Using podcasts to drive pipeline in B2B

Ep08 - Using podcasts to drive pipeline in B2B

Episode Description

In this episode of The Revenue Stream, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sam Kuehnle, VP of Marketing at Loxo, to discuss how he's driving pipeline with podcast.

Sam spilled the beans on Loxo's approach to marketing in the recruiting software space by pivoting away from traditional Google ads and leveraging podcasts as a core strategy to drive brand awareness and demand.

He shared his thought process on which types of companies should think about podcast, how he convinced his leadership team to trust in podcast as a strategy, his distribution plan, the backend ops process he has for his podcasts, the metrics he tracks, and the impact he's seeing with it.If podcast is part of your marketing strategy, this is an episode you don't want to miss.

Show Notes

Follow Sam Kuehnle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samkuehnle/

‍Learn more about Loxo: https://www.loxo.co/

‍Follow Vikash Koushik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vikashkoushik/

‍Learn more about RevenueHero: https://www.revenuehero.io/
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Episode Transcription

‍Vikash: Welcome to another episode of the revenue stream, a podcast Vikash Koushik and I have with me Sam Kuehnle, VP of Marketing at Loxo. Personally, I've been following Sam pretty long time now. One thing that drew me into his content and what prompted me to, you know, invite him to our podcast today is a lot of his content is grounded on reality.

He shares a lot of content that's based on what's happening at his company, what he's learning. And one of the things that I learned very recently is our podcast is pretty big for the folks at Loxo. So my goal with this episode is for folks who are listening to this episode, walk away with an actionable step, a step by step guide, if I can put it that way, on how you can execute a podcasting strategy, right?

Like, uh, how can you drive. demand using podcast at the center of it. So yeah with with that said Sam I don't want to butcher your introduction if you can talk a little bit about What you've been doing and what Loxo does, I think we can start from there.

Sam: Perfect. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.

Definitely looking forward to this conversation. I love that you've been following for a while. Uh, so like you mentioned, Sam Kuehnle, VP of marketing over at Loxo. So the easiest way to describe what we do is we work in recruiting software space. So many recruiters, especially when you think of external.

Like headhunters, those who proactively go to try to find candidates for hard to film positions. A lot of those recruiters have very hefty tech stacks. They have an ATS, they have a CRM, they have a tool to find people like LinkedIn. They have a contact information tool and they have to email them and they have to text them and they have to call them.

Then they have to report on it. Then they have to get that over to the client. You can see it adds up really quickly, right? That's a million tabs. Their computers, how they haven't blown up yet is beyond me, but we consolidate all that down into one platform, a talent intelligence platform, which is like, it's kind of like a lot of people listening to this, probably familiar with hubs, but everything a marketer could possibly need, everything a sales rep could possibly need in one place.

That's what we do for recruiter as well. So that's our mission is really just to help. recruiting software tech catch up to the realities of how recruiting is done today. Fun fact, the applicant tracking system was first created 50 years ago and it hasn't changed much since then. So that's what we're, that's what we're, you know, changing, you know, you don't have to be limited by the tech anymore.

So yeah, that's, that's what we do over at Loxo. And then on the marketing side, we just have fun. We, we market to people how you want to buy today, how you want to research today, and really just not running the old playbook. Um, Yeah, we'll get into it in this conversation. I don't need to lead any more into that.

I'm sure it'll come out with good questions.

Vikash: Amazing. Amazing. I never knew that ATS software was created like years back. That's, that's like crazy. Um, man, having fun with marketing. We'll definitely dive into that. But I think one of the posts that really caught my attention, especially being in Category like ATS, right?

Like the first obvious thing is to start running, uh, Google ads, right? But you on the other hand went the other way around and said we're gonna pause we're gonna stop all our Google ads, right? Talk me walk us through the thought process over there one and two How did you manage to convince? It's the co founders because they're like, it's, it's like the obvious thing to do, right?

For most folks, right? Like run a bunch of ads, you get, you know, a bunch of leads, pipeline starts coming in. Then let's figure out some of the other more creative stuff, more fun stuff to build a brand and drive pipeline through that. So what was the thought process?

Sam: Short answer was, it was a very literal thought process.

The numbers didn't make sense. We were losing money on it. So let me explain that now that I've, I've shared that. So when I first joined there, there wasn't any like proper marketing function. So we started from the ground up, um, most B2B marketing. What are the fundamentals? Paid search, paid social, you know, just get a little bit off the ground with those, see what happens.

So within paid search, you have your branded terms, Loxo source, those types of terms. Then you have the non branded. So best ATS software, best executive search software, um, competitor terms, if we want to go after, you know, you like the greenhouses, the workdays, anyone within there. So we ran, we ran ads on there for, gosh, it was at least six to 12 months or so, enough time to get some data and understand, cause you know, it's, that's.

Google search. You have to run the Google search if you're a B2B marketer. But we saw leads come in. That was great. We saw opportunities created. That was great. Saw some deals win. That was great. But then we started running the math from the back end of it. Okay. How many deals closed? What was the amount of revenue that came in and you're recurring on that?

