Tactical Tips for Scaling & Growing a Business #scottsthoughts

Welcome back to another episode of the success story podcast today you're going to hear me on the business and lifestyle legends podcast hosted by Ben Schneider we speak about personal brand we speak about marketing strategy for early stage startup we speak about organic versus paid social media marketing digital marketing I think we even spoke a little bit about outbound sales if I remember correctly I hope you enjoy there's a lot of stuff we went into is about an hour long podcast But if you are trying to build a business grow a business start a business or just trying to get some new ideas for your marketing strategy I think you will get a lot out of this let's jump right into it again This is me on the business and lifestyle leadership podcast hosted by Ben Schneider Welcome guys to the business and lifestyle legends podcast my name is Ben Schneider I'm the host of this episode today and today I got another awesome guest for you guys He is a career sales and marketing executive he rewrites the playbook on sales marketing brand and take to the market strategy from startups to enterprise he worked with executives and entrepreneurs to tenets their businesses Zolt and marketed to the most iconic fortune 500 and fortune 100 brands throughout his career he his work has also been featured in over 100 plus new sites and publications He speaks globally at industries conferences and has had articles and insights featured in Forbes Wall Street Journal Hackernoon the startup and others he currently runs a global saw sales and marketing organization which is what we are also talking about today And he is the host of the success story podcast where he interviews inspirational people mentors and leaders Please welcome guys Scott scott clary has got how you doing good thanks thanks so much for having me on I appreciate it very very kind intro that I that I gave you to read also very good very kind thanks for having me awesome thanks you liked it yeah so I wasn't that you're here today so you are very deep into the sauce business and we have a lot of people from the sauce business on this podcast which is quite interesting for me as I mentioned I run a sauce company by myself And it's also interesting for the people out there because a lot of people think they just need to develop something and put it out and then they can sell it millions of times And basically that could be correct but the truth is mostly a little bit different so it will be interesting to see your point of use on the sauce companies by today So what do you think is needed for a successful sauce company or for a sauce company to be successful? So you're 100% correct in saying the developers dream is to put out a piece of software piece of tech and have all these unlimited customers coming in never have to talk to customers ever And all you know all the the strike payments are processing and and you know your MRR just keeps climbing climbing but in reality if you build it they generally don't come unless you have truly an incredible product that just through evangelism And your own network will gain some momentum attraction usually you have to put in some work usually have to build a brand usually have to build out a content marketing machine you have to build out a true inbound funnel that will drive people to your landing pages your website and eventually convert And I think that if we're going to discuss like how SaaS can be successful well I think inbound marketing or demand generation is probably the way it will be successful now what does that look like well there's multiple there's so many different types of marketing you can spend money on ads you can spend money and time on SEO rather you can you know spend a lot of time on content marketing on social media I believe that out of all the components of marketing which you should still be creating so all the different assets all the different platforms all the different things you can do in the marketing world to drive demand and drive interest and to get eyeballs looking at your product. But I do believe that the number one thing you should do is to become a content marketing machine you have to become a media company you have to be that that company that's putting out on social podcasts YouTube video audio everything that is positioning yourself as a subject matter expert answering the questions of the people that could be potentially purchasing your products. I think that that is where you can differentiate yourself and that is where you can drive a huge amount of demand with relatively zero at like almost almost zero ad budget so relatively inexpensively and I think that the best companies that drive demand are media companies and are really strong content marketing companies and I look at examples like for example HubSpot and Marco bears and how he basically flipped the script and didn't even focus on outbound. They still had enterprise customers which is in the traditional like SaaS self-serve model like there is different you know you can go up market and SaaS you can sell to you know mid market enterprise but if you want to sell like self-serve SaaS even then he didn't do any outbound outbound is very time consuming outbound is very expensive especially for a customer with a very you know a very low lifetime value or a very a very small monthly recurring revenue right if you do outbound for that it's very expensive so you have to bring them to you and I think that acting as a media company. Putting out a ton of content and positioning yourself as either an individual in the company a CEO an executive or the company itself positioning themselves as a subject matter expert in a certain industry is what wins and is what drives the most traffic and is what creates the most trust and is the highest ROI activity that can you can really use to differentiate yourself. Okay but it takes time to put out a lot of content as the SEO machine yeah you need to keep it running and it takes a lot of time and maybe it takes you depending on the niche you are maybe six months or more to get traffic out of that so I think basically starting if you have some money with paid ads wouldn't be the baddest idea. But what do you think about the enterprise clients you mentioned that in a little word and that was something I was thinking about too because you can go for the for the Facebook ads and the Google ads and all that kind of stuff putting out YouTube videos doing SEO stuff which is all great and needed 100% agree with you. But I think what people underrate is the enterprise level where you are reaching out through the phone