Transcription
Hey hey. Hello everyone. It’s Friday once again. I’m Stuart Pet Turner and this is the Flow State podcast. Welcome back if you’ve listened before. Welcome for the first time if it is your first time. Um, today just a bit of full warning. Um, my parents are visiting at the moment and my partner has decided to uh, do some DIY dog hairdressing. So you may hear the um, comments of the audience slash the traumatic home hairdressing of one of our two relatively high-maintenance dogs in the background. So if you do hear weird noises, that is likely to be what it is. Um, if you’re really keen, I will post the results if anyone wants to see it. So just, just FYI, that’s what’s happening around around me um, today.
So um, on that note, related, what I wanted to talk about today was the simple power of our human animal instincts and how you can use those things to address the many challenges that we are facing in both the digital industry at work, just with sort of life in general around that, to be perfectly honest.
Now you might be thinking, hm, this sounds like a bit of a leap away from the core themes of the series. Uh, and I would challenge that thinking because have you listened to the previous three episodes? No. Well, if you had, you would know that they’ve all been leading up to something similar to this. Um, so go back and have a listen if you haven’t listened or watched. Um, but look, the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because I met with um, some of my team who are the most, the most locally based, who are who are in Sydney uh, yesterday and we were all chatting about the sort of, you know, the simple, you know, satisfaction of a bit of human connection.
Now as you are very well aware, I’m sure, like the nature of white collar computer-based work uh, was forever changed in the dark times that we no longer speak of, the co times. Um, because we all got forced to work from home and some of it, like I’d been working remotely for quite a while before that. So it wasn’t really uh, anything new to me, but obviously it was quite a dramatic change to a lot of people to be forced to turn your home into your workspace and the sort of mental changes that that, you know, that that triggers. You maybe aren’t aware of it, right, but you’re bringing together two very different states of mind and states of being. Um, and your home is talking about, you know, animal brain stuff, right? Your home is your sort of safe space that you retreat back to to push away the the concerns and worries of the world, right. And a lot of people during that time found that the um, the stuff that you would normally compartmentalize and leave at the office is suddenly invading your house and your laptop and your phone, uh, and you can’t turn it off, and that’s not great, right, mentally.
Um, so the reason that we got chatting about this was because um, obviously a lot of my team are, you know, either fractional, as as the kids like to call it today, um, or just, you know, on demand, like we all, we bring people in based on their, you know, their skills and and t he work that they want to do. Um, and that’s how we’ve pulled our team together. Um, so, you know, we don’t have to get together a lot, which is why I try and make the effort to get together with everyone that I can when I can. But we were just chatting about, you know, what is, what is valuable to do together now? Like why, why would you bring everyone together? Like, you know, obviously you can get together and have lunch and have a chat or whatever, but it’s nice to um, have more control over the hows and whys of being in the same place together um, instead of being forced there.
Um, but I think we’ve, you know, from a lot of my conversations, people feel like we’ve sort of flipped, the pendulum swung too far the other way to to remote, right. Where like so much of of my work, and probably yours if you’re listening to this, um, being a digital person is online. Um, and the challenge with all of the online stuff is it’s all become very low effort, low commitment, right. And like I don’t necessarily blame—well, I do blame some people for that, but I think I don’t think you can blame yourselves, right? Because again, triggered by COVID, everybody’s, you know, just became mad for like webinars and online stuff because that was the only way that you could, you could engage people. And in the industries I’m working in now, in like B2B, um, people have always loved webinars and events, but the problem with them is it just creates this whole like, you know, it’s very low commitment and low thought around it. So like I’m guilty of this as well, right? You’ll be like, yeah, register for a webinar, it comes around, I’m a bit busy, I can’t be asked, I just, you know, I won’t turn up, whatever, they’re not going to miss me because they’re all recorded. Um, and the mindset is just like, you know, whatever, I’ll just watch the recording, which I then, you know, nine times out of 10, just don’t bother watching it either. So like there’s a lot of effort that goes into putting these things on and the actual sort of end result of them, um, I would suggest is way sort of, you know, poorer than people are reporting back.
