How to Fight Your Flight Response
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We’ve all heard the term “use it or lose it.”
The Secret To Making Your LinkedIn Post Go Viral With AJ Wilcox
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Have you ever wondered if you should be running ads on LinkedIn versus another platform? In this episode, AJ Wilcox, LinkedIn ads professional and Founder B2Linked, joins John Livesay as they reveal the secret to making your LinkedIn post go viral. John and AJ talk about targeting people on LinkedIn and the strategies you can implement on LinkedIn for people to buy from you. Get to know AJ and his company a bit more as he shares his story of origin and his journey through the years. Tune in and learn the secrets to how you can leverage LinkedIn and increase professional traffic in your business.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Secret To Making Your LinkedIn Post Go Viral With AJ Wilcox
Have you ever wondered if you should be running ads on LinkedIn versus another platform? If so, this is the episode for you. I have AJ Wilcox as my guest who is the Founder of B2Linked.com, which is the only agency that specializes in LinkedIn advertising. We’ll go into the secret of how to make your LinkedIn post go viral, as well as how to target people on LinkedIn so you’ll get a relationship going to get them to want to buy from you. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is AJ Wilcox, who is a LinkedIn ads professional. He Founded B2Linked.com, which is a LinkedIn ad specific agency back in 2014. He’s an official LinkedIn partner, host of the LinkedIn Ads Show podcast, and has managed among the world’s largest LinkedIn ads accounts worldwide. Did you notice the theme there? Yes, it’s all about LinkedIn. I love that focus. He also happens to be a ginger and a triathlete. He and his wife live in Utah with their four children. His company car is a wicked fast go-kart, how cool is that? AJ, welcome to the show.
John, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for the invite.
We met when I heard you speak. I instantly loved your energy and your vibe, as well as your expertise. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are wondering, “Which platform should I use? Is it content or do I need to run an ad?” There are many questions people have that you have the answers to. Before we get into your expertise, this is about successful pitch and stories. Take us back as far as you want, your childhood. You and I have talked about how the LinkedIn thing all happened, which is a great story. You can start there or you can go even further back, wherever you want to start.
Starting from my family life, my parents and family are all fiscally conservative. My dad was a VP at a bank for his entire career. He retired. We don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in our entire family tree body. My thoughts in growing up were, “I’m going to go and work in a job and become a manager and then a director and then a VP and then, hopefully, a CMO or CEO someday.” That was my career trajectory. That’s what I thought I was going to do. I’ve always been highly technical. In fact, in college, I had a job troubleshooting network connections and internet servers. I enjoyed the technical. At the same time, I was studying marketing. The fears of a college student brain, it was like, “If all I know is tech, who’s ever going to hire me in marketing when I graduated?” Marketing is tech-heavy so I laugh at that but back then maybe that was a legitimate concern.
One of my professors brought in a guest speaker who spoke about search engine optimization. As he was talking, the light bulb went off for me and it was like, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. This is tech plus marketing all in one.” I went up after class and I begged this poor man for an internship and he took me on. This was back in ‘07. He and his team taught me search engine optimization and how to build websites and Google Ads. Fast forward a bunch of years, a couple of agencies later, a couple of in-house gigs later, I got brought into a company that’s publicly traded that was a business-to-business SaaS software company. On my first day, talking to the CMO, she asked me about my marketing strategy and I tell her what I want to do and she goes, “All that sounds great. Go ahead and execute it. Just so you know, we started a pilot using LinkedIn ads so see what you can do with it.”
I didn’t want to look like an idiot to my new boss. I jumped in and started trying to figure things out. Within about two weeks, one of our sales reps came up to introduce himself and he said, “By the way, we are fighting over your leads. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” I logged into our CRM to go and investigate what are these leads. Without fail, everyone he was talking about was sourced from LinkedIn ads and that was not the only channel we were running.
Long story short, I kept investing until I took that to become LinkedIn’s largest spending account worldwide. After running that for about 2.5 years, I ended up getting laid off from that company. It was at that point where I went, “I have skills on this platform called LinkedIn ads that I don’t hear anyone else talking about. Maybe I could do something with that.” Years ago, I launched B2Linked and we’re an ad agency that only focuses on LinkedIn ads. Back then, who knows if this can even support our family. We’ve got a little bit of a runway, let’s see. I’m sure the majority of the readers have at least heard about LinkedIn. It worked out nicely.
It’s fascinating because a lot of people go, “Facebook, they got all this advertising. You can create lookalike audiences. I don’t know that LinkedIn can do any of that.” Let’s start with that because I’m trying to anticipate what my readers are thinking and ask those questions beyond my own personal questions. The first one is if someone is trying to decide between a Facebook ad versus the LinkedIn ad, are there certain advantages that one platform has over the other or are they pretty much even as far as the ability to laser in like that?
There are definitely many similarities and many stark differences. What you need to understand about LinkedIn is all of the targeting is around who you are as a professional. We can laser-target people by job title, seniority, company size, and industry, even specific company names. We’ve got 27 different ways of targeting someone. It’s insane for business-to-business or if you need to target people by who they are professional. We pay for that level of specificity in our targeting. The average cost per click on LinkedIn is somewhere between about $8 to $11. On Facebook, I’m assuming the majority of your readers are probably paying between about $1 to $3 per click. If you start comparing, you’re like, “Is a highly qualified lead worth 3 to 5 times more to me than I’m paying for it on Facebook?” LinkedIn ads is pretty much a no-brainer. If it’s not, maybe LinkedIn priced themselves out of the market for you.
[bctt tweet=”What you need to understand about LinkedIn is all of the targeting is around who you are as a professional. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s say you have your ideal client and that client has hired you for quite a bit of money to buy your course or hire speaker, all these other things, and you’re thinking, “They have not signed an exclusive with me. Would it make sense to try and target their competitors because I have experience in that industry? I could use the similar titles of the people that ended up hiring me to do that.” Do you ever see that happening?