Then how much did it cost to acquire those customers? And that's when I was just like, Ooh, this isn't a pretty picture. So we are, we're a lower ACV product. We have a tier that starts at about 1, 200 per year. We can go well North of that 10, um, you know, the five figure, six figure deals. But most of the, the deals that we serve were like HubSpot.

Now, again, the long tail of the market where, you know, the, the small shops, the small agencies. And so when I started to look at what was actually closing from Google search, ran the ACV on those. ran the customer acquisition cost on those. We were, we were well north of a 12 month payback. Um, probably somewhere around a two year payback, but with, with marketing ad dollars, I would say like, there's no reason that you should be over a 12 month ad CAC payback period.

Cause when you start adding in marketing costs, you have a marketing CAC payback, start adding your overall GTM costs, starting your company costs. You're not going to make that money back. I'm sorry. Like it is what it is. Right. So that's always been my threshold of, I'm like, if we're already closing in 12 months, that's going to be tough to reconcile.

So I, I've looked at the numbers, um, came up with a proposition and luckily our CEO was always, skeptical of Google ads as well. So that, that helped in my cause. Cause he's very, I mean, we're a bootstrap company. It's his money that has created all this. So he's very frugal and watching every dollar that goes out.

So he's always the first to say like, if it's not working, if it's not ROI positive. So I looked at the numbers, ran it all. Um, I've got a fun paid search analysis sheet if anyone ever wants it. Um, yeah, basically went to him and said, Hey, we're, there's like one keyword where we are under a 12 month CAC payback period and it's branded.

So we'll be fine. You know, it's going to come back on the organic side. I'm not, I'm not worried about it. And so we ran the numbers and said, okay. We can reallocate this to existing channels that are underneath a 12 month ad cac payback period. We can add additional resources to the team. We're a lean team of three full time marketers right now.

So we could always add another one with that, that count, you know, most people are spending more than six figures on Google ads, so you can easily turn that into a couple of headcount on your team. Or we could take a really big bet and just go into a completely different channel medium that we hadn't done before.

And so he was all for it. The math was there. We ran the numbers, we did the analysis. And then, um, I looked at it again, six, 12 months later to make sure, you know, this all, how it looks on paper, is that what it looks like in reality? Did we start to lose any pipeline? Did we start to lose any deals revenue as a result?

We didn't. And so I can't, you know, again, this isn't, I'm not saying this is for everyone. Everyone should do this. If you're a high CV, your ad cac payback period is going to be much healthier than ours probably was. But you know, we ran the numbers and saw that. We were picking that back up on organic on direct pipeline was still healthy in the other ways.

In fact, we were growing because we did reallocate it over to other channels that were the sub 12 month. So, um, all that to say, like, you know, just because the channels always been used in your space. Don't feel like you have to do it. Use math, use your instinct and don't like, you can always go back out of a door that you, you exited.

So say that was a bad decision. I would say, Hey, cool. We're going back and do Google ads. You know, it made an impact whether we wanted to see it or not. There were other things. So very long winded answer to say that's how we approached that, you know, the whole Google ads period.

Vikash: Amazing. Yeah. I think it's probably one of the, one of the hardest things is probably to say, uh, no to the channel, especially if it's been proven by.

You know for decades by multiple companies and probably I guess one of the biggest things that you had in your head obviously the math made sense right and also it was great that your CEO is also a little bit skeptical like you mentioned right so I think that definitely helped coming to the meat of the topic you mentioned you you allocated you know all that budget to other channels I'm guessing podcast, uh, podcasting as a, uh, strategy as at the center of it, right?

I want to talk, take, you know, a few steps back, right? I think today it's probably the most obvious thing to do is like, Hey, everybody's doing podcasts. So we're also going to do podcasts. It's, I know, invite some guests, record it. Chop it into snippets, share on social, you know, uh, you know, the trend, right?

But I I wanna ask you this, right? Like, do you think certain companies should not invest in a podcast as a strategy? Should every B2B company do a podcast and other certain types of companies that you would recommend not do a podcast?

Sam: Yeah, good question. Why? Why are you doing the podcast? If you can't answer that question, well, you shouldn't do it.

If your answer is because everyone else in our space is doing it, you shouldn't do it. You have to really have a good reason for why. Cause otherwise it's going to look like everyone else's, it's going to sound like everyone else's and the content's just, you're not going to have a strong direction or purpose with the content, so you're just gonna be making noise.

And at that point, is that the best use of your time? Is that the best use of your resources? Are you distributing it properly? So. I know I kind of went the opposite direction to starting like who shouldn't do it right off the bat, but those are the main things that I really think about. And so why we do it at Loxo why when I came in, that was at the core of what our strategy, the marketing strategy held was because as I said earlier, you know, we didn't have a marketing function before we had phenomenal win rates.

Um, Uh, without sharing too much details, you know, talk about like one out of three, one out of two deals. When they become an opportunity, they would become customers. So that told me something very quick when people saw lock. So they understood it. They got it. They bought it. The problem was, we didn't have a ton of opportunities.

We're in a very crowded space. The space if you go in G2, there's Hundreds, if not thousands of, of different players in the space. So our problem was brand awareness. It wasn't closing. It wasn't having product market fit. It wasn't any of that. So how do we create more visibility of our brand? And that's through education, through content.

