How Being “Funny” Became a Business Strategy: Henry Hayes

0:00We Have A Meeting Hosts:If you're a founder, you're an entrepreneur, or you're a B2B marketer, you aren't in charge of your brand, the consumer is. I've managed to sort out a way in which I feel like my work is played. I believe that all marketers need to be good salespeople. What then starts to happen is the linked influencers of the world. You're Andrew Tindall's, not your Sutherland's yet, he's probably too busy vaping.

0:26Henry, welcome to the podcast.

0:28We Have A Meeting Hosts:Hello, gents. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, great. All good.

0:32Henry Hayes:So we're going to kick off with a big question. Who are you and what problem do you solve?

0:37We Have A Meeting Hosts:There we are. Getting to the final point straight away. I'm Henry Hayes. I'm 31 years old now. I got married three months ago. There we are. Ring of the finger. Boom. I've got a dog, a golden retriever called Ronnie. He's a bit of a barky so-and-so, but we're getting there. Haven't got kids yet, like you two, four and two. That's something on the way. um and what do i solve essentially what i'm trying to solve is i'm trying to make the world of marketing a lot funnier i think that marketers it's a very serious game marketing and often i i think you know people like to think marketers like to think that they're the most important people on the planet i'm here to prove that it's just a job and that's what we do and you can be brilliant at it but you know just because you get up and go for i don't know a can line doesn't mean that you're solving, you know, poverty, hunger, stuff like that.

1:28We Have A Meeting Hosts:Okay. So that's kind of what I'm solving is trying to become the world's, that's my mission statement, trying to become the world's number one comedy marketer, I suppose.

1:36Henry Hayes:Okay. So we've got you on that side of like what good is and what good can be.

1:40We Have A Meeting Hosts:Yeah.

1:41Henry Hayes:What is crap?

1:43We Have A Meeting Hosts:It's a very good point. I think it's a weird one really because the world of B2B marketing or the world of marketing in general, EGC marketing and stuff like that, employee generator content. beautiful just thought i'd put that another marketing acronym rule number one be a hypocrite um so um like we are so far behind of what is happening in a d2c world and yet all of us at the end of our day we're scrolling or we're seeing stuff outside we're going out we're having pints with our mates we're having a laugh and yet we're not really transitioning that into our nine to five and that's what i've found very odd coming into especially the b2b marketing world i was in consumer marketing for years i co-founded a business um that somehow still in existence don't ask me how and it was like a food and drink app but we had to do some quite cool and engaging stuff to get loads of active users on the app right similarly i was in the electric bike space um which like really took off during covid everyone wanted a bike um subsequently went down a bit um but you know we had to do some really cool stuff and so i was doing loads of youtube stuff there and learning about the algorithms there and trying to engage audiences and you go into the the b2b marketing world or b2b to see whatever you want to call it and you just don't see any of that there so i think i kind of i just wanted to see if that landed and if people during nine to five when they're having their coffees which let's be honest everyone's got their linkedin tab open throughout the day if you haven't you're just lying okay or you're ugly um okay and it's true um and so i just thought let's apply that to that

3:23Henry Hayes:first up okay i would imagine that funny henry existed long before marketing henry where did the two first kind of coincide nice um thanks

3:39We Have A Meeting Hosts:you know what i so yeah i i did acting at school i really liked it i went to uni i got pissed up playing cricket for three years snake bite um hilariously on a wednesday night the chuckle brothers used to be the dj genuinely and when one of the chuckle brothers died we all went back to the su at warwick um and you know pulled a little one for him but after after that i didn't do any sort of comedy right I was very entertaining outside of work I think my mates kind of kind of a performing monkey I used to get my kit off and stuff in at parties and but I wasn't that happy I really want to make that clear I kind of by the time I was 28 I was really I was really partying very hard and like using the weekend as a form of escapism I didn't believe that what I was doing was was fulfilling even though I was in a marketing role I didn't think it was fulfilling at all and And so my wife and my best mates just said, look, mate, we think you're funny, which is really nice to hear.

