Episode Transcript
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Hello, welcome back to rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Today we are talking all about LinkedIn ads with Matt Heyman, founder of Linklow IO. Linklo is a platform to help you better manage your ads and ad performance on LinkedIn. And in this episode, Matt has a couple of really interesting ways that he thinks about both from a high level conceptual standpoint and a really tactical, practical way of getting leads from LinkedIn ads for less than $10. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Matt from Linklow.
So Matt, we spent kind of the better part of a week together in London for the tiny seed kickoff. You're part of the newest tiny seed kind of EMEA like Europe, Middle east and Asia Group, and your business is all around LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads and LinkedIn lead generation. And this is the first of several part series on LinkedIn B. Two B lead generation.
For folks who aren't aware of what you do and who you are, can you share just a bit about your Superman Genesis story?
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Of course. Matt Heyman, founder of Linkload IO we're a LinkedIn ads management platform that's designed to help LinkedIn advertisers generate the results that they hoped that they would be able to generate when they first came across LinkedIn, but have been unable to do so. So we're early stage company founded middle of last year.
My own story is one of managing LinkedIn ads for predominantly B two B SaaS companies. In fact, we can get into a little bit more of the backstory later if you want, but yeah, very much experienced the challenges and the pitfalls of trying to successfully run LinkedIn ads over the years and slowly over time was able to generate quite consistent results for the employers, but also for clients subsequently, when I went to work for a marketing agency. So, yeah, really, this is Linkclo is really the distillation of all of that hardship, blood, sweat, and tears along the way to try and generate results and give users more of a platform that I think is slightly more intuitive, that's slightly more geared towards the activities that are likely to generate real, tangible results for the business.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Cool. So I think in my world, like, of lead generation, you have the handful of arrows you can fire. Ads is definitely one of them. But within ads, everyone looks at LinkedIn these days, especially, it's on fire right now as a platform. But everybody looks at LinkedIn from an ad perspective, and they're just like, I don't sell a hundred thousand dollars thing. There's no way I can generate profitable leads there.
And so to me, it's just not even considered a lot of times.
And I'm not going to ask you to share the whole secret recipe. And that's kind of counter to what I do here a lot. But I think there's some special sauce that, you know, that we might not share all of. And I don't mean to be like a bitch to the audience, but I want to keep it a little high level because I think it is. What we try to do is we kind of abstract away the lessons of a particular tactic so that it applies to everybody. So I'm not going to ask you to say, okay, how do you generate $8 leads on LinkedIn for, like you did for one of your clients? I'm going to say, like, okay, let's generally talk about, like, how we should think about kind of mid market B. Two B SaaS can consider LinkedIn as a viable ad platform, because that's really, like, really why we're here today is we were sitting on the bus going to the hot tub tour in London. And so for all of you who have been to London, we took a hot tub down the Thames, and it was really amazing. But we were on the bus, and you're like, yeah, for my last client, we were getting leads on LinkedIn for seven or $8. I was like, bullshit. Because you're here 100 times that a lot, right? Like, a couple hundred bucks is pretty, pretty common, like Cac on LinkedIn.
Okay, so that's a very long preamble. But I think what I want to try to do is say, based on your history, how can maybe a company like castos, where we sell, like, some enterprise podcasting solutions from, let's just call it ten grand to 50 grand a year.
I think thats a really solid mid market, lower enterprise level, which is where a lot of tiny seed and indie bootstrap folks want to live.
How can we think about LinkedIn as a viable ad platform? Lets start there.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Maybe theres a couple of ways to break this down. Firstly, one of the things that is often overlooked is the impact of using LinkedIn ads for branding.