I’m sure it happens. As an agency, we don’t do that. I feel a high degree of loyalty towards our larger clients. They took a chance on us earlier so I like to give back. Quite a few of our clients will start to specialize in an industry. You can target specific roles at specific companies, they could go out and say, “We slayed it at insurance.” Look at what we’ve already done with Geico, “Allstate, check this out.” That can be highly successful.
There seems to be a specific niche of people who are the best type of clients to do this. You’ve been successful with B2B products or services that have a lifetime value of something over $15,000. Without giving a name out of a client, can you give us an example of what a product or service would be like that?
We do a lot with SaaS software. Let’s say your license is $1,250 a month and people are going to stick around for 2 or 3 years, that would be much a no brainer. Targeting the people who need your software, they feel that pain. People with coaching mastermind groups where there are $15,000, $20,000 a year sign up products like people in the medical industry who are selling multimillion-dollar MRI machines, that thing, those are the types of things that do work well. We find that the average customer client to close usually takes about $1,000 to $4,000 in advertising. If you imagine you’re going to pay $1,000 to $4,000 and then you’re going to make at least $15,000 from it that leaves plenty of slush there to pay an agency to manage it for you and compensate your sales reps with commissions.
A big medical company, for example, they got a marketing budget and they’re hiring you to get their sales teams good leads. What’s fascinating about that is I’ve worked with some companies and they’re all struggling with the pandemic because the salespeople are not able to go to the doctor’s offices or go to the hospitals and catch them between surgeries like they used to. They’re struggling even to get the appointment for a Zoom call. I would imagine that running a campaign to grab those people’s attention, if you can’t get past the receptionist or whoever’s managing their calendar, would be a solution here.
I’ll add into this. There’s a social network that is reserved for doctors and surgeons called Doximity. I have been dying to try this ad platform out because you need a minimum of $100,000 buy in to get in. The ads aren’t expensive once you’re in. It takes this massive commitment. Once you’re in, you can target doctors by specific specialties. It’s a network they spend time on and trust. If I had a highly medical audience, I would try to scrape together $100,000. If you’re going to do this, please contact me because I would love to be involved in a Doximity campaign.
What’s also interesting is it looks like you’re also helping people who are targeting MBA candidates, the private Pepperdine’s of the world and all the other business schools that are out there that spend a lot of money on marketing to try and get people to use their MBA program versus another. That’s even more challenging because a lot of people recruit people from overseas to come here in the States and maybe they have issues with travel or things that are more difficult. If you’re going to be taking an MBA class remotely versus on campus, they have to justify that price still being the same. There are a lot of challenges there that I’m imagining you might be able to contribute to how to do that.
I can surely help with the targeting. That whole industry is seriously being disrupted. I wish I had the answers and knew what was going on. From a targeting perspective, if you know who it is who would make a great MBA candidate, whether it’s home or abroad, LinkedIn’s got good targeting for it. If you have a bachelor’s but don’t yet have any advanced degree, if you studied something like English or journalism or arts that doesn’t turn into money, you want to advertise those people and say, “Come bring your skills into something where you have a career.” Those are the types of things that LinkedIn allows you to do. What you do with that strategy after in such a changing environment is up to you. I’m along for the ride.
Do executive search firms ever hire you to target certain people? That’s a fascinating niche because I assumed that the executive search people would email or call the person directly. What makes them need an ad to help them is it if they’re not getting their emails returned?
Viral LinkedIn Post: Marketing is tech-heavy.
No. Here’s what’s amazing about headhunters, about recruiting in general. If you are reaching out to people, that’s a manual thing that takes a lot of time. Time is expensive, as you know. They are usually augmenting this with things like job boards. They put a job posting out there, they hit the job boards and what they find universally with that is the candidates who apply are job searchers. They are active searching candidates and they tend to not be nearly as high quality as those who are passive. As soon as you start turning on ads to your exact audience who already has the skills and title, you’re looking to hire for in that area has the right experience. If you’re showing an ad that says, “You look experienced here. Would you be interested in applying for our position?”
What it invariably does is it starts bringing in these passive candidates that recruiters love. This is the first time they’ve considered searching for a job. When you give them an offer, you’re not competing with eight other companies and have to get into a bidding war. They’re usually gainfully employed at that point and they tend to be a better candidate. It works well hand in hand with the other efforts that they do. Most of the time, we find we can beat the other methods.
From an entrepreneur standpoint, tell us a little bit about what lessons you’ve learned growing your company, payroll, taxes, recruiting clients, how much time are you spending, and how do you get clients. All of that would be interesting to the readers.
It’s sure as heck interesting to me when I was going through it. I started this company because I was insanely good at advertising on LinkedIn and not because I was good at operations, finance, sales, or any of the other things that you have to take on when you’re running a company. The biggest lesson I learned is, immediately, I was faced with this dilemma of, “I can run an ad account, but how do I go and find clients?” First of all, I’m averse to sales. I hate being sold to, like everyone else. One of the reasons I went into marketing is because I wanted to learn the ways that people were marketing to me and selling to me and trying to manipulate me. I could know their tricks and be immune to it.
I remember I walked into an appointment and usually lead with like, “Let me tell you about this platform.” This lady looks across the table, we have a common friend, and she goes, “Pitch me.” I was like, “No one has ever told me that before. That sounds gross.” I utterly failed. I was not proud of that. I figured out quickly, “AJ, you are not a sales guy. Don’t try to pitch, instead, do what you do best as a marketer, which is you go and provide value. You go and teach, train, share everything you know, and eventually, you’ll get the inbound leads coming to you of people who trust you.” We’re years in and that’s the tactic I use. I still don’t do any outbound sales. We don’t do any advertising ourselves. Everything is word of mouth, it’s people who’ve heard me on a podcast or seen a webinar or seen my content on LinkedIn and heard my podcast who come to us to work with us. I’m a lot more comfortable with that than I was trying to be the used car sales guy.
You don’t do any advertising, which is ironic since you’re the big one to advertise. I love that. I wanted to get that clarification. Now that you are friends with me, you’re going to completely shift your feelings around selling if you’d ever want to scale more and figure out how to tell stories in a way that pulls people in so you’re not pushing out the information. Hopefully, we’ve given people a little example for some of those stories and that journey.
