How to Drive Pipeline Through LinkedIn Thought Leadership and a Strong POV with Garret Caudle

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. My guest today on the call is Garrett cottle, founder and CEO at Influence, a full funnel LinkedIn agency. Garrett, how are you doing today?

Oh, my gosh, Kuba. I was doing well and then I got the energy burst from that intro and now I'm feeling even better, man. So feeling great. And thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, no problem. And yeah, for the energy burst, it's kind of my trademark. I feel the pressure each time. It's like it needs to be loud enough. So, yes, let's get this show on the road here. Garrett, super, super glad to have you here on Agency Journey with us here today. Before we get into everything, before we start our conversation, which I imagine might be revolving around LinkedIn and content there and anything else related to, I feel, I believe your thing is founder led marketing. So we'll dive into all of that. But before that, for the watchers and listeners to know you a little bit better. What is not professionally speaking the most fun thing you've done this year thus far?

Oh, gosh, not professionally speaking. Well, you know, I'm scaling an agency, so my time spent having fun outside of work is very, very limited. But let me think about this year. All right, so my family, I'm originally from a small town in Idaho and not a lot of people are from Idaho, but if you're from that area, you know that it's beautiful landscape. I mean, you have mountains, rivers, lakes. And so I'm very fortunate to have a little family cabin located right outside of Yellowstone National Park. And this year I went out there and, you know, spent some time with my dad and my siblings. We haven't all been together as adults with, you know, just the, you know, four of us in a long time. So we went out there, went to the park, you know, saw baby bears, you know, cooked a lot of great food and. Yeah, man, just being in nature, you know, I live in New York City and I'm from, you know, small town, rural. So getting to, you know, go back out and be out in nature is honestly everything I needed. So that would be the number one thing I've done this year.

Awesome. Okay. Family time and baby bears. That's so, that's so nice. And you mentioned cooking. What did you cook?

Oh, man. Okay. So you know, our family cabin, it's, you know, in the woods. So, you know, typically things we cook are very simple, rudimentary. You don't want to haul up a bunch of Ingredients. My brother and I decided we wanted to try cooking something that had never been cooked at the cabin before. So we did Greek food, which was the most random cuisine we could think of. We did Euros, being my great aunt, who's like 83 years old, like, eat a gyro for definitely the first time in her life. It was fun. It was awesome, man. I definitely recommend surprising your family with some oddball cuisines whenever you can.

I have huge respect for that, personally. I'm just on my kind of cooking skills journey right now, really trying to expand my repertoire. Yesterday I cooked my first vegan curry and I could kiss myself. It was so good.

I could kiss the chef.

Rewarding.

I need to start using that expression. I've had times like that where I sit back and I go, God, I don't even want to finish this meal because I want to savor the moment of what I just created, man. It's a good feeling. I'm glad that you're getting into it.

Yeah, it's like, kiss the chef. And if nobody's going to do it, I'm going to do it. I love it. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Okay, so we'll dive into agency stuff here kind of right now with you, Garrett. What I like to do is I like to kind of deliver value from the very beginning. So before we dive more into your background, your context, etcetera, I want to hit you with a traditional agency journey question. Are you ready for it?

All right, hit me with it.

Okay, Garrett, what is your number one tip for agency operators?

Number one tip. Okay, so this is maybe not going to be your most conventional answer, but I believe that any agency operator that is interested in scaling, which is hopefully all of them, especially if you're trying to scale rapidly, you need to put in extreme amounts of work in the beginning to map out your belief system. And what I mean by this is almost all agencies, at least I believe this is how it should be, are led by founders, people who have some sense of how the world's changing, a theory of change. Agencies exist in this weird space where there's a gap in the market, where technology or whatever has allowed for new capability to be exploited. And the skill gap with the market is wide, so the agency can fit there. If you have an agency and you're trying to provide next level service, you need to have an understanding of what you're trying to build and why. And the best way to do that is to open up a figma chart, lock yourself in a room for a weekend, order pizza, you can make it fun, but force yourself to map out all of your core beliefs about the way the world is changing and about how you believe the industry should be approached. Obviously you're not just going to do things the same way everyone else is going to do them. And if your answer for how you do them differently is, well, we focus on service, that's not good enough. You obviously aren't going to be able to have success if all you do is focus on service in a broad sense. So map out your worldview, map out your point of view, your perspectives, create the high level point of view, but then ladder it down to very specific things you believe. And what this is going to do is it's going to create an artifact for you that you can use to, you know, as you're, you know, building your service, as you are trying to differentiate yourself and you're creating, you know, better, you know, you know a better go to market strategy as you're thinking about your branding and most crucially, as you pursue founder led marketing, which is something that I, you know, believe in more than any other tactic, you are going to want this artifact to be able to figure out what should you stand for in the market? Where is your thought leadership going to focus? What the hell do you have to say that is different from what other people have to say? And that's going to come in handy from day one, all the way up through year five.

That's awesome. And I really love that I get to have this conversation with you. Very relevant for my goals, for Zenpilot's goals in some respects as well right now. So this comes at a perfect time. Time I wanted to drill into what you said just a little bit more. I'm imagining myself in my cabin with my figma and my pizza and that's right. I'm kind of drawing a blank on like what kinds of. Could you give some examples of like beliefs that, I mean, I don't mean to like steal them for myself, but what kinds of thoughts are we looking for here?