selling your product not through a Facebook ad you sell it through through appointments or online conversations explaining the product showing how it works but then you might be. Yeah I have certain enterprise clients which pays a lot of more money who has a way better customer lifetime value so for example you mentioned HubSpot for example you can you can I'm not sure what's the lowest package of HubSpot but let's name it for example $50 a month but they're enterprise clients maybe they pay a thousand or five thousand dollars a month for some money. So you need a lot of customers to get from the $50 to $5,000 and keep them on your platform on a monthly base and on an enterprise level you maybe you need only one customer so what do you think about that about the enterprise machine. So you made a couple good points so let's just touch on those briefly so I want to make sure that we're synced up because you are right to kick off any marketing effort you will have quite your conversions with paid and this isn't talking about enterprise yet but yes 100% correct on that and my point to that is don't don't forget about the content marketing don't forget about the SEO and just go into paid ads because it is it doesn't have to be the sustainable source of revenue for your top of funnel or your inbound. As you maybe kick off for the first six months you're paid and then of course then you're you're building up your content marketing machine you're seeing your website you're putting up content there you're putting up content on social and then the residual effects of all that effort over six months or a year will basically drive more traffic than most people will be comfortable spending for paid ads but now for the enterprise side so you're also correct in saying that for enterprise you do need outbound you need an outbound sale of pure sales outbound cadence you need people reaching out to customers you need them running you know seven to 15 touch point outbounds across phone email LinkedIn but the modern B2B buyer and this is going to go back to content marketing the modern B2B buyer does 70 to 80% of the research before they even talk to a sales rep but talk to an SDR or an AE so if you are selling into enterprise it's a very complex sales cycle the buyers are very educated they're very smart and if you do not focus on building the same type of content and the same type of brand on social media and on all these different outlets that create top of funnel and drive top of funnel customers for like a smaller MRR or a self-serve product that same content builds trust in your brand that an enterprise customer will research will see when you do outbound when when your SDR reaches out on LinkedIn or email they will investigate they'll do the research they'll build the trust because now they're seeing all the content that you're putting out there they're consuming your brand they're consuming your videos they're consuming your social they're consuming their blogs so when you actually have a conversation with an SDR that's a much warmer conversation so yes you're correct you still do have to do outbound you have to do a fair amount of outbound but the content marketing that can drive for the smaller customers like that self-serve revenue that works very well as well to build trust at an enterprise level which I think you have to do and that's you mentioned HubSpot HubSpot HubSpot isn't a self-serve product for enterprise it is a self-serve product for some of the smaller customers these that the $50 $100 you know monthly recurring revenue level but for enterprise they're using that same content that drives all of their smaller customers to just reinforce their brand so that when they're when they do enterprise sales and do outbound sales the people that are buying the product are just much more comfortable they've already heard about them and they also they also use that content marketing to draw leads for enterprise as well but of course it's more of a nurturing cycle for enterprise and it would be for like a quick like one-off sale for a for a $50 like the recurring revenue product so I think that I think that my whole point would be to regardless of what market you're selling into focus on content marketing for long term because it can benefit both of any any market that you're selling into you can benefit your self-serve it can benefit your mid market it can benefit your enterprise and I think that going heavy on content and content marketing isn't just SEO it's also the stuff you put it on social like you're recording a podcast you probably take this podcast you're you're probably putting it across your social you're you're building your brand that way companies should act like that it should be creating this media that they can use in their content marketing strategy that can create trust in their brand and then if you want to talk about for example targeting and what type of content you should make in in reference to the targeting or the ideal customer profile or the personas that you want to sell to well the content that you should be creating should again be answering questions that your your ideal customer profile or your target customer profile or your buyer persona would be asking because if you record podcasts and you want to sell to you know a VP marketing and the conversations in the podcast sort of revolve around questions that a VP marketing would be asking or problems that a VP marketing would be trying to sell for in their day-to-day job and you put that content out there now you have content is tailored to the perspective buyer and that works at any level that's good content for again enterprise all the way down to to like you know be to see yourself. I think it's also important what you mentioned about the recording of the content so what you mentioned let's make an example here with our podcast what we are going to do we record this podcast you're listening maybe right now or you're watching on YouTube or you see a snippet on social media so we record the video we take the video we can upload it on YouTube we take the audio file we can upload it on iTunes for a podcast we cut it and take it creates snippets we call it short snippets and post it on YouTube not YouTube linked in maybe Twitter Facebook Instagram take talks so you have you have maybe 30 minutes of recording but you have 20 30 times content pieces to use this is how this is the only way you can create massive content because you cannot create any single content piece you cannot create 100 YouTube videos or 100 social snippets one minute snippets that's too much work because mostly you are an entrepreneur and you are your