2287 - Using AI and LinkedIn to Supercharge B2B Lead Generation with Bill Rice Strategy and Kaleidico's Bill Rice

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0:58With us right now, Bill Rice. Bill, You are the founder of both Kaleidico and Bill Rice Strategy Group. You work as a chief revenue officer. Bill, it's great to have you. Hey, my pleasure. I'm looking forward to talking to your audience. Absolutely. We have the links to your websites in the show notes for a friend that's listening right now. Just click along so you can follow along. Hey, but Bill, before we talk about the work that you do, which I'm eager to chat about, just personally, outside of work, what have you been into lately? Like geeking out on, I don't know if you're watching anything or hobbies, anything like that.

1:36Yeah, yeah. So the obvious sort of work-related adjacent thing is just everything that's happening around AI and vibe coding and that sort of thing reignited some of my coding lack of acumen over the last few years. But the things that are kind of like really passionate outside of work recently, when I was young, I was one that was always doodling and sketching and getting in trouble for it back then. And so I've kind of reignited an interest in watercolors, believe it or not. It's one of the few things where I can, I like to travel a lot. So I can kind of have a sketchbook with me as I travel, sit down.

2:16You're forced to not be on a device. You can't be like, I don't know, it's just like the most kind of disconnecting thing. And then sort of adjacent and alongside of that, a thing that I did a lot when I was younger, again, sort of reigniting as I get a little bit more time to do things, is backpacking and sort of getting out into the wilderness. So I think as I kind of got reinvigorated and excited about all this AI stuff, there was kind of like this compelling need to sort of balance that with something that was like completely disconnected and based in reality. So those are kind of the two probably most passionate things that I'm doing right now.

2:54What does someone need to do to get into watercolor? Yeah, it's kind of an interesting medium. So sketching is super easy. You just take a pencil and paper and that sort of thing. But kind of to bring it to life, you got to figure out some sort of color medium. And I played around with, you know, alcoholic markers, which just made a horrible mess because you can't kind of blend anything. Acrylics are kind of is another kind of popular one, but it's, you know, takes a lot of work and prep. And watercolors, I just kind of love the basics of it. You know, anybody can do it. A little bit of water, you know, a little paint pan that costs you less than a couple bucks and a brush.

3:33and you just kind of, you know, color in. And it does as you go further into it and you sort of nerd out on it. It takes a lot of effort to get good. But to splash some paint on the paper and make it look kind of interesting is relatively easy and doesn't require a lot of like tools and things to carry around, if you will. Do you begin with like, how do you know what to create? Do you begin with the idea of what you're going to paint and then just, sorry, I don't mean to ask too many questions, about this. Yeah, no, it's kind of interesting. So one thing I'm not, I am not a creative by design, which is probably why I've been successful in creating some of the businesses that I have.

4:15I'm more business minded, more sales, marketing, that kind of thing. And marketing in a non-creative way, more analytic performance has always been my thing. And so I don't have the ability to just kind of envision something out of my brain and just like, I have to have a reference. So that's why it kind of blends nicely with travel. So I usually like, you know, see something kind of frame it up like a, you know, photograph, and then roughly sketch it out. And then sort of apply, you know, the color to it, which is its own little thing, but I always have to have a reference. So I think if you're going to get into it, the starting point is just like, you know, find little, you know, silly things on your desk to, you know, to sketch to give you some sense of like observation.

5:00So the key skills to it, if you really want to geek out on this, is improving your ability to observe something. A lot of times when we sketch, we bring out of our brain, you're going to sketch a house, you bring out the square with the triangle on top of it. But if you actually observe the house, it's a lot different. So it improves your observation. And then patience, particularly with watercolors, the magic to getting watercolors to really work is being patient to apply a layer, then let it dry and apply another layer. And so patience is another piece of that. But observation and patience are probably the two key components to really starting to get good at it.

5:41I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. I'm inspired. So Bill, let's talk about the work you do in B2B. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, from a B2B perspective, I love this space because I, in particular, we usually focus on fintech, but there's been a variety of different folks over the years that I've helped. But one of the things that I love about it is in fintech, there's always sort of an emerging space. And just by definition, when you're selling to businesses, you're often trying to convince the business that one, you're credible in what you do and your opinion should be kind of, you know, listened to.