In my experience, generally, what happens, especially in the types of businesses that you've outlined there, is that they will jump straight to lead generation and assume that LinkedIn is a great platform for generating leads. But the reality is, when you look at research from the likes of Ehrenberg Bass Institute, on average they estimate around 5% of your ideal audience are ever in market for your product. So if you come at this from the perspective of how can we acquire in market buyers through LinkedIn, you are going to be disappointed. There is no doubt you're going to be disappointed. Now, we can certainly shorten that journey, and there are things that you can do to generate the kind of results that you've alluded to, which I do see consistently. But there has to be a base understanding that part of effectively generation or demand generation on LinkedIn is high quality brand awareness. And most businesses in the kind of category that you've described really downplay how important branding is. They see branding as the logo, the color scheme, the typography, but they don't really go any further than that. And that's probably the big mistake. So if we set that backdrop of branding and that that backdrop exists, then everything else that flows from that becomes much, much easier. Without that, you are talking to people who have, or shouting at people who have never heard of you potentially, who may not even be in market.
And that's where you see the 100 $200 cost per lead results that people see, and then they come off the platform and complain to one another that it's an expensive platform. But the reality is they've just conceptually, they've thought about the platform in a completely different way. The way I like to explain this to some people is that if you think about a purchase, significant purchase, it's very, very rare that you would see a company advertise for the very first time and proactively engage with that, download an asset, potentially, or even more book a demo, or even more sign up for a product that you have never been exposed to before. So if that's how we typically buy, why are we expecting our ideal customers to buy in a completely different way? My argument is that most often the reason that's the case is that we're primarily orientated towards what matters to us and not what matters to the buyer. Aligning much more with the buyer and where they are in the buying journey is more likely to yield the kind of results that I've been able to consistently generate. And LinkedIn helps link, low helps users generate. Okay, bit of context. I think it's important because if we come into this from the perspective of how can I generate leads with the lowest cost possible, and does that work for my average order value, then I think we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Okay, so I want to come back to the last point a bit, but first I want to, ooh, challenge is not the right word. I need to understand how brand and brand awareness is done effectively, because I'll just say we have spent a lot of effort and money on brand. I think for very poor results. We haven't gotten, I feel like we haven't gotten much out of it.
How do you not screw this up? Because I see this as just a giant black hole of money and effort. If you do this wrong, hey, let's run top of funnel awareness just of our brand and maybe the problem that we have. And I go, well, fuck, that sounds like just a great way to waste a bunch of money. How do you not do that bad?
[00:09:48] Speaker B: So there's a number of ways we could come at this.
One person on LinkedIn, a chap called Dale Harrison, who I rate very highly, who is more from an academic background, I think, and his content definitely gives that impression. His perspective on this, and I love this analogy, is, is thinking a little bit like the way a manufacturing company might think about a factory as a cost center? Branding is very much like that. It's very hard to really demonstrate the ROI in the same way that you might be able to or want to in more direct response marketing. It is a backdrop through which everything else is elevated. Now, there are ways that you can certainly do this, there are ways that you can look at the impact of brand. And one of the ways specifically is to look at things like quite simply in Google search console, the trajectory of your branded search terms. So over a period of a year to two years, are more people searching for your brand, particularly a brand like Kastos, which is very hard to conflate with anything else. It is clearly thats your business, thats your brand. So one of the clear ways is to do share of search or, sorry, brand searches. So that gives you a sense of, are we moving in the right direction. Are more people aware. Now its not necessarily a perfect indicator, but it is a fairly good indicator. And generally speaking, metrics like that are a good indicator that your brand is becoming more well known and that more people are aware of you and are searching you out proactively. If you're, I mean this is, we're maybe getting a bit tactical too soon, but one thing that you can look at the very few people don't do is if you're running branded ads in Google, in Google search, then you can look at the click through rate on your branded ad ads. So let me break that down a little bit. The idea there is that as more people become familiar with your brand, their propensity to click on the ads that are promoting your product or service likely to go up. So when you're new into the market, your click through rate on branded ads might be a couple of percent. But as your brand becomes more familiar, more people are looking you up and searching you, searching for you, then that click through rate will, will continue over time. So those are another one I like as well, just to throw another one out because I really enjoy discussions around branding and SaaS is you can look at simply like a product like Semrush or Ahrefs, and just look at your backlink profile and more people linking to you. Now it's not, again, by itself not a perfect metric. There could be other reasons. For example, people linking to their podcasting page. It's not perfect. But again, as you see more people become familiar with you, more people are likely to be backlinking or linking back to your website. And those three in combination give you an idea of where is our brand. And so that sets the scene. For as that improves, as more people become familiar with the products and services that you offer and start to develop a sense of who you are and your personality, then you can layer in things like social proof, then you can layer in testimonials, case studies, examples of people who've got the results that you purport to give them. That then is a nice step further down the funnel. But again, without that brand awareness, you don't have that backdrop through which everything else can flow.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Yeah, gotcha, gotcha.
