How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

People soul go to Google or they would go online and they say, how do

I solve this right? Now they know they can type that

in anywhere from Google to YouTube to even TikTok

search, right? But now the question they're asking is, who can

I trust to give me the information that I need to solve

the problem?

Welcome to the How Leaders Think podcast, the show that transforms you

by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host,

Kenny Lang, and with me today is Logan Lyles.

He serves as an evangelism and content marketing

person, individual expert@teamwork.com, a

project management platform built for scaling client work.

Previously, he served in several leadership roles at Sweetfish, a

B two B podcast agency serving mid market SaaS companies,

taking over the sales from the agency founder in 2018, logan

helped triple that's three

the business in the first six months. He also played a key role in

landing the agency on the Inc 5000 list twice

with the two, while helping the company both ten X

headcount and increase arr by

1283%. Logan works

from his home office, which, if you're watching this, you can tell is just

awesome. There's probably books in the back he's actually read and

it's slowly becoming a mini video studio

alongside his labradoodle Mac in Castle Rock,

Colorado. Welcome to the show, Logan. Thank you so much, man.

We got the Mac mention in there, the office studio and lots

of numbers. All the.

I'm just I'm really trying to capture as wide an audience as,

you know, if we got some accountants and engineers,

but also maybe some animal lovers, you

never know who's listening. It's early days, it's early.

So well, Logan, tell me what is on your

mind? Yeah, I have been really thinking

about the evolution of marketing. As you mentioned

in the intro, even before I joined Sweetfish,

the podcast production agency you mentioned, my career

started in kind of this meandering path from journalism into B

two B sales and then really getting into B two B marketing and content

creation, starting with working for the podcast agency. Now,

as you mentioned, I'm in the marketing team for a

SaaS company and so thinking a lot about what is the next phase

of marketing look like. And because of my journalism roots, I was

always the sales guy who loved marketing, who really loved content

marketing, and I think HubSpot did a great job of

evangelizing both content marketing and the movement

towards inbound that they really have pushed forward

over the last ten or so years. And to me, I'm

really thinking about how that is now evolving. Right

when HubSpot started talking about the shift that they saw at that

point in marketing, we were going from outbound, which they equated,

to having a megaphone and kind of blasting your message out there. We even

used to call them email blasts, right.

Versus a newsletter today, which some newsletters are

good. Some more still should be called email blasts

because that's what they feel like. And they were saying, you

need to put down the megaphone. Outbound isn't working anymore.

Inbound is the new way. And the

visualization that they gave was pick up a magnet and attract

your ideal audience by putting out content that either educates

and or entertains. Well, that still works. I'm a

big believer in that. That's why I love guesting on podcasts like this. I host

two podcasts myself, one of which you've been on. But I think

what is shifting now is it's harder and harder for

that magnet to really work. Because the people that we're trying to

reach, whoever that audience is, if they own construction companies,

if they run an agency, if they're doctors, if they're b two b

marketers, whoever it is, they're surrounded by magnets. And that's

your competition. That's that new Netflix series. They want to

watch it's. Everything competing for their attention. And so I think that

we do need to evolve. Whether you're a small business or you're a

large organization, content still can

drive your marketing, but going it alone is becoming harder and harder. And

that's where I've been exploring this concept of

nearbound marketing. What does that mean? What does that look like? And how

can you actually leverage a newer approach

called nearbound in the marketing efforts that

you're executing, whether that's for your own small business or you're part of a

marketing and sales team within. A larger

yeah, well, lot to unpack there.

And obviously, I've mentioned a couple of times on

the podcast, just my background in the agency world and being a

HubSpot partner. And

I remember all the magnet stuff. Heck, I had it

on my website. I was like, you want to be the magnet, not the bullhorn.

Thank you, font awesome for making really compelling

icons. And then

obviously they go through the there were the four stages before they went

all flywheel flywheel from the funnel to the flywheel.

Yeah. Truth be told, I still hear people say the word

email blast and it makes my skin sizzle.

But I'm thinking about what you're saying

and I'm wondering, does this

you said it should apply to large organizations and

think solopreneurs or small.

