Mastering B2B Influencer Strategies: A Deep Dive with Rob Jones and Sidekick Strategies

All right, my hub heroes, we're back for another sidekick strategy session. And I'm super excited because today we're talking about the rise of B2B influencers in the creator economy. And as you can see on the screen, I am not alone. I am actually here with the mayor of HubSpot, Rob Jones, the HubSpot. Here on a humorous high flying journey. I've been watching you. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rob Jones, the charismatic trailblazer on an epic quest from HubSpot rookie to super admin with a knack for navigating the complexities of the HubSpot CRM. Rob is not just mastering HubSpot. Well, ladies and gentlemen, he's trying to redefine it. And there are three things that I wanted to pull out in this intro that I feel like you need to know. One, he is a content comedian in the realm of sales and marketing. Robust, stirring up a storm with his humorous content. Always on the lookout for the next big laugh. He's the guy who makes learning about sales as an entertaining as a hit comedy show. Of course, not with the orange suit today, but typically a guitar, an orange suit. He's a relationship architect, by the way, on LinkedIn. Rob is building more than connections. He's crafting meaningful, impactful business relationships. Key, by the way, to the topic that we're talking about today. He's the go to guy for a hearty chat, a strategic insight or a collaborative venture. And the third thing that I'll mention before we get into the good stuff today is he's a growth guru. That's right. Always thinking, always innovating. Rob is the mind behind fostering personal and professional growth at Revpartners. He's not just an employee, he's a visionary, driving the company towards every milestone. Rob, how did I do with that intro, by the way?

Dude, my heart rate is like, I'm jazzed, like, like blood pressure, anxiety, nerves. I'm excited to be here with George B. Thomas. Very glowing review and I don't know if I would endorse it all myself because you speak so highly. There's a lot of alliteration in there too. I mean, you're using literary elements in the intros. I loved it, man.

I do what I can to keep everybody happy. It's all about entertaining and educating. And today when we're doing that, we're discussing the rise of B2B influencers in the creator economy. Rob, I want to start with this question right here. When I ask you, what the heck do we even mean by the title.

That we're throwing is what I would say. So a lot of this idea, it's not new. It's worked in B2C, it's worked in direct to consumer, it's worked in almost the non profit, it's worked everywhere except B2B.

Right.

So I mean, and even traditionally you've had leads or spokespeople or paid actors or talent or people that do endorsements. But if there's one thing people need to have in their minds, it's openness to be able to think about, especially in marketing and martech and where we both sit. I sit in rev ops and you're the HubSpot guru. There's a lot of, a lot of data and backing about things that work to 3%, 6% with that sort of stuff.

Right.

So if you could, if you could depart from the traditional data backed approaches and not settle for that and start thinking of bringing some of the more non traditional and relationship focused things to this space, I think, I think you might get a lot out of it.

I love this idea of relationships. I love this idea of patience. I love this idea of non traditional. Maybe, maybe just for a second, put your measuring stick down, follow your gut to do some of what we're going to talk about today. Now, Rob, I've kind of aligned this in a direction that I want to go, but I'm willing to go off the beaten path at any point of these questions and, and also rules of engagement. If there's a question that I should have asked at the end, I'm going to ask you, Rob, what didn't I ask you in this interview that I should have? But I want to go at this, starting with business owners, moving into marketers and then actually going into sales. So if you can see what I'm doing here, I'm kind of giving a rev ops kind of approach to the different pieces and parts that play. Right. So with business owners, Rob, I want to start to dive into strategic alignment, that thing that you bumped up against ROI expectations and long term partnerships. But let's start with the strategic alignment portion of this. How can business owners align B2B influencers, marketing strategies, business strategies, their overall goals, how do we align all of that together when we're first starting to think about maybe doing something around the Creator economy and B2B influencers, whether it be us or invoking other B2B influencers into our brand?

Again, a lot of my responses to this are probably non traditional and maybe unexpected, but they're honest And I think that's one of the first things that you need is being direct over communicating. Alignment typically isn't a directive. So along with that of just an understanding of what the overall org goals are and then kind of by department, there needs to be a culture of transparency, honesty and then really trust.

Right.

