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Alright, let's get in the show.

Welcome to Distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to. Get the most out of everything you

created.

Everybody, welcome to this week's episode of Distribution. First. Love

having repeat guests. And today we've got Parthi from Letterdrop back

again. If you didn't listen to his first episode, it was one of the most

popular ones we did last year on really going

deep dive on SEO changes, on all those things and how you can do SEO

better. But today we've got Parthi back and we're going to talk all things

employee advocacy. I have seen the good,

the bad, the in between. I've seen a bit of part of it,

and now I'm advising clients on some of this stuff too. So super excited to

have you on Parthi. Absolutely. Thanks for having me again. Like first

time I've been on a podcast for the second. Yeah,

yeah. It's one of my favorite things about running my own show is if

I want to bring somebody back on and talk about something, I'm going to do

it. So today's the day. So I guess from where we

can start is like, and I know you've been at bigger orgs now,

obviously you're pulling your own sort of startup world here with a small

scrappy team. But kind of just curious, give us a lay of the land on

where you're seeing with employee advocacy how you've been able to build that out with

your team and really from the outside looking in, made it a

priority probably in hiring discussions and things like that

too. Like you all have really hit the ground running. Yeah, absolutely.

And in all fairness, I think because of the nature of our business,

we take employee advocacy very seriously because we have a product that enables

it. But honestly, I'm just seeing so many companies out there

that are successful with employee advocacy in whatever way that

they manage to do it. And so you can think about the large companies which

have historically done this, think gong Apollo

metadata. You can think about newer companies

ourselves, like Lavender Hockeystack, which are just

truly surrounding their audience on LinkedIn. And so

regardless of how you do it, the concept behind it is very

sound. If your audience lives on LinkedIn or honestly, like any

channel, I think LinkedIn is the best channel. Just because you have all of this

formographic information as well and decision makers are on there, you

can actually get in front of them by essentially getting your employees

to authentically talk about your product. The problem you solve

just sort of like always be selling publicly online.

And so that is the crux of employee advocacy. I think it is

incredibly effective and also very important, especially as every

channel is getting saturated right now. Right. A lot of selling today is

based on relationships. And so if you're just one of

100 cold emails that I open in my inbox every morning,

one of 50 cold DMs on LinkedIn from like

a stranger every day or a cold call, the one way

you can stand out is to make people come to you and have your brand

be present and for people to passively learn about your company. And I think that's

really where employee advocacy is starting to become incredibly

important in this new go to market as channels get saturated. Yeah.

And for me it's how do you consistently stay top of

mind and a brand just doing that

on their own with a brand page? Can't do it. Certainly

can't do it at the same scale and at the same level as a company

who is doing it with multiple people. I think the interesting thing, love

that you said metadata because we did do it right there for a while. When

I was at metadata with Mark and Jason and everybody else, it definitely

stopped. I would say that. And so

the crew who was there at the that and I say that because being able

to kind of pull the curtain back there, that was a huge part

of what we did and it was actually baked into the

strategy of, hey, this whole LinkedIn thing

isn't just fun and games. It's not just like

something to waste time on. It really was valuable to be

able to do that. The balance for me always Parthi is, and I'm curious

your take on this because you said something about having them do product and talk

about things. What's the balance there for like I mean it makes sense. I

think especially for the folks on your team, it's part of the product. What you

do is part of it makes sense to talk about those things. How do you

balance that when it's like we make developer tools and I'm the

content marketer and nobody's paying attention to me for developer

tool things. What's the balance there with employee advocacy? How

do you kind of think about that? Yeah, in your specific example,

I think it would probably be a Devrel person, like a developer relationships

person. They have to be able to communicate with developers. But I think

more broadly, the question you're asking is more so, like, what happens if you

feel uncomfortable being the voice of your company? Essentially, like,

you feel like, hey, I can't speak to this audience because I'm not one

of them, is essentially kind of like what you're bringing up. And so I

think with employee advocacy, number one thing is

it is much more effective if one of the founders

can actually portray that. It just makes sense if a founder, the

CEO, is not willing to show up, it's very hard for the rest of the

company to also do that. I'm not saying it's impossible. I actually don't know who

the founders of Metadata are, but I know the entire marketing team at Metadata. I

