In the latest episode of 'Mastering Modern Selling,' we had the pleasure of hosting Matt Watson, the dynamic founder and CEO of Full Scale.
This discussion is a treasure trove of practical insights on leveraging personal branding and modern selling strategies effectively.
Key Insights from the Episode:
Matt Watson's insights from this episode of 'Mastering Modern Selling' are invaluable for anyone looking to sharpen their sales and marketing strategies in the digital age.
His success story is a testament to the power of personal branding and network leveraging in modern selling environments.
In the latest episode of 'Mastering Modern Selling,' we had the pleasure of hosting Matt Watson, the dynamic founder and CEO of Full Scale.
This discussion is a treasure trove of practical insights on leveraging personal branding and modern selling strategies effectively.
Key Insights from the Episode:
Matt Watson's insights from this episode of 'Mastering Modern Selling' are invaluable for anyone looking to sharpen their sales and marketing strategies in the digital age.
His success story is a testament to the power of personal branding and network leveraging in modern selling environments.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling relationships social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fistbump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller, carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of LeadSmart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive into business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape. This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fistbump.
Speaker 3:Brought to you by Fistbump, our other co-host today, Carson again, because unfortunately Microsoft is making him work. I think we're going to have to take that up somewhere along the line, but anyway, it sounds like he's on a pretty busy project today. But hey, Brandon, good to see you. And we have a really another, yet another amazing guest this week, the founder and CEO of Full Scale, Matt Watson. Matt, welcome.
Speaker 4:Hey guys, how's it going? Thanks for having me. No, this is going to, and I know.
Speaker 3:Brandon, I know you have some announcements we want to make here before we get started, but I am. You know, Matt and I were chatting before right. We have some weeks where we have experts and consultants and SMEs in the field, and then we have our case study weeks, which are where we actually get into the weeds of how somebody's actually applied some of these modern selling techniques, and this is definitely a case study week. So I am looking forward to it. All right, Brandon, I know you have a couple of announcements before we get started here.
Speaker 2:I do for everybody. Hey, we've got another we've got. We kicked off about a month ago with Carson, our modern prospecting series webinars, and we have another one tomorrow. I have the link. I'll get it thrown in the comments here in a second. But yeah, it's a Thursday at 11 AM and Mariana Lima is going to join me and we're talking about the post. I look, we know it's not Matt's going to join me and we're talking about the post. Look, we know it's not Matt's going to talk about this today too. We're not going to say you know, if you post it, they will come.
Speaker 2:But part of building your personal brand and having people know who you are and get that reputation is where do you post, how often do you post, what are you sharing? Where do you post, how often do you post, what are you sharing? And we're going to talk in the webinar about post over the last quarter, that the style and some little tips and tricks and strategies and that wonderful word hack that we've just discovered over the last quarter of what's really working well. So it's going to be very practical, very tactical. So we'll get that link put in and welcome anybody that wants to come If you register and you can't make it, you will get a link to the replay which we, like you better live so we can have Q&A. But you know, life happens, you're busy, so we'll take the replay if that works for you.
Speaker 3:I think that's our highlight.
Speaker 2:We can get to the good stuff now.
Speaker 3:Well, and speaking of live, if you are listening live, please jump into the chat. Let us know you're here, where you're. Take a minute, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know you're a four-time founder, long-time entrepreneur, but tell us a little bit about your background and kind of what's that, how that's led up to what you're doing now, and then we'll kind of jump into the modern selling strategies.
Speaker 4:You know I, so I also host a podcast and one of my favorite people ever interviewed on the podcast. I asked him the same question. I was like what do you do? And his answer is always my favorite. It's like just a guy looking for something to do and I feel like that's me. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, started my first company. I was like 22 years old. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was trying to help somebody do something right, I was just trying to help somebody and actually they were just trying to upload pictures to the internet. That was it and started a business. So been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I'm a technology guy, software developer by heart. But you know, see those evolutionary things, how people go through evolution. I went from you know software developer to cto entrepreneur, ceo of a tech company, to now a marketing guy. That was the evolution. So here I am it's a good evolution.
Speaker 2:I mean, the nice thing is you get to marketing, especially when you carry a ceo title. It's because business development is everything and messaging is everything positioning, positioning and branding.
Speaker 4:It's everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're going to talk about personal branding today, which you've done a great job with.
Speaker 4:So earlier I had a meeting with another startup founder who's a developer. He's a software developer by trade and we were having the same conversation about how years ago he hated marketing, hated everything about the marketing teams, like we'll build the technology, I don't care about the marketing. But then now, as a founder, he realizes, like marketing is everything. Like I can build this, but none of it matters if I can't sell it. Like so he's finally like the light bulb goes off eventually. Right, and you're like marketing is the most important thing.
Speaker 3:You mean, if you build it, they just won't come.
Speaker 2:I've tried that.