Business owners, especially in this CEOs, founders, those types of people. I feel like as you scale and grow and as there becomes more removal from ICs to management to the actual C suite and leaders of the team, there's less awareness, there's less trust and detail, granularity. And so it's harder to not request approval or data or science or backing for some of these initiatives where there isn't anything in the space yet. You take somebody like Mr. Beast from YouTube who has billions of views and 100 million subs and all this other stuff. It took a long time for people and investors to trust him, right? So, but, but it works there. And, and he is generating a ton of revenue just by making videos, right? So, so there are other industries where it's been proven, there are other verticals or other segments where stuff like this has been proven. It's just, it's harder to do in B2B because it's new. I don't think it's any coincidence at all. As a matter of fact, I think there's a cool corollary from the kind of, from the pandemic where the work from home, like work life balance became altered, I'll say. And the separation between what it meant to be at work and what it means to be at home or personal, those lines are blurred more than ever now. I mean, I am at home right now working, right? So that type of stuff. I think that a lot of content, a lot of ideas and a lot of people started meshing the two or blending the two or I mean that that is factual, that that has happened. As far as like the rise of people that we're talking about right now, the creators that are doing it for B2B, what do you need? And how would, how would you address a business owner that is looking to, you know, consider this or think about it. If what you're wanting is to settle for the same, you know, conversion rates and kind of the waterfall math, right, that's fine, but I'm not asking. It's kind of like the hub illusion concept, right? I'm just putting out there there's another way to do it. Doesn't mean it's the right or the best one, but it's worth exploring. It's worth putting some, some resource into.

I love a couple words that you threw out there. Settling. Should you settle? Are you willing to settle? And I love this idea, too, of what keeps coming to mind as you're talking about that is like, listen, do you want to be a trailblazer? Because nothing in, like, nothing's new under the sun. Listen, go west, young man. There's a gold rush out wet. Like, go there. Like we're talking about. If you're going to be a trailblazer, you might not know what's going to happen. You might have to pivot and transition and do all the things to survive in the thing. But at the end of the day, you're heading in a lucrative direction. Which, speaking of lucrative, one of the things I said I wanted to talk about from a business owner standpoint was ROI expectations. Don't get nervous because I'm going to set you up for success here with this question. What kind of ROI should business owners expect from B2B influencer collaborations? Not expect from B2B influencer Collaborations, or maybe have over a lengthy period of time with B2B influencer collaboration? See, Rob, you can answer that one any way you want.

The most important part of that is length of time. It is not something that you're going to hire an intern for. The whole social media intern. It's kind of how it's traditionally done. It's become a meme. Those people have had success. But to build anything out like this, that, that, that catches and that becomes sticky and develops continuity. It's a process both for the exposure. We mentioned this kind of before coming on, but there, there needs to be a prolific element to it, right? It is going to take a long time to see roi. Now, what define length of time for me in this role, really starting to go full into it. We saw tangible, I guess we saw ROI within a year. And it was, it was, it was kind of like you were talking about earlier. I made something that was, we'll call it offbeat. And it was a video, it was humorous, it was on LinkedIn, it was public at Inbound. Somebody said, hey, you know, wanted to meet you. The reason that you won this deal or the reason that this was, you know, that was brought to you is because I was thinking about a referral. I was thinking about doing this. Who can we work with on lunch? You know, clicked on LinkedIn, saw this, and I remembered you guys, revpartners, you do exactly what I was looking for. So from the length of time perspective, about six, eight months, somewhere like that, within a year. And that was substantial, like 50k. So that type of stuff. Now, did the video call it like close the deal for us? No, but I've said that I have a couple of weird mantras. One of them is you don't have to be a top mod to be top of mind. I am not a strategist. Like I'm familiar with HubSpot, but you could run circles around me for sure. But that's not my function.

Right?

My function is almost like a beacon.

Right.

Christina Garnett, she's amazing. She's an amplifier. She's a voice of the customer. So I just want to redirect attention to the people that are the experts at revpartners, people that do the implementations and those relationships, like anything else can take a while to develop. So it isn't even necessarily about the ROI of the concept, but it's about as far as measuring time length, but it's about how long would it take you to build a relationship with somebody virtually via content. The faster you can do it, the more ROI you will see. I know that for sure. Should business owners be looking for that or shouldn't they be looking for that? Again, it depends on how risk averse maybe they are, how risk willing and how much they trust people. A lot of this is built around. And again, I can't really speak to other places and I don't aim to, but at RevPartners there's a culture of trust and unlocking human potential. This is something that I enjoy. It's something that I do feel like I have at least some skill set or some wit or some humor and that resonates with people in a way that it would be much harder for me to do trying to fabricate that I'm a rev ops HubSpot extraordinaire like we have in the ecosystem that it's comprised of really, really, really smart people. But I am not one of those implementers. So it's pointing my skill set and using it for something else. And again, in my case it's demand gen. So long winded answer. But it's a hard topic to condense into, you know, singular responses.

Yeah, without a doubt. But here's the thing, what I my brain unpacks as I'm hearing you talking. It's like off the beaten path a little bit. Meaning you're leaned into your human element. You leaned into your humor. I love the fact that you said you don't have to be A top. Mine to be top of mind. That is so true. But you showed up as your authentic self and it was a spark that started the flame, that then the flame was measurable. Spark wasn't measurable. Flames measurable. Right. And I love that. And what's funny is you even mentioned like six months a year. It's gonna take some time. And I, you, you, you mentioned, you use the word catch it eventually, you know, it caught and then. And I want to talk about long term partnerships, but I want to be careful because I want to do it in a way that again, could be bi directional. Because I know here in a minute we're going to drop down to the marketer section and I'm going to ask a question about content creation and use. Either us becoming the B2B influencers or using other B2B influencers. And so when I say long term partnership from a business owner standpoint, I want to ask it in the way of how can long term relationships when influencers drive sustained business growth? Or I want to ask it in the way if your business partnerships with the content that you're going to create in the platforms that you're going to create it on, what happens as far as sustained business growth? Again, Rob, you can answer in any direction that you feel led.

