Kyle Turk, VP Marketing at Keynote | Top 40 Under 40 Turned Marketing Leader

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host, Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10x businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders. The second, what's work for them, the spell myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host, Scott and today we're going to be sitting down with Kyle Turk, who is the VP of Marketing at Kino Group. Now, Kyle is an award winning entrepreneurial market leader with over a decade of experience, building brand engagement, driving revenues and client acquisition through both strategic and creative marketing solutions. Kyle's super impressive, he was a 40 under 40 recipient in 2018, he received the marketing leader of the year award from Renstad, Canada in 2017. And he was awarded the best performance in marketing award from the best Ottawa business awards panel in 2016. He is one of the first 20 marketers in Canada to receive their chartered marketer designation from the Canadian Marketing Association in 2017. He graduated from St. Francis Xavier University with a bachelor's of business administration with a major in marketing in 2007, excuse me, and received a marketing strategy certificate from Cornell University in 2017. Now, what is his company keynote group? The keynote group is an executive search and recruitment firm. They do things a little bit differently and I'm going to let Kyle speak about that, but they focus on mid market businesses and organizations and they help them find fit and achieve peak performance for their new hires. So they find the best and then they make sure that they stay the best and are the best within that organization long term. So I'm going to let Kyle take it away and speak about his experience, his story and what keynote is doing now. I hope you all enjoy, have a pen and paper because Kyle is an expert, take it away, Kyle. So give us a little bit of a background. I'm the VP of marketing at keynote search and keynote group executive search and recruitment firm. Before that, I was a director of marketing at Welch LLP and previous to that, I was a co-founder and director of marketing at Faces Magazine. So you've been doing marketing your entire career then? Yeah, right into school, majored in it at St. FX and then just couldn't find a job. So I ended up starting Faces Magazine and obviously there's a lot of marketing in there. So Faces, that was the first thing that you did outside of St. FX at a university? Yeah, I went right into it and my brother was my business partner. He was a graduate from the Noah's College of Art and Design at Halifax. So we ended up starting it together in Halifax. It was sort of a social scene, nightlife, heavy on pictures. We launched right when Faces opened up to the public, sorry, when Facebook opened up to the public. So it was kind of a printed Facebook type of strategy and it kind of played along very well with using a social media marketing strategy because we were also broke students at a school and had no money and social media was free. And that was the time when Facebook let you reach your entire group audience or whatever it was back in the day without having to pay a dime. So it worked out pretty well. So you did what a lot of people I think are afraid to do and you jump right into an entrepreneurial venture as opposed to getting a job and sort of learning your craft that way. You did entrepreneur first and then you transitioned back into working with somebody. And I sold out to the corporate world. So I grew up both my parents are entrepreneurs. They run a business called Lawrence Planger Service in Peterborough, Ontario where I'm from. And so I kind of always grew up with entrepreneurs and then they were very supportive for my brother and I to kind of hop in and following the entrepreneurship kind of path. And you find like that that taught you much quicker than if you were trying to learn like through a company like I would assume so just because I know like if you start your own thing I used to work with a whole bunch of startups. And now I'm now I work with a company full time was working with startups like the lessons learned in startup land as a founders entrepreneur like 10x what you're going to get working for a company. Yeah, you I think one of the benefits of doing entrepreneurship right away is you learn sort of the facets of an overall business how it all works. And then if you want to specialize in a field like marketing you can really see how marketing fits within the entire organization and sort of how it plays a part with you know the financials with all the different parts of the business sales customer success like all that. Yeah, okay, cool. That's an awesome background. So you've been doing marketing for a bit now you're now your VP marketing at keynote search group. So what does keynote do. So keynote in executive search and recruitment firm. So we find executives on behalf of companies to work for them. The difference between our firm I think in a lot of the other firms there is we have a heavy focus on the post placement side so we offer executive coaching as part of our process on inclusive in the rate as well. And we also have sort of a focus on using technology they're incubating kind of a their own proprietary AI back onboarding tool at coach as well. So they're really focused on using the latest tech and finding sort of the best people to work at the business and combining that sort of their main differentiator. And with the one thing that I find interesting about search groups is you have to win clients on both sides. So you have to win the businesses and then you also have to get the candidates. So as VP marketing your messaging is not targeted at one customer target your target to like very, very different groups of people. So how do you. What challenges do you see with that like how do you how do you circumvent that and be effective in both arenas. Very good question I think for us from an outward into the marketplace messaging we target the businesses that were business to business service. So we're targeting you know the construction companies real safe companies tech professional service all those kinds of industries with with our messaging you know hire us to do your searches. And then once we get those searches our second core message like you said is how do we find