just want to point that out so it doesn't have to be the founders, a

great marketing team, or a great whoever at the company who can speak to that

audience can fill in that role. I would prefer if it were the founders. But

if you're a marketer and you're just trying to hit pipeline goals, I

want to just let you know that you can be empowered to fill in that

gap. You don't have to wait for anybody's permission. Just do things,

make things happen, make numbers move, and I'm sure your

organization will reward you and also be like, wow, this actually

works. Thank you for proving that to us. I think the second thing is, if

you really feel uncomfortable about it, try to figure out who at your company you

can turn into that kind of advocate. I would try to do it yourself, but

also figure out, okay, is there somebody at the company who has the right role

or right title and are they willing to do this? If you find

yourself in a place where you can't find that person who wants to do it,

I would try to do it yourself. And if you really feel like you're not

in a good place, I don't know what to tell you. I feel like the

organization is not set up or doesn't want to try this channel. It's just

a lost opportunity for them. It's not that it won't work. It's more that the

organization doesn't want to do it. And I think that's a hard part

to navigate. I think there's a whole conversation you should have in terms of

opportunity cost and going to your CEO and talking about if you are very serious

about hitting pipeline goals, we will structurally make changes at this organization

to maybe think about this as a channel. That's a great point

that I certainly don't think a founder

or people who are unaware of the reality of kind of the landscape of

the Internet, and especially how LinkedIn

truly can play a role in that. And content, consistently putting

content out can play a role in that. And how would you go about having

that conversation with a. They might not know? Where do I begin

to even think about that? If I'm a VP of marketing, I'm a content person

talking to my VP like, hey, there's real opportunity

cost for you not doing this. And it's a truly legitimate

channel. Because my assumption would be most founders wouldn't

think of it the same way as a paid ads program,

a blogging program, an SEO, like a more

traditional marketing function within a team

where they're like, I'm just posting on LinkedIn. Like, what's that have to do with

anything? Absolutely. And I actually feel this problem fairly

viscerally because we sell to marketing

organizations and look, we sell across a whole

suite of ways in which you can actually think about generating pipelines.

So last time on this podcast, we talked about SEO quite a bit. This time

we're talking about LinkedIn and we tell our customers, like, hey,

SEO stuff is going to help you with demand capture. But if you want to

see results really quick, you need to actually start creating demand, doing

demand Gen. And I think the way for you to do that, especially if you

think your buyer is on LinkedIn and most decision makers are, you should

start going hard on LinkedIn. Here's our playbook. We have like a playbook for you.

Here's the tooling. Knock yourself out. We'll handhold you, too.

And you would be surprised by the number of people who are

unwilling to actually take that advice. I would not be surprised.

Parthi not surprised. And people are just

unwilling to actually do it. And if I think about why, I

think they kind of see it. They see us doing it, they see all these

companies that we mentioned doing it, and I think it comes down to being afraid

to put their face behind something. I think there's an

element of habit creation in here hard, in the same way that

working out is hard or eating healthy is hard. There is an element of habit

creation in here. And I think the last one to your point is I don't

feel like I'm the right person to be able to talk about that. In which

case, I think you as a company have a bigger problem. Like if your marketing

sales team feel uncomfortable talking about your product or problems that

your customers face, you have a larger problem than tactics over here.

And so I think those are more structural, systematic issues that

companies really need to address fundamentally before thinking about,

how do we do these things? Because tactics are not going to solve foundational

issues in terms of product marketing or just understanding who you're selling

to, how to reach them, and all that kind of stuff. And so my advice

to somebody, if you want to have that conversation with your founder, first off, send

them this podcast. Justin and I are talking about it. I can tell you that

64% of our inbound pipeline comes from LinkedIn.

A large chunk of it is from mine, the founder's LinkedIn. But we get our

entire sales team doing it. Our BDRs, our AES

have a higher connect rate on LinkedIn. People want to follow them, want to connect

with them, because they show up as trusted voices in the

ecosystem. Higher connect rate means more meetings booked,

means they're hitting quota better. When our BDR cool calls

somebody, they say like, hey, I've seen you guys on LinkedIn, or I've heard of

you before, or, we connected two weeks ago, and I've seen you in my feed

before. Instead of hanging up and swearing at them, they actually want to have a

conversation and be like, hey, shoot your shot. You have like two minutes. Tell me

what you're about. And so there are all of these benefits that come

from actually social selling that sort of grease your marketing

sales, go to market funnel. And I think you don't know it until

you do it. And so I'd encourage every company foundationally think about it.