Yeah. So partnerships in relation to making content on behalf of other people, is that, is that kind of where you're going.

Either like, is it like making content or having somebody make content for us or us making our own content for our business are the two directions. But you did kind of just bring up a third of like. Or is our business getting paid to create content for other organizations? So this could have three prongs, but just whichever one you want to go down.

Yeah, it's been more effective for me to make content for the people I work for. I made a HubSpot AI launch video, which was the dream, you know, thing to be asked to do and involved with. But that was more. Again, HubSpot. Love them, we both do. They're fantastic. But they're a gigantic, I mean they're a billion dollar company. So even that approval process and like the notes and the brand guidelines, I should have probably been sued a couple times with some of the stuff I've put out there just from fair use and all that stuff, which is, you know, it's important. I'm not advocating to do the kind of stuff that I do, but that was built into the understanding.

Right.

Like, am I going to get in trouble for this? The HubSpot mantra of like, use good judgment came into play. So I do feel like I have decent enough judgment to stay within the lines. But all the content that I'm making is more the concept of agency. So the third one, like making content on behalf of other people, there's. That's what a marketing agency does. That's what a creative agency can do. Making your own content is something we've leaned into at RevPartners because it's part of our. It's part of our core value, right? To unlock people, to unlock latent potential for human flourishing. And so it's not requisite. You know, it's not like you. Your first day, you have to be vlogging and recording and making funny videos or singing songs or any of that stuff, but you have the option to do so if that's who you are. And so we really try to treat the people as humans first. One of the mottos is, you're a human being, not a human doer. So if that's something people want to lean into, they now have an avenue to do so. And we've seen success with that. For me, a business that makes their own content, it's not even really about hiring someone or doing it yourself, but it's that it's authentic and that it stands out. How many emails do you get a day? How many webinars? How many? Even for the space I find myself in, which is, you know, I was in a sales seat for a year and had pretty good success, even though I'm not the best salesman, but I'm a really good relationship builder. And so in a sea of where those reps, HubSpot reps and other channel partners are being themselves sold to all the time, right? Hey, introduce us, or hey, can we get in front of you? Or hey, whatever. There's a different approach to do that that is much more direct, much more authentic, and it rewards connection more so than it does hit a quota or hit a target or hit a number. One of those examples is really with the suit, that whole concept. Like, I would go to these, you know, formal team meetings in the suit and just be, you know, be in character, if you will. And that, that creates an impression, like an imprint of who are they going to think about easiest, right? Is it one of the 7,000 partners in the HubSpot ecosystem? That's a lot to narrow down from, right? It's a lot of exposure and it's a lot of the same types of initiatives with one, pagers and webinars and ebooks video specifically gives you a better opportunity to make an impression and stand out. And so that. That was the approach. It was very much. I've used this example, which is ridiculous, but it gives me. It just gives you an idea of how I think in Billy Madison, he's drawing a blue duck in kindergarten and she says, that's a great blue duck. Billy, why'd you draw a blue duck? And he's like, I've never seen one. Wanted to see one. So I try to take the approach of, like, what isn't in existence in the ecosystem now and do that. Whether it's good or right or bad is almost not. It's not really the point. It's. This is going to stand out because it's unique. And it just so happened that at the time I started making funny stuff, you know, humorous videos, whatnot, on LinkedIn, that didn't really exist to the level even in the last two years that it does now. So I was kind of, I mean, really fortunate and lucky. I feel at times like Inspector Clouseau, if you're a Pink Panther guy that just stumbles into success almost accidentally and just transparently, I feel like that's a lot of the reason I've had any success is almost more of leaning into asking forgiveness, moving fast and breaking things. You know, that whole concept, which is, again, in a startup, it's easier to do that because there's less separation from people that could give you the power or delegate trust or any of that. And it's just been a perfect storm of all that stuff for, for, for me, man.