Speaker 2:It doesn't work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, one of the topics that we talk about, too, is the lens in which people look at LinkedIn, and I think it's the lens that we look at marketing in general, messaging and brand building, and a lot of times I think people want to throw that in a marketing bucket and let the marketing team go do their thing. But I always come back to the CEOs who go to events and they're well-known, they have a reputation, they walk around, they wave to people, they shake hands. A lot of people know them and what happens is doors open for everybody else on the team, whether it's sales trying to get somebody to come to the booth or sales trying to have a meeting with somebody. It's HR that's recruiting. When the CEO is active and has that networking mindset and reputation, it just opens up a lot of doors for everyone else on the team. And I know we're going to talk a bit about that today, which is why I'm so excited to have you on the show, which is why I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I've been posting on LinkedIn for the last couple of years and even before that, but really heavily the last couple of years. And it's totally bizarre how I can be like at Lowe's down the street, like going to the hardware store, and I see some guy I haven't seen in years and the first thing he says to me is like oh yeah, I read your stuff on LinkedIn every day. I'm like what? Well, yeah, I never, never heard from you in years, like, but you read my comments on LinkedIn every day. Okay, like you just never know who is reading all this stuff you put out there either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I had an experience a few weeks ago in an airport and I was like frantically working on sending out an email before I boarded the plane and they're doing last call. And I'm hurrying up and I get someone tap me on the shoulder and she said hey, and I looked up and it of course took me a minute. She goes from LinkedIn. And I said oh yeah, and I didn't totally recognize her right away, but we had a quick little talk. She's like oh yeah, I love your content. In fact, the company I'm going to visit right now I'm going to tell them about what you're doing. They need your stuff, they need what you're doing. Loved it.
Speaker 2:No comments, no likes but, consuming the content, and that's good top of mind activities for any of us.
Speaker 4:Well, I don't remember what the stats are, but about 90% of people, be it on Facebook, linkedin, any of these things will read the content. They will not like, they will not comment, they will not engage in any way. Right, it's only like 2% to 10% or something that will even like or comment and only like 1% of us actually create content.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 4:In any regularity.
Speaker 3:And there's a lot of people out there that are, as you said, observing, watching, if you want to call it that, and they're there and you have to trust that. And I know that's hard. Even the show that we're doing right now, we have no idea actually how many people are actually watching or listening Millions, Now. I assume it's millions, we assume it's millions. In fact, that's how we promote it, but we don't really know exactly. And I have two podcasts and it's very common for to go to a show, to be at a show or whatever, where somebody comes up and says, oh, I love that episode or I love that conversation. You had no idea they were ever listening on that. So you really have to trust that dark social is there and that people really are listening, but they are. It's like you just can't always look at all the attribution metrics to be able to figure that out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got Patrick in the comments saying that he reads your stuff every day. Matt, there you go, motivation. Keep it going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and greetings from Butch, one of our regulars, from Atlanta, saying he's stuck in traffic. Isn't that a shock, brandon?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I agree with Lance, I think it is probably more like billions. So I think Lance is actually right on track there. And then David, also from Georgia. Hopefully you're not stuck in traffic with Butch. But yeah, thanks for everybody for jumping in. If you have questions for Matt or for us, please put them in here and we'll do our best to answer them. So, so, matt, let's, let's go back and let's talk a little bit about your evolution right From and it's funny, I laughed. I was laughing when you were saying my background I graduated from college with a degree in computer science, thinking I was going to be a software engineer for my whole career, which lasted about two years. And once you get that sort of entrepreneurial bug, very quickly you realize that the software part of it is a very tiny piece of it and the business part of it is a big chunk of it. So tell us a little bit about you. Know how you sort of got into this world of marketing, modern selling, what you're doing, what the strategies are and kind of how it's working.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I had a company called Stackify that I started in 2012. And so sometime after that is when I really first started using LinkedIn and probably like some people, I was using bots to create LinkedIn connections basically, and so I was creating outbound LinkedIn connections to other software development managers, basically because that's who our target audience was. But I didn't really post on LinkedIn. I was mostly just doing the connections and hoping that somebody would randomly see my account and buy from us or whatever, and maybe I had a little bit of success with that, but I don't think it was much. I don't think it worked very well because it wasn't like a fully baked, like strategy, it was just like doing connections. So that's where I first started using it and then over we started Full Scale in 2018 with me and me and another gentleman originally started it, and it was a perfect example of the power of somebody's network and your network.
Speaker 4:So I was pretty well known here in Kansas City and the tech community, and when we started Full Scale, I started it for myself, but had enough people that I knew that said hey, matt, if this worked for you, I'm interested.
Speaker 4:How can we work with you? We hired 100 people in the next 12 months because of just my network, just the network locally, but also just randomly posting on LinkedIn about it and different things, it really blew up. The business took off all because of my networks, just people that I knew and people that knew of me and I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm going to a hundred percent say that was all because of LinkedIn, but it was just in general. Just just people knew me or knew of me, right, and knew that what we were doing and heard about it. But LinkedIn definitely helps amplify that Right and if and the bigger audience you have on LinkedIn, the more powerful that will be. But from the very beginning, linkedin has always been a huge part of our growth and posting on LinkedIn you know, every month, every week and now every day, has always helped us grow.
Speaker 3:So I want to touch on something real quick that you just said there, because I think it's really important, and your company, full Scale right, is providing staff development, staff and development. You know, staff augmentation for software engineers Is that the basic?
Speaker 4:Yep. So I have 300 employees in the Philippines that work for over 60 different companies, most of them in Kansas City, but not all doing staff augmentation now, just various types of software development. We actually have customers in Australia and different places too.
Speaker 3:But what I heard you say there is that that business kind of jump-started because you had a network right?
Speaker 4:You had people that knew, liked and trusted.
