How to Become Impossible to Ignore Online - Tom Hunt

0:00All I've done for the last 10 years is how to get attention online. Your entrepreneurial journey has been kind of a rollercoaster. I tried like 15, maybe 20 things. You're on Dragon's Den trying to sell leggings. What was the response from family and friends? I wasn't good enough, so I ran out of cash. I hate being told what to do. People start a podcast, they do four episodes, they expect to be the next Stephen Bartlett. Paid for the podcast like nine times over, so you have 10 seconds for that. And you've been a whole team on pips. It was like four to like 54 last year. We've pissed some people off before, but you get the impressions, right?

0:31And then try and fuel like rage. So if I took fame away from you now, what are the rules? It was anonymous because I wasn't allowed to do anything. And then the company found out. Tom, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, boys. Very excited. We always start our podcast up the same way. So who are you and what problem do you solve? My name is Tom Hanna and my business, Fame, starts and grows podcasts for B2B brands. So their problem is they want to be more well-known in their space. and so they can start podcasts with us to help them do that nice okay so for someone listening someone's just tuned in what are typically the symptoms people are experiencing that make them come to you so i guess they would have they have their like really boring cyber security software and there's like a very specific type of person that they want to come inbound to them to buy the software so my favorite example is like governance in cyber security and so there's probably a thousand people they want to sell to and if they just launch let's say that this they're amazing piece of software but not maybe five of the thousand people know what they could do is start this this audio podcast and video podcast that could ideally entertain inform these those thousand people so that over time those thousand people start to know and like know like and trust their brand so then ideally when one of those thousand people needs the governance software they come to them that's like the ideal setup okay so i mean you're you're the perfect person to be sat across when we talk about podcasting.

1:56So it sounded like the way that you were talking there, there's like two streams of like generating clients. One is people are listening to the client, people are listening to the podcast and coming in, but it also sounded like you were alluding to like inviting your potential customers on your prospects rather than cold calling them. You could actually just sit and have a conversation with them. Where do you think people go wrong when it comes to kicking off a podcast? Three things. um and but before we get into the three things i'm going to explain what we call the fame formula i like it so take taylor swift she started in country music then moved to pop music right and she got very famous in both she did two things in both fields first she made a lot of really great content in the country music field she got really good at it started really young so by like age 20 she was really good and she was just then seen around other famous country music so she would go on their albums or they would come on hers and she became famous in country music and so then when she decided to switch to pop music she did the same she got very good at creating this specific content the pop music and then she got ed sheeran to come on our album or she went on on a cheeran's right and so that's the fame formula is you create a lot of really good niche specific content and then you're seen around the other famous people and so going to the first point in your question it like if we want the thousand people in the cyber security governance space to know us then we want to pick the five most well-known people in that space bring them on the show we become seen around them maybe they share it and that helps us become more famous um so that's like the fame formula that we tried to or the podcast is a vehicle in order to implement the fame formula for a brand um the three ways people mess up it first one is not being consistent second is not like getting the positioning or the the niche of their show right and then the third one is not being strategic about guests and go through them if you want please take us there so consistency you just have to out of like all the content you can create there's like social in my mind written and email and there's podcasts at the bottom podcast is the hardest one to grow maybe you guys know that you've been running the show and so if we are gonna get to those thousand people maybe we can only reach like five a week or maybe in five a week are gonna follow us because they're just busy in their lives and so we have to be there consistently at the right quality level um a cadence that we can manage and so for that show it might be every two weeks that the company can commit to ensuring they release a good episode every two weeks so consistency is the first one second one is positioning the best example i give of this is that if you have an email if you're you sell email marketing software you're not going to start a marketing podcast you probably shouldn't even start an email marketing podcast you start an open rate podcast we go as niche as possible it's very easy to grow that early audience and then we can go broader from there and so our cyber security governance company is great their or their product is niche enough we probably wouldn't need to niche down anymore because there's only a thousand people trying to reach anyway so they can have the cyber security governance podcast that's the second thing and the third one is as part of the fame formula it's being strategic about guests in the early days we want people that either could be our customers right away we build the relationship and maybe sell to them they could be partners refer us to the other thousand people or they have an audience of the thousand people that can help us accelerate the fame formula so those are the three things that most people get wrong when they start really b2b podcasts we're being specific about here um like podcasts where a b2b company is trying to sell their software or service okay so creating the content is one thing and i can imagine with data tools these days it's probably not hard to find the top five people in your niche and and invite them on and we know from like the outreach we've done like people people are wanting to get themselves out there now you've recorded that conversation when it comes to taking it to that ideal audience what what are some of the things you can tell us about that tom yeah so we have like eight promotional pillars but i'll pick out like two that i think are working well at the moment so probably the the biggest opportunity i think right now is that there are these lists if you google any top x podcast so you could google top cyber security podcasts or top cyber security governance podcasts are these these like just blog articles that list the shows because they're just trying to get that organic traffic of the people that are interested in that niche um those people don't really understand how valuable the placings are in those articles and so what we would do for a client in that space is we go to all the cyber security articles and do some kind of deal to get that podcast featured there and so for you guys who might i know this podcast is not like sales focus but maybe you could do this for like i don't know uk entrepreneur podcast you know um so you do some kind of deal maybe you bring on the ceo of the company whose blog it is as a guest and then you in exchange for being featured maybe you just pay them maybe you give them a backlink from your blog and then if you get that right and you get coverage in all those then you're probably going to get this like slow inbound uh uh like flow of listeners that's one thing that's working well the second thing is thought leadership ads on LinkedIn.

