How This B2B Brand is Building Community

Have each department talk about what they care about each week. How do we get the employees to actually care about this? How do we get the executives to care about it? We attend their meetings and then turn their knowledge into content. And then they have that aha moment where they hire their VP through a LinkedIn inbounder. They close a large deal that comes to them through inbound. So they start doing it organically, then their employees do it organically. Creating that aha moment internally, culturally, at your team is what can create this, and that's free.

Exit. All right, Dan, good to see you. Glad to have you. You know, I don't know if you feel the force a little bit, but we got. We got Burlington, Vermont covered right now on this. On this podcast in. In Sass. I'm happy to have you here.

I'm so happy to be here. And, you know, to be, you know, the second most critically acclaimed community marketer in Burlington is something I take a lot of Pride in. Within B2B size. Go to market.

Maybe. Maybe there's opportunity you and me need to own. Like, we should start something. I think we're gonna need to start something and own something and really niche down and create a category here in Burlington for B2B SaaS. I think.

Let's do it. It's like, what would that be, the Burlington marketer story? It'd be like cold plunges and coffee while talking.

That'd be amazing. Do you want to do a coldplant instead? If instead of. And me can go do a cold punch and then lunch. I'm. I'm down. I got a lot to. To talk about first. Can you tell me how to say your last name? I've always wondered.

Oh, yeah. Shma.

Shma. Cool. All right, Dan Schmela is here. Dan, what is. You work for this company called Apollo? What is Apollo?

Yeah. So Apollo is one of a few companies right now that are vying for the title of, like, a unified go to market platform. Right. So the core of it is we have, you know, hundreds of millions of different, you know, points of data that. That allow people to reach out to their customers. You know, like emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn addresses, all kinds of stuff like that. And on top of this data, there's a suite of tools that allow you to engage with them. So the idea is that the future, it's not just like a static database of buyer contact information. It's a suite of tools that allows you to engage with them. And it's a lot of fun. I'm having A blast working here. Been here about 13 months.

Okay, so you've been there 13 months. Your role is VP of community. And that's an interesting role in that. Look, I'm a huge advocate of content and community. We're going to get into a lot of that stuff. There aren't a lot of SaaS, companies that I've seen at this stage who have a VP of community. Tell me about what you do, what your job is, Team structure, roles. People are going to be really interested in that. So I'd love to spend a couple minutes and dive in there.

Yeah, sure. So it was a similar role to the one I held at my last company that I was working at Chili Piper and Community. For me, I believe that there's a lot of these disparate brand efforts. Social media, customer marketing, events marketing, field marketing, pr, evangelism. And if they're united under one umbrella, which I call community, it allows them to work more seamlessly together. So that is what I manage. You know, all of those departments. I've got a team of four, they're all hiring right now to become managers and it's a lot of fun.

We can you go into that, that, that makeup again? So at Apollo you have community and then the functions that are under community or what?

Yeah, so customer marketing.

Okay.

Field marketing, events marketing, which is kind of the same as field marketing, evangelism, social media marketing. And then I kind of split responsibilities of PR with our, with our product marketing team.

Got it.

Cool.

And then like, who are your peer? Like, are there other VPs that manage marketing functions? Like, is there somebody that, that runs product marketing and demand gen?

Yeah, yeah. We have an incredible VP of Product Marketing, Halle Panaud. We have an incredible VP of content and customer education, Josh Garrison, our VP of Demand gen, Andrew Maddox. Amazing. And then my boss, the SVP of marketing, David Malpass, has kind of assembled this, this dream team on the marketing side.

All right, cool. So what I think is really cool about this team structure, and I want to call this out for people, because around exit 5 or just like in the, in the community or other people that ask questions, what, what you did. I'm taking notes, by the way, like, this is a made up team structure. It's made up like, and I think people obsess too much over, like, there's got to be this team and there's got to be this team and there's got to be this team when like, clearly you have a background in a bunch of these things. These functions are important for Apollo. Instead of like, splitting them up into six different teams. It's like, oh, let's call this community and have this roll into. We're going to bucket these things together and they're going to be aligned across those areas. Like, when I was at Drift in the early days of the company, I would spend a lot of time with David, who's the CEO of just like, let's just rethink the org structure here. And like, what are the. What do we need as a team? Oh, community. We got social. Like, I think it's interesting how this has come together. Is there like a recipe for this? Or am I kind of getting at something here where you're like, well, these are all things that are important to us. Let's put them together and manage them as one unit.

Yeah. I mean, at the last company I was at, our CEO Nicolas said something that I thought was really poignant that stuck with me. And, you know, I joined there. They were like, hey, we're hiring a community manager. I was like, I'll join, but I want to be your head of community. What he told me is that the way you increase your responsibility as a marketer and grow more, which a lot of people want. I'm not saying, hey, the job is to corporate climb or whatever, but think about, like, concentric circles of responsibility. So I'm the community manager at Chili Piper. I noticed the social media wasn't popping, so I just started doing it. You know, that's one circle adjacent to community. And I actually feel that maybe we should talk about this. Like, what's the definition of community? But eventually, like, these circles kept expanding upon each other to the point where I applied to Apollo. They're like, what do you do? And I'm like, well, I do a lot. You know, I was also managing the content team at Chili Piper towards the end, but we have an incredible content team at Apollo, so it kind of just naturally made sense for me to do this. But I'm curious, Dave. Dave, you know, because community, it's thrown around all the time. How do you define community? You know, knowing there's no one. Right answer.

Yeah, I think we're probably. From what I can tell about you and you mentioned content, I think there's also a world where, like, this role, community, could also own content. Clearly, in this case, there's already someone great there. And it's like, why? Why blow that up? Like, I think you could definitely own that. For me, I think of Community as it's all of the channel. It's basically you're trying to, you're trying to pull together, you're trying to create content and rally people around a shared interest as it relates to your brand. And I don't have a, I'm, I don't have a course to sell or I haven't, I don't have a framework on this. So I don't have like a perfectly clean definition. If I spent a, if I spent two days, you know, jamming on this, I'm sure I could come up with like my XYZ methodology for this. But I see it as you have it set up actually at, at Apollo, which is like there's all of these non direct response channels that really matter. And so for me, it all comes back to brand. And brand is, you have a logo, you have colors, you have design, but a brand is your reputation and a commute. And community is like, where are all the places that your potential customers hang out online and how can you do good marketing to them? And to me, good marketing is content. And the days of content marketing and marketing are over. Like, content is the best marketing channel. And so I like the idea of like putting them all together. Now. There's also a community in that. Like I have exit 5, which is a behind a paywall community. You all don't have something like that. You don't have to have something like that. And in fact, we do.

