How to Make Your Marketing Resemble a Gift w/ Colin Campbell

UX Marketing

Blake: [00:00:00] On the podcast today, we have Colin Campbell, who's here to talk to us a little bit about marketing and how to make it feel like a gift, not so much a, a burden or an interruption. Colin, how are you doing

[00:00:15] Colin: [00:00:15] today? I'm great, Blake, thanks for having me on.

[00:00:18] Blake: [00:00:18] Really appreciate this and I'm excited. This is somebody that I follow closely on LinkedIn, so really, really excited, but I want to get some context on you for the audience first so they know who they're dealing with here. if you could just give us a quick story about your career so far, how you got started and how you got to where you are now.

[00:00:34] Yeah,

[00:00:35] Colin: [00:00:35] sure. So the short version is I graduated from college with a degree in global studies, which turned out to be not so useful for helping me get a first job. I was lucky that my parents had a small business, so I helped them with customer service, sales and marketing. I taught myself some content marketing.

[00:00:53]got a job at a content marketing agency doing strategy for all kinds of clients in all kinds of industries. And then I ended up, six years later leading. That account management department in the Boston office of that agency. and then through sort of a serendipitous connection to somebody who worked at sales hacker, I got the job running sales hacker after that.

[00:01:13] So I've been doing that running sales hacker for about two years.

[00:01:17] Blake: [00:01:17] Awesome. And if you don't follow sales hacker, go look it up, but we'll, we'll talk about this at the end, but it's, it's great. so. Let's, let's dive into this. I'm curious, first of all, what, what would you consider your professional superpower?

[00:01:31] Colin: [00:01:31] Oh, yeah. I think I'm kind of the guy who just asks why a lot, you know, like, I, I try to do things with a purpose. Which is kind of a strange superpower to have cause it's not a tactic. Like, you know, you hear people talk about the T shaped marketer. my, I guess, you know, I, I'm not, my superpower is an SEO or content.

[00:01:50] I'm pretty good at those two things. My superpower is really like, let's figure out why we're doing these things and then prioritizing and trying to give teams focus so that we can go big. In one area and, really make a difference for the people who we need to make a difference for. Well,

[00:02:07] Blake: [00:02:07] let, let's dive into just that.

[00:02:09] And so making marketing field feel like a gift. That's definitely not how most people feel about marketing. It's usually perceived as kind of slimy interrupted. so I'm curious, first off, generally, what do you mean by that? Cause you say that a lot. That's one of your core messages.

[00:02:29] Colin: [00:02:29] Yeah. I, you know, this started out I think is me trying to like assuage my own adjunct about my profession.

[00:02:37]cause I do love marketing, but, but I am pretty conscious of the fact that I don't love being marketed to or being sold to. And I think most people feel that way. So I really just tried to start doing things in marketing roles. For our audiences without the catch involved, you know? and, and like, the reason I gravitated in early in my career towards content marketing is because it felt like that, it felt like, Oh, this is a nice thing I can do for the people I hope will one day become my customers.

[00:03:06] And if I teach them. Some stuff that's useful for them, you know, maybe it'll come back around, but then we all got really good at attaching forms to things and, you know, basically adding a catch, and I didn't like that. Yep. Yeah.

[00:03:23] Blake: [00:03:23] Well. So let's, let's dive into it a little bit more and start here by, I mean, so you're, you, you're at sales hacker, so you're thinking w a lot of people are gonna think, Oh, this is a sales person.

[00:03:32] But you're, you're a marketer. So first off, what's, what's that like working in a, at a place where sales, is that the primary focus, but you're. More on the marketing side.

[00:03:44] Colin: [00:03:44] Yeah, it's pretty interesting. and I actually, so sales hacker is a, is a community for B2B sales professionals, not just salespeople, but like, you know, sales leaders, people in operations too.

[00:03:55] And what's so interesting about being at sales hacker right now is that we're actually. owned by outreach, which is a SAAS company that makes software for sales professionals. so I kind of get to walk this cool line where, you know, my job is really to connect with and grow this community of B to B sales pros.

[00:04:13]but I kinda like, we're doing it by creating a gift. I mean, the community itself is a gift. To the, to the community. There's really no catch. Like outreach is so customer obsessed that, their obsession with salespeople success starts well before they're a customer, before they're even a lead. It's just, you know, from the time you enter your sales profession, we want you to have an ability to connect and grow your career, which is why sales hacker exists.

[00:04:42] What,

[00:04:42] Blake: [00:04:42] what are some of the examples of the gifts, quote unquote, that you've given at sales hacker?

[00:04:47] Colin: [00:04:47] Yeah, so, some of them are like, they look and feel like a gift, right? Like, we found out, last fall that there is a holiday called national sales person's day that nobody celebrates. And like, you know, there's a made up holiday for everything, right.

[00:05:02]but we decided to make it a real thing and it's, it was December 13th. in 2019, we decided to do a whole week, and so we made a virtual summit. but there were no sponsors, so we didn't share any leads and all of our speakers didn't get the leads either. They just kind of did it because they liked the idea of, of giving a gift as well.

[00:05:22] So we did like a week long summit with over 40 speakers. 5,000 people came and showed up for it. and then we all went our separate ways. And you know, we can look back on that memory fondly knowing that we are not, you know, every guest is not now in someone's sales funnel.

[00:05:39] Blake: [00:05:39] That's, that's super interesting.

