How much are CEOs actually worth?, How this CEO pays $300k a year for LinkedIn services, The end of inbound SDRs?, and more

0:00Neil, do you know how much CEOs are actually worth? it depends on the company size, but I think they're worth millions of dollars. Well, I mean, in the case of Snowflake, they're worth billions of dollars to the tune of$15 billion. So Frank Slootman, the technical, we can get a little technical. Yeah, we're going to technical in a bit. So look, Frank Slootman, he was the CEO of ServiceNow, and then he took over as CEO of Snowflake. Amazing guy. I really recommend, if those of you that are entrepreneurs, read the book, Amp It Up. He's like a hardcore CEO. He really helps shape the pace and the culture of a company, right?

0:37And so when he announced his resignation, it wasn't all him, but the market cap of Snowflake dropped about$15 billion. Yeah, but it wasn't that bad because it was bad either way. But if you look at the stock chart, it went down to 175 and then it went back up. It's now 186. So it's slowly climbing back up. And it's only been a few days. In their case, yes, the news hurt their market cap. But keep in mind, when the new CEO comes in, performs over time, the stock price should go back up. And that's a very rare case. That's snowflake. For most people, we don't have$50 billion companies. So press like that isn't going to kill it.

1:22And it's not just the CEO being worth that. It's more so if you get bad press, it can crush you. Look at what happened with Google stock and AI with them only creating images that were non-white for images when the person should have been white. What did Warren Buffett say? So, okay. Oh, no, no. Sorry. Benjamin Grimm said this. Do you remember the quote? No. In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it's a weighing machine. And so this is a short-term thing, right? I do believe Frank Sloopman's worth a lot. I don't think he's worth $15 billion. No, he's not worth$15 billion.

1:54He's worth a lot. Yeah, he's worth a lot. It's very rare that a person is worth $15 billion. There's a lot of amazing CEO candidates out there that you can hire for $20,$30 million a year that do amazing job. Or$50 million, right? I know that's an expensive amount. I'm going to give him$100 million all I care. That's still not $15 billion. Yeah. So, I mean, to the people that are like, oh, CEOs, should a CEO get paid $1 ,000 more than a regular employee? probably if they're driving that value. But it's also, here's a flip side for you. Wamsif Satya, the CEO of Microsoft, was going to take the place of Snowflake.

2:29Do you think they would have went down at all? No. I bet you the stock would have went up. Yeah. Because of what he's done and recency bias, right? It's like he's done so many amazing things in the last couple of years. And the real thing is when Snowflake denounced their new CEO, a lot of people have no clue who this person is. Do you know who it is? Nope. I Googled them too. Do you know anything? Nope, I didn't see anything crazy. Oh, okay. Well, I'm looking at it right now. Yeah, that's also one of the reasons the stock price went down. Because there's uncertainty. Yeah, there's uncertainty.

2:59When there's uncertainty, things drop. But they wouldn't put someone like that as a CEO unless they know they're an amazing performer because they're part of the organization for a bit now. So at the end of the day, yeah, they took a short-term hit. Long-term, they should be fine assuming the company can keep performing. Dude, Snowflake has net negative retention. If they do jack crap and they lose customers, the customers that stay on board pay more money so much so it offsets all their losses plus more each and every single year. In a more AI-driven world, people are going to need more data warehousing, right?

3:28So they're going to be a fine business. Which leads me to my next one over here. Let me tell you this story. So there's a CEO that pays$300 ,000 a year for LinkedIn services. So basically$25 ,000 a month. He pays. Wait, a CEO pays for this? Yes. Is the CEO the founder of a company? Founder of a company. And they do call it$20 million a year or so, right? But still, spending$300K, he only pays these two people at this LinkedIn consultancy. Okay, what do they do? And so for$10K, here's what you get. For$10K... Wait, I'm confused. $300K, which is$25K a month, or$10K? I'm breaking up the costs. So here's a$10K and there's a$15K.

4:06So here's a$10K first. Imagine I'm the consultant. Okay, so Eric's saying the$10K first, and then the$15K separate, but when you combine it, he's paying for both, that's$25K. Yeah. So let's say I'm the consultant. I'm talking to Neil right now. I'm going to serve Neil, right? So for 10K, Neil, what you're going to get is I'm not going to write for you, but I'm going to, I'm going to pull all the stories out of you and your experiences, all the content you have, but you're going to write on LinkedIn. So they're not, they're just coaching you. They're not even writing for you on LinkedIn. I'm like, that sounds a little expensive to me.

4:33I don't think I'd go for that. Okay. Now the second piece is on the 15K. So for 15K, Neil, this one's a little more interesting. My co-founder and I, we're not using any other people. My co-founder and I, we are going to go for that. going to go into your LinkedIn inbox and we're going to book qualified meetings for you based on all the content that you're putting out. The people that are engaging with you, whatever, we're going to put qualified meetings for you. I'm like, okay, how many meetings am I going to get? Well, for 15K, they're estimating anywhere from 40 to 50. So let's assume they booked 40 meetings per month, right?

