Content Isn't Hard, It's Misunderstood

Neil, you know what really grinds my gears?

What?

So, you know, typically when someone has you record on their podcast, for example, they'll give you the raw recordings. Okay? Yes?

If you ask for it.

If you ask for it, correct. Right. And so like whether, you know, when I did a podcast with Gary Vee, like he— I gave him the raw recordings. And then when I'm on someone else's podcast, they'll give me the raw recordings. Because if you do the raw recordings, what's going to happen? You're going to get a lot more reach, right? More reach than you would without having the other person take the raw recordings, correct?

In theory, yes, because they'll push it and then you'll push it. And there's no rules on this, but I believe the common etiquette is when you take the raw recording, you tag them or you mention them in the social post as well, which helps their podcast or their brand. So it's a win-win in theory.

Exactly. In theory, right? And so I remember when I did it with Gary, he took the interview and he published it to his channel too. And again, you're doing the podcast with the other person because you want to maximize reach, right? And when Neil talks about etiquette, it is kind of, at least in America, the etiquette is that you do that, right? And so recently I did a podcast with someone. It was a very high-quality studio. And then I asked her afterwards, hey, could I get the recordings? She said yes. And then I thought there was going to be no issues, right? All that to say is they've kind of reneged on the deal. And then I'm just like, okay, let's just cancel the podcast. And then from that, that's when she got really pissed off and she sent like this long book. And all that to say, guys, is if you're looking to do a collaboration with someone, you got to think about the goal at the end of the day. If the goal is to get reach, to drive reach, then maybe you should do the things that are in your best interest to drive reach. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense to handicap it, right? So all that to say is that's what really was grinding my gears before I started the podcast. I'm like waving this Chomps around right now because it was really grinding my gears. So anyway, wanted to start off with that. Neil and I just came back from speaking at— Wait, wait, wait.

Let's go back to that, okay?

Okay.

So you recorded the podcast. Did you tell this person beforehand that you wanted the raw recordings?

I told her right after we recorded. I didn't say before.

That's fine. I think it's common for if you ask, you receive. Did she say no?

No, she said yes.

Okay, but when you emailed asking, did she say no?

In the email, it also said she agreed.

But you didn't get it, so why cancel it?

Because she wanted to do all these other things around it where it's like, oh, we're gonna give you the raws, but you can only publish 3 shorts and you can only do this. And there's like all these conditions around it. I'm like, dude, man, come on. This is not like we're doing a deal.

Yeah, this is too complex.

Yeah, just stop, man. Like, this is the etiquette. And so I'm like, at this point, like, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want this. This is like, this is even a podcast episode for us. This is taking too much rent in my head. And I just like, Just cancel it. Let's not do it. Okay, this pisses me off, but I just want everyone else to know that, hey, if you're going to do these collaborations, yes, you should absolutely do them. Just be smart in terms of how you collaborate, please.

So a few lessons for anyone listening is one, you should want to give people the raw recordings because the more people that have it, the more likely more channels and more people are going to post it to most social profiles, which means You'll get more views and branding for yourself. Even if you'll get extra 1,000 views or 10,000 views, something is better than nothing. The second is never limit people on how many clips they can use. The more clips they take from whatever raw footage you've created, and hopefully they tag you. If they don't tag you or do a collab, but you're still in some of the videos, it's still branding. Again, something is better than nothing. And the more clips they use, The better off you are. Worst case, your podcast is getting branding. And the reason I say these 2 things is I think this person messed up in 2 areas. One is not understanding that giving more raw footage to other people actually benefits them. Do you have a larger social following than them, Eric, or a smaller one? A larger?

Larger.

So if someone has a larger one, those are the ideal guests you want. Because that's going to help you grow faster. And again, you would never want to limit someone with a larger following or even a smaller following to post more content related to your podcast or your business because it just helps you grow.