You need to make it a strategic initiative that has a little bit of

buy in and go do it for six months, the same way that you would

say, like, hey, I'm going to commit to going to the gym three days a

week for six months. If nothing happens, that's fine. I would be

surprised. If you don't see positive results. You start seeing

source deals from LinkedIn, you start seeing larger pipeline, all

the great stuff. And I think people should do it individually first, because

if one person isn't willing to spearhead it, it's going to be very hard for

you to coordinate or herd a bunch of cats to do it. So do it

once, do it as an individual. If you're the one who was taking the initiative,

make it work at some small scale and then expand it to

the rest of your team. Once you can back it with numbers and say, look,

I did this for six months. Look at the number of source leads we had

from LinkedIn six months ago. Look at the number we have today. Look at all

of the target ICP accounts that are visiting our website

right now. And I put in UTM params to show that they're from LinkedIn. And

look at all these people who are connected with me and now following with me

who are all on our ICP list. And so I think if you can do

that, you'll have a much better chance of building an employee advocacy

program or a social selling program at your company. And that's going to take

you very far against a competitor where

everything kind of sounds the same, every product is largely the same.

Now you have a brand and you have trust with real people who know what

they're talking about, and that's going to help you out compete them thousand percent.

There's so many things my brain is going a million miles. You touched on a

little bit. But as you sort of try to map that out, because this is

what it's going to come down to, right? Proof. I need proof that, is there

a dashboard you're setting up? Is it simply just like you mentioned, the

UTM links? Is it something within the actual

demo request form that you're tracking? How are you sort of tracking the

overarch, especially as you build this out with more people and it gets a little

bit more complex, how are you sort of looking at it from a macro level?

It'll be like, here's baselines, here's where we're at now.

Yeah, so sure, track the vanity metrics, impressions, clicks,

all that kind of stuff. But that's not the conversation you want to have with

your CEO. They'll be like, cool, good for you. What you really want to think

about is pipeline revenue. Every marketer in this macro

environment needs to be thinking about this. I just need to double down on that.

I'm still surprised by a number of people who are looking at vanity metrics. Easiest

thing is if you're plg and you're onboarding form, ask put in

a how did you hear about us? If you are sales led and you have

a demo form put in, like how did you hear about us? Leave it open

ended, don't have a drop down. Because if you have a drop down, people

are just going to select the first option that they see. You're going to get

bad data. Let them enter whatever they want to enter. We make it

mandatory actually at letter drop. And it helps us figure out

how to spend tens of thousands of dollars every month in terms of

marketing. And so it's very important for us to actually know that. And I think

it's short sighted for people to be like, no, we're going to not have that

field. So that's the easiest free thing that you can do right

now. The second thing I would do is there's a lot of solutions

out there in terms of essentially just identifying traffic on your

website. You can get clearbit or similar for free. To get

started, just pick your favorite, drop one of them on your website, start

noticing the kinds of accounts that are coming in. If there's a correlation

between the accounts that are liking commenting on your posts

and people who are coming to your website, that is a positive indication of

where they're coming from. You're getting ICP traffic from social and

LinkedIn. And then the very last thing, and this is stuff that we

work on, is trying to actually figure out, can we actually try help companies

understand the content, journey across LinkedIn to your website to back

your CRM data in terms of close one pipeline. And that's something that we have

built and we have. But I think that's like, if you want to go real,

once you've built this program out and you want to really get down to numbers,

you can do that. But I think the first two solutions are free and you

can get started with that literally just today. Yeah, that's awesome. That's super

helpful. And I think, like you said, that is key. The vending metrics are

fine, and I think in some regards they can be useful

for, especially as you're trying to prove out growth or prove those things.