Yep. So let me give you an example of, you know, I did this and I trust I had some trusted people, you know, know around me that I brought into this session with me. And they included, you know, people who had scaled agencies before, people who kind of believed at least in sort of similar things to what I believed in, had a similar theory of change. And what I really narrowed down to is what narrative that I want to be, you know, my worldview, my narrative. I want to be, you know, basically evangelizing and then all of the, you know, specific points of view that I have, that ladder up into that narrative and it has created, in my opinion, the perfect artifact, perfect map that I've been able to use for my own thought leadership marketing. So an example worldview that I have, LinkedIn is the most untapped opportunity in content marketing today. And I will fight anyone who disagrees with me on that. And I will stay up all night in a debate with somebody who thinks that's not the case. So that is my worldview and that's the most like I, you know, be super economical with your words.

Correct.

Create a really specific statement that captures your exact feelings about the world and notice how that ladders into my, my, my narrative. Now my narrative is the future of content marketing is people first, decision makers value authenticity and, and thought leadership content. And the best way to deliver that is to create content consistently through personal LinkedIn accounts of founders, executives and other subject matter experts. So that's the narrative that I'm trying to put out there. And then the last piece of this was the point of views. So my point of view is underneath that managing a CEO's LinkedIn account is a full time job. I genuinely believe that. And that is a very, very strong point of view that I have. LinkedIn can be full funnel. You can do full funnel marketing through LinkedIn. That is a POV that I have. Your CEO's account should be managed by the marketing team or an agency. The CEO should not manage their own LinkedIn account. That one's gotten me in some fights. I genuinely believe that. And it goes on and on and on and all of these POVs ladder up into the narrative and all, you know, that narrative ladders up into the worldview.

Okay, awesome.

Okay.

I feel like that's a taste of what we'll be getting into kind of later in the conversation. So we'll call that the number one tip, an extensive one. I'm still in that cabin. I'm having that pizza. So before we move on then, would you care to kind of give a little bit more context around influential, your agency, you know, your background, so that we have that kind of ticked off and then we can get straight into the rest of the insights.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so as the listeners probably can guess by now, my agency is focused on LinkedIn. So Influent is a LinkedIn marketing agency. Like I said, I believe LinkedIn is the future when it comes to content marketing. And the reality is that although the channel is very old, LinkedIn's been around for a long time. It's still sort of an emerging nascent opportunity because LinkedIn is really the only platform for B2B marketers where virtually everybody's ICP is in some way. Meaning if you do B2B, you know, services or technology, there's some application for LinkedIn in your marketing strategy. And yet the way Most people approach LinkedIn is they have some intern posting from their company account, 80% of businesses, that's the extent of their LinkedIn, or they're spending way too much money on ads and not getting results. And so what I wanted to build was a platform specific agency that gives small startups, but also mid market and even enterprise companies the full LinkedIn solution that ranges from upper funnel awareness all the way down through lead gen. And the approach we take, the specific approach, and we'll get into more of that later, is through executive thought leadership. So that's what our agency does. We work with, like I said, startups mid market, we work with their executive teams to build out executive thought leadership strategies and we deploy those strategies through LinkedIn. That's the agency.

And can you tell me a little bit more about the scale of your agency? Like what stage are you at right now?

Yeah, so I launched the agency in 2022. The first like 6ish months was, you know, doing a lot of product market fit, operationalization of services, trying to really understand who's my ideal customer, what sort of services do I want to bring to market. Then things started getting really serious. I started really going hard at sales and marketing. Um, and in the first six months we were able to, you know, launch the agency and hire, you know, up to four employees in that first or the second six months after the product market fit. And then this last year has been all about really turning the, you know, the afterburners on. So we have been scaling like crazy. We're at 10 full time folks in the U.S. we have a team of really awesome contractors, you know, three or four people in the US as well, but 10 full time, and we are, you know, hiring a new person every six weeks. You know, we're scaling extremely quickly. We should be around, you know, 20 full time by end of year.

Okay. Okay. So whenever you're listening to this watchers and listeners, you'll find that probably influence is already bigger than what Garrett is mentioning here. Awesome, awesome. Okay, so there's so many threads to pull on here terms of LinkedIn. Let's maybe first build the kind of the vision of what is typically happening then right now, in terms of LinkedIn, here's what I've seen and even been a part of is that usually this initiative of founder led marketing, either it's something that's kind of, it's like an ongoing investment of like 20% of one marketer's time on the team goes into this and it's just, you know, KPI, one post a week done. You know, and it's kind of ticked off. You get like above average amount of reactions and you're just thinking, okay, it's a brand thing, right? It's, you know, it's brand awareness. We're not counting on anybody coming in, know, raising their hand that I'm buying from you because the founder was posting and I loved it. Right. And I'm the, the feeling I'm getting is like, that is possible with your approach. So I wanted to dig into like, what is typically happening, why such initiatives are either kept on the back burner or there's like, you know, a brief hurrah and then they die off. Like how and why does that happen?

They're kept on the back burner because they're not effective. That's reality. Marketers are rational beings. Um, we prioritize what works and if there's a channel that, you know, isn't producing revenue, or at least revenue we can measure, then, you know, we don't spend time on it. And so that's why, you know, there's this sort of a common, you know, belief that, you know, founder led marketing or LinkedIn in general is this upper funnel only channel. The reality is this is a two part problem. One is that we think we're doing brand awareness, but we're measuring the wrong thing. And two, there's an attribution problem. But let's start with the first. Do you mind if I go in some detail here?

Yeah, by all means.

