Empathetic Leadership & Predictable Revenue w/ Cybersecurity Matters Podcast #scottsthoughts

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary, and today You're gonna hear me on the cyber security matters podcast the cyber security matters podcast is hosted by Dominic Vogel in Christian Redshaw they speak about all things business tech and of course Cyber security they brought me on to the show. I was fortunate enough to have a chance to sit down with them We spoke about Leadership why it's important for leaders to show empathy and what true leadership is. We spoke about Content we spoke about predictable revenue. Just a great variety of topics for any small business owner or any Entrepreneur or sole printer. So this is me on the cyber security matters podcast Hello, everyone and welcome to another epic edition of the cyber security matters podcast. I'm a co host, Dominic Vogel, and joining me as always is my Friend in crime Christian Redshaw Christian. How are you doing today? I'm doing awesome. How are you dominant? I am doing well. I am missing seeing you and I look forward to seeing you at some point very very soon this summer as well as our Lovely production crew as well But rather than just pying for a familiar faces. Who is our special guest tonight? Well, we have Scott Cleary and he is a sales and marketing executive from Ontario, Canada But based I believe in Florida at the moment He also is a podcast host as well and the podcast is called the success story podcast Which I have listened to on multiple occasions and it's very good. So I expect great things from Scott today Awesome, please and fantastic individual will take a pause here. We'll bring Scott in and let's have an epic combo with some stay tuned. Let's do it Scott all the way from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Welcome to the cyber security matters podcast Well, thank you for having me on I appreciate it. It's great to finally have you on here. So My first question here you have some marketing and sales focus. You've got a lot of Interest going on here, but you also have your podcast which is called the success story podcast So let's start with that just just quickly tell us what that podcast is and then I've got a follow up question for you Yeah, sure. That's very kind of you to plug the podcast podcast first started Out discussing things that I do in my career. So interviewing sales and marketing leaders That's it's sort of grown a little bit since then and the way that I Draw parallel from people in the podcast universe. I try and put out content that's Tim Ferris, but more of a business focus. So I bring in people that can speak about how to you know be the most productive you can be Accelerate your professional or your personal life, but also bring in sales and marketing leaders entrepreneurs CXOs and discuss like very Tactical business strategies that somebody who is starting a side hustle or somebody who is Building your own business or somebody that is a term that I like to use entrepreneur somebody who is Very motivated within their own company can also gain some insights from the show and apply it to you know whatever organization they're part of That's the core the core the core takeaway from the podcast. That's what I try and get across I love it and you know I have often wished that Tim Ferris would be more of a business focus consistently in his podcast So you're you're definitely scratching my itch there I'd rather that he talked less about psychedelics and mushrooms and other other weird stuff Doesn't really Thank you for thank you for that. Thank you for filling that gap for me So so my question then because I've been able to listen into and enjoy a few episodes of the podcast in the past What has been the biggest let's say turn around story that you have been able to see where you know One of your guests has had this crazy background with these insurmountable insurmountable odds and have been able to overcome and turn their life into a into a success story Is there is there one that stands out for you in particular that you can share with us? I'll answer that question first with With a I guess like a high level Take away that I've started to understand after speaking to all these individuals that I've quote unquote Success stories could be and by the way the definition of success can be in the traditional sense where they've built a big business Where they have a great you know, they have a great career or it could just be something Inline with they've built something themselves and that allows them freedom that allows them to spend more time with their family Whatever so that's the definition or several definition of success that I like to run with but The main takeaway that I get from many of the people that I speak to is that they all have significantly difficult stories obstacles that have stopped them major failures and It's the they don't let the failures define them and the constant theme is the learning from the failure and then overcoming and then iterating and and persevering and then coming out on top now there's a variety of these stories They each manifest in a different way. I'd say that one story that I would say would be the biggest I guess dichotomy between a very a very difficult upbringing and then the success of that individuals achieve today Love them or Hayden would be Grant Cardone Grant Cardone had Not a impoverished childhood, but he was he was trouble. He was into drugs. He was he was the not But you know the person who got like a Harvard MBA and then went on to build like a you know a billion dollar company, but he overcame some own his own personal struggles I think he has some family issues as well and now he's a brand name. He's a known name He's worth hundreds and millions of dollars. So I would say in terms of from Dealing with drugs in his early to mid 20s. I think he was even an arrest at one point If I'm not mistaken to becoming hundreds of millions of dollars in that worth that's probably one of the greatest stories But I don't want to discount anybody else because everybody else has a story similar to that They just probably aren't worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but by any any definition They're very successful