Um, and that, you know, that kind of leads me around to what we were talking about, right? Where we’re like, we, you know, obviously are doing all our own outreach, our own growth. We run our own program for Flow State to run all of our outreach and we inevitably have to use digital channels as the way to introduce ourselves, which is what this is all about. It’s what all of our outreach is about. Um, but the mindset that we are battling currently is that one. It’s like you receive a message from some, you know, British rando in a jellyfish t-shirt and you’re like, who the hell is this guy, what’s he trying to sell me? Because I get all this stuff, right? It’s like just low-effort, high-volume, spammy crap that is directed at me. And like I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time and I’ve been working pretty actively with LinkedIn as a channel for the past maybe even eight or nine years now. And over the course of that time, I’ve noticed a lot of amusing trends.
Like when I’ve changed my job title various times, you get different types of spam coming at you, right? So like currently mine’s like managing director and founder. So I get loads of crap fake agency spam. People trying to sell me creative services, people trying to tell me they can book me seven to 10 qualified appointments for six figure businesses a week. And I’m like, “Fucking no. All of you, no.”. Um, pe—real people, I’m happy to entertain, right, but nine times out of 10, this is just some, you know, fake profile rubbish. Um, but the problem for me now is like, you know, we—that’s what I’m fighting, right? I’m trying to engage with people in as real a way as possible within the um, constraints of the medium, like which is pretty lame, right? You know, it’s like you can send some rubbish characters. Like I’ve done a lot of like sending video intros, but sometimes people think that’s a bit weird because, weirdly, they’d—they hate getting spammy messages, but they’d rather get a spammy message than watch a video. Like these are all the the challenging and fun human behaviors that you have to work around. Uh, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve come to actually quite enjoy the uh, the game because it’s fun. Um, and then when you do break through and people like, “Oh, you are a real person and you did really want to talk to me about something,” it’s much more satisfying, right?
But um, I think the um, the point I’m making here is like, you know, a lot of people, as I was saying in the the previous couple of episodes and some of the previous conversations, are letting uh, the software or the tools drive their thinking. Whereas a lot of our strategic decision making, the entire sort of concept of this business and the way that we have put all of our solutions together, is actually just to sit back and be like, do you know what? Exactly as I’ve just said to all of you, if you were sitting back and being like, is LinkedIn good, you know, just as a person, is the experience good to me? Largely no, is not, right? Because people are just running around doing all the poor rubbish stuff um, that nobody likes. But ironically, that then makes it easy if you are being more genuine and, you know, just actually putting the effort in, to break through.
So like I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing. I just think that it’s weird that so many people are so wrapped up in like the numbers and the scale and like, you know, staying on trend with the uh, the theme of this particular series, you know, AI, right, is allowing unprecedented scaling of spammy low-effort rubbish, right? Now it’s actually quite easy to just do like 10 really important things now instead of doing a thousand massively unimportant things and then being like, oh, but I did a thousand things. You’re like, well, yeah, so what? What does that actually generate for you? Like nothing, right? Um, and I was saying this yesterday to my colleague Ross when I met with him, right, where we—Flow State is not built to be a huge millions of clients business, right? We work with a small handful of clients and we do like bigger work and we want to have deeper relationships. So the, you know, sniper style approach—well, let’s not say sniper—let’s say the well-thought out and, you know, sort of effort-filled approach we’ve taken to researching people that we want to talk to has paid dividends, right? Because we’ve worked with probably six or seven um, big clients and accounts over the course of the last, you know, four and a half years. Um, and that’s exactly what we were aiming to do when we started the business. So like we didn’t need any of the scaled rubbish to do that. It’s just been all me and two or three other people have driven all of that, and we’ve just been careful and methodical and, you know, thought through everything that we’re doing. So like I’m not just trying to, you know, big myself up here, which is maybe a bit what it sounds like, but like the—this methodology works for everyone no matter the size of the business.
