What is an MQL - and why is it the most important metric when it comes to measuring your social med

Who is it that I wanna sell to? So if you already have some clients, the first thing that I would do is look at your CRM and look at which companies are making you the most money and figuring out what it is that they have in common. So if you have customers already, that's great. You can just interview your top 10 best customers, see what they have in common, and then start finding more people like that.

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. I'm delighted today to have Staffo joining me. All the way from Belgium. Staffo, 10 Point, how are you? Welcome to the show.

I'm great. I'm very happy to be here with you today, and I am ready to share as much good stuff as I can and hopefully help whoever's listening to this, help them get noticed and hopefully help them generate some more revenue.

That's wonderful. And you've got a long background in lead gen, and one of the things that you shared with me is the idea of differentiated between general leads and profitable leads and the move from sort of general casting the net to really spearfishing. Can we just dive right into that topic? Because for most people, finding leads that convert is a number one problem.

Yeah. So I think one of the things that I've noticed these days, especially with people just listening to, well, basically social media managers pretending to be marketers, And what everybody's doing is, or what many people are doing is trying to get seen by as many people as possible. And you can tell about how they're talking about it. It's just like, oh, I got this many views or I got that many views. And that's nice and that's really good for your ego and stuff, but it ultimately doesn't really help you generate any money. So I like to differentiate between MQLs, marketing qualified leads. Those are just people that fill your requirements, people that you want to sell to. And then we have SQLs, which are people that also fulfill your requirements but are also interested in buying from you. Now, before you get to any of those, it's important to just start understanding who it is that you want to sell to depending on your business. So what I think is instead of just doing stuff like just doing a let's say a podcast without a strategic background or before you're posting on Instagram or LinkedIn or doing any of these kind of things, before you're just doing this and casting a wide web, I think it's much more useful to start with, okay, who is it that I wanna sell to? So if you already have some clients, the first thing that I would do is look at your CRM and look at which companies are making you the most money and figuring out what it is that they have in common. So if you have customers already, that's great. You can just interview your top 10 best customers, see what they have in common, and then start finding more people like that. If you don't have customers yet, that's fine too, 'cause I've been there, you know, like I've had my own company. If you don't have any, start with figuring out a list of, I would say, 100 companies that you are saying like, these are people that I would love to work with. Now, the caveat or the— The thing that you need to remember is that you want them to be as similar to each other as possible, because if you make a piece of content that would be valuable for all 100 of those companies, it's gonna be— gonna make things much easier for you. So the first step in the way I look at it is just like, okay, who do I wanna work with? Make a list of 100 of them and then interview at least 10 of them, but you'd really wanna interview all 100 of them. And when I say interview them, you really wanna be interviewing the people that would be in charge of buying your service, right? So not necessarily the people that sign, not necessarily decision makers, but the people that would initiate this kind of a conversation. We were talking a little bit before about how you have a PR firm. So I would imagine that if you're working with a smaller company, the marketing manager or marketing lead or whatever would be the one that would first go like, huh, maybe we need some PR. So that would be what we call your champion. So what I would do if I were helping somebody similar to you, I would tell them like, look, let's make a list of 100 companies and then talk to all of their marketing managers and see if you can interview them. And oftentimes from just these interviews, just marketing and research interviews, a lot of people start, are already able to start a sales conversation because you're most likely the first person to actually listen to them instead of just talking about themselves the whole time.

That's a really good idea, Steffo. Now, just from a practical point of view there, you've listed, say, 100 companies. Any tools that you think people should use, or is it just getting on the phone? And how do you incentivize that person who's already busy and may see this as just a sales ploy How do you incentivize them to take part in your survey?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think a lot of the times, just so if provided that you manage to find a list and just making the list is gonna be mostly just Googling, though you also have tools like FindThatLead or Sales Navigator to be able to find them. You could also use Crunchbase, which is a good— if your target audience is startups and you need to know about their funding, but really just starting a genuine conversation by sliding in their DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram works really, really well. Alternatively, I think it also works really well to do a cold email campaign with a tool like Lemlist. What's nice about Lemlist is that you can add personalized images. What does that mean? It means that, let's say, what you could do if you wanna get somebody on this podcast, you could take a screenshot of this moment right now, And then automatically replace my face with the face of your guest. And then you say like, look how much fun it's gonna be when we get on a podcast together.

Okay.