We are also a speaker. I think to myself, “How does he have time to do all this?” You get hired to come in and speak and one of your takeaways is which ad formats work best and which one people should avoid? That’s a fascinating topic because, first of all, most people think, “Is there more than one ad format on LinkedIn?” Let alone which ones to avoid. Without giving away all the secrets in your talk that people pay for it, do you want to give a little hint of what that means?
I don’t hold anything back. I’m an open book. There are four different ad formats that you can use on LinkedIn. Chances are, you’ve seen all of them but you haven’t realized because they’re not as in your face as something like a Facebook Ad. There’s a newsfeed ad and that’s where I recommend everyone start. Start with a single image, they call it sponsored content. It’s a great middle of the road ad format. It’ll fit whatever call to action you have. It’s versatile. There are ads over in the right rail, which tends to be cheaper. They’re over in the right rail, they’re only available when you’re on a desktop computer, which most are on mobile. They don’t get clicked on a whole lot so it can be hard to drive enough traffic to make it worth your while.
You have one that is the new sexiness of LinkedIn where you pay to send a message into someone’s messaging box, their InMail, and that’s called sponsored message ads. They seem sexy because you’re only paying $0.20 to $0.65 per person you send it to. When you do the math, only about 50% of people will open them and then only about 3% of people who open will end up clicking on what you’re asking them to. You end up with an astronomical $20 to $40 cost per click. I recommend test into those later because they are higher risk but start with the lowest risk in the newsfeed ones first.
[bctt tweet=”You need to go for something in between where you are providing enough value to make people want to click but you’re also asking for them to fill out a form.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Is that your fourth one, the newsfeed, the rail, and the email that you were paying for?
The right rail and there is one called text ads, that’s the cheapest. There’s one called dynamic ads, that’s a little bit bigger. It’s $6 to $8 a click. You can pay all the way down to $2 per click on the text ads. You’ll pay $6 to $8 for the dynamic. It’s two separate ad formats there. Start with sponsored content and then try text ads because it’s also a low risk.
It means I’m getting a text on my phone with an ad?
It’s an ad. It’ll have a little teeny image. If you’re on desktop, on LinkedIn, you’ll see a little 50×50 pixel images with a 25-character headline and a 75-character description and you’re stacked in there with usually 1 or 2 other advertisers.
I’ve never even noticed it.
Now you will.
This is where my niche is. What are you saying in those ads? What are you saying in those sponsored emails that grab people’s attention? There’s a lot of expertise you have here about which offers convert and which ones are a waste of time. Do we want people to set up a call with us? Is that the good outcome of an ad versus trying to get them to go from an ad and clicking to buy something? What is the normal offer that makes sense here?
From a business perspective, every client we talked to says, “I want people who are ready to buy, ready to hop on the phone with sales.” We realized that if we show that to a cold audience, these are qualified people but it doesn’t mean that they know who you are or that they’re ready for what you do yet. If you put an ad that says, “Click here to talk to my sales rep,” no one will click that ad and you won’t get any leads, which is unfortunate because that would be amazing leads if you could. You don’t want to go to the opposite extreme, which is like, “I’m going to pay $8 to $11 per click to send you to my blog posts and hope that you fall in love with our content and are dying to work with us.”
You need to go for something in between, that would be where you are providing enough value to make people want to click but you’re also asking for them to fill out a form. They’re identifying themselves and raising their hand. The types of content that tend to work best here, as long as it solves a pain point or satisfies a curiosity, no matter which of these you choose, it’s going to work. It’s like, “Join our free webinar. Download our free guide, our eBook. Download this free checklist or cheat sheet. Come attend our free in-person event.” Those are the types of offers that will convert and you’ll be able to get your cost per conversion way down. A good sales team is usually going to get 10% to 20% of those people on calls for demo requests. That’s a much stronger approach on LinkedIn.
Viral LinkedIn Post: Once you have someone in your funnel, all of your channels can give them that warm digital hug and keep nurturing them down.
That’s the importance of that lead magnet. What’s interesting is you would assume, “You’re clicking on an ad from LinkedIn. I know who you are. Do I need your email?” You do, so you can continue to nurture that past paying for those emails for that specific things we’re trying to do here to be in the weeds a little bit. Why would I need them to give me their email? You’re not paying to reach out to them again. The expectation is huge, correct?
Yeah. When you own their email address, sure, you could always retarget them on LinkedIn. As soon as you get their email address, you can upload that email address into Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Quora. You can put them in your marketing automation. You can reach out directly. It gives you many different ways of enveloping that prospect in a warm digital hug, which is much better than waiting a week and a half for them to happen to log into LinkedIn and see you again.
What a great soundbite, “Give your prospects a warm digital hug.” I love that. That’s great. Any advice for people who are trying to decide how much money to spend? You’ve got all kinds of retargeting things. When is the right time to say, “This person opted in and signed up for my webinar or got my PDF,” do I need to keep retargeting them or I’m still going to retarget people who haven’t opted in?
It’s all worth testing. LinkedIn Ads is insanely good. I call it, getting the horse to water and getting them to take the first drink. It’s getting them into the top of your funnel, opting into some that is of value. Once you have someone in your funnel, all of your channels can give them that warm digital hug and keep nurturing them down. A lot of the testing I would do is start out by saying, “Download my eBook.” Anyone who’s downloaded the eBook, “Let me see if I can get you right onto a call now.” Did I earn enough of your trust that I can get a high conversion rate to a sales call?
If I’ve driven fifteen, twenty conversions by that point and I go, “My conversion rates still don’t look great. Let’s try inserting another offer in there.” Maybe it’s eBook and then webinar and then let’s try on a demo call. If you can find the right combination, the right sequence of offers to get someone to know, like, and trust you, then that’s gold. You can then take that to every other marketing channel and build around it.
That’s a useful marketing strategy for those of you who haven’t thought of that. Most people think in terms of all or nothing. The analogy I use is, would you ask someone to marry you on a coffee date? Probably not. Yet, we think this ad should go from a coffee date to down the aisle. Sometimes people need to be rude more than once, and hence the retargeting comes in. I think you like that analogy.
