2467 - The New Lead Generation Strategy Built on Personal Branding with Belkins' Vladyslav Podoliako

0:03Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Vlad Podoliakou. Oh, man, I'm going to start over. Hang on, hang on, hang on. I said it fine the first time. Here we go. Three, two, one. With us right now, it's Vlad Podoliakou. Vlad, you are the founder and CEO of Belkins. You're found on the web at belkins.io. Vlad, it's great to have you. Yes, sir. Hey, Josh. Really, thank you for having me today. Yeah, you're currently based in London right now and excited to talk about the work that you do and who you serve. Before we do, I always love just kind of talking with folks about what they've been into lately.

1:38And you and I were kind of talking about movies and there were a few that come out that have been like, eh, it's kind of mid. But one that came out earlier this year that you and I were just talking about was Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary. Give me your quick review on Hail Mary. Again, I know this came out several months ago, but here's your belated review. What'd you think? So actually I do have the genuine feeling that everything that will be with the Gosling in, and even with the stone eventually, it would be a really great movie because you kind of, where else you can get so much empathy for this kind of story where some guy went to space to kind of save humankind and uh like let's say meeting like alien life in the form of stone and with the kind of interaction was that was the thing uh you kind of feeling a lot of empathy like uh and you just like you know feeling it and just just film with one person all the time on the screen and it's just really you just kind of have a really kind of great like human feeling of kind of what is real, what's kind of like mission of humanity, how, you know, how hard that was for the main character to kind of go to like end of space without his will, very human thing, and get the jobs done, return, and save this like real little thing as well.

3:17And for like two and a half hours, you're just getting only Ryan Gosling on the screen, like mostly. And he just like felt really, really great. I thought Ryan did such a remarkable job. You're right in just conveying his personal humanity over everything and the, you know, kind of the weight that he felt and the position that he, you know, he didn't ask to be in that position, which I thought was just, you know, really set up quite well. You know, the part that I really loved, too, was kind of breaking down communication. So if, you know, and the way that that he and Rocky ended up, you know, beginning to communicate, you know, know, it's something I've, I've thought about, you know, like, you know, if we were to establish contact with, you know, another, another species, you know, how might we learn to understand one another?

4:20And I think that they documented that beautifully of probably how it could go down, you know, as long as we have shared goals and kind of, you know, in a similar level, evolutionarily, you know, between Rocky. It was really interesting how Rocky, they had, their species had evolved in so many different ways, but then they had areas that were complete blind spots that we had figured out. And then of course we had enormous blind spots that they had figured out. I just thought that was so cool. You know, I've been kind of geeking out on like, your dark forest theory and you know yeah the chance of life and you know and other um you know and other systems and so forth so anyway really really good stuff vlad um before we continue hey which microphone are you using an editor i'm going to ask you to chop this part out which which microphone are you using your little echoey for me echoey uh yeah which where's your which microphone are you using that's uh elgato uh can you see it well no no no the do Do you have a physical microphone or is it on your...

5:24That's physical. That's physical. Yeah, where is it? Like here. Like, can you bring it closer to you or is it on the computer or something? Can you hear like that? Oh, that's so much better. Please bring it as close as you possibly can. Oh, of course, of course, of course. Just tell me about it because I usually have like tons of meetings during the day and just like, you know, back and forth moving in it. But now it should be better. So the microphone doesn't move though. Now moved. But you can't move the microphone closer to you. I can't. I just move it. I just move it. Yeah. Move it closer.

5:57Ideally you want a microphone this distance from your mouth. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. You can hear me right now. It's much better. It's much better. Yeah. I'm just suggesting for future podcasts, like just go ahead and start off, like bring it right up to you. So for podcasts, so it sounds warmer. So yeah. Okay. Okay. All right. Let's, let's continue. Okay. Vlad. Well, great, great chatting about a project Hail Mary. Let's talk about the work that you do with Belkin's. Let's do that. What do you do? What do I do? So, yeah, if I put this in a simple way, we're helping our clients to bring more clients for them, for their products, for their services, no matter what they're doing.

6:39So we are in lead generation space for 10 years, between appointment setting, sales tech, more tech, building, creating a lot of different products. But ultimately, we're helping clients to get more clients. All right. So in the world of lead gen, can you give us a little bit of a state of the union? Because obviously, I mean, I've got some strong opinions on bad marketers who have really made a lot of lead gen work worse for people. So where are we now? Obviously, you know, AI is jumping into it. And guess what? Every amateur marketer is now again, abusing a lot of these traditional lead gen channels.

