In this episode, Brian Mattocks and Sean Boyce dive into the vital role of precise outreach within the sales process, with a special focus on leveraging LinkedIn. They explore the unexpected drawbacks that can arise from poorly executed hunting campaigns and underscore the importance of selecting the most suitable communication channels. Moreover, the host stresses the significance of providing valuable content, like blog articles or podcasts, rather than jumping straight into sales pitches. They also shine a spotlight on the effectiveness of personalized and hybrid strategies as a way to distinguish oneself and attain superior sales outcomes.

Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services. 

To solve this, Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.

Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:

• The ineffective and spammy nature of most LinkedIn cold outreach messages
• The shift towards capitalistic behaviors in social media platforms as they prioritize monetization over community engagement
• The allure of hunting for new business opportunities, but the importance of investing in consistent and morally ethical processes
• Offering something of value generates a stronger response from potential customers.
• A hybrid approach that aligns with your interests and strengths can be effective.
• Generic sales messages are often ignored.
• Consistency and testing are necessary to find the right approach.

Resources:

• NxtStep Consulting
• Podcast Chef

Connect with Sean Boyce:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:

• LinkedIn
• Email

Quotables:

• 06:22 - “If you're spamming hundreds or thousands of messages a day and you're getting like random chance basically consistency back, you know what you're doing really isn't worth it. That's not what you want, is you want a process, you want a process that can produce predictable results. But at the same time, you also shouldn't be doing anything that makes you feel like dirty or gross. Like you really just shouldn't be investing in things that are trying to take advantage of people or being slimy. Really, anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, you really shouldn't be investing in those things.”
• 10:22 - “Farming, farming sounds attractive, but I think people struggle with how do I even get started with that? Or they haven't seen them a lot of good examples of it, and it doesn't promise immediate results. So it's, it's just, it can be more difficult for folks to get started with. And for those folks, I would say there's a hybrid approach here you may not have considered that I think is worth experimenting with. Realistically, that's what I was doing when I was looking for a better solution to the spray and pray model.”
• 09:26 - “But, the next thing that I want to talk about too is as you start to get in a good sort of honed in understanding of your target market, one of the things that you realize too is that not all channels, not all approaches are appropriate, right? There are tons of situations where that LinkedIn kind of approach, if you're already on LinkedIn, it might make sense as that's a place to sell LinkedIn advertising, for example, or sell something similar. But if your target market's not congregating there, if they're not doing anything on LinkedIn, you're not gonna, whatever, however successful or unsuccessful a campaign may be the right tool in the wrong place or the wrong time is never going to work.”
• 02:46 - “I was reading a Cory Doctorow article on this. It's, they call it, he calls it the “enshittification” of social media, basically where something starts, it's got this really great, like fa you know, fan base. People are active, engaged. It's honest in its own way. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but it's honest. And as the corporate machine tries to turn that whatever that magic is into money, it inherently defaults to the capitalistic behaviors that make being in that environment awful. You see it with Facebook, you see it with Reddit, you see it with all of these social media platforms where they're like, oh well we also need to take money. And they do that at the expense of the community that kind of built the environment.”
• 12:28 - Sean: “You love writing, do that, you love podcasting, do that, whatever it is, like just try to stand out from the crowd because I can't tell you how many messages I get on LinkedIn these days. It's like five to 10 probably per day for people deliberately just trying to sell me specifically lead gen, whatever. And I ignore all of it.”
  Brian: “Yeah, I think that gets back to the way we kind of have a magic bullet approach socially to a lot of stuff where it's like there is a single solution, and it is, you know, you can buy your way out of the problem. And there is, you know, and every marketer that hears this right now is, is going, yes, you're exactly right. There is no magic bullet solution to not knowing who you're selling to. There is no magic bullet solution to not knowing the value your solution offers.”

Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:

• LinkedIn
• Email
• Schedule a Free Podcast Consult