And this actually really transitions very well into your other question, part of your question, which was how do you incentivize them to be interviewed by you? So for many people, asking them to have a little marketing research interview is already enough. And you could give them something like an Amazon gift card or whatever. So for many people, they're actually helpful and they don't mind as long as you're genuinely starting the conversation and before you're asking them, like some of their content or look at their website, maybe make like a free video. Let's say you're a marketer, you could record a screen share of their website and review like top 5 things that they could fix. That would give them, that would make them feel like you've done something for them and will incentivize them to do something for you. So that works in many cases, but what works in even more cases is inviting them on a podcast. So just starting a podcast specifically targeted to those 100 people, 100 companies, so that on the one hand they would wanna appear on it. So it would need to be a podcast about something they feel like they have an expertise in, but also a podcast that they would wanna listen to, right? So let's say you said you do PR for some manufacturing companies, if I remember correctly. So you could make a podcast that is something along the lines of like PR for the, the PR for manufacturing podcast. And then you could even say PR for marketing managers in manufacturing podcasts. Like it's super niche, but it would be so relevant to them that they would definitely wanna be on that show. So sending a cold email with a tool like Lemlist and inviting them either to be on some kind of an interview or to be on your podcast is a really good way of doing it. If you wanna be even cheaper than this, you can just manually write them on Twitter and then on LinkedIn and then on Instagram until they start responding. The more you've actually looked at them beforehand, the better. And the more positive things you can do for them beforehand, like, I always think that if, let's say you're a designer and doing, maybe making a free design for them or reviewing some of their different designs, And a video upfront helps them a lot because you're leveraging your expertise to do something positive for them. Why do you wanna interview them, I think, would be another great thing to discuss is there's many reasons for this. First of all, it is you're opening a conversation which could potentially lead to a sale at some point. That's very useful. But the second thing is you start understanding what their problems and their challenges are, which you can then use in your marketing. 'Cause if you make a landing page or even a cold email, you really need to know why is it that these people would wanna buy from me? What is the trigger that makes them take the step to buy from you? And you cannot guess this, you can only know it by asking them. That's why it's so important to interview them, and as you get to know the people better and better, you will see common threads, so they have things in common, and because they have things in common, you can make one content that is useful for all of them. You also start understanding which kind of questions they have, and if you're the best one at answering the questions— and actually you don't even need to be the best one, because if you're now connected with them on LinkedIn and you're answering their specific questions, they're gonna see it. And you can just tag them underneath the post. It's like, hey, I had this discussion with Jim. Jim asked me about this, so here is how I think about it. And then they will often tag their friends, and their whole company suddenly knows who you are and what it is that you're up to.

Yeah, and that's really great advice. The only thing about podcasts, of course, is many people feel that can be a bit overwhelming. So is there a way maybe even just to, for example, have a Zoom call and record that and make notes and share that with them as part of a survey? Because a podcast sort of almost requires some continuity, doesn't it?

Yeah, so it's a That's a good point. So I always feel that the most important part about the podcast is saying that you have one and then recording it. I think that's much more important than all the other stuff. But if you think about it, what is a podcast, right? It's, you know who it is that you wanna talk to. You have a cover image, you have some sort of description. Cover image, you can literally get done for $15. on Fiverr. So it's super cheap. And then the rest is just, like I said, you're calling them on Zoom and then you're recording it. And that's really it. So, and then of course, if you really wanna take it, if you wanna have a real podcast, then the next thing is just uploading this audio to something like podcast.co, which is my favorite podcasting platform. And of course, if you can get it edited and have it as nice as possible, that's great. But really almost anybody could just cut up the audio to where it starts in the right moment and ends in the audio. Also, if you wanna have like a little intro and outro song, costs you like this. There's this guy that I use like 5 times on Fiverr, costs you like $40 to get a nice intro song. So it's all super easy, but the— and I have— there's a really nice article about this by Sweetfish Media. It's something like 26 steps to start a podcast and it's super easy, much easier than you think.

Yeah, okay, the barrier to entry now is so low, isn't it, in terms of both cost and technology as well. And when we were talking before, you're also mentioning about once you've got this content and you've done these interviews with your avatars, right, the companies and the individuals that you want to know what problems They need to solve. You're talking about how you can share that as content from the podcast, but also beyond. Staffan, can you share with us some other tools that you've mentioned?

Yeah. Yeah. So if you actually manage to record a podcast, then the next thing is to help the person that you record the podcast with, help them share this on social media. Why is this important? It's because they're usually connected with other people similar to them. So that means that you can propagate your reach to other people that fit your ICP, your ideal customer profile. So that's really very beneficial if you can get them to share it with just other people from other companies. But the other thing is also people from within their company get to see it. And the more expensive your service becomes, the more important It becomes to make sure that all the stakeholders know about you. So let's say, for example, I work in a company, Bottlers, and I'm the marketing manager. So if you were selling me PR, I would be your champion. So you would first want me to know about it, but then you would also want my boss to know about it. So if I share a clip from this show that we're doing right now on my LinkedIn, my boss is gonna see it. And all of a sudden, everybody that needs to know about you knows about you. That's basically why it's so important. And how you do this clip is you have the podcast.co platform where you can do all your podcasting stuff. And I'm not paid by them, but just so you know, I just like their tool. And you can, they have this button where you can just, it has like a little video icon. If you click it, it just allows you to see your podcast, choose a little timeframe from it, and then immediately turn it into a clip where you can have like a little waveform and automatic captions. Captions are important because, what is it, like 90% of people don't turn on the sound when they're watching something on LinkedIn or even Instagram. So within podcast.co, you have a Headliner integration, and Headliner is the tool that actually allows you to make those clips. And then anticipating your next question, which would be like, how do you get people to actually see it? So you have this tool that we mentioned before we started recording, which is called Lempod. It's from the same people that I mentioned before with Lemlist, which is the cold email tool. This is Lempod. What Lempod does is it allows you to make a group of people, preferably people you know, and you agree to say like, you agree to engage on each other's contents. So let's say Jim and I were in Lempod together. That means if I post something, I can make it so Jim's profile automatically likes it. And that's important because LinkedIn shows your content to people in your first connections based on how many people engage on the content. And if it reaches a certain threshold, so let's say it shows it to 100 people of your first connections and let's say 30% of them like it or something like this, then it will start also showing it to your second connections. And the second connections is based on who it is that is engaging. So let's say we use that, I post on LinkedIn. I use Lempod. Your account likes it. This makes it so more of my first connections get to see the post, but it also makes it so your first connections see it, which are my second connections. And this is also a very cheap tool. What is it, like $5 to $10 a month or something like this to just get a lot more people to see your LinkedIn content?

