In the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve is joined by Tim Hughes, the Co-Founder and CEO of Digital Leadership Associates. With a focus on the integral role of social media in business growth, Hughes shares his wealth of experience and knowledge in the digital world, including insights on artificial intelligence, content strategy, and the transformative power of coaching and training.
What you'll learn from this episode:
Don't forget to tune in to the full episode to learn more about social media and business growth. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with your network to help us spread the word.
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
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Steve: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. This is the interesting B2B Marketers podcast. Today I am joined by Timothy Hughes. Tim, welcome to the show.
Timothy: Thanks Steve. Thanks for inviting me.
Steve: Yeah, my pleasure. So, all right we are gonna jump in this to the best part of the podcast. I'm a little biased on that cuz I always like the case studies. But before we jump into case studies, tell us about who you are in 60 seconds.
Timothy: I'm a salesperson. I've been in sales for 25 years and I've worked for a particular big company in software high tech. And back in 2014 I came across this thing called social selling. And then I've been building on it ever since. So my first book came out in 2016. And not long after that I started my own company with my business partner, Adam Gray. And we've been running LA Ignite and transforming sales teams and companies since that.
Steve: Awesome. Love social selling. It's super powerful. And it's always fun to see organizations go through that migration of the usual tactics to then leveraging online to build trust and enable the sales team. So awesome. Let's just jump into that and the case studies today all fit under that umbrella of social selling. So it's nice that there's a common theme. The first one that you're gonna walk us through has to do with you. I'll just call it what can happen in six months. Like when it comes to implementing change. So excited for you to share the first case with us. Go.
Timothy: Yeah, so you've got a sales team, classic situation, little pipeline not showing what they're gonna do going forward. The current mechanisms that they're doing, which are, you know, cold calling, probably doing little bit on LinkedIn, sending emails just not working anymore. And actually investing in using social selling and having a methodology to underpin that. So not going on to LinkedIn and messing about, but actually having a structural program underneath that can actually help them drive the change. Number of issues associated with any program of changes, people can have to do things that they may have, may have not done before. It's gonna take them out of their comfort. They may need to unlearn some things. They may need to stop doing some things. We get a lot of people coming to us saying we don't have time for that. And it's like, well, you need to do something where you're actually generating something rather than spending time, not, you know, one of my equivalent of an SDR basically said, they need to be spending their time having meetings rather than spending their time doing nothing as in generating nothing. So the thing that is often the thing with society is that people see it as or what's been seen as being best practice is in effect. You just go on social media and everyone's allowed to go on there and willy-nilly, and no one's actually given any support. Now we actually know, you know, from the way that we work, whether it's diversity training, inclusion training, health and safety training, that we need to show people what is good and what is bad, and explain to them what needs to be done. And how they need to be supported. And one of the things that people miss out on is to change. So we quite often get asked, you know, we need to can you come and talk to us for two hours about hints and tips on social media? It's like, well, that's gonna do nothing. You know, we're in the fifth industrial revolution and a two hour meeting on hints and tips isn't gonna impact. Your business that's affected by the fifth industrial revolution.
Steve: So tell me, like, I've been in this situation myself before where it is viewed as like a nice add-on as opposed to like a full shift in how you do that. And my, the biggest thing I always bring up is, I'm never gonna say like, well, you shouldn't be doing all these meetings. You need those meetings, but the scale and reach that you can get by spending 30 minutes online, if it's like once a day, you're reaching hundreds or thousands of people. And it still fascinates me how some, some clients just view it as like, but it's on the side. And it's like, no, it has scale enough so that if done, You're, you're way more efficient. So what are you seeing similar themes as it relates to organizational culture change?
Timothy: Yeah, we get a lot of people saying, oh yeah, we're social selling already. And you say, well, are you getting these as particular results? And they say, well, no, we're not. It's like, okay, well maybe you're not doing it properly then. I mean, what we found is, you know, when social media came out, no one really knew what to do with it. So they gave it to marketing and marketing basically put it in a box in a cupboard. And every week or so they take it out and they basically put a post and say can you go and like that? And that's probably generating zero benefit for them. So they're getting no ROI for it. And what we, you know, if you are going onto social media, if you're doing anything in sales and marketing, there has to be a return on investment. And there has to be a challenge coming down from senior management saying, okay, so all of this money that we're investing in social media, what are we getting in return? And while we can look at likes and clicks and stuff, there has to be ultimately a revenue gain from this. So for example, the classic example is people think that social media is about going and posting. It's not social media is about conversations. Cuz everybody who's been on your podcast, Steve, whatever they do in B2B marketing has to have a conversation to sell. I mean, if you're not having a conversation, then you can just put it on your website and say, we'll automate it. Social media is about having conversations, so this is about how can we get the sales team, it may even be the marketing team or even the HR team, or even employees across the organization using social media as a way that's gonna drive conversations that's ultimately gonna drive us revenue, and that's a big difference.