So if we're thinking about kind of increasing brand awareness through some kind of paid medium, Google, you mentioned that that's pretty straightforward. I think that's just on search terms. On a platform like LinkedIn, are we using the same kind of traditional targeting method?
Whether it's a lookalike audience or something kind of similar. I assume they have existing website visitors or demographic based company size, position, role seniority, location, things like that.
And then what are you showing? Is this just we're cast as we do podcasting, or is it like a video talking about something specifically?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Yeah, perfect. So, yeah, both those. Yeah, we can go into detail on those. So in terms of the targeting, the reason why I think LinkedIn as a platform for advertising is so good, it's around about a billion users. What do they say? Something like 16% of those are daily active users. So in the region of 130 40 million daily active users.
And the beauty of that is that people volunteer all of this information about every aspect of their working lives. I do it, you do it, we all do it. Those who are of us who are on LinkedIn, by and large, we all volunteer this information that then powers an incredibly powerful LinkedIn ads platform. So all of what you've described, you can target through. But when we think about brand awareness, typically what I would like to do with an early stage, relatively early stage SaaS business is really dial in on the ICP. What's the ideal customer profile look like? In fine detail. Now, typically, again, when I've worked at startups and I've advised companies, that generally starts fairly broad. It's almost cliche now it starts very broad. There's lots of internal discussion and debate about should we, while we're going to alienate this audience, what should we, we do about this one? Anyway? Clarity on ICP is probably one of the most important factors when it comes to LinkedIn, because it's very easy, and LinkedIn don't make it hard to spend a lot of money on poor targeting.
It's fairly easy to lose your shirt. It's not quite at the Las Vegas casino level, but it's not too far off. So it's engineered to encourage spends from advertisers with deep pockets. So one of the things is to really take the time to go into a lot of detail with the targeting you can target based off of seniority, time in post job title, you name it. And so for a company dipping their toe in the water, really what I would do is go with a very specific audience that you are very, very sure are a good fit. So in the case of Castos, there's nothing to stop you at least doing some preparatory research. I'm not sure what the actual numbers would look like, but people whose, whose title would be podcast manager or a title that it would be very, very hard to argue is not a decent fit. If the demographics and the thermographic information of the company are correct.
So start really specific. Don't try and go too broad. Again. LinkedIn will advise that you want to have, excuse me, a couple hundred thousand people in your audience. I've got campaigns running right now. We have Linkclo users running campaigns right now with four, 5000 people in those cold audiences and generating results with those. So go as focused as you possibly can and then start to just expand that a little bit. Start with one campaign, expand to another territory. So don't try and as move either out or next. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is where we get into. This is where we get into the other, you know, some of the stuff for maybe later in the conversation about why you would have different territories.
Engagement on LinkedIn varies throughout the day and it varies throughout the week. So go super specific on territory. That also then allows you to try some of the other things, particularly what Linkclo allows you to do around scheduling.
To your second point. The second question about what do you show them?
All of the research around branding demonstrates that there is a real value creating an emotional connection with your ideal prospect through that initial touch point. So in the UK we have a department store called John Lewis. John Lewis is very, it's sort of mid to high end department store. Every single year they have become famous for their Christmas ad. The ad that's shown during the holidays every year. People wait for it to come out. They watch it, they deconstruct it, they share it, they talk about it.