daily business is not recording some videos your daily businesses managing your team having calls with some people and all the kind of stuff or maybe like I do you have to manage several companies so you can record the whole day and that's why it's important that you do the content recycling would you agree with that 100% and that's actually the strategy that you just mentioned I've spoken with the strategy on podcasts as well because not only do I personally use that strategy so I record podcasts and I chop them up and then I you know I put them like you just mentioned you have video you have audio I've even taken it turned to a blog post then you put into like 5 10 minutes segments and you put it across all your other social you can even do like short clips and put them on like reels or TikTok or YouTube shorts or snapchat stories or whatever it's called that's that's the easiest way to create content at scale and we're talking about an entrepreneur doing this the reason why brought up content marketing and being a media company and putting all this stuff out originally is because I see a lot of businesses large businesses 500 employees a thousand employees 10,000 employees that totally missed the mark on how to do content marketing properly even in 2021 HubSpot which I put a camera which year it was a while ago they are still one of the gold standards for content marketing people haven't picked up on it if any business had the same perspective on social media and content marketing that for example Gary Vaynerchuk had they would be exponentially more successful in their industry they would be a category leader instantaneously some companies do this quite well not just HubSpot like even like Salesforce does this incredibly well with content marketing but how many companies are pulling in like hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions of dollars in revenue and just don't get it they just don't do it you look at their social media I as an individual probably yourself as well you put out more content than some enterprise customers with like a 50 person marketing team a 50 person plus marketing team so my point is this is social media is a great equalizer social media allows the entrepreneur for relatively no money at all just perhaps time strategy process and a couple of tools to create content at scale that can rival the quality and the cadence of an enterprise company and then sell to their customers that's incredible because no no other point in history could you have that amount of eyeballs looking at your company virtually for free leveraging again perhaps a SEO on your website but also content on social because normally you'd have to buy billboards by radio at spots by TV spots that was not affordable for the average entrepreneur bootstrapping entrepreneur so now everything has changed we've been a paradigm shift in what we have access to and how we can leverage and scale ourselves because like I said you you do it as well you put out more content than some billion dollar B2B brand and you probably put a better content that people actually like to listen to and if people didn't know you were one man shop they would probably buy from you for a product that a large enterprise B2B organization would sell because they trust you they know your face they know what you're all about and that is incredibly impactful and something that people still don't quite get and it's hard to shift an organization's mindset to basically the future of media and the future of marketing but the sooner you do it the sooner you will differentiate and then you will you will disrupt your entire category whatever category one point I cannot really agree with you as that it's for free because content marketing is not for free so if you maybe you go to an agency and they should do that for you they cost tons of money or if you do it in-house which you can do what we're also doing but you need a team so you have three four people who are involved with that you have a designer for example who's designed some creative you have maybe a texture a writer who is creating a blog post something like that or a script something like that you have a video graph who is cutting all that kind of stuff you maybe need someone who is recording it if it's not you so basically I cannot really agree that it's it's for free because it's not so basically you can do it for free if you are on Zolapreneur and have enough time for that but the reality I think it's it costs money and I think the problem maybe because a lot of I think a lot of companies tried it and then they stopped because there was it was not yeah there was not that revenue like in PPC campaigns or anything like that because you need to put in a lot of work and you need to put in the works for maybe one two three years and then you will earn what you planned before and I think that's that's maybe the problem why those big companies are not doing it so you're 100% right they should do it but I think most of the people give up I think they may give up I think they may listen I've worked in large organizations the general mindset of people that work in the organizations is we know what works we've gotten to a certain point doing what works why would we radically shift our perspective on how to do things and to be honest there's so many layers in a large company it's very hard to change the minds of several stakeholders which is why you see companies that don't have all those layers all that red tape they just do whatever they want and yes you're right there's there's a there is a cost to hiring somebody to write copy and to do design I guess my point was that it's much cheaper than for example if you were trying to buy a super bowl which you could not do but you can but you can hire fiber you can go to upwork right and that can let you compete at the same level so in terms of buying media for a truck or you go to Shopify which is our platform which is also chop search platform oh okay so I didn't even know you can do that as well so so your platform or like an upwork or a fiber like there's so many options that you could you could do it if you had a good paint if you had a well-paying job a high-paying job say you're making a 100k or 150k you have some budget to play with where you could hire freelancers that could do a lot of this stuff yeah so that's that's what I mean but normally the person is making $150,000 a year if they want to start a company they can't compete with TV spots they can't do that they can't do and it wouldn't make sense for them to do that and even like the paid ads like you know it depends on which platform you're going on like Facebook