Actually, I forgot to mention also I, I always, I always mix up my definition of what I do because under those buckets there's also Community, which sits under Community, which is our customer advisory board and our, our Slack group, which is now about 3,000 members.

But I'll give you an example. So when I was at Drift, as an example, we had a strong community without a community, right?

Yeah, the message board, right, where people would ask questions about products and then someone from Drift would reply and answer those. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, but we didn't have that. Like, I'm not talking about that. We didn't have that. We had a strong community in the sense of like, we had fans and followers and people in marketing that were like following our content and subscribing to our stuff. And so like, the way that I think about community is that is are there people in your ICP who are like following you on LinkedIn, subscribing to your newsletter, listening to your podcast, showing up at your events? We had all of those. We had probably thousands and thousands of people in that bucket before we ever had a. And hey, go to this message board. And ask questions type of place. Right. What's your definition?

Yeah. So firstly, this is one of the things we've never really met before, but as this podcast goes on, I might reveal how closely I've been following your work, particularly at Drift. Like, there's a lot of talk of takeovers. Right. Everyone doing these takeovers.

Yeah.

You were the first, right?

Yeah.

Like, you had everyone record a video.

Yes.

About something and they'd all post it. So I want to get back to that because I've been. I've been wanting to learn about this from the horses.

I'm making a note. I'll make. Let's talk about community. I'm making a note of takeovers, because we'll hear about yours and I'll tell you about where that came from.

Okay. So for me, the definition of community is a space, either physical or digital, where people who aren't explicitly paid to do so freely exchange knowledge and information united by an idea, a product, or something they want to jointly advocate for. And that seems to kind of align with what. What you described as. Well, and there's 100 little caveats we can add, but that's it for me. So it could be LinkedIn, it could be in person events, it could be the comment section of a blog. You know, it could be a bunch of stuff.

Yeah. And what do you think the key to being good at that or doing it successfully is? And I'm going to lead the witness a little bit here in that you can't be. The way to do it is to not. I see a lot of companies that try to do this and they immediately go to, like, the specific use case of their product. What's your perspective? Like, how do you be good at that?

Yeah, I mean, in short, I think the answer is it varies. But I've often found that marketers get a lot too fancy with the way we try and figure out how to market to people. Like, let's do all this testing and then we'll read 10 books and then we'll do this and that. Like, the best way is just to ask them. So every time I try to build a community, I ask people, like, what does community mean to you? Like, where do you want to hang out? Where can we support you? So I'd say if there was one key to doing community well, it would be seeking to understand those around you and then deliver things that are of value to them outside of the context of a feature for your product. And sometimes it is a feature as well, but it's. But that's definitely, that's not the whole picture. There's more there to building community than having a great product.

How do you measure this?

Measure community?

How do you know if it's working?

I, I have like somewhat of community privilege, right, because, you know, at Chili Piper I joined and we started building this community stuff and then the brand like exploded. And you know, we do surveying and like 70% of people said they heard of us first through an event, social media or a community. So we didn't even really need that much direct attribution because we had directional attribution. And the same thing happened at Apollo. You know, I can't get into the numbers, but we've had a pretty amazing. Last year, you know, we raised $100 million, reached a valuation of more than $1 billion. And the, the share of voice in our reach just from a sheer impression impressions perspective has increased thousands of percent. Like when I joined, we were getting about 40,000 impressions a month. Now we're reaching millions of people organically every month.

So you can look, is that linked through LinkedIn specifically or all.

Mostly it's through LinkedIn. Like I was asked once, am I over indexing on LinkedIn? Maybe, but it's working, right? Like all the buyers are on LinkedIn for a go to market, you know, go to market company. So yeah, it's not just the company page, it's all the assets, right? So for me, kind of building community is somewhat about acquiring different distribution points for your brand, right? Like you can build a community around your employees and then your employees are sharing content. So, you know, we drove the company page, LinkedIn impressions from 40,000 per month to about 750,000 per month. But then we added 100 distribution points on top of that. I'm posting, you know, Zoe Hartsfield on our team is posting, Medjooli's posting. We have all these customers who post and when they do, we create feedback loops around that so they feel great about it and they want to do it again. You know, we're partnering with folks like you, we're partnering with other folks in the space. You know, it kind of takes an army.

Well, so somebody, most likely another executive, asked about, are you over indexed on LinkedIn? And I think your answer is probably right, maybe. However, the catch to any of these things is it's almost better to. Even though it make. Even though the business people don't like it because it seems risky, right? All your eggs in one, in one basket. That kind of is the only way to grow, though. You have to pick like one channel and really go hard on that channel, especially if you know it's the one. I've multiple times made the mistake of being like, let's do LinkedIn and YouTube and YouTube shorts and Instagram and TikTok and Twitter. And it's like, well, all of those channels become okay. Where I'd much rather see a company do like, none of those other things, go really hard on LinkedIn and have that be like the number one channel for the brand. I think we saw this with like, Gong was a great example of this. In the earlier days, obviously you did a bunch of work. Drift, Drift or Chili Piper did a great job. And now you're seeing this with Apollo. And so I, it's, it's almost like, yes, that's part of the risk. It's almost the same question as like, well, what about, what about having all these employees right on LinkedIn and build their brands and what if they leave? Which is a whole conversation that I. Drives me nuts. But it's kind of like that is the risk that you have to take in order to build there, because you need to pick one channel and be great at it.

Yeah, I feel the same. And also like, I feel like the work that, that marketers should do and the work that managers should assign their team, it's at the intersection of what's easy, what helps the business, what they're good at, what develops the skills they want, what's visible. And then I forget the other criteria. But I had seven. But it's like when I came into Chile, came into Apollo, I was fortunate that some of the best folks I'd worked with at Chili Piper, our head of social media and our head of customer marketing reached out to me and said, hey, can I, can I join as well? And, you know, they've been the key behind a lot of my success at these last two companies. So we came in with an existing playbook we knew we could execute, took the path of least resistance to the most gains. And that meant doing a playbook we'd done before, but better this time. And that playbook was written on LinkedIn. So certainly we're doing fun stuff with these other platforms now with TikTok, with in person events, with podcasts. But if you know you can get wins in an area like, go out and get those wins.