And even more so, I think when you're trying to build the habit, right,

it's much more rewarding to go to the gym when you step on the scale

and you've lost five pounds. So you can see the leading indicators of things

happening. You haven't lost it all or you haven't gotten in super shape. You can't

run a five k yet, but we're making progress. Kind of gives you that want

to go back and do it again. But yeah, being able to map that down

and understand where traffic is coming from, people ask

me, and again, for my business, it's so scaled

back. But same thing. I know when I'm having a conversation with

somebody, I know where that thing started for the most part, or I

can kind of quickly go figure out. Right, are they on the newsletter? Do they

respond to it? Okay, yes, that makes sense. LinkedIn is very easy to see, for

me to see that through, but that's how you start to. And again, I don't

have any fancy CRM, but it's built out in the CRM to understand, like, where

did this contact come from? Where did this lead come from? And I would say

90% of them, for me, are even LinkedIn at this point. It's that

powerful of a tool for people who are using it. Another thing, I think

that goes in with it especially, and this was something that we experienced when we

were at metadata is, and I think you're probably kind of touching a similar vein

as you're building it out with letter drop, is you don't need 50

people on the team doing this to make

you feel so much bigger than you actually are.

We probably had two people that were super consistent, three

that were pretty consistent, four that were consistent enough, more

consistent than average or average. And we still felt like, oh,

my gosh, there's so much stuff going on here. Are you finding the same thing

where it's like, you just need a few people who are willing and able

to talk about these things over time? Yeah. You don't need a big

team to do this. Our go to market team is four

people. Right. And so it's not like we're a large company,

but people do say they feel our presence. They see us quite

a bit on LinkedIn at the very least, I think we're not doing as nearly

as well as some companies our size. And I think that's more of a matter

of nature of content, which we're trying to fix.

But small team, you can actually get quite good results

just by showing up a couple of times a week and actually sharing something that's

generally insightful, thoughtful, educational. Then promote your product or

service in the mix as well. And the reason why

is because the bar is so low, you're competing against nothing. Essentially,

the vast majority of companies are doing zit. And so if

you even do something like, you will stand out. Right now, I think the

easier thing to do is, or the low effort thing to do from the rest

of your company is if they don't want to actually be a brand themselves,

the least they can do is share it with their network. It's just like

that. Like that comment. And tools like us automate that as

well. That also goes pretty darn far, because when people

do that, their network starts seeing that content. And as long as their

network is prospects or buyers, that works. So what you don't want

to do, for example, is you sell to developers, get your engineering

team engaging with this kind of stuff, for sure. If you sell to

HR people, getting your engineering team to like

and comment probably isn't quite as effective. If anything, you're giving LinkedIn

the wrong signal, telling them, hey, a bunch of engineers like this, I

should show it to more engineers. What you need is connect people who

are in your sales team, partnerships, team marketing team who are connected with

prospects, connect it with partners. So hey,

we have a customer advisory board, and these are people who have influence in

our industry. Those are people you want to engage with you. I think that's a

way to get your sort of extended circle your family around your

company to essentially help promote your content. But at its

core, in terms of the actual voices, the producers, like a

handful of people will go a very, very long way. So that's how I would

structure it. Founder and then maybe like a handful of people

on sales, marketing, whoever it may be. And then broader

reach is employees who have the right network. And then

broader reach beyond that is partners,

investors, customers who have the right network. And that is

how I would kind of layer on LinkedIn. Employee or

partner advocacy, essentially. I know letter drop lets

you have the people come in from the like. You can assign the people to

be able to automatically engage and comment and things like that. Is it similar

for customer advocacy programs or is there like a weird

sort, know you're not at our company, how do we add you in there? Or

like, have you seen anybody think of doing it that way? Yeah,

we have a bunch of customers who do that. So for example, signal fire is

a VC firm that works with us. And whenever they launch a

new company, they want to make sure all the partners have, all investors have

a lot of great portfolio companies who could be customers. And so

that's an example of non employees or people essentially

boosting stuff. We have other customers, companies like warmly, for

example, who essentially get their friends and partners to

participate, and then they essentially give them different permissions. So

some people can, you can post on their behalf, some people you can comment on

their behalf, and some people you can only like on their behalf. It depends on

how comfortable they are with different levels of permissions. You can set that out

for an individual, just group them and say like, hey, here's my advisor list,

here's my employee list, here's my sales team. And then for the

right type of content, you can get the support from the people you

need. It's all opt in. They still have to authenticate into your LinkedIn

account. So they are opting in. They see the permissions and they can also choose