Steve: Yep. Take us back to the case, like what was the mindset of the leadership team that you were working with? How did they go into it? And then where did you eventually help them get to?
Timothy: Like a lot of clients that we come across there's a skepticism about social media because it's seen as being people are posting their pictures of lunch, or it's seen as being political or it's being seen as, you know, demonized in some sort of shape or form. So first and foremost, you are always, you know, the classic crossing the chasm. You are having a conversation with people about saying, this is how people are doing it already. This is what a good business looks like. And so those conversations then are about building consensus within an organization to make sure that they actually understand what this is about. This isn't about wasting time on social media. And fluffy stuff and posting flowers on your LinkedIn profile. This is about having a mechanism to generate revenue just as much as any other process, whether it's cold calling or email. You go through a number of steps and you expect to get a return, and that's what we've done with this particular case study. And what we always do is we always run a pilot.
Steve: Yeah. When I've done similar programs, I've, I'll stereotype and say, I put people and say people, the Salesforce into three groups. The first is that I love it. I'm already in, thank you for making this more of a priority. Then you have another group, I call 'em the fence sitters. So the middle third is like, ah, I've heard of this. It's probably good, but I'm a little unsure. And then you've got the third who are just, I don't really believe in it. It's not a good use of the same patterns? Are there other groups?
Timothy: It's, it is as if you knew what I was gonna say. And what often happens is that we get people being put forward for a program because they're the sales director's mates. They are currently active on social media or they think it's a good idea. And none of those necessarily will actually show that you will be successful at the end of the program. Quite often people who are active on social media at the moment don't necessarily, and it's a sweeping generalization. I'm not saying this is about everybody but quite often some of those people will actually say, well, I'm doing it already. I don't need to learn. And so what we do is that we always as we go through the processes, we have a standard This is what social media and social selling presentation, which we basically give as an all hands call. So part of the communication process that any business is going to be running. They need to be communicating, saying this is what we're gonna do and why we're doing it. So we get a senior leader saying, this is the strategy, this is what we're gonna do, and this is how it works. And then we get and we ask for, so that means that we break through that. We're not having to break through those three different tiers of people. We're getting people, and we're actually saying going onto social media requires you to share something about yourself because so many people think this is about going onto social media and and sharing brochures or brochure brochureware and research shows that actually that doesn't get you anything because research shows that people come to media to be social. And so what we're looking for is people that are gonna share things about themselves.
Steve: Yeah, it's interesting. When I first got into social selling, I was in the incorrect camp to say, no, it is about the organization's perspective, right? So I need to be communicating the things that are gonna help me as a salesperson, or if I'm in a marketing role, you know, they'll help get word out about my company. And I've pivoted now to understand. It is so much more about the trust and just, you know, so much of buying in B2B is, can I trust you? And we forget that because we default into like, well, here's my solution. It's the best solution. But ultimately social selling for me has migrated into, you know what? I am open to sharing more personal information as opposed to just my marketing, you know, philosophy. And you can see how that really compliments me. And I say that because when I have some of my first conversations with potential clients, for me, they come across as if they already know me, right? Like they already have a relationship as opposed. And it's so funny cuz sometimes I'm like, how does this person know this? Like they're talking like they really know me well and I, this is my first meeting with them. So it's funny how that happened.
