I started posting content on LinkedIn about 18 months ago and seeing some traction. I just realized there was this massive market opportunity to help these individuals who have been building audiences and have a specific knowledge set around a niche and have authority within that space and have built this audience to help them monetize their audience through brand partnerships that are authentic. And so I think the future of marketing is personality led. I think now companies are starting to realize that you'll see companies that are bigger companies like delegate to one stakeholder and say you're now the spokesperson and the performance and reach of that individual skyrockets. So what we think is the future is that all companies will have a team of creators who create organic content consistently and drive awareness for the brand. So it's an exciting space to be in relatively new and we're learning as we go and building it very, very quickly.
Andrew McGuire:
Interesting. So you're thinking, because one of the things that I'm working on is helping founders at early stage venture backed companies figure out their founder brand. Like Dave Gearhart wrote the founder brand book. I go through the line of questioning that he has in there for people to figure out what's your voice, what's your story, what's unique? How do you actually stand out from the noise and help them tell the story, but they're the founder, the company's their baby employees are uncles, cousins, maybe they could just maybe leave the company and take it with them. So I wasn't planning on going down this rabbit hole with you, but how do you think about that? Because having teams of creators that are employees that could potentially take their audience somewhere else, Kyle Coleman with Andy Byron at Clary is now at copy ai and I was thinking that Andy Kyle combo at Clary, but Kyle's the employee he's now at copy. Talk to me about
Dave Walsh:
That. It's fascinating that you bring that up. My short answer is it would be the future looks like you cannot care about your employees growing their own audiences and be kind of, I suppose, conservative to that approach. It only benefits you when you hire somebody or you work with an advisor, you work with anyone at your company, you get their name, knowledge and network. And so when they start to create an audience that just amplifies that, if you're starting to think, oh, I don't want my employees to create audiences or to be publishing content in case they leave, that's a very close-minded thought process. I've come up against it with other companies and almost every single company now is just leaning in and saying, you know what? This is actually getting a lot of results. We understand organic reach and we want our employees to post content even if there is a risk that they become more valuable to another company to acquire them. You just got to take that risk. And I think it's still extremely powerful as a channel and I think all companies should promote internal employees to post content online and we're actually building a tool, which we'll talk about how to help people do that.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay, interesting. So what have you seen to be the most successful way for a brand to work with a creator? I've seen, I believe Mark Koslow is an advisor. I believe Devon Reed, correct me if I'm wrong, is helping, but I've seen a lot of partner posts recently and then Jen Allen just did one. Help me with what is the most successful way brands are working with them? People
Dave Walsh:
Like them? Yeah. Well, Devin and Jen, I'd love to have advisors. They're not advisors. They have logged into the platform.
Andrew McGuire:
You guys
Dave Walsh:
Here, I've met them. I want them to be advisors
And I would love to have them on board. But yeah, I think the most successful, to answer your question very directly, it has to be authentic number one, and that means that most often the creator has to actually use the product or be aware of the product or be able to solve a specific problem that is relevant to their niche through and enabled by the product. So authentically is number one, so critical. I then think for the brand, they should have consistency. A lot of companies come in and they say, Hey, I want to try this. And they do one poster to the creator, I didn't get the results we needed. It's about consistent content and forming longer term partnerships so those individuals that are creators can be essentially spokespeople for your brand. So that's the two nuggets. I'll just give you authenticity and consistency. There's probably a lot more I could share, but those are the two.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. Then let's go down the path of what's this insights, influential benchmark report that you put together. There's a lot of data in there. If you were going to give one nugget from it that a brand is looking for thinking about doing this because I've had a lot of conversations recently with marketing teams trying to understand what I'm doing, which is helping founders turn their brand on. It's a new marketing channel. It's very confusing. How do you tie it to pipeline and sales? And so the benchmark report is really interesting and I'd love to just get a sense from you on how a brand should think about this to justify it internally to be able to start doing this because it is very new and different and that's part of the fun, but also the challenge,
Dave Walsh:
Right? Yeah. So this industry is so new and what we're trying to accomplish is building an infrastructure product that can power it, starting with bringing more transparency to the space, more clarity both for the brand and for the creator. So a lot of the times we get asked from creators, how much should I charge? They don't know. And then the brands are like, how much should I pay? And they don't know because there has been no benchmark, there has been no, it's just a wall, wall west. And so there's always an art and a science to this. So I want to be very clear, our benchmark report is just for a guide and a guideline. The quality of the content is really what matters. Our goal is to basically say, Hey, here's what we typically see in the market from analyzing thousands of proposals, hundreds of posts, and saying typically this is what we recommend to pay or to charge as a creator or as a brand.