Yep. Here's what I'll say. And so I'm going to give my meta lesson and I'm going to talk about the conference we went to yesterday and then Neil, you can go do your thing. So what I will say is this, you ultimately want to be a giver, not a taker, okay? In this situation, and so the quote here from Zig Ziglar is, if you help people get what they want, you're going to get everything that you want, right? The more that you give, the more that you get ultimately. And so that's why in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, what is my give-to-get ratio? I want that to be at least 4 to 1, hopefully even 8 to 1. So every 4 gives that I have or every 8 gives that I have, there's 1 get that I get from it, right? And so oftentimes I'm not really asking for much. I'm trying to, like even us doing this podcast right now, we're trying to give as much as possible. And so you don't want to be a taker, right? And in this situation, Like the biggest lesson for me is that initially this person then asked me to be on the podcast. I'm like, okay, don't really know who this person is. And then initially I'd said, hey, can we record at a studio that's near me for convenience, right? And this person, they go, no, let's go record over here in downtown LA. It took me like 50 minutes to get there in the morning, right? And then 50 minutes back. So, okay, first you asked me to get on the podcast, then you asked me to go in traffic. And then when I asked for the recordings, you don't want to give it to me and you make this whole ordeal. And so that's like so many levels of taking. And then even right after I recorded the podcast too, she had asked me, hey, can you make an intro for X, Y, and Z over here? I made that intro, right? So I think it was like 4 takes. And then I don't know what I really got out of this. And I was just trying to get the recordings to even promote the thing. So in life in general, this is the life philosophy that ties into all this is you want to give much more than you take. Because when you do that, people will see you as a giver. If you just take all the time, people can pick that up very quickly. And that's why I have no interest with working with this person at all in the future. And we'll just move on from that. So anyway, that's the right way to do these content collabs to maximize views. Just be smart about it. Think about what your goal is ultimately. That's all it is. Give much more than you take. All right. So Neil and I— Neil went to get some water too. That's very nice. Very nice. So yesterday, Neil and I spoke at the Social Commerce Summit in Manhattan Beach. So Stuart, our friend Stuart Johnson, through the event, and he's going to be doing a lot more of these. And so that was his inaugural event. Neil, do we want to talk about any lessons or anything that came up from the speech? Anything we learned there? Because it was a quick in and out for us, but maybe there were some things.

There is, yeah. But first off, before we get into lessons, I had a question for you. Did the QR code work well for you at the end?

I don't know. Let me check right now. Did it work for you?

I have no idea, but I've been doing QR codes for years. I don't know when you started doing them, but it's been an amazing strategy for us to collect leads.

So I'll say this. When I did the one at HubSpot last year— oh, I see the bump. Okay. Let me tell you. Okay. So I got 65 subscriptions yesterday. So, and in the audience, maybe how many people do you think were in the audience? Because it was like a late night session. We did like 6 to 8 PM or so. How many people do you think were in the session yesterday?

I have no idea.

You know, you got lucky.

I want to say maybe like 100 and something.

So, Neil and I were speaking, right? But then, there's only like one kind of main screen. And so, I was standing in the middle the whole time. And so, when I went to my QR code, so Neil went right after me, right? I was like, okay guys, scan the QR code. But then, someone like, I didn't realize I was blocking it. And then, someone was like, hey, you need to get out of the way. So, I had to squat. But then, you got the learnings from that. So, you probably got more opt-ins. But yeah, 65 opt-ins, which is pretty good from a session.

Yeah, no. Well, once you started ducking, people started scanning again.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what I would also say when I did the one at HubSpot, so basically Neil and I are talking about when we do these talks at conferences, we'll put the QR code at the end to say, hey, if you want the slides, get access. And neither of us really hard pitch at all. And I would say from the HubSpot one, I think I got like 500 or so from my session.

Good question for you. What fields do you ask for when you scan, have people scan the QR code?

I forgot. I think it's, it's, we, this one, we made it really basic, but I think the HubSpot one, we did ask for revenue size, um, and employee size as well. And then the company URL or the, yeah, it was a, sorry, not company URL, but, but, uh, work email. Yeah.