Yeah, but don't you think those other things come secondary? It's like you, you start with one channel like LinkedIn and you have success and you start to figure out what, what works and then you might find the Playbook for what's going to work on TikTok based on what you've already been writing about on LinkedIn, it's that feedback loop that's going to tell you what to go and create on these other channels, right?

Yeah. I think for us, strategy outside was secondary to LinkedIn, like, focusing on the other channels. But there was something that LinkedIn was secondary to, which is like, where is the customer? Right. And what's influencing them? So I would say there is a step before LinkedIn, which is like, I call it building an influence map. So you reach out to your customers and you say, you know, what podcast do you follow? What social media platforms are you in? Who do you respect the most on social? What events are you attending? And from there, you can build this map of influence. And then the question becomes, how do I deploy the customer voice to those spaces for us after asking those questions? And I also honestly knew, like, I did the research anyway when I joined Apollo, but I already knew everyone's on LinkedIn, so the answer becomes, oh, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. Okay, how do we reach those folks? It's not just going to be through our company page. It's going to be through building relationships with those people that they respect. So I agree. If you're going to do something, do it really well. And everything else is secondary. There's this book, Essentialism, that's awesome about it. Have you ever read Essentialism? Yeah.

Greg. Greg McCown. McCune.

Yeah. Yeah. For the. For the audio listeners, just imagine a circle with a hundred arrows coming out that go one inch, and then another circle with one arrow that goes a mile. And that's Essentialism, where it's much easier to stand out and do a good job. When you have a defined kind of goal, then you do that, and it's kind of like the concentric circles. You've done great on LinkedIn. Now you expand it to one thing beyond that, leaning on your existing playbook and in some cases, repurposing the same content you use from one platform, but adjusted for another algorithm.

Yeah, so. So now I kind of stumbled my way into building this business that is Exit 5. And it's basically entirely built on that playbook, which is the podcast episode becomes the newsletter topic. The newsletter topic becomes LinkedIn content. LinkedIn content becomes a webinar. A webinar becomes like a content series. And when you're in the middle of all these things, it becomes so easy to see. This is where, like, content and social Media, if you know how to do it right, is such a competitive advantage. Because, like, I could go write a LinkedIn, like, I could get off this call with you today and I'm scribbling a bunch of notes down and I'm like, oh, Dan really said this. He said this interesting thing about his definition for community, right? I could take that and I could write it in a LinkedIn post and that LinkedIn post could blow up and it could be like the most comments and responses this week and I'm like, huh, out of all the things I posted this week, that was the most interesting one. There's something here I could then take. Take that and we could write, we could take that copy, edit it, rewrite it, reformat it, write it a little bit better, punch it up. That could be next week's newsletter topic. I send out the newsletter, we get hundreds of responses to that newsletter. I'm like, shit, there really is a big topic here. Oh, maybe we should have Dan back on and we should do a webinar in June about how to build community at a B2B SaaS company. Like, I think this, this is how this stuff works, right? And this is, this is how, this is the hard part about, like, it's hard to explain that to the CEO, to the cfo, to the other executives of the team, but when you work at a company or have a business where you really get social media and you can have this feedback mechanism and you can create this flywheel, it is such an advantage. And so to your point earlier, I don't know much about ABM. I don't know much about MQLs, SEO, PPC. Take all the acronyms, all the B2B marketing. Like, I'm, I'm not Chris Walker. I'm not these like hardcore demand gen marketers that you see on LinkedIn. I'm really good at the storytelling, I'm really good at the content, I'm really good at the social media part. And that has given me a lot to work with to help B2B SaaS companies be successful. And I just wanted to call that out because that this is the fun, this is a path for a lot of people that I don't see enough talking about. B2B marketing does not have to mean you obsess over MQL conversion rates. That's definitely one path for the more analytical funnel marketer. But I think there's this whole other world around content and creative that's really fun and exciting. And I think this is the world that you're in also.

It is. And honestly, I feel so lucky to be in this world. You know, when I, when I was going through college and I ended up dropping out people, my mom was like, how are you going to work when you can only do the things you're passionate about? But honestly, I feel like that has been a hack for me because I'm able to be passionate about the work I do. I just do fun stuff like we, we build relationships, we do events. I don't worry too much about setting up like inbound lead flows or like marketing operations. That's such a hard job. I'm not going to try and be a master in that. I would rather just build a brand. So the best marketing operations people in the world want to come and support me in that way. But it's really fun and I think when you enjoy your work, you can pass that joy on to those on the teams that you serve. And I really think a team that's genuinely excited to go to work like medially. Our social media manager and I, we have so much fun each week thinking about the different unique ways we're going to say things. And that's not something I'd want to compete with. I think it shows why Apollo's doing so well. And the only other thing I want to touch on there is yeah, like I do believe and I feel really lucky to have a strong partnership with our content team. But it's like the future of content marketing is almost social media and community marketing because you don't create content. A lot of content marketers do this. They're like, I created the content, now SEO will drive people towards it or whatever. But like if you take a community marketing approach, you can take one piece of content, turn it into 50 pieces of content and distribute each of those 50 pieces three different ways. Now you have 150 distribution points for one piece of content. So each of those distribution points could get like 1,000 impressions and you're still guaranteed to have 150,000 impressions on this content. So that's part of the reason why I do see several departments uniting together under the community umbrella in the future.

Yeah. And that doesn't take away from SEO. You can still do SEO, but I just don't think it has to be that that is not the only way. That's just like a track of content that you also need to do. And so, you know, I don't mean to. There's a lot of people that are in the demand gen world and that is what it's just like everybody has their strengths, everybody has their unique abilities. Mine are on the storytelling content side. Some people, like I was not a math and finance and analytical kid or person growing up and I think I'm seeing that play out into business and I love the B2B marketing stuff for, for that, for that reason. Now I do think it's very important to have that partner. And I'm sure there's somebody at Apollo that is that person for you. For me, I've always had a, a peer or a co worker or a partner that's been like the, you know, we've been the, the, the thunder and lightning or what, whatever the, whatever the two opposites are. And like when you pair those things together, man, that's how you really have something powerful. When you have strong brand content community plus strong funnel demand gen marketer. When you put those two things together, that's how you really, you really work well together.