to disconnect the app. Any point in time if they're like, yeah, this is not

something I want to do. Yeah, that's cool though. I could even see it around,

like you said, when they're launching or doing something, but like, hey, I've got this

thing I'm launching. Are you willing to kind of help me do this even in

a short term period of, I'm just looking for your help, but I'll do it

for you because I think that's one of the hard things too. And I'd

be curious, kind of getting your thoughts on that as well as it's hard

to get people to do things that aren't part of their

daily job. I've even seen that like podcast, right? Like, I

have you, come on, I can create a bunch of stuff for you and hand

it over to you and it can sit on a folder because it's just not,

you know what I mean? We've all been there and done that, and so how

can we better arm folks to

actually either know what's coming, know what

content? I think that's a huge part is like one of the struggles I always

had at companies was, hey, I've got this new blog

post. Oh, okay, cool, what do I write? I feel like there's

a lot of, you got to make it kind of almost a program in a

lot of ways, like you talked about. It's got to be embedded as

a thing that we're doing because otherwise it won't be

successful if it's just like, oh, here's our boilerplate for new feature came

out. We've all seen this on LinkedIn. Probably like company comes out, it's all the

same post all day long. Okay, yeah, totally

agree with you. And which is why I think my view on this is

almost like, don't rely on people. It's

boring work. Nobody wants to do it. It's not part of their day to day

job. If you can automate it, if you can let software do it, just let

software do it. Let people focus on the things that they are good at, which

is probably the initial insight, which becomes your content that you want to

share. That's where people should be. What we want to do at the

end stage, which is distributing stuff, like just making things happen, that's where it

has to be as automated as possible. Because to your point, yeah, there's a lot

of clips just sitting in folders out there. There's probably

a lot of pipeline companies could be generating if they just took the

effort to distribute that, redistribute that on a regular basis on a

regular cadence. Just because our first podcast is still relevant today,

there's nothing from that podcast that wouldn't be beneficial to somebody

today. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be shared. And we do do it.

We have a lot of content. We do share it occasionally, but I think not

enough companies think about it that way. They don't think about, here's an asset that

is evergreen and I just need to create the infrastructure in

place to be able to get it in front of my buyers

on a consistent basis to stay top of mind until they're ready to actually

have a conversation with me about a purchase. I was doing a

workshop with a company last month, and one of the things their team brought

up was there's still a big disconnect, I think, for a lot of companies

in terms of the push and pull strategy as far as like, the

goal of my social content is to get you to come back to my bigger

thing and you must consume my bigger thing in order for me to check a

box and be like, that was a successful content campaign. And I think it's

a huge shift for folks to understand, like, the goal of creating this piece

of content is not necessarily for you to consume all of

it. The goal is so we can chop up on these ideas, get

different things out there, and then I can, as a smart marketer, find the best

pieces and then distribute those things out in front of the audience because

I want the audience to get the information. So if I take this episode,

and I think a huge part of distribution in 2024 is employee advocacy.

So that's a huge thing that I should be talking about. It's obviously a huge

thing that your company is going to be wanting to talk about. It's not necessarily

like, my goal is to get everybody to listen to this 30 to 40

minutes podcast episode, the goal is, I bet if I

dripped, if I get ten clips out of this and I dripped ten clips over

the next six months, that's going to be pretty effective, too. Now I'm going to

talk about employee advocacy probably way more than I normally

would because it's maybe not part of the everyday conversation that I'm

having, but it is important. Yeah, absolutely. I do think that

a lot of people think about the base asset, your

long blog posts, your 40 minutes podcast episode,

and I think those assets are very important. Don't get me wrong, the person who

is sufficiently motivated, who wants to learn about something, will go and do

it. Guess what? That person is also very much in the market to buy

if they're willing to do that work. So don't get me wrong, those assets matter.

Brian law talks about this like long form content isn't dying. We watch

three hour long movies. All these assets matter. But these

assets are not easy to distribute. To your point, what you need to do is

take these assets, make them easily consumable, and use those

as essentially leads for people who are not quite

ready to sit down. They might be in a couple of weeks, that's fine, in

months, whatever. But nurturing them through that journey over many months

or many weeks to get them to the point where like, yes, I'm thinking

about employee advocacy. I'm thinking about Justin, I'm thinking about Parthi, I'm

thinking about distribution version, I'm thinking about letter drop. And I'm ready to go in,

listen to that podcast, read that blog post and actually think about it. Because my

CEO just told me today that we need to think about lowering our CAC.