Okay. So, you know, when you think about the way most people approach founder led marketing, they start producing some posts for their CEO, for their founder, whoever, or maybe the founder does it themselves. They post a couple times, they get, you know, 50 likes and then 40 likes and then 30 likes and then they sort of lose steam. They go, okay, well we got some awareness and you know, maybe that's good enough. The reality is if you looked at who was engaging with those posts, I guarantee you the vast majority weren't actually in your icp. Meaning that not only did you not, you know, get leads, but you didn't even really get brand awareness. You may have, you know, been top of mind for Your, you know, audience you already had, but you probably didn't actually get much engagement or interaction from a net new audience. And that's why there aren't any results is because you are focused on building engagement with your existing community and not building net new engagement with a new audience. So the reality is if you can, over time, let's say over six months, create fantastic content that resonates with your ICP and measure that your ICP is actually engaging with that content, you will absolutely see lead flow. Any business software services, if you're creating great content that actually resonates, you will see lead flow. And there are different ways that we can generate that lead flow, that we can kind of spark more leads. But the problem almost always is that the content actually sucks. And it's just what, you know, people look at vanity metrics such as how many likes you got but don't look at who's liking the content. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it does. At my previous company, we used to actually do that analysis where it's like, okay, we're seeing who reacted, but not just how many people reacted, but also who reacted. And sometimes a post with 15 reactions was worth more because five of those were CEOs. Right. And paying attention to that, I'm starting to understand why you're saying full time job because it's a lot of qualitative analysis trying to play detective of okay, but why did that person, is there a personal connection or was it the content that won them over?

That's exactly right. And when you win a like from three people within your ICP who are new to your network, that is a massive signal. And that signal gets ignored 95% of the time. You'll continue to optimize for the posts that get the most likes, the most views, but the posts that drove those three engagements from your ICP doesn't get optimized for. But if you do it and you pay attention and you create content that way, you end up turning those three into 30 and those 30 into 300 and next thing you know, you're driving a lot of new engagements.

Tell me more about that. The types of posts like, what do you see that are kind of the traps of like, okay, you'll get 100 reactions, but it means nothing versus the ones that actually get relevant attention.

This is where that thought leadership map that I brought up in the beginning is so crucial because the reality is if you spend a ton of time distilling down what you believe, what you end up with is really, really punchy, specific ways of looking at your industry. And these punchy, specific ways of looking at your industry are what make you ideally a thought leader. These are the actual things you have to contribute to the space. 80% of your views, I don't care how brilliant you are, 80% of your views are probably, you know, in some way, I don't want to say commonplace, but aren't going to spark any sort of interaction. But there's 20% of those views there, and that's what you're, that are actually novel and are actually interesting. And if you focus in on those, which is the purpose of that exercise in the beginning, and you bring those into your content, you, you can see extremely great results. So let me give you an example. You know, before I mentioned in my thought leadership map, one of my core POVs was that managing a CEO's LinkedIn account is a full time job. Now this isn't something that I believe because it's controversial. It's something I believe because I have deep experience that leads me to believe this. So this becomes a core pillar of our content. And we have posts, you know, for example, one that uses that exact POV as a hook. Supporting your CEO social media account is a full time job. And then I go into the details of why that is and what the actual reality is that I believe that Post then gets 64,000 impressions, 623 likes, and ends up generating over 10 qualified leads, three of which convert into clients and turns into, you know, over 20k worth of MRR from one post.

How would you explain, like how does it happen that this particular post actually generates that kind of relevant interest? I mean, they see a message like this and is it that you support it with strong enough arguments where they say, okay, now I see how much effort is involved, or is it, is it something else?

It's that there are people out there who believe this as well. And the reality is, is that, you know, your clients likely work with you for, you know, maybe a bunch of reasons, but ideally they work with you because they share the same worldview as you. They also believe that X, Y and Z is the case, which is partly why they chose you over another vendor. Ideally. The reality is, is that there's a lot of people out there who believe that, you know, supporting a CEO's account is hard. That's another way of saying it's a full time job and those people have certain pain points. And the people who believe that are likely in market for my service because if they believe it's Hard. That means they're looking for a solution or that they know there needs to be a solution and that solution could be us. So that's what it is. It's about finding those POVs and then finding the people out there in the market who have those same beliefs. And that's not always how it is. You know, this is one way of doing it. You know, there are people who build in public and that is exciting for other people. And so there's other strategies.

Kuba.

But this one in particular is. Is pretty effective because you resonate on that belief level.

Okay. I think I would really benefit from like another example that doesn't pertain like directly to you, but like, let's say, you know, somebody you worked with. What's another type of pov? And again, how do you structure a post and get relevant attention around that?

Of course, here's an example. We have a client who is an agency accelerator. So their whole business is. They work with other agencies to help them grow. Pretty obvious what accelerator does. One of their beliefs is that LinkedIn or not LinkedIn, pardon me, that agencies ought to build software. And that is a take that a lot of people may disagree with. Not software as a service, but like build proprietary tech.

Interesting.

That is a. You say interesting because it is interesting. There are so many people who disagree with that take. The reality is, is that the founders who are sitting there, the agency founders are sitting there every day and going, God, I just feel like I should build some proprietary tech I want to exit in five years. I want that exit to be more valuable. I just have a feeling that tech is going to help me get a better multiple. They see that post and they go, oh my God, that's what I believe. I believe that they then comment and say, there's a match. Absolutely, there's a match. And that worldview, that belief becomes an open door for new business to happen, if that makes sense.

Okay, so I'm seeing something in that post that not a lot of people believe, but I do. And also this person posting does. So in my mind, I can see the hook. How does the rest of the post then play out for somebody to really trying to steal the secret sauce here? How do you then go through the narrative of the rest of the post and how do you do the CTA at the end?