Yeah, I feel so strongly about that because. And modern technologies change this a lot. Right? You can have a drift or a Chili Piper and then I can do something that goes viral on LinkedIn and then if that's set up correctly, that'll result in qualified meetings. Right. On a calendar of an ae or you have a PLG model and you can go viral. Like our best, like signups period over the last year wasn't when we raised $100 million. It was actually when we got attacked by one of our main competitors who accused us of having fake evangelism. And then like a hundred customers were like, I love Apollo and they didn't pay me to do this, I swear. And that was our best ever day for signups. So if you have a structure like that, to some extent, you can survive off inbound. But if you don't have the adults in the room who like, you know, no math, know the technical, know how of that, you'll just create brand noise in a vacuum and it won't translate towards revenue. That's part of the reason I'm so glad to be at Apollo, because, you know, we have this amazing PLG flow where someone can watch your podcast right now, go to Apollo I.O. sign up for the tool without inputting a credit card. But in other companies, maybe they're more transactional, maybe with higher ACV sales demand gen, they're a bottleneck in that. And that's something to be embraced. Like you sometimes need AES to take meetings as you move further up. So if you don't have a strong partnership, not only in demand gen, but in sales then you might find that you're doing everything right, but it's not getting results. Community in a vacuum I think is really difficult.

Also you should be like the best partner to demand gen. So if there's like a camp, if they're trying to do a campaign, if some funnel specific campaign, if you have someone like a Dan. Like a Dan and what you're doing in your world or my background. Right. Who's going to know better which message and which content is going to land and then that's what you're going to figure out what to go spend money and put behind instead of just like demand gen Guessing it's like, hold on, we have thousands and thousands of data points because of what we've been doing organically. I don't have a spreadsheet on this, but I could tell you and I guarantee you could do the same thing. You and your team. What are the, what are the top two or three things that people care about right now? I can tell you because I'm in the comments all day. I read this stuff all day. I'm there. You get that piece of data. All right, let's go back to. Oh, this is. I had one follow up. You mentioned measuring share of voice. Is that something that you do and how do you do that?

Yeah. So Apollo has an incredible research team and it's just awesome. It's led by Anthony who's basically a PhD professor turned.

This is like an internal, this is an internal internal team.

Eight people. Eight people. Yeah. And it's, it's run by this like professor mad scientist guy. So basically we'll use sprig surveys or different things like that to determine share of voice and you can survey your close one customers for that. But you also can look in different things like you know, different reports like Forester Wave, you know, they'll do some of that stuff for you. You can look on G2 to see share of voice, how much you're being searched versus your competitors. And I don't have the exact data on how much our share of voice has increased, but we know it has and it filters not only through. Great marketing isn't just a demand gen thing, it's a customer retention thing. It's a customer education thing. It's a talent recruiting thing. Like hundreds of thousands of people applied to work at Apollo over the last year. That did not happen the year before. And a similar thing happened at Chili Piper. So like great brand is so much more. It really touches every aspect of your business.

Got it. And so the, the share of voices. It's also easier to measure when you have a clearly defined space that you're in. I think you can clearly name a couple competitors and then you can look at, you know, how, how you've grown compared to them. You mentioned talent and recruiting. Man. If this isn't like the most un, untalked about piece of LinkedIn that I think people don't understand is like what the, the vanity metrics, isn't it? Egomaniacs who write on LinkedIn, blah, blah. Talk to any company who has had a successful LinkedIn strategy and ask them what it's done from an employment brand perspective. Like, how does Apollo or Chili Piper or Drift or Gong. How do you find, how do you get top talent? You post that you have a job opening. Like, imagine being able to do that and have the hiring manager post like, hey, we're hiring for this role. Like, you know, your DMs are going to blow up. That is something that a company who doesn't have a presence there, they, they're not able to do that.

Yeah. And it's like the, the best talent in the world, they can choose where they want to go. And in some cases, like having a brand that will uplift the people who join there just through association with the brand is a selling point. So, you know, I've successfully, I don't get any commission for it, you know, not yet. No. I'm just kidding. But I've successfully referred nine employees that are full time at a.

Well, you do. It's just called equity and hopefully, hopefully it comes down the right.

Yeah. And it's like, that's a great way to stack the deck. Right. Two of our highest performing AES this month, both were my referrals. And then I also try and refer people who want to create brand. Like Brendan Short is this incredible technologist in this space. He's amazing and he's running a really core part of our marketing team now. He also has 30,000 followers. He posts a lot on social. So it's like if you recruit, you can create this flywheel where people who are at the intersection of being excellent and creating brand in public want to join your company and that compounds upon itself. The other thing that's really powerful from a recruiting perspective is the voices that you showcase. Right. People inherently want to work with people who look similar to themselves and seem successful. This is something J.R. williams told me, which is really great. Like you want to work somewhere, you want to see someone who looks like you and is successful and Supportive. So actually brands can showcase more women on their page and more women will apply at Chili Piper. We did this thing on TikTok where we would just point like chili papers hiring remote throughout the world. Apply now. No gender pay gap. The race, gender and location of the person applying would match the person we showcased. And this ended up being showcased in Forbes because 8,000 people applied and we ended up hiring our head of cybersecurity through TikTok. But we even could to the point where we put like a scarf on that had a Brazilian flag on it because we wanted to hire people in Brazil. And it's like, what do you know? We showcase a video of one of our successful SDR leaders who's a woman in Brazil with a Brazilian flag, and everyone who applies is a Brazilian woman. So, like, I think that the power of social media and brand for recruiting is not only like uplifts everyone, but you can use it to hit. Hit goals to make your company more diverse as well.

Yeah. I mean, especially if you have a diverse team. That is the best recruiting tool that you're going to have. Right?

Right.

Unless you have very pale, white, bald male Dave in all your videos, then you're. Then you're screwed. It is what it is. I can't.

We're just two guys from Vermont right now. So, you know, I think we need to. That's why it's important. You know, you talked about when employees leave, and I think about this a lot, like, how do you build a brand that's stronger than any one person? And I think it's like, it can't be about any one person. Right. Like, when I thought of Drift, I didn't just think of Dave, although I did think of Dave primarily. You created a process where you empowered dozens, hundreds of people within your company to create content authentically. And that's kind of where the sweet spot happens.