4:37We Have A Meeting Hosts:But you're not really showing that you're not really aligning what your true skill set may be with work. And so it was I was basically on the phone to a recruiter trying to get a new job, despite the lads that fully charged the e-bike business being great. And then that was when I went, you know what, I'm just going to give comedy a go and social media is free. I don't have the time to do stand-up because people know the stand-up world. You've got to be in a pub for two hours for your five minutes. And kind of fortunately, it just landed from that moment. I had a real issue with green screens or people just at home, just filming stuff that you were seeing on TikTok, that like no production value went into it and had a real problem with that.

5:18We Have A Meeting Hosts:So I went, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go into the wild, go into like actual natural environments and put my observational lens on it. and it just it just started working and then inside of two months my my boss found me on on instagram and tiktok generally i know my now boss raffi from passion fruit co-founder of passion fruit and he just said um it was bizarre he basically said um you know how you do these end-to-end tiktoks i was like what do you mean end-to-end like write the theme tune sing the to he said yeah and then you edit it and I was like yeah I suppose I do he said can you run events and I was like I don't know but this is the way that this guy thinks he's an incredible like linear thinker and just you know I really look up to him and uh I gave it a go so that's kind of where it started and I didn't really do any comedy in the in the business world for the first year I just sort of nailed that brief of doing events but I got to interview the likes of top jaw, Emily English, the rugby pod guys, Will Buxton from Drive to Survive, some really Bradley Zero, who's sort of, you know, founding member of Boiler Room and stuff like that.

6:26We Have A Meeting Hosts:And got to get some really cool CMOs, marketing directors, heads of marketing to those events, and then built my kind of following a bit, not much. And then I thought, right, time to attack in December. And the last reason, last thing I'd say before that is my boss came to me in my december review last year and said look i'm going to be honest with you mate i don't think you're going to be as smart as the cmo of hubspot i went brilliant thank you and he went but i think you could be funnier than him or her and i went yeah maybe maybe i agree with that to be honest um let's hope uh and so um and so he went go out there and make really good comedy to build build brand awareness for for passion fruit on linkedin so that's that's it really zach thompson do you ever

7:11Henry Hayes:get sick of calling kebab houses and nanas when you're trying to speak to qualified decision makers i do well i think i might have found the solution 98 correct qualified data which means when you're cold calling you're always going to be speaking to the right person do you know what the solution is it can't be prospio can it prospio let me spell it for you p-r-o-s-p-e-o dot i-o If you're looking for great qualified data, then you know what the solution is. Prospio.io. So all that started with that search for fulfillment.

7:48We Have A Meeting Hosts:Yeah, exactly.

7:49Henry Hayes:How's that going?

7:50We Have A Meeting Hosts:Awesome. Like, you know, I'm... I said awesome. Like, I'm sort of one life. Awesome, right, I'm out of there. That's done, podcast done. That's your lot. Clip that. 30 seconds, bang, he's out. um no i i say awesome because where i was two years ago from now is a very very dark place you know i was really struggling and you know i i got a lot of opportunities growing up as a kid and so to be not nailing that you really felt i just felt a massive sense of disappointment to me and felt like i was letting people down and then you know it's silly everyone talks about these on podcasts but like the aggregation of marginal gains right i just got up in the morning i started doing exercise i started writing i now write right white i'm jonathan rossall all of a sudden i write um i write religiously every day for 30 minutes in the morning now i've just like blueprinted that into everything i do and i'm a much better bloke for it it's it's less about the fact that maybe the comedy at the moment may be landing some stuff doesn't it's more it's more about the fact that it just makes me feel happy like just off camera we were talking about um a video that i've just released snatch um for 2025 guy richie snatch but it's about matcher and that took me about a month for two minutes to put together but i enjoyed every moment of it i like religiously watched the film i wrote everything condensed it down to two minutes made it relevant for 2025 then did the low then did the day shoot 12 hours four locations then have just literally released it today and i don't know the whole process of that even before knowing what it's going to be like just make makes me feel good about myself i suppose so yeah very fulfilled at

9:29Henry Hayes:the moment you strike me as someone that's very confident and like you've got this evidence of like yeah i've been the funny guy so there'll be people watching this that are thinking about maybe like creating content whether it be for linkedin from a marketing standpoint or maybe just as like i just want to go on tiktok i want to do instagram whatever i want to do that there is obviously that fear of like what are my friends going to think what are strangers on the internet going to think I imagine it's probably not always been like clean sailing from everybody loves everything you do. I'm sure there's been lots of hateful comments at times.