Speaker 3:You said, oh, if Matt's doing this, this is worth looking into, right. And then it moved from there. Had you not had that network, you would have been basically starting at ground zero. So you basically 100%. It was a springboard. Right 100%, right 100%.
Speaker 4:Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 4:So certain companies, especially products and services like what we, that we offer, are almost entirely sold based off trust and referrals.
Speaker 4:Right, like you know you guys like Tom, you have a tech company, and Brandon, yours is kind of a tech company too right, you guys probably get emails every day from some offshore company in India or wherever, trying to sell you software development services. You don't know these people, you've never heard of these people. You just wish they would stop emailing you, right? And so that is the difference of LinkedIn is being able to do thought leadership, build kind of a we'll call it a relationship with people, even if you don't talk to them every day, but, like, they read your content, they kind of know who you are, and that builds a little bit of a relationship, right, build some form of trust or like hey, at least I agree with this guy, I agree how they, how, how they do business, or whatever, right, and so there are so many types of businesses that trust and referrals are huge, and especially for my company, it's the number one way that we do sales.
Speaker 3:Well, it's interesting in the market that we're in for our software company, which is manufacturers and wholesale distributors. It's a very relationship driven market. It's very much built on trust, right, it's a very trust kind of just. It's long. A lot of these companies are hundreds of years, you know, a couple hundred years old, 100 years old family owned all of that. It's very based on trust. So anything that you can do to build that trust, that legitimacy and that credibility is obviously going to and, brandon, I know you see the same thing right. I mean clearly right In addition to people getting emails about, about development services all day long, you get emails all day long about marketing services and sales consult. I mean, we get those all day long.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean, I think, going back, one of the things you said, matt, which I try to emphasize with people all the time you said it was all about your network, and there's a very used saying maybe it's overused, but it's 100% true is that your network is your net worth and you're a great example of it in Kansas City and outside of it. And what I like about LinkedIn is the amplification effect. Right, as we said, you know you've got Patrick that reads your stuff every day. We got people out there that read the content that we produce, whether it's posts, it's newsletters, linkedin newsletters, it's regular newsletters, it's blog articles. We're constantly influencing people by creating content and being consistent. And I think the other thing and I'd love to hear you talk about this, matt is it's that consistency is really important.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of folks it's kind of like prospecting in general If you do, you pick up the phone and you call for a day and you don't get anywhere. You don't hang up and you say you don't say well, the phone doesn't work, let's try something new. It was a bad day, or it didn't work, or you didn't get the right people, or it was bad timing. I think with LinkedIn. It's that same effect that I think Mark Hunter said on our show a few weeks back this consistency creates the credibility We've got to keep showing up, we've got to keep being there. And then what happens is you get the inbound leads to come in. You get somebody that's like oh, I've been reading this, we're ready, can we talk? You're like wait, who are you?
Speaker 2:I've never seen you in the comments Never seen you like, but okay. I've never seen you in the comments, never seen you like, but okay. And then other times it's you know, you send out something a little bit more direct and say, hey, you know, this is what we've been doing and you share it. And they respond because they'll say things like oh yeah, let's talk. I feel like I already know you or I've been watching all your stuff. This really resonates with me. It's all those is. Carson says, anything we can do to increase our probability of success and what I like about LinkedIn, and we'll talk about podcasts and shows and everything else, but that consistency effect and the amplification effect. We're in front of so many people all the time and we just don't know exactly what's happening. But it's that combination of a little bit of passive post it and be consistent and then a whole lot of active make sure that we're targeting and trying to speak to the right people.
Speaker 4:Well, I think the consistency part of it, part of the key there is just being top of mind, right, you know, at any given time, you know, depending on the numbers, that say, okay, one to 5% of people, or whatever, are in market. They want to buy something today. Right, the rest of them are, are thinking about it, maybe the future, maybe they're never going to buy whatever, but it's usually a small percentage, right? So you've got to stay top of mind and so when they are ready, they're like, oh, I just had a meeting with my boss. He just said we really need to hire software developers. Like, oh, yeah, I read Matt's stuff every day, I'm top of mind to them. Like, oh, I'm going to reach out to Matt, right, versus, if I posted once and they haven't seen a message from me in three months, I probably don't remember who I am anymore.
Speaker 3:So let's hit a couple of these comments here. I think they're good and I want to get into more. Matt, you mentioned strategy. Right, let's really get down to some of the details of the strategy. I know you have a podcast. You have other things you're doing other than LinkedIn. I assume that one plus one plus one is more like five or six as they work together. But I want to hit a couple of these comments here.
Speaker 3:You know and Lance is saying the same thing, right Consistency is critical. You know, gamers are posting their schedule online, so they're showing that they're in a. It provides that trust and credibility. I think that is really really a key point. And again, you know Kathy saying the same thing right, people need to know you are real and often come to your LinkedIn to get to know you before they even want to meet you, and you don't know that they're necessarily on there. I mean, I guess you can. I guess you can if you have the premium, you can see who's there, but you are getting an idea of people coming to check you out.
Speaker 2:And it goes beyond the profile. You know, I think what Kathy said is very true and you get a profile and you learn about what you do and that's great. But the consistency and the different types of posts that we're sharing, let them get to see more of a holistic. I mean, we talk a lot about we're going to talk about this in the webinar tomorrow the value of selfie pictures, and I know they can be controversial because people are like, oh, that's Facebook. We don't do Facebook on LinkedIn, but what I found with it is selfies in different environments.