I hope everybody is getting the nuggets of wisdom along the way as you're talking. You mentioned I'm not really great at sales, but I'm great at relationships, by the way. Relationships is all. And sales is all about relationships and just other things that you said. Like you said, I made an impression, an imprint. Dare I say you evoked an emotional response. People buy based off of emotion, not really knowledge. That's the great Zig Ziglar quote that we could throw in there. So there's just so many nuggets that you're kind of leaning into and I want to continue to double click on something. You started talking about content creation and so let's move into the marketer section of this and under marketers. I want to talk about content creation. I want to talk about trends and innovations. I have a specific thing that you did that I'm going to tie back to this and be like, what in the world? And Then overcoming challenges. So for marketers, content creation, trends and innovations and overcoming challenges. So let's talk about content creation. Many marketers might watch this and immediately they're thinking, well, how can I, as the marketer, collaborate with a B2B influencer to create content that resonates with my target audience? I'm going to ask this in a way, and you kind of talked about video, you talked about you creating the content. Can it be a mixture of both other influencers and us? Should it be just us as the influencer? When it comes around this marketer and content creation and creating this buzz and stepping out and pivoting and almost doing this, like, test, iterate, test, iterate, test, iterate. Under a culture of there is no failure, there's only lessons like, just unpack content creation for us.

You mentioned how do you get the right content in front of the right people at the right time? That is, I mean, what is that to the three things that you have to get right separately? So there's almost too much of a timely element to worry almost who your audience currently is, who they were, who they will be. A lot of that with trends and what's like in vogue changes all of the time. Like, so I don't probably tell myself my audience, I'm not even sure who they are because my audience is HubSpot's audience, which is growing $26 billion in like, I'm not sure who my audience will be tomorrow, but I do know that people that are going to work with us would probably. A differentiator is probably the, the topics and how it's presented rather than a demographic or an age range or a title. And so humor is universal. My background. And again, I realize I'm not for everybody either. And that's, that's something you kind of have to lean into is like, I try to make content for one person. Like, I make it for not the entire segment or the entire ICP or role most of the time, but like the nuance and the Easter eggs and the nuggets and the stuff I try to put into videos is like, somebody will get that right. Somebody will understand and lean into it. Who should it be made for? Again, background and memory. There's a concept of like limbic resonance that comes through.

Right.

The reason that a music video or the reason that certain things resonate more is because there's more room for them to resonate with you. And even being remaining top of mind as your audience changes and moves into a buying motion, you know, there's different statistics on only 3,4% of people are in a buying motion right now. So finding that 3% is kind of like the like older BDR cold call mentality. You got to make a thousand calls with, you know, 3% meeting book rate, conversion rate there. To me, you can get in front of a lot more people more quickly without automating, right? So with remaining personal and remaining human and authenticity by making content that's exposed and put out into, into public. And it's less about caring who the audience is, how old, what they're, what their title is, because that can change. They can be in a buying motion and out they can. Again with Hubspots. I'm pausing myself because almost again, another perfect storm with the insane ravenous hurricane of product updates and feature releases to HubSpot. That attracts new people, it attracts new industries, it attracts new verticals, and it attracts a larger audience. So some of the intent, with very, you know, people have asked like, why don't you make more RP content? Why don't you make more things that point to revpartners, right? People are gonna learn that, they're gonna seek that out. So we, we've become like a buyers who seek information. We have so much available to us. So educating and pushing content and product pitches and ebooks and all down people's throats is not like, it's not unique because that's what happens. But it's also not very personal. I think if I can contribute in any way to growing awareness of HubSpot what it does, and let people do their own research, then the person that opened that door or built a bridge there, me again, hopefully I'm top of mind. Whenever they do need a RevOps resource, whenever they do need an onboarding or implementation partner, and it's again, that's going back to the first call. What's the ROI on that? How long does it take? It's, hey, you know, I've been in this seat for a year and a half and we've seen a lot of success and a lot of revenue that we can point to from some of these initiatives. But it isn't to the chagrin of every business owner and person that has to make these decisions. It's not something you can really predict when it's going to happen. It's not all of it necessarily as repeatable as people would like for it to be. So it, it's scary. I mean, it is. I can't imagine having to be the one to enable, you know, a team of people to make that it does take kind of going against the grain and leaning into other stuff. I don't want to say it would require desperation, because that's not true at all. But from what I said, it takes a little bit of openness in your mind to be able to think this way isn't working as well as we thought, or we need to increase and there are other avenues for us to do that and get our message out. And that's kind of the approach that I've taken.

It's interesting because you mentioned the word desperation, where my brain goes and has always gone with the content creation, becoming the B2B. Influencer or influencer is every video, every piece of content that you create. It's like you put a worm in the pond because you're kind of doing some fishing. And what's funny is when we've all seen the guy or gal who you go to the bank and they've got like four or five fishing poles. Never once did you look at them and go, oh, they're desperate. You look at them and you go, oh, they love what they do. And they have a strategic plan on how to catch more fish. And so that's where I would lean into this. And the other thing too. I'd be remiss if I didn't share a quick little story around this content creation and eventually it getting there. I'll never forget I had a call with a gentleman who reached out and he said, hey, I would love for you to train me how to use HubSpot. And we had a nice little conversation and I got about to the middle of it and I said, sweet, so what level of HubSpot do you have? And he goes, I haven't even bought HubSpot yet. And I said, what do you mean you haven't bought HubSpot yet? You've been watching my HubSpot videos that I created for HubSpot users so that they could use HubSpot better. He goes, yeah, well, I was just evaluating if I actually wanted to buy HubSpot, stumbled across your videos, and now I want to buy HubSpot and I need you to train me right now. That wasn't the strategy, but it just happened. Because it is. But it wasn't. All right, let's move forward and talk about trends and innovations here.