The history of that is that there was a very conscious decision by the advertiser or the agency advising the advertiser that we really need to create an emotional connection between our department stores and the emotion around Christmas and not here are the range of toys that we stock or here are all of the brands that we stock, or here's where we're located. It was very much about creating an emotional hook within the mind of the user so that you start to sow the seeds at the back of their mind that they even to the point where they even associate one of, if not the most popular public holidays with a particular retailer. So the key is the emotional hook. Without that, you do become. It was interesting that that's where you went to with your example around. We're cast us, we do podcasting. It's about as unemotional, and I know you weren't being serious, but it's about as unemotional as it could possibly be. And you'll often see that with SaaS companies they will go for, this is exactly what we do, and this is exactly why it's so good. They won't necessarily orientate towards and what's the kind of emotional reaction that we want to generate in somebody. Now I can, I mean, maybe if I pause, but I can share a particular example that worked very well for me. Yeah, no point for me to pause.
[00:19:36] Speaker A: Yeah, no, as you're describing this, I think about in the US when I was, I'm 44 now. I just turned 44 on Monday. I think about growing up, the Budweiser commercials around the holidays and the Clydesdale horses, it's a very kind of similar thing. It's like, oh, it's this thing. And then they had the Dalmatians with it after a while. And just like every year it's slightly different, but every year, yeah. I don't know if we looked forward to it, but I wasn't in kind of the business or marketing world. But I'm sure if you were at the time, you'd be like, man, they did so good, and it drove so much kind of brand affinity. It had nothing to do with beer or anything. It just like feel good, feel good kind of thing.
My thought, and it's not necessarily a question, it's just a thought. It's like two things, I guess. One, as technical marketers, largely, that's hard for us to come up with. How do I go from work, as does we do podcasting to the Clydesdale horses or whatever the department store kind of did? So I think that's probably a fair leap for a lot of us as generalist marketers. And the other is, I'm sure there's kind of this sequence or trail that somebody goes through is like they see this thing and then they get retargeted or kind of whatever, with another type of lead after that, or another type of ad after that, is like, how do you think about kind of drawing the line between two pieces of exposure to ultimately lead to an opportunity or lead?
But those are just thoughts.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Yeah. With the brand piece for a technical marketer. And I would say this isn't something that throughout my career I've gravitated towards as a priority. It's not something I find particularly easy to do, but I do find it very, very helpful and very revealing where I would typically go. Maybe if I bring this live with the example, because I think that could be quite a useful example. So Linkload, as we mentioned, is a platform for managing LinkedIn ads. So one of the places I went to with that is what are some of the emotions that people are feeling when they're using the platform right now? Generally, it's disappointment and it's frustration. Those are two overwhelming feelings that people have when they're using the platform. So then my mind goes to, well, then I think of kind of shoulder categories. So where else would we experience frustration and disappointment? And now, I can't necessarily tell you where this came from, but it did occur to me just before I woke up one morning, it came to me in the form of an image in my mind of a child writing a note to Santa at Christmas. So Santa, Christmas is around really wanting something. Sometimes being a bit disappointed, a bit frustrated, but really wanting something. The overwhelming drive was, there are things that I want, that I really do want, but I can't have, and that's a bit frustrating, and that's a little bit like the platform. So then I start to go to, I have two daughters, ten and five, and I was thinking of my eldest and her writing out. So that's what I did, wrote out a handwritten letter to Santa. Dear Santa, I wish LinkedIn ads would let me schedule my ads, split test my ads, manage my budget. Love, Annabelle, age ten xxx red pen, blank sheet of paper. Click through rates. Off the charts. Off the charts on that campaign, because we ran it at Christmas, we ran it in November, December time, and click through rates. Absolutely. Demolish any benchmark that you can see, and it's simply just a handwritten note on, on a piece of plain paper. So that's where, I think that's where technical founders or technical marketers who aren't particularly comfortable, familiar with that kind of approach is think about the emotions that your users are typically experiencing around the pain points. Think about tangential examples which relate to that, and just let your mind play with, don't try and tie it to what you do. In fact, decouple it completely from what you do and start to think about where in that person's world where those emotions