And that is what we do for everybody, right? Like we’re like, “No, you don’t need to spend $100,000 on paid advertising to achieve massive results, right? What you need to do is talk to your team and enable your team um, and spend money in the areas that it makes sense to.”. Uh, and as several huge brands demonstrated, probably going back longer than I um, would quote off the cuff, right, like you can just turn off all your advertising and generate the same results. Like everyone’s just trapped in this mindset that’s directly driven by other people’s agendas. Um, which is what I kind of covered in a couple of previous episodes, right? It’s like, you know, LinkedIn, they want you to spend time on LinkedIn. They’re in the the Facebookification has been ongoing for ages, right? Where like you’ll see in your notifications, it’ll be like, “Oh, is this directly related to me? Oh no, LinkedIn are just saying that some rando that I’ve never seen has posted something like brilliant, or oh, you might be interested in reading this garbage that someone’s put on here that’s just obviously clearly like AI generated,” and like you’re like, no, I’m not interested, right?
Um, so anyway, point of all that is think about your experience as a human person of the internet, think about what you like to receive and how you like to be treated, think about whether you’re actually really doing that in your sales and marketing and any sort of growth related activities. And then if, if you’re not doing that and you’re letting tools or vendors or, you know, people with other agendas than yours tell you how to run your communications and growth activities, it might perhaps be time to rethink your strategy. If you run on the calendar year, right out, don’t just feel like you need to keep spending and keep doing what you’ve been doing because of numbers and charts and blah blah blah. Like have an actual think about what those numbers and charts and blah blah blah are actually doing. Um, are they actually generating real revenue? Are they generating really meaningful relationships with your customers? Are they actually generating the leading indicators that lead to meaningful relationships with your customers?
I would confidently go out and say that probably at least 50% of what you’re doing is not really contributing anything significant to the growth effort of the business. Um, and I would challenge people who are in these roles to sit down and instead of thinking, what else could we be doing, how could we be doing more, how can we spend more money, think about what you could cut back on and reinvest into much more meaningful activities. Whether that is digital outreach, digital growth, whatever, or whether it’s internal stuff, like how do we just spend more time together as a team and then achieve more, maybe without spending money? Crazy, I know.
Um, and look, the other things that we touched on that were very relevant were um, that I found quite funny was, you know, just the general sort of continued lack of consistency and communication across even just like digital teams, right? Like channels are running isolation. No one’s talking to anyone. Things aren’t getting centralized in one sort of main um, platform or reporting repository. Um, all these challenges that we’ve been talking about getting on now for two or three years are still here, people are still doing them. And do you know why they’re doing them? That’s all like human animal stuff, right? Because their job is not to pull all this stuff together. Their job is to do this bit here. And there’s nobody in these these brands in a position um, to draw it all together because, you know, their jobs are something else as well.
Um, anyway, the reason this is all really top of mind is because um, you may or may not be aware, but um, you know, the stress and uh, sort of high level anxiety of running one company was not enough for me. So I’m actually doing another one as well, um, Catalysis, which is been, you know, secretly in concepting for a bit. Um, and the specific example that I wanted to give, just following everything that I just um, run through about how the power of just human thinking um, led me to where I am right now from four, fourish years ago when I started Flow State, um, is is a very simple one. I think it like illustrates a few of those points I was making.
So my business partner Eve Chen, who if you do not follow, you should, um, because she writes loads of awesome stuff uh, around ABX account-based experience, right? She’s an account-based marketing genius who’s based over in Denver. We’ve been um, talking and sort of chatting like probably for getting on for like over two years now, and then we officially sort of started this other business um, from those conversations, but we’ve never met in real life because I’m based here. She’s an expat in the US. There’s been no real sort of reason to get together yet because all the money and effort’s been going into um, you know, putting together this this new business so far. So we’re like, well, why would we spend a load of money to fly between our two countries um, if they would even let me into America at the moment, you know, with with my suspicious attitudes about everything? Um, you know, like we, we were like, look, we’ll just, we’ll just carry on. But I actually met Eve um, through LinkedIn um, because we got a mutual connection um, lady called Jade who works at F5. We both kind of know her. We were like, you know, I think we were commenting on something that somebody had posted between the three of us and then got chatting and we’re like, oh, we’ve actually been thinking about a really similar sort of con—conceptual approach to um, deploying our, you know, domain expertise into technology, building a sort of supported um, technology plus process plus people expertise solution. That was where it all started. And then from there, it just all kind of all evolved, which is awesome, right?