And so that gave me a very different set of problems than, you know, we need to close more versus create more two different strategies. What do you run a podcast? If you need to close more, I don't know. Probably not. You know, I'd focus like what's an ROI calculator. How can I work better with sales on, on those things?

So the. Reason that we did our podcast was, again, how do we. Educate, entertain, inform the market. And a huge gap that I found was that there are tons of influencers and thought leaders in the recruiting space, but there's no one company that you can really go to, to learn. I'm going to throw it back to HubSpot again.

When I started my career in marketing, I remember going to HubSpot. com. I wanted to learn about content marketing. I want to learn about demand marketing. I want to learn about how to write an email campaign. I never used HubSpot during those years, but I learned from them. I had strong brand awareness, familiarity, and I, I, I Recommended whenever people would ask me like, what's the best marketing software out there?

I'd say, go check out HubSpot. So same exact approach here at Loxo is we want to help build the next generation of recruiters, bring them up to speed with what modern recruitment looks like. And we have to do that through education, through showing them what's possible. And so that's where the podcast really comes into play because it's not even focused heavily on our product, but what are trending topics that we're seeing in the market?

What are best practices that we get into the tactics of and teach you how to do that? We have, um, thought leaders and, um, customers who are doing. Cool cutting edge, unique things, or some of the, just the top firms in the entire world. What makes them successful? I don't, I don't want to hear the story about how you're so great.

I want to hear about what it is that you and your team are doing that makes you so great. And so all this is teaching and education based, and that's what we're doing with the podcast. So we have to record the long form like you and I are doing here today. So we can get to those shorter form to create the micro videos that we distribute on LinkedIn.

Recruiters are all over LinkedIn. It makes it very easy. Yes. To get there, to write the blog post, to get the customer stories that sales uses, customer success uses, the list goes on and on. But you can't get to the short form media if you don't have that long form first. And so that's what we're really setting the stage for.

How do we build more brand awareness? How do we get this content that can help us tell the story and share a point of view that we want? I

Vikash: have so many follow up, follow up questions for that. So one of the, probably one of the most difficult parts, I think I've, I've, I remember listening to a couple of podcasts and it felt a little bit too sassy, right?

I don't want to name names and all that stuff, right? But. How do you find that balance? Right? Like, because on one side of the spectrum, there's always that urge to sort of like talk about like, especially if it is like really relevant to what you do, right? There's that a little bit of urge for you to talk about the product and maybe even how it, how you do it.

But that's not why you're creating the podcast, uh, also, right? So how do you find the balance or is it? Uh, strictly known, uh, when it comes to, you know, talking about the product.

Sam: Mm-Hmm. , we talk about our products. I, I, I'm not gonna lie and say that we don't, we don't do it heavily though, like it's only when it naturally ties in with what we're discussing.

But even then, I'd say it's, it's less than a half a percent of the total episode length. Like it might just be like, oh yeah, you can do this in lock, so if you wanna use it. But I also say, you can do this in any a TS if you really want to do it. But having familiar with the product, that's where I'll say like, Hey, you can do it in our product, you can do it anywhere else, whatever.

Where I find the balance is in the. Podcast album cover. We have our logo in the top left corner produced by lock. So at the end of the episode, we say, Hey, this is a production of locks. So if you liked it, check out our website to learn out more. But here's the thing about buyers today. They know that if you're a company, you're an individual and you're sharing this type of content in the B2B world.

If you're talking about a problem, you're probably the solution to it. You don't have to like, people are very smart, right? At the end of the day. So, um, People get it, you know, we're not going to be, I'm not going to be over here talking about medical devices. I don't know about medical devices. I'm not trying to sell you medical devices.

Like that's not something that I sell for. So it's that same exact concept where, you know, Sam keeps talking about ATS lot in a software. Sam keeps talking about finding the best candidates possible on his, on his podcast. Well, I bet we can probably help them do that if they were to go to use the software.

So that's the line where buyers are smart. And this is, I think just part of the ongoing movement in marketing in general is just stopping. To think that, you know, your buyers are a lot smarter than we realized. You don't have to send them to a demo page. Everyone's been trained to go to the top rate of a website.

There's a little button and whatever that button does, it's probably going to have you talk to sales or sign up for the product. Like we all know that. Right. So again, it's just, it's another. Psychology catching up with marketing, I guess, in the, it's 2024 now. Like that's, that's what we're really after there.

And that's how we do it.

Vikash: I love this. I was listening to an episode today morning and somebody was trying to coin the term event experience, right? The person on the other side said, I don't think this exists, but once. A product comes in and starts championing then it's going to catch on, right? It makes a lot of sense.

I would just say sweet. Um, So one of the other follow up questions that I had was championing this as a strategy, right? Like first off like you'll have to convince the leadership team Obviously the sales team is probably going to be behind ipad saying like hey, how are we going to drive? You know You know, more pipeline through podcast as a strategy, like what goes on, you know, behind the scenes, you know, for, for, for someone to sort of champion this as a strategy and say like, Hey, this is why we're doing this.