I have a story similar to that. Really a really quick one. It's that exact same thing. It wasn't even reaching out to train, but it was, I guess you can blur the guy's name out later if Whatever. But I've told him this, and I told him I'm going to sing his praises because this is just such a genuine relationship, connection thing that happened on LinkedIn. His name's Matt Gabota. He has a B next to his name. The tagline is like, he does something and then below average beekeeper. And he engages with content that I do all the time. And the comment was the most famous one to me was, I don't know what a HubSpot is, but if I ever need one, I'll know where to look.

Right.

That's very similar in that, let's say, evaluating him and his role as a person. People move all the time. People change orgs all the time. There are barriers in place with all orgs and with whatever company or industry, et cetera, et cetera, all the time, to where that isn't a buying motion right now, but tomorrow. And as they move into a new seat and a new role, that all changes. So you're not marketing or creating content to the company, you're creating it to the individual. My ICP is based less on demographic information and more on what. What type of humor? Like, what type of interest do these people have, what type? Who are they behind the demographics? And so if you create content like that, that can speak almost universe, it crosses boundaries from like, is this the right fit at the right time, right person, right title, right role? It's almost irrelevant when you're making stuff that can be appreciated just for what it is. And that resonates later. So that's my. That's my story.

Yeah. And I now I want to double click on that, because what I hear when we're talking about this is where my brain goes, is the idea of if one person laughs, if one person learns it's about the human, it's about the one. And the one may become many, but I'm willing to create the content because of the one. And here's the thing. You brought up, Matt. Not only will he change potential orgs, but we don't know who he knows and who they know and. And the idea of network at a global scale. When you put content out for the one in the universe that could potentially become the many, you just have no clue. All right, now let's dive into trends and innovations. I'm gonna ask the question first, then I'm gonna tell you why I'm asking you this question. My question is, how important are emerging trends or historical mainstream concepts in B2B influencer marketing? No matter if we're the ones creating the content or have hired a B2B influencer to create it. Ladies and gentlemen, back in the day, there was this thing called the Great American Hero. Rob, you made a video for multiple people. I happen to be one of them. Talk about innovations, historical mainstream concepts. Talk about the Great American Hero and kind of what you guys did and why that's important, why people should kind of maybe think in this direction or pay attention to it. Just unpack all you have around that.

I literally, right before this call, posted one of those today and I changed it up. You're talking about the Budweiser campaign series from. You know, we're old enough to have seen it and appreciated it, but it's real Men of Genius, which. The whole idea was like, we salute you, Mr. Charcoal Barbecue Grill Master. And it was very satirical and very, you know, funny. That stuck with me and I was a kid at the time, right? And it wasn't about the beer. That's the other part. It was, it was. I couldn't as a kid. I don't, don't even know what Bud Light or Budweiser was, but that was really cool. The trends and innovation that again mentioned this earlier, but they come back around. Everything's at bogey. I think it's really a separate talking point. But it's funny to me that the same sales techniques and whatnot and marketing techniques that worked in the early 90s with like business on the golf course and relationship and handshaking is almost the way that I think it needs to be done now instead of endless automation. But I'll tie this back into the earlier point that we were both making, right? Like how long should you expect if you tap into that something pre existing and have shades of it or a. I've heard it called. I do a lot of parodies.

Right.

But if you use that as a point of reference, it's much more likely to be impactful a lot quicker because people don't have to build an awareness of what it is.

Right.

The commercial series. It's also a lot more effective to templatize the creation of those. Those videos don't take long at all. It's just writing and so, you know, it's not overly produced. It's not a big cost to make them, but the intent is to champion. You know, yours was like talking about you wearing the hat and the hoodie the same color and what an expert in HubSpot you are. So you almost gift that. I like the concept of gifting content, right. Which is making Stuff on behalf of people without them asking for it. There's no requests, there's no anything. It's just like, I value you as a human being. Here you go. Now. A lot of times people don't know what the hell to do with that. It's like, what is this? And why did you make it? But there's several other things that they're like that too. If you have a new idea, number one, it's probably not new. Number two, somebody else has probably already done it or working on it. And then number three, if it is truly unique and new and original, it's going to take time to be caught onto. I listened to Mike Greenberg and Greeny and get up and stuff every day because I'm a sports fan. He's. His type of genius is one that'll be understood only long after he's gone.

Right.

It takes time for ideas and concepts to become trending.

Right.