and Facebook is probably the best for for B to C if you want to go into like B to B and you want to play with like LinkedIn paid ads that have like you know great targeting options you could be looking at like G's like seven seven dollars like CPC like $10 CPC like it gets very expensive very quick so I guess it was point being it's the cheapest of all the options that still lets you compete yeah so to give to give you guys an imagination we aren't Shopify as you didn't know that we're a shop search platform so we compete with platforms like fiber upwork online shops and I had some talks with CEOs of that companies and six figures a month in ad spend there's nothing for them it's nothing yeah so they spend a lot especially fiber right now it's spending a lot of money on ads and PPC marketing and I think that that's also what you wanted to say it's way cheaper to gain social media channels it takes a lot of time but then when you have that audience in your circle yeah you can you can spread out your word and making some sales and then it's much more cheaper than putting PPC marketing or anything like that I think it's always a combination it's not only content or only PPC marketing or only Facebook ads or something like that today it's different it's a multi-channel you need to be everywhere and you need to put in some ads I think especially in the beginning so because if you if you put out some educational videos as you mentioned which is 100% through but the problem is you have to record those videos you have put in the work you have a great videograph for example it's stuff like that so these videos cost you a little money but then nobody is going to see it because if you are new right now you're founding a company and I think on our chop on our YouTube channel we have around 300 subscribers on Shopify so this is quite nothing yeah it's tough it's tough to get it off right now yeah we get 102 2 3 400 views maybe but this is nothing in this world so what is the only option you have you can put ads on it and try to spread it into your target audience and try to get subscribers but the subscribers you will not gain by this video you will gain it by playing another videos showing another video and this you have to do I don't know six months 12 months and then your audience will grow what do you think about that I think you're right and I think it's I think so if you're going to if you're going to do this properly you're using ads to get a little bit of momentum at the start and you can always like listen I have nothing I sound like I'm like against paid ads I've always used paid ads to some extent and I've always used it to test material quickly right if I want to see what type of content resonates with an audience if I want to get people to sign up for a webinar if I want to get people to test a new product that we just like I want volume quickly and if you build a community what you do on social it takes a ton of time so there is a place for paid ad but what I would say is do it do it intelligently so you're using paid ads to of course position your company to sell a product to perhaps even build a following on different social media platforms so that you can leverage those but then while you're doing that of course you want to also be cross promoting so if you're building and you're paying ads and you're putting out content on different social media platforms like even something as simple as cross promoting and asking followers on one platform to connect on other platforms if you continuously put that out there and you put that messaging out there then you start to see like a multiplier on your on your efforts so it's just about being smart about it and if you are spending the money and you are investing the time and the energy and hiring people to create content it's just about where are you spending your time and how can you leverage like you mentioned your strategy for creating content it's all about leveraging yourself to the leveraging yourself as much as possible so if you have that piece of content or you have these paid ads how can you leverage that for other things how can you leverage one audience for other social media platforms how can I leverage a one piece of content for 50 different pieces so just it's just about leveraging just about being smart so I guess if you if you know where you want to end up and you know that you want content marketing you want um you want social to be part of your long-term strategy but I think it's smart then build it purposefully while you're initially scaling your business through PVC paid ads like on you know Google being social whatever um because that will just then there'll be this almost like this uh this breaking point where all of a sudden you'll notice that more revenue is coming in front organically than what was coming in from your say $5,000 a month paid at spend or your $10,000 a month paid at spend and that's the point when you know that you hit this critical mass on social and you can choose to either double down on paid if you'd like or you can double down on social because now you have some money coming in essentially for free so now your profit margin on that money or that customer is much higher because you didn't have to pay to acquire them but that does take time for sure it takes yeah you're right probably takes a year year and a half to see that ROI on investing into like social or to content marketing um SEO is always a time very very time continuing but you know every time I've really focused on it I've never regretted I've never regretted the long-term impact of even you know writing writing more blog posts every single week like it seems silly but people just if you're an entrepreneur you're like oh I don't want to write again like just do it like just do it and in a year from now you will thank yourself from doing it you will you will thank yourself for doing it excuse me um even if you don't see the immediate impact or the immediate effects and I think in a large organization that's a little bit easier to manage those um those mental setbacks because you have an organization supporting you and you have a set strategy and a set structure for how you want to market your company but as an entrepreneur if you don't see the immediate if you don't see you tweet something and nobody likes it you write a blog post and you don't see an increase in traffic that week it's hard it's mentally hard to continue to do something that you don't see immediate returns of doing but from people that have done it before listen like just maintain that pace and then the long-term I think it will pay off for you yeah 100% agree on that what