Yes. I use it all the time right from a cold ad saying, “Jump right onto a call with sales or buy something.” It’s like you met someone for the first time on the street and you’re screaming, “Marry me.” You might be a great marriage candidate but they will never know. They’ll think you’re crazy.
Do you ever encourage your clients to create content that maybe isn’t paid for in addition to the advertising so that there might be some synergy going on there?
I’ll go into a little bit of a hack. Readers might not perceive this as a hack but I’ll explain why it is. When you are sharing stuff on LinkedIn, it’s easy to go viral. It’s the easiest network in the world to go viral on. When you provide value to people, you’ll get a lot of interest. You’ll reach people outside of your own network. The challenge that you face if you’re doing organic is the leads that you get are the people who are connected to you and connected to the people connected to you and you don’t get to be specific about who these people are. Whereas with advertising, we can make sure you have this role and this level of seniority at this size of company, we know you can afford what we do. When you combine them together, it’s great. You’re getting a good combination of things. Sales teams like variety. They don’t like hitting the same thing over and over.
[bctt tweet=”The types of content that tend to work best are those that solves a pain point or satisfies a curiosity.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One trick that we’ve used is when you post something organically, let’s say you came out with this new guide, maybe you’re advertising it. When you share it organically, you don’t say, “Go to my same landing page here.” What you do is you say, “I created this new guide. I’m proud of it. If you want it, say something in the comments and let me know. I’ll follow up with you.” There’s a reason why this is a hack. When LinkedIn sees people commenting, it perceives that there are valuable conversations going on and it’s virality fuel. LinkedIn is going to say, “This is amazing. Let’s show this to as many people as possible.” Every person who comments is saying, “I want it. Send it to me.” You’re going to have to take some time and go and follow up with all these people or your VA. What ends up happening is that post ends up reaching way outside your network and tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people will see it, and it was all free. It’s your time in following up.
How important do the comments come within the first hour of the post?
It certainly helps. There’s this concept that you have heard, I don’t know if your readers have. Pods on LinkedIn or in other social networks where you let people know this is a group of trusted people, you say, “I posted this, go like and comment if you can.” What happens is, in the first few minutes, you can determine the fate of this post if this is going to go crazy or if it’s going to get buried. The first hour is helpful. LinkedIn is going to try to show it to enough people to feel. If you can spur the algorithm on by reaching out to friends and saying, “Can you help me out here?” You’ll give yourself a better shot.
Obviously, on certain days on LinkedIn, a lot of people aren’t going on weekends. I’m guessing you’re not posting things or advertising on weekends, or do you?
This is all over the board. The majority of our customers only want to advertise during business hours, during the week, because that’s when they got sales staff on board ready to nurture people and ready to have conversations if they opt-in. We have quite a few clients who end up getting higher conversion rates and more leads on the weekend than they do on the weekdays.
Even less, probably.
I’m imagining people waking up on a Saturday morning, sitting on the toilet, deciding to pop in and see what’s going on LinkedIn and they’re converting somehow. That depends on industry.
They’re like, “Why would I go to a business web’s platform on my weekends?” Yet if you’re getting comments from maybe another post or somebody is messaging you, suddenly you’re there and then you’re looking around maybe. The last question I know people always ask is, how important is video content on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn was late to the game with video. They approached it in their bidding algorithm not in a great way. When we take a video and a static image and we test them against each other, usually what we find is the cost per click from the static image is lower than video. I tell people it’s less risky and less expensive because video cost money to produce, to try an image ad and see what happens and then test into video later. The reason for it being slightly more expensive is when you have a video ad and you have a call to action, there are implicitly two calls to action. There’s, “Watch my video,” and then take the action I want you to take. As we know, the more things we ask someone to do, the less likely they’re going to go all the way.
Viral LinkedIn Post: When you provide value to people, you’ll probably get a lot of interest.
Unlike Instagram where you’re scrolling in the videos playing automatically, that’s not the case in LinkedIn. You got to hit the button to watch that video.
It does autoplay. It works the same as Facebook and Instagram, where it starts auto-playing but plays muted. It’s important to have action going on in the first few seconds so you can get someone to stop scrolling and it’s important to have subtitles as well.
AJ, there are many value bombs. Any final thoughts or quotes? Anything you want to share as a parting gift?
Most people go to an ad platform because they want to generate leads, that’s why we go. LinkedIn’s targeting is good, in the last little while, I’ve been thinking heavily about using it for market research as well. I’m targeting marketing decision-makers. I’m going to put together a campaign that’s like, “If you’re in marketing and your seniority is manager and above, I want to target you.” Instead, what we do is we create four separate audiences. One that’s marketing managers, one directors, one VPs, and one CMOs. When we show them exactly the same two ads, the same AV test, what we start to learn is it’s like a silent focus group of what level of seniority you are and what you like and don’t like. We can find when our content resonates with the C-suite or it resonates with the individual contributor or anything in between. You’re going to generate the same leads but you’re also learning about your audience in a way that you couldn’t on any other network.
That is fascinating. The CMO is the only one that can make the decisions, but maybe somebody below them will want to impress their boss and take it to them. You’ll never know who’s going to be your advocate or brand ambassador. Thank you, AJ. If people want to follow you on LinkedIn or in any other way, what’s the best way to find you?
If you search for me on LinkedIn, I’m easy to find, it’s AJ Wilcox. Look for the smiling ginger. That’s simple to find. Do make sure that you customize your connection request to me and say, “I heard you on John’s podcast.” That way I know to accept the connection request. There are plenty of spam out there and I don’t accept the request that I can’t tell why they want to connect.
Good advice. Thanks for being on the show.
John, thanks for having me.
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Transformational Storytelling With Scott Monty
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
A good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not. When you bring the emotions out, you make your audience feel like they are part of it, and that could become the best customer experience you can ever design. On today’s podcast, John Livesay welcomes Scott Monty on the show to tell us more about transformational storytelling and the concept of creating emotions in the details. Scott is a Strategic Communications and Leadership Advisor helping executives become better communicators, better leaders, and better humans with timeless and timely advice.