might start to come up. And the reason we're doing this is just to bring it back to branding more broadly, is we're doing this to build mental availability. We're doing this to occupy a small space in the mind of our ideal prospect, so that although they might not act now, when they see another example of that ad, another quirky ad that registers too, maybe after that they're exposed to some social proof in the form of a case study or a video testimonial. And then maybe the third layer is we offer them something that's extremely high value that relates to a pain point that they experience on a day to day basis. Now they know you, they're aware of you, now they start to get a sense of, okay, these people get me. These people understand where I'm coming from. The social proof tells me they're legit and the promise of the product is delivered. On the third is a piece of high value content that the user goes, okay, this is perfect. I need to know what's in this material. And that's the real journey. That's how you get to your eight pounds. Your eight dollar cost per lead is because you've led them on a journey which has ended up with them wanting to download a piece of content from LinkedIn from a company that they know, who have shown a history of demonstrating they can deliver on a promise and are now offering something extreme value for that person that will help them in their role.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, super cool. Super cool. I would suppose that, so we're kind of talking about a three touchpoint sequence of ads. Maybe. I would suppose that the goal isn't necessarily click through, rate or engagement, even on the first two. It's just get this in front of people so that we can, I'll use the term retarget or kind of sequence them to the next place and show that super high value kind of final add to them.
Do you kind of optimize for engagement or click through rate in those first couple of ads? Or is it all just like, hey, how can we lead this to the, to the end point? Most of it's a good question.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: So I, yeah, my goal is to generate engagement. It's to, an engagement for me is clicks, comments, likes. Yeah, it doesn't matter to me at that stage because it's partly a function of the, of the ad itself. It's, it will often be in the, in the case of the, the letter to Santa campaign it was, I didn't know that people would like it or comment on it, I didn't know if they would click. But it turns out that they did all three in quite large numbers. But there will be other types of execution which would lend itself more to comments or likes. But really what I want is, I don't want, the worst case scenario is that nobody does anything with it, they just ignore it because this is our opportunity to drive that emotion. So really if the real marker is engagement as a sort of, as a global proxy, really whatever form that takes in terms of the campaign manager data, it's really just that we have created some degree of a hook in their mind. There is some degree of emotional connection in their mind.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: Yeah, no, love it, love it.
I want to pause on the super tactical stuff for a minute just because I think people need a minute to process, but I want to go more to a founder level.
I love so much. And there were several people in your tiny seed batch who had kind of experienced this problem firsthand, thought the tools on the market kind of sucked and were like, I can build a better mousetrap. You, like me, are unique and that we are solo, non technical founders.
And so, like, power. Right?
It's hard, man. But can you kind of just share that journey of you're managing LinkedIn ads, you're like, gosh, this sucks, or this is hard, or, there's no good thing for this. How did that kind of evolve into what is now link low? And what did you now that you're a year later, as you look back, if you're advising somebody, don't do this or definitely do this. Yeah, kind of share that story.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: Advising them to create a product of their own experience.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, you saw this problem. I want to go start a SaaS because I had this problem.
When is that a good idea? Not. Yeah, sure.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: So, yeah, so the backstory really starts a long time ago when I was running a small marketing agency for local businesses, and at that point, I was working with hotels, museums, shops, restaurants, and was doing that for like eight years in total, and moved from that to work in B two B SaaS because partly as a result of some of the advice and material from Rob Walling, one of the tiny seed co founders. But, yeah, very much started to get really interested in SaaS. Thought the business model was just beautiful. It was just a beautiful model. And back then, it was very much a case of there were huge. There were just a plethora of products on the market that were solving really specific problems really elegantly. I mean, fast forward to now. It's like there's products for managing products for managing products, and it feels like the whole sector's below completely from where it once was. But anyway, back in those days, I really liked that you have an elegant solution to a specific problem.