We need to think about new acquisition strategies, because what we're doing right now is

not working. And that's where all of these consumable things

come in. And to your point, I think more people need to start

thinking about content from that perspective. It's a long term game, and I

think attribution is important. But attribution over a six month,

twelve month period, not over like lead clicked on my thing, went

to the long form thing, signed up a demo request in a funnel in the

same minute. That doesn't happen. Yeah, in one false roof, they just did it

all. Amazing. Yeah. No, it's interesting, too. And I think for

anybody who's, as you're building out this sort of employee advocacy

structure at your team, or you're doing more LinkedIn posting on your own as a

founder, or however it is, there's also just the reality of

LinkedIn. And how that platform works is like, your buyers are probably your

lurkers, they may not be your commenters, and even the people

who like your stuff. So I think that can be true. But

I've even seen that, for me, where there's people who I've

never interacted with, literally never interacted with or seen

on LinkedIn engaging with my stuff, who fill out the form, become a

client, and say, I just been listening to the podcast and been seeing your content

for six months straight, and I'm like, oh, I didn't even know that you knew

it existed. So amazing. So I think that's another thing to understand,

too. Is it? Isn't that direct line. It's sort of

like all of those things working together to then make the system run in

the long run. Happens all the time, literally. We'll get

inbound DMs from CMOs, from 500

employee companies, people who we would normally struggle to get in front

of our BDR would struggle to get in front of decision maker at that

level. Inbound. They're like, oh, yeah, I've just been following you on LinkedIn for the

past three months. I like your stuff. Some initiative came up. I thought of

you. Can you give this person on my team a demo? Happens all the

time, and I don't think enough companies know that this is

possible and they're just sleeping on it. And how much better of

a conversation is that? That's one of the things when I've been talking to content

teams as well, in terms of really the distribution, the

repurposing. Why do it? Why get your stuff out there? It's a ton of

work. We're already doing a bunch of other things. I don't have time for it.

It's not a priority. The hardest thing in a lot of this is you're

battling status quo, whether it's the founders who need to post

or they're not, or the teams who are doing things one way and doing another.

But I think what you said right there is so key, which is you're priming

the market. There's people who are not ready to buy.

It's the fact or whatever the status. 3% of the folks that you're engaging

with are actually potentially ready to buy and 97 aren't. And

so of those 97% of people, it's your job to be

the first person they think of when they're ready to solve that problem.

And the trick with it now is the idea

of being known, liked and trusted. You can't be

this nameless, faceless corporation and compete on

features for you. It's, you know, I

saw, you know, I saw like, when I was

a know Mark and Jason and the podcast know, even my stuff from time

to, like, that stuff really matters because now it feels like

when you hop on a call or when somebody else hops on a call,

oh, man, I feel like we've talked before, or I feel like, gosh, it seems

like we're connected in this way. And I saw something, I was

reading a book the other day and they were talking about this. And the idea

being that your brain cannot decipher digital

from real. And so a human brain is like, the

connections are there regardless of whether and obviously, I think if you're in

person and there's probably a different level to it, but just at a baseline,

your brain is connecting you to these other people. Totally true. Which is

why a lot of people feel closer to celebs or

famous personalities than they are. They feel like they know. It's this information

asymmetry. I think you touched upon a very important point. You

just mentioned Zach from our sales team. I've never talked to you about

Zach. You've never met him. No. You know him. You

mentioned Jason and Mark and all these people from

metadata, who I've all have had the pleasure of meeting over the past

year or two, and none of you are at metadata anymore.

And so one of the pushbacks I see with these programs is people are like,

I don't want to attach myself to my company's brand. I don't want to hurt

my own brand. Guess what? A, if you're not doing anything, you probably

don't have a brand to hurt in the first place. Two, it's viewed

positively, right? If I'm a future employer and I look at that, I'm like, you

could do that for your previous employer. As a company, you're an

asset. Make yourself more sellable. You are helping your company. It's

just win win for everybody. And I think we can point to that.