Yeah. We usually ask for a name, email, work email. I mean, sorry, name, email, phone number, uh, website URL, uh, employee count, revenue numbers, marketing budget. So we're at 7, maybe I'm missing one. You will get a drop-off the more you ask. We just find that the drop-off—

Quality goes up.

The quality goes up and the revenue, we still generate more revenue than when we ask for less because it helps our sales team determine which ones to really double and triple down on and where to spend more time. And the reason I say why, the reason I make this point is You have to remember, yes, a lead costs money, whether it's your time or you're going to a conference or you're paying to speak or you're getting paid to speak, but time is money. Or if you're spending money on ads to get a lead, but people forget that when you have a sales team, it costs you money as well. Sure, you're paying for their salary, but if they're spending time on leads that are irrelevant and are never going to close or that aren't a good fit, You just wasted money as well. So you had to keep that in mind. But I would say there wasn't really any big learnings for me. I did notice one thing that would probably make you more money. I can tell you offline if you want me to tell you offline. But yeah, I thought overall it was a really good event, good crowd. What I do wish some conferences would do, and this conference was great, um, I think it was called, uh, Social Commerce Summit.

Social Commerce Summit, yeah.

Is they put the screen above you. I hate when the screen is behind me because then I have to move back and forth to make sure people can end up seeing everything. Um, and yeah, I did notice that because Eric went first and he was blocking a lot of his slides, not intentionally, there was just no choice because if you're standing on stage and the slides are behind you and the monitor is behind you You have to keep shifting back and forth.

Yeah.

And because he went first, I don't think he knew or realized. And I kept walking back and forth to make sure that no matter where people were sitting in the room, they could see the data.

You got the learnings from the evening. So, from me going first, you got the learnings. Yeah, I'm like, dude, you got— I got the guinea pig. You got the guinea pig off of me because you knew to get away from the QR code and then not to stand in the way. But that's the annoying thing too, when you're speaking at a conference, You don't want to be the one that's moving around all the time because you're going to get people to move their heads like this all the time. So, that's why I try to usually just stand in one place, but that wasn't ideal for yesterday. I will say though, I think Stuart and the conference organizers, they did a great job, especially it being an inaugural event. I think there's something to be said that in 120 days, he put this together, 700 people applied, and I think that's a good way to put together an inaugural event. He had some amazing people there. I was spending time with the president of iam8, which is the David Beckham brand yesterday. So I spent like a good, probably, I probably talked to him for like 30 minutes to an hour or so. Danny, if you're listening to this podcast, Danny's the founder, had a great conversation with David. It was cool. So yeah, you do meet interesting people and then some people you're going to find time to spend, you're going to be able to go deeper on. And those are the ones that you're actually, you should follow up with afterwards. One thing we did say, Neil, is One thing that AI is not going to take away is community. And I think having that type of community, you're able to network with other people, make friends, and maybe start your own groups and hang out with these people more because it's very hard to find your own community. But nobody's ever— like, once you have your community, your relationships, AI is not going to be able to take that away. Quick break for agency owners. You know the content bottleneck. Clients want more content, but writers are more expensive. Freelancers are It creates production-grade content your clients will actually approve, not generic AI slop. It's content that actually matches their voice. One agency using it reported saving 90 hours a month per person. That's margin back in your pocket. Plus, it handles internal linking and content audits, which most agencies charge extra for. There's a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. Your ops team will thank you. Back to the show.

Yeah, and some quick housekeeping. Quick stats, we generated 5 booked calls from the event. So 68 QR code scans of people filling out the form fields. I think we have like 7 or 8 fields, it's somewhere around there. And out of the 68, 5 booked a call. We only show the call booking to a qualified lead or a lead that we think is qualified. So my guess is if we had 68 and you had 5 out of there, Roughly 40% of qualified leads book it. So we had somewhere around 12.5, 13, or let's call it 12 to 13, usually based on our existing numbers, 12 to 13 companies that are qualified. Of those, 5 booked a call.