Took on a role with a B two B SaaS company called Refract at the time attempting to compete with the likes of Gong and chorus in the conversation intelligence market, and very much I was running marketing the whole thing, and it was a case of, we need leads for the sales team. How quickly can you generate leads? And at that point, because of my history, I hadn't been exposed to LinkedIn in the same way as I am now, but obviously it had to be the place to go. So the pressure was on to generate leads. A sales team hungry for people to contact and founders with one eye on the Runway and a lot of pressure. So I think it's that old cliche of pressure and the diamonds. We had to get something to work quite quickly. So, yeah, from there it was a case of, how quickly can we generate leads on LinkedIn? How can we do that? We were able to generate those quite well, quite quickly through a range of different tactics.
But really, what kind of occurred to me throughout the whole time was just a lot of testing, a lot of iteration of campaigns, and slowly starting to see patterns in what was going on that I could begin to replicate. And there were tactics that we were employing that seemed to work consistently well. The problem with those was that they were all extremely manual, and most of them were extremely manual. So, fast forward to, I suppose, three or four years ago. And then I really started to think about the fact that there need to be a product that would do some of these functions automatically and automate it. So that's what led me eventually to dip my toe in the water and start to get an MVP built. What I would say, though, to the potential founder is if it's causing you significant frustrations, if the problem that your product purports to solve is something that you've experienced all the time, then there is at least a case to build an MVP. Test it yourself, as I did for a couple of months first, and then start to show it to a few people and get their initial ideas. But because I'd experienced that problem at close quarters for so long, it was very easy for me to articulate what I believed to be the correct solution. Now, it turns out that not all of my users and not all of my prospects agree with that. Who thought it, but I thought I had all the answers. Clearly not.
So that was really powerful. Was that, yes, I'm close to the problem. I do know the solution, but I don't know all of it. And the product will always evolve. Off the back of speaking to our users and the frustrations of our users, I would say with things like no code platforms nowadays, it's never been easier to dip your toe in the water and try. But I think it does have to come from the perspective of, I can articulate very clearly an elegant solution to a really specific problem that I understand at a deep level that I think puts me, dare I say, in a good position, an advantageous position to both build a product that's really useful, but equally gets traction quite quickly, as we were lucky to do with Linklow.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that part about learning from your customers in an unexpected way, I guess that's the definition of learning, is really something that is underappreciated because we have a lot of people who use our platform either for public podcasting or for private podcasting, for communities, membership sites or internally for companies, really differently than I would. And it's challenging.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: That's, that's really challenging from a product perspective, because what you end up having are, you know, it's the proverbial, like, tail wagging the dog a little bit. Where I have a vision. Francois, our head of product, has, like, where he wants things to go, you know, largely, you know, from, from my kind of vision, if you will. And then you have, like, the community and our support team coming in saying, yo, we got like a dozen people who want to do this thing. And I'm like, well, that's dumb.
That doesn't make any sense. That's not valuable. That's not in line with the next seven things I want to do with the company.
And that is really hard because now you're in this friction between, well, the customers are always right, really. And the, like, the Henry Ford, like, faster horse thing. Right. So I don't have an answer for this other than. I totally hear you. It will only get harder because what happened is you had a single use case, right, and your earliest kind of testers and validators were probably as much aligned to your way of thinking as possible. And now that you're spreading out like concentric circles from here, you're going to get different types of people wanting to use the product in different ways. And I was chatting with Rob yesterday, and he said that reducing the number of decisions that you have to make as a founder is actually a superpower. And I think that this is one of the, this product and product direction and kind of mark, growth strategies and tactics are the two places that I have learned to limit myself the most in is, like, we just say no to basically everything now and at our own peril, probably, but we do it because if you rewind, a few years ago, we tried to do everything and we ended up doing it all poorly, both from a product and from a growth like strategy and channel perspective. So that's just my, like, I totally hear you. We've been there. We fucked it up royally. But at this point, pretty disciplined around it. And I would just say like, cautionary tale for everybody, not just you, because I think you get it, but you got to be careful how much you listen to customers I think is the short version.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm pleased you're not looking to any kind of insight on this from me, because I think I'm probably the worst person to answer this question. We're way too early in our journey. I think what I would say though, and one of the things I've tried to do is, even though Linkclos price point is relatively modest right from day one, I was very, very eager to do sales demos, to be on sales demos. It's not something I find particularly.