6:39And so if we can get a massive name from the cybersecurity governance space on the show, maybe get the video snippet of them, a vertical video, they post it on LinkedIn. We can then get them to allow us to pay money to advertise that snippet, the links of the podcast in the comments to those 10 ,000 people. So it's kind of leveraging the fame to get cheap impressions of the 1 ,000 people that are trying to reach. So they're the two strategies that are working well at the moment to get a podcast more downloads, or views is there a way to kind of market test an idea before you go live and put the time and the effort in a market test a podcast idea yeah yeah good point i would probably what we in our in the positioning process what we typically say is that the company normally knows around five people of the thousand people they're trying to reach and so trying to like take different or get them to vote for example on ideas is something that we do recommend but there's quite a lot of work to go from like idea to launch your podcast maybe it takes like four weeks or six weeks and so it's it kind of once you're in that process that's like quite a big investment for a company and so we it's like in the early stages we we try and get quality feedback ideally from the people who are trying to reach um but i don't think there's a good way of like testing podcast positions um because it takes so long to like build the the assets for the show what about then how you how do you know it's working the main metric that we like to track for clients is downloads and we would shove youtube views into that as well so this one metric that has all the consumption of um the content you're producing and so in month one you get a spike because you launch in month two it typically goes down and from there we like to take an average and that add on 10 and so we want to see 10 growth in downloads over time after the month two dip um and the idea we just want to keep going going if the content is good um the secondary metric is a specific to apple podcasts and youtube which is consumption on youtube it's average view duration on on apple's it's average consumption and so before we invest big on promotion as ideally that the downloads are going up but also ideally with every episode people watching slightly more on average because that shows that the content is getting better and so we only like to invest heavily in promotion once the content looks like it's being consumed more by those two metrics and then you spoke earlier tom about like expectations and i'm sure that there are so many like things where well i've had it before where people start a podcast they do four episodes they expect to be the next stephen bartlett and then all of a sudden they're disappointed so if you're sitting down or a b2b owner is thinking about launching a podcast and you had to give it straight to them know this do this these are the expectations of what it will take what would you tell them in terms of how much What do you think?

9:31So the thing with B2B podcasts is that their objective often isn't massive like B2C fame or often isn't like a number of downloads or followers. It's often just they want to make more money than they're investing in the podcast. And so we can talk about making money from podcasts if you want. So in the short term, RRI will typically come from the guest side. And I'll tell a quick story. So in 2019, I was head of demand gen at a B2B company called Ebster. We sold sales software. I joined and I decided that with this new customer persona, we're going to target. It was the sales ops person. They do like ops.

10:04You guys know this. They do also sales teams. And so I saw a podcast, started getting some of these people on the show, started doing interviews. And then the 11th guest with the VP of sales ops at a company called Intercom came on the show, ended up chatting with our CEO afterwards, closed a deal that paid for the podcast like nine times over. So before that, the business were like, what's this podcast thing? We don't really care. And then after it, they were like, wow, this is amazing. So they gave us more resources to release twice a week and improve production value. And then that grew the audience of the sales lots of people.