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Listen to the podcast here
Transformational Storytelling With Scott Monty
Our guest on the show is Scott Monty, who’s an expert in storytelling from a historical point of view. His definition of a good story is whether or not somebody is moved by that story emotionally. He also said to people, “Do you want to read about a case story or do you want to be cutting- edge and be a case story, as I call them, versus case studies?” We have a great conversation about how you build trust through transparency. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Scott Monty, who is a strategic communications and leadership coach and advisor, who helps the C-Suite embrace better communication with timeless and timely advice. A Fortune 10 leader whose background in classics positioned him to see through the shiny objects, Scott can drill down to understand the common human needs from throughout history that will still drive us all. He was ranked by The Economist as the number one, top of the list of 25 Social Business Leaders, and Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford Motor Company called him a visionary.
Scott spent six years as an Executive at Ford, where he helped turn the company around with an uncanny ability to merge technology with humanity. He served as a strategic adviser across a variety of business functions, leading the company’s global social media strategy. He also has another decade and a half of experience in communications and marketing agencies. Scott’s clients have included companies such as Walmart, IBM, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Google. He writes the Timeless and Timely newsletter, which I can’t rave about it enough. I can’t tell you how lucky you are to get to hear Scott’s insights. Welcome, Scott.
Thank you, John. It’s a treat to be with you here.
We both love storytelling, marketing, messaging and both of us have a passion for arts, although yours is at a whole other level. Your in-depth knowledge of it is quite fascinating to me. Let’s start wherever you would like to in your own story of origin. You have some insights that might be interesting. I know a lot of my friends say, “When I have a kid, it brings back a lot of my own childhood memories, or I’m reliving my own excitement at whatever holidays coming up.” You can go back to childhood or school, wherever you want.
Transformational Storytelling: Luxury is not about the price, but anticipating a need before somebody knew they needed it.
There are many choices here. Let me start where it brings the most meaning. I went to school at Boston University. I grew up in New England. I gravitated to and stayed in Boston for twenty years after I graduated. While I was there, my intent was to go to medical school. I was pre-med. I didn’t want to major in Biology, Chemistry or the typical sciences because I figured, “I’ll be scienced out for the rest of my life if this is my career. Let me try something different.” I was at the College of Liberal Arts. It’s now the College of Arts and Sciences, but it was CLA. I said, “Let me try some classic liberal arts.”
I took a class in Greek Civilization. Maybe it was the professor or the material. I had three years of Latin in high school, so I understood the ancient world, but I was immediately hooked at that moment. This gets to the core of what you do here, and that is, “He was a storyteller. He brought the past to life.” To me, if you can take the past and make it relevant to what we’re experiencing, it’s the same. If you go to church and sit through a homily, nobody wants to hear the reading regurgitated. What you want to hear is what does it mean in respect of what I’m dealing with in my life now and the challenges that I have?
This professor was able to take that. I still remember the line he used because I had never heard a teacher use profanity before. We were talking about Oedipus and he said, “You have to understand that to the ancient Greeks, calling someone an Oedipus was the ultimate insult.” He paused and went, “Oedipus was a mother effer.” I went, “Now it’s relevant. I get it.” It was a smack in the face, but it suddenly hit me that there’s a whole world out there that happened before that can be brought to life in new and different ways. From there, I went on. I didn’t go to medical school. I went to business school focusing on the business side of medicine. I went into biotech, medical device consulting, and managed care. Ultimately, I ended up at an agency that did B2B marketing in healthcare and high-tech space.
That’s where I discovered social media back in the mid-2000s. I had to leave that agency because they couldn’t get it. They had a client who wanted a new way to tell their story. This is when podcasting had come out. My vision for them was to host a podcast, surround yourself with smart people, highlight your own type of thinking, and showcase it. They went, “We’re not sure. Have you got a case study on this?” I was like, “This was launched three weeks ago. Do you want to read a case study or do you want to be a case study?” She went, “We want to read a case study.”
[bctt tweet=”A good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Removing the flat spot from my forehead from beating it against the wall, I left there and went to an agency that did strategic consulting with large brands to help them understand social media strategy. I did that for about a year and all of a sudden, I got a call from Ford Motor Company from their head of communications saying, “We’re behind the eight balls. We know digital communications and social is important. We need someone to come in here and lead it.” I said, “Do I have to move to Detroit?” I was in Boston at the time and working virtually with the agency I was with. We were all around the country. He said, “Yes. This is a high-level leadership position. We need your presence in the building.” I went, “I’m not interested.”
I’ll never forget his response. He didn’t say, “How dare you, sir? We are the Ford Motor Company. He said, “Are you sure?” which to me spoke of humility and willingness to let the other side explore their feelings. I said, “I’m pretty sure. The timing doesn’t feel right to me.” At the time, Alan Mulally had been the CEO of Ford for two years. He’d come from outside the auto industry and he transformed Ford or was about to transform Ford, which was on the ropes. The whole auto industry was in late 2007, early 2008. I followed Ford’s progress. They made some financial progress in that first quarter of 2008. The head of communications and I reconnected. He said, “We’ve talked to about 50 people. We still haven’t filled the role and your name keeps coming up. Why don’t you humor us? Come out here, spend 1.5 days with us, talk to 8 or 10 people to get a feel for what we’re all about, and then you can decide what’s right for you.” I did that.
John, I’ll never forget walking up the walkway to the glasshouse as it’s known Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, which is probably about an 8th of a mile long and twelve-stories high. It’s an impressive building. You’re walking into history. Henry Ford put the world on wheels and by the 1920s, half of all vehicles in the world were Ford Motor Company vehicles. This is a storied past. When I met with everybody that day, they were intelligent, talented, but most of all, they were passionate. I thought, “You can’t just invent passion out of nothing. There’s something special happening here.” Long story short, I signed up and by July of 2008, I was the head of Global Digital Communications and Social Media for Ford.