Speaker 2:You're at a client office, you're traveling, you're walking down the street, whatever. Songs are constantly bringing it back to sharing value in business, like, we talk about the think and what do you think? What do you observe, what do you feel? So, getting that, what it does is you're expressing a bit of who you are as a person, which is important. That's part of the know, like and trust. And then you're sharing. What are you observing in the industry? What are you learning from clients? What are you learning from prospects? What do you hear? Do you hear? Because, as I've said this on this show before, I learned this from Mrs Wilson in first grade. If you have a question, probably over half the class has the same question. They're just too shy to ask it. So put it out there and help everybody else out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally so. Matt, can you take us through a little bit about your strategy and your kind of your playbook on how you're doing some of these things? And are you using selfies and how are you finding with those? Are you doing video or or? You know, and not only that, but is it just you or do you have your team also, you know, involved?
Speaker 4:No, it's just me. I do all of it, which may seem crazy for those who follow me. Like this guy posts two or three times a day. How does he do all this? Yeah, it's just me. But I do use like a Papleo. For those who aren't familiar, it's like a really cool tool on LinkedIn to queue stuff up, so like I have a whole queue and queue up posts and use that to queue stuff up.
Speaker 4:But the strategy for me has changed. It continues to change and I would say, for those who are thinking about it, at some point in time you just start, and I think you start with the like you're just trying to make noise, even if it's not the greatest noise, even if it's not the most value. Just by making noise you'll have some success with it and you'll figure out how to iterate and get better at it. Right To me, it you Brandon. You were talking about like kind of personal brand and authenticity and all that kind of stuff. I think it's really important.
Speaker 4:People that do this that just seem very robotic and they don't seem like a real person. You know like it looks like Chad GPT is writing everything that they wrote, like people see right through that. Right, I think you want to be very authentic. I think you want to be a little vulnerable. You want to, you know, tell the tell the real story. Sometimes I post stuff that's a little, a little more opinionated or whatever. I just put it out there. But I think it's you want to seem authentic and you want to seem real and that's like one part of the strategy. You know, of multiple pieces to it.
Speaker 2:Matt, can you give us an example of that? Like I mean, you said you give an opinion like what type of an opinion or what type of content do you do to be real?
Speaker 4:Some of that is like more based on current events, like I think I posted the other day about I don't I don't see how the US government's going to ban TikTok, like we don't have a you know a firewall like China does, like it's going to be harder to accomplish that. So sometimes it's, you know, commenting about kind of events that are going on and things that relate relate to my experience or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's still tech related and you know, I think you know we can make an assumption that a vast majority of people that we're connected to use TikTok in some way, shape or form. They may not use it for business, but they use it and they know what it is. So I think it's totally relevant and I believe that sharing opinions like that on things that are, you know, they're kind of sort of in our industry, but what you're doing is sharing your thoughts, your opinions, and those are the types of conversations we would have with prospects or customers if we were having a beer with them or we're out on a golf course or at some sort of an event Like that's chit, chat type of stuff that we use to get to know each other. And we can put that out as part of our post as well and let people get to know us and get to know the way we think and the way that we act.
Speaker 4:Well, I think part of that is like people have to have an opinion and I think one of the if you're thinking about doing this, a lot of people are scared to put themselves out there. They're like I don't want to make people mad or, you know, people aren't going to agree with me or whatever, but some of you have to put yourself out there and you have to have an opinion. You're going to have some people that are going to love you and you're going to have some people that hate you and a lot of people that probably don't care either way. But you know, the ones that love you are the ones that are going to be your fans and you're more with and all that kind of stuff. Versus if you just put this very generic chat, gpt crap content out there, right? Nobody's gonna like you.
Speaker 2:so nobody's gonna know you're actually doing it worse no, no.
Speaker 4:So I think I think the the best type of content is agitation content.
Speaker 4:Okay, that is by far what works the best on linkedin and tiktok all of them, where you pick a topic where there's clearly like two sides, and you figure out how to have a kind of opinion about one side or the other, and then everybody else will come and debate in the comments about both sides, right.
Speaker 4:So you have to figure out how to like walk the fine line of like how to have an opinion, you know. But you know there's certain topics like that. If you understand your industry and you understand, like, what are kind of agitation, controversial topics, those drive huge engagement, and there's several of them that I'm well aware of for software development that if I post about, we'll get like tens of thousands of views and hundreds of likes and hundreds of comments or whatever, and you're not going to post about that stuff every day, though, but you can do that kind of research for whatever, whoever your target is, and figure out some of those types of topics. So we're talking about the strategy that this is like one of the strategies of the types of topics that you would want to consider.