I think that's. I think social media kind of blows out of proportion with like, here's what's trending today and here's. You have to do this right now. It makes a lot more sense and it's a lot more efficient to leverage existing concepts and then shade them in a way that. That's different. That's an example. The. You know, we have a zoom waiting room meeting that's like an inch. A part of the Shrek movie that people rave about. And it was just a ridiculous idea that I had. But I just posted this again. This is a second iteration. The videos. The mayor of Inbound presents real admin of Genius. And then I do background vocals. Well, that's. That's a parody of the Budweiser campaign. But now I thought, I need a way to introduce our awesome sales teams to people. That isn't invasive. I'll say. You know what I mean? That's not something that's unwanted. And so I made. I changed the colors from orange to green, kind of the same layout, and just made real salesmen of genius, which is some anecdotal stories. You know, we've got a guy named Matt Fuhrman who. He closed a big deal and we thought, man, we got to do something for this guy. So we shipped him a potato. There's a potato parcel.com thing. Just the most random, weird thing ever. But it's just a potato stamped in is like, you're a great leader. Congrats. Here's a potato.

Right?

We put that in the video. So the intention there with like, not. Not even the trends of, like, what you're making it and what the subject is. But, like, what. What's trending and what's important as far as a differentiator in the ecosystem. And one of those is leaning into appreciation of people. There's a lot of product pitches. There's a lot of. We have this new great whatever it is. There's a lot of AI. There's a lot of lack of authenticity present. And so it's easier to connect with somebody that you know something about.

Right.

The. The weirdest couple minutes of a sales call or disco or any call are the first three when you have to figure out what to talk about. And so if I can put into the ether that Matt has famous cats on Instagram, that's an. That is. That makes the recipient or the person he's trying to get in contact with in business specifically, more susceptible because it doesn't feel like he's a stranger. It doesn't feel like, you know, it endears. It starts building a relationship on his behalf asynchronously. I feel like. I know I just mentioned Mike Greenberg. Never met the man, never spoken to him. He's a celebrity, he's in all sorts of hall of fames. But I've listened to him so much that I feel like if we ever met, I would have plenty to talk about and I would feel like I knew him. That that is the intention for me, trying to make people aware of kind of the personal side, not just slide deck death, not just product features and whatnot. And we'll see how successful it is. I posted that about an hour ago.

Love it. Very cool. It's funny, a couple things. One, I can't tell you the amount of times in my HubSpot career that I've had somebody get on a call and be like, man, I feel like I know you. Is that weird? And I'm like, no, it's actually not weird. I get it quite a bit. But you said something in there, and I hope people rewind and re listen to that part because you talked about gifting content. And what I want everybody to realize and dive deeper into is when you gift somebody something, there are a couple different outcomes that can happen. One, they can enjoy the gift, and it made them feel an emotion. And they're probably at some point going to talk to somebody about the fact that this happened in their life. And so again, that universal connection. And then there's most of the humans on this planet. They're gonna put it on Instagram, they're gonna put it on Facebook. They're gonna put it on link, they're gonna share it to everybody. Because why? Well, they've been gifted a piece of content that puts them in a spotlight that they want people to be able to see. It's funny. It makes them feel a certain way. And so realizing that you can get gift content with the strategy of being human, but in the understanding of what that means, and that most likely it is going to get amplified, probably far further than you could ever imagine.

I don't know if this is a superpower, if this is odd, or if this is like a vulnerable moment, but I view the people with whom I share a seat and a spot, I view their presence and attention and their support as a gift.

Right.

It doesn't have to just be internal. And I also operate almost exclusively in metaphors and memes. So I'll share a story that, that this metaphor is important because it is gifting.

Right.

At inbound, I got invited to a, to an executive dinner.

Right.

Immediately was like, this is not the right email address.

Right.

I'm not. It's not. That shouldn't have gone to me. So I asked about it. Yeah, we, you know, we want you here. I was in a room with some of the actual executives, some VPs, some, like, stars.

Right.

Some people that I've researched before and looked at it was. It was through Alina Vanderburg, who I just think she's amazing. And so I took that as a gift. The other thing gifting can do if you do it non surreptitiously is it creates a need to reciprocate.

Right.

It's easier to do that when the gift is not consumable.

Right.

Gifting now, I think in a way is a lot of consumable stuff and not digital assets. Right. Like, I made you this here again, as weird and offbeat and whatever as it is. I also love the Grove cookie people. They're amazing. That is a good gift. But like, that was over and done in for me about five minutes because I ate all the cookies. So at the dinner afterwards, a couple weeks went by. I just made, literally rewrote a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, recorded it, sang it and sent it to her in the dm. That was like, I don't know what you're going to do with this, but I really appreciate it being at this dinner. And here's. Here's this weird thing I did within like 10 minutes. It is a 404. Like, it's a redirect theme music on their webpage. Is that Giving revpartners any revenue? No. Is it, is that roi? No, but it. But that relationship and that effort and that gift or content piece, I feel like could lead to that. I feel like it could be a, an avenue to further and deepen and explore relationship professionally. I feel like it's necessary now to evaluate connecting with people based on ideals and culture and whatnot and on a human level and then explore any professional type of. Type of relationship. So. And I've done that several times weirdly. But that's the, the most prominent cool example I can think of on the spot.