Yeah. So Neil, my numbers are we had 4 people book a call, and one of these was a very large company. I'll just leave it at that. in Asia and basically 4 out of 65, so 6% were qualified that booked the call. So we're sharing those numbers. Yeah, very similar, but my offer is kind of different now, Neil. It's more on the implementation side on the AI piece. So it's interesting because yours is still— Neil's slides, just so everyone knows, was very data-focused on e-commerce and I think he did a great job. And then mine was more focused on kind of theory around More so AI implementation and AI change management. So, you know, different, but both help business.

Yeah, but I think you can clean up if you just made one small tweak to your presentation.

Tell the audience, go do it.

Okay, so Eric has a great presentation.

You watched it?

Yeah, I was there in the audience. I was sitting in the back.

Oh, very nice. I was watching yours. I was the guy— you know what's funny? I was the guy that said zero in your very first question.

I know that. So, okay, so Eric's presentation, do you want to give a context of your presentation on what it is and then I'll tell you what I would tweak?

Yeah, so the context is, you know, a lot of people right now, like Shopify as an example, they're talking about how they have this river that lives in their Slack, right? That's kind of an ambient agent that people can ask questions to and they get things done a lot faster. Jack Dorsey from Block likes to talk about the world brain. We call ours Single Brain and the whole concept is that You have all your data connectors tied into your Microsoft Teams or Slack, and your team can just speed up things a lot faster in terms of getting the data that they need. Excuse me. And then they can execute a lot faster. So that's kind of the premise of this unified brain, single brain thing.

Okay. And then within there, I'm assuming Eric, you know, he teaches how to end up doing it, right? He talks about quite a bit of theory, but he breaks down some of the ways that you can end up doing this. And other cool ways you can use AI. Like, I know you gave an ad creative example as well. The presentation is great. The design is great. I'm assuming you use AI to design it.

You know what's funny? It was— I did the initial AI design using Claude Design, and then I handed it off to a designer, and she didn't like using the Claude Design piece, but it ended up becoming what it became. And I thought the output was pretty good.

I thought the output was great. I had no Real feedback on your design quality other than it was good. I think your stuff is ahead of its time, and what I mean by that is it's really good. Companies should be doing it. They're just not adapting as fast as you are. I'm assuming you would agree with this, hence you have the Single Grain division.

I agree.

So, Single Grain is a spinoff of Single Grain, call it a sister company or a subdivision of Single Grain where Eric's marketing agency now helps with AI implementation. When you're giving all the examples and theories, I would have a slide right then and there that breaks down how it was implemented in a company and the results. And if you did it for every section—

Yeah.

I understand that some of it still will go above certain people's heads, right? Some people will get it, some people won't. But if you had a case study for every section showing the real results for different industries, so if it's e-com, focus on the e-com, you get what I mean. If it's a SaaS event, focus on the SaaS case studies. I kid you not, your booked calls would just go through the roof. And the reason being is people want it. They look at it as pie in the sky, like, oh, this is hard, we'll eventually get to it, or maybe technology will make it easier. And Eric uses the example, which is spot on. He's not a developer, yet as a marketer, he's using AI and look at the results. But if you show the revenue or the conversion lift or the traffic lift or the lead lift or tangible versions for each step, hey, this is what we did with ad creatives and look at the results of before and after with our ROAS. I'm telling you, you would just start getting way more paid gigs from this. I'm not talking about speaking, the actual consulting and revenue side.

We should talk about that for a second. Um, but, but let me react to that. So Neil's absolutely right. The more case studies you have, the better. The challenge right now, Neil, is all of these people are in pilot. Um, and they are saying amazing things, but we need to wait a little longer because keep in mind, we've only been doing this for like 2, 3 months or so. And then the pilots just started like a month ago, but the early reactions have been really good. And so what Neil said is important that if you're going to speak or even do a webinar, for example, ideally you're layering in case studies as well, because even if you layer in case studies, Like the organizer, Stuart, was actually concerned that I was going to pitch heavy with my slides, which I don't think I did at all.