I love the choices there of humility versus hubris, and how one question can say so much about a culture and a person, “Are you sure?” versus, “How dare you?” The other part of that was clearly they’re selling you. When we’re younger, I know for myself in my early twenties, if somebody ever tried to recruit me, I was flattered. I never stood back and analyzed whether that was something I should do or not. As we get a little more seasoned in our career, we think, “That’s not right for me. I’m not willing to move for that.” The premise of, “Let’s not get you to commit on the phone, humor us,” which is another humble way to phrase that, “Spend some time with us.” It is all part of the journey, whether it’s the funnel we’re creating in digital marketing or a social media way to start to get people to engage with us, where in fact, in actual sales call where you’re getting someone to “take a test drive.”
Transformational Storytelling: If you can take the past and make it relevant to what we’re experiencing today, that can be brought to life in new and different ways.
This was the ultimate test drive, which is what they do when they sell the cars. What a great metaphor of coming out. If you can get somebody to test drive and sit in the car, that’s what the whole goal of marketing and advertising has always been. After that, it’s up to the salesperson and the person’s criteria. If we get you in the car from an advertising standpoint, from my ad sales background, we’re like, “Our job was done. That’s all we need to do.” He knew that if we can get you here, we’re not at the top yet. We don’t have a yes, but it’s a much easier to ask than come here and interview.
When you think about it, whether it’s a sales or a management process, there are several leaders who feel like they need to be in control. They need to control the situation. The bottom line is when you’re dealing with an employee or a prospective employee, a lead or a prospective customer, the decision lies with them. They are going to do whatever it is they’re going to do. All you can do is create a culture around them to make the decision easier. For example, when Bill Ford decided to bring Alan Mulally in as the CEO, Bill Ford was the great-grandson of Henry Ford. The family’s name is still on the logo. It’s a family-owned company. Bill was the President, CEO and Chairman of the Board. He said, “Alan, if you come in, I want you to be the CEO.” This will be the first time somebody from outside of the auto industry as a CEO. He said, “I’m even willing to give up my chairman seat on the board for you.”
You talk about humility. Knowing that you come from the family that invented the moving assembly line, and you’re telling the world and the guy that’s going to replace you, that you’re not the right guy for the job. That’s leader humility right there out of Bill Ford. Alan said, “I don’t want to do this without you. I need you by my side to be the visionary. While I do the heads down, hard work to start changing the company, you have to be my cheerleader. You need to keep me in line.” This relationship between the two that it wasn’t all one or all the other, they were willing to give up some control in pursuit of excellence and their ultimate goal. You don’t see that a lot. Many times, people want to control, micromanage, steer you in a certain direction, and force you into a box. That old chestnut is true. If you love something, set it free. If it loves you, it will come back.
It sounds like Bill Ford love the company and the legacy enough to not let his ego get in the way of being the one to have to keep it going or adapt. What is fascinating is that Alan said to Bill, “I still need you to be my visionary.” He ended up hiring you and calling you a visionary. Alan surrounded himself with visionaries above him and reporting to him. That’s a nice way to look at what the story is as you told us like, “As a leader, I need visionaries in every corner, please.”
[bctt tweet=”Emotions are created in the details.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the first parts of leadership is to know that you don’t know everything. Many times, we promote people from within because they are a particularly good individual contributor. You would have the most sales, you designed the best product, or you got so far at customer satisfaction scores. How does that translate to management? Being a good individual contributor doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to lead a team or how to motivate people. One of the first things you can do as a leader when you’re promoted is to say, “First of all, I’m new at this. I need to admit that I don’t know everything. I need to find the people that know more than I do about a whole lot of subjects and to complement my skills with other people around me, so together we form a cohesive team.”
I know you get hired a lot as a consultant, as well as the speaker. One of your topics is transformation storytelling. Since this show is all about storytelling and pitching with storytelling as a tool, I’d love to hear what you think is your definition of a good story.
I’m a big fan of history, as I mentioned. The difference between the recorded past and the remembered past, the recorded past is history that’s in the books. It’s a spiked cannon. It’s a statue, a monument. The remembered past is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago, but stories about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago. To me, a series of events, a story well told becomes the difference between moving someone emotionally or not. If you want to take us back to our most basic level, consider early humans who were hunters and gatherers. There are two of them that are out in the woods and they hear a twig snap. All of a sudden, they turn and there’s a tiger there. The tiger is beginning to give chase.
One of the guys goes up a tree. The other guy gets mauled by the tiger and his neck snapped, and he’s gone. The guy up in the tree is quietly waiting for the tiger to finish his business and go elsewhere. He comes down and he returns to his tribe. He recounts the tale of being alone with his friend, Kevin. Kevin is there in the forest with them and how that twig snapping sound, how the hair raised on the back of their necks, and how his heart raced. By putting those different levels of details in there, by making his audience, which in this case was his tribe, feel like they were part of the action and embellishing that, not falsely, but bringing those details and the emotion out, he makes them feel like they were part of it.
Transformational Storytelling: When you work for the same company, it doesn’t make sense that you’re trying to outdo your colleagues. You should be out doing your competition, not your colleagues.
The tribe is able to say, “Now we’ve got a lesson. We know what to look for when we’re out. If we hear a twig snap, what does that mean to us? If we are chased, we know to seek out a tree.” These become life lessons for them. They become a cautionary tale to become something that’s handed down from generation to generation. If we can do that in the workplace with anything that happens to us, it could be a sales call that went bad. It could be the best customer experience we ever designed. You name it. This becomes part of the culture that we build around us. The challenge now, not only with the pandemic where we’re all separated, those water-cooler moments, those opportunities to chit chat in the hallway before a meeting is gone.
At the same time, we also see that in terms of workplace retention, people are jumping from job to job. There is a lack of institutional memory. There’s a lack of these stories, this oral tradition being upheld. To me, that’s why it’s important to capture these stories wherever we can in video, in audio and in written form, and make them part of the experience so that when a new generation or workforce comes on board, they can absorb these stories without having been part of them or without having been touched directly by the people who experienced them.