Yes. We have this team in mind and yes, these are the numbers that we see today, but. If we start doing podcast at the center of our, you know, our entire demand chain strategy, and we're going to distribute it like this. The problem I see a lot is there's no direct line to more demo requests, right? That's usually the problem, right?

How did you go about communicating this at Loxo?

Sam: Yeah. You mean attribution is a problem. People struggle with that in the B2B space. Who would have thought? Um, so how do we do it? We're a B2B company. We sell to B2B companies. Most B2B companies that want to start a podcast are also B2B company themselves.

Right? So here's what I did. I did this at Loxo. I also did it before when I was at Refined Labs, working with countless B2B startups, was get in a room, Zoom room, real room, whatever kind of room it is. CEO, CTO, head of sales, head of marketing, head of customer success, you know, leadership of a company.

And unless they're from the stone ages and you know, they have some money, they're buying software also for themselves. You know, you have to have your own CRM. You probably use something like gong. You probably have some type of data source. And so I look at the CEO, the head of sales, whoever's like the most skeptical.

And I say, Hey, what was the last, what was the last purchase you made for the company? What software was it? Call it HubSpot. Cool. So you bought HubSpot. How'd you find out about it? Like, what was the process to going into buying it? Well, you know, our, our marketing manager hadn't had learned about it. They were, they were discussing it internally.

I follow either CMO on LinkedIn. I listened to one of their podcasts. Um, you know, we did some research. They were on a video somewhere else. I'm in the community. This other CEO talks about, I'm like, huh, how many of those are showing up in your attribution software? None, but then I'd also go back to like.

Look at those things that you learned about them. How did your marketing manager, like, what was it that they were getting from them? They were learning. So it was blog content, customer stories, videos, whatever. You mentioned podcasts specifically. So you listened to a podcast, you watched a video that probably came from a podcast.

And that's what we're creating here is you have to have this foundation, this engine that's going to create all of that. From there, we work with sales to get it in front of the right people and everything else. That's usually when they start to have the aha moment as they're listing these things off that they're just like, we can't attribute it to it.

But then you ask them, because it gets them out of their CEO hat. And then to just like, What all had to occur for that to happen. And I, I completely cut out like 80 percent of it after the original research grade, but it proves the point, right. Of that's how a lot of buying committees and purchase decisions are made today.

Vikash: Makes sense. I guess indirectly you're also sort of like asking them to talk about their own experience while they were buying a tool. And. And we're just saying that, Hey, this is what you went through. We're also, we're going to repeat something very similar, right. And yeah, that makes, makes a lot of sense.

You spoke about getting these content pieces in front of the right people. Right. And you also briefly talked about, you know, creating blog posts and things like that as well, off of these podcast episodes, can you talk a little bit more in detail on like what goes on into. You know, distributing, you know, these content pieces, right?

Like this at the end of the day, people are not, they're not getting enough eyeballs on this, like, and your company. So yeah, I'm curious about how you go about distributing them.

Sam: Yeah. And that's honestly, I don't want to call it the chicken or the egg conversation, but just as you create the content doesn't mean that people are going to find it.

You can find the people, but if you don't have something to serve them, like you're stuck in a, in a predicament either way. So yeah, distribution is, is wildly important for getting that content out to the right people. So, I mean, there's a handful of different ways that you can go about it. We can go about it.

You know, you have your, your people. Paid distribution, paid social. Again, I mentioned earlier that recruiters are all over LinkedIn. Like if you sell to sales reps, if you sell to marketers, like LinkedIn is a very good channel. Not affiliated with them. I'm not saying go spend more money with them. It's just a very easy platform to, to get in front of them.

When I was working at Refine Labs, I love Chris Walker's term for this. He calls it, you know, it's like guaranteed distribution to your ICP. When you can pay to have whatever asset, whatever message you want in front of them. And so when you change the. The internal conversation or internal dialogue from, we need to get a lead from them right away too.

We just need to inform them or educate them right away. That's what you're doing with this podcast. And so, yeah, you have the paid mechanism where you can do it in that way. But again, like, what are you driving them to? Are you putting the video in feed? Are you driving to a blog post? Are you driving to a YouTube page?

Are you like, what is it that you want to do? That's where you have to figure out, okay, where, What's the medium that matches the channel best? And that's how you then have to work down like, okay, we have an audio of a podcast, but also a video of it. Do we create the snippets? Do we put the long form on YouTube?

Do we use something like chat GPT to pull a transcript and consent to condense it down to an 800 word blog post? Is it a guide? Is it a top 10 list? That's what you have to decide. That's where the marketer comes in. AI can't replace that. And that's why I always say like use different tools to your advantage, but that you stuff to think you have to have the strategy to know, like, how do you want to execute on all of that?

So, um, Yeah, distribute through paid search or sorry, paid social, um, organic. This is something that our, we have our CEO doing especially is people love to hear from the CEO. It's, it's an interesting psychological effect. I don't always know why they just put in. amount of weight into what this person says.

And so you've seen this in the rise in recent years of just the, it's like founder led marketing, right? When you get them to talk, when you get them to share their thoughts on the market, the product, the space, anything, people listen more than if it's a content marketing manager sharing it, if it's a BDR sharing it, a sales rep, cause they always know, like the sales rep, okay.