10:35They turned out to be good customers. We're making them know, like, and trust us. So ideally, we also got deals from the listener side. So in terms of making money from podcasts, what we like to say for clients is short term, it typically comes from the guest side. Either we close a guest as a customer or we close a guest as a referral partner. It can often be higher leverage. um and then once we do that we can reinvest make sure we're like doing the 10 month on month growth increasing the average duration so we're actually getting that audience of a thousand people to know they can trust us and then they come inbound like you're saying it before we started recording right you have people coming inbound to you guys certainly they listen to podcasts and then reach out so short-term guests long-term listener side is is how we like to work on roi on podcasts okay Right.

11:17And then I always, it makes me think of that phrase like shy kids get no sweets. Like I'm thinking about the call to action. So if your whole purpose of starting a podcast is to generate leads and close more deals, how would you approach like the call to action or talking about people getting in touch with you or positioning yourself as the solution, talking about the problem? How do you advise your clients to think about that? yeah so so we i'll answer this two ways so when like when in the process we like to insert the ads and then what we put in the ads so in terms of when again going back to that process we want the 10 month-on-month growth we want the the um consumption happening so what that tells us is that we're adding value to these people and so we want to add value before we start pitching them and so maybe month four month six if the numbers are looking good then we recommend to put in ads um in terms of the what some of the best podcasts what they can actually do is insert the the power or the meaning or something about their product into the episodes without being salesy i'll give a quick example we had a client in the u.s they did like marketing research software and so they collect loads of insights and so every episode the host would take the insights that they got about one like group of people and then he'd talk to the guests about that and so he was able to say okay in today's episode we're talking about this insight that we gathered last week from this campaign using our software and so that like brought that in without being salesy so that's kind of like the best ad but if that just isn't possible then we just have the host record what we call um or a host read ad so it's essentially them explaining why someone listening should go and take the next step in their funnel which often is like could be an ebook or could be just straight to meeting or straight to meeting or demo or could be some other thing in invite to an event for example um a really good example right now is a company called implement ai by pierce linney you should get him on the pod maybe you have already he's been on he's been on the pod yeah so he their their shows just two of them chatting great numbers and then their cta is an invite to an in-person event in london and so and then that's like quite pitch heavy and so that's a good example of an ad in a in a pod oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time.