do you think about some background stuff so what I mean is we always talking also Gary and all people are talking about put out content put out content take your smartphone make a video and put out okay but what about um SEO optimizations um formatting backlinks stuff like that what about uh youtube youtube SEO with the title with the keywords all that kind of stuff so people maybe are possible are able to to record something or to write a blog post but they are they don't know how to create backlinks or anything like that what do you think about that machine so I think that actually when we're talking about this we're talking about content marketing I didn't really touch on SEO but it is important to not forget about SEO on youtube or on your website in terms of even like your headers your page speed um getting backlinks using for example hero to get some backlinks from some high ranking domains um the reason why is because uh social media is very noisy so social media should be part of your strategy but it shouldn't be everything so if you are not focusing on SEOing your site and to be honest you're like if you don't know what SEO is I would recommend you do what any entrepreneur successful does and go go figure it out go take a free course go watch Neil Patel on on youtube like you can figure it out pretty simply like SEO is not actually that complicated but if you but if you look at the amount of traffic that's coming from various social media platforms like SEO SEO is really hasn't ever deteriorated in the impact on the business whereas if you go on Facebook or if you go on um Instagram a lot of time spent there is it's going to be hard to build a community uh your organic reach is limited right now if you have a product you can sell in TikTok or if you can use it in short little video segments on the Reels or YouTube shorts then you can build an audience LinkedIn is also good for B2B because it's still has a pretty good organic reach meaning that you don't you when you post something a lot of people see it you post something on Instagram very few people actually see it but there's so many people creating content so um actually if you have a really visual product I would actually suggest you check out Pinterest as an option because you can still get pretty good organic reach on Pinterest but that turns social media but the difference but SEO always works um yeah I know what I'm sorry because Pinterest also talked um last week with with someone about Pinterest Pinterest is great for getting traffic but the traffic is not converting so yeah oh really so I've never I don't know Pinterest that well I just know that it's one of the the highest traffic traffic it's awesome it's awesome you can get traffic from Pinterest but you need to have a huge retargeting machine um on Google ads and Facebook ads and all that kind of stuff because the Pinterest traffic right in that moment is not converting um because you're not in the mood to to buy something when you're on Pinterest you are for researching how to I don't know optimize my garden or or we're doing doing some or like a redecorate something like that or a recipe and there's all this nice stuff but or even close close like e-commerce probably good on Pinterest but you're right I have no idea what the conversion rates are like probably linked in would probably be your best conversion rate if you can make traffic from LinkedIn it's all targeted maybe that that that was what I meant um it's it's a whole machine it's not a one channel target on LinkedIn and then it will explode it's a machine right retarget on Instagram retarget on Facebook acquire on YouTube stuff like that so but what you're saying is very stressful for an entrepreneur starting out so that's why there's there's there's levels to this right so I would say I would say writing blogs do a little bit of research into and I guess I you know it really the conversation and the stuff that I'd be telling you depends on who the person is and and where they are in their entrepreneurial venture or the conversation I'd be having with you would be very different if we were talking to only a VP and trying to get them because it because a VP marketing would already have been bought into SEO most likely more more more more VP's of marketing have been bought into SEO which has been around for quite some time obviously versus putting out a lot of content on social but for an entrepreneur they're gonna have to look at both because perhaps they don't know either that well so they would have to research SEO do a little bit of blog writing a little bit of back linking on their website but then simultaneously you have like a pretty good content strategy so you're right it is a machine so whatever parts of the machine you haven't figured out yet that's what you want to explore that's what you want to research if you're just going heavy on social and you're not writing a single piece of content on your blog on your website that's not good either right if you're just going heavy on social in your website and you're not doing any outbound well that's a that's a level that you should add on you should be running outbound on LinkedIn via email if you have time or you can hire people on on your platform or otherwise to do some coal calling some outbound calling that's also important so you're right you do have to have an idea of how sales and marketing align how they work together the different components of each and then I think the the high level with this regardless of what you're good at what you're not good at or what you want to add on to your business or what you want to try out if you haven't been doing it yet is that just make sure it seems simple but just make sure that everything you're doing it speaks to each other so when you're sending out a message on LinkedIn when you're sending out an email the messaging the tone the things you're discussing that has to align with your content strategy that has to align with the blogs that you're writing on your website and that lack of alignment also really hurts organizations so if it definitely hurts entrepreneurs but it hurts organizations so if you don't have that alignment if the the discussions you're having when you're doing outbound sales and you're reaching out to say again like a VP marketing or a CEO or whatever if they're not aligned with the content that you're putting on on social and the content that you're writing about on your blog you're misaligned and that means that the buyer when they're doing research the content you're putting out all this work all this branding is not going to resonate with that so again identify identify who your