Yeah, I love it. And honestly is awareness. And awareness is the starting line of what could be a full fledged race to a closed one deal and revenue. Speaking of a closed one deal and revenue, because we have limited time and I want to make sure we give value to all the departments, let's go ahead and skip overcoming challenges for marketers. We might have to do a full episode with some other questions. We'll just let the people let us know if we should do a version 2 of this. But let's dive into the sales professionals because getting to that closed one deal, generating revenue, being able to eventually tie back the ROI of these efforts and stories that we've been talking about, and you've almost been answering this along the way, but I want to get a succinct answer to this idea of integrating influencers into the sales strategy. By the way, in this section we're going to try to hit Integrating influencers into sales Strategy, a feedback loop that might be important to pay attention to. And then I definitely want to give you time to dig into the building relationships portions that you teased out at the beginning of this episode. But with integrating influencers into sales strategy, what are effective ways to integrate all this craziness, B2B influencer creator economy stuff into just a broader sales strategy where maybe it's a couple people instead of just one person. Where does your brain go, Rob?

It's important to evaluate what the purpose is. So what, like what is the purpose behind the content? Not necessarily the topic, but it's to. Again, this is almost answered immediately to generate revenue, right? That's fine. I think generating revenue is a result of relationships. So instead of again integrating that into the sales cycle, I take the approach and we've kind of taken the approach to do, do what others aren't like, do the small things and the important things that may not be able to be automated, that take some time, a little bit of manual effort because they pay dividends. So if you're aware of, and you should be as a sales rep of, like, what industry standards and best practices are and what everybody else is doing, divert from that. One of those. If you're in a disco call, right, with somebody and you recaps and then like next steps and whatnot, pretty common practice. Instead of just a body of text or whatnot, you can, you can go a step further by formatting, and we use that at rp. You can go a step further by doing it within 12 hours, which is one of our SLAs. You can go a step further than that by sending a loom video through the recap. You can go a step further than that by sending something entirely different.

Right.

So those are the types of things where creating the content, specifically video, in this case, it doesn't feel foreign to me. But I also understand that a lot of businesses and a lot of works, that's not built into their process. It's built for us and we take advantage and leverage that. But integrating that requires thought and it requires failure, too. Like, I want to be very clear for myself and to anybody listening to this, it's not going to be successful or finished immediately, and it's probably going to change and it's going to require iteration. But some of the, some of the best sales practices and efforts that we've used leverage other people to talk. One of these was the DM was a former collegiate basketball player and like really, really tall. Right? So we sent a loom video from somebody on our team who's like six, eight. And we fused that with Matt, who came back on camera, like underneath, like out of frame a little bit, and that. So. And that worked. It's those types of little tiny nuance pieces that 100% differentiate you. It's. It's 2% extra for 98% more like the likelihood to convert or close or get your desired response from it. It's important to lean into that and try things.

So good. So good. Let's keep driving forward. I want to talk about the feedback loop. And again, when I think about this, my brain goes in two different directions. And I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about marketing and sales teams aligning each with each other to actually work on this initiative. But also it's the feedback loop from the audience that you're gifting or delivering the content to or who is seeing the amplification of the gift. And so when we think about feedback loop and sales professionals, what or how can I guess sales Insights, boots on the ground, improve influence marketing campaigns in the future. Like, we've done these fun and crazy things. This ends up happening. We can't actually tie to roi, but during the process, this is what sales thought or did or saw. Talk to me about that. And then also you've put a plethora of stuff out to the world. Like how much are you paying attention to the comments and the emails that come from that? And how is that dictating, like what happens next?

I realize I don't have a lot of time for this, but this could be a whole episode for sure. This is something that I obsess about and it's not about the comments. You've said feedback loop a couple times between sales and marketing. It'll be indirect and you'll gain awareness of how people feel almost through like dark social. A lot of that stuff is shared on LinkedIn in particularly. Again, ignorance is sometimes a superpower, not only bliss. So for me, not having the understanding that geographically, culturally, even engaging with a LinkedIn post either with a like or comment isn't necessarily done to let the creator know, but people's perception of like, if you, George B. Thomas, interact with or like or comment on something risque or insane or whatever that I've done and people see that you've engaged with it, they're going to have a perception of you. So a lot of the feedback loops, a lot of the engagement metrics and likes and comments and whatnot aren't as evident and they aren't engaged with. The numbers aren't as high, but the impact is greater. Right? We've had people that have said I've been lurk, kind of. You've had this too. I've been lurking, I've been watching videos and I haven't ever commented. But I do want to pay you for a year up front. So you should expect the feedback loop process to be challenging. It needs to be direct. You need to, you know, with some of these initiatives, I've just gotten reps or people on the phone and said, you've heard of nps, you've heard of enps, this is our nps. Like, how do you feel Like I did with this channel initiative. And please give direct feedback to how this is. So I love feedback. The idea of feedback loops is important, but there has to be an innate understanding up front that it's going to be hard to nail down all that stuff. Example I gave earlier about the 50k deal, that was just coincidental that I ran into him and that and that that was brought up, but it was a story. There's a, there's much more of a qualitative nature that's important to the feedback loop process than a quantitative nature.