And it's never perfect. It's meant to be used as a reference point, but it's been super exciting to see that uptick. I think we've now got 500 people downloaded that report. It's crazy. And on our website, we getting a couple of people to download it every single day because it's in demand because again, growth leaders, marketing leaders are thinking about this space. They're trying to understand this, they've never done it before. They've maybe done it once or twice. This report helps them understand how to do it and then how much to pay and what to expect and how to maximize results. So that's the ultimate goal of the report. Okay.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. Understood. And as you were talking, a thought popped in my head, which is I spent two years helping a creator. His name's Adam en Froy, not a LinkedIn creator, but he's been on YouTube building a blog growth engine, and all he does is talk about blogging. He had a lot of success there, and there's a community and a course, and I was helping him with partnerships and trying to manage what do partnerships look like? And it was everything from we'll pay you X amount for an ad spot to the most creative, which has been more of a partnership than anything, right? It's weaving things throughout everything the creator does. And I'm talking to a brand about sponsoring this podcast, the newsletter, what I'm doing with the creator breakdowns one post a month. And then trying to think through, I'm trying to think through as a creator, I don't have that large of an audience, but the audience I do have is valuable because it's founders that want to start their founder brand. And I'm struggling with how do I package that? Is that 5,000 a month? Is it 10,000? Is it an annual thing? So I was just reading through the report and it really helped me a frame of reference while also having this experience, helping a larger creator, figuring out how to do this with big brands like HubSpot. And so anyway, that's a huge problem. Space for creators
Dave Walsh:
Is the point. And I will say our report is very deliberately focused on LinkedIn to begin with, but actually our creator network have a lot of channels. They have newsletters, they have a podcast, they have a YouTube following, a Twitter following. So, and we actually suggest and recommend that brands partner with creators and do multi-channel when it's available. Because I was actually speaking to Scott Ley about this yesterday, who, if you don't know Scott, he's the head of content at Clay, an awesome guy. Obed, and the team over there at Clay are just killing it on the creator side. And I get fortunate enough to get to work with them and help them build this creator program, which has been exciting. And Scott actually reminded me, we were talking about the strategy and the direction and what we're trying to build, and he reminded me like, Hey, Dave, the future is just around acquiring the personality and the person and everything that comes with it. So their audience is not platform dependent. You're actually getting that person, that stakeholder and allow them to create content wherever their channels are. And then you basically benefit from that content and can potentially repurpose some of that content into brand specific content or even ad channel content. So yeah, it's been really exciting and I think multi-channel partnerships are great. We typically focus on LinkedIn and that report is very LinkedIn friendly and focused because nobody's done it before. It's brand new.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And I was just thinking about the Devin Reed put of this latest newsletter about the notion takeover of everybody with the faces that rolls for however long. And so just getting creative with that. I'm going to pause for a second just to time out of the podcast. I know we've got two minutes. Is there anything else that you want to roll through before I move into the closing piece?
Dave Walsh:
Let me think. We went through how to do partnerships. We went through the pricing benchmark report, future of marketing,
Andrew McGuire:
Just the unlocking pipeline. Where I was going to go is number one way B2B
Dave Walsh:
Creators. Yeah, I can go on that. I think that's our ultimate goal is essentially to connect content to revenue. So I could do a nice spin on that.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay. Well let's finish off on that then. So I ask every guest this, what's the number one belief about pipeline generation in 2025? The market has completely wrong, and how should brands be thinking about doing it differently to unlock this next big opportunity? And I think we've been talking about what that thing is, but if we could be a little bit more specific, like established brands, their belief, what is it that they should be doing to think differently about pipe gens
Dave Walsh:
Here? Yeah. Well, I can tell you from my own personal experience, and I'm working with ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, bill.com, Alibaba, some major national companies, even publicly traded companies, and I'm typically working with their head of marketing or head of growth marketing or head of growth. And all of them are thinking about how do we get better return on investment from our ad spend. Right now, the channels are becoming more saturated, it's more difficult to compete. You have to compete on keywords. So they're always looking like, how do I get reduced our customer acquisition costs and get better return on investment? So ultimately, obviously my biased opinion is focus on creators, right? Creators can be a huge channel for growth, especially if you do it the right way. And I will say influencer marketing as it exists today is very much about brand awareness, like being top of mind, consistently being on the newsfeed and being in people's ecosystem for when they do decide that they need a product to then think about your brand.
Where we want to go with this though, Andrew, is we want content to be very directly tied to revenue. And I think that is the ultimate goal, and we're accomplishing that in a couple of ways today. But revenue attribution is super complicated. There's lots of different touch points, especially for sales cycles that are a bit longer for product-led growth cycles. It's a bit easier. Not everyone clicks on the link. Not everyone follows the exact track to convert, but we are getting a much better sense of how creators can influence pipeline. And we're building technology around that because I think the last thing I would say is the goal is not to just have a company work with us, spend a couple of tens of thousands of dollars and not get measurable results. We are very clear on here's what we expect to happen, let's set some clear measurable goals and let's show you the value and hopefully the pipeline that's generated from these content partnerships. And that's very exciting to do because once we crack that, companies will just double, triple and quadruple their ad spend, which benefits creators, which is ultimately our mission, which want to get creators paid.
Andrew McGuire:
And I will leave you with this, which is you triggered a thought for a product or future feature, but I'm helping founders with their founder brands. And one of the most challenging things for me is how do I tie this piece of content to pipeline? And if there's a way to not only do that with creators you're partnering with, but if you load it in the founder of that brand as the creator to be able to tie what they're doing and all the engagement data that I'm dropping into a clay table to then figure out how to do attribution and all this crazy system, that is a complete mess. And yes, clay is awesome and please help. So with that, thank you Dave for joining us on the GTM Snacks podcast. We take small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy, and today we've been talking about creators and how to unlock creator brands to help you generate pipeline. Thank you, Dave, and we'll see you on the next one.