4:59That's$375 per qualified meeting. And I was talking to one of our mutual friends. He's like, dude, I'll pay$800 per meeting, right? And so in that case, that starts to become more interesting, harder to scale. But the CEO that I talked to that pays at 300 grand a year, he's like, it's been working so far. All right, so let's rephrase. The 10 grand gets you, them just talking to you on the phone, getting stories, and then you have to write content based on the stories you told them, or they'll write the content for you based on your story. First one, you have to do the work still. Because they're just like, we can't replace your voice.

5:31So I'm like, that's expensive for that. That's really expensive for that. And then what's the 15? The 15 is, we're going to book 40 to 50 meetings for you, and we're going to manage your inbox to generate conversations based on whoever engaged with your content. 40 to 50 meetings for sales or press? Sales meetings. Sales meetings. Like demo requests. How long have they done it? It seems like it's been three to six months. And they're happy so far? He's happy. I still think they're getting ripped off on the$10 ,000 a month, the$15 ,000. If you're getting good meetings. Yeah, if you're getting good meetings and you're closing more than what you're spending, who cares?

6:05Do that all day long. Cool. I would actually figure out how to ramp that from 40 to 50 to like$200,$300,$1 ,000. because what's the point of getting 40 to 50, right? If you just want to, how do you get more people to help you do that? But anyway, this message is brought to you by single grain. A single grain is a marketing agency ran by yours. Truly single grain does paid media, SEO, creative conversion rate optimization as worked with a handful of companies, just such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce to startups, venture backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers.

6:39If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's single grain, grain like wheat. And we'll see you on the other side. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Dude, and you also talked about SDRs here. You think it's the end of inbound SDRs now? Yes, I do. Okay, so this is a good post from a guy I'm friends with named Peter. Peter, he runs Databox. Peter Caputo? Caputo? Peter, you can correct me on this.

7:20I'm sorry if I butchered your last name. But okay, so his headline here, this is a LinkedIn post. It says, I think we're seeing the end of inbound sales development, of the inbound sales development role, SDR, as software service companies, SaaS companies. I just don't think buyers want this outreach. As a result, the inbound sales game has permanently changed. And so Adam Robinson, the founder of retention.com, he talked about cutting his sales team, right? He cut a bunch of people. I have another friend, he cut like 60 people down to three or so. We're seeing a lot of this, right? And so he's telling a story over here.

7:53He's like, with my own company, our own experience last year made us painfully aware that there's diminishing return on additional SDR headcount. By the beginning of last year, 2023, we had grown our inbound SDR team to 15 people. With our marketing team generating 5 ,000 signups per month for our free product, our SDR team's job was, is to handle incoming chat and questions, as well as to reach out to new users with an offer to set up dashboards for help to, or help them book a sales call, right? So here's what he said. Last part. There's a lot more than this, but last part. He said, even though the bigger team enabled us to connect and provide more setup assistance to more users, the impact on new sales was not proportional to the increased investment.

8:33At the end of the year, we drastically shrunk the team to three people. Wow. So he pretty much thinks that he can do a lot with AI instead of using humans. I think so. I mean, because the AI is going to be able to see the patterns of all the calls or the chats that went well, and it will tee up the conversations for you. And the AI knows how to rebook the calls too. Again, I think this goes to what are you selling and how complicated of a sell it is. We talked about this on a previous episode, but if you have a really complicated sales cycle and you're pitching custom solutions and you don't have - Yes.

9:05And if you're not going for volume of customers, but each customer spends a lot of money, like in essence, you're going whale hunting. It's hard for the AI to learn because there's not a big sample size for them to, you know, compute and analyze and be like, oh, all right, here's what you need to do in this scenario or that scenario. I'm like, well, everyone is really unique and different. Algorithms change. So you got to adapt with them each and every single time. I still don't see a world where inbound SDRs are fully gone. I do see AI helping or taking over the job for really easy sales. I do think it's still going to be there for complicated sales and for if the AI just can't perform as well.

9:47And here's the example of that. Dude, a lot of software could just be self-service and you can do a demo online and record it. yet a lot of corporations have a book a demo button and they want to have it scheduled with you. Not because they can't just do a recorded demo. They know their close rate is way higher when they get you on the phone. Now you could try to have AI do that and be on the phone and talk to the person. But you know, a lot of times it just converts better if it's a human. And I think what's going to happen in the long run, this is just my take on it. A lot of people are going to be tired of communicating with AI and they're going to want to communicate with humans.

10:24And I believe conversion rates over time will go the opposite way in which you start working with AI. People see big lifts. Everyone's doing it. Customers get tired of dealing with AI. Companies start offering a human touch element. Those companies that offer human touch elements start seeing their conversions go through the roof because they're one of the few that are still using humans. I think it's AI enhanced at the end of the day. So the AI might help you get there, but you have a human in a loop and that's probably the best combination. Same thing we've seen with our blog post right now, right?