Speaker 2:Matt, how do you go about there? Actually, before I ask that question, tom, you bring up Seth's comment. You know, just a little bit more support for the selfies, you know, and it's true, they show you're real, they show you're vulnerable and they show you in different places and I think, especially with so many people working from home, they see you out and about somewhere and there's kind of a draw to it of like, well, where are you, what are you doing? Are you in an airport? Where are you going? There's some human interests, human intrigue with those type of posts, this concept of hey, I want to do an agitated type post, and you're probably, every time you read, you're listening to podcasts, whatever you're, you're always kind of your brain's always kind of scouring for, oh, that could be a good, you know safe topic to go agitate some things. But how do you think about and how do you go about creating your post ideas?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think, first and foremost, inspiration is everywhere. If you're just looking for it, you know. I think hosting a podcast is a huge advantage because you get to talk to smart people. You know, a couple of times a week doing the podcast. So I have the startup hustle podcast is mine, and just like people listening to this or doing this, like we'll walk away with those like, oh, this was a great idea, this was a great tidbit, whatever, you can take those tidbits and then go create content around them, right, like it makes it really easy to see those inspirations.
Speaker 4:But I think I just kind of see inspiration all day long and different things, and the key is capturing it. You know, and that's why I use Tapleo is I can pull up on my phone and even just write like one sentence and save it as a draft in tableau, even if I don't finish it. I don't sit there for five minutes and try to make this perfect post, I just capture whatever the comment was. So no matter, you know, if you want to use a some kind of text file, whatever, what you know google doc, whatever it is you want to use, just capture those little inspirations and tidbits when you get them when you get those inspirations, just capture them and then figure out later like when you would post them. But the other thing that that helps me out is again doing the podcast, because if we release two podcasts a week, it's like, well, twice a week I have something to post about from the podcast alone and then I also write a newsletter or blog post. You know, one of the one of the easiest things to do as an executive, a thought leader, whatever is actually to create a blog post but actually create it more from video or as an outline. Ai is wickedly powerful these days for creating that kind of content where, for example, I took my kids to school the other day and while I'm driving I pull out my phone and I just use voice to text and I'm just literally speaking into my phone and it's writing it all as text in a giant text document and if you saw it it would look like garbage because there's no periods, there's no sentences, it's just garbage.
Speaker 4:But it was thought leadership on a certain topic. I took that. I give that to ChatG, gbt or Claude actually prefer Claude and tell it to write a blog post from it. And it writes a beautiful blog post because it is all my thought, thought leadership, but it, you know, creates something out of that that actually looks like a nice blog post. And then you can take that blog post and you could create a LinkedIn article from it, a LinkedIn newsletter from it. Or you can take that blog post and probably create two or three other LinkedIn posts from that, like what were the key points from the blog post, right? So if you're struggling with like what to post on LinkedIn, it could be like doing that other types of content can be really good and you can. What I just described you could also do in video. Just go record a video, record a video for one to two minutes, take the transcript and then go use AI to figure out okay, make, make something, make some sense out of this garbage I recorded.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll do a little shameless plug on on what we have at Fistbump, because I do that with. I use audio notes on my phone Better than for it's better than voice to text. But I'll use an audio note and then I'll download the transcript and I load it into my twin. So I'm constantly feeding my twin and for me, because it's verbal, I find that when I speak it's more natural, it's more me. No-transcript templates, but they're like structures of posts. I could even choose the type of structure I want for them and it writes it and it's my voice, it's my words. It's not just some random chat GPT, but I like that. I like that hack for people and I hate the word hack, but I find myself using it more and more a little cheat or a tool to make you more efficient.
Speaker 2:Whether you use what Matt said with text, voice to text, use an audio note, use a video, I think the key thing is just start talking, Hang up the phone on a call with somebody that's a prospect and start sharing. Hey, what was her challenge? What did? What were they? What did they need help with? That's great content because, again, going back, Mrs Wilson was always right. If one of your clients is having the problem. There's probably thousands of them out there that are having the same thing and when you start sharing that content, you become the source of that valuable information. Like David mentioned in here, provide value that's valuable to people who are dealing with their own challenges.
Speaker 4:Matt, if you're no go ahead, Sorry. Well, so going back to the strategy a little bit, when I use Tapleo, I use it for the scheduling right and in Tapleo, one of the things I like about it is you can have multiple types of content. So I have it set up to say, okay, I'm going to post about full scale twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday at this time I'm going to post about full scale, and then these days of the week at this time I'm going to post about this, you know, the podcast or the newsletter, whatever. So that's one of the other thing that's great about it is you can kind of create multiple cues it newsletter, whatever. So that's one of the other thing that's great about it is you can kind of create multiple cues. It's like so I have a cue about full scale related stuff, I have a cue about podcast related stuff, whatever. So you talk about like the strategy and like how do I have the right mix of the type of things I want to post about on LinkedIn or whatever? It's actually really helpful for that, and one of the things I did in April that I never really did before was recycling content, and for those who are thinking about doing any of this.
Speaker 4:You can 100% recycle content. If you can create like 50, 100, whatever pretty good things, you can recycle a lot of that stuff every quarter, every six months, whatever you want to do. And I took all of my best posts from last year and now I'm reposting, like the best, like 20 of them or something once a week and so far that's doing fantastic, because most, most people are not going to see whatever you posted 90 days ago anyways, or they have done, forgot about it, and so I'm recycling the content. And then that's the other thing people have got to think about is you can recycle content If you can come up with good content, figure out what works, and so I use things like Tapleo.
Speaker 4:Somebody just asked about that. It's T-A-P-L-I-O, T-A-P-L-I-O, Tapleocom. You know I went through its stats. It has all the stats of all my posts from last year. Export it to Excel, so in Excel document I can see all of my LinkedIn posts. Sort it by engagement views, all that kind of stuff, and then just go through and pick the ones I want to repost again and it works great. Recycling old content so that's once a week I recycle an old piece right now.