13:34How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No with a better connection right wow nooks.ai nice okay so how do you think then about the brand so let's say you've got someone who wants to talk to cyber security persona then you might have someone who wants to talk to marketing persona how do you think about the look and the feel of the actual brand behind the of the pod yeah so the podcast is always a derivative of the brand of the business um we like the shows not to be named by the brand of the business but they want to be like branded or presented by and so again if we take the implement ai podcast by peers it's like the logo is in the exact same brand guidelines from the company and and it's like a tiny logo i can't remember what the podcast called it's maybe the implement ai podcast which just breaks the rule i just said so with my podcast i've kind of taken this a little bit even further a step back more on like the personal brand and the company brand it's called confessions of a b2b entrepreneur and have no fame branding but has like fame a link to fame in the show notes and we and adds the fame in it um so that's like a bit far removed but most clients they want the company brand on the on the show but it's normally a derivative of their main brand okay and then i imagine the other devil's advocate thing here is what we hear a lot at the minute is everyone's got a podcast it's almost like stereotype to say i've got a podcast and if i've got a podcast i probably got an ice bath in my garden as well so people probably start to see a podcaster in one way and that probably stops people starting one what would your answer be to that well i think even we were chatting before the recording right and you guys i think are experiencing two benefits from the show even without anybody listening probably one is like networking you get to know people that could just be like your friends or can refer business like me for example um so you actually get to it's a very good excuse to meet people that you might not be able to meet i'm not saying that that happened here but i've had guests on my show that would never reply to my email if i didn't have a podcast um that's first thing and then the second thing is that you mentioned it's like can be great bottom of the funnel content so even if it's just like around someone is considering buying from you but want to get to know you more without jumping on a call then they can see on the video and so i think even if it's not going to get if we're not going to get that growth hours explaining it can be useful for a business regardless to have the show so you obviously you you mentioned your own podcast there and i think like obviously you'd be a hypocrite to say everybody should have a podcast if you're trying to generate and you didn't do it yourself what examples can you think of or what stories can you think of when it comes to um generating new business by using your own podcast that i've done yeah how many deals i've closed so we have the other thing we haven't spoken about sponsorship that you guys also have i believe um so right now the show is i would say primarily monetized by sponsorship um we also have i got a deal we've had so the best the absolute best thing that's ever happened to me in my marketing career probably is when people come inbound to you and then it when you ask them on the form like where do you hear about us like the podcast so i think it's been like two or three people have come over the path like three years from the show saying that and as you mentioned because they're like indoctrinated almost into the way of thinking those the sales cycles are very low and they're very easy to close um i we have also had clients from partnerships made by people from the podcast so if we go back to the roi thing with podcast is like guest side and then it's listener side for my podcast we have i don't think we've had any guests that have become customers but we've had guests that have come partners that have referred customers and then we have had people come inbound saying that they heard about us from the podcast where that was in their journey to learning about fame it isn't clear but it influenced those deals um and then the layer above that right now is we do have sponsors that that pay for episodes or pay for per month so i want to i want this conversation tom to be like a full lesson in everything b2b marketing sales entrepreneurship so you you you run your own company now and then you spoke about being um employed demand generation but then i i have a feeling from from a little bit of research that i've seen like your entrepreneurial journey has been kind of a roller coaster what what can you tell us about that so i studied chemistry for four years and then i went to because i didn't know what i wanted to do with my life i went and did management consulting for four years and then i realized i didn't want to be employed and so then i didn't like i didn't want to be a scientist i didn't want to have a job and so i had to start a business i also couldn't code and i was interested in the internet so in the year of 2014 i set myself the goal of replacing the salary of my i was working at accenture like in in east london by the end of the year with my own business i built and so what happened there is i built a team in the philippines and then i sold them through cold email to startups in london for like double their salary so i paid them like 700 pounds and then i charged them out like 1400 400 pounds and i did just about replace the salary at the end of 2014 and left accenture and then the only time i had to get a job with the 2019 period at ebster where i had to because i ran out of money um so that was like 2015 to 2019 there's four years there where i tried like 15 maybe 20 things like stupid little businesses some made some money some made none but none we would traditionally call a success you know so i ran out of cash went and got the job because i kind of knew the founder of that company and then quickly realized that again i wasn't very good at having a job and so then that was the seed of fame and essentially fame was just this process we started building in-house at that company editor and they became the first client of fame wow so talk us through some of those ideas that you had that they didn't work out yeah i think back and some of them like skip out of your mind and then they come back but the first one was called the self-help book blog and it was like the most un-seo friendly website you could ever imagine but what i did so i was reading a lot of self-help books and so i do like tiny reviews but then i also did email the author them being like would you like uh can i interview on this for my blog and i remember i got a reply from thef godin he said no and then i also but i did get on the phone with a couple of authors that was quite cool but yeah that made zero money um let's try to think of another one well yeah the one that replaced the salary was called start out consulting and that was a team of people in the philippines and now fame have a team of like 30 people in the Philippines.