Yeah. I think there is another side of that, though. I think, you know, even if a brand does become associated with somebody.

That.

Brand gets to benefit from that for. For that time period. Like you, you get in, you create an outsized advantage and so does it. Is it going to last? Fore this actually came up, I did a thing with Refine Labs and Chris Walker and he had a great question about just like, you know, what happens? Somebody asked like, yeah, I believe in this LinkedIn approach, but what happens if somebody leaves? And Chris had a great point. He was like, pay them more. Incentivize them, because their value to the company has now changed. Right. And so you hired this person, they started writing, you know, they're a great fit for your ideal customers. They start sharing content on LinkedIn. They're driving awareness and pipeline for your company, and you're going to keep their compensation the exact same and not, you know, treat them, you know, like they're adding more value to their business. Then of course they're going to leave. And so I think there's a. It's an interesting thing there. And anyway, I love this topic of LinkedIn and I think one thing that we wanted to come back to was this idea of takeovers. But here my segue into takeovers is. I think what I don't like about LinkedIn, though, is what attracted me to you all at Apollo. You're doing it your own way. You are aware of that. This is 2024. You're not just taking the. Oh, I saw the Drift playbook from. That was 2017. That was seven years ago. Like, so good, though. Okay.

So good.

It was great. But, but I think what you all just did is great. And it's like you have to, you have to find what, what, what can work for you now. And so, like, I think you, like, if anything, the best advice is going to be like, commit to doing stuff on these platforms and use your own brain and figure out what's working for you and try to develop a strategy. So let's talk about. I'm happy to talk about takeovers with you now.

Yeah. So how did you get. So I watched Drift super closely. Yeah. And like, really closely. And you keep saying that.

I'm like, freaked out now. No, no, really closely, man.

Look outside your window right now.

Like, right, really close. Closely. I'm actually your neighbor.

Have I seen your podcasts? Yes. Through binoculars. Just kidding.

Yeah, you're like, I usually have a side view of this podcast.

Yeah. So basically LinkedIn, a lot of social media marketing and takeovers, is chasing the algorithm. And I want you to tell me, if you can, about this thing where all of a sudden everyone from Drift would record like a one minute video and then I'll tell you how that inspired me. And we've done five iterations of that since then and changed it each time.

All right, so LinkedIn, this was about 2016. David Cancel, who was the CEO of Drift, my, My boss, my mentor at the company. Right. He noticed that writing on LinkedIn. So we were early on at the company, they had no, they had no customers. They had no, they had like small customers, which is very early brand. But what they had was when I joined they had a well known founder. David had probably 50 to 100,000 followers on Twitter. He had a lot of. Medium was huge at the time. He had a ton of readers on Medium and it's actually what led to us starting this podcast seeking wisdom where we didn't really have the right message and product to sell yet, but we had a brand. And so we wanted to build the founders. We wanted to build like build up David's brand. That was like the first bet to, to grow the company. It's like you join a new company, you look at the ingredients, you're like, oh wow, there's something huge here. Like let's, let's build on this. And so as we moved to B, as we moved into B2B, initially the company was focused on the consumer side. As we moved into B2B, we started to notice that when we wrote on LinkedIn, when we posted on LinkedIn, very similar to what we were doing on Twitter, the numbers were like skyrocketing. And so this was like late 2016, early 2017. Writing on LinkedIn, we would get hundreds of thousands of views for like pretty regular types of regular posts. And so at that time it was very clear that LinkedIn was shifting from this older platform, which was just a Rolodex, like, oh, Dan and I met today. I'm gonna send you a connection request and nice to meet you Dan. You know, see you around. And that's how LinkedIn worked. It was very clear that LinkedIn was shifting to a content platform. So David had this idea of like, let's go hard on LinkedIn. Like this is where our buyers are. Let's own, like we're the only people doing this. Let's go hard. We actually had.

They launched a video feature.

Then they launched video feature, right? So I'll get there. So we had, he had, he had this idea of like, let's make a list of our top 500 to a thousand, 000 customers and let's go and connect with all of them on LinkedIn. And so we had like a VA or some data service, I don't know, probably that other one of your competitors at the time. We used to get the data and we, we literally did that. And so there, there's like a limit. You can only connect with so many people. So for like two months we sat next to each other and every day we'd go and connect with 50 to 100 people in our target market. And because we were, you know, marketing manager, CEO, real person, real company, he had some cachet as a, as a founder, like, multiple successful exits. I don't know the math on it, but I would say that like 80% of those people accepted our connection requests. And what that means is down. They, they opted in to see our content. Okay, so then we start posting more people see our content. LinkedIn announces video lesson number one. Any new, any new channel in social media, try it. It might not work, but go. Because they often give an over. They give it. They overweight something new. And so LinkedIn launches video. LinkedIn launches video. Everyone else is like, oh, LinkedIn, I'm not going to post a video on LinkedIn. We were like, fuck, yeah, we're going to post videos on LinkedIn. Let's see how it worked. I would record a video of myself walking to work sharing like, hey, two things on my mind about marketing today, blah, blah. That video would have like 100,000 views and I had like 20,000 followers. It just made no sense. So the engagement was insane. We decided that.

And, and on that. There are just two things on that. As we keep going, there are two things that are brilliant about it. Like, one is, you've probably seen this in LinkedIn. Your recent connection just made a post. So by connecting with these customers and then creating a regular ferment of activity, it's like a megaphone to your new connections who are customers. And then the second thing on the feature, I think about that constantly. What I like to think about, and if you're a social media marketer, I would encourage you to think about this is what, like, there's a meeting at LinkedIn right now where the product people are talking to the engineering people and they're like, this is the feature we really want. This is the behavior we want our users to take. Take that behavior early when they bring in new features and you'll get rewarded to it because your actions align with the actions that are desired by the product people running LinkedIn. So I, I just.

Yeah, or for, for any, for any channel. Right. Like YouTube releases, shorts. Like, the people who are there, you're just gonna, you're just gonna link, learn. So anyway, we, we were getting like crazy results and what, what we were doing because we were going outbound and like connecting with people. The people who were watching our content wasn't like just Joe Schmo, like, random person. This is like we're connecting with like the CMO at Adobe.