So that that's something that I've noticed again and again I think you have been able to have that privileged position of being able to see It's kind of the aggregate of all of your guests and see those common themes Which is it is so good that you share that with us. And I agree Grant Cardone is kind of a love and more hate him guy But definitely he's got some good things to say. I was going to Remind our viewers and listeners as they're not following on on LinkedIn to follow your your content I've been connected for quite some time I was appreciating the the terrific engage in content that you put out there and one of the things I wanted to Discuss with you was Fulusing around I guess well referred to as I guess modern approaches to sales or modern approach to leadership Namely around where empathy fits in you know when we look at old old school sales tactics It's not really relational. It's much more transactional on your own treating most people as objects The awards and approach where we're seeing more common today Especially with I suppose younger generations as well Amongst an approach by leading with empathy I'm wondering if you could talk a bit more in terms of where empathy fits in from a sales and leadership perspective Sure, so empathy has to be at the core of a sales and leadership And it's not just a nice to have. It's a need to have and the reason why it's a need to have Versus a nice to have is because If you're leading a team or if you're selling a product you have to understand that We are closer and more connected than ever before as business units as organizations between customers and and suppliers Between team members and leaders and the ability to see The other to see what else is out there in terms of shopping for new products or for example Even shopping around for new companies to go work at it's in your face all the time and it's easily accessible The barriers to switch jobs to switch To switch providers has has never been lower right now. We can almost the most most most most people can now work virtually most people in In any sort of in any sort of like knowledge job can now work virtually Which means that they can go apply anywhere in the world customers now do 70% of their research On their own before purchasing a product from from a company So that being said because information is out there access is available If you aren't leading with empathy and by empathy, you know leading my empathy or selling with empathy It means that you'll have the employees centric view or the customer centric view You are focusing on what the needs of the employee is or the customer is and that's what's driving your decisions That's what's driving everything that you do in your day to day And if you don't lead with that and if you don't have that then you're going to find out very quickly that the old school way of for example Top down management where you're just telling people to do more do more do more or for example The old school sales methodology where you're trying to almost like Conn somebody into purchasing a product isn't going to work anymore because people have access to information And with access to information means that you have to up your game you have to up your game in every aspect of your business And it's not hard to do it just means that you have to be aware of that be cognizant of it and just be better So I think that that's something that a lot of I guess legacy business leaders or even sales leaders Um have trouble with and you know That's something that I think the pandemic is really shone a light on Who can lead with empathy who can lead with an employee first view or a customer first view Those are the people that have won throughout the pandemic Those are the people that migrated their workforce from in office to remote successfully and everybody maintained the productivity Everybody was happy working remote and everything was sort of it was difficult But there was still progress versus For example a leader who wasn't able to lead with empathy and who didn't have the trust support of her employees And because of that when people went remote they just slapped off or they didn't feel like they wanted to contribute anymore same with selling the customers now you have customers that are losing money They're losing their own customers and they have to find budget for your product or service If you are still trying to push a product or service down that customer's throat You're not going to be very successful when for example They've just let half of their own staff or their own workforce go So being aware of the driving motivators of the of the other of the employee of the customer That's how you win and I think that like I said like the pandemic really Exposed us that that was a necessity and requirement not just it's not just a nice to have but like I said a need to have that sensational insight sky And I guess it's loosely related but you know A lot of entrepreneurs and people whether it be solar printers or people who are growing a business And a lot of them we're talking with them and again, we're not we're not salespeople But you know and in our and in various groups that we chat with people What sort of a common problem I hear about is people struggling to build predictable revenue Through through their sales In your mind, you know, is there is there a certain approach in terms of how you go about building predictable revenue I know I've asked that question before and I think The someone said well, they have predictable revenue. You have to have predictable leads Well, what's your take on that? How can a makes that an entrepreneur or a small organization go about building predictable revenue when you want to build predictable revenue I think the best way to do it is to model after Mark Robairs and the HubSpot model the content Marketing model and the the demand generation model that's focused on creating Or positioning your business as an authority or or the subject matter expert in a certain field with a certain product and when you Have spotted this the best and and this is why I reference them a lot of other companies have sort of Followed HubSpots model, but HubSpot was a content creation machine. They were putting out content all the