20:13I learned a lot about working remotely, et cetera. So that there was, there was lessons there and that one did make some money. I, I wish I just kept doing that business from 2014 to today, because right now it's quite trendy and quite a good business model to build offshore teams and then sell them to Western companies. But I got like infected by the tech startup world and decided to try and create a marketplace, like an Upwork clone, but just for philippine you know virtual assistants i as that business wasn't going well not because it wasn't a good business but i wasn't good enough i just i thought i should transition it and so i spent like six months building this platform with a dev team in egypt where you could go and hire someone in the philippines and it would manage the payments and you can filter and find them etc um did manage to sell that but for like 17 000 and it was like two years of my life i spent building it and then we entered a accelerator called ignite in london me and a guy called James and we traded on about five different things none of them worked then after that after that oh stitch leggings I went on dragon's den because we had a male leggings business so many um and so we had this with my two best friends this leggings company um went on dragon's den didn't get any investment and then after the the the accelerator companies died I was like I'm going to start like an econ roll up and so I had I bought my friends out of leggings company bought a gold a gold chain brand and then also bought a 3d printing accessory brand and then i hired a team of three people who are like supporting all the businesses uh but again i i was i don't think i was good enough i didn't have any finance background it's quite hard to run e-com companies you have to like buy stock and so so that that didn't work out i shut that down and that's when i got the job i was following it up until and then it all went a bit crazy yeah so many different things overlapping you had i could i can actually see the link between the offshore philippines to fame but the bit in the middle with gold chains and men's leggings yeah it doesn't seem like it makes any sense so really like the the leggings was actually the first thing that that started before i worked well with steel extension but really the theme here is between 2015 up until like today i just spent all my time working about how to get attention online it's really online marketing because i have the leggings and the gold chain brand but really i was working out how to sell them because it was just we had a distributor in china you know and so all i've done for the last 10 years since i decided to be an entrepreneur is to really learn how to get attention online and that resulted in an agency that i have and what we do is get the right attention online for b2b brands so that's that's like the secret is spending 10 years like losing money and learning how have you obviously there's been so many different things there and i think that you can look back now and you can kind of giggle and you can laugh about like some of the crazy ideas but i imagine when you're living it day to day you probably feel like this is gonna work this is my ticket out of here how did you as an entrepreneur deal with the highs and lows of that yeah i guess i didn't really have a choice i couldn't i couldn't go back and get it well i could go i guess maybe that's the safety net if i could go back and get a job i was building skills that would enable me to get a job and that was proven when i got the head of demand general role at that company um so i guess i always had that option but i really didn't want to do that because i just hate i hate being told what to do so that was like it's good to have safety net but it's also good to hate that so i tried harder to make the other things work what were the people around you saying and thinking because i imagine you've got if you've come from a chemistry background i'm sure that you've got lots of educated friends and then you're on dragon's den trying to sell leggings like what was what was the response from family and friends yeah my mom my family my immediate family were just like oh god so i'm like this is tom's doing a thing again friends oh well i think i did an okay job of like making entrepreneur friends when so they just completely understand that not much stuff works and everything um and then other like uni friends and stuff yeah i think they're just like oh that's tom isn't always doing that you you said This was really interesting before.

24:28You said the commonality between all the different businesses is you've learned how to get attention online. It's all how do I get attention online? So if I took fame away from you now and you have to start a new business, what are the rules of how to get attention online and build something from scratch? Yeah, so I would, if I was starting from scratch and I wanted to get attention online, because what we didn't talk about, guys, is that before fame, the thing that actually found the first customers that weren't my employer for fame was an email newsletter called SaaS Hacker. And it was a daily email where I would create or find how a SaaS company had grown.

25:04And I would just explain it on the newsletter. I did it every day, I think for like three to maybe six months. It was that was while I had the job. This was like my attempt to get out of the job. And so I built that email list. And that ultimately, there's a bit of controversy because it was anonymous because I wasn't allowed to do anything while I had a job. and then as the day like the week after i had it in my notice i like said it was me like connected it to myself and then the company found out and then ultimately took it because they it belonged to them because i was working on it while i was with them anyway so the point is that i if i was to start again i would do the same thing as i build the audience first work out and then instead of sell things to them as opposed to work out what i want to sell and then work out how to sell it to people you know because what happened then is that i managed to like or before it got taken away i managed to get two more customers for fame from that email list i built so what i would do is i have like a it's called the waterfall of of like personal brand or b2b content is there's like social and i referred to this earlier social email written and podcast so as we go down the chain the it gets harder to grow the thing but you get the bigger impact you get the bigger like impression on the ideal buyer and so so someone watching like 20 seconds of a youtube short is much easier to get but has a lower impact for your brand right um but it's much easier to go at the top so i'd start at the top and i would pick a social platform that i thought that i had people on that i would in the future want to sell something to probably linkedin it's probably the easiest you also have to think about how you like what's the best content for you as a person to create and for me it's writing because i just enjoy writing and that's what i did for the 10 years so i start linkedin and i pick a topic that i think maybe it was like a rising trend or maybe i was interested in it and knew how to get attention in it and i would start writing about that to build the audience then i probably build a newsletter and then probably from the newsletters when i start testing selling things and so right if i was to do it again i would pick something in in hr like a big part of what i like about fame it's like the management and the culture etc so i'd pick hr linkedin is a great place to get attention there and then i would build the email list where again the content would be like similar to what i'm writing for the posts and then i'll start like trying to sell things to the people on the email list maybe it'd be a service maybe it'd be some software maybe it'd be an event and then see what gets the best uptake and then start selling that making money and then the podcast will probably come a bit later as we found the sub niche within hr that we want to target we build a podcast around it and then we follow the fame formula by bringing the people on and then getting well known so that's probably what i do so give us an example so the testing selling things what have you learned that works and doesn't work so i'll explain how i did it before so as i had the through i had the the newsletter of sas marketers and sas founders while i was at work in the day we're doing this podcast thing that was getting money that was like roi positive of the business and so i was like in In that case, it was like, well, I have these people here who want the thing that I'm doing in my job.