I mean, is the need the

and and is really anything any different? I mean, Gary Vee has

been beating the drum about the attention economy for

ten plus years now. Really? What is

different? Besides the fact that maybe more people are

hiring more agencies, like a sweet fish or something else

just to level up their quality. So it's worth listening

to. There's no more new stuff. It's just more

quality stuff out there. Why change, I guess,

is my question. Yeah, so I think you hit on

one thing there. As far as content marketing

goes, the bar is raising, right? Because the barrier to

entry is lower. Right? It used to be even just

three, four years ago to create short form video content. You need a

videographer, you need an editor with some serious chops. Now, there are

AI tools where we could grab these two tracks

from the podcast we're recording right now, drop them into a tool and

it can spit out pretty decent auto captioned video clips that

are ideal for social right now,

varying degrees of quality there at the same time.

But that, I think, adds to the noise. But I think the other

thing that has changed is not just that, okay?

It's noisier. And so you need to raise the quality bar in order

to stand out and get more attention. There's also this

other shift because there's so much noise and because there are

contradicting messages, whether we're talking about marketing or

politics or anything else, right? We can

scroll very quickly and hear two things that are in direct

conflict and we're like, well, which message do

I trust? And so what I've been noticing is we're making

this shift or this shift is happening from what

we and a few others have been calling the how economy to the who

economy. And what I mean by that is it used to

know people would go to Google or they would go online and

they say, how do I solve this? Right? Now they know

they can type that in anywhere from Google to YouTube to even

TikTok search, right? But now the question they're asking is,

who can I trust to give me the information that I need

to solve the problem? Because finding an answer is no

longer the problem. We're in the middle of the info apocalypse,

right? There's information everywhere. It's noisier. We're surrounded by all

these magnets. The question people are asking is, who can I

trust? And then that's the filter that's going to be there. So the

quality is one, but I think the trust factor is even bigger. And

that's where I think the approach of nearbound marketing

can help people adjust to this shift that is happening.

Because if outbound was interrupting and inbound

was attracting, nearbound marketing is all about

surrounding. So what I've been talking about on the podcast that I

host, formally Marketing Together now we're renaming it to Nearbound

Marketing is how can you co create content with the

people that your buyers already know and trust, so that you

can amplify your message together and surround them? Not just to

be louder and noisier, but to create a

message that has trust baked right into it?

Got you. Because being a guest on

a podcast or something like that, you get to cross pollinate audiences

and you borrow on the initial trust that

person's audience has and get exposure.

So it sounds like that

there's not really an issue.

You said there's not an issue in getting the answer,

but there is so much of it

that we're now maybe I don't like

the phrase now more than ever. I think we use that enough in

COVID to last us the rest of the millennium. Can we squeeze in a new

normal in here as yes. Yeah, I would

love it. Now more than ever there is a new normal and

some other buzzwords together. Three years,

a quick aside HubSpot

inbound in 2020 that got canceled became purely

a video. It's kind of like Apple has gone to their big

product announcement, just scripted and post produced,

which is great, but they had a now more than ever. And I

tweeted I was like if it was a drinking game

to take a drink every time Brian Halligan said now more than

ever we'd all be drunk out of our minds. He liked it and I'm pretty

sure retweeted it, but he at least liked it. And

I was like, I wonder if he looked up is this guy actually a partner

or something? But that was like a weird moment in the

sun. I love that, but I appreciate that he had a sense

of humor about it. So

how is that shifting? Is it just a greater emphasis

because having referrals like

Facebook several years back put in

the looking for a recommendation function

into it was a post type I don't see it quite as

much anymore. People just put like ISO, like In Search Of or something

like that. But we're trying to play

on the fact that people are looking

for human referrals like within my network who could give me

advice simply because is there that much

just bad misinformation out there or is

it more about sorting through the good

information to find the great information?

What's at the heart of that, do you think? Yeah, I

think that without going into a whole tangent and I'm not going to come

down on one side of misinformation disinformation

debates what is the difference between misinformation and

disinformation by the way? Never mind. We'll set that aside for

now. But I think that there is some of that people are

concerned like am I getting fed a load of

bull here with what I'm getting? But it's also just I only have

so much time. There are so many places I could get this

answer. I don't know if I can trust any of them. So one, for the

sake of time and two, for the sake of not making a bad

decision, especially in the world that I live in, in B. Two B, sales and

marketing where you're talking about higher consideration,

higher ticket value. If you're an agency selling

services and it's a 510 thousand dollars a month

retainer, there's more that goes into that. There's more that's on the line.

And so people want to know if they're getting a recommendation, can I trust it?

