Why B2B brands should be doing influencer marketing with Ishveen Jolly

Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by Agentic AI. There's been a huge shift in marketing teams over the last year. AI agents are now part of the team, and this is what it takes to be successful in B2B marketing. They're in our meetings taking notes, and they're behind the scenes handling the work that used to eat up everyone's week. The teams doing this well are shipping higher quality output, running better campaigns, and actually getting the most out of everyone on their team. But what are AI agents and how should you be using them? What use cases work for B2B marketers? Check this out. If you're asking any of these questions, Optimizely is hosting a free virtual event on June 9th called Agents in the Mix. It's built for and by marketers who are experimenting with AI agents and wanna see what best in class actually looks like. Every session comes with demos of real agents built by and for marketers with no development required and practitioners sharing what's working for them right now. You will learn how to go from AI output to something worth shipping without the endless revision cycle. How one team built 8,000 personalized landing pages. Holy cow. How to distribute one asset across channels and audiences without starting from scratch every time. And if you want to do all this, you can go and check it out right now. Optimizely.com/exit5. To register for the event. Look, I think it's a great time to go deep on AI and really become one of those AI-native, AI-pilled marketers. And Optimizely, they have a great bunch of resources over there and really smart group of people to help you do this. So go and check it out, optimizely.com/exit5. They're gonna help you get smarter about building with AI. Hey, it's Dave. I wanna give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact-level ads platform. Look, You probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with, people you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people, the ones on your site clicking your ads and checking out your competitors. And they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and Vectr together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to vectr.co to learn more. That's V-E-C-T-R. Tor.co. And if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them ExitFive, please. See ya. You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show. ExitFive! 1, 2, 3, 4! ExitFive! 1, 2, 3, 4! ExitFive! All right, I'm excited to do this episode. Ishveen Jolly is here and she's the founder and CEO of Open Sponsorship and When we first got connected, I was like, man, this is really cool to me because I like marketing and I like sports and I always wondered how deals get done. And I was like, I don't know if it makes sense to have you on the pod because this isn't really B2B. And you're like, no, actually a lot of what we do is B2B. And I was like, heck yes, this is— I'm excited to have you on. So first, can you gimme some background on you? You're, you know, you have impressive, impressive resume here. I got in my prep notes, CEO of Open Sponsorship, which is a marketplace that connects brands with athletes and influencers for sponsorship deals. You've been on Forbes 30 Under 30, Oxford alum. You were a former sports agent, which we should dive into that. And now Open Sponsorship works with 30,000 athletes across 100 sports, Olympians, NFL players, and niche sports figures. Can you tell me about the brief overview of how you got into this, creating Open Sponsorship, going from an agent to here, and why this is an interesting business? Basically set the stage for us with the business, and then I have a bunch of things we're going to get into.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, firstly, thanks for having me on. So yeah, I started my career at Westwood. I got into sports because I played a lot, so I was a keen student athlete at university. I know you love sports as well.

And so then what did you play? Or you're equestrian, is that— do you say that? Do you play equestrian?

Do you play? I do equestrian, I think. Um, so I was mostly— so I grew up in England, hence the accent, and I mostly played netball and cricket at university. But honestly, like, if there was a spot on a team or a tennis racket or anything to hand, I'm like, I'm in, let me go. So love sports, graduated from Oxford, studied economics and management, was very much supposed to be on a quite a different trajectory, became a management consultant, and then realized like my passion for sport was beyond kind of just on the field. So moved to India, thought, you know, if I'm gonna piss my parents off once, let me do it twice. Moved to India, became a sports agent, and the rest is history. Fell in love with sponsorship as a form of marketing, and fast forward, thought why is there not a better way to do it? And then very naively set up Open Sponsorship about 10 years ago.

That's super cool. And how does your business like make money?

So we essentially, as you can imagine, 10 years of running a startup growing company, we've evolved over time. So at first we started off as a self-service marketplace, so we charged— but I suppose the business model's always been the same, but we, we charge our brands a kind of management fee to run everything for them, which we, you know, we can talk about later. But big reason for a lot of our learnings and lessons is like getting involved on the strategy piece. So we charge a monthly like management fee, subscription platform, whatever you wanna call it. And then we take a cut of the deal from the athlete influencer side. And so that's our revenue.