They're, they want to get quota. They want to hit their deals, whatever else, but with the CEO, it's, it's a different. Mindset that people go into it with. So that's where we take the same approach with our CEO that we do with our podcasts, educate, inform, entertain. People can see you are the CEO of this company.

They can guarantee you that unless it's a post showing a picture of your dog, you're probably going to be talking about the, the problem that you solve for. Right. And so that's, again, where we take, you know, we have our CEO on our podcast constantly and we create videos for him. We even, um, He loves to write.

He actually prefers to write over video format. So we help him come up with like, okay, what are different, um, you know, series that you want to come up with templates, themes. What are just some like thought starters that we can give you to help send you on your way of writing? Cause again, he's not, he's not a chat GPT person in the sense of like writing at all.

He likes to come, come from his head with it. So. We brainstorm with them. How do you want to deliver that message? And then usually those things are coming from podcast conversations. We have that he then puts into a Google sheet. And then when he, when he's thinking about something that makes sense, he's like, Ooh, this was a topic I wanted to cover, then he just goes and links to it and starts on his, on his tirade.

And then back to the paid side, thought leader ads, you can now promote that guaranteed distribution. So say your C only has 2000 followers. Well, that's a max of 2000 people. They're going to get in touch with and reality says you're probably only going to hit. 30 to 40 percent of those, if you're lucky.

Paid side, you can guarantee that to 200, 000, uh, 50, 000, however large your ICP is, you can pick and choose exactly who you want to see that message. So, um, that's the, I'll just like the paid social side playbook. You can always go search side. How do you optimize videos for YouTube shorts for YouTube itself?

Um, you can go into other channels if, if your audience spends a lot of time on Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Twitter. It's, it's all just at that point it's matching what's the preferred medium of the users on the platform and just translating it over to that and then follow the same exact process, organic, paid, what are the different levers?

How do we do it? But it's, it's almost rinse and repeat at that point.

Vikash: Amazing. One of the things that you brought up, right, your CEO being super active. The. Challenge personally, even personally for me has been, you know, to get a CEO, you know, to get, to be active on LinkedIn, right? Like, because he has like a bunch of things that he's juggling around every single day.

So yeah, I'm just curious how you managed to sort of like, uh, solve that problem.

Sam: Call it positive reinforcement. And you know, as a dog knows how to train a dog, knows what it's like to train a dog, go to the bathroom outside. Good dog. Here's the treat, you know, go sit. Here's the treat. Good dog. Do that with your CEO.

They're going to kill you. Don't call it positive reinforcement. Don't say that you're training them, but it's the same kind of process in the, they're not going to want to do it. They have a million things going on that they would rather be doing. Just say, Hey, let's test, let's show a couple examples of either other CEOs, leaders, founders that they respect, admire who are doing it.

And, and. What do you think about this? When you see it, would you like to do that and get them going that way? And then help them start posting a little bit. And the beauty of it is they're probably going to see pretty quickly. Their, their engagement's going to go stronger than others. And this is where the positive reinforcement side comes into play.

Look at this post you just shared. It did so well. Usually we only get 10 likes on a post. This had. 30 and it's only been up for six hours. That's crazy. Um, if you have self reported attribution and you'll start to see this where people will say, like, saw your CEO's posts on LinkedIn, featuring your CEO. I take screenshots of that and I share it with him on Slack as soon as they come in.

Just those little positive reinforcements. Cause you know, say he hasn't posted in a week and you send that. Usually later that day, post goes out. So little things like that go a long way because every CEO wants to drive business results. And that's what this is going for. And they're quickly seeing, Oh, I don't have to spend more money to do this.

I just have to share my thoughts. I just have to put a little time and effort into it. And this is going to generate real pipeline for us. Okay, cool. I'll do it. Very easy. So, um, doing those types of things go a very long way. And then, um, I'm not sure if your CEO still does any like founder led sales. Our CEO still is involved in some sales processes.

So when we started our podcast, I said, just watch in six months, you're going to have people get on demos with you who know your point of view, who know what you're going to say, who you don't have to sell to, but they're going to be like, I feel like I already know you. I feel like we've had conversations already.

And he's just like, that's crazy. That's not going to happen. I'm going to have to keep selling them. Six ish months later, I forget what exactly it was, but he's like, remember that conversation we had where you were saying that people are going to say, I feel like I know you already. And I'm, I'm going to get into this topic.

It's happening. And so that's another side effect where win rates become easier. You have people who you don't have to sell so much on the concept, like they're aligned with your point of view and your mission and what you want to accomplish. They want to come along for the ride instead of you have to try to pull them with you.

So that's where the beauty of it all comes into play where it's just, you know, share the wins with them. Let them see what happens in the long tail and then when that does happen, just reinforce it.

Vikash: Amazing. I'm going to make sure like my CEO doesn't see this episode because because of the positive reinforcement bit.

But the, I think the, the baby step that I tried personally and it failed miserably was me trying to write for him. And it, he was like, this is not how I write and this, like, yes, I get the essence of the message. Uh, but this is not how I write. And then he ended up rewriting the entire thing and he was like.