Timothy: It was Brian Fanzo that said that social media turns the first meeting from a handshake to a hug. And, and it's very true. I get a lot of people that will come to me and say, I've seen you, I had someone the other day said, I've spent all morning listening to your podcast. I went out for a run listening to you, I've been doing, and then we had a meeting and he was quoting this stuff back to me. But the thing is that you know how you know how quite often you'll have a meeting and you'll do this round robin thing? I dunno if you call it that in the States. You basically all introduce yourselves in a way. You've cut through all that because the person knows you already. And this, and it's something that marketers struggling with big time at the moment because they still think it's about brand. And what we're, and a lot of them are spending a lot of money on, on it's about brand. But actually what I'm doing is I'm building a relationship with you. And if you change companies, my relationship goes with you. And this has been like this for 10 years. Except that no one's been voicing it. And, and so what we're doing is that what we're seeing is that relationship is a central part of a sale. Now, quite often with the term relationship, we think of, oh, well there's Steve and I've known him for 20 years because I went to school with him. Not you obviously, but relationships can actually be built very quickly. And you know, we only need to either have a very quick discussion on LinkedIn, which is a, you know, a, a direct message DM environment or get on and have a call. And we've already built a relationship. And what's happened in sales and marketing over the last five years is that the, basically the relationship's been squeezed out of the process deal sequences. Except they're a great way of squeezing the relationship out. So what happens is that traditionally, When you sold 10 or 15 years ago, you could go back to the person and say, you didn't, you weren't ready for this six months ago, but are you ready for it now? Whereas now it's, do you wanna buy it? No. Okay. Well, I'm gonna throw you in the bin and I'm just gonna to the next one. And that's one of the things that I think that people are definitely struggling with. But the fact of the matter is that we know Christian, you know, Christian Ronaldo. You'd call them a soccer player, but I've called him a football player. He has seven times more followers than the top 10 brands because we are interested in Christian Ronaldo. I don't know what pair of football boots he wears or what but we're interested in the person and when we come to social media as this is not new, this is what we've always done. I'm interested in Steve, and I'm interested in what Steve does and what Steve thinks. I know that Steve probably sells something, therefore I will take that on board. I know you're a salesman. I, you know, but ultimately what I'm interested in is, you know, Steve's into barbecues or Steve's into hockey, or Steve's, you know because what I'm looking for are people that are like me. As a buyer. And the thing is that I always call it you alluded to, is what I call the barbecue test, is that you're going live, you've bought a product, you're going live, it's the weekend. And always, you know, with software implementations, things go wrong and it's a part of it, but it's about whether someone will sort it out. And what we're doing is that we are looking online and we're going, is this person, when I phone them on a Saturday and they're gonna bar a barbecue, are they just gonna push my call to voicemail or are they gonna pick it up and, and basically step back and say, I'm gonna put my beer down and, and I'm gonna come and that's what we're looking for. A buyers, you know, I'm used to, I'm not talking about transactional things, but in a B2B enterprise where you're still making transactions of hundreds of a million or millions of dollars, that's what we're looking for.
Steve: Yeah. All right. So here's my question then. We've covered the human, the humanity side of, of what the content is, right? You, you're getting to know me as a person. Do people cross that line? And I say that too. There's also another element of like the LinkedIn algorithm, which has also shown that the more emotion driven you are, the more dramatic you are. You tend to get traction, right? Because people see the story, they have an emotional reaction, it gets seen by more people. When do you not go there? Because that's one of my pet peeves is always these big dramatic posts. Sometimes feel fabricated because people are just, you know, they're whipping up this emotional connection. So that's my thought to you is like, at what point do you dial it?
Timothy: I think, you know, there's some people that got a very big following by putting out dramatic posts. So obviously there's a recognition that maybe that works. And I think what happens is that some people go, well, I'll have some of that and then try and copy it, but at the end of the day, what we need to do is we need to be, well, what. People are looking for someone that's authentic. So for example if something isn't you shouldn't be doing it. You know, the only USP is the unique selling point that you have for any business. Now are your employees. Because you know there's the MarTech 10,000, there's 10,000 products that are exactly. Now, someone may come on onto your podcast and say, yes, but mine is different because of this very small bit. I totally understand that. But the buyer isn't sophisticated enough to understand that. What the buyer sees is this across LinkedIn is this amorphous of everybody that's the same. And therefore what they're looking for is something that's actually gonna stand out. And that thing, that unique piece is you. Now, I often say to brands, when we pick up our phone and we basically go through our LinkedIn timeline, what we do is we go, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring. That's interesting. Your job is to be that. That's interesting. And every brand I talk to says, yeah, that's us. And we can measure that by how many likes and comments that you have. Now that's not like and comments from people within your organization cuz they're gonna do that pay license and sure. Because their mortgage is backed on that. And they probably don't have big networks, which is an issue that businesses have. But for us to get digital resonance with people. That's where we're basically people who like it, who may be in our network but even better are outside of our network. Cuz one of the things that we should be trying to do is selling through our network, is actually getting people to like and comment on those posts. Because at that point we can see that there's something here. They obviously feel that there's a connection going on and my answer to you is, well, you know one of my case studies is about somebody who got a lot of traction, but there's a revenue response to it. And but you know whatever we are doing on social, what you'll find is that there will be people out there that will get a lot of response, but they're not necessarily turn turning that into revenue, which is a sales and marketing organization, whoever you are, that's kind of, that's actually what your objective is.