Yeah, of course. Well, there's different ways to then go about the post. So you have the thing you believe and that's the thing that's out there, either resonating with somebody or even rubbing them the wrong way, which can actually spark a conversation and could become a reason you get connected. The rest of the post could either be an exchange of value, meaning that you're trying to educate, or it could be some type of. I mean, at the end of the day it's going to be educational, but it could be in the form of something very directly educational, Meaning this is the way that I would approach this if I was building tech and here's why, and unpacking it in that last example. Or it could be more story based. I did this and this was my approach and this is why it worked or it didn't. Or I have a client who did this and this was their approach and using data was really helpful here. So, you know, I have a client who built, built proprietary tech. They, you know, over three years only invested this much money, whereas others in their industry invested this much money and yet they had this much of a multiple. And that is a reason why you should do it. So it's about either storytelling or it's about just direct value transfer, but it's almost always educational, if that makes sense.

Okay, I see. And then I'm curious because I think a lot of the watchers and listeners are going to be curious as well. I know I'm getting into the nitty gritty here, but that's, you know, when I get questions about LinkedIn, I get these kinds of questions all the time.

Like, I love it.

How do I get people to engage? Do I ask a question at the end? Do I agree? Is there a link in the comments? Again, it's tactical. But how do you approach this? Or is this the wrong question to ask? Tell me about that.

The reality is that a call to action almost always deauthenticates the post. Meaning if you say, and that's why you should work with me, come join our website. Look, there are, you know, I get it. There are reasons why sometimes you want to drop a CTA and sometimes you know it, sometimes it can work. The first link in the comments thing used to work. Not so much anymore. LinkedIn sees that they actually are hiding it now in like you try to like go to like most recent comments versus most relevant. It's. Yeah, yeah. The point is, is that if you create great content, the open door is the person commenting liking or sending you a message. And you don't necessarily need to say, and then go to my website. What you're actually doing there is you're forcing them to take a step they're probably not ready for. And if you're doing true content marketing, you should be more interested in nurturing the relationship than you should be in making the conversion, which is counterintuitive, but you nurture enough relationships and conversions happen. That's the reality.

I see. So it's important that they do show up in the comments or the reactions. Would you then take a step, like, if it's somebody relevant, like, reach out to them via dm, send them a connection request, or is it all inbound?

This is where it can get interesting. Right, so let's say you've now been working with our agency for six months, or you're doing this in house. You've been doing it for six months and you're doing it the right way and you're paying attention to your ICP and all this stuff, and you're building content based on the frameworks that I'm describing. You then start to accumulate this mass of people who are really warmed up, who believe in what you believe, and it's a community. Genuinely. Some portion of this community is just going to send you a message and say, I want to work with you. Some portion are going to, you know, go to your website and maybe they show up as an organic search lead because they search for your brand and they went to your website because they've seen you for six months. But there's going to be a portion of this website that of this community that isn't necessarily just going to reach out to you and say, let's work together. And this is where you can get really creative and where if you measure things the right way, you can utilize some really interesting techniques. Let me give you some specific examples. We have a client where we've done this strategy for six months. We have a really huge pool. It's about 600 ideal customers who have been like decision makers who have been engaging with their content over the last six months. These are 600. You know, their lifetime value per customer is super high. So this 600 people represent a lot of potential revenue if we can get them into the pipe. And so something that we did that has been extremely effective is we basically took some tech that we built, we analyzed all of the engagements of the last six months and. And we scored out this list and said of that 600, these 200 have the highest engagement score. They've been commenting, liking and sharing more than anyone else. More than that, we did a little bit of analysis as far as what posts they've been liking and commenting on to really understand what has been resonating with These people. What we then did is we did a two part campaign, one from the executive themselves, basically reaching out with a hyper personalized message. Almost looks like a text message to the person, basically referencing the things they've been enjoying and saying, hey, if you ever want to talk shop about X, Y or Z, like I'm your guy. Booked a few calls that way. But the power of it was that we then actually linked it up to the sales team and we had the sales team connecting with other people from that buying committee of those companies. And we started seeing that we started getting a lot of account intent from each of these companies at the top of that list. And what we ended up having was a ton of booked calls through sales outreach from the sales team to people in and around that executive. It's a fascinating strategy that utilizes both the executive themselves and the sales team to sort of hit both the person who's been engaging and their surrounding buying committee. It's okay, drove, it drove a lot of results and it continues to drive results. We're doubling down on it.

Okay, so I'm building up a picture here. I can kind of see what's happening on LinkedIn. I can kind of see the post. I can see what's happening kind of. After you post and analyze the outreach. You gave me a piece of that one. Tactical question then, because I can see like a single post. But like, so what do you recommend, for example, in terms of frequency? A lot of founders are asking themselves, is one a week enough? Should I be posting one a day? Like, what's the, what's the latest on that? Or you know, what's the importance of it?

Our magic number is four a week. We find four a week to be the best for two reasons. One, after four you start. For most of our clients, we start seeing some cannibalization. Um, LinkedIn is unlike other platforms in that they surface your post for a longer period of time. It's sort of a longer, it's a long tail, a slow burn. And so after four, we've seen that, you know, it starts damaging your overall impression. Share per post. Um, if you're going for a quantity play, you know, five can be fine. But the other part of it, the second part, is the amount of time and quality you're putting in each post. If you're doing more than four posts, my guess is that you're not putting enough time and energy into each post individually.

Right?

Um, that's not necessarily true. If you have an army of people who are doing this, maybe you can get seven just crazy high value posts out per week. But again, diminishing returns. And at the end of the day I think you're better off just making sure those four are just dialed in.

Okay, one, I've got it. Like, I've got like a few tactical things to kind of check off the list formats. Then primarily text posts. A mix. Is there video involved?

Primarily text posts. LinkedIn is a text first platform. You know the way we all use LinkedIn. This is what I always tell people. If you want to know how, how LinkedIn the best way to get in front of, or better yet, if you want to understand user behavior on LinkedIn, just look at your own LinkedIn user behavior. Because the reality is, is that the people who are out there telling you you should do this and do that and that, they are scrolling LinkedIn and 90% of the posts they engage with are written posts, I guarantee it.