Wow, that's amazing. This is lempod.com, Lempod. And a few people have asked me to be part of a sort of a group where everyone goes on to like the content. And the theory is good, but actually the practice, practice is that you could spend ages trying to go through all these linking posts. So Lempod solves that problem of, of making content sort of liked and therefore move up the, the algorithms. That's fantastic. And then how are you then, Staffo, starting to close the loop? Because we started this conversation With your ideal customer profile, and you've taken us through that journey, which is fantastic. Where do you get them into the funnel then? Because what we're also talking about is getting people into a place where you can have a sales conversation with them.

Yeah, so my expertise is high-ticket B2B, which might sound more fancy than it really is. And for actually, for many freelancers, I would actually suggest to them to charge a lot of money So that he can focus on 1 or 2 clients. So what I— so just to loop back to the previous things that we're talking about. So my suggestion is, if you're doing a podcast, to have a little conversation before you start recording and you ask them, when is your hard stop? So a lot of the times they will say like, okay, I have to stop at 6. And then you say, okay, that's great. That means I'll stop the recording at 5:50 so that we have 10 minutes to talk. And then during your podcast, you actually ask them a lot of the questions that you would normally do as a qualifier, your qualifying questions. So you figure out during your show whether this person would be a good person to buy from you or not. So when you then shut down the recording, you can actually say like, okay, by the way, this is what my business does. If you were interested in this, we can always book a call about it. If you're not, that's fine too. And then after your call, after your podcast, you send them a little email to thank them for being on the show and how much you appreciate it, and maybe the number one thing that you learned from it. And then you add your booking link in there as well for your— if they wanted to book a discovery call. And then the next time you can follow up is when your episode goes live and you let them know, hey, the episode went live now. And then also when you are posting your clips, you can tag them again. So they have many, many different touchpoints with you. And because you've had this podcast conversation with them or this interview conversation, which really all fits very much the same requirements, though the podcast has an extra edge because it shows that you appreciate them and think that they're experts. Anyway, so both of them are really good at helping you Establish a conversation and build rapport. And by then just telling them a little bit about what it is that you do, if they are currently in a stage where they would be interested in looking for a service like this, it very naturally flows into a sale because they just, they like you, they feel like you like them, and there is a little bit of a relationship built and that makes it easy to transition into a sales conversation.

That's really nice, Stefano. So somehow reaching out, learning from them what they need from you, somehow formatting that into either a podcast or even just a Zoom meeting, it could be, right, that you make into a video clip or an audiogram, and then sharing that on social and possibly having your Lempod community share it simultaneously will amplify that conversation. That's fantastic. So Staffan, you've now joined a company called Botters there in Belgium. If people would like the benefit of your wisdom over and beyond this podcast, how can they find you?

Yeah, so if they want to learn more about this kind of lead generation stuff, then they can always reach out to me on my personal LinkedIn. I'm sure there will be a link. And if by the off chance you want to build an app or a digital product, then you could find us at botters.com. But we haven't really talked about the stuff that bothers us. But yeah, anybody's totally free to send me a message about lead generation. And then if I can help with some advice, I'd be happy to do that. And if I can connect you to somebody that can actually help you in other ways or help you find the tools, then I would also be very happy to introduce you to the right people and the right tools.

Thank you so much for joining me on the Unnoticed Show today.

I'm very happy to be here and I hope people enjoyed it and that this was somehow useful.

Very much so. And I've taken a screenshot, so I'm going to share that on LinkedIn once we finish this call. And for all those listening, I will put in the show notes the links to those applications and also to Staffo's LinkedIn account. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Show, and we've talked really about the need to focus on a few ideal customers rather than worrying so much about the vanity statistics of large volumes of likes, because most of us Don't need millions or even hundreds of customers. We need a few profitable ones. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're working on LinkedIn and B2B marketing, think about focus and content and have a lot of fun. Thanks so much for listening.