Yeah.

You know, and then like the sales team would be like, hey, Dave, I see you're connected to the, you know, VP of marketing. @ whatever company. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know this person, but they're. We're connected. And, and. And we can share content. So we see this channel every month. We did something called a marketable moment. So we tried to do it. We did not try to. We did a product launch or a marketing launch, some type of launch the first Tuesday of every month for two years. We did this. We did this because we had the belief and we saw it firsthand that like marketing and launches, we can create our own momentum. We don't need Gartner. We don't need to wait to be featured in a Gartner report. We don't need to wait till the G2 ratings and reviews come out. We don't need to wait even for the product team to ship some big feature. We had a culture of like, we're going to drive momentum. And so the product team did ship really fast. And so we often did have. We. We did an announcement, and it was something that was related to our core, our. Our strategic narrative. So it wasn't like a random feature. It was like every month we want to be beating the drum, like, with a new launch as it relates to our strategy. And we decided that, hey, for this launch, I think it was like maybe our email product that we launched this, we did with video. We said, let's get. Let's see how many. If this is working with just David and I and a couple other people posting. Like, imagine we had a hundred people inside of the company post on this day. Now, here's the biggest secret ingredient, and you all have this at Apollo right now, the way that we got people to post was because people loved the company. They loved working there. They felt like they were part of something bigger. We had momentum. Everybody was excited. Everybody was bought in. There wasn't a trick. We didn't incentivize. Anybody wanted to do this because they saw our results from LinkedIn and they were like, yeah, I can see how if I did this. And so we had something called show and Tell. Every Friday, each team would present what they're working on. I presented on the show and Tell Friday, and I said, hey, on Tuesday, we have this big product launch. We got everybody excited about it. And we're like, and we need your help. And we showed them by saying, like, look at how much business and results we've been driving from LinkedIn. On Tuesday, we're going to ask if you want. It's not a requirement. I want everybody to share a video. It'd be awesome if 100 people did this. And we're gonna ask you to share a video. Here's a couple of ideas. We'll send this all out. So we sent people out instructions. We send them a script. We said, no pressure, dudes, but if you could record like a less than one minute video about how we're launching Drift email today, why it's interesting, why it matters for customers. And like, lo and behold, on that morning, we had engineers, designers, product marketers, finance people, the lawyer, everybody posted videos, and it just took over the feed, and we drove hundreds of thousands of. Of visitors that day. And if, if some. If I still had access to the. The website analytics, I'm sure you could go back and we could see that that was a. A huge spike on that day. And that's how that whole thing came together.

It was so cool. Yeah. So we're watching that. Yeah. So it's good to hear the, the, the kind of details behind it. I've always wanted to ask you this because, like, brands don't just come out of nowhere without specific tactics and specific people like you who encourage them to try those tactics. And when they do come out of nowhere, those tactics are often new and innovative. So we saw that at Chili Piper, and I was like, okay, how do we do this? So we started small. We did a small takeover with text, and I was like, how do we make this cooler? We raised Series D or Series B, series B round. We created a video. We had everyone post that video. It blew up. They all posted the same video. Then LinkedIn released something where if people produce the same video, they're gonna cut the engagement for the subsequent reaches of that video. So then we're like, okay, let's edit the first five seconds of the video for each person and then send it out. And it's this constant battle between the algorithm and the people trying to get tons of gains. Now they're doing the same things with photos, right? If everyone shares the same photo from a company, they'll. They'll cut the reach on it. So it became, how do we. How do we do a takeover each month? All right, how do we do it each week? Okay, each week is, Is a lot. How do we have each department talk about what they care about each week? Okay, how do we get the employees to actually care about this? All right, let's get the executives to care about it. How do we get the executives to care about it? We attend their meetings and then turn their knowledge into content. And then they have that aha moment where they hire their VP through a LinkedIn inbounder. They close a large deal that comes to them through inbound. So they start doing it organically, then their employees do it organically, then their employees. Employees do it. And it's almost like with a product like Apollo, for example, the aha moment is when somebody, you know has a contact in the database, and they use engagement to reach out to that contact, and they book a meeting. Like, after they've done that, they are, like, gonna retain, because it's like, wow, it's so easy to have your contact database and your engagement suite in the same place versus, like, going from Zoom info to outreach or whatever. When it's all in one place, it's so much easier. Like, creating that aha moment internally, culturally, at your team is what can create this, and that's free. And the other thing is, it's really hard to track attribution from these takeovers. So it takes a certain leader to understand it. But what's nice is marketers are so blinded by marketing attribution now. And I know the marketers who are speaking, maybe not you who are listening, but a lot of. A lot of them are like, the CFO is like, what's the result of you sending this one guy a pizza? You know, it's like, well, I don't have the ROI on that. But when you operate in spaces where the ROI is a little bit less trackable, there's less competition there, and that allows you to get outsized gains. So I just want to let you know, like, I think Chili Piper gets a lot of credit for these takeovers. And you see our competitors, like, ZoomInfo copying our takeovers, but it's not really copying. Like. Like, all marketing, I think, is. Is inspiration from past marketing. Not all of it, but a lot of it. And it's just fun to see. Like, maybe you didn't know that the legacy of that was Chili Piper doing takeovers, and the legacy of that was Apollo doing takeovers. And the legacy of that is all of Apollo's competitors copying us to do takeovers. So I want to make sure you knew that, because I love that there's.

You know, I think it's worth saying that there's people who hate, hate, hate you at the same time for doing that. And we had plenty of people who were like, g drift always in my LinkedIn feed. And that is what it is. But if you're going to reach that many people, of course some people are going to not like that. And they. They. You know that that's just the cost of, the cost of doing business, right?

Yeah. It's like, oh, well, I'm sorry you hate my marketing that you're talking about right now and you're thinking about and it's in your mind all the time time. Like, I just think maybe I'd rather, you know, about us.