the right candidate and market to them the opportunity in a way that they want to work for these companies. So we you know recruitment is turning into basically it's marketing at its core right it's how do you convince somebody to leave what they're doing and consider another opportunity. So a lot of the messaging is branding on behalf of our clients coming up with the strategies to you know convince somebody to want to talk to us to work for the company. And and when does or who do you try and target like do you speak to people that are in firm in companies or do you speak to people that are looking for jobs on like indeed or LinkedIn who's your who's your go to target client. So I mean we speak to we speak to both when we're doing a search job seekers and sort of the passive job seekers we call them as people who are open to change but not actively looking. Nine times at a 10 it's going to be asked by reaching out to somebody it's not really the applicant that's typically going to be involved throughout the process with us. But we'll talk to 150 to 250 people per search pending on the search in the criteria. You know get interest from those people narrow it down to maybe 50 type of the best candidates we think interview them phone screen them narrow that down even further and then present the clients with four or five key people that we think would work and be a good fit with the organization based on all the background we've done. So personally I don't do any of the recruiting or the executive search work but I see our team and I engage from a marketing standpoint with the med various areas in that process everything from the messaging that we put out there to instead of doing sort of those boring job descriptions that they all look the same we'll put together sort of a package where it's more we call them position profiles but it's everything about the company is what will success look like what challenges will you face but packaging it in more of a booklet like a branded booklet where people can really get a feel for the company that they're going to be working for. And sort of create that engagement early on as opposed to trying to create it later in the process. So you're mentioning and I'm just taking notes so don't mind me if I'm just writing down because I just want to go back to some things and this is the only way I'm ever going to remember. So you mentioned a couple things that are very cool you mentioned like you have some some tech tools some AI that's really just crunching numbers and optimizing I guess on the candidate side like which candidates are best for whichever particular job. So obviously you're not wasting your time but you also mentioned something that's more of like a human a human touch which you said post placement coaching or so what is that. I guess what is that and why is that important for a candidate because you're doing it you're spending time and effort so what's the value at. So at keynote you know well let's take the overall sort of executive search recruitment industry typically it's more transaction driven it here's a person here's an opening there you go and that's the end right. So at keynote we put a 12 month guarantee behind anybody that we place so with that you know we want to make sure we're putting the right person in there we want to make sure we're giving that person the right tools and make sure that they're set up for success. That way the client happier with us the candidate is more successful and then by adding that executive coaching piece in there to help the candidate perform in their new role and you know how to work with their manager that kind of thing what that does it kind of ramps them up for success quicker. So they're able to provide more value to the company we just place them in in a shorter amount of time and keep them on track so. It's it's helping the company by delivering better performance out of the people we're placing and it's also helping the candidate by becoming a better performer at their new company. And you know you did mention that you don't actually do the recruiting so if I'm going to ask you this question if you don't want yeah it's cool but what what are some of those things that a candidate or that you help a candidate with when they're moving to the new role as part of that post placement process that you see really help them. Yeah so I mean I can speak to this because at keynote they you know are CEO James Baker and wife Donna our managing partner they like to practice what they preach so they actually each employee that they hire a keynote goes through that executive coaching process to better help them so that we're performing better but also for us to you know grow and part of that process is you know they learning a. Profile of who you are your characteristics where your strengths and weaknesses lie as well as where the profiles and strengths and weaknesses of our managers are so for for them how do we approach them to engage them best in in our conversation it's about it's about basic self awareness it's about awareness of the people around you and how they like to work. Um so you know the golden rule treat others like you'd like to be treated but through the coaching obviously it is the platinum rule that you know most people go by treat others the way they want to be treated so it's about learning about all the other executive in the in keynote in how they would like to be treated how they would like to be. Spoken with to sort of improve our engagement or collaboration do you I'm gonna ask this question and I think I know the answer because I've worked in a variety of organizations myself but is that something that you seen with other companies are just something that's really refreshing that you seen with keynote this attitude. Yeah I think most companies have you know a professional development type a type of program and where they want you to grow but I think keynote takes that extra mile by you know really you know they put a lot of value in us as employees and they you know it really showcased that they're investing in their future as a company by investing in their people so I think they take it an extra notch I think it's very unique. I think it's I think it's strong that they focus so much on on being self-aware and also like really understanding not just a professional drivers but the emotional drivers of people that you work with