But that, you know, that’s the perfect example of kind of the flows concept, right? It’s like the digital intro, meaningful discussions, eyeball each other virtually, see whether we get on, you know, do we agree, whatever. Then we’ve just sort of proven to each other over the course of that period that we’re we’re trustworthy and, you know, we’re happy to work together and we’ve, here we are, you know, getting ready to bring this out to the world, this second business. Um, but interestingly, the bit that was missing that I previously would have relied on there was like, you know, we’ve never met in person. Normally you’d meet someone and get a feel for them through your, you know, sort of miscellaneous subconscious sensing of whether you get a good vibe from somebody or not. Um, which is really hard to like I don’t think is replaceable by online solutions at present because I just don’t think technology gives you a tangible enough experience of speaking to someone else online um, that you need to make those calls. Um, and that’s just because it’s all screens and boxes and stuff, right? Which is not like, not like how we like to engage each other in person.
Um, so that was where we started. But again, because we’re, you know, we’re now prepping to run another growth process for another business, we’ve obviously been doing a lot of other stuff that I can’t really talk about at the moment. Um, in order to start to build our networks into other areas where you need to demonstrate trust and credibility and like all this other stuff to new groups of people. Um, and going back to what I was saying, you know, we’ve, we’ve been challenging ourselves to think about how we, how we do that classic startup style on, you know, we’re self-funding everything at the moment. How do we do that in a really effective way because we don’t have tons of money to drop at this at the moment?
Um, and it just means that we’re all very much in that mindset, right? You get a good sense of um, you know, when you’re running your own growth process, the the sort of daily experience of casual rejection from strangers becomes a very, very uh, you know, common experience and you get used to it quite quickly. And I actually think that’s where a lot of uh, startup businesses kind of fall down because people just can’t, can’t take it. Like they just, you know, it’s, it, you know, doesn’t feel great when people are just like, “No, can’t be bothered. Don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say.”. Um, but like I was saying earlier, I just treat that as a bit of a challenge to say like, well, you know, obviously I haven’t, you know, I haven’t done the initial intro in the right way. We have, it’s the wrong time. We pitched him in the wrong channel. You know, our initial why we should talk. Like it’s all just about breaking out that whole how you start relationships process.
Now I’ve got a lot of respect for anyone who’s got a career in sales from my time in B2B because I used to dismiss this as like, you know, when I was purely a digital guy, you’d be like, “Sales people, what do they even do?”. And then moving over to B2B, away from the, you know, the very simple and easy bun fight of B2C marketing, like you just get a real different sense of the whole complexity and challenging nature of the human side of uh, of marketing and and selling stuff. Um, and like with the the kind of technology businesses we work with, that’s even more challenging, right? Because nobody needs those solutions and often there’s huge risk associated with changing that solution. So the the requirements for like trust and proving the concepts and stuff are so much higher, like the barrier to entry and the friction in the sales process is so much higher. Um, so yeah, you know, great work anyone who’s in BD, sales, whatever, like you’re doing a good typically very thankless job where you just get, you know, doors slammed in your face left, right, and center.
So look, you’re probably thinking, well, what the hell does all this have to do with like how you make better decisions in in digital or in your marketing? The general line of thinking in my experience—and I’m going back to all of my B2C stuff as well, like, you know, way back to the early days—what has happened is a lot of people that are in marketing roles or sales roles or any anyone who’s in a growth ro, right, that uses a lot of digital channels, huge amounts of their thinking and strategy, in inverted commas if you are only listening, is driven by the people who are trying to take your money and marking their own homework.
Now what I mean by that—and this was a big thing that we used to contend with when I was spending huge amounts of other people’s money at Group M—is like Google, Facebook or Meta now, whatever, any of these advertising platforms, any um, advertising technology, any marketing technology, right? All they do, as you well know if you’re in this kind of job, is they give you their own tracking tags, they give you their own metrics, they give you their own recommendations about how to spend your money. And now they give you products that optimize your campaigns for you in a way allegedly that makes them perform better, all based on their own tracking and their own metrics and their idea of how you should spend your money.