And so you never get through a video.

I don't know. I know very few people who regularly use LinkedIn for video. Now video, we should talk about it later because LinkedIn has a new video feed. It has a different kind of algorithm as the regular algorithm. It's a fascinating thing. But the reality is, is that 80% of posts for our clients, maybe more like 75, are text based. Adding in data and other things to that text based post, it can be an interesting post even if it's just text. The other maybe 15 or 20% is going to be a mixture of graphic and video graphics, particularly in the form of slides. Obviously LinkedIn slides and carousels has been a really trending thing. Graphs, charts, data visualizations, things that help show your point, are really effective. We have some clients who work in very, very commoditized industries who are looking for ways to explain very technical aspects of their, the way they approach their work to try to differentiate themselves in those instances. A video can be great. Similarly, a quality of a video view is high because someone's seeing your face. So there are reasons to do video. And I won't say don't do it. But as far as what our bread and butter is, it's almost always written posts, right?

You mentioned faces. So selfies with posts, yes or no?

The answer is sparingly. Sparingly. Okay, look, I mean, here's the thing. If you look at the people who engage with those posts of you taking a selfie with someone else, it's going to be mostly people from your existing network. And there's utility in that. There's a lot of utility and you know, your current clients, seeing you out there on, you know, on the stage, smiling and like taking a selfie with your other client. There's absolutely utility. There's also utility when it comes to, you know, attracting great people to your agency. Right. Like people see you out there in the market, smiling, doing things at the, you know, at the off site, those are really great reasons to produce that kind of content. But if you're just optimizing that machine for lead generation, those selfies aren't going to do you a lot of good.

Okay, okay, understood. I had to ask. It just popped in my mind. I appreciate it. So here's what I'm hearing. I'm like Garrett here is saying, you know, as a founder, I should be posting four times a week, various formats. Needs to be good quality, deep thought in there and I have a few concerns. One concern is how long do I need to keep this going to start seeing, you know, the first results, the first return. Like how do you usually set expectations around kind of the ramp up time of this thing?

Sure. So, you know, most of the time when people are thinking of results, the, you know, the three letter acronym they're thinking of is roi. And ROI looks different for every company because know, are you selling a $50 SaaS tool or a $350 SaaS tool or a $3,000 service or a $30,000 service. Right. And for each of those different, you know, companies, lead flow, you know, for some of our clients, it takes one. It takes one every three months for them to earn ROI. Sometimes it takes one every six months to earn ROI. Some of our other clients, they need, you know, 30 demos a month to earn ROI. And so the reality is, is that we, what Roi from LinkedIn is going to be is going to look very different, especially depending on, you know, these factors, your customer, lifetime value, all that stuff. However, some general expectations, if you're doing it the right way, within 90 days, you should see net new opportunities. I like to use the word green shoots. You should see qualitative and some quantitative measurements that tell you there's something here, something's sprouting out of the ground. And this could take the form of, oh, my website traffic from LinkedIn is up by 60%. That's crazy. Or oh, interesting. We've had people on sales calls mentioning our LinkedIn content, or I was just at a conference and someone mentioned my post, or you know, our client who left us churned two years ago is now back. Those are the green shoots you should expect in 90 days for doing it the right way. In six months, you should expect to see some regular level of lead flow. Now, if you're a SaaS company, you need 30 demos a month. You maybe don't want to wait six months. Maybe you want those demos immediately. That's where there's a whole host of other LinkedIn strategies I could recommend. You can boost certain posts with thought leadership content ads. Thought leadership ads are a great way to, you know, get your organic content sort of boosted immediately. So taking all those use cases aside, the $50 SaaS product and agencies alone, by six months, you should be expecting to get some regular lead flow. And by a year, you will not want to stop this machine you've built. We have a 95% client retention rate after a year, meaning clients that have made it a year with us end up, know, renewing for another year. So that's the reality is that if you make it a year, you will see that this becomes a huge, huge part of your marketing strategy.

Well, that's, I mean, it's a great vision, right? And something that like, you love to see it when it, when it works out. Here's another concern that like my inner founder is whispering in my ear right now. Okay, so to post for such a long time with such consistency, how do I keep the creativity going, going? Like, how do I keep posting? I assume you're supposed to kind of reinforce your POV or your kind of set of POVs a certain amount of times. Kind of keep reminding people what you're about. But then how do you keep it fresh? How do you not just repeat yourself?

Yeah, it's a great point, I would say. I have two tactical recommendations for this. The first is that you need to be paying very close attention to what's being said in the comment section of any of your posts. You will get three times as many post ideas from there than you will just, you know, top of your head. Because the reality is what you're saying in the market is going to generate, you know, questions, other perspectives that aren't addressed. New angles are coming at something and that always is a rich pool for new ideas. Plus, you know that people care about it because they took the time to comment about it. So that's one place to look. The second place is to start branching out and to start utilizing other people from around your industry, meaning looking at other thought leaders in your space and looking at what sorts of ideas are being talked about in the thought leadership sphere. The reality is, is that you may have to adapt at Some point your POVs to address some of the hotter topics that are happening in the market. For instance, for my industry, building in public is something that is super, super trendy. And you know, I didn't have a lot of POVs about, you know, whether you should or shouldn't build in public. I've had to develop those not only because they help my content get more reach, but because that's what people are interested in right now. Should I build in public? Should I not? And so, yeah, that's a good example of where my content continues to develop.

Okay, so there's trends where you haven't taken a side yet and you decide to take a side and kind of builds out your pov. And I mean, might be a silly question, might not, but how do you actually go about that? Like, is there a particular technique to building your POV on certain things or is it just a lot of introspection?