I think that's something that's really nice and I didn't you know I don't know a ton of companies that do that or care or care about that so that's it's refreshing to hear that. Okay so let's so that's really good so that's like a nice little summary of what you're doing for clients with keynote let's take it back to your specialty so marketing so yeah. What is what is your overall strategy it could be that you've seen work in your space so you're in the executive recruitment space but you know there's so many different facets to marketing. You have SEO you have SEM you have social you have male campaigns you have pushing stuff that is like a thought leader a subject matter expert social selling. There's like a million different ways that you can market yourself so is there something that you this a strategy that you've implemented with keynote that seems to work well and is it specific to keynote or is it something that you would like to do. Or is it something that you would recommend for people that you know it doesn't matter which industry this is what I've seen work in in my past because you've gone through several marketing positions so. Yeah so I guess my last two roles including keynote and then at Welch LLP it's a professional service that provided to from a business to another business standpoint. So from that standpoint what I found to be very successful is using a content marketing strategy where you know will produce thought leadership pieces even if it's content about our company being in the community. I find the content marketing strategy creating webinars how to guide blog videos just anything to really engage an audience and pull them in to want to work and learn more about and learn more from an education standpoint. As opposed to pushing out advertising thing higher up we're really good at executive search kind of thing so I think it's more that pulling in the audience in the key decision makers that we're targeting as opposed to pushing out our messaging. You find that and I agree with you I think that is the way that you have to differentiate yourself just in terms of general marketing strategy because I find that too many people are just pushing stuff out but the truly successful ones are those thought leaders right and the conversations for example that I don't know how your sales force works and maybe you can shed a little light on that and how they work in terms of like your inbound lead your lead funnel. I think that if you push out content that positions you as a thought leader as a subject matter expert at the very least is going to make the conversations when your sales force engages with your target customer much easier much easier to convert all these things are just easier right as opposed to you know you push content out there and now your sales force is bombarding people and cold calling them which is something that you do have to do anyways but I think that if you if you like you said your content marketing strategy it makes everything a little bit warmer than then yeah. Yeah we I mean we actually don't do any cold calling what we do will engage with our lead that would be warm leads because they've already engage with our brand but being in that professional services market a lot of the new business will get is referral based word of mouth. So what we kind of focus on and that's why the content marketing strategy works the well is when somebody recommends us to another potential client the first thing that clients going to do is they're going to Google us or they're going to go to our website right yeah. So we want to make sure that as soon as that happens we're supporting that interest by ensuring where you know we're seen as experts they can see build trust with our brand right away so it's a lot of supporting that sort of word of mouth. And then because the sales cycle is basically it could be years it could be weeks it could be month because it's a service it comes up when the need arises. So when the need for new executive arises that's when we want to make sure we're top of mind so if they've been engaging with our brand by tuning into our webinar attending our events even hearing our speakers in the community then they know when they need to hire they're thinking keynote right away. And that's sort of where our marketing strategy wants to the end goal position of the top of mind firm to use for executive search. Do you find that other firms in your industry are doing what you're doing or is it they have a more like a legacy approach to marketing. I think a lot of the firms are doing similar stuff but it I think it's how you execute. What a lot of people do is they'll read best practice guides right and they'll say I've got to do Facebook ads I've got to do a webinar I've got to do a how to guide but the doing it properly means you know you've looked at your customer base you've looked at your audience who you want to target. You understand the journeys they take both online going to events but true you know the different personas of those key decision makers and how they fit the industries and how you can engage with because the CEO of an engineering company completely different from. Feed let's say a managing partner and in the counting for right so you got to look at you know how to reach each of them and the content you put out has to be mission off or personalized enough that it's it's speaking directly to one of your key clients persona. So without all that background work of truly understanding how they engage what they're doing if you're just putting out a guide because you know you best practice says that's what you need to do and you're putting out how to do executive search or something guide it's not going to be effective. So I think creating those niche pieces and speaking to a core group of your audience and then using you know tools like LinkedIn ads where you can really get granular in your targeting and use that guide to simply target you know the one target that you made it for right yeah. So I think it's really breaking out each of those people and doing it properly so that's also really good point on how do you how do you properly define who those buyer personas are how do you collect enough data to be sure that that's that's what that person or how they interact with with your brand. Yeah so marketing automation software so something like a hubbott Marquetto part odd act on