ideal customer profile is identify who your buyer persona is and then everything you do in your entire business has to be targeted towards that that model that person that persona and then I think that that's that's like a good north star to sort of go towards when you're trying to market anything create anything write anything produce anything and I think that that's something just make sure you know who you're selling to which it seems silly but sometimes when you you start a business you want to be like jack of all trades master of none or and you you just try and sell to a variety of people and you don't actually think about who could be the best possible client or or you make a guess but you don't actually know so usually a good piece of advice for founders is go sell go sell 50 of your product go sell 50 of your widget and after you sell 50 of your widget first of all never hire a VP of sales before you sell 50 of your widget because that means you don't even know if you have product market fit for your product but at an early stage sell 50 of your widget look at your customers build a persona or profile of your target customer from those first 50 sales and then that's how you you know now start creating content you start creating your social content you start writing blogs tailored to that persona that you discovered in your first 50 sales then also for your outbound that persona is now who you're going forward you're going to start targeting that's that's probably the best advice for somebody trying to figure out what to do because there's so much you can do so just sell 50 of something and then use that to drive everything else because you need that model to be successful or else you're just going to be spending your 100% degree so incredible tips for you guys a little note we had also Neil Patel on the show here for some SEO insights so if you're interested in that guys you can listen to that episode what do you think because we also spoke or I was also speaking to to a lot of people about personal brand a company brand and what is easier because there is no relationship to company brands so it's easier to build a personal brand and stuff like that but there are a lot of people out there they won't be in front of the camera or or I don't know what I'm but obviously you need to have a brand and yeah you need to spread the brand and stuff like that so what do you think about being in an article some newspapers some magazines and stuff like that and the problem is mostly you cannot get there for free so I can be on every magazine by tomorrow if I just pay for it and what do you think about paying for those articles because the articles itself will not drive you tons of traffic in most cases maybe a little bit but but maybe they the articles itself are not worth paying to five thousand dollars for it I think I'm not 100% sure but no I don't I don't I don't believe that it's worth it so so if you so there's a few tools that you can use like so I use press hunt or hero so press hunt and hero basically are aggregators of of journalists requests for commentary on certain topics and you can filter so in terms of free that's the closest you're ever going to get to free unless you've done something incredible with your life but I would definitely check those out because I have gotten featured in in pretty notable publications like I got a Wall Street journal publication it was like like two or three people that were in the article but I got to mention and I got a backlink from a WSJ just by responding to hero and actually that's an acronym for help a reporter out so those are two services that I would suggest you use can you pay for placements yes you can I don't really see the benefit I don't ever see like like the thing is if you are incredible at your job if you're doing incredible work if you're actually impressive people will find you people will always find you and people will write stories about you it may take a little bit longer but people will discover you and I actually think that it's better to spend more time on social building a branch that people can discover you I can tell you right now I've gotten infinitely more podcast invites speaker opportunities just from LinkedIn than I have from any press mentioned that I've ever gotten nobody really reads press and is like I want to book I want to book Scott but if they see me again and again and again showing up I'm like didn't they like that content that's when I get books for a speaking gig so I say it's not worth it and it's also not worth it because if you do spend say you spend like I've been pitched just a lot I get these DMs all the time like do you want to be listed in this top 10 entrepreneur list going to go on Forbes or whatever in my opinion like people see through that stuff people look into these people like there's no way these are like the top 10 entrepreneurs like it looks a little bit shady it looks a little bit sketchy like you're with 10 other people that also look like they haven't really done too much with their life to be quite honest compared to like what an actual Forbes story looks like when somebody really impressive does something really incredible and you can tell because a whole article about them but to be put in these lists that I've seen that people have pitched to me I don't really see the value in it and if there is somebody you see is like oh my god that person was in Forbes and they actually take a second to go and interview you if you are paying for exposure you better be damn well ready to back up how impressive Forbes makes you look you better be really strong on one subject or have accomplished something or be able to educate on something that Forbes is speaking about because in a in a five minute conversation with somebody I can tell very quickly whether or not they have any experience in the actual subject that they've said they have experience in and every that's going to like everybody's going to pick up on that so if you can't actually talk about what Forbes says you're famous for after paying five thousand bucks or whatever it is then I would definitely stay away from it because it's going to do you more harm than good and if you are that good at it just talk about it a lot on social media and then those outlets will eventually contact you anyways and then you don't have to spend five thousand bucks for in my opinion like it's just throwing money down the drain so that's my opinion I think it's just more to put the logo on the website and I'm known from Forbes and Wall Street Journal and stuff like that and this might be impressive but I think for the SaaS companies this is not that