28:10So I'll just test selling it to them. And it worked. And so it would just be like a normal new thread that I would send. And then in the PS, it would be like, by the way, I'm trialing this new service that does this. Click on here to book a call. But if I didn't, because obviously if I was starting again without anything else, I wouldn't have something that I was building in my job. But I guess I would have knowledge and experience of what we'd implemented at Fame that had an impact on our culture, etc. So I'd probably just pick the one thing that I thought had the biggest impact at Fame that I would like to deliver to other people.

28:43And I'd probably just try and sell it. And if it worked, I would just do more of that, probably. So we go to the top of the waterfall. You said social. And obviously, you're notorious on LinkedIn. That's how I know you. And then if you think about the psychology principles of like why your LinkedIn has grown twofold or tenfold over the last few years. Like what are you thinking about from a psychology standpoint that is engaging people and getting people to connect, interested by what are those principles? So how to get attention on LinkedIn. I remember the first time that I noticed you is that you wrote a, what's the word?

29:22uh uh so where were you like take the piss out of something satire satire i posted one of mine apparently you did block me oh wow tension i didn't know this oh yeah no i'm blocked now wow it's okay now you guys have done well i didn't know any tension between either of you no so i i i really like you you're going to linkedin game um okay so how to get attention on linkedin i the bigger thing for me was just switching topics i used to post about b2b podcasting b2b marketing and they start posting about hiring stories and then it just pops off because if you think about linkedin the thing everyone has in common is like a job or then we'll try to get a job so that's like a bigger thing um behind it there's like loads of small things you can do i think like we can talk about the the anatomy of the viral post should we go into that please so if you think about what happens when when the post when you hit post what happens is that this like unit the image and that that writing is inserted into the algorithm and as soon as it's inserted the algorithm is trying to understand how are people reacting to this and so again let's just do text and image to keep it simple we basically have one line and maybe two depending on how many characters put in the line and an image to get people to engage with the post because that is what it's going to tell the algorithm to give it to more people and so what i found is that having a face as a big part of that image just for whatever reason engages people and makes them stop because the first positive signal for the algorithm they stop scrolling right there are many other things people can do to tell the algorithm that we'll get into later but we just want them to stop and so putting the face there maybe with sunglasses on works maybe we have a coffee on the table that's the first thing and then the other thing we have the opportunity is the let's say like the the one line and maybe the second line and so the question is what else can we do to after they've hit the image to get them to click see more that's like the next thing we want them to do and so what i found is that a statement that's like the start of a story that someone can relate to often works and so off the top of my head the ones that work the best is that i i cancelled a one-on-one with a team member so again it's like everybody having everyone knows what one-on-one is everyone has that experience and then it's curious to do i even because like why the fuck did he cancel the one-on-one and so then they hit the c more and then the best all the viral posts i've ever done they're like very simple basic writing um about this like hr story that often has some kind of controversial or like i'm ignoring some kind of nuance so last week for example the um the hook it was a picture of me and the hook was about how i suggested to someone on a team that we're going to need to put someone on a performance improvement plan and the whole post then was about how we've actually started putting more people on performance improvement plans uh not because we're trying to fire them but because we want to improve people and so that i and i didn't think about the time but what i'm really confusing in my mind is the difference between a performance improvement plan and a personal development plan right you've been a whole team on pips i put the numbers it was like four to like 54 last year um because here's what we do and so i i kind of knew that but i kind of didn't but the result is that we have loads of like hr experts coming and like telling me how much of an idiot i am um that one probably had a higher proportion of negative comments i would normally accept um but you get the impressions right and so again going back to what the algo is looking at i think the biggest uh like thing that the biggest the heaviest weight the algo is giving is big chunky comments from people that don't know you and so ignoring that nuance getting the hr experts to come and chime in with the big monster comments i think tells the algo to to share the post more so let's just summarize like picture with a face on let's try and get people to click see more and with a curiosity driving hook like very simple language because you have 10 seconds for someone to skim the post i'm trying to ignore some kind of nuance um and then try and fuel like rage not rage but try and fuel discussion in the comments okay that's that's the anatomy so you do all that