all these are great software from market standpoint that allow you to collect data on your potential customers on your customers how they engage with your brand. So you can track somebody along you know what pages they went to what type of news items do they like to see because it's referral driven it you know what people are you know what testimonials do they look at do they want to see what work we've done do they even care about our industry pages. You can you know what events are they going to by pulling all that together you know you're never going to know exactly because every person quite different but you can get enough data to truly understand what makes them take action at least enough to create a persona for them that's so yeah. Exactly and and then what do you have that persona something like LinkedIn ads I don't even look at LinkedIn ads from in ROI perspective at the start so when I start with LinkedIn ads I want to see what kind of messaging works best what words use create more you know click their engagement what imagery works best so when I create. So if I want to better understand the CEO of a construction company and what what messaging or imaging they like i'll make you know a dozen different LinkedIn ads all under that one campaign and see which ones get more engagement you'll always see one or two types of those ads of the 12 perform out perform the rest by far so you use that knowledge of the imagery in the messaging and then I'll use that in all of our other marketing strategies. So you can you actually like reverse engineer because a lot of people will A B test ads that's that's pretty standard but you reverse engineering that process into literally everything you do now and that's that that's where you take your key insights from and that's where you can start. Exactly yeah so then I'll know what resonates best with that so when we do a direct mail campaign or when we do our email marketing I know exactly the language and imagery to use to optimize how good that's going to perform with that specific audience that's very good and you mentioned a couple of technologies so for people listening what is your your marketing tech technology stack look like what do you like to use. So we use act on for our marketing automation software is very similar to a hub spot type type of platform where you can do all your email marketing create all your landing pages it integrates into our CRM which we use which is Salesforce so we use act on Salesforce I use Trello for a project management standpoint. Matt basically I'll go to webinar for our webinars I'm also trying to think like we don't use a ton of tech we don't use any of the social media stuff I prefer to post natively on each platform with different messaging with you know tagging properly. Yeah I find it works best to just go on the social platform as opposed to scheduling something through who tweets for example and nothing is too sweet but they bought that message out across the platform is very convenient but I find to be more effective. Yeah I was going to say one thing I've noticed when you use a scheduling software is that when you try and first of all you can never tag properly but if you try and upload some assets like sometimes the formatting or what not isn't a hundred percent on point is it would be as if you uploaded natively so I think that I think that just if you're trying to have like the best possible experience for the customer. Yeah I agree with you there I think that's so your text that is actually relatively like to be honest yeah. Yeah which is which is no that's as long as you have the basics and I've actually never personally used act on but that does most everything I guess from. Yeah it doesn't have like part of how the spot marketo would have lightly different and probably a bit more robust sort of mapping it at the persona and nurturing and in constant contact and that kind of thing but for us at keynotes. Personally I don't do any automated follow up email marketing campaigns or touch points with our clients in our database because my personal preference is to only contact somebody when there's something irrelevant to them. I don't want to force something that I think oh this is the path that they're going to want to take although it's been proven in study shows that it's effective at conversion I find only there's something really important do I want to make sure I push that out. So I don't use any drip campaigns no nurturing that kind of thing I keep it all very I just don't like I don't want to bother people I don't want to overwhelm people don't want that in this day I find you find that. Because you mentioned a lot of your strategy depends on on word of mouth and referrals and you find it by differentiating yourself in terms of how you don't do some of the drip campaigns which everybody or a lot of companies do do you find that that sort of elevates your brand somewhat and when people look at you they don't look at you as an annoying oh I've seen you in my inbox and so I don't mind working with you. I mean it's hard to say I think what we're doing is removing any possible negative connotations with our brand with our key sort of lead I'd say that's more or less what we're trying to aim at. I don't think it makes anybody work with us more because we're not annoying them. It's hard to it's hard to gauge if it's a referral why that person chose to refer you outside of just being an incredible brand and delivering an incredible service and if there's other if there's other mitigating factors it's impossible to truly. The referrals are a product of our staff that actually do the work not myself but it's them doing a good job in making sure they're taking really good care of the clients placing really good people for our clients. So when a client having somebody that got super hard to find people right now especially in Ottawa I think the unemployment rate 4.4% or so. You're basically you have to grab from somebody else's company or you have to go out of town and look so we're able to kind of help that person find somebody they need that's very valuable to a company. So they will always brag about us they will talk about how great of a job we've done and then that's where the referrals come in and then we need to make sure we're supporting that by. With somebody looked at us they're not saying oh this company was terrible I don't know kind