If you work in marketing or if you have a business, you have to admit to yourself that marketing is a game of attention. And I think there is a group of, there's a group out there that is, doesn't want to play that game. And that's totally, that's totally fine. But typically if I'm working at a company and I want to generate business results for them, like, then you got to play the game. Now there's different ways to play the game. You don't have to play the attention game in a slimy skeezy way. Right. There's a car dealership downtown and they're running a sale and there's a guy standing on the street corner doing flips in a ridiculous costume. Like, you don't have to play that game, but you can find ways to hijack that attention and, and work it in your favor. And I think that's an example of what, what something like the LinkedIn takeover can do. I also just, just to under. I think it's really important to underscore that the reason these work, if this was a company where the employees all hated the company, no one believed in the vision. One was like, ugh, this is so embarrassing. My employer's asking me to post on LinkedIn, then it's never going to work. You have to have the right culture. And I think you, you, you can tell if something like this would be successful or not. And I think it was a no brainer to do it at drift. Based on what I've seen externally from just how many people I see from Apollo posting, of course this was going to work. You all had a. So your play was tell me about the idea for this job change takeover. I saw the first one and I'm like, what the heck is this guy doing?

It's so funny. So like I feel really lucky to just have such an incredible team that I support and they support me. And like I said, you know, Medjooli, Taylor and I all came from Chili Piper together, so we kind of had some of those playbooks. But sometimes the CEO, like I've never met a CEO who's not like crazy like straight up. And I say that in the nicest Way like they're all like all the top performing CEOs are just on a different level. So Nicola, our CEO is like, I want to do something on April Fool's Day where we'll all change our title to, to include Piper something. So you know, I was like the drum Piper or like the audio Piper for the Migos or whatever. And we did this thing and then we also released this report where one of our recruiters became the CEO. She's like, I'm changing my title to CEO Piper. Things are going to change around here. It's this fake press release. And what happened was it generated a huge amount of buzz and that resulted in web traffic. So that was the first instance of that on April Fool's Day. Then Rippling did it. They changed everyone, changed their title to recruiter. Now there's someone on our team named Nam who's on Demand gen. We were talking about ways to boost MQLS towards in a certain time period. It's like we need MQLs. These two. He said, hey, Rippling did this thing. It was our best day ever. And then it becomes from that like you did the takeovers with video. So how do we make it unique in ours? So at the same time we were also trying to do more Persona based stuff because Apollo was basically seen as a sales team. But Apollo is actually super relevant to a bunch of teams like Revops. You know, we have inbound lead routing, we have calendaring, we have data cleansing stuff like marketing, we have have data deduplication, we have enrichment, you know, a data health center, contact based list building form shortening, form enrichment, all this stuff. But people primarily saw us as a sales team so said hey, what if we changed our title every day for a week to be like the best friend of sales? And then people say, oh, this is another version of the takeover we've seen before. But the next day we change it again. Best friend marketing, best friend CEO, best friend rev ops. By the end, some people got kind of annoyed. But we reached reached. We reached millions of people with zero spend. And it's like I feel like the best marketing might ruffle some feathers, but that means that you've already reached millions of people. So that's kind of how that came about. And sometimes you just need to be crazy enough to do it. Like, hey, I like this idea of changing the job titles once. What if we did it five times right? Everyone around me was like, are you sure? I don't know. But that's part of why it's so great. To have a culture, especially as a manager, where people around you are able to take risks and make mistakes, because it's like a fear of failure. And not having the psychological safety to fail is one of the top things that stifles innovation. So I feel very grateful to have that support from my boss, David Malpass, and pass that on to the team that I serve where they're like, what if we did this crazy thing? I don't know. Maybe it'll work, maybe not. Let's try it. Let's talk about.

Talk about that for a second. Just as a. As a boss, as a. As a manager. You're a boss. How do you. How do you give your team that psychological safety? Something that I struggle with is like, how do you. If someone pitches you an idea and the idea is like, okay, it's not. I don't love it, but I want to give you the freedom to try it. Like, how do you create that space for somebody to do that and realize that, like, yeah, there's multiple ways that this can work? It doesn't always I have to be my way, but sometimes I just have a reaction to something and I'm like, ah, I don't like that. But then I'm like, but should I have let them do that just because, like, you need to let somebody do that? You know what I'm getting? You know I'm getting.

I know what you're getting at. And it's something I struggle with as well, because sometimes. And I think you have this too. Like, we'll have an instinct about something but not know how to. That won't work because of this.

Yeah, I just don't. I don't know why.

Yeah, like, I had this thing for a long time where it's like, everything is good because there's a lot of marketers who create content that's highly relatable and highly engaging, where it's like getting hung up on for the 50th time as an SDR. And everyone's like, ah, I resonate with that. And I don't like that because I like. I just find that there's something incredible about positivity combined with realism versus, like, complaining and negativity. So I'm like, hey, no negativity. They're like, why? I'm like, I really don't. I don't know fully. But anyway, tactically, to answer your question, I think it starts in the onboarding process with your employees, where it's like, like, what's the key to being a good manager? And the key is that there is no one key. That the job of a manager isn't to extract tasks and works from their team, it's to support their team. In order to do that, you need to understand them. So the first aspect is just like asking those on the teams you serve, how do you want to be managed? Like, how do you like to receive feedback? How do you, like, what are some of the things you struggle with? In some cases, they'll identify, like, I'm nervous about taking mistakes. I don't. I feel like I get my ideas shut down, so I'm less likely to bring those ideas up. So having that conversation early on is one way to do it, and the other way to do it is just to be a fearless defender of your team. Like, a while back, there was something that. That we posted on. On Social that was wrong. And Medulli and I had discussed it, and we caught it, like, 20 minutes after we posted it. And someone's like, why would we post this? And I was like, you know what? I authorized this. It was me. We post it because I thought it was a good idea in collaboration with the team. So when the team knows that you're going to be there for them to give them credit when they win, but take that when you lose, that enables them to feel comfortable taking risks and taking mistakes. And then once you have a couple cycles of failure with no response, that's negative. Like, hey, this didn't work. They're like, let's chat down to talk about it. They're like, oh, my gosh, what's going to happen? Hey, I understand the concept behind this. Why do you think it didn't work? They tell you, here's why I think it didn't work. How do we take a different approach to make this work next time? All right, way to take chances and get out there. Good work. Let's do it again. Like, it takes that cycle, a couple of those cycles to have people feel uncomfortable making mistakes. But one of those will help hit. And it's like, I. I use this thing called creative discovery, where it's like, if. If I have an idea, I won't be like, here's what we're doing. I'll say, what do you think of this idea? And then we'll collaborate around that idea. And often those on the teams that I serve will make that idea themselves. Like Kayla Drake, our director of field marketing, I had a vision for what events would look like because I've done events for so long. That vision is not what we have now. I think what we have now is better because part of being a manager for highly creative marketers is bringing them along a journey to recognize their own power. And when people are creatively empowered, that's when the kind of burden of creative marketing shifts from one person to being like a collective responsibility. So that's a lot of how I try to cultivate psychological safety. And it starts from asking folks, what does psychological safety look like for you?