Is this becoming more relevant now in the context of B2B? Because of what's happening with AI and search and how people find and research and get information about brands. I'm feeling a pull in our business of just like more in-person stuff. I'm seeing CMOs spending more on out-of-home again, trying to do more interesting things other than just put the credit card down and spend more money with Google, Meta, TV. Is there a trend there that— am I getting it? Is there anything I'm getting at with like wanting to be everywhere in person?

Yeah, I think the trend is there. I would actually say, interestingly, I think it started during COVID When I speak to a lot of like creators, I'm always like, "So how did you sack your day job and become an influencer?" And I'd say like 7 out of 10 say they started in COVID because everyone was at home and we became more addicted to our phones. We started following social media more, people became influencers more. And so whether they took off afterwards or whatever else, and I think that was probably like trend one where CMOs and like decision makers were scrolling so many more hours online. And then obviously also that was the rise of like Netflix and everything else, which meant exactly to your point, like attentions. I think live sports obviously has an amazing following, but what COVID did to live sports, moving everyone to like Netflix in that moment, it's come back, but it's not fully come back. So I think COVID was definitely a first. And then I think AI, for what you're saying, like that authenticity is absolutely huge. And I think for the B2B side, it's what we've seen is that mix of social and offline. Like, so you might have an event, great. Before, you'd have that event and it was done and dusted. Now you can invite 10 people. You could turn up, record a live podcast, now suddenly loads of people are seeing it. 10 influencers show up. And so the amplification through creators and—

yeah, through social has been like this connection. So, so for me, I love sports. The, the number one sport in my life right now is golf. And golf is a really interesting one from a brand standpoint because it's much more— it is more individual-based. You know, if you play for the Boston Celtics, you have your own brand deals, but the team has those sponsorships. But in golf, I'm Dave, and I might have— I love it because I, I come from kind of enterprise software and B2B and tech, and I love seeing like a random PGA Tour player with, you know, some like— I'm like, what the heck is that? And I Google and it's like some, you know, cybersecurity like AI company. Or, you know, there's— I'm just thinking of a recent PGA Tour winner, Matt Fitzpatrick, has Workday on his shirt. But what's interesting is it's like you don't just get that exposure on TV during that tournament. It is exactly what you said. It's not just the COVID thing. It's, it's because of social media, everyone now can be their own influencer. And so you go to his Instagram and he's filming content with them and there's more brand activation. There's more things that are, that are possible. Or I was just listening to him talk about this guy Tommy, I don't know if you're familiar with golf at all, but this guy Tommy Fleetwood signing a big brand deal with a company and I never thought about is like what you get as a sponsor if you're sponsoring him is like you then get a couple of times a year where you can say, hey, we rent out this private place, he's going to be there. You can— we're going to bring 50 of our top, you know, if you're Deloitte or whatever, you're going to bring 50 of your top clients to that and create a bunch of content. And so I'm like, okay, this is interesting. So I think our audience, there's a handful of people that are, you know, billion-dollar-plus companies, CMOs that listen to us. But I think the majority The reason I want to have you on is because I wonder if there's a middle ground here. Where is there a play where you can— I don't want to say micro-influencer, but is there some middle level here? And I kind of see you nodding along to this, and I want to unpack that a little bit, what that might look like for a B2B brand. So if I'm a cybersecurity software company in this world and I'm trying to think about ways we can grow in 2026, 2027, how do I work sports into that equation?

100%. And I love the question because especially after the classic move, which was like talking about like Tommy Fleetwood, everyone's like, well, those budgets, I they don't have.

So it is really always— do we do— I mean, we do like every webinar we ever do, it's like no matter any example that I give, someone always is gonna say, well, of course it'd be easy if I was MasterCard. And I'm like, yeah, but no, this does exist and this is your whole business. So I want to talk about it.

Absolutely. Yeah, no, perfect. So 100%. And I'd say, I think what sometimes people might miss is like Tommy Fleetwood, of course you'd pick that any day if you had the budget. Golf winner, whatever else. But the thing being is like the B2B authentic side is when you think about athletes, especially like, you know, they invest in businesses, they have like their own side hustles. Actually, most of these golfers are structured as a probably like an LLC anyway. They have like really complicated tax structures because whenever they play in a different country, if they win, they have to pay tax there. So there's almost like, how do you create authenticity to your business? So that's the first point, which is like, don't just see it as like, well, it was a billboard or it's like a media day because I'm sure that, I'd like to think, if they're not, they should call us. But like, I'm sure that all of these sponsorships have got some like interesting integration. Like my favorites are like, you know, the NFL with AWS where it's like all the stats behind the game powered by AWS. It's like such a perfect.