time Answering the questions that their buyers had and by doing that they created an inbound Demand generation machine and Mark Robairs was there one of their first employees was a CRO that sort of championed this model And by creating that inbound demand generation machine I don't have these statistics or the percentages But the majority of the revenue wasn't built through an outbound sales process So I think that by building this content creation demand generation machine That's how you have predictable inbound flow of leads um But also if you do want to have some sort of outbound initiative which still works It's obviously a lot nicer to have you know the the predictable revenue coming in through all of your inbound needs But if you want to go outbound Imagine the authority that you've built by creating all of this content by creating a predictable inbound machine So that when a rep an SDR goes outbound and call somebody that person's already heard about your company So it's already created a much warmer environment for that outbound So I think that by focusing on creating content around your brand Again a good content creation strategy is about answering the questions that the buyers have By doing that you're going to have that predictable revenue and there's other pieces as well If you have to know your your ideal customer profiles your buyer personas and all that kind of stuff But once you figure that out um You have that predictable revenue inbound and then it also sort of doubles down and reinforces your outbound And I think that the reason why I highlight that is because if an entrepreneur is going to market and selling a product And they go pure outbound and that's it It can work But it's hard and it's not predictable um And also you know if you're selling uh A one-time or non-recurring Charge service versus a monthly recurring service uh You know you you eat what you kill and after that project is done you're on to the next one So it's even more difficult if you have this sort of service or project-based product Um or even a hardware product and not like a sass recurring revenue product And you are only going outbound So I think you just have to set yourself up for the success and know that you should focus on Developing demand from day one That's an awesome mini masterclass answer right there Sky that that was amazing You're very very kind. No, it's I love that answer that was phenomenal Absolutely phenomenal um Yeah, Christian I'll hand the reins back to you there for sure So I'm going to continue on this thread and I'm learning taking notes as you're talking here But Scott so you have ROI overload and ROI overload academy. So I can tell you just my understanding of it It seems like it is educational content for sales and marketing is it Maybe you could tell us really what it what the essence of it is it is is it a system or is it just a List of resources that you can access on demand. How does it work? Sure You're very kind to plug everything I'm working on Necessary and like super super grateful um, so I guess I have I have a job So right now I currently lead Sales and marketing for an innovation unit within Grass Valley, which is about a six-year-old company I got that job because the company that I was working for before that was acquired by Grass Valley That's my nine to five and I focused on sales and marketing strategy and a lot of the stuff that we just we just spoke about outside of that I do the podcast Which is also focused on you know very similar Stream as to what I do in my job Outside of that the podcast and my job I also have a brand called ROI overload then that brand is comprised of A newsletter, which is just something that I write again sales and marketing strategy So you see that I start I I sort of you know eat my own dog food I I create the content that speaks to the people that I want to interact with and that's sort of the long-term play building my own brand My own name so I have the newsletter under the ROI overload brand I have a medium publication where other sales and marketing leaders can contribute their own Pieces to that publication still same same stream The academy something I'm actually building out and I haven't quite I haven't quite figured out exactly how I want to position it But at the end of the day what I want it to be is I want it to be a dedicated A dedicated resource of classes for entrepreneurs looking to build business and there's and don't get me wrong The first you know the second you hear that you're gonna say there's a lot of that stuff out there and everybody who would say that would be correct So the reason why it's not finished yet is I want to make it so that it is the content is so exceptional that it provides That much value if I'm going to monetize it which right now if you try and get anything on it There's you can't because it's not actually open to the public yet But that end goal would be to have some sort of academy or resource or Perhaps even courses contributed by other leaders in sales marketing building business whatever it may be And people can go there and the way I think I'm going to monetize it as some sort of subscription model. So monthly A monthly you know access fee that gives you access to say like two thousand videos And you can segment them into whatever you want to learn about and it's really meant to give quality Equality business building entrepreneurship startup information um, I think the The one thing that I really want to focus on is quality sales information because there's a lot of old school Sales methodologies and tactics that are frankly like garbage. I'm there's a lot of great marketing information out there But how you sell in 2021? Um, I don't see a lot of people doing that properly I still see you know like what you know what you mentioned that old school sales methodology So I want to Create a resource where market or entrepreneurs can go to find out how to market their brand but have that You know have that congruence across their marketing and their sales so that they can build and and create that repeatable Revenue pipeline And not just focus on that pure outbound old school You know cold calling dialing for dollar sales methodology. So that's really what I want to focus on