It's a great question. So in my opinion, it is a combination of two things. The first is basically using the people around you to, you know, help inform your pov. So here's the thing. You are an agency founder and that's fantastic. If your agency is any more than, you know, 50 people, the day to day work that's happening at your agency isn't necessarily going to be something you have your hands in. I mean, that's the case at probably an agency of 30 people, 20 people. Even. So, taking all of those smart people, the people on the front lines who are actually doing the innovative work, and the people in management who you're hiring, who hopefully are smarter than you in certain domains, and funneling all of that knowledge into your strategy is a super effective way of sourcing that information. Hopefully that makes sense to people and hopefully it's intuitive. But basically you should feel comfortable taking all of the subject matter experts at your team and as your team grows, bringing those people into that room with you, that cabin with, you know, you'll order more pizzas, but it'll be worth it because you'll get way more ideas contributing. So that's one. The other thing that I'd recommend is, you know, basically taking a deep and hard look at what sorts of interesting data or other things you can bring to the table that helps support your pov. Because as I found, working with clients is that the more we lean into their proprietary tech, the more we lean into specific case studies, the more we're able to pull out perspectives based on the data, meaning create opportunities for you to lead with insight rather than trying to just come off the dome and always give a fresh perspective. And if you surround yourself with fantastic data, client data, third party data, it'll give you opportunities to be able to come up with fresh new perspectives.

Yeah, I really feel that. And I think most agencies will find that they do have a unique advantage in terms of data in some respect. For example, from Zenpilot, when we take on new clients we have this intake form. We always ask them a bunch of questions about their project management problems because that's what we saw, right. We helped them do like a whole project management or operations makeover on top of ClickUp to make everything visible, track everything, et cetera. And you know, what we found is like we have I think a couple thousand answers like that in our database. Like such a rich vein of like they've all confessed to what's kind of what their pains are. And now we can use that to say we've heard from all of these agencies where the pain is most typically most strongly in terms of project management and that's kind of the data that we can stand on.

Exactly. And there's something about that that you're taking what is proprietary data and one, you're squeezing the most juice out of it that you can, but you are basically becoming, you're building an insights extension of your marketing team, right? So your marketing is not just about saying hey, we do this well. Hey, we do that well. Hey this is what we stand for, hey, this is what we don't stand for. But it's actually pumping unique insight into the market in the form of data that you have that other people don't. And you know, that is the organizations. So we work with some that are, you know, we work with a lot of startups of course merging industries, really interesting folks. But there's a people in the mid market and the enterprise level, and this is their unique value, is that they have incredible data. And we even have clients who have hired data, you know, data scientists, data engineers, whose whole job it is is to take all of that data, client data. I guess we're talking about agency use case right now. It'd be client data and third party data and leveraging that to just churn out crazy insight that of course is going to be valuable to your clients but is going to be an incredible thought leadership tool. Because now you're not just saying hey, this is what we stand for, you're saying hey, here's some incredible data you've never seen and here's the perspective that we, you know, generated based on that data and now you're not just resonating with people through the perspective, but you're actually providing incremental value. And it's an incredible strategy.

Yeah. So that in my mind that kind of builds part of the framework here is like, what information are you privy to that others aren't? What unique insight you have here.

Definitely. And agencies are commoditized, which, you know, there's a, if you are just a full service marketing agency and you don't do, you know, I'm a very specific and platform specific, I do LinkedIn. And if you're just everything, SEO, websites, everything, it's incumbent on you to, you know, layer in these extra things, the data, you know, the specifics of that.

I was going to say there's a brand that comes to mind. Do you know Lavender?

Nope, nope, I don't think so. I was thinking of a different company.

So Lavender, they've got, it's a tool to kind of analyze your emails and approve them, particularly, you know, cold outreach emails for cold sales. And what I particularly liked about their marketing is that, you know, through their tool, you know, you plug in enough accounts they are able to make crazy statements. But true, like we've analyzed, you know, however many millions of emails and like, here's the perfect length, here's what you should and shouldn't do in your subject line is like, it's such a rich vein for them. You know, when you put tech in the mix, you know, there's so much more that you can leverage here.

I genuinely believe that like if you, from the very start, let's say you're an agency like us of 10 people right now and, and your goal is to be an agency of a hundred people in the next five years, if from the very start you intentionally create pathways that link great technology with the insights that are being generated on the day to day through your client work with your marketing team, what you're going to end up building are these tendrils that as the company grows, they're going to be roots. And what you'll end up having is this machine that just pumps out just incredible data that is going to end up being a differentiator for you. It's going to make you look like an expert more than anyone else and it's going to give you the most incredible thought, leadership content that you've ever seen. So yeah, if you can leverage technology, especially if you're piecing together third party tools in a way that's unique or interesting, then you absolutely should.

Okay. All right, so Garrett, let's try. I would invite you now to kind of dumb this down for me and for the watchers and listeners a little bit. Okay, so let's say I'm a founder. Listening to this, I'm going to temporarily kind of not look super hard at what you said in terms of full time job. And I want to try this for myself and try to ramp up on LinkedIn, have these four posts a week like you mentioned. Can you draft me a plan of what should these four posts be? Is it POV 1, 2, 3, 4? How does that, you know, like what's a simple recipe to follow here? Just for starters, for somebody who wants to diy, like where to begin?