Because it's not just an Amazon purchase that you can just set back out on

the porch and have ups come pick up, right? Your job might be

on the line, your career might take a different turn if you buy

the wrong product for your company or you hire the wrong agency. So in

B to B, I think that emotional

toil over. Am I getting good information? And what are going to be

the ramifications of that? I think that's what's also playing into

it. That's really intriguing. So do you think that

maybe it's just starting here, but do you think

that the price tag or maybe the

perceived level of risk is where this gets applied

and actually matters, is going in a near bound

method or approach to your marketing and

sales? Because otherwise, like you said, if it's the

equivalent of maybe it's even a few hundred

dollars that you're like, yeah, I'm disappointed. Maybe you get a

partial refund, whatever it may be, that

campaign didn't work out. You spent some dollars on paid ads,

no big whoop, but like you said, $5,000 a month

or a six figure contract or something like that.

Is that where this actually matters? And does it even

matter at the lower stakes level? Yeah, I

think that's a good question. I think you are exactly right there, Kenny.

The higher the amount of the purchase, the longer

term the investment, the higher consideration that's needed

in that sales process. Then as you climb up there, it's a direct

correlation into the importance of trust

in that transaction. Right. At the same time, I've seen

folks talking rightly so about the impact

of influencer marketing, which I think is a subset of what we're

talking about in Nearbound. Right. Because those are people that may be different

than a referral or an agency or service provider or

a company that's already doing business with someone that you're partnering with. An

influencer does have a degree of trust and that works very

well in kind of that direct to consumer realm

as well. But I think to your point, it's kind of a sliding scale.

As you move up to higher ticket purchases, higher consideration

sales cycles, then the trust factor, the more you move up

there, the more you better not be ignoring that factor. Otherwise

you're going to lose out to the folks who do have the connections and are

leveraging the relationships to establish trust. I'll give you an

example here. So I just came back from Inbound in person this year.

It was my second time making that trip to Boston. And as you

mentioned, at the top, my current role is on the marketing team. At Teamworkcom,

we're a client operations and project management platform primarily for

agencies. So being an inbound and all, the solution

partners being there, like that's our ICP, right?

And so we've got a booth. We want people to come up, learn about

the platform, get a demo. And what we did is we have a

few consultants who are our solution providers.

So very much like HubSpot has agency partners who sell the

product, service the product, offer complimentary services.

We have the same@teamwork.com. And so I knew that some of our

partners would be there that have been agency

owners themselves. Actually, in both cases, they're kind of similar to

you, where they've run an agency, and now they consult with a lot of agencies,

so they have a lot of trust built up in that community. One

of our partners by the name of Zenpilot, and

they've worked with a lot of agencies to kind of audit their operations, those

sorts of things. Well, instead of just saying, hey, you guys are going to be

there, you should stop by the booth, come and talk to people, we decided to

do a little bit of a push. I created some graphics for them, shout out

to our graphic design team at Teamwork, and we called it a

partner takeover time. And we said, hey, the Zen Pilot folks really know

agencies. They've consulted with over 2600 agencies. They're going

to be at our booth. So if you want to talk to someone besides a

salesperson, come chat with them. And I kid you not, I had an agency

owner. He said, I'm currently running our agency on X

competitor. I won't mention them right now. And he

know we've been happy. But based on what I hear

from you and Gray and his team at Zenpilot, doing stuff

together, partnering here, having this dedicated takeover time, I

should look into Teamwork.com. I'm not even looking to switch right now. And

so the difference for me was we could start having the

conversation about discovering his needs, giving a demo,

and seeing if there's a good fit. We didn't have to spend the time of,

hey, will you stop by the booth? Hey, will you give us the time of

day? Because that trust had already been established. He was

willing to give us the time of day. Hear us out. And now we could

get right to the Discovery demo and the rest of the

conversation without that first hurdle because that bridge

had already been crossed. That's really interesting. Congratulations.

By the way, I did see some of the videos. If you're

listening, you can go back and check around the first week of September. There's some

cool videos, especially with, like, Gray and Peter giving some productivity

tips. Oh, yeah, that was a good um, and just a heads up,

Peter's got a fantastic so

that's the one that's half the reason I like, going to Teamwork's YouTube

channel is just listening to them talk about bland things, but

it sounds magical because of the accent. I was like,

yes. You know what? I could rearrange my folder

hierarchy. Yeah, that's really good.