10:04Henry Hayes:What can you tell us about like overcoming the adversity there?

10:08We Have A Meeting Hosts:Yeah, I'd say, you know, the great news about what's happening in the content world nowadays is it's almost becoming. um oh what's the word like it's almost becoming sort of second nature for people to push themselves out there now and and actually what i'd say is you should always play to your strengths right so for me it's um kind of i'd say body language performance being quite like facially red mostly um to be honest but that kind of works for me but but you know thought leadership or stuff like that doesn't have to be entertaining it can be educational as well but playing to your strengths I think is number one, the thing that kind of that overrides your, that kind of makes you overcome like your initial doubts.

10:59We Have A Meeting Hosts:Because ultimately, if you're just comfortable in knowing that that is your skill set, number one, then that's fine. In terms of your mates, you know, all I'd say here is just compound. So don't just do this for a month. You may get a comment here and there from a mate. You may get your mates on your WhatsApp groups, your Monday night football club or whatever, having a piss. Just don't stop is what I'd say. I think for anyone that's looking to do this, really give it a good go for six months. Now, that's not posting five times a week on LinkedIn. That's not posting three times a week on TikTok like everyone tells you to do.

11:31We Have A Meeting Hosts:Just post something that you believe is really good once a week, maybe once every fortnight on an Instagram, on a TikTok. And be happy with what you've done. because I can guarantee you that in the next six months, that's going to compound. Adam Robertson, our head of commercial at Passion Fruit, is one of many tech sales bros out there. Two many of them, to be honest. They were just downing isotonic drinks and electrolytes, to be honest. But he was only posting once a fortnight, and then he really started to double down on what does he actually want to try and achieve on LinkedIn. And it wasn't like trying to sell into businesses because he's way too salesy.

12:05We Have A Meeting Hosts:I say it to his face. It's mental. It's like James Smith. He can't go at it, okay? but he's really good at getting talent into the company because young SDRs are there going, God, this content is really good because he's talking about the processes that he's going through with the client leads, with the SDRs. And so we've managed to find like this really good hack of finding really good talent and passion through from that. And my last point on that would be the trolls. I remember I didn't really used to get any trolls. And then I did a video about Margate um you know you now live in Margate and it was basically a guy who used to be on the marching powder and now he's on the haddock chowder um and uh if we could say that um and uh he he's yeah kind of like a rock star kind of basically Pete Doherty right and um and some guy put in the comments it's got it's done really well like the video's done really well it got like a million views which is mad and about 20 000 likes which is just really really good for me but a guy put in the comments he said ah here comes gammon head with his outrageous brand of wank comedy again and it got quite a few likes so i came back i came back saying don't worry mate i got called gammon head at school too it's all right and then loads of people like me were like yeah like in that but i just think it's part of it you know you just got to be comfortable with the fact that if you're going to put yourself out there you're going to have some people that don't like it and now i'm quite resilient to it to be fair nice so let's talk about am i allowed to

13:36Henry Hayes:swear you fucking swear as much as you want fine um my dad you're not sorry i'm really sorry so let's talk about linkedin yeah you post some brilliant sketches on linkedin and they do great numbers compared to what what linkedin's known for i guess people at home might be thinking how does you being funny and recreating fucking jane austen on linkedin equate to money in raffi's