10:54And so he ends up with this. He says, look, in fact, I still think it should be possible to engage some of these buyers and that a bit more time and experimentation might have allowed us to figure it out. But I think our results are probably more related to the reality of how people buy software now. Turning more of these users into hand raisers, I think, has become more of a marketing and product UI UX exercise and much less of a sales exercise. I agree with that piece. So imagine you're going to have little chatbots that are maybe guiding you. It's like, oh, you're reading this. What questions do you have around this?

11:20Okay, you're answering questions around like an article or a free resource. Then at a certain point, it's just like, hey, do you want to talk to our team about it? And it's just like sense like when they want to like get on a call. And then like a human jumps in the loop, right? So I think there's going to be a lot of angles to this. And we're in like the first inning right now. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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12:25Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

13:01It was easy to use, and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

13:31Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's Framer.com, promo code MS, Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. So yeah, we're really early on, but you know, time will tell on where it all goes. And Eric and I are on the same page in which AI is great. Most of us guys who are really in it, and we're not in it like the Sam Altman's, but we're in it enough, at least on the marketing end, we see a world where there's AI combined with human will do way better than just a human.

14:07and it'll do better than just AI by itself. It's just like Tyler Perry. He's not having, he didn't create his studio for$800 million because he saw what Sora and other things did. And he's like, wow, this is amazing. Not just hearing about it, but seeing it. And he's like, well, you can create movies with all this kind of technology. You can. But what makes Tyler Perry's magic amazing is the storytelling. It's not the film and the production. There's a lot of people that do that and have been doing amazing job for that for ages. What makes Tyler Perry do really well is great, amazing storytelling.

14:40Dude, today I recorded a lot of my social content and my team created some scripts using chat GPT. And after I was done with the first one, I was like, this content's crap. And I was pissed. And I was just like, and I messaged myself. I'm like, dude, don't send stuff for recording at 4 a.m. I was jet lagged, so I was up at 3. and expect us to record it at 9 a.m. and have 11 scripts in there and no one's had the time to modify them. Right? And he's just like, my bad. He's like, I used Chad Chibb. I'm like, I knew something was off. I'm like, these scripts are just crap. Didn't you tell him to not use Chad Chibb before?

15:20Yes. And he's like, I know, but I needed to whip it out. And I'm like, cool, but I'm not going to post it on my social media. You want me to post stuff, you better give me good stuff. If you can't produce it, let me know. I'll create it myself, but I'm not posting crap. And he's like, you won't post it. I was like, no, I'm not posting it. This is your problem. I wasted my time recording. You wasted your time having ChatGPT crank out the content. It was too wordy. It didn't flow well. It was just crap content. It's too hard, in my opinion, to delegate out taste. And what I mean by that is also, if you have taste, if you think you have taste, your taste is also very unique.

15:52Your taste is different than mine, right? What you think is good is different than what my style would be. And so it's very difficult to hand that off. And we were talking about this yesterday with Greg Eisenberg, who has a nice Twitter following. Everything comes down to taste at the end of the day. That's why I see the LinkedIn agency that charges a 10 grand or so. I see their reasoning because I talked to the guy. I do agree with him. You can't just hand that off. You know what I mean? I agree with that. But at the same time, spending 10 grand for that, dude, anyone on your team or yourself could just think about your story.

16:25That could be impactful. Just go browse LinkedIn or any social platform. You can see what does well and it'll give you ideas of what experiences you've had in the past that could potentially do well. Actually, okay, we can end on this. So if you do the exercise from the story worthy book where you create a story bank and you just have a Google sheet every day where every single day you're adding in the most interesting thing that happened to you and you're just working on that exercise, eventually you're going to have a couple of good stories that you can tell. And then you just have a note and then pull out the best stories that you like.

16:54And it can be things that happened to you or things that happened to you a long time ago or other experiences, right? Alex Coromozi has a good framework for this. I forgot what it was though. Dude, in my tweet today that you retweeted about not being a CEO and how it's the worst job ever, I posted it based on my own experience. I'm not saying it's true or false. I'm just saying based on my own experience. Same thing with the coaching one too. That's your take on it, right? That's okay. Yeah, and a lot of people may not like it, but it's okay. The same goes when you talk about politics. I know a lot of people don't like it, but it's your opinion.

17:25You have your right to your own opinion. Everybody has their own politics. And everyone has their own viewpoints and everyone has their own rights. And whether other people like it or not, you should talk about it because that's the stuff that, funny enough, also gets the most engagement. I was looking for the hormones. I can't find it. You'll get it in the next episode. So go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to apply to hang out with Neil and I in the Agency Owners Association. So we have different groups. There's an online community. There's an in-person one. If you want to grow your agency faster, this is the place to do it.

17:55It's like EO and YPO, but for agencies. And by the way, Neil and I are both in YPO. So we love YPO, but this is different. So go check it out.