It's sort of a work in progress because you know working a job running a podcast writing a newsletter once a week Obviously, it's it's very time-consuming But that's sort of the end goal to have all these different assets that are associated with my name my brand that you know sort of Just our Extensions of what I've learned over my career and that's what I want to give back to the startup community The aren't you like in an entrepreneurial community and just people who want to just learn more about building business I love doing it. Yeah, so I mean we Truthfully we are keenly interested in the subjects that you're bringing to the table here So yeah, I mean maybe it is kind of you know your ability to talk about what you do But we're also learning and taking notes here. So I maybe you know I have a more of a tactical question for you and it may be an old school question here So you've done such a great job of talking about this the strategy, right? The empathy and you know the demand generation and warming up the the cold audience for for some outbound if you want to do that as well What about in terms of the tactics? So you'll see a lot of marketing and salespeople You know advertising like like agencies advertising that they do you know SEO You know paper click You know paid ads all that kind of stuff every social media marketing blah blah blah um Can you tell us kind of you know your preferred tactics amongst amongst those Like how do you see that kind of batch of those traditional Methods that people are still using effectively. So yes, you're correct So I think that there are a large variety of different marketing methods um and if you're gonna start a business I think that You should be testing everything I think there's Based requirements like minimum requirements you have to have in every single category So for example, you need your social media profiles. You need your website I would focus on writing a blog once a week that you know Writing a blog once a week by definition is SEO you are creating content You know your keywords that your audience is interested in your answering questions that your audience would be asking you in a blog once a week Google's gonna index that there's there's a you know not a great SEO strategy But it's a start of an SEO strategy. You have content creation. So you're putting up posts on social You're making some video clips of great content creation strategy I think a variety people have sort of spoken about this But what you can do is you can record a podcast like this you can break it into you know five to ten minute or even less like You know two to five minute clips you throw those clips on linkedin on facebook you break it down even further You can put those on twitter you can break it down to six year thirty seconds sound bites you can put those on reals tick talk YouTube spot YouTube YouTube shorts, you know snapchat spotlight So you have a content creation strategy So to you know that's like the basics in terms of where you should Fall when you're first marketing a brand. So you have Some content on your website which turns out be SEO you have some content on social Which turns out to be a good content or social marketing strategy outside of that Then I would say you'd want to look for Your niche outlets where your audience could be hanging out. So When I sell a SaaS product. I'm on product. I'm on hacker news. I'm Trying to find different communities that would love to test out a brand new SaaS product. So Those are the types of things that you'd have to find out for your particular product where do like for example You didn't know you're you're working your podcast is about cyber security If you're selling any sort of IT services where the forums where your community's hanging out Where your evangelist could hang out if they love what you do go find those as well And then at that point now you have your content strategy You have your social strategy. You have some other sort of niche type pieces of marketing collateral that you're putting out or that You know that you're putting under the world And then I would say you just you start testing you and by the way another thing you mentioned is paid ads I actually wouldn't even bother doing paid ads until you figured out who is going to be buying your product because To use paid ads to test out your your audience is expensive You can do that with content. You can do that with finding niche groups. You can do that With seeing who is for example coming to your website and converting and maybe entering their email after they've read your blog Whatever that may be I would try all the free options first and there's a there's a few out there and then after that Once you figured out what works then you can try and run some paid ads Maybe you can see if you can like you know You driving some extra traffic against the people that you've identified could be your customer profiles or your buyer personas Based on who's already purchased your product But also you just want to you know you test out all these different channels and then you double down on what works That's really it like there's no one size fits all If you want to go if you want a really good resource on how to build a product from scratch Go on YouTube and type in Noah Kagan first 1,000 customers Noah Kagan is the founder of AppSumo amongst a variety of other Products and brands and he speaks about how he markets to his first Thousand customers so for his first hundred customers first first five hundred customers first thousand customers And a lot of it is just testing and then doubling down on what works But when you first start out you just you just do everything You do absolutely everything and then you'll start to notice some trends You'll start to notice that some channels work better than others And that's what you that's what you sort of double down on and then After you double down on that and you get to say your first 50 sales your first 50 customers Whatever then you try that at process that whole process again because now your your service could have matureed Your website could have matureed your product could have matured So that some of those channels didn't work for zero to 50 customers could work from 50 to 100 customers