There’s a lot to unpack there. I love this line that a good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not. What great short criteria, whether it’s a commercial, social post, storytelling, did it move people emotionally, yes or no? That’s all we care about at this point. You then go on to tell us that the emotions are created in the details. That’s a thing that I see most people are completely unaware of when they’re learning storytelling is they’re like, “I need to be specific with the time, the day and the location, or what it felt like.” In order to describe someone’s problem, you have to describe how it felt for them so the people can see themselves in that story, that concept of emotions are created in the details. Once you believe and engage in the premise, that’s the whole criteria for a good story.
Most people don’t have an awareness of is that storytelling not only help you win new business but help you retain employees. That is a topic that not many people are talking about. I’ve experienced it myself, working with a healthcare tech company, by having all of their sales teams create a story of origin and then putting it into a repository map so that they can get to know each other personally and feel part of the culture and the tribe. Somebody took the time to ask me, “How I got into healthcare? What I did before I worked here? Anything that’s personal and that it’s valuable enough to be recorded to your point between remembered versus recorded history. It also allows new people to join the tribe or new hires to get a sense of, “Who am I working with here?”
[bctt tweet=”One of the first parts of leadership is to know that you don’t know everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love that you talk about this need for storytelling to create a legacy that creates a culture that people then feel like they’re a part of it, whether they were there at the beginning or not. Working for a legacy brand like Ford, you’ve got to experience that full-time, which goes full circle back to what you were saying, that it wasn’t just a group of talented people, but a group of people who were passionate. My question there is do you think part of that passion came from them identifying themselves with a legacy story?
It was part of the legacy story, John, knowing that they were carrying on in the giant footsteps that they had to fill. Let’s not forget when Steve Jobs died in October of 2011, he was compared to two other businessmen that transformed the 20th Century: Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. If you’re one of those companies and you’re following in the founder’s footsteps, there’s got to be some passion there and some trepidation in terms of, “Am I living up to the legacy?” At the same time, there was this wonderful culture that Alan brought as the new CEO of a created a spirit of working together with Bil Ford until that time had become a series of silos of fiefdoms, where people were competing for knowledge, rather than sharing knowledge. They were hoarders of knowledge. They were thinking that they were outsmarting their colleagues. They were pushing them down.
Alan said, “We all worked for the same company. It doesn’t make sense that you’re trying to outdo your colleagues. You should be outdoing your competition, not your colleagues.” He very quickly made it clear that there was going to be One Ford and it was translated through very simply, “One team, one plan, one goal.” It was something that everyone could remember. The challenge of a leader, of a storyteller, is to take a complex issue and to boil it down in its simplest terms with emotion, but in a way that doesn’t make people feel like you’re talking down to them. That’s a talent. I’ve got kids and I’ve seen them go through various stages. I’ve got a seventeen-year-old all the way down to almost seven years old.
I made a note a while back for a newsletter or a blog post. It was titled Thirteen Minutes. The only note that I put under it is it takes my kid forever to tell a story. If you’ve ever been with a little kid, they ramble on and on without getting to the point, and you’re thinking to yourself, “This kid’s cute, but when are they going to get to the real meat of it here? I’m getting bored.” At the same time, when they go to tell a joke, they run forward to the punchline immediately. You get back to what we were talking about before, in terms of putting those details in there. When you’re telling a joke, the timing matters, but the level of details that you put in and the suspense that you build with people is an important emotion. Suspense is a little bit different from horror.
Transformational Storytelling: When you’re telling a joke, the timing certainly matters. The level of details you put in and the suspense you build with people is very important.
When somebody asked Alfred Hitchcock about what suspense means, he said, “It’s the difference between a bomb going off on a train and telling someone that there is a bomb planted somewhere on the train.” It’s how you build that emotion with them and how you craft it. You don’t want the story to stretch out for thirteen minutes. You want to do it in a way that keeps their attention, keeps them engaged, and ultimately, gets to that punchline.
I’m happy that you shared that phrase from Ford, the use of one. I’ve seen that with another client. I’ve worked with Gensler, their architecture firm, and they call themselves The One Firm Firm, meaning that they don’t want to be perceived as doing silos and practice areas. They want to be perceived as some company that can do all of the things you might need from marketing all the way up to designing your law office or your airport. Also, that culture is not about having a one-star name architect. When you look at companies, cultures and their whole business model, two CEOs and different cities, they’re the largest revenue of all the firms.
When you have defined your story is then not only do the right team members come but also then you can explain that to potential clients as what your point of differentiation is. Therefore, usually justify a premium price along with it. You’ve also consulted with Google, what a range from a new company to Ford, and I’m curious, without getting into anything proprietary, what’s the consistent things you see, whether it’s a Google or a Ford that they bring you in to do?
Initially, people are interested in what’s the latest thing you can tell me? What’s going on in the marketplace? What are people saying?
[bctt tweet=”If you have unquenchable curiosity, it will take you to heights unimaginable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Is TikTok where we should be?
I will always begin with some grounding data. People are spending less time on traditional televisions and more time on handheld screens, whatever the data point is relevant to them. There comes a time in the presentation or in the engagement where we step back and say, “Let’s take the trends out of it because those will always be changing. Let’s step back and fundamentally, look at what it is that you’re doing now. How are you approaching this particular problem? Who do you have working on it? What are their points of reference? How are they going to market? What types of things are they sharing with their audience? In what format are they sharing them?” We look at the mix of paid, earned and owned media and all of that.
Fundamentally, if you can understand what it is that people want from you and you go back to Steve Jobs, nobody in 2003 or whenever the iPod came out was saying, “I need a thousand songs in my pocket.” It wasn’t there, but he knew people love music. People used Walkmans forever. What if he could create something new that met a need that wasn’t specifically expressed? To me, it’s a question behind the question and getting my clients to ask more questions and to not think that they already have the answer. I do this as a consultant. I ask a lot of questions. One is because I don’t know the answers, but two, I’m innately curious. Curiosity is one of the best traits of a leader, a marketer, a salesperson. If you have unquenchable curiosity, it will take you to heights unimaginable. Dorothy Parker once said that curiosity is the cure for boredom, and there is no cure for curiosity. If you have a curious spirit, you will never find yourself at a loss for information.