So just sit down and have a think about that and think about all the channels that you’re running in right now and think about whether you are running things that are aligned with your business goals and your business objectives or if you are running things that are aligned with your technology vendor’s goals and objectives, i.e. How do we spend more of your money? What I see a lot recently is a lot of people still doing the old, “oh, let’s quick pull a report from the ad console. What does it say? Oh, it says everything’s great,” or “it says it’s crap. We should spend more money.”. That is literally the recommendation from any advertising platform.
And the most insidious one recently is like, you know, like with PMAX that everyone’s been obsessing with from Google. “Oh, don’t, don’t worry guys. Let us, let us optimize it. We’ll build your ads for you. We, we’ll do it all for you.”. And LinkedIn have launched one as well. It’s like, “oh no, don’t worry. We’ve got our own AI model. We can, we can train it to spend your money better and and get better results.”. And you’re like, you as a marketing person should be sitting down and thinking, “no, no, you won’t. I will optimize my campaigns around my objectives,” right?
Um, and then the next bit of that, right, is like you should be connecting those directly to people accounts and people. So if this isn’t all being tracked back to effort towards companies that you’re trying to engage and win, or efforts towards contacts and pushing and building those relationships. The other challenge if you’re just using digital statistics is like it’s very hard to tie them to actual people, right? The entire tracking process across most advertising platforms is incredibly opaque and obfuscated. And unless you’re running like stuff from like your CRM for example, and you’re tracking individual users that you have actually identified, nothing that you can track can be directly tied back to a person. Like the only way to do that is to draw that direct link between a verified user of some description that you yourselves have verified and then everything else.
There’s a huge gray area in the middle of that process where everyone’s claiming credit for everything and nobody’s actually really sure what’s like really driving the results.
And the reason that you can use your human, your human thinking to address these things, and the reason that in B2B, you know, we love events so much is like there is sort of safe space, right? You sponsor an event or you go to an event, they give you the attendee list, you meet the people and then you’ve generated stuff, people stuff, right? But the challenge at the other end of the spectrum there is like, well, what’s next, right? What happens next? Where do they go? What’s the strategy around that person or their business that you can deploy to continue to build that relationship or nurture that relationship? And going from, you know, the virtual bottom to the top, that’s the other thing that doesn’t happen, right? Sales have got loads of stuff that they can tell you that’s incredibly useful to build those relationships or to to keep things moving. But that generally gets ignored back up the, you know, back up the pipe at the top end because people in the marketing space are just obsessing over, oh, we got this many visitors to the site, or loads of people downloaded this white paper, or people have coming to, you know, our webinars.
So look, that’s where again, I’m not trying to, trying to stay positive, right? What I’m saying there is there is an opportunity there. So just go talk to your talk to your colleagues, see what they’re all saying. Come up with a better strategy and a better way to spend all the money. Come up with a better way to spend your time at work. Like there’s so much people can be doing there that is just simple, again, simple human stuff. Don’t let technology vendors um, and advertisers and people with a vested interest in taking your money tell you how to build your company and grow your company. That is the that is the key takeaway.
Um, and look, all you need for that is that you don’t need digital expertise. You don’t need to know how to run ad campaigns in Google. You don’t need to know how the back end of your CRM works. You need to step out of all the detail rubbish and stop fiddling around with the bottom end of the tools. Get your head out of the engine of the car. Go sit inside the car and have a little chat about where you’re actually going. You know, get on a little map and have a look at the destination and then think, “Oh, where would be nice to stop on the way? What, what would we like to see?”. Like that’s the kind of thinking that everyone needs to kind of draw back to, I think.
So look, that is my little, you know, sort of TED talk for the day on how you can just just put aside all the noise and digital garbage for like a day. Go for a walk with your team. Do the old walk and talk and go just sort of have a think about how you could be doing things differently. Like there’s, there’s just an obsession, and like obviously we’ve talked about it a lot on this series, a dangerous level of obsession with the tools and not enough obsession with what they can actually do. That is the dramatic conclusion I will leave you with.