But anyway, so that's really intriguing. I was

going to ask you, you mentioned something just a little bit ago about

you've got referrals, you've got influencer,

help me, but maybe help the listener

locate where does nearbound

Fall? Because I could probably hear somebody

there's probably a cynic or a skeptic. And that's fine. Listening

and going nearbound, that's just referrals,

dude. That's just co branding.

You're making up a term for something that's already

existed. Why all the

exuberance, right? Yeah. Which is a fair

question, right? Marketers ruin everything. Marketers try and make something

out of nothing, right? Yeah. We'll make a T shirt about that. We'll ruin

a T shirt by saying marketing it, but marketers

ruin everything, including this T shirt. We're going to do that.

We're going to have a limited print for me and Logan to do that

here first. We should do that. We should just have a

podcast that's like seven minutes long or

shorter, and we just talk about one thing marketers ruined and

then that's a great premise, my friend. I

did have an idea once upon a time to do something called More Better

Marketing, and it was going to make fun of all

the crazy marketing stuff, like some Gary Vee

things and just a lot of hyperbole. But anyways, where would

you place Nearbound amongst all the

other versions of I heard from someone,

I saw someone I trust, I'm in this audience or

what have you. How is it different? Yeah. So

two things. One, I think that a lot of

companies are starting to see how this impacts several

different things, including referrals, and how they're seeing it is.

During the inbound era, we really tried to track everything, right?

Because it's all digital, so we can see everything. We know where they came to

us, all that sort of stuff. Well, we quickly realized that we can't track everything.

And Attribution software is broken. Even when we give people an option,

they're like, I don't remember. Right? And so what a lot of B, two B

companies have been doing is going towards a model of self reported

attribution. So when you sign up for a product

or whatever the case might be, leaving it open, not giving them a

set list of options and just saying, how did you hear about us? Because

people will be a little bit more open. They will be more candid about the

buyer journey. They're like, hey, I heard Logan on Kenny's podcast, and

then I saw your ad on LinkedIn and then I Googled you, right? It's

SEO, it's social, and it's

some co marketing in there as well. And so I think that's one

thing that people can start to see. Where are the

impacts of nearbound by doing that? To go

back to your original question is, are we just renaming referrals? Are

we just renaming this? And really, my exposure to Nearbound

started when I started hosting the podcast

that's now called Nearbound Marketing. Initially, we were calling it Marketing Together, and

I just started exploring every instance where people

were marketing with people outside of their marketing team.

So we started talking about marketing with customers. We started talking about

marketing with strategic partners, marketing

with solution partners, or like, what someone would call channel or agency

partner, right? Executives within the team,

employee advocacy, influencer marketing,

marketing, all of these things. And the common thread

was how can I make my marketing better and get

it out to the people that I'm trying to

reach by partnering with different people. Some of those within the

organization, some of them external, some of them look very

different. And so that's where I would say nearbound marketing is

not just about co marketing or partner marketing because partner

marketing is just webinars, right? No, although

I can say there was a time right, you would think in a lot of

cases. And so when you

look at referrals, when you look at partner marketing, when you look

at your executive or founder brand, you look at

employee advocacy and then influencer marketing, all

of these different things that kind of seem like disparate different

channels and efforts within marketing as a whole. I

really think Nearbound is kind of the

overlay there across all of these strategies and tactics

where you're tapping into trust. You're bringing in people from outside of

your marketing team, different sorts of personas, different sorts of

motions, and it kind of brings them together. And that's really where my eyes

started to open up. There is something different here. And in all of

these motions, there's a different way that you can do it. If you tweak your

thinking a little bit and understand the buyer behavior that

matters, that leads to how we should do each of these things

a little bit differently. Yeah, okay. That makes

a lot of sense. And I'm glad you brought up Attribution, because that was always

a nightmare when I was working with clients

is they wanted it because they understood there's data.

It's like, well, what does the data say? Well, oh, it looks

like this one channel is just working really well. Yeah,

but it's all SEO because they're

coming through Google. Well, why are they searching for our name? Oh, because they've been

seeing us on Facebook or LinkedIn or listening to our

podcast forever that they know what to search for. Right.

Then you try to bring up multi channel Attribution and then you just

watch some CMO or VP of Marketing's eyes

glaze over and it's this I don't need this hate in

my like, they act like I woke up and chose

violence that morning. But it

is really difficult. But it seems like Nearbound is giving

at least we'll say marketers. Or if you're like me and you

run a solo practice when I'm wearing my marketing hat. But it's

giving us a way, like you said, to pull. Those disparate

pieces together and account for

I don't want to say it's just all like serendipity or something like that because

there is a lot of intention that you talk about on

your podcasts and also partner

Hacker and a lot of their now nearbound but the

materials like they have several ebooks and things like that.