First of all, you said a phrase and it’s one of my all-time favorite phrases, which is the “What if?” question. When we ask people that, we get into the right brain where imagination and storytelling live. If we can ask and get them to imagine, “What if we did this? What if we created this?” What you’re saying about where the iPod came from, it’s coming up with a concept of Walkman was popular that people love the dots and be ahead of the puck, as Wayne Gretzky says. Anticipate where it’s going. The example I have is when I was working with the Banana Republic and they had the premise that their definition of luxury was not the price, but anticipating the need before somebody knew they needed it.
Transformational Storytelling: If you have a curious spirit, you will never find yourself at a loss for information.
With that, as their starting point, they then ask the questions. What could we do to give our top 20% of our clients that experience without having to raise our prices or anything? There’s some basic stuff like acknowledging their birthday with a card and things like that, but then they came up with the idea of allowing people to charge their phones in their Rockefeller store and their Banana Republic, Union Square store like, “No charge to charge your phone while you’re shopping as an unexpected luxury.” You’ll be like, “I need this. I didn’t know I could get it done here. This is great.” They’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of service, but they can at least try to do something. Their sales went up so much in those stores because people kept shopping while they waited for their phone to fully charge, not just charge a little bit. That’s a great example of what you were describing the reasons people would want to bring you in for those kinds of outcomes.
It reminds me of one of my first meetings while I was at Ford. It was a couple of months into my tenure there. It was an all-employee town hall. I was standing at the back. I was standing next to the Chief Marketing Officer, Jim Farley. Incidentally, Jim was named the CEO of Ford. I said, “Jim, I will give you a great, free idea that you can take.” I don’t oversee this area. “When you go to a car dealership, wouldn’t it be great if they had free Wi-Fi?” This was 2008. Free Wi-Fi wasn’t like water as we have now. He immediately said, “Scott, it’s going to be too much. It’ll be too expensive for the dealers to complicate it.” I said, “Jim, you’re missing the boat on this, the bigger picture. If you create Wi-Fi experiences, you’re going to keep people in the dealership rather than wanting to take a courtesy car home.”
A few years ago, I had a client who is the number one Honda dealer in the country. He operates a single store out of Queens, New York. He came to me and he said, “Scott, I want to work with you.” I said, “Brian, you’re already number one. What do you have to prove at this point?” He said, “You don’t get it. The dealership model is broken.” I said, “You’ve got my attention. What do you propose to do about it?” He said, “I don’t know but we are getting hammered, not by other car dealerships, not by Tesla, but by Apple, Uber and Amazon because of the experience.” I went and took a tour of his storeroom, which is a typical New York place. It is crammed with vehicles and a postage stamp size lot. I said, “Tell me a little bit about your customers.” He said, “We’ve got 180,000 customers in our email database.” I said, “That’s interesting. Tell me about your service.” He went, “Our service, we’re doing oil changes and all the regular services were booked six weeks out. We’re open from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM,” which is certainly better than the 9:00 to 5:00.
That is incredibly inconvenient when you think about it. He went, “We’re booked out from 7:00 to 7:00, six weeks in advance. We are 100% full. I said, “No, you’re not.” He went, “What do you mean?” I said, “You are 50% full. What about those other twelve hours of the day?” He went, “Who’s going to want to bring their car in at midnight?” I said, “Nobody, that’s why you’re going to go pick their cars up from them.” You almost saw his head explode. Logistically, we figured out how to do it. They have an on-demand service where they don’t tell you what openings they have. They ask you when you’re available. They send a valet out to pick your car up from your driveway, from your garage, from the street or your place of work at whatever time is convenient for you. They take it. They get it done. While the car is in there, they send you a text. When it’s arrived, they send you a selfie of the mechanic. They show you the parts they’ve taken out. They show you a picture of the parts they’re going to put in. It is complete transparency because transparency builds trust.
What is an auto dealership, but a black hole where you are convinced they are sucking money out of your bank account? As you’re sitting there in the waiting room in the old days without Wi-Fi, drinking their old coffee and eating their stale donuts, they’ll tell you it’s going to be an hour and you’re there two and a half hours. They’ll come out and tell you, “In addition to your oil change, John, we’ve discovered these three other things.” You’re ready to blow your lid and you go, “I have two questions, how much and how long?” You’re ready to say, “I’ll risk my life. I don’t care. I’m not spending a dime more with you guys at this.”
When you do this pickup and delivery with them, your home on your couch, and you’re getting these texts and they say, “It’s going to be an additional $212.70. Would you like us to do it? Hit here for yes. Hit here for a no.” That’s easy. Over time, Brian at Paragon Honda has seen their repair orders go up by 36% and has seen $1.5 million dropped to the bottom line that they weren’t getting otherwise. It is simply because they changed their perspective and wanted to make it more convenient for the customer. They seeded control. I said, “Let’s go with what the customer wants.” It created a completely new business for them. This was pre-pandemic. You look at all the dealers. This is what they’re doing because they have to. Brian was a few years ahead of the game on that.
I could talk to you forever. I love that line, “Transparency builds trust.” Many people are always saying, “How can I build trust?” You gave us an amazing gem there. Do you have any last thoughts you want to leave us with? A quote, a favorite book, a favorite art piece, anything that you want to leave on?
I will give you my favorite marketing quote of all time, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.” This wasn’t said by Dale Carnegie. It wasn’t said by Seth Godin or any of the marketing and management gurus. This was said 2,000 years ago by Cicero, whose job was to orate, to be up in front of the Senate and to convince people to see things his way. He knew that he had to get inside their head and their heart to make them move.
It doesn’t get better than that. Scott, people can find you at ScottMonty.com. They can also figure out how to subscribe to Timeless and Timely, your newsletter. If they want to engage and hear more of this incredible content and delivery entertainment as a speaker or as a consultant, ScottMonty.com is the place to go. Thanks again, Scott.
Thank you, John. It was such a treat being with you here.
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