[00:05:40] So like when you're, when you're going into it, you still have to have some kind of business objective behind these things or, or it's, I mean, what was the objective ultimately? What were you hoping? If you're not promoting a CTA or anything, you're just giving away information. Just being generous. What's the hope in the longterm.

[00:05:57] Colin: [00:05:57] Yeah. Well, my, I mean, I'm in a fortunate position of having a really, really big total addressable market. Like I want every single B2B sales professional in the world to be a part of our community. which means I need to make investments in branding and just like how people feel about us. so if I was going to pin a metric to that, it would be trying to, you know, as we do more and more things like that over the next year, see a year over year increase in net promoter score.

[00:06:26] Blake: [00:06:26] I love that it's, again, customer obsessed. So that the core audience here, we're talking about people that are more side hustlers, not necessarily in a business or well into their career. Maybe they're just starting a product or just starting to build out their personal brand. But the principles of that totally apply across the board.

[00:06:43] Being generous with your time, giving your ideas as a gift instead of always just trying to have a CTA and get something back in return. So what specific advice would you have. For a side hustler, for example, on doing just that. Like how can they feel comfortable giving away knowledge and ideas when they don't really have a lot of business to rely on yet.

[00:07:05] Colin: [00:07:05] Yeah. Well, look, so I learned from the best, like I didn't invent this concept. If you look at someone like a, if you don't follow Josh Braun on LinkedIn, he walks this walk. So, so well, his job started as a side hustle. He is a sales coach, and consultant and a and trainer and, and like, he spends his time almost all of his time giving away free nuggets of knowledge on LinkedIn and other venues.

[00:07:32] And, it works out for him. I, you know, I think it's different for everybody. He's got a full playbook full of, you know, I don't think it's now like 200 different sales plays that you can learn from. He doesn't give all of that away, right? Like, he has to have an outcome for himself at some point, but over the course of a year, he may give away, you know, like.

[00:07:52] 30 of them and it only wants, makes you want the full playbook even more, or, or it makes you want to hire him as a trainer even more. So. I think you need to find a balance. it is definitely, a marketing strategy that can work for everybody, whether they have a huge market or a small market. but, you know, just, I, I, my advice would be to just start by finding one thing you can give away and then giving it multiple shapes.

[00:08:19] Blake: [00:08:19] And that kind of plays into your idea of depth is more important than breadth or stretching yourself too thin is not nearly as effective as going deep on one thing, and I'd love to dive into that specifically around, I guess, personal branding or building out your product for these people that are listening here.

[00:08:37] What, what process or what, what ideas do you have around how to find that focus and go deep on it?

[00:08:45] Colin: [00:08:45] Yeah. well I think the way that I've found focus in the past is by talking to customers and, the more conversations I have, the more I realize that. You know, there is probably 10 or 12 things that I want to say or that I want to be talking about, but all my customers talk about the same two or three things, and we only overlap on one thing sometimes, you know, so it's, you know, take your list of things you want to say, talk to a lot of customers or potential customers, find out what resonates with them, and then hammer that point home.

[00:09:16] And it doesn't mean you repeat the point exactly the same again and again. Again, another example, I'll point people to Andy Raskin. on LinkedIn, he's a storytelling consultant and amazing at what he does. he's got 1.11 belt ring, and that is that your business needs a core story. And he tells that story again and again, but it's comes in so many different formats, so many different ways of saying it.

[00:09:42] And he tells his own stories, his customers that, you know, it doesn't look like he's repeating himself, but he clearly has focus and it makes it memorable. So

[00:09:52] Blake: [00:09:52] that we're, that we're talking about depth of content, depth of focus there, but then there's also this side of depth of relationships. So how do you develop a deep close relationship with the right people?

[00:10:04] First off, how do you, how do you find the right people to even start building the relationship with? And then part two of that would be how do you. Develop a good deep relationship with them, knowing that you're both in the business world, not necessarily just like only friendship.

[00:10:20] Colin: [00:10:20] Yeah. it can be hard to find the right people, especially because, you know, I do most of my personal networking through LinkedIn.

[00:10:27] I think that's how we met Blake. Yup. But, and, and the world of LinkedIn is so big and everybody can seem like a potential. Connection, not even just a potential connection, a potential close connection or a close acquaintance. so it can be tricky to find who the right people are. I don't know if I have the best strategy for that, but I cast a wide net.

[00:10:48] I just have a lot of conversations and like when anybody connects with me or I connect with somebody who seems like they may be interesting, I try pretty hard to turn it into a real conversation. And if they've said something interesting, I try to take it off LinkedIn and have a phone conversation or jump on their podcasts like this.

[00:11:06]and then, you know, to foster those relationships, you really gotta focus on giving again. Like if you. We all have that friend who's always asking us for favors and over time they probably kind of become not a friend cause that's annoying. so you gotta you gotta be the person who is thoughtful and giving them things, even when they're not asking you for stuff.

[00:11:27] Just, you know, spend a couple minutes a day thinking, Oh, this person seems like a close connection. We have a lot in common. They may be able to help me someday, or, you know, maybe it would be a potential future customer of mine. What's one thing I can do today just to help them for free because it's the nice thing to do and kind of have faith that the golden rule who work in your favorite later on.

[00:11:50] Blake: [00:11:50] Well, I know that you have, you'll have a slight group, right? Where you, you had you kind of engage with support or some of your more enthusiastic folks over there, and I'm curious what that does for you. Like...