You. Yeah, how do your, your writing on LinkedIn is unique. You, you rarely write like a one or two line post. When you, when you write, you, you go, you, you write deep. You go pretty hard there, you know? No, nobody. If there's a employee at Zoom Info that come, that comes at you the wrong way, you're gonna, you're gonna let them know. What is your, what is your personal LinkedIn strategy? Are you, are you writing daily? Do you just write off the cuff? Do you have scheduled stuff? Do you have. And you, you save it for later. What's the, what's your personal LinkedIn workflow?

I need to write more consistently because often I'll write when we need something or when there's an opportunity that arises. And it really varies. Like, I'm sure you're talking about some of the stuff with Zoom Info. Like when I joined Apollo, we had this goal, like there are all these crowded companies and Zoom Info is the leader. How do we equalize with ZoomInfo? And it's like when you take an extractive relationship towards your customers, when you charge as much as possible versus as little as possible, you're able to take kind of an idea based path towards branded marketing. And like the idea that unites Apollo is that world class go to market should be accessible to all. So basically from that we, I came to and I started noticing as soon as I joined Apollo, a lot of people really don't like Zoom Info. And I put it together in my head, like, wow, I've had kind of a negative renewal experience here as well. Well, and then like I was like, what will happen? I kind of test stuff from my personal page and then we'll put it on the LinkedIn page. So it was kind of awkward. Henry Schuck, the CEO of Zoom Info, who I have a lot of respect for, he sold like 22 million shares of his company. I was like, hmm, when do founders sell shares of their company? When the company's best days are behind them. So I made a post. Hey, Henry sold 22 million shares of his company. Probably not, because the future of zoom info is bright, right? Like maybe you get the tool that's the same or better but a fraction of the price. And what I find is whenever I post about zoom info, I'll get like 200 likes or something. But like a hundred, 200,000 impressions. So ultimately like for me, posting on.

What do you think that means? People are sharing it but not liking it. That link is going around but nobody's clicking like or commenting honestly.

And this might undercut it, but I'm trying to be less aggressive towards them because I view them more of as an equalness now. But it gets shared around zoom info internally and they all ruminate about it.

That's great.

But I think people send it to each other just because that's stuff that you don't normally see, but it's like if you can back it up. And I do believe that like, you know, zoom info had a bit of a monopoly. They don't now. So people like to see that called out. But basically like my philosophy on LinkedIn is you don't make a unique post, but they're kind of content pillars. So one of my content pillars is like kind of combative commentary about an aggressive competitor that works. So I'll be like, I'll try and do that every month. Another one is like shout outs to the team that I serve. So for me, writing on LinkedIn is about honing in on something that works and then trying that as a pillar in different content mediums. Like a video, like a poll, short form text, long form text. But oftentimes on LinkedIn, honestly, particularly with the zoom info stuff, one of our AES will be like, look at this horrible thing that happened. It was so aggressive. And I'll be like, okay, okay, hold my beer. I'm trying to get better at it.

Well, look, I think that's been interesting. I think that the way you're obviously a good writer, you have a background in politics, which I think probably sprinkles into how you have a way with words in, in this way and you're able to deliver those messages in a way that it, that it works. It's like oftentimes the headline makes you feel like, oh man, what did Dan say? And then I read the post, I'm like, oh, this is actually like pretty reasonable. But I also think what you're doing is, this is startup market. This is, this is a startup marketing. Like bring more of this back. This is okay, like, have fun business, make business competitive. Have fun doing it. Like you're not being a Jerk. You're not attacking anybody personally. Like, business can be fun, it can be pet, it can be comp. Competitive. This is like early 2000s Salesforce. Like, have some swagger, like, and what you're doing, let's be honest here, you're punching up. Zoom Info is a massive company, wildly successful. You're punching up, you're not punching down. And, like, that's a brand marketing lesson 101. Like, if you're going to take shots, at least make them go this way. Right?

Yeah. The three rules I have is don't ever punch down. Don't do anything that's personal. Don't do anything that's private. Within those three things, you're good. But I got a message after some aggressive stuff on Zoom Info from this guy at Salesforce. He's like, hey, it's just a little aggressive for me. It's like, do you know what Benioff did? Like, Salesforce, they used to be a bunch of street fighters, you know, and it's like, when you get to the top, you moderate your brand and that's what Apollo's doing now.

Do you know that they literally hired actors and put them in a jail cell outside of a conference? Like, this is.

Yeah, they rented every taxi for Microsoft's conference. Like, that's. That's what they did. So I think ZoomInfo left a vulnerability by treating their customers so poorly for years. And then when they match our pricing, by giving them a 90 discount, it just shows that they've been overcharging by 900%. So I think people are ready for something new.

Cool. All right, I'm going to put you on the spot with my last piece. So since you're based up here in Burlington, we're doing an event in September. I'm going to send you the date, and I. I think you're going to need to come and I think you're going to need to give a talk. We're going to do, like, short lightning talks on a specific topic. I would love to channel this energy into a. A, into a talk right down the street. You don't even have to hang out all day on community or on LinkedIn or something. So you don't have to answer me now, but I'm just. I'm throwing it out there.

All right, I'm in. Let's do it.

All right, great. We don't even have the website up. We got a speaker book. Dan, great to see you. Let's. Let's do a cold plunge. Let's get some lunch at some point. Go connect with Dan on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll see his stuff. Do what I do, which is like, like a. If you find somebody that you're interested in, go like and comment a bunch of their posts. Then you'll see their stuff all the time. Shout out to you all. Shout out to Apollo. Thanks for hanging out, Dan. I hopefully see you soon.

Right, thanks so much, Dave. I've. I've learned a lot from you over the years and I'm excited to. To bring our friendship to the next level and shout out to the entire Apollo team and, you know, it takes a village.

Sure does. All right, man.