Steve: Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Let's jump into case study number two. This one we're gonna discuss the most loved and feared thing in the B2B marketing game, which is the telephone. So talk us through this case study.
Timothy: So we, one of the things that we wanted to do with this client was that they actually had, they're a small business, but they had cold callers, so they were used to getting a cold calling response. And so what we did is that we put them through training in terms of social selling and then, we measured the response. And so as of the 1st of January, 2023, what we've been able to do is have a number of leading indicators that are being measured. And this is leading before it would get to a CRM. So measure these leading indicators to allow them and say, right, each week, what are the responses that we are getting? And you know, how does that compare to what we were doing before?
Steve: You know, it's interesting too. I feel like the phone is such a polarizing channel, but to me, if you stage content the right way and you are genuinely a good fit, like you're providing value to someone, I've done some things where we've heed up on an email outreach before a LinkedIn outreach and sending content that is just such a good fit for them, so that when you do get to the phone, you reference that piece of content, right? It's like, I'm the guy who sent you X, and then if it works right, it clicks for them and they go, oh, and that I should, I should come up with a methodology, right? A call to O pod. If you can get to that, you need to.
Timothy: If you get to that name, call warm warmish calling or something like that.
Steve: Yeah, if you can get to that moment. You've just given your, you've, that's a five minute permission window that they will say, all right, I know who this person is. They've helped with, you know, a point of view or something, and then, you know, that's all. It's the, the five minute phone conversation needs to be a, Hey, let's set up some time to have a conversation.
Timothy: Totally agree with you, Steve. And I think so first and foremost, I'm not anti-phone. Some people think that social selling says, oh, well we can't do it because we can't, that this is not about transacting over social media. I've never said that. This is about using social media as a mechanism to get you more conversations and conversations at scale. And that is therefore you know, you, you have a converse, you have a conversation on social media, and the objective then would be to take it to a Zoom call or a team’s call or a phone call or something like that. The difficulty that most organizations have is that they're still going to market based on one principle, which is that they create content based on a message, which is buy my product because we are great. So if you've got 10,000 MarTech products all saying, buy my product because we are great, we can't differentiate that. And as I said earlier on, your differentiation is probably so small that I can't recognize that. So there's a number of things that we need to be doing to make sure that when we could be making an outbound call or even getting an outbound message, or actually getting an inbound call then absolutely. What we need to do is make sure that what we're providing, I'm gonna use the word value. I don't like the word value, cuz value means different things to different people. But what we need you to be doing in that case is being very targeted and also actually offering them a piece of content that's insightful. Tell 'em something they don't know. Maybe it even entertains them. Because actually we come to social media. One of those things is, and people still grapple with this, is that we're actually looking to be detained.
Steve: Yep. So tell me for this case study, Where's the client today in terms of mindset from where you started with them to where they are today?
Timothy: So luckily they had a very open mindset. We weren't really in a position where we were needing to go to them and saying, we need volunteers. It was very much a case of them saying, this isn't working with what we're doing at the moment, sending emails and making cold calls isn't working. What we need to do is make a change. And so gradually what's happened is the averages have also gone up. So January was pretty average. But the averages and the leading indicators that we're getting are going up and up and up and up. And what we're able to do is benchmark and really get a handle on what is best practice.
Steve: I'm gonna go there for a second. So I wanna get into the metrics of social selling. Tell me about, you know, what are the interesting things to look at? I mean like the shares, the likes, all that, the views, but like what are the metrics where you can say, you know, what, if you had to choose one or two, this is the metric to validate that social selling is a good fit for a company.