Yeah, or like the, in golf, it's like the Masters and IBM. IBM does all of their video and stats and data, and so they have the best website because they have access to all that. Is that, is that what you mean by being— so authenticity could come in, there's some deeper brand-level integration. Yeah. But it could also come with, hey, we're choosing to work with this athlete because this person has a particular backstory that's interesting, that relates to us in some way.

100%. Yeah, perfect. Which we'll get to Maybe on the medical side, that could be quite interesting. But so for us, I'll give you a couple of like real-life like examples of what we're working with right now. So two brands that come to mind. So we're working with a company called Summit, who they're an insurance company in Canada, and they are no, you know, insurance is all about like protecting yourself from risk. Who takes a lot of risk? Skiers or like snowboarders or people like that. So there's your tie-in, but they as a company To your point, Dave, they're not like one of the biggest founder-owned, they've raised a bit of money, but so, you know, it's like, what can we do with like a $10 to $15K check? And that can go quite a long way. Why can it go quite a long way? Because B2B, you need stuff to talk about. I mean, every business needs stuff to talk about, but like, you can't just be like, hey, here's, you know, we're B2B, like, we've refreshed our website. Great, no one cares. It's like, okay, here's a story about one of our case studies or users or whatever else. And so here's just another angle. And what we have found is that, like, again, actually what's interesting about going with smaller budgets is you might not even need the athlete or the influencer to post on their social because most of their audience is not your customer. But what you want is the link between you and them. And when you don't get them to post, it's actually even cheaper. And so we just did this, a company called Sportradar. They are like the data providers for most broadcast sport, kind of like similar to what you were saying. They literally gave us a 5K budget for March Madness and they were like, what can you do? And so we got 3 coaches who produced videos of like, this is how we use data in our like, you know, March Madness campaign. Didn't need to post it, already really authentic. They knew the company and they go out and push that through case studies. And obviously that performs just so much better because It's someone else telling your story.

Well, it's almost like getting them to post. We talk about this. So we have a sponsorship business with my company, with ExitVibe. Our difference is our audience is marketers. And so our sponsors are people who want to reach B2B marketers. And we've been doing this for 4 years now. And I've learned so much about what works because a lot of the companies at first would want to, would want to work with me and have me because I, before ExitVibe, I had a big following. So it was like, let's get Dave to post this and if he posts this ebook, we're going to get thousands of downloads. And it just doesn't, doesn't work like that. And it's very hard to, especially in B2B, move product with a single post because the deal cycle in B2B is— could be years. It could be— it's the average that we heard on the pod is 211 days from LinkedIn. So me posting like, check out this piece of software, like no one's going to just go rush to buy that. And so then it has to be like, well, what game are we playing? And it's more of like Do you have a key message right now? Could we be an avenue to help you? Like, could our sponsorship be a way to help you promote a message? Right. And then instead of like a direct response offer. And so you saying like, yeah, if I'm going to work with an athlete, like what's an athlete going to do if an athlete goes to their Instagram and posts an offer about some, you know, ebook in B2B? Like, of course that audience is going to explode. But if I can sign an agreement with someone and I can have film and videos and content, I'm basically now able to trade on their brand and use them in my marketing, that's like a signal. It can be a signal for brand awareness, for power, for influence. And then hopefully also there's ways to integrate. What I also think is interesting is not just going for the biggest influencers that you can find in any niche. It's like what's cool about social media is there's a whole cast of— if I just open my Instagram and I click on my For You page, there's people that have 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 followers that, you know, maybe probably are still— this is different from what you do, just trying to make a point— but like are probably still working full-time in a different job, but they're trying to like become a content creator and be an influencer. And so they're often willing to do deals with you for lower dollar amounts, and then you can actually find a way to test into this. Is there anything similar that you've learned on, on your end with, with athletes? Like if I wanted to advertise, if I want to say, hey, Exit5 is sponsoring a PGA Tour player, like, there's got to be a way I could have some kind of like third-tier level PGA Tour player that I could, I could put Exit5 on, on his shirt, right?