14:08We Have A Meeting Hosts:pocket um it is 100 a tactic and not just like um a sort of tone that you should put out the results are quite phenomenal if i'm being honest and if you told me nine months ago when i was started doing this that these would be the type of results i would have genuinely bitten your hand off literally it's it's it's really great to see and i think for context what it what it kind of does and we can distill it down into the numbers more um in a few minutes but to that point of people want to see entertaining or educational or value-driven content right like we're quite lucky because our tam our total addressable market again marketing acronym um is the whole of marketing really so but i say the whole marketing it's it's cmos heads of marketing marketing directors vps of marketing at series a and above scale-ups mid-market enterprise and enterprise so it's it's quite a big adjustable market but um but all i realized is basically if i can put a culturally relevant topic and or something that so culturally relevant topic could be anything from like a brand workers purpose um brand purpose workshop it could be the bear that's just been released um season four or upcoming the wicked two musical okay now that is like a really visual thing right like me and in the green which thing doing something if you do something that's culturally relevant like pride and prejudice and you apply marketing keywords or marketing jargon to it because you know linkedin and this is the thing all of us here pretty much know linkedin we understand it and we understand the jargon in the words what my wedding taught me about b2b sales all this type of stuff so you don't need to look far for your creative inspo you just need to scroll down the feed and you can see the type of words jargons that people are saying you just apply that to a sketch or to you know whether it's 916 or 69 or whatever landscape and what then starts to happen is number one the linked influences of the world your andrew tindall's you know not your Sutherlands yet he's probably too busy vaping but you know okay your Mark Ritsons your Sophie Millers you know some people have a lot of clout they start liking it because they're always on LinkedIn what that then does is it goes out sorry Rory never met you want to um you then go out uh it goes out to a wider audience and then all of a sudden you're hitting the exact type of people that you're trying to do business with and what I started to do because we're a scale up and we're not we can't just sit down and wait a year and a half for an income inbound leads come in i basically connected i would literally trawl through the people who liked it and it could be 100 likes to start with 200 likes you get the occasional one like pride and prejudice 2000 trawl to everyone who was icp ideal customer profile um again and and you trawl through that and you you like everyone you connect with everyone and you get 70 we we get 75 connects of me liking or connecting with a person who's just like my content we do inside of two days and then i send a personal video to that person via linkedin dm and that's where we then get meetings books for client leads and it's from there that we have a 38 success rate on getting that person an mql an mql for us is quite distinct so marketing qualified lead is quite distinct okay That is anyone, a key decision maker who wants to use Passion Fruit inside of the next three months.

17:42We Have A Meeting Hosts:So they have a freelance marketing requirement inside of the next three months. It's not just like, oh, we got them an email from an inbound sign-up form. And from there, we get a 38 % chance of getting them to MQL. And from there, we typically get a customer for every 30 % of MQLs. So already, something like a Pride and Prejudice that's brought in seven MQLs, it's actually already brought in two customers from what we've done and our um our deal sizes are averaging at like five and a half grand so and that costs 687 quid to put together exactly

18:16Henry Hayes:that video that follow-up video that you send what what is that yeah yeah so that follow-up

18:22We Have A Meeting Hosts:video is is i could show you um it's me literally in the office or at home my wife generally has earplugs now because it's like the same sort of thing i literally go hi um hi linda linda marketing term don't know why um you know thanks so much for liking my um pride and prejudice post um xyz look i'm going to be straight with you i wouldn't just get in touch with you for the hell of it i really do think that we can help here at passion fruit here's how we already work with chat gpt's got custom gpt in there of comparable businesses we work with 180 they're just like that business x y and z and helping them scale at speed via highly vetted freelance marketers okay and then i say they they work in all of these different areas for you are you just open for a 2025 minute call it'd be fab for me to loop you with one of our team members just so you can find out a bit more about what we do that's it and i do that a lot so the creative side is fab uh but i spend five percent of my time doing it i spend a lot of time doing that off the back of it because there's no point bloody putting this stuff out as a scale-up unless you're going to like mine the leads off it.

19:26We Have A Meeting Hosts:Now, if I was in an enterprise business, I could sit back and relax and do chaffle with a cigar, okay? But I can't, I'm in scale-up land. So, yeah.

19:34Henry Hayes:What's the, that's a lot of work, right, to do that in terms of the follow-up. Why would you do that over just messaging someone in written form? I'm sure you're equally funny in writing.

19:44We Have A Meeting Hosts:I just think it's a nice touch, you know? So if they've seen me visually on a video and they've liked it or they've engaged with it, to then see me personally sending them a message. And I think, you know, with Passion Fruit, despite the tan being really big, you know, these are big people, I suppose. People who take themselves quite seriously, rightly so. They've got quite big jobs. And so I just believe that going that extra mile, they've got thousands of SDRs, like messaging them every day or thousands of agencies who are trying to get in touch with them. and just doing, let's face it, ordinarily boring copy or better, a voice note.