It's not just well, they magically came into my

sphere and are in my sales funnel and you know what we'll just call

it nearbound. We can't really point

at SEO or paid ads or one thing, so we'll just give it a

blanket term. I am curious

then in what you're seeing, because

obviously, if we're talking about this in the context

of an evolution from inbound,

which I think is a good and a right context,

eventually inbound Start wasn't just

they dropped just the marketing, right? Because it wasn't just

marketing, it was also sales. Do you see this?

Does this nearbound, dare I say, movement? But this

move towards Nearbound, is it just for

marketing? Is it playing a role in sales yet?

Or is that something that happens later when newer

methodologies and ways of organizing

marketing come about? What's your take on

that? Yeah, so you touched on the rebrand

recently of the team that's behind the Nearbound

Marketing podcasts that I host, and the previous name was

Partner Hacker. They renamed to nearbound.com. And this really

started with an event that they did last year in

2022 that they called PLX. Partner led everything.

And they started talking about how this idea of partnering with people

outside of your department and outside of your organization,

reaching into the ecosystem that you serve, finding the people

who are these nodes of trust that your buyers already

know and trust and working

with them. And that being a strategy that helps

every function. It helps sales, it helps marketing, it helps

customer success. It even helps product. If you're

engaging in the market that you serve, you can build

better products. Right. But what they realized was as much

as that really caught people's attention and they

said, this makes a ton of sense by still leading with the

word partner, it was like, oh, we're still talking about the partnerships

department. It's kind of like us talking about partner marketing. It's just like, oh, it's

just webinars, right? If you have a bar, if you had the value added

leaders, then you can execute this methodology. If you don't,

then it's not for you. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And so really, actually, the folks

at Reveal and Nearbound.com have been

talking more honestly about the sales side. Right.

Because we're at a point now where

a lot of B, two B sales teams are looking at how can I find

the folks that my buyers already trust? And not just kind

of like you said, just wait to see kind of what the Attribution says

and just call it Nearbound. But proactively building relationships with

sales reps in other organizations, working through their

partner teams and aligning the partner team and the sales team to

run campaigns together, those sorts of things. So

Nearbound really does apply to the entire go to

market motion. And like we said, I think it's more of an

overlay and it's a

compilation of different tactics and motions that

you can use across your entire go to market function

that start with, how do I leverage the

trust that already exists in other relationships? And

that can play out in sales, that can play out in marketing, that can play

out in customer success and account management, expansion, sort

of opportunities and those sorts of things. So definitely

not relegated to marketing. My take

and why I talk a ton about nearbound marketing was I've been on

this journey, really where I was eventually going to Lange in a marketing

department. I had a brief stop in partnerships, and I was like,

okay, I get this, and I want to take this

into the marketing team. And so I actually

just shared recently on the

podcast that my transition from head of partnerships to

this evangelism role, where I'm really focused on identifying those

potential evangelists for our company, activating them, and going to

market together. This shift in the market, this shift

from partnerships as a department to nearbound as a

strategy, you can see even in the evolution of my

role@teamwork.com. Yeah. Wow.

So I love that it can encompass a lot.

In part, I guess one of my references was

that it came out of inbound. I forgot whose

post it was, but mentioned that it's becoming

far more common for even HubSpot's

direct sales team to

close more deals when they bring a partner,

a solutions partner, into the sales and the

purchase process is the deals were

larger, they closed faster. The retention,

I believe, has been better with those sort of

deals and that's sort of that collaborative, hey,

we have somebody here who isn't I mean, yes, solutions

partner, but they're not on the HubSpot payroll. Therefore, there

may be some of that objective third party

trust that people are looking for.

So I think from the

methodology standpoint, I think you've covered it well. You've given us a

place to sort of orient it. It's not just a

repackage or rebrand of older time

tested items. It's an

addition to and an evolution of in part because of the

sophistication of attribution models or even just

how the world keeps shrinking, so to speak, because of the

Internet. But I am curious on

if someone's going to listen to this and like

any great if they're a CEO or C suite or something

like that, if they're listening to this, much, like coming back

from a great conference, they're going to have a great idea and they want to

slap it on whatever they're doing. Right? That's the first thing you

want to do, which is not a bad instinct to just take action on

something you've used some discernment to

say. Yeah, I think that's a good thing for us. It probably answers some

questions. If they're experiencing some of the pain of, like, why isn't our marketing

generating leads like it used to? Why do we have to sell so hard? Kind

of like your guy that you didn't. Really have to oversell

at Inbound. How important is it

that people dial in that ICP?