Yes. Here's where I would begin is basically what you said. I would create my thought leadership map and that thought leadership map would generate me those POVs ideally. And then I would basically take each of those POVs and I would ask someone on my team to just interview me based on those. Hey, so you set a CEO's LinkedIn account as a full time job. Tell me about that. Why? Okay, give your answer. Interesting. Just like you're doing now. What about this part of it? Why? What about what would. What, you know, this is a common objection someone might have. If they disagree with you, what would you say? And I would just go through that and I would have someone interview me and I would do it once a month, have them go through, do a 60 or 90 minute interview touching on every one of those POVs. And I think what you get there is a fantastic transcript that you could then look at and say, okay, how can I turn this into a post? How could I? You know, it's going to be great notes for you to be able to refer back to and say, I think there's a post here. I think there's a post here that you could then look at and say, okay, how can I turn this into a post? How could I? You know, it's going to be great notes for you to be able to refer back to and say, I think there's a post here. I think there's a post here. Now the real work starts of having to figure out how best to write on LinkedIn, which is a very difficult thing. It's time consuming if you're a founder who doesn't feel strong about your writing skills. You know, that's the thing about being a great founder is you're a thought leader. Fantastic. Are you the best writer? Are you the best graphic designer? Are you the best social Media strategist. Well, that's, you know, we'll find out. But that's how I would, that, that's, that's the recipe. I would say thought leadership, map POVs, interviews. Take the interviews and break those down into posts. And I would say start there and do text posts. Make it easy on yourself. And I would start there for the first, you know, three months and see where you, see where it takes you.

Very interesting. So basically ask myself, what do I believe strongly. Then ask somebody other than me to kind of poke holes in it or try to look at it from a bunch of different angles and the content kind of emerges from your answers to that. Am I getting that correct?

That's correct. Now, that's. Ideally, you would want somebody if you're not a marketing. There are very few agency founders who don't have backgrounds in marketing. But if you're somebody who doesn't have a background in marketing, you'll probably want somebody to spot check you to make sure that your ideal customer actually cares about some of the stuff you're talking about. You know, there are some agency founders who will riff on POVs that have nothing to do with what their ICP actually cares about. And, you know, that does happen. And that is, you know, if you're not a marketing founder, then you need to be aware of that. You need someone to say, hey, that is fascinating what you have to say about AI. There's no way that this, any person in our ICP is going to give a shit about that. So, you know, that's an instance where you want that person involved. But yeah, what, you know, that's the general, that's the general 101 framework I would recommend. And then the other advice is just get over it. Which I know is. And what I mean by get over it is get over how cringy it feels to post on LinkedIn. This is what I'd like to, this is what I like to tell people, is that one of the biggest things that's going to stop you isn't actually any tactical thing. It's the feeling that you are putting something out there completely unsolicited. And the reality is is that posting on LinkedIn is inherently, it's, it's inherently unsolicited. No one asked you what your opinion is. No one asked you to give some advice, and yet you're doing it. And so you just kind of have to realize that, like, if you want to be a thought leader, you're gonna have to walk up on stage when everyone's eating dinner, tap the mic and say, I have something to say. And maybe there's gonna be people who care and maybe there's not. And maybe, hopefully you don't get booed off stage, but have to get over it.

Your mind works really similar to mine, Garrett. Like, I try to make it visual in my mind, like, what is happening? What type of like, rhetoric is this? I imagine it as a corridor. You're going through a long corridor and there's doors and they're slightly ajar, and you peek into each one of those and there's a speaker on stage and they say something and you're that speaker on that stage. What can you say that is going to make people come in and listen to the rest of what you've got to share there?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You know, it's really funny because this is actually very. I find that with clients we work with, especially the small ones, you know, the mid market ones, it's much more about, you know, what proprietary data do we have and how can we make the founder sort of this avatar that represents all this value that this agency has. And that is a very fun thing to do. But when you're working with small clients, we have small agencies, teams of, you know, eight people, 10 people. It's much more about the founder themselves. And it's a very personal thing that's happening. And we actually see is with a lot of these people there's a transformation where for the very first time, they're actually listing out that they believe and for the very first time, they're actually going out into market and saying, you know what, this is what I stand for and this is what I believe. And it's a very empowering experience. And we actually find that those founders end up going on to want to be on podcasts, end up going on and speaking at conferences, because it's a whole unlock that sometimes people founders are not willing to take, they're scared to take.

Okay, so I've got two last questions here. Although I feel like the two of us could go on here for like two more hours on this, especially since I'm Heavily, I'm a LinkedIn kind of person. Like all my friends, you know, they'll find me on LinkedIn more typically than anywhere else. So, last two questions, one thing that's on my mind, you talked a lot about kind of sharing your POV on LinkedIn, what you believe. It seems to be kind of specific to what's happening in the industry. What's relevant to the icp. So now I wanted to confront that with kind of the personal part of personal branding. What do you see? Like, is this like a sometimes kind of post or like, what's the value of like, going. Going on LinkedIn and saying, well, also, aside from being a CEO, I also do baseball, or in my case, I also do bass because I play bass. Aside from being a marketer for a Zen pilot, like, there's a time and a place for this. Like, what's your take on those?