Speaker 2:That's in.
Speaker 2:And I like about that too is it takes the pressure off people.
Speaker 2:And we just had that conversation I can't remember yesterday or this morning with our internal team about recycling content for our customers, and the reality is, for all of us we're not that important, meaning people don't remember everything that we post and, as Matt just said, with the algorithm and people's schedules, most of the people that you're connected to didn't see it the first time anyways, they won't see it the second, they won't see it the third, maybe they see it the fifth. And so, yeah, I've created in my twin that I've got a post repurposer button. I can take one of my posts and go in there and say, can you rewrite this using my voice, and then I could choose a different structure to it if I want to. Sometimes I even pull the same picture because I'm in a hurry and I'll just use the same picture. Other times I'll go on my phone and I'll tap into all my photos and I'll find a new photo and add to it, and it just takes a lot of the pressure off, to be consistent. I like that yeah.
Speaker 4:Huge, huge fan, and somebody just commented about Claude. So Claude is the AI company from Anthropic which is a competitor to OpenAI and ChatGPT and, by the way, I really prefer Claude. It will also let you write longer content. So ChatGPT for those who aren't aware will only write up to like 600 words or something like that. If you want to write like a blog post or anything, claude can write much longer content. It also usually to me sounds less salesy, so I'm much more of a fan of Claude. And then I recommend a tool called TextCortex that you can go and makes it easier to build your personas, so I can build different personas into it and you can upload different knowledge bases to it to different things. I use AI a lot for writing All of our product marketing. We use a lot with AI, so all these tools are super helpful and can all help with you know, creating content that you can use on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I like about that, too, is it's their efficiency tools. And, matt, tell me if I'm wrong, I'm going to speak for you here, to the audience. Like none of us are saying, go use Clot or GPT and say, write a thought leadership article. For me it's your thoughts, it's your ideas, it's things that you have heard, you've talked about, you've shared before, and just let it help you craft it into the right format. Write it faster for you. We've always known that it's easier to edit something than to write it from scratch. So help yourself out, start from you, let it write it and then edit it, and it saves a ton of time and it prevents the whole I don't know what to write, and then, oh, I'll do it later. And then a week goes by and you haven't done anything.
Speaker 4:Well there's, there's a big difference between going to chat GPT or clot or whatever and and say write me a blog post about the top tips of how to sell with LinkedIn. It would give you some generic crap and it might be okay. But if you said, write me a blog post on that, but include this and this and this and this example and why this is good and why this is bad and whatever, and when you put those things in there, it can just be just very poorly written little notes, right, you just put like very poorly written, no grammar, all the spelling is wrong, all of it. But you just tell it include this, include this, include this, don't mention this, do include that. And then when it writes it, it'll include like all the key thoughts that you really wanted in there and it'll come out a hundred times better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great, that's good stuff.
Speaker 3:So, matt, I heard you said you post a couple of times a day, so 14, 15 times a week. Do you post on the weekend as well? So seven days a week, or?
Speaker 4:I do and I know some people are for or against that and over time I have not posted on Sundays or I've not posted on Saturdays. I've done different things. Actually, one of my posts that went the most viral I posted on a Sunday, so I don't know.
Speaker 3:Well, what was that stat Brandon from a couple of weeks ago about the number of executives that are on LinkedIn over the weekend? Yeah?
Speaker 2:it was a Harvard Business Review article and it was that C-suite will spend an average of about 42 minutes on LinkedIn over the weekend, so it's a good time to post things about your product, your service or your offering, because that's when they're looking at it.
Speaker 3:But going back to your 15 posts and I think this maybe helps people organize things it sounds like you've got a number of categories right. So you have podcast, you have what you call agitated content, which I like, that You've recycled content. So how many categories do you? Are? You having five, six, seven categories and then you're then organizing those to then figure out kind of the sequence of what goes where. I mean, I'm an engineer, that's the way I'm. I figure you think? The same way you know.
Speaker 4:So in TapLeo I have four different queues and obviously I'm probably a power user and I overcomplicate all this. For those who are thinking about doing it, you don't need to do any of this. You're going to have one queue and even LinkedIn has built in scheduling into it now. But if you want to take it to the next level right, you've been doing this for a few weeks or a few months you want to go to the next level? I mean, yeah, I absolutely recommend, want to do something that promotes my business and maybe the rest of the week it's, you know, more value content or thought leadership content or whatever. Trying to figure out the mix, right, that's where this, these kinds of tools, are helpful.
Speaker 3:So you have four cues and then those four cues basically feed the 15, 14, 15 posts every week.
Speaker 4:And it's a very inexact science.
Speaker 3:Right. But it does seem a lot easier to me to thinking I got to do 15 posts other than saying I've got four categories of stuff that I got to organize and especially recycling, maybe a couple. That really starts to make it much more less overwhelming.
Speaker 4:So I have some stuff scheduled all the way into July already because of I talk about like the recycled content. I had recycled personal content and I have recycled business content, like full scale related content that's already been rescheduled. So if so, if I go on vacation, worst case scenario that stuff will still still go.