necessary so it's nice to have but it's not that necessary I think it's more maybe if you are in the coaching business and you need to impress people with your car and also where you have been mentioned and that's like not a good vibe I'm 100% with you but no no it has an impact for your business but if you have on you know if we put now we are mentioned on Forbes or not nobody will buy our product more or or less I think no you're right and actually that's something that I thought about like I like I've gotten into you know everything that people have done to brand themselves like you look like if you look on my on my LinkedIn right now like it says that I've been featured in Forbes and WSJ and like those are actual features I have to see how that's perceived by the market does that actually impact me because I'm not selling coaching I'm actually working in a job does that get me more publicity or not now they're not paid spots so like I'm proud of them but I don't know you know I don't know how it impacts the the image or whatnot I think if you're proud of what you do just own it but I don't see any benefit in I really don't see any benefit in paying for it I don't think it you know I'm just thinking through it now like if if if a really great article features you yeah show it off to the world because that's impressive and the people that write those articles they do they speak to tons of people and if they choose you to you know feature they obviously value your insight and that's probably like a litmus test for is this something that I should talk about because somebody else valued my insight and they speak to tons of people so they had other option but if you're paying for it then you're basically fast-tracking any due diligence that a third party would have on your opinion and that doesn't really that doesn't have any benefit yeah I'm not sure if being featured in some online magazines is that that awesome like it would have been 10 years ago because I think maybe maybe it's the circle or the people around me but I think I'm not sure but more than 50 percent of my interview guests are featured on Forbes and so so so basically to be honest I'm not yet featured there but but but it's not that yeah what you're saying it's not that exclusive like maybe 10 years ago because they also these magazines also put out tons of content so they do not do not put out one article of they they spread maybe 10 or 20 articles they and so it's maybe easier to get there in and then it's not that special if you are featured on that I'll give you another example I'll give you a personal example so when I got my MBA across all my social media I put MBA after my name so I was very proud of it it didn't take me long to figure out that nobody really liked that and it just had like a really really bad vibe attached to it so it's on my LinkedIn to the professional site whatever I want people to know there and it's a good I think it's a good look on LinkedIn but it's not anywhere else just because you have to you have to understand the lens that people look at you through so there's a there's a fine line between being impressive and then show boating or gloating and I think that it's okay to be impressive but you can also prove that you're impressive by the things that you say and the actions that you take and the things you discuss and and speak about and also the results that you achieve in your career or your life or your coaching and it's and if you achieve incredible results in a business or if you achieve like if you if you're say you're consulting and you bring a company from two million to ten million dollars like maybe figure out your MBAs if you're allowed to speak about it but that's a really impressive story and that's something that I would start to try and highlight versus just logos because people like if you do a case study about what you actually did to get from point A to point B that's going to resonate with people a lot more than just putting logos on you know on a website so I think that's a it's something you should think about if you're trying to do personal brand and it's and it's not easy because you have that you have that internal that internal like need to validate yourself all the time so I think that half the time when we when we self-brand we're almost validating like our own our our own what's the best way to put it like we want to seem like we're good enough to compete in the world so we say that we've done this and we showcase that we've done that and we put a logo on our site but at the end of the day nobody really cares it's really just what you've actually done not what logos you've been associated with so it's something to be said for that too I think that's something related to that coaching business industry that grew in the past years because everybody is putting himself on a pedestal and and showing their cars and all that kind of stuff but tons tons tons of people have not really an own business or a good running business they I have the feeling maybe I'm wrong but I have the feeling that most of the coaches out there were not able to run a real business so they wanted to help people out there running their business and I think that's that's not how it should be but that's my personal imagination of that well no I think I think I personally I have like I have mentors in my life but I don't like subscribe to a certain coach but I think that if I was ever going to search for somebody to help me with something I'd want them to show me examples of how they've done it themselves before and I think that's actually you know I have a podcast to when I've brought people on that our our coaches but I've made sure that they have some documented achievement in their life that allows them to teach what they're teaching because there is a benefit in somebody who's done it before who's gone through an exit who one guy I had on he had built up his own real estate brokerage to a very impressive amount of camera but it was like in the hundreds and millions of dollars in asset under management so he has done this before so he's qualified in my opinion to teach somebody else to replicate the steps he took but you're right I don't agree with the lifestyle coaching the not the lifestyle like the the showboating the lifestyle the cars that like it's honestly very stupid because not one of those people that actually if you if you hire do you ever hire a coach for whatever reason and you're trying to do your due diligence if he has pictures of or she has pictures of exotic trips sports cars whatever it may be don't hire that just do yourself a favor because people that have incredible success who