of big right now the support that great referral word of mouth with a great online experience yeah and then also we do events as well to make sure that we're also engaging you know in person not just online as well. Yeah because I unemployment at an all time low not just in Ottawa I think like in North America I think even in the States it's at an all time low as well so you see that for talent it's there's definitely a war out there yeah just I'm I'm not involved in the staffing and recruiting industry but I just I see articles about it so I know there's people that are writing about it it's obviously a thing. Enough of a thing that because I think that in the past how many years I'm sure you would probably know stats but it's probably at an all time low for for a significant amount of time. It is yeah I mean it's it's a good time for it to be an executive search so hard for those companies to find people this is not very many people who aren't currently working. Yeah no that's it's really interesting okay so just just again back to back to marketing in particular. What are some of the worst practices that you see in your industry that you really wish would not be a not be a thing yeah. The worst practice I think is I call it social selling if you want or selling on social media anybody that comes with a sales pitch on social media you know they connect with you on LinkedIn. You know you're like oh they you know they look like you know we're in the same city you know we're in similar industries that kind of thing. So you know I'll accept people I don't know but I hate when they're worse practice and somebody as soon as they see I've accepted they send me this huge long sales pitch and I never look at them and then you'll see there's some of them where you'll open it up and they've message me like six seven times a letter respond of these generic sales pitches they could have got scripted and just copy and paste for everybody. And I think that's just I can't see it working first of all I think it's a waste of your time and your resources to try to go about it that way. I think there's better ways to engage people as opposed to these generic LinkedIn copy and paste messages once you connect with somebody. I think that it's it's really watered down LinkedIn unfortunately because LinkedIn can be such a great platform. And like for example like you know you use it to define your target audience but I get a ton of those two and it's it's the most it's the most annoying thing. I don't think I've ever like to be honest if I've ever bought anything it definitely has not come from a LinkedIn outreach message. Yeah I mean the inbox like the email message is on LinkedIn like yeah I can't I can't see anybody ever buying anything off that or being like oh I do need to help with my FDO let me. Yeah I don't see it working that way and then on the opposite side of that is companies are themselves with their corporate branding. Sometimes they're just as bad and they're posting you know if they're an executive search company they're posting we do executive search higher us were the best and they put that out there like. That's never going to work either people go on social media to be entertained to be educated or to read something interesting they don't want to be told to you. So even when the people are I see promoted post kind of thing and it's always if it's complete salesty and it's basically like an advertisement in your face it's it'll never work in my opinion. The one thing that I've seen a lot with executive search firms they put out these salary guides all the time as is that something that you think works do you endorse it or is it something that just seems like everybody does it now so it's no longer effective. So a lot of the executive search firms predominantly are database driven some of them are very database driven they have these huge databases of people so that when they get a search they they can just filter through their database and go here's a good person for you right. So what they're doing there the salary guys is they're trying to collect leads on the candidate side as part of it the other part would be you know if I'm an employer I might want to know what I have to pay somebody right so they are collecting I think some of those leads are probably useful for them for us. What you'll see like we don't use a database so every search we get we start from scratch and part of the strategy behind that is every role in every company is so specific right. You can just filter database and throw people that a VP of marketing somewhere and say here's VP marketing we have right. It's looking for the characteristics it's matching the profiles it's the type of experience they have so that's why we do everything from a proactive standpoint in going to search for each of our separate searches because it. Databasing I don't think is the solution in the executive search and a lot of companies really use that as their predominant way of finding people. Do you have any suggestions for people that are listening that are looking for a new career or to make a move what and they want to say they want to work with an executive search firm or a search firm does not always have to be executive level. What things should they be looking out for in terms of who they should want to work with outside of just you know looking for keynote. I think you know fit is always the biggest thing right people you got to fit with the organizations culture and a lot of companies will promote their culture is one thing and truly it's not something else so it's if you're a candidate really you know if you're going in there for an interview to think it is a good fit it. It is the vibe you're getting from that interview is it the office that you've gone into is it the vibe that they're putting out there on you know on their employer branding type marketing stuff so I think it because if it's not then that person isn't going to laugh if it's not what they were looking for once they actually truly start. I think yeah candidates just looking at you know the company as a whole is the leadership team that you can be working with somebody that you know you'll be able to work with and get along with well if you're going to but has the entire time you know that's not going to be a long lasting you know employee. Yeah I think just making sure you know it is the right fit the people