tick tick tick and then people will be listening going right i can i can i mean we've we've done some posts we've pissed some people off before i pissed you off tom so we get over it but then how do you then say okay but also i'm tom hunt i own fame come and use me for podcasting like what's the the connect where it then turns into customers and money if i had a b2b sass the hr b2b sass company i would it would we would have i'd have a big business basically so i made the switch last year of going from talking about marketing b2b podcasting to hr because i'm just like a slap for the numbers basically i just want the numbers to go up um now we do get people coming inbound that they heard about it through my linkedin um but if we were b2b hr sack company we get a lot more so it's not ideal but i made that sacrifice you know because then i can monetize it through other other way through sponsored posts basically um so it's quite simple like you can turn creator mode on then you can have the visits the website thing at the top of the post and so the post is getting 100 000 impressions you're probably if it's targeted to your ideal bias you're probably going to get people to click through to the site just to be like who's this person um i think it is a good idea to and i'm not doing this because they don't get the numbers it's put bottom of the funnel posts in with like case study videos or just case study what you do with clients so on like tuesday you do a massive viral post so linkedin is like wow we need to give this person attention then on the wednesday you do like a bottom of the funnel case study video post and so with like a cta in the comments to drive people to to book the demo interesting we've noticed a weird thing where maybe it's because of the stuff that we post but that the viral posts tend not to be the ones that bring us any inquiries or any new business well yeah because they're top of the funnel content you know they're like not stuff it's like that the case study post of how you've really helped a business like book loads of meetings is not going viral because that's at the bottom of the of the funnel um but then if you do the case that is the day after then you're probably going to get a bit more attention it's not going to get as many impressions but you probably get a bit more if if you're if your profile's hot with the algo um so i would just save them for the day after the value of viral post nice yeah um there's one thing we talked about before i just want to circle back to you talked about sponsorship for podcasts i think a lot of people that even we've had on have got an audience an engaged audience in a niche space i'm thinking about people who've got like recruitment only podcasts and things like that but making that leap to right now i want to get a sponsor and kind of monetize this audience that i've got is a bit of a leap even in how to structure the deals who to reach out to like what have you learned that works in in sponsorship yeah so we just we build like a compelling offer so it's normally just in a google doc and be like for you pay this amount per month for this many months and you get this and this is normally three or four things it's like the link in the show notes it's the ad the kind of ad we're talking about earlier host red in every episode it's tagged in linkedin posts about every episode and maybe some kind of visual branding on on the thumbnail so just create that google doc and then just like you you both know this right just do an outbound sales process to all the people um that you think could be sponsors actually the best thing to do is look at your competing shows find out who's sponsoring them and then put them at the top of the list because they're already qualified obviously that's a good list to reach out to um and yeah just keep going until you find sponsors um say you only have two two at one point at any point in time and then as you you can say we've got a spot opening up maybe i'm talking i'm preaching to the choir in terms of how to sell but it's basically running a sales process so you make a good offer and then run outbound sales process to qualified list nice and then you've mentioned obviously like a lot of your content is around like hiring and culture and from from the outside it looks like you've got people working all over the world so like you're you're not afraid of this work from home policy you've probably got people in different countries what have you learned about building a cohesive culture for your company yeah yeah yeah yeah this is this is a definitely challenge you got you guys have an office right but you live in different places so you've got two offices yes how many in each uh so it's a team it's just over 20 split across two split across two and then each of you lead each office yeah would you say the culture is different in the two offices or you think you do uh yeah i would probably say slightly yeah but then also well culture i think culture bleeds from the top down doesn't it and i think that and we've got a third director who the third jones i didn't know that he doesn't like to be on camera yeah he's in manchester the brains of manchester i'm just the face in manchester um but me and zach obviously we've been friends since we were like 15 so there's very similar values very similar sense of humor big teams chat every every morning there's a kickoff meeting as a thing so i think we're we're very conscious to be driving that culture but i think over we've definitely seen changes in cultures over the last few years and people uh existing team members leaving new people coming into it it's culture is a challenge yeah it evolves over time i think for you guys as well with the