Dude, this took me one hour to write, right? Like, I'm, uh, I can't spend one hour every single day, right? And that's usually the pushback I've gotten. Was that the case for you as well, in the initial days? Oh yeah,

Sam: we went, we went through that exact thing, where we were just like, do you want us to guest write these for you, some of you?

Do you want us to give you, like, thought starters? And we did a couple of those on, as we said earlier, like, he likes to write, so we quickly found that The things that we gave him, he'd be like, I just want to make one small tweak and then 45 minutes later, he's just like, I rewrote the whole thing. So then we were like, do we just want to give you bullets that you can kind of go off of and riff?

Um, but in the end we were just like, here's the topic, here's 50 topics. Pick one, like when you want to go and do something, here's your idealist. Something's relevant. If something's timely, if something's top of mind. It'll jump out at you as you're scrolling through this for your ideas, but usually it's just helping them with that.

Like I getting over that idea slump, so to speak, by having that, that's usually just the direction that they need.

Vikash: Nice.

Sam: Amazing.

Vikash: Sam, I think one of the, at least in my head, how I'm seeing the entire, you know, this, this playbook, if I have to call it that, right, is at the end of the day, you're creating content pieces where you're sharing your thoughts, So I'm going to talk about how you should process your opinions on how you should solve this problem, right?

And a big piece of it is like, you know, because it's super easy to sort of like talk with people, you know, and record that and then, you know, repurposing that into different videos. Types of consequences, right? One piece that's still probably not very clear in my head at least is, you know, the trust factor, right?

Yes. I see my CEO. I see your CEO post regularly. I see you post regularly. I see, uh, Lex, who's part of a team also post regularly. Yes. I sort of understand who you folks are and what you, what you folks do, but At the end of the day, if I'm spending 10, 000 on, on software, I want to make sure that it really works, right?

Is there a way for you to sort of build that credibility and trust through this, you know, playbook? Or is that something that you probably shouldn't even try, uh, with a podcast at the center of a strategy?

Sam: Yeah, I think you can. Um, trust comes from Experience you you Trust that other people like gone through that have experienced it.

You can tell when someone's just kind of like regurgitating something else that they've seen by some influencer somewhere versus someone who has true, deep knowledge of what they're talking about. They understand the problem. If you ask them why, why again, and why a third time, and they can answer proficiently each time, you know, they've got the depth of knowledge with that.

And so that's what you can really do with the podcast. And why I do think there is a subtle shift in, um, in Eric Jacobson over at the Hatch team, he talks about this all the time. Um, you know, keep the credibility with yourselves, like have guests and everything else. But you also want to, if you're just having a podcast where all you do is interview other experts, what credibility is that giving you?

You're just the host, right? You're giving all the value to the other people and not say that you shouldn't, but there's a balance that you can strike where have those conversations, but also share your knowledge, share your experience and what you're seeing. And that's where like, we have our. We call them our CEO comes on and he talks about his point of view and his different lessons that he's learned.

And that comes through and like, that's what provides some of the trust because that's not just some CEO getting on and sharing platitudes about, you know, ATS is dead. The, this is dead. That's dead. You know, all these things, but you're able to hear when they explain why the deeper level, why the even deeper level, why, where it's going.

And. Tell that through a story in a, like that you can tell they've thought about it and they've really mapped out the pieces they've thought about, okay, this could branch in four different directions, which one should you take? Which one shouldn't you take? Which one might pan out? Which one won't pan out?

That's how you can build trust. And especially when you do it and say, you know, if it's like certain platforms that are what we do with our podcast, say this is the best practice that you should do. You can do it in lock. So you don't have to do it in lock. So you can do it in most of the other platforms, wherever you do it, just do it.

That's what we recommend. That's how you also build trust. Cause they're just like, Oh, like there's this, I don't know. It's a weird psychological thing where it's just like, that's nice of them. They're not trying to say like, and share only things that you can do with their product. They're trying to help the market as a whole.

So that's another thing that you can do to build trust in that way. It's just sharing, sharing things that aren't platform specific, but things that you've learned, experienced through. Unique scenarios that have popped up or, or anything else. And then share, how does that translate? If you use lock, so cool.

Here's how you can do it. If you don't use lock, so cool. Here's how you can do it. And that's a great way of doing, and then distribute wherever your audience is. I

Vikash: think one thing that really blew my mind and I just cannot understand how you're managing to put this off, but sounds like you have like two or three different, Kinds of podcasts running right and the ops behind it.

I Honestly, like I really wanted to understand like how you sort of like what's the process you have in the back back and you have Someone dedicated to sort of like recording. Sorry, you know transcribe all this edit all of this What's happening on the back back end because it's probably one of the most time consuming bit personally for me I'm not a I'm not great at editing You So, yeah, I'd love to, uh, get some tips on that.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. It's a multimillion dollar mechanism. A lot of time. It's easy. As I said, there's three of us on the marketing team. We don't have the time to do all that either. All right. So working, let's start with the show itself and then we'll work back into the logistics of it. When I intro our show, I say, Hey, this is Sam.

Welcome to another episode of becoming a hiring machine here. We have shows within the show. So I quickly set up the expectation of, okay. Overarching show is becoming a hiring machine in the show. We have episodes with industry thought leaders and, and other people who are shaking up the space. So that's our typical interview.