It's not my comfort zone at all. I'm very fortunate in that I do have a sales coach in, a former colleague who helps me with that. But what that has done has helped me. I think in the early days really understand the level of resonance that we had with the target audience. And I think if the feedback had been in those early conversations and still today had gone in a certain direction, the product would have absolutely pivoted very, very quickly. So I think that's where I really enjoy those conversations with prospective clients, because you get so much insight into their world and how they operate and how they see the use of a product like link clay fitting into their workflow, the value that they would see from it. So I think, yeah, on the feature side, yeah, nothing to add. But I think what I would say if there's any advice I can give for those early stage founders in particular, is even if your product price point is on the low end and it's not scalable, there is a goldmine of opportunity in what comes back from people from prospects on those early calls. That would be if I could offer any advice that's something I found hugely beneficial.
[00:37:06] Speaker A: Yeah, 1000%. Especially early on as you're developing product market fit learning, even with the depth of experience you have, you don't know everything because the use case of the market is slightly different than yours.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: Totally good mentor of mine said something really insightful, which I think is really stuck with me, is that if we'd have gone self serve from day one and somebody comes onto the website and doesn't buy, I have no visibility into any of their decision making process. I have nothing. All I have is a bounce rate or a conversion rate and no other story to tell. A conversation gives you infinitely more data points than that. And I think fight your resistance to go, oh, I don't know if I'm comfortable talking or I don't know how to sell. I think use it as product research and product validation as well.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Just real briefly, because I think we did a really good job of touching on, at an appropriate high level, how folks could think about structuring a LinkedIn ads campaign sequence.
How would Linklow fit into that? What do you all do? That really enables some of that to work, right?
[00:38:24] Speaker B: Yes. One of the key areas there goes to the point around when I was at refractory, we were generating these low cost leads. The question then became, where could we take this? How far could we take this? I had LinkedIn reps saying on calls, how are you doing this?
We're seeing your data, and it seems very unusual. How are you doing it?
One of the key areas there is, and this is something that Linkclo really does really well, in my opinion, is scheduling. So if you were to think about, let's go to the third stage, the lead generation element of the three step funnel, if you like, that we talked about, there are some patterns that certainly emerge there around people using the platform. So you certainly don't want to have your ads running all the time, and you may hear conflicting viewpoints on that.
I'll leave that there. You may hear conflicting viewpoints.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: All of the data, I would suppose it's different for different people in different industries with different types of audiences. So I think it's fair for you not to give a blanket statement here that, like, you know, run your ads between this time and this time and turn them off on Sundays or something like that. Probably doesn't work for everybody. So I think it's fair to just.
[00:39:38] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It definitely works. It definitely works for the majority, for sure. But, yeah, that's fair. I would say scheduling is key because if you're going to, in the same way that you're, you know, you'll see people schedule posts on LinkedIn, you'll see scheduling is relatively commonplace. Same is true on, on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn ads, what we typically see is mornings, early mornings, weekdays, early mornings on a Saturday. Those are periods of time which generate better results. So what tends to happen is you see a better conversion rate during those time periods, and then you see it dilute throughout the course of the day and throughout the course of the week and then into the weekend, which is another reason why you get that elevator cost per lead, because actually, you're running your ads all the time, and that's not necessarily when people are most active on the platform. So scheduling is definitely one area. I think on the other area you've got split testing, the ability to run split tests on your ads to see which creatives are performing better than others with statistical significance. That's another factor that helps. But those two in combination are extremely powerful for generating disproportionate results. But as I say, as long as you have that structure in place, you'll be in a good position. But it's the scheduling that really turbocharges that and the ab split testing that really turbocharges the results that people see.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: Cool. Cool. Awesome, awesome.
I want to circle back because I just had a thought around doing demos and not being self serve. What is the most surprising thing you've learned that you think is generally applicable to anybody looking to do this type of early growth, like go to market motion?