100%. There's like a few things actually, well, that we've learned kind of over time. So full disclosure, like, we started athletes, but today actually 50% of our deals are athletes still, which is what we love. But like 50% is non-athlete, so financial influencers, mom influencers. I'd say apart from beauty and fashion, we take every niche. Podcasters and things like that, right? And so I think why that's happened is because athletes are really good for like story. Golf is an exception because you're reaching that CMO, CXO, which is why it's so valuable. But for others, it's like you're using that kind of name, image, likeness, but then someone else could be for audience. So for example, like people will sponsor your podcast for the audience, but as you said, like there's only so many times that they, Dave can hit them the same message. So they get— you get them like some funnel and then they might use an athlete for story or vice versa, right? You might find it's the cheapest to acquire customers, leads through like Facebook, but there's only so many times you can hit them with the same like ad. And then this is where kind of the uniqueness comes in. So I'd say like, I think that interplay of like, well, what's your success metric? What is your limiting factor? You know, we did a campaign with Glassdoor and it's like you have a million people in your CRM. The problem is, is that when you send out an email, if it's boring, whereas like sports allows you, you know, everyone's talking about the Knicks, everyone's talking about FIFA World Cup, like be part of that conversation. And to your point now, how can I be part of that conversation without spending a million dollars? Let's get a basketball content creator, let's get an analyst, let's get a G League player, or let's get a college player, let's get someone who's in the conversation But yes, not Jalen Brunson. If you can afford it, great. But if you can't, then there's all these other people who are relevant.

Yeah. Okay. So since you expand beyond sports and work with momfluencers, B2B marketing influencers, sales, whatever it is, one of the things that comes up a lot is like a lot of B2B marketers believe in influencer strategy and influencer marketing today, but they often say like, hey, we want to do an influencer campaign. Like, how do you find influencers?

I would say, I think doing one and doing one well is very two different things.

It's very easy.

Agreed. Okay. So I think let's do it well. Let's say we're defining it by doing it well.

What would not well look like?

Not well is the wrong budget, probably too big a budget, which means that you don't wanna go again. You're like, there's a budget to test and then there's a budget that is not a test budget and you fail and you, you're burnt. So I would say test budget, fine. You can do it not well and learn, and that's absolutely allowed. Sure. Right?

Sure. Well, let's just make up a number. We'll say $10 grand versus $100 grand, right? Like on that scale, $10 grand, we're gonna do something and learn. Okay. Budget could be one mistake. What about as far as like content, right? Because I think it's like, this is where it comes down to, this is where I've seen most things break, which is like, well now hold on, hold on. We're spending money on something like we wouldn't run. AdWords campaigns without a landing page and a call to action. And so I've had people that want to work with me and it's like, okay, we want you to post on this date and here's the ebook and here is the UTM perfectly trackable link. I'm like, dude, no one's going to click on that. So we have to come up with a campaign. It's like the offer is the piece that I'm trying to get at.

Yeah, I think so. My second thing for like that you need to do upfront with or without a partner, right? So this is kind of why we went into being more like a tech-enabled agency is because people will come in exactly that, here's what we want to do, and we're like, this is not going to work. And then it doesn't work and they're like, okay, thank you so much, it didn't work. And it's like, oh, that's like, tear my hair out. And so what is success? Now, if you're like, I want to get landing page views, I just don't know if influencer is the right method for that. It might be after you've tried and tested that influencer, their audience is bought in, and then you can put paid and actually, in fact, they would never be the right person for it. Their content—

what's a proper goal then? Because I think so, most likely the goal is going to be like, well, I want, I want more people to buy my product. Yeah, but getting someone to just post something doesn't magically get people to buy your product either. How do we help coach people on the right, the right offer and influencer match? Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer.io are sponsors of of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first-party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI, and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more blah. AI isn't magic. It's not gonna fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what CustomerIO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters, the craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out Customer.io. It's customer.io/exit5. Go and check them out, customer.io/exit5.