We have trending topic episodes. So that's a, something where Lex and I get on and we riff about. Things that recruiters are talking about. We have tactical Tuesday episodes, which are usually like five to 15 minute quick hitters, just something very tactical that you could do in lock. So, but you don't have to do in lock.

So I talk about things like that all the time. Um, we do mic drop episodes with Matt. Like I was talking about earlier, where I T him up on a certain subject and we just kind of riff back and forth. We do Q and a, where we just take listener questions, let them come on. And then every now and then, like if one of us is on another recruiting podcast or something else that we think would be helpful for our listeners.

We have a guest episode where we just pull that recording and put it on ours. So, um, we do that so we can cover a wide range of topics. We can cover a wide range of, of things that people like to listen to, because there's some people that are going to be earlier in their careers. They want the tactical stuff.

You also have, you know, founding members of executive search firms who were like, they're not in the day to day. They don't care how to, what's better to do a subject line test a B or this or that, like they want to know some of the things like what's Matt's vision on this or, uh, what's this other executive search leader who they just brought on for an interview doing.

So we set up the show so that it truly is appealing to our audience. And I call it like the choose your own adventure book. It's not sequential. You have to listen to episode one and episode two and episode three. We title each episode. So, you know, exactly what type of episode it is. And then what's the, what's the subject of it?

Is it an interview with someone? This is a covering this topic. Is it how to do X, Y, Z and two minutes. So, um, that's how we, how we've structured the podcast to be able to cover all that. And then getting into the management side of it. Lex and I just kind of map out. We, we do two episodes a week that we release every Tuesday.

We do a tactical Tuesday episode. That's a, uh, always going to happen. And then every Thursday we do one of the other types. And so we basically just kind of work out what do we want to cover over the next week, month, whatever, and then start to map that out. So like in August business development was a huge struggle for a lot of recruitment agencies.

So we said for August, let's just do an interview series and tactical. All on BizDev. So we brought in some of the best BizDev leaders in the SaaS space, cause they're still trying to solve for the same thing at the end of the day as recruiters. So had Jen Allen Newth on, had Kyle Coleman on, had Morgan Ingram on, you know, a handful of different leaders like this to share their experience.

Cause it all translates over. It's just, instead of talking to marketers or sales reps, you're talking to. Recruiters or hiring managers, same, same concept. So, um, really just structuring what do people care about right now and getting that into the podcast is the biggest thing. And then the recording, um, coordination, everything else, a lot of that is, is just done through myself.

So if there's specific people that we want to interview with, we don't have Set windows on when we record. We record every Wednesday at 12 o'clock. Like that's not how we operate. We just say, who do we want to have on this coordinator on their schedules? And then we can plan like it doesn't have to drop on this date, or if it does have to drop on a certain date, we plan out ahead of time, six, eight, 10 weeks ahead, so we can schedule it, get it recorded with the flexible calendars and then pushed over to production.

So Lex and I handle a lot of that. Um, I'll do. Research for the interview. If I'm the one that's hosting it, Lux will do research. If she's the one that's hosting the trending topics, whatever it is, make it a good conversation, because again, we're also there to learn. We're not trying to, yes, we're going to have our point of view that's nested within it, but the goal is like, if I was just listening to this podcast.

When you're listening and someone says something, you're just like, how'd they do that? Or why'd they do that? That's what we're asking in the conversation. We're not following this structured, you know, ask this question. Here's our answer. Ask this question. Here's their answer. It's, it's a natural conversation based around like, what would you want to learn or get out of it?

So that's how we follow those. We let conversation run as is. Um, Like you, you and I are recording here on Riverside. We use Riverside and then, um, partner with hatch. fm. So Eric Jacobson and his team over there are absolutely phenomenal and they do our audio post production. Um, so we record in here, give them the audio files, tell them, Hey, we swore during this one, beat those out.

You know, I, I blabbered on for too long in this section, cut this out, but, um, they're really great at that. And we have a, it's a two day turnaround where we drop the episode and you can work with them if you need to do more episodes, less episodes, fast, slow. They're, they're great with all of that. But we work with them to just figure out, okay, like I'm not good at audio editing.

I don't have the time to do audio editing. Let's get people who are great at audio editing. There's not AI tools that can come in and do some of this. I don't know what the future is. Hatch works great for us. It's affordable. I love working with their team. That's what we keep from there. So that's the audio side video side.

We have a freelancer who is, works exclusively with us to do all the video editing. So he takes the long form episodes, puts our branding on it, makes it look good. Clean it up. He does our micro episodes. He does our motion graphics. He does a lot of videography and other elements for us. So he takes these podcasts.

I just say, Hey, here's three clips that I want us to use. Here's the time sections for it. I just tell him when do I need it by. So again, there's, I think Riverside even has this now where they're starting to like magic clips and others, AI can't help with this. It just depends on how many resources do you want to put behind it?

What's your budget look like? What's the quality come out of it? What's your, what's your. Where's your bar set at, so to speak. So you can do this any, any number of ways. And then from there, you just have a podcast distribution platform. So we use Spreaker. It's completely free. Um, we just upload the, upload the episode to it.