Like, Metadata's organic presence has

declined since that cohort or marketing team has

left the company. And all of you are doing great things

at new places distribution first, Jason's own consulting

shop. Mark at user evidence. You're running the same playbooks at different

places and doing so successfully. And so I want to just encourage

every marketer out there to be like, if you can hit numbers

for your company and run these employee advocacy programs for your

business, you can technically do it anywhere. It is a

skill you can take from company to company. Don't think of it as, like, tying

yourself to a brand. The brand can change. I might start a new company in

the future, or people may not be in market tech. People are going to be

like, oh, M. Parthi is a Martech guy. I was like, heck, I was a

software engineer and a product manager two years ago. I'm not a marketing person.

But here I am. Now I am, and I can reinvent myself in a couple

of years as well. And I think every individual you can do that, too, is

what I would say. If that is an objection in your head as to why

you can't do. This, I think another objection that I was thinking

of, too, and I've heard this is the flip side of that coin, which is

like, why? And I feel like this is dying down a little bit, at least

in SaaS startup land, because I think they're starting to see that's kind of a

silly point. But what if these people leave who are now they're the

faces of my organization. What happens? Know, in this case, let's

say you propped Zach up as this thing and now Zach

leaves to another company and what the heck, right? He was our guy and

now he's somebody. Like, how do you think about that? Or how would you maybe

have that conversation with another founder who is

sort of questioning like, should we really buy into this

one? You as a founder should do it yourself. So you need a

baseline, which is, hey, like I was, I'm with the company

and I'm stuck with the company. And so this is our baseline. The second

thing is you want at least a couple of employees to do this.

We get our whole go to market team to do this. It's not just Zach,

it's Ryan, it's Matt, it's Keelin, it's everybody. And anybody who joins our

go to market team is going to be expected to do this as well. And

they can get up to speed in a couple of months. It's not a big

deal to get someone up to speed. We've done it already. We can do it

again. Sure. There's a short term hit where your person,

like in metadata's case you guys left. There's no reason why they can't

done that with other people and they still do have some people, I think like

Rachel for, like I still see her on LinkedIn, they can build that program up

again. And so in the same way that I think

it's a transferable skill or a transferable thing for an individual

from a company's perspective, I think you can figure out

how to encourage employees and build this every time. That

said, I would highly encourage the founders, do it and have a little bit of

a baseline there. I think a lot of very successful companies are able to

do it with the founders. If you're not doing it with the founders, I would

just say it is completely possible to do that over and over

again with new members of the marketing team. There's no reason why metadata can't just

prop up like, hey, look, here are new faces right now. And it's the same

thing. It's customer education. I think your customers, at the end of the day,

they care about their problems, whether the face, it's coming from changes

every now and then is almost secondary. Yeah. And I saw somebody talking about this

the other day with YouTube. They were talking about how some companies are

hesitant to prop somebody up to, say, be the YouTube

person on the team, because if that person builds their

own brand or leaves or something, now the face of the company

is sort of gone. And the point they made was like, well, sure.

What if you had an engineer who was a star engineer and they left? Of

course, it's not at the front end, but you would try to find another great

engineer. So your goal in that case would be to find another great person who

could be in front of the camera and be that. And so I think that's

the same thing where it's like, to your point, these playbooks can be

redone with different people and built out in different ways. I do

think at the end of the day, it does come down to the founder. I'm

curious, before we wrap, because it's been in the back of my brain for

the founders, this is just not what they're going to do. They're not going to

do it. What's your take on ghost writing? I feel like ghostwriters are

booming everywhere, or multiple people kind of in

my world, like solopreneurs, they're doing ghost writing for founders.

Is that a viable avenue for at least, let's say, if it's done

really well? Do you see that as viable in case the founder is like,

I'm not willing to write this content. I don't know what it is, but I'll

have a conversation once a month. And you can do it for me. Absolutely. I

think that is incredibly viable to have ghost writing. Here's a little

secret for the audience out there. Half of my content is not written by me.