So a lot of it is you know, this is this is not new but iterating testing AB testing whatever that may be It's just not just with an ad set. It's across all of your marketing activities And then when you find something that works really well You just keep going down and and doubling down on that until You feel like you have the resources to try new channels But I think what a lot of people do is they try and be excellent everywhere And they end up being excellent nowhere because they're just spreading themselves too thin And if they're a bootstrapped business and you're trying to go across every single channel You're just going to run out of resources or you're just going to you know You personally are going to just be absolutely just way way max out on your bandwidth You're going to be stressed out. You're going to be it's not going to work well. So I would say You can build your first 50 customers your first 100 customers just off one channel Find out what that channel is and then Abuse that channel as much as you possibly can. I feel like you didn't hold back on us there You you laid out a little bit of a mini course for us And I hope you do create a course out of Based on based on that story you just told there people want like a magic bullet and they don't yeah And and they don't get a magic bullet so they just try everything and they they keep trying everything But if they really if they really just look at what they were doing and they will start to notice trends in for example Even even among social I notice which social channels work better for me than others I'll give you an example I've started doubling down more on Twitter because I noticed when I look at my conversions I actually get more traffic in Twitter even though I have one of the smallest audiences on Twitter I have about 25,000 followers on Twitter which relative to everything else is small But for some reason the content on Twitter drives conversions I get more my KPI is newsletter signups I get more newsletter signups on Twitter than I do on LinkedIn Which has an edge has an audience. It's 4x as large as Twitter So yes, am I still going to post content on LinkedIn of course But what I'm really trying to figure out is how do I do really well on Twitter? How do I create content that's that's shareable? It's retweetable because that's driving most of my traffic right now now Maybe that's not going to be the end-all strategy and I have to re like you know re-evaluate in a month or two months But that's something that you have to be caught and set up and just and just look at the numbers and then figure out and learn from I guess one more one more point I'll make on that is if you want to if you want to learn how to do a particular channel Very well because you noticed that your first effort is yielding some results Just study people that have done it before like I have people that I look at so Matthew Matthew Kobach for Twitter is somebody that I look at for great Twitter content For LinkedIn I look at Justin Welsh for some of his You know his LinkedIn content There's a there's a marketer I can't remember her last name, but her first name is Mary and I can't remember her last name But she puts out a whole bunch of stuff she built a great community on Facebook if you want to really build a Facebook following If I look to content writing and blogging and look towards Seth Goden Seth Goden is the person who I try and study and figure out how to write like Seth Goden So you just figure out what works and then you study them the experts in that particular field and learn from them And it's it's not like when I when you say it it sounds obvious, but you know Comments since it's in common and that's really all you have to do. I can honestly say that you just came in here and absolutely smashed one out of the park like that was a hell of an episode like I know this one Christian I can be talking for for many many months to come like that you absolutely Press shit where we're so grateful you came and to join us today You were you were rocks are thank you very much. Thank you man. I appreciate that. It's very kind of you I'm happy I was here I'm I'm hope you got everything you wanted and I know it was a it was a shorter one. It was only about like 25 minutes But that was really fun Normally what we that's normally what we aim for is we try to mess my attention span, so Christian we will we'll take a brief pause here and then we'll be right back to wrap up today's episode Well, that was some mind blowing awesomeness their Scott really really brought As I mentioned the episode there I thought it was a mini masterclass on on sales and and marketing there Guy, you know what one of your key takeaways was from that conversation For sure really our show time slots really didn't do justice to what Scott was delivering today I wish we could have gone on for another at least 30 minutes there really that whole idea of not Not going to the old-school way of approaching sales and marketing and the idea of Creating demand through content generation and creating that Demand generation machine like the HubSpot model that he mentioned there I think that is a really good illustration of how you know us and others listening can really model their business development efforts After yeah, you know could could agree more Christian. I think it was a brilliant conversation Scott just had so many gems. I'm gonna have to relisten to it probably that it doesn't time to get all the good notes from that But I love how he was talking about you know empathy and sales empathy and leadership. You know You really I think it pitimizes you modern sales and definitely someone worth following and and learning from And again, and we come to that point of the show where I was wanting to make sure we extend a special thanks to our loyal listeners and And viewers for carving out special time their week to spend some time with us Thank you. It was always for supporting the podcast I do want to make sure that I remind everyone to check out previous episodes of the server screen Matters podcast on our YouTube page as well as on your preferred podcasting platform But until next time be well be safe and we'll catch you next time on the server security matters podcast You