Timothy: Well, I have to be honest. At the moment, what we're doing is a lot of the work is head-to-head with people basically cold or email marketing because in effect, those are our competitors. So what we're doing is that we're saying that here is a different way of working and we're using the benchmark to say you know, for example this team is getting well before when they were cold-calling, they were getting two meetings a week. And then what happens is that when you cold call someone, your objective in that call is to get the next. And what they were doing is getting two meetings a week, and of those of that conversion, they're getting a nor 0.3 conversion rate. In terms of their averages. Now they're now getting 11 meetings a week on average. So last week they got 25. And in terms of the next action, they're getting a 37 point 5% conversion.
Steve: So that's nice. You know, I like that it's a business metric cuz I think the challenge is there are a lot of social engagement metrics, which inherently most people react to them as. All right. That feels good. There's some skepticism around that, but like, all right, I get the activity is good, but the connection to the business metrics is always the hard part. So I like that you described it as almost like a test and learn scenario where you could keep your eye on the same metrics and just see by adding this one element of social selling, here's the net impact on the business metrics.
Timothy: Yeah. We were in a particular one of our clients. What we found is that when we went to meetings to present the results. So this is the first case study. Actually, this is the first case study I was talking about. What we found is that you would go to sales and say, these are the results you are getting, and they would actually want the results in a particular format. Whereas when you went to marketing, they'd want it in a different format. So what we ended up doing was coming up with a format, so in terms of the metrics and the first case study, the sales team over six months connected to 25,000 people. They had 800,000 views on their content. They had 20,000 interactions. Now an interaction is a conversation. If someone places a comment or like on your content, that's your opportunity to have a converse. Whereas, and that was what marketing wanted, whereas when we went into the meeting with sales, they wanted the fact that we generated 2 million in pipeline 900K in closed business, and they'd actually found an opportunity, which was half a billion dollars as a billion, not million. So they were, you know, they got a 47,000 or something, but there was, what we found was that what we needed to do was make sure that we measured it and provided the metrics in two different formats.
Steve: All right, let's jump into the, to case study number three.Still under the umbrella of social selling. So yeah, interested to hear this one.
Timothy: So, this was basically an individual contributor or an entrepreneur. And again, got them social selling, having conversations and understanding this, this, the fact that when someone comes to your LinkedIn profile, they need to know what you stand for. So if someone comes to my LinkedIn profile and anybody watching this, they're more than welcome to do that. What they need to do is that they can see that I stand for something. But also what we're doing is that we're also sharing these things about ourselves. So for example, on Saturday, I share the picture. About my family, I think I was probably about five years old on the beach in, in a place in the UK called Hastings. And it's a black and white photo that my grandfather probably took. And I had hair in those days. And I obviously had an interest in cardigans cuz I had a cardigan on. I also saw my mom and dad had cardigans, so we must have been the cardigan family or something. But the idea, you know, but it's about percent, this is me when I was young and a bit of a joke about cardigans, et cetera. And that was about then generating a conversation with my audience and my network. And what we find is that that will generate a lot of organ, generate more traction. What you need is to have a mechanism or a methodology behind that, so how can you actively harvest that. So, for example, this particular post that we're talking about was about a person and his son and they went to the beach. It was during lockdown, it was the son's 16th birthday. And the son wanted to be out, probably with his mates drinking, but he went to the beach with his boring dad. And that got something like I can't remember, 185 likes. But what that turned into was the individual because they had a mechanism behind that. They got 124 leads, six C level meetings and two proposals on one purchase. And it took him 10 minutes to basically do that post.
Steve: So that just to clarify and something like that, there is no business time, it is purely just, that's a personal post. People went to that person's profile, learned more about what they did or like help that I'm always fascinated by that, you know, because I'm AI, I came from the world of like direct response. So I always, you know, well, here was the audience, here was the offer, here was the conversion rate. But this is purely just an awareness play that led to business.
Timothy: What we're not saying is that you put up anything unprofessional. We are not saying that you are, you know, a picture of me standing by the beach is not unprofessional. What you're doing is you are learning about me now. There's a particular senior leader that I know that puts loads of pictures of her. She takes a selfie with her team. It looks to me as all she does in her life is basically stand next to her team members and take selfies. You know, if I posted pictures of me on the beach, you would just think, well, you are obviously a surfer or something like that. Which is why I say that you need to have different content that shows what you stand for. But what you'll find is that when you put out a personal post is that you will get far more response from it. And it's that when people are liking and commenting that they're actually saying, I like what you are doing, or, I understand that, and I recognize that. And that's about having that digital identity and having that digital connection with someone.