6:23But the other thing is you're trying to convince them in almost every case to do something different, to do it in a different way, a better way, a more efficient way. And for me, that's kind of a chess game and a logical, again, I'm not a creative person. That's a logical conversation and discussion that's fun to have, whether we're creating marketing material to support inbound lead generation or thought leadership, or just having a sales conversation directly with decision makers. Yeah. Well, so I know you have a few brands or ways that you work. Obviously, one of them is FinTech. But do you mind just kind of giving us an overview?

7:07You're working with mortgage lenders, law firms, senior living. And I know some of this is not necessarily B2B. to be. But actually, before we get into all of those use cases, would you give us just a bit of the city union for higher level lead gen, particularly for those, maybe their agencies, they're dealing with, you know, five figure on up engagements. What is their world like right now in lead gen? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, lead gen is, and that's kind of been the cornerstone of all my fascination over the last, you know, 20 to 30 years. But I think what is kind of the most interesting is it in every business, it always seems to be the most challenging part of the business, because most businesses are built out of some creative idea.

8:01And it's not built out of kind of a solid understanding of the market and, and kind of how to draw people in, you know, or to convey that. So I think right now in lead generation, a lot of lead generation had moved to the web over the last 20 years. And so this concept of Google ads, Facebook ads, outbound outreach with email specifically, now we're, you know, entering into sort of social media outbound. There's a lot of success with, particularly in B2B with LinkedIn, outbound outreach or marrying that up with email. And so that's brought in another skill. LinkedIn itself has kind of, and again, I'm talking in the context of B2B, has tilted into content marketing in a way that was not seen before.

8:53I used to call LinkedIn a ghost town for resumes, but that has essentially changed as they've embraced content. So that gives us more accessibility to use that platform to create inbound inquiries and to have a more accessible way to get thought leadership. You know, back before sort of LinkedIn started to embrace content management in order to for a B2B company or a young founder to get into the thought leadership space into the mind of their customers and be observable. You had to, you know, ink a deal with Forbes or Inc or Fast Company or again, talking a little bit more in fintech, but you had to somehow get yourself inserted, or build a partnership in a really sort of competitive industrial publication or space.

9:48And now LinkedIn gives you, you know, direct, we always call in the B2C space, direct to consumer, but direct to business opportunity to kind of do that. So that's, that's probably the big thing. And then of course, again, AI is a little bit of a rabbit hole right now that you can go down. But, you know, some of those techniques are actually getting us into the large language models, the chat GPTs, the CLODs, and those sorts of things. And I think for B2B, we're always dealing with more complex questions and problems. And so people increasingly are going there to have an initial, you know, initial discussion.

10:29So. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And, and I just saw something, I forget what the actual amplification or the kind of the value is, but a referral from AI. So an AI driven referral versus SEO driven referral. The AI driven referral is incredibly more valuable. Yeah. Because, you know, AI said, Hey, listen, I know everything about you based on this conversation and i'm telling you this is probably what you're going to want to check out as opposed to seo who knows who you know i could just be someone who was fortunate uh you know in in gaming the seo system right so you know even though it might make logical sense and you know oftentimes with their ai we can go back and forth you're like yeah but these are my use cases and this is exactly what my knee are um so you know i i think the good news you know is for people that, you know, service providers that are tried and true, have a great reputation, you know, they've quietly done the work.

11:33And I think they've, I don't say not quietly because they've documented it. It's out there for all to see. What are best practices? I see that one of your efforts has to do with LLM visibility. Any idea on, and you'd mentioned LinkedIn as well, But if you were someone that wanted to look good in the eyes of AI search for, we'll just call it that, what kinds of things would you focus on? Yeah, absolutely. And this is, again, you know, Google for the longest time search has been a little bit of a black box. And over time, we figured out all these sort of best practices based on a bunch of testing.