7:24So how do we win in that kind of a world? how's that for a question so what it did not kind of give you something generic like being like personalize everything you use emails your call calls or do ai seo and other things i think you're just creating communities around your brand and especially it takes like when you're building your own product when you're building your own company that's actually really a lot connected to your personal brand as a founder and over like LinkedIn or like Substack or your personal newsletter and this is comes first right now like your personal brand it would be much easier for you to kind of spread the word about whatever you do whatever your value proposition are you just kind of put a lot of efforts to on the first hand to yourself your brand and it will unlock a lot of doors for you like down the road with all those acquisition channels that you probably will read on like how to bring your first clients via email or cold calls or ads or whatever so personal brands is and the communities is the key how you can kind of grow right now everything because there is a lot of ai right now and people kind of really obsessed how you can automate things and to get the best result how you can get like you know what's called fable like is it the money button that you can press and bring all those kind of clients to you eventually no it kind of i hope it will work this way for some people down the road but now it's kind of a lot of different work that you need to adjust to like prompting building creating some that work and it's not just kind of like create me um one million dollar business overnight and you just be like sitting on the money bag like a dragon or something like that You just need to invest your time, your effort, and resources into what you're doing.

9:26And I would really suggest to put this in your personal brand. Yeah. Well, tell me more about what you mean by personal brand. So go ahead and expand on that a little bit, why that's so critical today. If you are building something, you wanted to have people use it, or you wanted to sell this to them or you want to share this with them uh how you would do that ultimately you kind of want to buy some ads to like do some conference or meet some people or like you know go to business launches or send some emails or do some cold calls or word of mouth or like tell your friend about it and now it's kind of really overwhelmed um over the last like i don't know like three five years especially with the ai right now all the communication channels really overwhelmed with like tons of email tons of cold calls i know how you judge but i'm getting like hundreds or 200 emails per day which is like completely bullshit and also when my phone is on um like i'm getting like 200 or 300 cold uh cold cold calls and you just like have a red red phone book and you're just like why are people doing this even though i'm like like you know if you're not pick up for while or no necessarily emails you just need to kind of uh i i i i've got the feeling that you potentially will go off the basis but you just continue to get even more of those emails even more of those cold calls and more of those messages so like as being said all those channels really overwhelmed and overused with a lot of people right now because right now we all time high on product creation company creations a lot of people creating something and just need they need to distribute the things to you so why is personal brand would be the best thing that you can do right now is just the personalities like there is a lot of kind of things that you can attach to your personality to your brand and about building your personality by building your brand building your kind of social networks let's say like LinkedIn and Substack or like as your newsletter personal newsletter or maybe your personal website it potentially would be easier for you if you would be like really bright personality or just sharing with the world what you're building it would be much easier for you to ship something for those people that potential would benefit from what you're doing so I think it just kind of I wouldn't put this is a shortcut, but it is a shortcut for getting down the road other channels to work for you.

12:05Yeah, I love that. Because to me, it feels like you have to be way more, when other lazy marketers and amateur entrepreneurs are up there just flooding the zone with crap, if you legitimately, Here's kind of my take on there's kind of what I'm hearing and how I'm kind of taking the ball and running with it. It's, you know, if you're if you're legitimately good at what you do, your job is to just double down on being more human online and allowing people to making it ridiculously easy for them to build a human to human relationship with you. because there is so much AI slop that's coming in. Like I get, I honestly, like I get podcast pitches from folks.

12:58It looks like they set up their business. They, you know, it's like they had, you know, Claude throw together a website yesterday. They've got no background. There's no humans in it. It's just, you know, cranked out crap. And it's just noise. And so, you know, let them do that stuff. but I like your advice. Like, I feel like all you're right. Like all of your lead gen is going to work so much better. Um, when you make it, um, easier for people to build that virtual proximity with you leads to familiarity bias, no, like, and trust. I feel like I know the real, you know, Vlad, Paul Eliasco and Josh Ellage right now, you know, cause we're hearing these are humans.