you connected with the people they're engaging the relationship is easy to build just frictionless it's just yeah yeah yeah okay so just to because we got that was that was an incredible session and you give a ton of a ton of info insights so I appreciate it now just to just to wrap up a couple questions I like to ask. If you were going to tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be just keep going enjoy I mean when you're 20 you enjoy your life and you set yourself up you know and don't be afraid to take risks I wouldn't tell my 20 year old self to you know try harder in school or you know make sure you're getting better marks or make these. Connections before you leave university kind of thing I just enjoy life if you're in university enjoy it make the most of it I think the life experiences are what's going to help you down the road so as long as you just you know have fun I'd say keep having fun 20 year old Kyle. Good no that's good man that's good and when you you know obviously you're you're senior you've learned a lot over your career where would you suggest people go if they want to learn it could be podcasts it could be books it could be mentors people that you follow either personally or people that anyone would know where would you suggest people go. I think definitely the mentor routes I think you would you would learn a lot more quicker to advance your career you get better guidance in terms of you have you have basically a sounding board is what a mentor can be for you and they can really point you in the right direction I think that would be definitely a key way to learn and also there's so many free resources online. So if you're in marketing you know you can take Google's out word certificate Google analytics certificate you can take a social media marketing certificate inbound marketing certificates they're all available for free and it's great it's a great way to learn your field. And be that with some of those things that do have tangible certificates to them you can also add that to your resume and it just it helps you become more well-rounded quicker so I say mix between the mentor and basically just free online courses. And is there anything that I didn't I didn't hit that you wanted to speak about or do we get no. Thank you. So where do people if they want to reach out to yourself or keynote where can they find you. So if you want to reach out to me you can find me on LinkedIn Kyle Turk BP marketing at keynote group. And if people want to get in touch with keynote you can visit our website keynote search.com. Alright and next time I'm in Ottawa we'll we'll grab a beer or something. Yeah definitely hit me up. Alright cheers buddy we'll talk soon by now. Cheers. Well you heard it from the man himself Kyle Turk VP of marketing at keynote group if you want to hit up Kyle hit him up on LinkedIn. He's obviously a very knowledgeable guy a great resource to learn from and I hope everybody got something from this thank you so much Kyle for sitting down. I learned a lot and it was it was a great session. So this has been another sales versus marketing podcast you can download this podcast wherever podcasts are found or you can go find it on YouTube as well. If you haven't already hit like hit subscribe share this podcast with your friends family family co-workers colleagues peers whoever you think can benefit. If you haven't left a rating please leave any rating as long as it's a five star rating and if you do have somebody who you think should be on this podcast please reach out to me. You can hit me up on LinkedIn LinkedIn dot com slash in slash S Douglas Clary or you can email me S Douglas Clary at Gmail dot com I love meeting new people love interviewing new business leaders sales leaders marketing leaders. Anybody who you think should be on this show reach out to me and I'll I'll bring them on. So that's been another sale versus marketing podcast I hope everybody has an incredible week has a very productive week and we will talk again soon by now. Welcome to Scott's thoughts where I break down some of the topics that we just discussed in the last sales versus marketing podcast. So we just spoke with Kyle church who was an incredible and incredible interview Kyle was a VP of marketing at keynote search group and the lessons learned obviously he's the very senior marketing leader and I hope that everybody got a lot out of it. But there's two points that I really want to double down on so the first point is something that they do for their customers something that keynote does for their customers, which is a differentiator for their firm, but also something that keynote does internally. And what I'm speaking about is their post placement process. I use the term post placement because that's how they use it with their clientele, but it's also something that they do internal with their own employees. So their post placement process is a leadership lesson. What they focus on after they bring somebody after they have to play somebody within an organization is they focus on up to one year after they've been placed a focus on executive coaching, helping them find a cultural fit within the organization. All sorts of support help them on board and and and ramp up to productivity much quicker and they also focus on itself awareness and and stakeholder and building out the stakeholder relationships within the organization. So outside of just the concept support that they offer and provide for clients that they place within organizations, they also offer this this massive focus on on building out relationships and not only abiding by the golden rule treat others how you would want to be treated. How do you effectively do this in the context of a business environment? Well, you have to know the people you have to build relationships with them, you have to facilitate that process of understanding the stakeholders that you will be dealing with on a day to day and building out these meaningful relationships does not only will that allow you to work with them more effectively and be self aware of how you interact with other stakeholders within your organization is against something they do for their clients. It also it also allows you to on board much quicker understand and adapt to the culture much quicker and these are all things and markers and milestones that keynote search group has identified as things that if achieved