12:12I would say that LLMs are in the earliest stage of that. So everything that I'm telling you is just kind of personal observation of what's working, not necessarily that anybody sort of opened up the black box and can tell you for sure. So I would say a couple of foundational principles that are important. One is just creating as much surface area as you can for the LLMs to learn about you. So, you know, being in LinkedIn, publishing in LinkedIn, it's going to see that. But one thing that small businesses in particular have been sort of reticent, they've been so reliant on Google My Business for so long because that was kind of the only way to get in there.

12:49And their websites often didn't rank because it was so competitive. The resurgence of the website and the blog is really important for small businesses because that stuff is now getting picked up in the LLMs. And then the other thing is, and this is much like SEO, but trying to be as focused as you can with your content so that you're not confusing the LLM as to who you are and what you do. So those are kind of probably the three biggest principles. I love it. I love it. So, Bill, who do you work with and what outcomes do you create? Yeah, I mean, as far as, you know, who do we work with on the B2C side, we're not going to talk quite as much about that.

13:35Mortgage lenders, law firms, and senior living communities, they have very similar problem sets when trying to create inbound because they often don't have sort of sophisticated marketing departments. And a lot of times they're either buying leads or they're in one way or another outsourcing. And so we pop in there and allow them to have a turnkey marketing department so that we can generate what we call first party leads. So we can generate leads underneath their own brand. On the B2B side, what we do is a little bit that is a little bit unique is, you know, the traditional B2B marketing agency is just doing like massive, scalable, outbound email outreach, right?

14:17And what we try to do is we like to get the founders and the key executives increasing their surface area in social media. So we're trying to get them to post in LinkedIn, and we're going to help them and support them to create that rhythm. And now with AI, we can aid them with their voice and doing more and even doing research and putting things in front of them so they can look at it and say, yeah, I want to get in that conversation. And then we help them create that content. So that's a big part of it. Because there's a resurgence of the website, we're trying to get, again, those executives in a more visible way, building content.

14:57And then, of course, email outreach is still a thing. But once we've gotten that executive level out there and exposed, again, doing podcasts, doing videos, getting on LinkedIn, getting them over that sort of natural proclivity that once they become an executive, they retreat to the corner office and disappear off the Internet. at. We're trying to get them back on there because then when we do that more traditional B2B outreach with email and sales, it's so much easier because those executives that we're trying to break through and get to have heard of our brand and have heard of our executives and they've heard of it in the context of more sort of nuanced opinion and thought leadership.

15:42And so that's kind of our framework for B2B. Nice, nice. Bill, your websites, your friend that's listening, where they go from here if they've enjoyed this conversation and kind of figure out, you know, working with you in some way or, you know, diving. I know also if you could maybe share resources that you make available just for people to get to know you before a conversation, where they would go from here. Yeah. I mean, if you just want to learn about me and all the things that I'm working on and what I'm focused on. Billrice.com is a simple way to engage me. BillriceStrategy.com is the best way, you know, if you want to work together to get a hold of me.

16:22And then probably the most valuable resource because it's a weekly resource that I push out. Everything that I'm looking at, all the trends, all the things where I think the puck is sort of headed. And that's MyExecutiveBrief.com. And I built that newsletter for me, actually, to help my team. I wanted to have a chief of staff that would bring me all the latest and greatest and boil it down so that I could consume it. And I sort of built that as a newsletter. So myexecutivebrief.com is probably the best resource. You're going to get videos in there. You're going to get my latest playbooks. So there's a lot of resources there to just help you stay ahead of the trend.

17:03I like that. Oh, you built it on Substack. We'll have to talk later. Yeah. Everyone's moving to Substack, man. I love it. I love it. Yeah. It's just so easy. It's so accessible. Sort of self-promotes. The community is growing inside of that. So you can get some of that community action as well. But yeah, it's a great platform. I love it. Again, Bill Rice, your websites are many. There's BillRice.com, MyExecutiveBrief.com, BillRiceStrategy.com, and Kaleidico.com. I think I got a few of them. Yeah, exactly. Just start with BillRice.com. It's got links to all those other things. So I've kind of started to make a hub there.

17:42I love it. Bill, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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