Steve: What was the individual that you were working with on this? I'm gonna dive into their mindset too. Were they embracing this from day one? Were they skeptical? Like, how did that go, John?
Timothy: They started off very skeptical cause a lot of people will the thing that we are taught, or I don't know, it come where it comes from is that when we go to LinkedIn, what we have to do is we have to write in this jargon, which is, you know, I'm an energetic results orientated. Overachieving president's type A,
Steve: You're leaving out type A,
Timothy: And we all, you know, you are overachieving. I'm overachieving, you know, we're all of those things. And actually what, and actually it's meaningless. And what we find is that it actually, if you talk about. The more that you talk about yourself, the more that you share something that is, you know, for example, one of our clients, the CEO, talked about the fact he got thrown outta school, but the story he tells is the fact that what he learned was being thrown outta school, gave him the skills to understand and become ace. And what happens is that the more you lean into the story about yourself and show some vulnerability, you show all the things that you would expect if you went down, if you were talking to somebody in a bar or in a pub, or getting to know one of your co-workers. What you are looking for is understanding the full thing about them, not just about what they do at work. And what we find is that the more you do this, the more people will actually lean into it. The more you share about yourself, not repetitively, the more people will actually support you. Now, the second that this particular individual, this is the, the post that they did, they got the most, the second post they got was about Led Zeppelin.
Steve: I was gonna say, you were bringing up these themes of kind of like, you're in the bar, not in, you know, I think B2B marketers are victim to thinking that the press release, like initially buying media or doing a press release was how it was done. And the press release format is always very buttoned up. It's like you're wearing a suit. That's the comfort zone of so many marketers out there is they just feel like they have to be uber professional and buttoned up. And there's a time and a place for it. But I think in social media, my advice to people has always been, when you're writing it, pretend that you were in a coffee shop with a good friend, and would you talk that way to your friend? And as soon as you stop talking that way in your, in your copy, you don't get it. You know, the people smell that as, oh, this isn't for me. I'm gonna tune it out.
Timothy: We often get people saying, I don't wanna share anything about myself. Okay. So you then ask them questions. So what's the best way that you find it selling to people? They say, well, you know, I take them to a game, or we go out for dinner. So what do you do? You take a bunch of brochures along and read them out? No, we talk about stuff and families and we get to know each other. I said. So what's the difference between that and doing that on social media, but doing it at scale rather than one to one? You know, having 20,000 people looking at you and going, do you know what I want for my next project rather than one? And that's the problem that people quite often are faced with that they feel that this is this, I need to go to LinkedIn with a shirt on, rather than actually saying, which isn't you actually need to go to LinkedIn as the best of you. And actually what we are looking for as a buyer is you to share your vulnerability. A massive friend of mine, and I'm quite upset about it, she went on to LinkedIn today and told the world that she's got breast cancer. Now she has done that because she knows that her network will step up. And she knows that people will, you know, I said to her, you're an inspiration because what you'll do is there'll be people out there that will have not gone for their scan. And if you can get one person from that post to say, I need to go and get, I need to go for my breast cancer scan. If you can do that, then you've achieved something with that post. And so there's so many things that you can be doing with social media to make the world better. And you know, it's taken her 14 days to actually come up and write that post. But I think it's inspirational that she's done that. She's not done it as a way of trying to get attention. She's done it as a way of writing it in a way to connect with people and for her network to step forward and support her.
Steve: Yep. All right. Three great cases. I love the focus on social selling. We're gonna jump in now to Q and A. So tell me about your real gig in B2B marketing. I say real gig because we're all, I don't know, some marketers are born marketers. But like, what was your first job?
Timothy: Well, it's always a strange one, Steve, because my background, I mean, I'm a salesperson and I get dragged into conversations about marketing and probably over the last seven years that I've run my own company, I've become more and more knowledgeable about marketing. Brand 24 said I was the 16th most influential person in the world around marketing. And I seem to have conversations with marketers, you know, Mark Schaffer for example. Ted Rubin. People that I, you know, I admire are fantastic marketers and I seem to be able to stand on my own and talk to them. But I've always actually been in sales. So my answer to that is maybe my first job in marketing was when I started running my own company.
Steve: Yeah, it's a good answer. I think having started my business, you know, over five years ago, it is funny how you essentially have no official responsibilities, right? Like, you focus on what needs to be done as the owner or the CEO and you can really quickly step into what needs to be done: is it marketing, is it selling, is it both? What do you enjoy the most about what you do?