So I would say, kind of mentioned it before, but like, you have to think about your whole infrastructure. Do you have a PR agency? Do you have a media paid budget? Do you have a very good website email marketing team? Do you have a podcast agency? Like, who do you have? Where are you spending? And what might need help? And then influencer, like a content creator, kind of sits as like a, basically a, like you said, like a content generation machine feeding into those, not in isolation typically. And I was gonna say, unless you sponsor someone really big, but even then, like if you built a whole campaign around Jalen Brunson, you would need all of those things to be working. You could put into your contract, hey, we're gonna secure a 5-minute interview with a top media company to interview him on our product, but you'd need a PR person to go and get you that. You would need to create content to put into emails and whatever else. And so I think to your point, when someone does all of that work, it's also really dangerous 'cause they're like, look how many hours and look how much time we've spent. Trying to create this landing page and this and this and this. And we're like, just let the content do its thing and then use the content where you need it, right? And the most powerful thing you could do if you're B2B might be giving that content to your CEO to post on LinkedIn with a really clever message, right?

Because it could just be a signaling thing, right? It could just be like, holy shit, they got Jalen Brunson sponsoring Workday or ExitFive or whatever. And especially with LinkedIn, you can run thought leader ads, you can doesn't have to be them promoting it. You can basically— you're signing an agreement to use their name, image, and likeness in your marketing, which is like one of the oldest tricks in the book, I guess.

And the other thing I'm seeing is when people come to us and they're like, we're really good at TikTok, but we're going to with you try YouTube and we're also going to try influencers. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. If you're good at TikTok, let's find some people on TikTok to do the stuff that you already know, to create content the way you want. And then once we've got the person, we might then use them to— it's almost like too many differentials all at the same time. So it creates the difficulty test. And then there's also persona, right? Because it really is quite hard to know, like, I get it, like I'm in favor of people coming to us and say, look, my vibe is really serious. Let's find someone who's quite funny to create a piece of content. And you know, my marketing team can't do that. So this But that goes back to, okay, let's spend your test budget on that. Definitely don't spend your whole brand ambassador budget to get like Kevin Hart and it flops because you realize like being serious is really important to you as a brand.

Yeah, that's interesting. So that all has to match. I think the other thing is just time. I think the length here, especially in B2B, matters. And it's like the reach and frequency of seeing this stuff over time is what's going to move the needle, not like did we make one video with Jalen Brunson and like hope that it goes viral? And like, what if it didn't? Versus like, is someone going to wear our stuff and post our stuff? Even in our, you know, the way we've evolved our sponsorship business over the years is now we don't do any like à la carte, you know, one-off stuff. The companies that see the best results with our sponsorships is like one company's been renewing. They've been doing 3 years in a row annually. And it's like the reach and frequency and time of that is what's moving the needle, not like one. I think there was an example of, do you remember when Snoop Dogg said he was like quitting smoking or something and it was like actually just to announce like a partnership with Solo Stove, like the, like outside little fire pit. And that post went viral because everyone's like, what, what? Snoop Dogg quit smoking? He's like, actually, no, I didn't. But I partnered with Solo Stove and it was like, I think they posted about it and it basically provided a big dip in near— in short-term sales. But then after that, it was basically like it never happened. And I think that's not the goal.

I think so. Exactly to that point where even when you have like a spokesperson, it also ties to your messaging as a company. Because I'm sure the brand you mentioned who sponsored you for 3 years, the stuff you're doing in your ad reads or talking about today is so different to what you did 3 years ago. I mean, I know you nodded when I said like, we've evolved as a company. And so A great example is we worked with, we worked with a health company, and if you do your job well, they've got enough patients and then they need to move on to a next problem, then they need more doctors, and then they might need more financing, then they might need more customers again. And so it's almost like, how do you, and this is what I love about social, which is I can't even imagine the days where you used to create an ad and it would run for a year. Whereas like today, it's like you can literally get someone to create UGC for you, even if it's a long-term deal. And what you're saying in Christmas time is very different to— that might just be, thank you very much for being great. This is like earnings calls. This is whatever else. And so I think the idea that one of the things that I love about the way that we do things, there's a lot of this testing and learning. And even if you like someone, do 3-month deals. It can be a long-term partnership, but you kind of keep them honest to keep performing as well, which especially in our world with athletes and influencers, like if they get bored or they go MIA or they delete their social media and you're like, oh my God, I'm in a contract with them and they've gone private because there's some news around them. And so I love the idea of like the short bursts. And sadly for athletes, it's a bit of a sad thing, but like you can use that content for so long, 6 months when you've got one post. I'm sure people are always constantly, I mean, we'll do it, we'll be like, we were on Dave's show and it'll be like in 6 months time, right? And there's, that's like part of the content game.

Right. Or even just like getting the content from this can be something. Yeah. Do you have specific examples or advice for the B2B marketers listening to this that maybe want to explore this channel?