Heyo. Keelin, who's on our team, takes a lot of the core

ideas we have on our blog, on our podcast, on our videos like

this, or I have said something intelligent or smart, we've turned

it into a long form asset. She uses our toolian platform to

essentially repurpose them. We have a bunch of templates which for

like advice with strong hook or product launch

or bullet points or whatever, we have a lot of templates. We pop them

into letter job. Out comes something. She gets her 90% there. She

edits it a little bit, and then she says, okay, this is going out on

parties. LinkedIn next Tuesday in review, and I just get an

email in my inbox. I'm like, cool. I don't like this word or whatever. I'll

change it and goes out there. And that is 50% of my LinkedIn

content, quite honestly. And so I think ghost writing is very viable. The

catch is you do need the long form assets or you need something

sensible to say. I've put in the work at some point in time. I've

had those thoughts or opinions or perspectives. We're just

repurposing them at some point in the future. And so that's what makes the ghost

writing effective, is that they have a good source. And so if

you ghostwrite and the person who's ghostwriting for you, how much ever

that may be assisted with AI, if they don't have good source

material, they don't actually understand the business, the customer, the

problem, they will fail and you will get content that you are not

proud of putting out on your LinkedIn. And so that would be

my sort of caveat or catch there is you

still need to have an opinion, perspective, and be able to

educate your customers. Without that. It's the equivalent of the SEO

spammy article, which make no sense. But on LinkedIn form, that's

it. It's interesting. Like, I've definitely done ghostwriting for people. When I was in

house, I was that person. I've done that.

And now I've actually worked with a couple. I never thought about it as

ghostwriting, but I guess that's what it is like at the end of the day,

working with them to sometimes they do it for brands, and sometimes that

content is spun off and given to the founder or things like that. But it's

why hiring a good ghostwriter costs a decent chunk of change, or having somebody

who's on your team to learn that and spend time to do that, because it

takes time to learn the audience, to learn what is going to matter, to learn

the voice and tone of that founder. And obviously, the more you do it, the

better it gets. But as somebody who's done that, having a piece of content

that's really solid, you can get a lot of content. And that's what

I think people don't quite understand is this podcast for you, Parthi,

you'll get a lot of content out of this, or your team will get a

lot of content out of this. 40, less than an hour to record.

And so I think for that time, the ROI is pretty

high to be able to do something like that. And this is obviously an

external thing. But even if you did that internally, and this was a Zoom

call, and you just had a conversation for 30 minutes to an hour

every month, you're pretty well set to be able to have a pretty good stream

of content. And then I think tools like letter drop, other things like having a

strategy using the distribution first frameworks, why people are here and listening to this

show, all of those things are how you scale yourself. It's how

you get more done, be more efficient. We're in a wild transition where there

are groups of people who are stuck doing it the old way, and there are

groups of people who are massively more efficient in being able to get way

more done by using proper strategy and proper tooling.

Absolutely. And I think, to your point, you don't need a podcast. I mean,

a podcast is great. You can talk to another person, you can share audiences,

but you can just have an internal conversation with somebody who's a subject matter

expert in your company and create lots of great content.

And a lot of people don't want to do that. Initial bit of hard

work takes half an hour, but will have an outsized

impact on everything else you can create. Yeah, and that's the thing. If you did

one interview, and again, whether you do it manually, whether you use a

tool like letter drop, whether you do it in a different way, that can

become a blog post which becomes LinkedIn content, which all

fuels that thing to be able to get way more and to get those

thoughts out in different perspectives as well. So this has been

super great. Hopefully, it's been a helpful episode for folks listening and trying to

get in on what the heck I should be doing. From an employee

advocacy standpoint, I think my biggest perspective and takeaway is

if you don't have your founder on board, it's going to be tough, but

there are ways around that. I think some of the ghost writing stuff is a

way around that. I think building the habit and starting on

your own and then building out the proof of what that is. So I talk

a lot about this with concept programs, doing pilots. So starting something and just

doing, again, not saying you're going to run a marathon, but hey, I'm going to

learn to run a five k. It's a different animal in a whole different world,

and it's a little bit more achievable. So those are my big takeaways. And Parthi,

thanks for coming on, man. This has been great. Thank you for having me. It

was a pleasure coming on a second time. Yeah, we'll see. Well, you know, six

months from now, you come back and we'll chat about something else. So it'll be

great. Thanks, Parthi. Absolutely.

All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode of distribution

first, and thank you for listening. All the way through. I appreciate you

so, so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in

this episode one way or another, into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and transform

the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe to the show and sign

up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co. So you don't miss

a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next episode as well. And

until then, take care and I'll see you next time.