It syndicates out to Apple podcasts, Spotify. We upload to YouTube. We cover all the main places. Um, It's not as, I want to say it's not as complicated as it thinks. A lot of people are scared and think that podcasting takes way more effort than it does. And honestly, like the post production isn't that hard.

If you have people who can do it, I mean, go to Fiverr, go to any of those. You can find people who can help with these, um, relatively affordably. The hardest part is coming up with like, what do we want to talk about? Why are we doing this? And, and sticking. So that is the reminder of like, why this podcast is even here in the first place.

Yeah, it's, so there's the fundamentals, right? It's amazing, right?

Vikash: Amazing. I think I have one last question from my end that I'd love to hear your take on. Uh, I think you, you talked about it a little bit when you spoke about attribution, but At the end of the day, I think you probably still have to say, share some form of a leading matrix saying that, Hey, this is working, right?

If you stay at this for long enough, consistent and be consistent at it, we, we will see results at end of say one month, two months, three months, whatever that horizon is, right? What are some of those say leading metrics that you look for, you know, to see if your strategy is working out?

Sam: So there's Brand Lift, Brand Growth, so you can go into Google Search Console, Google Analytics, wherever, and just look at like your branded terms.

Are people searching and coming into our website more when searching for Loxo? And this is going to show up in direct traffic, organic traffic, um, If you have product names, it's going to show up in those. And why that's important and not paid is paid as a function of spend. You can drive more traffic with that.

It's not cheating. It's just, it's a different way of pulling people in, but you're direct and organic. That means that you're either creating content or you're memorable enough where people are saying like, Oh yeah, Loxo solves this. I want to go straight over to them. So that's a great way to do it. Big fan of self reported attribution.

I've been doing this since our refined labs days, especially when you have so many different tactics and plays like us, where it's, it's unattributable in the sense that like, you can't have a cookie on a podcast, it's, you're not going to be able to pull something over from YouTube. So just asking like, how do people find out about us?

Cause that's where we hear all the time, you know, saw your CEO's post, listen to your podcast. I'm in a community and a peer recommended you. And even on my favorites now, and this is going to. Getting away from attribution, but like working as a true go to market team, we're starting to see like BDRs be mentioned.

And how'd you hear about us? AE's being mentioned. And how'd you hear about us? And that's exactly what we want. Cause what that means is that they're truly being like consultative partners and that they're saying, you know, recognize that you may not be. Buying right now, you don't have budget. You're in a contract for another 17 months.

You know, any number of reasons why people aren't actively in market, but they shared information, they built trust, they were able to do that. And either that prospect more often than not, they're just going to reply back to the AE and be like, Hey, I'm ready, ready to talk now. Let's go. But sometimes they just, they come to the website and they're just like, Oh yeah, I guess I am like, let's do it.

And then they'll just type in like, yeah, heard about you through Jim, heard about you through Susie, and they would talk about them in that way. So, um, yeah. It's just, it's a really cool mechanism to see, like, what is it that, that helps them. This isn't, again, to get all the credit for anything, but it's just to round out that picture of the untrackable.

Items and how they're coming into play. So yeah, it's a, it can be, it can be a messy one if you let it, but that's where I say, like, be, be data informed, not data driven data informed is where you, you have a data set, you look at it, but then you also have your intuition, your experiences that you've learned from, and you can marry those two instead of being so literal where it's just like, Oh, paid search.

We have to show up for this term all the time. Cause they, they have this one touch point in it and it misses, like, The podcast, talking to the peer, the video that they watch, like, that's where you have to really balance the two of them.

Vikash: Yeah. I think it's, it's that entire journey, right? Like I had a very similar experience with one of the tools that I recently bought, where BDL was constantly messaging me on email, LinkedIn, all these different platforms.

And he was like, he understood that I'm not ready to buy right now. But I, he was constantly looking at the posts that I was posting and he was saying like, Hey, it looks like you might have this problem. We wrote about this. That's good. Yeah. Uh, no strings attached, but I think this will actually be helpful for you.

And like you said, like, uh, I remember like almost six or eight months later, I thanked him. I responded to him saying that, Hey, I am at the market to buy right now. I don't want to go to the website and you know, uh, I might get round robin to somebody else. Right. Let me help you with your quota. Can we get on a call?

Right. And that's, that's exactly what I did. And we ended up buying the tool. Right. So yeah, I, I love that. Amazing. Cool. Sam, I learned a ton. Thanks. Thanks a lot for taking the time and coming on the podcast. One last question. Where can people find you apart from LinkedIn?

Sam: Yeah, apart from LinkedIn. That is where I spend my most time.

We've got the podcast, Becoming a Hiring Machine, if you're interested in recruiting and that nature. Our website, locso. co. And then I also have a sub stack, if anyone's ever interested in a little bit more long form. Written stuff that I come up with just sam Kuehnle. substack. com.

Vikash: Amazing. I definitely recommend subscribing to Sam's Substack.

I recently subscribed to it and I've been enjoying your content. So amazing. Once again, thanks. Thanks a lot, Sam. It's been great learning from your journey.

Sam: Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me on.

Ep08 - Using podcasts to drive pipeline in B2B

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