Very cool. And yes, I feel like it could be an entire episode. So let's dig into building relationships. And really the question I want to ask is you transforming yourself into a B2B influencer. Like how many relationships has it built? Because listen, on the back of my whiteboard or behind me on my whiteboard, it says you've come a long way since 2013. Right. It's a journey. When you think of this B2B influencer, when you think of building and maintaining relationships, when you think of the potential of friendship, clients, customers, just unpack the power that is this focus on building the relationship first and letting it then go from there.

Yes, succinctly so. Availability and responsiveness. There's. There's not a word. I mean again, background and I said memory, but it's specifically in behavioral therapy and counseling. And there, there isn't much more dehumanizing feeling than being ignored. So that should be the key focus as far as building the relationship. Don't ever be the one to leave somebody on red. I. It's hard. It, it's time consuming. But it's important that if you care about a relationship that you, that you respond, that you're available. That's a sales technique in and of itself.

Right.

There's tons of data about. If you respond quicker, you're more likely to close the deal that's out there.

Right.

It's the same thing. You're more likely to close a deal of a relationship if you are responsive and engaged and participating. And it's both ways. There needs to be some sort of intent or understanding, but you have to be able to communicate back and be responsive. LinkedIn and social can feel a lot like shouting into a void. It can feel very fake and inauthentic with the. I mean, LinkedIn now gives you automated response options. Like if you get a promotion. Congrats, congrats, congrats. You know, that's a little bit different. But a thoughtful two sentence comment can build relationships that you're not even really aware that you're building. I had you just said you have this where people come on and feel like they know you. How much have you responded to them? How much have you attempted to build that relationship the other way? Well, they view it as, George is always here. He's always got, you know, HubSpot tips and tricks. And HubSpot heroes and like that is communication. And it's. Don't people feel that individually, although you're putting it out there for a large audience, People feel the individual connection with you. So people, you need to have an awareness that that's how other people respond to that and see you. And if somebody's engaging in a lot of stuff or engaging in comments. I mentioned a guy by name earlier. That is to me is the spark of a relationship. And then how you nurture it is kind of up to you, depending on context.

Love it so much here. In a minute, Rob, I'm going to ask you the question of if people want to reach out, if they want to know more, if they want to talk with you, where they should head. But my last question for you today is, there's somebody watching this. They haven't dove into this. They're scared. They're afraid of failing, whatever it may be. What advice? Advice for newcomers, right? What advice would you give to the human, the business that's just starting with this idea of influencer marketing or becoming an influencer for their company? What's your advice? Words of wisdom, if you will.

I could, I could be very magnanimous and pragmatic about this, but it's. It's really not the case. Right. It is scary. You, number one, you probably are going to fail more than you succeed. Number two, it's going to take experimentation. Number three, people aren't going to trust or realize what's happening. Number four. And number five, that is okay, right? You have to get started. Even if it's recording loom and becoming familiar. I'm nervous on podcasts, I don't know if you can tell, but, like, I make myself do it right, because it's building that creative muscle. It's building that. The muscle of becoming, you know, kind of what I. What I want to do. So those are the five bits. Not all them are good. But it's important that I'm direct about it, right? It's not League of Their Own, right. Of course it's hard. If it weren't hard, everybody would do it, right? That's kind of the approach I'm taking. And you should expect that, like, transparently, you should expect it to feel weird to be Putting yourself out there in the public is not for everybody. It's not the most warm and fuzzy feeling a lot of times because you open yourself up to judgment 100%. And this is coming from somebody who on LinkedIn, you know, put a seashell bra on and wore a wig. So I mean like, I understand it's terrifying, but I'd rather be honest and direct with that message than say, oh, it's easy and it'll, you know, it's instant success. That's just not, not my, not my vibe.

I love the advice. I think it's amazing. Rob, if people want to reach out to you, where do you want to send them?

Yeah, LinkedIn. Rob Jones on LinkedIn. I'm @revpartners. Reach out to us there. You can email me at rjonesvpartners IO if you, if you feel led to and ask questions. I'm happy to meet. Give you a calendar link and we'll talk through this or any other content or demand related thing or HubSpot. I'm a talker if you haven't haven't noticed throughout this episode. So I'll love to, love to chat and connect with anybody.

By the way, couldn't tell that you were nervous at all. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been my pleasure to bring this valuable information to you. Hopefully you're entertained, hopefully you're educated. But more importantly, hopefully you take action. Remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you on the next Sidekick Strategies event.