[00:41:27] Speaker B: So I'm not going to directly answer the question, but I hope the insight's useful.
Having done the demos, having, having delivered demos for quite some time now, and having received coaching on my demos, I've realized how certain character traits and certain personality traits will generate or lead me in a direction that's not necessarily helpful for selling the product. So when you look at, so there's an organization out there called objective management group, who have this very, very large assessment of sales people, sales professionals, and there are a number of different domains inside of that which give you clues as to how you approach sales and selling and your mindset, and what the ramifications or pitfalls might be, as well as the upside might be of having, of skewing in a certain direction. And I think one of the early observations from my sales demos that's had the biggest impact on me, and I appreciate it, it's not quite really what you asked, but hopefully relevant and helpful, is that if I were to do one of these assessments, I would probably have quite a high need for approval.
And a lot of people have this. It's a standard trait, but it's a trait that leads you in certain directions. So, for example, when I'm on a demo in the early days and the person pushes back, I dont push back in response because that would have a detrimental impact on how they perceive me. Or if theres a pricing objection, if they say, well, we like the product, but can you do anything with the price? Somebody with a very high need for approval would say, well yeah, what kind of figure do you have in mind? Where are you thinking? As opposed to we dont discount? So its that conscious, its being cognizant of, of all of the baggage that we bring to the table in those sales conversations has been extremely helpful in helping me sell more. Another one is around attitudes to money. That's another one of the traits that the assessment looks at. Your attitude to money and what money means to you as an individual will impact the way that you sell. So those kind of revelations have been extremely helpful.
I hope if somebody's listening to this and thinking they're going to give sales a try, I would be thinking about what am I bringing to the table? What are my personality traits and how might that manifest itself or show up on my demos?
[00:43:52] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. Not necessarily specific to your experience with selling Linkload to your audience, but more generally getting into a sales motion. I can totally relate. I think that we all have the lens through which we see information and that we try to project our sales motion.
And I think in a lot of ways, you got to lean into that, knowing the detriment of your style.
That's how I am. I have a style, and I kind of know, like, it's good for some people and it's not for others. And I don't try to, I don't try to be the chameleon salesperson that everybody says because, and it's just hard, like, hard to stay consistent, hard, hard to get the same outcome or output with doing that versus just like leaning into who I am. And some people just don't like it, and that's fine.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: So another, another way to reflect on that is to think about, and this is, again, as part of the OMG assessment, is the way that you like to buy. So really simple exercise. Anybody listening that this can do is just think about a time when they made a purchase reasonably high value. So think tv, think car.
A sizable purchase. Not just a throwaway purchase, sizable purchase. Think about how you like to buy. So you walk into the dealership or you walk into the showroom, somebody comes up straight away, hey, for me, that's a big no no. I turn around and leave.
But that, again, would then impact on how I sell Linklow, because I wouldn't want to become, I wouldn't want somebody to think of me as pushy because that's how I like to buy. So it's thinking about how you like to buy is also quite a critical step, I think, in how you sell. And again, what the potential pitfalls of that might be. Not that there is a right or wrong or that we're trying to be this chameleon as you say. It's just that reflection on what are my preferences, what are my own styles and how might that show up on a demo, and why might that not be the best option for me?
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Yeah, technical founders. This doesn't mean that outbound email doesn't work, or that you can't push back on objections, or that you can't get on sales calls. You have to do all this stuff. I think what Matt and I are talking about is within reason, consider your selling and buying preference as you're putting together a sales motion for sure. Awesome. That is amazing. Thank you so much. For folks who want to check out you and learn more about Linklow, what's the best way?
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yep, so they should go to Linkclow IO and have a look at the products, but they should also check me out on LinkedIn. I'm fairly prolific on there, putting out content fairly regularly and some insights in there as well. So if they're more interested in some of the technical aspects, they can head over there and take a look. But yeah, Linklow IO is the place to go if you want to see how we can help you improve the performance of your LinkedIn ads.