No, you didn't pitch at all.

Yeah. So anyway, all that to say is even if you put case studies in there, you're not really pitching, right? And I think that the smart move is you include case studies to build that authority, to build that credibility. And at the end, when you have the QR code too, people might book calls, they might not, but if they scan the QR code, your sales team will then reach out to those people and say, hey, by the way, here are the slides over here. And then you can have your AI come in and say, oh, here's, by the way, here are the other angles where you can use this stuff too. And I I think that should be included in the outreach too. So I think definitely you're right on that. We just don't have the ones that we need yet and those will come. So what did you see right after? I wanted to react to something else. What were we talking about?

For the event?

Yeah, for the event. God, I forgot. I was going to say—

We talked about the presentation behind us and then we talked about the QR code and we talked about using case studies in leads to generate more revenue or case studies and presentations to generate more revenue, which I think, you know, yeah, that was really all we talked about so far for the event. We were talking about paid. I think you were talking about if we got, if there's, you make money as a speaker or not.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We should talk about that. Yes. Thank you. So one thing is, so Neil and I, we've been speaking for a while now, so we do tend to get, for vast majority of cases, we do get paid sometimes. You know, it just, maybe there's a strategic movement and maybe not so much. But in this case, again, they're very gracious to pay both of us. But I also think that whatever event you're going to choose to speak at, or maybe you're going to do like a webinar collaboration, it has to make sense for your business, right? The biggest mistake I made in the past was, and Neil saw me make this mistake, where I would travel for like half the year and I'd go to all these random countries and it'd be really fun, don't get me wrong, but they wouldn't drive customers for me because I would go to like Ukraine, which is beautiful, by the way. This is before, you know, kind of, you know, the war, the conflict that they're having right now. I went there and don't get me wrong, like I spoke at a tech conference there, but those people weren't going to buy from me in the first place. Right. And so keep in mind, if you're going to speak somewhere, you want it to be connected to your business so you can drive leads or whatever it is that you're selling.

Yeah. And I still believe people just get that one wrong in which They focus on events that are potentially paying them instead of generating leads. You know, some of the best events that I've spoken at, I actually had to pay to speak, like literally pay to speak. Now imagine someone giving you $50,000 to speak at a conference and then going the other way, we had to fly to that country. Let's call it business class travels, $10,000, $15,000 right now because of fuel prices. And then you got to pay, call it another $25,000 to speak plus hotels and miscellaneous and your team, easily you spend $50,000. So imagine going from getting $50,000 plus all expenses being covered to paying $50,000 in total just to show up and speak at an event. And you know what? The ones I pay to speak at are the highest profitable events we've ever done.

Well, give an example of kind of how you mapped it out. So you spent the $50,000, how much do you think you actually got short-term and then long-term from it? Like how much detail can you go into here?