Timothy: It's a really good question, Steve, cuz actually what we do is we change people's lives. A lot of people think that conversation is about training and coaching, and we do that, but actually we're training, we change people's lives and we give them new skills that they didn't have before and. We've not done it so much over the last three years because of Covid, but in the first four years of existence, we did all of our training and coaching face-to-face, and I would always have people coming up to me and hugging me at the end of it. And seeing people, you know. Talking to people where you go into a room and they're all sitting there with their arms folded and saying, you can't teach me anything about sales. And certainly nobody over the age of 50 can know anything about social media. So this is a waste of time and I don't know why I'm here. And for those people to come up to me and hug me at the end of sessions is just, I mean, I've been in meetings where I sit there and, and I'm like, nearly because seeing that change that takes place in people is just an amazing feeling.
Steve: And I imagine too, like there's always, in any organization, there are the people who don't believe in it and they'll never see the impact of it because they are just entrenched in something and I don't know if that's mostly to do. You know, some people are just naturally introverted. They don't want to take that next step, or they've been in a role for 20, 30 years and they've been taught it way back when, and this is what works, so I'm not gonna change anything.
Timothy: I'm an introvert and I actually love social media because it gives me time for one of the things that I'm really rubbish at is sitting in meetings where there's lots of extroverts, putting in lots of, of solutions. And I'm sitting there going there has to be something that, you know, has to be something better than that. And I'm a classic introvert, which is, I think about it two hours later after the meeting. But you know, we are living in a world now where a lot of the leadership, and I'm, you know, I'm kind of an age, which is, this is the situation. You know, my first job there was a typing pool. And so we wrote letters and I wrote them out and I handed them to the typing pool. And we have this situation where we have leaders in place that are used to working in an environment where they may have not had PCs. I remember getting my first pc and then we sent out letters. It wasn't until the 1990s that we had the amazing email. I still remember doing my first email marketing campaign, and in that case, quite often people didn't have their own email. It was like a house email. So, so we've changed and we have this situation where, what happens is that all the way through life and through leadership is that we tend to think about all of the things that we've done in the past will help us in here we are, you know, sitting in a world where there are so many things going on that and so many crisis that seem to be going on from covid 19 you know that actually what got us here won't get us there. And I think that quite often we, I talk to a lot of people that are talking, you know, this is what we've done and we've always done it like this. And it's like, well, it doesn't work like that anymore. You know the modern buyer, the modern job hunter, the modern investor. So your future employees, your current employees, your prospects, your customers, your investors, your future investors are all on social media. And if you are not there, you are invisible. And this is the big thing that they're missing. So, you know, the average person spends two and a half hours a day on social media. And when you say that to people, they go, I don't believe it's like this research that backs it up. And this is the big thing that's missing, that we have organizations that are working in an analog world and they don't realize that we've moved to digital. Look at the changes that are taking place with artificial intelligence. You know, one minute we have artificial intelligence was like, yeah, it's a bit of a cul-de-sac. We won't go down there. The next minute, you know, if you are not using artificial intelligence in your business, you are behind. It's the same with social media. If you are not using social media strategically in your business, you are behind.
Steve: Yep. Makes sense. All right, one question before we wrap it up. I want you to speak to that person who's on the fence about social selling and what's the one thing that you could say to them to give them that encouragement or the confidence that they need to make some type of change. What would you tell them?
Timothy: My advice always is to give it a try. You know what? There will always be, someone will say to me, ah, yeah, I know this person and they're killing in cold calling. Well, then they don't need to do this. That’s not the norm that we see. Which is why we always start with pilots in organizations. It is to say, let's take a group of people and let's try this out and let's see if it's right for your organization. But any person now in leadership needs to understand what this is about. Just as much as they need to understand what artificial intelligence is. You know, we can't sit there anymore and just believe that ignorance is going to help us. We need to be understanding why things are happening and understanding why we are not going to do it, rather than just saying, I'm not gonna do it because I know everything. And I'd sold something 20 years ago and that's how I did it 20 years ago. And it's still the same.
Steve: Awesome. I really enjoyed the conversation. I wanna thank you and thank all the listeners for joining us today. We look forward to coming back and sharing more content with you on interesting B2B marketers. So coming to you live from Studio 26. Thanks again for joining. Have a great day.