20:22We Have A Meeting Hosts:But translating, seeing me in that sketch format to a personal video, they're always going to open it. And then, as I said, I always get reply back. I like, never don't, really. And even if I haven't, after two weeks, I've double checked and gone back in and then sent them a note. Oh, I just want to check on the above. So, yeah. Yeah.

20:44Henry Hayes:So then let's talk about, so obviously LinkedIn's one platform and then TikTok and Instagram. And they, they're resonating. Linda's not watching your Instagram. That is Barry from Marget and he's calling you nasty names. How does that then generate into, to business?

21:01We Have A Meeting Hosts:Yeah. Um, so, um, more so than you would think. I think that there's, I mean, they talk about the flywheel now, don't they, marketing? I mean, what's that about? Do you know what I mean? The flywheel. used to be the funnel now it's the firewall shut up give it a rest ritson come on mate you know the flywheel but there is there is a content flywheel out there i believe and i think it's i think it adds a lot for me to be on instagram and tiktok showing that i'm culturally relevant from a consumer landscape so actually whether i'm just down the road here i did a um uh soho fashion kid video where i interviewed loads of 16 year old kids with their parents consent and i basically mugged them off okay because you know how they're all wearing the silly stuff and oh that's cold brev you know oh it's cold man you know and you're like what are you wearing it's like hold tight the burkeys so you do that and you realize that actually cmos marketing directors of of the fashion world are actually watching that and then that goes and then they're also on linkedin so i realized that actually god i'm actually on instagram and tiktok for business purposes for LinkedIn more than I am now for, I don't know, trying to get a brand deal out of something.

22:17We Have A Meeting Hosts:I've never taken a brand deal on Instagram and TikTok ever. I was about to get a smudge smudgies, you know, the budgie smugglers. Oh yeah, yeah. About to do that. But I didn't. My wife was like, no way. Not with the size of that pack. 16 stone behind it though. So that's all that matters. But anyway, let's cut that. let's not have that in um but anyway or you could why not but um so i i basically realized that very quickly that was um a really good way of getting good leads into passion fruit and so we do events at passion fruit they're run by eleanor um it's remarkable really she's like 23 or 24 and then we do 22 events a quarter we do seven in the u.s 60 of our revenue comes from the US.

23:05We Have A Meeting Hosts:So we do quite a few there. And then we do a lot in the UK. And actually quite a lot of people that come to the events have recognized me from Instagram and TikTok as well, because of the areas of London that I do. So I'm very particular about the type of stuff I put on, on Instagram, because, you know, and, and in districts or neighborhoods are very tribal. And so I kind of know that if big marketing director lives in Notting Hill, or whatever, and I do a video on notting hill they could be a chance for them to see it because everyone sends it on their whatsapp groups and so that then with linkedin things and stuff they then make the parallels our books are

23:41Henry Hayes:now open if you are sat there wondering where your next sale is going to come from wondering why your pipeline isn't full of meetings with qualified decision makers look no further because the we have a meeting team has got you covered just go to www.wehaveameeting.com speaking of books if you are looking to get better at sales communication and making more money our book sales is therapy is available on amazon now nice so then let's talk about my penis so let's talk about so you were saying earlier that obviously you you co-founded a company yeah you have to be more creative so when you're in scale mode i think people listening to this are entrepreneurs founders and they're thinking i'm not as funny as that guy but but maybe i'm as creative how how do you get people to think outside the box when it

24:48We Have A Meeting Hosts:comes to scaling up um that's a very good question thank you i think um number one this is kind of it may or may not help people i think it will it's like you basically got to to give yourself more shots on goal okay so um what i'd say from that from being creative from creative standpoint there's actually quite a big structure to it so i know that people talk about pillars but if you're if you're trying to be creative from a content perspective you're a young founder young entrepreneur set yourself four pillars that you want to talk about okay and um i actually use a company as example they're called love juice and they are in the um like alcoholic drink space and what i do is basically have four four pillars it could be like personal brand stuff which actually is really good that does well then you could have like the feeling of what your product gives people.