Speaker 2:And what I like about that too for people to understand when you get your categories you have two, three, four, it doesn't matter you also start training yourself to think that way and, matt, as you said, you get to a point where you're looking for content, you're looking for post content and styles out there, and when you have your categories, it's like you're training your subconscious to be looking for content that fits those your categories. It's like you're training your subconscious to be looking for content that fits those different categories. It's a good way of like organizing the brain to be looking for opportunities to turn something into a post.
Speaker 4:I think the other thing that's really important is you want to have multiple types of content from the perspective of kind of top of the funnel, you know, or bottom of the funnel, and so the stuff that works the best is usually like weird satire or like some of the most random things are the ones that get a lot of views. They're not necessarily going to sell anything, right? So I had a post a couple months ago that 3 million views, three million impressions on LinkedIn which is absurdity. I had one a year ago that got a million. I'm like there's no way I will ever do a million again. And then this one did three million and it was like lightning in a bottle, like how to redo that again. I don't know Right, but that type of content helps expand your audience, right.
Speaker 2:So it's like you want content that kind of expands your audience, and then you want content that nurtures your audience. You kind of need both.
Speaker 4:What was a topic on the one that you said went viral. It was about. It was more humorous. It was a more humorous satirical post about software development related terms.
Speaker 2:Software development related terms, yeah, yeah, and I think you know it's one thing we forget is there's a perception overall like LinkedIn is for business, but the reality is business has never not been personal, like we have conversations about you know funny things in our industry or current events that are going on in our business conversations all the time, so they totally fit. It just feels weird for a lot of people to just post about it because it's not, you know, it's not business, but I think that's a really good example.
Speaker 4:I've also seen it be very tricky. So one of the other guys I follow does a really funny job. Every Friday he posts career-ending advice and it's satire. But he starts out the post that seems very serious, but he has some really bizarre idea that makes no sense. And you keep reading the post and you get to the end and you're like okay, it was all satire, I get it right. And if you follow him every Friday you pick up on the fact that he does this every Friday.
Speaker 4:I tried to do it once and people thought what I was saying like I really believed it and it was true. So I kind of I had lunch with somebody the next week Like I read your post last Friday or whatever, and I can't believe you believe this. Or if like no, it was supposed to be funny, dude, like it was satire, like so I think part my point is like sometimes you have to be careful because if you're posting something like that, like not everybody is going to take it quite the right way. So it depends on the execution of it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, and I think it goes back to your, your style with agitator content too. It's like some people are going to get it and they'll actually really like you more for it and they'll follow you more and pay attention more and other people. It may make them think twice about you, but that's part of business. We can't be for everybody all the time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I do think. No, I do think, matt, what you're saying, though, I could see, especially on the satire and things like that, right, if somebody doesn't read the whole post, they don't fully duplicate what you're really trying to say. They jump to a conclusion, right, I can see where that could in some cases be risky, so to speak. And I think, yeah, it's looking. You know the guy on Friday, right, people are expecting that, so they're going into it, maybe, looking for it, whereas if it comes out of the blue, maybe it's a little bit more. But on the other hand, per Brandon, right, it's like, maybe that's a good pattern interrupt, right, it's a good pattern, interrupt into how you're actually. I guess you just have to test it and see.
Speaker 2:Hey, matt, I just looked up at the time. I can't believe we're almost 45 minutes into this. This has been a great conversation. Before we go I'd like you to get to. You've talked, you've shared with me before that about 60% of the leads that come into full scale come through you Could you share a little bit about? We've talked a lot about posting content. We've talked about our personal brand. We've talked a lot about posting content.
Speaker 4:We've talked about our personal brand. How do you take this to the next level? What do you do as far as asking for conversations, booking meetings and telling people more specifically? Hey, it's like our goal was to be Mickey Mouse. It was to run around tell everybody about the magic, but we didn't deliver the magic. Like the team delivers all the magic right, and so even today, I actually try to stay out of sales conversations. I try and just post all the content and when somebody does shout to me, I may chat with them a little bit, but I'll be like, hey, please schedule a meeting with our team, and I give them a link to our website schedule a meeting. I actually try and stay out of the loop If I can. I'm trying to hand everything off to the sales team and be more focused on the marketing. How do we scale? It is a good question, so it's already scaling, naturally, a little bit. You know, 18 months ago I had 15,000 followers. Now I have 45,000 followers on LinkedIn, so it is scaling that from that perspective. But I'm also using thought leadership ads on LinkedIn and I highly recommend those as well.
Speaker 4:That's something new to LinkedIn over the last year or so that you couldn't do before you know. So normally if you scrolling through LinkedIn and you see what very clearly looks like an ad, you'll scroll right by it. But if it, if it says it's from Matt Watson and it just looks like a post, you may read it and you don't even realize it's actually a promoted ad. It'll say in real small print, promoted by full scale. But those work extremely, extremely well. And so we're we're running um ads, thought leader ads, and I actually had a call today with LinkedIn. I have a monthly call with LinkedIn every month about our attic ads account and stuff, and so trying to scale it with that as well. And those ads are also driving a lot of new followers. So a lot of the new followers I get are not just more organic, they're from the paid. So that's another way to continue to grow. Your reach is through those paid thought leader ads.
Speaker 3:And just to be clear, right, the thought leadership ads allows you to promote something from your personal page, correct?