13:39These are definitely not, uh, you know, these are definitely not AI bots talking at each other. So, um, Vlad, so now, you know, when you've got that, I don't know if you do a lot of advising around like, why don't you dress this up? Why don't we do this? Why don't we do that? And then what does the actual work look like that you do with your clients? At Belkin's or generally, or personally, you mean? Yeah, you know, with your clients through Belkin's. Yeah, when they're coming to work with you, you know, they say they've got a great brand, then what are they going to do with you? So we actually kind of onboarding them to our technology that we've built over 10 years.

14:19Those technologies will be related to channel that we're choosing for them. One of those like that we were just mentioning about emails, cold calls, ads, AI engine optimization as well, like as a traffic content and offline kind of events, meetups, like whatever. And we're just establishing the tech that we are thinking that would be most beneficial for our clients' value proposition, for their ideal customer profile, and for their total addressable market. And we're onboarding them to our technology. We are onboarding a team who will support them with this technology. And we're bringing them, we call it sales qualified leads that they are then later on close as their client.

15:11So those sales qualified leads is actually pre-qualified with some practices like, I don't know, bond, for example, budget authority, time unit practice. And they are ready to get to the sales call with our clients, sales team. And they ultimately close this deal in getting ROI from working with us. It sounds a bit complicated, but it's easy. Yeah. Well, you've got a website. So it's belkins.io. What would you recommend? So for a friend that's listening right now, maybe they're already researching you. They came across this podcast episode because they wanted to get to know you and find out how much you like.

15:48Great movies, great films. And you have, by the way, I should point out, you do have a podcast. We do have a podcast. The Belkin's podcast. So congratulations on that. You can just do a search for Belkin's podcast and you'll find that in your podcast app. We actually do have really nice guests. There is my partner. He is like shining over this podcast. And he is like speaking to really great people on, you know, from like sales tech and MarTech. There was like CEO of G2, like this like product listing or is like chief revenue officer from Zoom Info. And there is a really, really great people on the podcast.

16:32So really suggest to listen. All available at Belkins.io. what else should people do when they go to belkins.io go to our blog it's really really really good blog with no slop and there's a really huge team that really doing really nice content and actually because of that content we are indexing in uh all those ais right now and getting a lot of ai citations from it and we're actually getting you know 15 20 percent of our travel total traffic from AIs because they are suggesting our content. And it's just really useful. We're just putting everything that we know, how to do that, how you can copy paste it and all those reports, data, whatever we kind of ending up with, you just like take it.

17:19Yeah, you do. You've actually got a lot of data in your blog articles here. LinkedIn response time, outreach statistics on LinkedIn, in, cold email deliverability rates, sales follow-up statistics. This is really helpful, I think, just to, if nothing else, to kind of compare where you are at. Again, if you've got some objective data that might be really valuable, just to make sure that we're not over or under performing and there's an opportunity to improve, I'm sure you can help them with that. Vlad, But if someone is, who do you serve and what should that person do?

18:05You work specifically, you work with B2B companies. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Like primarily with mid-sized companies. And right now we are usually for the last three years pivoted to enterprise companies. But our bread and water for 10 years wasn't like straight in a row working with mid-sized companies. And the main, actually, we're industry agnostic. we're working with B2B companies but the best cases was most unsophisticated ones unsophisticated industries like manufacturing logistics and again old fashioned ones where people have factories and like you know really interesting businesses yeah Vlad Poneliosko again your website belkins.io also don't forget the Belkins podcast we've got that linked up we've got a link to belkins.io Oh, Vlad, it's been a great conversation.

18:56Thank you so much for joining us. Likewise, Josh. Thank you very much.

19:03Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If your goal is to grow your business, increase revenue, and build authority without gimmicks, this show is designed for you. Each episode gives you practical insight from leaders who have turned trust and credibility into real business results. If you value short, thoughtful conversations that respect your time, make sure you're subscribed. We publish daily 15-minute episodes focused on growth that actually compounds. And if you're interested in being a guest or you want to turn podcast appearances into measurable business growth, visit podverified.com.

19:39You can start for free with your Podverified score, along with free podcast guest training and a free media kit builder. These tools are built to help you get booked on better shows, deliver stronger interviews, and convert audience trust into revenue. No more desperate sales. You truly can enjoy all the business you like by generously sharing your wisdom. Everything we offer is built by podcasters for guests with a focus on trust, organic growth, and long-term business success. Thanks again for spending your time with us. I'll see you next time.