So this is actually a fantastic question to sort of have here at the end, because what I've been talking about today is about building a thought leadership strategy. And it's focused on what the thought leadership, the actual, you know, key, giving insight to the world and allowing that to drive new business. The really special thing about this Strategy and about LinkedIn is that it is coming through a person, it's not through a company, which means that this sort of personal piece of it can be your. It sort of ribbons its way throughout and can be basically your unique angle. So everything we've talked about today is about finding the POV and about, you know, leveraging that and data. Can you do that in a way that is super unique to Cuba or to Garrett? And what might that look like? And that's where this whole, you know, science turns into a bit of an art. Where. How can I identify what. What is it about me that people like? People tend to say that I'm batteries included. I have a lot of energy, right? And so how. How do I bring some of that in so that all of these POVs are supercharged with the fact that, you know, that it's coming from just me and not Kuba or anyone else. It's not just the idea, it's the. So the point is, tactically, what does this look like? You're going to have some posts where maybe it's really POV driven and it's exactly the way I've described, and that's fantastic. I think layering in some specific aspects of who you are can be done without having to post all those selfies. Now you can. You can do. You know, I'm here I am playing baseball. But I think what an even better way of doing that would be is by saying, here's my pov, here's what I believe. I've experienced this not just in my work life, but in my personal life. And here's why. Here's what I've dealt with that's helped me see this or another Way of doing this would be you are creating a video about marketing, but you're doing. So maybe on the way to your son's baseball game, there are ways of not talking about baseball to show that you're a baseball guy. Maybe every once in a while, there's a picture of your team at, you know, at a Mets game, and maybe that's part of it. Um, but I think there's ways of doing this, and I'll actually leave that kind of as a treasure chest that people can kind of think about themselves. How can I take everything that Garrett said today and how can I make it just feel a little bit like me and no one else can? Be a really fun exercise to think about.

Yeah. So this is like. It's a cherry on top. It's like embellishment. It's like additional flavors. Like, with. It's a fingerprint. It makes it uniquely yours, despite the. The pov. You know, maybe being, you know, some other people might have similar thoughts, but not. Not the same kind of person is having those thoughts. Yeah, I'm getting. I'm getting.

Yeah, that's right. And it's. And like I said, it's much more of an art than it is a science. I have way less tactical advice, and I have more, like, energy for you that you can take and think about how you'd want to position yourself.

Okay. Okay. I made a mistake of saying that I have two final questions, because that was awesome. That would have been a totally good final point. I do have to add. Now ask my second question, because I did tease it. Lightning round or a quick round of. You mentioned between the lines that the writing piece itself is hard. And, you know, as a writer, I concur. What are some of your quick tips of, like, okay, just follow these, like, you know, few rules, or, like, you have this kind of template, and then the writing will be, you know, decent.

I think this is a perfect last question. I can be quick with it. We have intentionally sourced incredible writers, people who have spent their entire careers as writers alone, to work at our agency because that competency is, I think, the most important. Maybe second to journalism and interviewing, which is a huge part of our strategy if you're going to write for LinkedIn. Some advice. 1. Parsimony. Meaning, be economical with your words. Be concise. Work on trying to say more with less. You know, the punch is a really big thing I always talk about. I want sentences to punch. Similarly, having sentences push you down to the next sentence. So whenever you're thinking about, you know, you're reading your post, look in there for are there any parts where I get bored? Are there any parts where I feel like I could, you know, I don't feel energy pushing me to the next thing. So that's really important. The second most important thing is make sure the thrust of the post is the main message you're trying to get out there is part of the hook. You know, the hook doesn't just have to be a pov, but whatever the value you're trying to bring, bring it right up there at the top. I see this all the time more than anything else is people bury the lead, people want to put it at the very bottom. And finally, this is what I want to say. And it's like you're doing yourself a disservice. No one's ever going to get there. I would say, yeah, I would say the third and final thing is ditch any and all flowery. And this is part of the first point. But it's a little bit different. If you use ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to write these posts, what you're going to find is it's going to be extremely embellished and there's going to be a lot of superfluous language and there's going to be a lot of formality. It's going to have a lot of marketing speak. You're going to see really complex sentence structure. Write like you talk. That's what I would say. Write like you talk. If you talk in short sentences, you talk. In incomplete sentences, you talk. You know, it's choppy, it's quick, it's fast. Write like you're a friend giving some advice to somebody else. Don't write like you're writing a blog or something.

Yeah, that's what I always mention. Like you're talking with somebody I typically mention over a beer. Like, how do you give it to them straight, you know, exactly. Okay, awesome, perfect. And I think, and I concur with all of these and I think that would set anybody watching or listening well on their way to LinkedIn success. And this whole founder led marketing thing that we covered here today, what an awesome conversation. We covered a lot of ground I feel here today. Garrett, thank you so much for sharing all of this. And now I would love for you to share, like, where can people get more from you? This was just, you know, a little less than an hour conversation. How can people learn more from you? Where should they follow you?

Well, I appreciate it, Kuba.

Is it LinkedIn?

Is it LinkedIn? You know, follow me on Clubhouse, please. No, the reality is, is you can absolutely find me on LinkedIn. Please do connect with me on LinkedIn. I produce thought leadership content that, you know, will help you, you know, basically have success with your thought leadership content. So follow me on LinkedIn. My name is Garrett Cottle. That's G A R R E T C A u D L e. And then I would also say find us on our website. That's influent CO I n f L U E n T. Like the word influential without the IAL CO because.com was like $1.5 million, and we couldn't do that. Yeah, unfortunately.

Okay.

But that's the place. That's the best place to find us. And please do reach out if you have any questions at all about growing your own, you know, LinkedIn strategy. It's a. It's an important part of any agency's growth in 2024.

Amazing. Amazing. Okay, thank you. Learned a lot from this conversation myself, and, like, we kept things pretty rapid here, but, like, we kept up. This was awesome. Really great talking with you, Garrett. To anybody else watching and listening, don't forget to follow Agency Journey as well. Subscribe to us on YouTube, follow us on the podcast platforms, all that good stuff. And if you want clips from the show, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Jakub Grajsar. I post them very regularly. Although after this conversation, I think I'll try to turn more of these into text posts as well. I think you should.

I think you should.

Yeah, there you go. And that's what I'm taking away. One of the things that I'm taking away from this conversation. Okay, Garrett, thank you again so, so much for coming on the show. Thank you, everybody else, for watching and listening. And, yeah, we'll see you all next time. By.