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 3:Whereas the traditional LinkedIn ad, you have to do everything off of your business page. So this is the first time that I'm aware of that LinkedIn allows you to actually pay to promote something on a personal page versus a business page.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I and I tried last month. I've been doing the thought leader ads. I tried promoting one of full skills at like posts instead and the cost per click and everything on it was like 10 times higher than my personal one. Interesting. I really recommend the thought leadership ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's logical to me too. I think people like to connect with people and what they have to say, and there's a scary factor for people in connecting with a company. It's like if I do this, I'm going to start getting sold, and people don't want to get sold.
Speaker 4:And a lot of the people that our sales team talks to. They'll they hear from the hear from people all the time Like, oh yeah, I followed Matt on LinkedIn or blah, blah, blah. I don't know any of these people, they aren't people that I even talk to, but they're talking to our sales team right, it's not like I even had like a real relationship with these people, but they mentioned to the sales team like, oh, I followed, you know, your CEO on LinkedIn or whatever, and so, yeah, it's amazing how well it works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's good stuff.
Speaker 3:Okay, before we wrap up, I'll just hit Benjamin's question here. He's asking about you know, basically prompts, right? How do you structure your prompt on cloud or chat GPT? Obviously, the prompt is going to be different based on what you're asking and what you're looking at to do. But is there anything math that you include in the prompt, like in any context about you know how you want it to talk, how you want it to speak, how you want it to present any just quick? You know suggestions that might jump out that help to provide a more solid prompt.
Speaker 4:I definitely do, and one of the things you can do is take a bunch of your own writing style be it LinkedIn, post or blogs, and you can feed it into Claude or chat to BT and ask it like please describe my writing style, and then you can use that to like feedback into the prompt and that that is helpful. I also use it, for example, with our transcripts from our podcast, and so I have to put in there like hey, don't refer to Matt Watson in the third person form. I am Matt Watson, right? So, depending on what you're trying to do, you know how you tweak all those prompts. Is is important, benjamin. I'm happy, to happy to send you an example of one of my prompts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would add to that too, benjamin, using transcripts from customer conversations. I'm going to make the assumption, benjamin, you're in sales, taking transcripts from customer conversations and using those, and then the prompts are really just thinking about what do you want to communicate, how do you want it to feel? We built in LinkedIn to fist bump. We've got some settings that you can set about how formal you want it to, how informal do you want, and things like that. But all of those are just they're prompts. We just turned them into buttons. But just think through your own style. And then the nice thing is, you can run it, you can read it and then you can give it more direction. Go, you know I really like this and this, but can you make it this way or that way or those types of things? It's just giving it personal direction, so it sounds more like you. Benjamin, on OpenText, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3:All right. Well, this has been great, Matt, Really, really, really. I knew, Brandon, we were going to have a case study tactical episode. I think Matt lived up to the expectation Absolutely, Really good stuff. You know, I just want to summarize, right and Brandon, we talk about this all the time, but I think Matt nailed it. If you really want to create this flywheel and I really believe, to summarize, right and Brandon, we talk about this all the time, but I think Matt nailed it If you really want to create this flywheel and I really believe, Matt, you've got the flywheel going, which is the ingredients are using the podcast, using the live show or the podcast, using LinkedIn, repurposing that content and then supplementing that and even further amplifying it with the paid strategy right On top of all of that.
Speaker 3:That really gets you know, Brandon, we talk about this all the time the flywheel going, and it's not just any one thing, it's the things together that really start to create that momentum, especially if the prices are better than what you're going to pay on traditional LinkedIn apps. You know, you can invest a little bit of money and probably get even quite a bit of amplification off of that as well. So, kind of taking those ingredients together. It aligns perfectly with a lot of the stuff Brandon, we talk about each week, and what Fistbump does, and everything else Absolutely Well, Matt, I knew you were going to be a great guest.
Speaker 2:You're going to have great content for everybody. I love how tactical and practical it was and it looks like from the comments it was valuable for people and I'm sure people on the podcast and replays will really find it valuable too. Matt, before we go, do you want to let everyone know where they can find you? Obviously, LinkedIn.
Speaker 4:On LinkedIn. Yeah, just look up Matt Watson on LinkedIn. Yeah, startup Hustle is my podcast, so we primarily interview other tech entrepreneurs. That's at startuphustlexyz and I have a newsletter about 20,000 people that subscribe to the newsletter. You can subscribe to that too. Yeah, benjamin, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Glad to respond to you, all right.
Speaker 2:Benjamin, I'm here as a resource too. I think we're already connected, and Jason and I have been talking as well, so if there's anything I can do for you too, please ping me.
Speaker 3:All right, brandon, you want to wrap this up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, hey, another, another great episode. Matt, thank you so much for bringing all of that to us and taking time out of your day, and for everybody, thanks for joining us. And another plug our webinar is tomorrow. If you're listening to this, we we're doing one to two a month right now. Our next one is going to be great Tomorrow's with Mariana Lima and the next one on May 22nd is with Mark Hunter. Mark always brings great stuff, so I'm really excited for that one. But hey, carson's not here to tell everybody happy modern selling. So thanks for joining us everybody, and we'll see you next time on Mastering Modern Selling.
Speaker 3:Thanks everybody.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us today on Mastering Modern Selling. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe for more insights, connect with us on social media and leave a review to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fistbump and our concierge service at GetFistbumpscom. Mastering modern revenue creation with Fistbump, where relationships, social and AI meet in the buyer-centric age.