have a lot of money who for some reason still want to work they're not posting their Lamborghinis on Instagram or whatever and there's a few people that that I think started that phase and I I would say that it's almost like personal branding on steroids I see a lot of people that put like Forbes on their LinkedIn and that doesn't really matter to me but the people that drive around in luxury cars and are just totally like they're like their personalities are next level like their personalities they have to have like really really flamboyant personalities or else they probably wouldn't sell but they're selling with the personality and maybe they do have some experience but I can guarantee you if they're coaching and they're trying to flex on you with these like luxury goods they've never really been that successful in the thing that they're coaching before they started coaching it or else they wouldn't be coaching that way I know people that do advisory for startups I know people that are VCs and investors and people that work at startup incubators like the people that work in these environments are generally considered to be like in the upper echelon of business success right people that have exited people that have done incredible things that allows them to like work 10 hours a week just because they enjoy working with entrepreneurs but they're sitting on 10 million 20 million 50 million dollars from the last exit or whatever or they're working to start up as an early stage employee and help grow that company and then they exited and they had some equity and they cashed out like those people aren't doing that stuff I know the type of entrepreneur you're referring to they're not doing that stuff they're not showing their car they don't care they have nice ass cars they have a super nice house but they're not showing that stuff on Instagram because when you when you speak with them what they're teaching you you instantly know what level they've operated at and they can probably speak to operating at various levels of an organization of a company of building a business right they can speak to when it first started out how to bootstrap how to even hire like you know part-time contractors how to scale how to look for funding how to grow a sales team how to grow a marketing you know marketing organization all the different pain points that they've gone through as they've grown their company and then you can really understand if they've been successful and they start speaking about you know best practices for negotiating with potential investors or how to exit or if they've ever gone publicly gone through that process or gone through an acquisition they'll built the things they'll speak about will be much different than the person who has Lamborghini's on Instagram so it's an entirely different conversation but the second you have a conversation with both you'll understand why the person who is not flashy who has success and who is associated with a network of venture capitalists investors or or people that like to work with startups usually that's that's generally like the sexy place where you know x x employees or x founders like to work it's a very different conversation in somebody who is like a sales coach or a marketing coach on on social for example so yeah it's not it's not great it's I don't like when personal branding goes that far and I think that's the only way they sell themselves because what's the one what's the one differentiator between somebody who is very rich very wealthy and very successful actually successful versus somebody who isn't it's they're using they're using social media in in the in a negative way in a wrong way to sell themselves so you know you can't stop them yeah but I like the I like to phrase it's personal branding and steroids I like that one it is it's like if you if you you know don't do what they're doing but if you did like 50% of that and you used it to evangelize your company that would be like a good use of person of social media right like if you were just not the not the luxury stuff but if you were posting constantly if you were talking about the products or the services or the or the types of pains your customer or your company solves and you just continuously put that stuff out and you you know it helps if you have if you're your charismatic it helps if you have a personality but if you don't that's fine too the the goal is to just continuously put stuff out there you can see how it works because the people that don't have experience in doing what they say they're doing are closing business and growing their business through social without experience so imagine if you actually do have experience and you're using social that way how incredible that could be for yourself or your business yeah 100% degree Scott so guys if you want to learn more from Scott you can listen to his podcast the success story podcast you're talking about success stories with other entrepreneurs dear so it's a great podcast if you guys want to follow him what is your favorite LinkedIn right yeah LinkedIn LinkedIn is where I you know that's where my that's where my tribes that but all of my social is it's at SD Clary and I'm trying to grow YouTube as well I put a lot of like business content so like education for sales marketing I have some again YouTube is all free so I have some other tutorials from like other individuals that I brought onto the channel as well so if you want just sales and marketing topics as well as of course all the podcasts are all on YouTube as well that that would be cool but it's also at SD Clary so that's awesome so we will put that all in the description so you guys have the direct links there is there anything you want to mention by the end of this episode Scott you know I think we we did like a full 360 we went from like marketing to to brand to enterprise to start-ups to social media to personal we did a lot yeah I told you usually we are doing around 30 minutes but with you I think I could talk around two more two more hours I'm sure I'm sure we could do that for a bit honestly yeah I think that we're we're kindred spirits and we we operate in the same spot in the same space so no nothing else added it was fun talk awesome thanks for being here today thanks for sharing all that insights all that great tips with me and the audience and yeah wish you all the best for the future man definitely let's stay in touch thanks yes hopefully guys you liked that episode and yeah if you want to follow him just do that you find all the links in the description and hopefully we'll be with us in the next episode does the span I wish you a great day bye bye