and acted on and implemented properly obviously increase the likelihood and chances of success of a executive success within an organization. So this is what they offer for their clients, but this is also something that Kyle went through himself when being brought into a keynote search group to the two founders of keynote search group placed an extreme emphasis on on this this nurturing into an organization so building out relations with other stakeholders being self aware of who you are and how you interact with others and then a focus on just bringing you up the speed onboarding you supporting you training you educating you coaching you mentoring you. So this whole process they do it for other companies because not every company does it effectively but they also do it for themselves and obviously it's shown by attracting incredible talent that they and they continue to excel in their industry and differentiate. And I think one of the big reasons is their attention to attention to their people detail detail attention to their people and obviously they've seen it work internally and they see it work with companies where they place people so if there's a leadership lesson you can take away agnostic of the executive search and recruitment industry. This onboarding process this attention to bring people up the speed to integrating with culture and just so many touch points open communication that's so key for somebody's success if you just throw them into the fold you have a sinkers woman tality unfortunately there's a really good chance they're going to sink so by hand holding not in a micromanaging way but in a true care in an authentic in an authentic caring for their success within your organization. I think that you will see you'll see long term success with candidates you bring in and I think that you will help them integrate into your culture and make them more effective and make make the entire work group or business unit much more integrated and efficient. And all this stems down to building relationships between people and understanding other people and being self aware of how you interact with other people so that these are all great leadership lessons and you can have a whole discussion just on those. The other point that Kyle spoke about that I really like was his focus on content marketing so he adopts a content marketing strategy and I'm going to preface this by saying this is something that we learn about a lot now we've spoken to a couple different marketing leaders and the and the same type of strategies implemented. Industry agnostic you start to see a theme come up and when you start to see these themes come up through different marketing leaders it's something that you should probably take note of and think about incorporating into your own business if you haven't already done it. So what what Kyle preaches for his content marketing strategy is to put out content that positions you as a thought leader as a subject matter expert in the space. You are you're creating these educational content that allows people to understand understand your expertise in an industry they're consuming your brand online or wherever may be at an event at a great show on social media and all the content that you're putting out there it's not. Pushing your own brand pushing your company you're educating your acting as an advisor you're acting as a consultant and you're building a level of rapport with clients that are consuming you online or without a direct touch point it could be at a show where you're doing a presentation or you're a keynote speaker or a panelist it doesn't really matter you're putting things out there that help people understand that you know what you're talking about and you do that by giving them educational content that can. Help them through their pain points and you know what those pain points are because you're the industry expert so for executive search you're probably putting content out there that helps people understand the best practices for hiring and onboarding and success or finding the right candidates all these things the company struggle with keynote is is creating as part of their content marketing strategy and that's how they put themselves out to the market and by creating this this thought leader subject matter. Expert content and pushing it out into the market what keynote is doing is they're allowing themselves to build trust with their potential clientele before they even engage with them because as we know in today's day and age people consume. And the customers are significantly farther down the buyer journey so they've already consumed 50 to 60 to 70% of the information they need to make a buying decision before they even speak to your sales reps or your sales force so you want to make sure that the content that they do consume is our things that obviously build that level of trust because at the end of the day that level of trust is what we have to build with our clients for them to effectively buy from us because if we don't build trust they will never. Buy from us it doesn't matter price it doesn't matter how good our product is if we don't build trust with them they will never buy from us and customers always buy from people they trust they may validate that buying decision through pricing or through features benefits functions integrations. Other other sort of tangible logical buying motivators but at the core of that is always trust so to build that in a digital environment is to is to build out a in position yourself as a as a thought leader a subject matter expert. And then once you do that effectively everything else gets easier because now when they actually speak with your sales force now the conversations flow a little bit easier everything converts better. And the leads are no longer cold there they're warmer because they consume all this incredible information online that your company is associated with so those are the two points that Kyle spoke about that I really really I really liked and I really wanted to double down on. There was a ton Kyle was a great interview but if there's two things you can take away I think those would be it but anyways it's been another another Scott's thoughts I really hope you enjoyed that podcast and that interview as always have a great week have a productive weekend we'll talk again soon bye now. Go sales and marketing leaders and teams globally.