Yeah, well, one, I think you should definitely do something influencer. There's so many influencer categories that it's definitely worth doing. It's a really fun thing externally and internally, I would say. When I— by that I mean having people talk about you. I mean, it's like journalism, right? Like, no one's ever upset with Your CEO wants more PR, your state, your investors want more PR, your customers are happy with it. This is like a form of PR that doesn't rely on journalism.

Yeah, but what are the variables in success of that? Is it like you as a brand having an idea of what type of content you like? Who drives that content strategy? For example, like a brand reaches out to me and they just want me to post an ebook. That's different than like, hey, we actually have this really creative idea. Like, so you, you live in Vermont and you do this thing and you like this thing, and so the brand really relates. Like, what's the variable for success there that people need to know about?

I think for them, it's they need to ideally know when they come in to have a conversation, like for us, who's the audience you're targeting? And if it's someone different to who you already have that you're saturated with, like kind of who is it and why? So audience makes a big difference. And then like, what is success? And ideally, it's as upper funnel as possible. So like, you know, is it, is it just UGC that you can share that you can put on your website? Is it to build a bit more of a social media following because your investors care about it? Whatever. Like I would say those two things and then ideally some level of budget or what are you gonna be happy with? Because we have had brands who are like, I wanna spend 10K and then they're unhappy if it's not an A-lister and like those two things don't match up. After that, I would say us as an agency, let us do our job. Dave, if it was you, you are creative enough. I think if you got those three metrics, you would probably come back with a campaign. That was creative enough for them. And then there's a bit of tinkering. Okay, what are the dos and don'ts? What are the disclosures? What are the hashtags that you definitely wanna put in? Is there anything that, you know, you wanna stay away from politics or you wanna stay away from certain things? But I think it's up to each individual and that's what I have seen from our side that has been massive success for us is like the campaign for an equestrian is very different to a mom influencer. Western Union is a client And we've done campaigns with NFL players, and we've also done campaigns with expats who've landed in New York, and they give financial advice on, like, building wealth. And those two videos are completely different, but it's for the same campaign. It's driving the zero transfer fee. They feel different, they look different, they have different audiences. And it would be wrong if Western Union had come to us, which they did it the first time, was like, here's the brief. The second time they were like, okay, you guys decide a little bit more.

Yeah, I get a— I got one last week. It's like, hey, we'll send you to Salesforce's event and you'll go to Salesforce's event and you're going to post these, but you know, we'll comp your ticket, but you got to post these 4 takeaways from the event. I'm like, what's the point of that? Is it, is it just surround sound? Like if you just get a bunch of influencers to post about the event that helps with surround sound versus like, wouldn't you get more from that if we actually collaborated and did something that is more authentic to me and is on brand to me? Now, granted, they're probably just blasting that out to a bunch of people in a database. Database. It's not an actual, like, one-to-one relationship. But I kind of feel like that is— that's what the differentiator is going to be. And I asked you this question earlier, but people are like, I want to do influencer marketing, but where do I find influencers? And I'm like, the number one way you find— and you have to know your customer and you have to know your audience. And so you should know which people your audience follows on TikTok, which podcasts they listen to, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, what are they reading, what are they interested in. If you You're not going to be able to outsource that. I'm sorry. Like, if you don't have a finger on the pulse of what's interesting to your audience, there's not going to be like no magic database. It's like, oh, go reach out to these 3 people. I did an interview with this guy Chris, who runs social media at ClickUp. They're a billion-dollar SaaS company. And he said his trick is he goes to Instagram and he finds Instagram creators that have had 1 or 2 viral videos but don't have a ton of followers. So they have the chops to like clearly, and the algorithm on Instagram shows that video, that video popped off, that video had a million views, but this person may only have 12,000 followers, but they could be hired to make social media content for them. And that's a different way. That's a better way to prove out that, that model.