I can go into a lot of details. So let's just use general numbers. Let's say I spend on average $50,000. We will only pay to speak at an event that has our ideal customer profile. And I'm not talking about there's an event with 1,000 people and then maybe 5, 10% are your ideal customer profile. I'm talking about you pay for an event and however many attendees there are, we usually look for big ones where they have like 10,000, 20,000 registrants. So that's how many people show up per day. And the reason I talk about per day is a lot of times event will say we have 50,000 people. And if it is a 3-day event, they may have, call it 16,500, 17,000 people per day. And to them, they look at that as a 50,000 event conference because they're taking the number of people per day And timesing that by 3. We look at how many total registrations you have. If an event has 20,000, of course not everyone shows up, but the majority usually does by far. And we look for events that we're paying to speak at that have at least a few thousand or at least 1,000, and then we go from there. The second thing is ideal customer profile. We want at least 60 to 70% of the paid attendees or the attendees to be our ideal customer profile. We do understand there may be competitors or other people from other industries at the event or other service providers, but if you can get like 60, 70% of the attendees to be your ideal customer profile, you can usually get the numbers to pan out. The third thing is when we pay to speak, we want it to be a main stage. We don't want it to be an ancillary stage or anything like that. We find it not to do as well. We also don't pay for booths. We find that it's not as effective. The 4th thing is when we speak, we speak with just education, not pitching. And when you educate, we put a QR code at the end. We find that it helps collect enough leads if the talk track is good. And then your goal is to close revenue from it. Because we mainly pick events or we only really pick events that are enterprise that we're paying for, Our sales cycle is typically more than a year. For enterprise business, Eric knows this well, when you get a lead, you are only going to get a contract if they're in cycle to hire an agency, and then you have to go through procurement and all this kind of stuff. So in essence, when you're paying to speak, they may already be with a competitor. For us, it would be another agency. So you have to wait for them to be out of contract. And enterprise, typically their contracts are multi-year. So call it, someone may have a 3-year contract. They're not just going to switch right away. But if we look at the sales cycle and it being more than a year, if I spend $50,000 for an event, we usually over time can generate at least a few million dollars in contractual revenue.

There you have it. So let's just say $1 million for round numbers. You spend $50 grand or so.

We wouldn't do it for $1 million. We look for at least a minimum of $2 million.

Yeah. So, okay, you're looking for a 40x return long-term. Yeah.

The numbers aren't as good because in agency world, and this is more so for everyone listening, Eric already knows this, if you close $1 million when you're pitching, sometimes you have to travel to go to those, to that company. You got to spend time internally on a lot of pitch prep that costs a lot of money. So if you spent 50 grand just on the lead and you spend another 50 grand to close a million-dollar contract, the margins aren't good if you're only closing a million dollars. You kind of need a minimum of $2 to $3 million for the numbers to be pretty good.

Yep.

And that's in annual recurring revenue. And then of course, hopefully they stay on for 4, 5, 6, 7 years. The numbers get really great there, but in the short run you do eat it.

Yep. So what is the lesson here, everyone, is one, you have to know who's in your audience, but also you have to know your gross margin as well, right? And then you have to know how the 1-year LTV of these deals look for you, and then you kind of map that out. So would highly recommend that you do this with the finance person on your team, or maybe you do this with your finance AI, but then have a finance person verify it, however you want to do it. But that's how you calculate the ROI of speaking at these events or even paying to speak at an event. Now let's talk about this real quick because, Neil, we're both going to be at HubSpot again, HubSpot's Inbound, and we consider that like a flagship event. When you've spoken at like a HubSpot Inbound or like a Web Summit, for example, we've both been at the HubSpot, right? So how do you— how do we think about that from a perspective of generating revenue? Uh-huh.

I think every type of conference is different. We do have an SMB division. I would say your main focus, maybe the classification is different. What we call SMB, maybe you call mid-market or no?

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So internally I think we just use different terms, but you would say mid-market, we say SMB.

Yeah, that's fair. Let's just go with that.

Yeah. And I would say HubSpot has more of those companies and we look at it as a great place to speak for branding. Right. And a lot of those people at those events switch around companies. A lot of them eventually go to larger companies. And if you did a good job speaking and they get to know you, eventually they will hire you. Then that's how we see conferences like HubSpot. I'm not saying it's a bad event. It is a good event, but we don't look at it as a direct ROI. So every time we go, we just look at it as trying to build a brand versus trying to collect revenue.

Yep. And the way I see it too is from a brand standpoint. So they will, going back to the earlier part of this episode, they will give you the raw files, they will give you the clips, right? And then you can decide what you want to do with those. And again, I found that at least on X right now, when we put these mid-form kind of horizontal clips for 2 to 3 minutes or so, those do really well, right? And then if you have, my hope is that when you're going to speak at these things, or even when you're doing webinars, that you're able to clip these out. Like even Meet Neil and I doing this right now, we're not in person right now, but these clips where I'm kind of like side view looking at Neil like this, uh, does pretty well too. And we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later. Bye.