business you have for the we book a meeting meeting is business sorry is getting the right people to join right because i bet you get some people and they're just like epic and they just book shit loads and then but then you probably also have people that fall out or they're like join and then can't do it right and i bet your guys linkedin profiles help with recruiting you know what it's very weird like they're well i mean we've hired somebody that we've known about in the the space for about three years and that's a success but everyone else that has ever been like oh i'm a fan or i've been watching or i've been i'm a big fan of the podcast stuff like that doesn't tend to yeah it doesn't yeah it doesn't the issue i've noticed is if you consume jack stuff on linkedin you probably think this guy is going to be the funnest person to work with ever jack is like a proper he's like a proper ceo we understand that people don't rent so i think they show like the beef this is going to be really fun this is going to be and he's like fucking i wear the result you want me in my clown shoes come on yeah so i think that's probably the bit in it like people's expectation is like it's going to be you kissing people off and yeah okay it's not what i will say actually about the linkedin thing is that yes hr is not what we sell but our key role is the account manager they're basically the client contact for the podcast that went from 50 to like 500 a month after the linkedin started going well last year so it definitely has helped with hiring but back to your question about culture i think if like the boring question you get when you ask any other or the boring answer you get when you ask any other like entrepreneur obviously about this it's like understand what the values are and then hire fire and promote based on them and so we've had four values since day one we changed one over those over the last five years and we tried to do everything by those values and that i think is the best way to start trying to get a culture that's like productive and healthy for everybody can you run us through them and how you selected them yeah uh i'll answer the second question first they're like what i really they're like what i believe about work basically so first is client client client that basically means it's stolen from amazon it's like customer first customer obsession it's like let's just try and do the best thing for the client because ultimately in the long term that's going to help the business and then we have operational excellence let's try and be organized especially with the service business um that's remote uh action bias which is oh no that's the one we actually removed so action bias we took away um oh no no we took away detail obsessed which actually and it kind of wasn't it wasn't it basically wasn't as important as the rest and it's also interesting that i'm not actually that good at detail and so we kind of just put that to the side so client client client operational excellence action bias in that let's just get like do stuff and then learn later and then oh god this is embarrassing i forget the last one it'll come to me because i talk about this all the time um operational action action bias let's continue will come okay how how do you take them one of those values and make it a core behavioral trait of your employees so in the interview process for the account manager let's say i think it's the first interview is the one that oh no the first one is like can they do they have experience and interest in the job and the second one is like how are they scoring against the full values based on the competency questions we are so that ideally gets a barrier for people coming in we then have something called and i stole this from when i worked there is called the values award where anybody can give anybody in the team a 50 or 50 pound bonus based on them doing something that is in alignment with the value and they have to be specific this person did this that aligns with that value and so then in every meeting so the monday meeting i'm going to have in a minute is any fva's fame values awards given last week i read out and i say this person gave this person a fame values award for this value so i constantly get to repeat them so on the way in uh like mini bonuses and then also when people are promoted they have to or we assess how they're performing against the values or if we have three candidates and this person clearly clearly is has a client client client value then they may get prioritized how do you then because i know there's a risk in kind of over incentivizing things as well how do you find the the middle ground where that's useful yeah the fea is because it can be like strategic you know people i'll give you an fea you give me an f yeah we just have a limit of 10 a month 10 a month yeah so so we had to put that in recently tom i've absolutely loved this conversation i know that um i first came across you on linkedin when i was mocking you so it's nice to be sat with you now and i can call you a friend um we start the podcast in the same way every time and we end the podcast in the same way so we asked who are you and what problem you solve if the audience are listening what what question would you say that they need to ask themselves i would say assuming the audience is like entrepreneurs or like online business people I would say, how are you going to get more attention online tomorrow?

43:38I like it. I'm going to post a selfie with you, Tom. Thank you so, so much. If people want to find your work with you, what can they do to get in touch? Famed.so or podcast confessions of a B2B entrepreneur. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Cheers, guys.