Well, I also think it's interesting because I mean, today even we use like Claude to be like, right, what's a trending— you can get the whole thing off. So going back to your Salesforce example, I would say like the miss here is like that company ideally should come to you and say, here is my goal. I want to show that we are on ground at Salesforce, or is it Salesforce? Here's my goal. How do you help me hit it? And you would come up with like maybe 2 or 3 concepts. So this is the best way that our brands are working right now, where they say, here's my goal, influencer, creator, athlete, agency, whoever, or open sponsorship. Give me 2 or 3 concepts to say yes to. A, it's more interesting for you, B, anyone that knows you is like, oh yeah, that's really on brand for Dave. Whereas like the other way, someone's like, oh, he's being paid to do that. And that's where that whole like paidness comes in because it just doesn't feel on brand for anyone. And the third thing is, again, going back to value, because we talk about this a lot, we have seen you go to an athlete or an influencer and you're like, here's the campaign, same brand. If one is premeditated and they don't love it, the price could be up to double. And I'm sure you've had that. If they were like, you just do whatever you want, go interview some cool people, create some great content, and we're paying for your ticket and your hotel, you'd be like, this is a cool brief, I'm in, here's my price. If they're like, here's 4 posts, you have to do it, you have to do it on this day, that time, you are like, yeah, this feels like work. Yeah.

And you have to do it, it's usually like, and you have to do it while wearing an Adobe hat and use the hashtag Adobe partner. It's like, okay, well like, 'cause then you run the, am I willing to do that? Everything's got a price, you know, that I just think the opportunity is for most people listening, I think the opportunity is it goes back to social media, which I think is the biggest, most important trend you could be focusing on beyond AI if you're a B2B brand, which is like content, social. It's the only way you have this amazing ability to reach your customers directly through social media. And it's not social media, you know, 10 years ago it was like, oh my, you know, my cousin is a social media intern and she runs social for us. And it's like, social media now is the way people get information and it is the way people buy, even in B2B. And so I'm going to use influencers to help spread our message. But the gap of, of doing some kind of shitty thing with an influencer is just like, okay, cool, we got a little bit more reach on our social content because we had famous people post our stuff. First, like, when you see an influencer do a brand deal that like really is authentic or funny or interesting, it's like That's a 10x opportunity. And so I'd be like, what's the opportunity for me in my niche, whether I'm in, you know, fintech, legal tech, SaaS, manufacturing, like all the people that listen to this podcast, how can we find a couple of people in those that would make sense to team up with in those spaces? And instead of doing a one-off post, treat it like a longer campaign.

I also, on the back of that thing, what happens is there's a perception when you're saying that. I think there'll be people at home going, yeah, but Supplements is obvious, or fashion is obvious, or electronics is obvious. But as I kind of mentioned before, athletes and creators and influencers, they're like mini businesses, right? And they do have like legal issues. They're at risk of being sued, or they have health issues, or they have kids and they have families. So it's almost like we have this amazing social listening tool so we can like look into like, has anyone talked about being sued, right? And so like, you can already like find people who are, 'cause so again, back to your point, it's either the audience is a fit or they are a fit through some story that, yeah, and it could be as simple as they went to the same school as your CEO and it's like, you know, they come in and they interview the CEO and they're like former alumni and that be, if that's what you wanna promote, right? Like the CEO's story.

Yeah, that's a good angle. I like, that's an easy low bear. Like you can find what are these different little patterns we can find to match up who might be a good fit here.

I think you're just trying to make your company feel like, have a personality, whatever that is. And like influencers, creators, athletes, basically, you know, if you pick Shaq, you know that you're going for something larger than life. If you pick— I was going to go like Tiger Woods, but then I was like, right, let's stay away from that.

But you know, like there's basically like, you pick Tiger Woods, you're associating yourself with an addiction to sleeping medication and pain pills.

How's that? Exactly, exactly. Well, I remember like There was 2012 Olympics when Ryan Lochte— I don't know if you remember him, the Olympic swimmer— he like made up a story that he, he was in a heist at like the petrol station. It turned out he'd just been on a night out. He was dropped by all his sponsors, but like a couple of people picked him up because they wanted like—

You could lean into that.

Yeah, exactly. So it's like, basically, let's bring your brand to life with, with someone. That's one image. Two is let's have someone create some really interesting content for you. That's 2. 3 is let's tap into people because they've got the audience that you need. Like there are like literally today there are influencers for every single legal tips and this tip and day trading. Actually, interestingly, we were trying to work with someone for day trading and they wanted to lean into the influencer for day trading, but those influencers were saying, well, we can't take payment for this because we're the experts on this. This is our day job. So it would be so inauthentic to promote someone. So again, that perception that like, well, they'll just take money for anything isn't is not true. So I thought that was quite interesting. But yeah, I think there's loads of different reasons, but you need to be clear and definitely don't come and say, I want to get it all, because that's when it fails.

Final thoughts, anything I should have asked you or missed, or anything you want to, you want to say before we hang up today?

Well, I suppose let me ask you, you do hear more about B2B influencer marketing, but why do you, from your amazing experience with B2B marketers, right, why do you feel like it's not as big as it could be?

I think a couple things. One of them is probably just the— we don't like to do things that are not directly, instantly measurable. And so it's harder to be like, okay, if Ishveen is a popular influencer in this space, well, I'm gonna have her post this link to our landing page because we're going to need to track how many sessions and conversions that we got directly from that. It's a little bit harder to like— you almost have to let go of like, it's not direct response marketing, it's much more brand marketing, which is going to take time and you have to have a clearer opinion and strategy. And so I think oftentimes it's because we want to apply like the demand gen lens to it and we want to hire this person to be an influencer, to create content because we need 7 more sales meetings this month. And that's why I think it's a lot around like, what's the right content? What's the right offer? Who's the right person? It's much easier to justify spending $25 grand on AdWords because at least I can show the CFO or my boss or whoever, even if the ads didn't convert, I can show traffic, I can show why it didn't convert. There's a little bit more of a black box and almost like zero-click marketing strategy with doing an influencer deal. And then it's also this weird thing because if you want the influencer stuff to work, you have to forget all that stuff. And so it's like, it's not going to work if you do that. And so it's a little bit I think the people that do it well have really strong conviction and are willing to be creative and are willing to like test into something and, and really try it versus like, I think oftentimes we want it both. We want to like not spend the big budget, but we wanna make sure it's perfectly trackable. Does, does that make sense? You know what I'm trying to get at?

Yeah, it's so true. I think on that note, be ready for your test to be a small test that produces small results and small wins. And scale up, but know that like exactly that, like it's not gonna hit the same as a conference because I mean the spend's not—

Well, even a conference, a conference is a good example. A conference is almost like influencer marketing in some way. And I think a lot of times it's like the right people are at the conference, but if you go to the conference and your booth sucks and you don't have an interesting offer, like you're gonna be like, well, this conference, you, we deal with it. People are like, well, nobody scanned our badges at our booth. And it's like, is that a me problem? Is that a us problem or a you problem? Like, do you need to, be more interesting. And I think that's the 1% or that's the 99% is like, what's the offer? How do we have the booth that everyone's gonna go to?

Yeah, so true.

I also think you could be too small. I think you could do a bunch of small tests where like, I'm biased to like, I'd rather find someone we really like, have a really good idea or something that we feel strong about, come up with a really creative campaign and go and do it and take a bigger swing. Then I think sometimes if it's too small, then you're like, oh, we didn't really notice anything. And then you have no conviction to like spend more and go bigger. I know that's much riskier, but that's how kind of— I'm much more impulsive. I'd rather, I'd rather go all in and do something big and like deal with the repercussions of that not working out than like, I think sometimes in marketing you can do too many things too small when you should just really do one or two bigger things and like make a big bet and make it, you also then are forced to make something work first. We did this tiny thing and it didn't work.

Like, yeah, let's move on. Yeah. I think we also kind of slightly touched on it, but like the fact that Reddit, LinkedIn, all of these are really important. And also today when you think about like AI search engine optimization, it's not what it used to be with Google. And so I think there's element of influencer, again, it's creating content that then signals that people are talking about you., and they do scrape social a lot. We have just started a Reddit commenting strategy to improve our like search results through AI. So I think again, you're anyway having to think about all these other things. Why not take someone who's an expert to help you out?

Yeah, I love it. Okay. Ishveen Jolly, thank you for coming on the pod. We'll link to you on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll get a bunch of connections and questions about this. Goal in doing this episode was to give people an overview. I want get people to start thinking about life beyond Google and Meta. And there are other ways to spend your money. And I do think that in marketing, if you want to reach more people, you do have to spend. It's like I used to always take pride in, we don't spend any money, we're scrappy. And it's like, well, eventually you come up in the— you start to play a bigger game and you do need to spend money to make money. And I love this idea of influencers in B2B, especially with the trend of sports. And it's interesting to hear how you don't see it just as ports. You see, every industry now has these influencers. I think it's a really interesting, interesting time. So thanks for coming on the pod.

Thank you so much.

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