And that doesn't stand for Insane Clown Posse. That means ideal

client profile. Although that is what I think every time I hear

it. I'm just clearing that up for the listener. But

when I think about all these companies, okay, they're going to say yes, we need

to go to market with this Nearbound approach. We need to find

collaborators, find the people who market to

our ideal client profile and are serving them so we can work

together on this. One of the first things that I think

people still to this day, inbound has been out a long time,

different digital marketer HubSpot. All sorts of people have talked about

what's your avatar, what's your persona, what is your

ICP? And people seem to really struggle with it. It

seems like Nearbound would be sort of this advanced

level thing that you could only execute if you were very

clear about that. Is that the case or have I

overcomplicated it? I think just like anything in

marketing, it is going to be infinitely

better if you actually know who the heck you're talking to. If you haven't defined

your ICP, nothing in marketing is going to work as well

as it should. That is true of Nearbound. That is true

of just how you design your website and the copy that you put there,

right. If you don't know who you're speaking to, how are you going to write

to them? If you don't know who you're trying to surround, how are you going

to pick the right people to surround them? So this has been

a learning process as we've tried to define really what

is the motion for nearbound marketing? As we've talked about here, and

you asked a really good question, nearbound does apply to the broader

go to market motions, not just marketing, but at least in my

mind, there are kind of five phases to Nearbound marketing, and you

nailed phase number one without me even teeing you up for it.

Define your ICP. Not Insane

Clown Posse for those ICP

fans out there, but for us. Marketers your ideal client

profile. Number two is establish and document your

POV and your strategic narrative.

And I've actually been talking to

Nick Bennett, who now founded an agency consultancy

called Harness and Hone, where he's focusing on helping

agencies define the problem that they solve and

own their niche. He worked for a large HubSpot Solutions partner,

Impact, that merged with Marcus Sheridan's company

sales line. Right. And so I'm actually kind of evolving

my thinking on phase two. You've got to establish your POV,

but you need to do that based on the problem that you solve.

Phase three is about assembling your Nearbound marketing team. I think if you're

going to bring in people from outside of your marketing team to do marketing

better, or even if you're an individual and you're going to engage with people

outside of your company to do marketing together,

then there's certain things you need to look for in certain types.

Phase four is then activating your evangelists in phase five is

iterating and scaling. And

like we talked about here, it's tough to have a

point of view. It's tough to identify who your

evangelists are that you want to activate if you haven't defined your

ICP. So that's really the foundation of it. So

that's a problem if you're trying to do nearbound marketing. That's a problem

if you're just trying to market your business with no strategy whatsoever.

Right. But it would seem to me that

if you are going the route of nearbound,

that the definition, getting the

definition right, that process is going to be a little less forgiving than if you're

just trying to go it alone. Like you could leave some parts of your ICP

fuzzy, and lots of people often

do when they're just marketing by themselves.

You involve a third party right. Somebody else to bring

in the mix. Well, you've got to be really certain that you reach the

same group that they do, because you got to be able to somewhat compare

notes and say, okay, I see you marketing to these people. Is that

really like who you want? Yeah. For

instance, it's helped me because I was very broad even

to specialize in just founder led organizations

when I would tell people that it was helpful because

it at least classified some type of structure

or agency lifecycle or something like that.

But when I started saying agencies and nonprofits,

well, then I started getting into some different conversations

just by switching that part up. And it opened

up some doors. Yeah. I will say one of

the things that I thought that Isaac Morehouse, the

CMO at Reveal, he was one of the co founders

of Nearbound.com. He introduced me to this idea that he just

slapped me the other day. He's like, oh hey dude, I thought I made up

this term. I didn't. Here's who I gave the credit to and I forget who

it was. He shared it on LinkedIn. But I really like this.

So did he. And suffice it to say, it didn't start with

us, but this idea of permissionless co marketing.

So one of the things that you can do if you're not super clear on

your ICP, you're not super clear on who are the

Nearbound evangelists, as I call them, that you want to activate and bring

into your Nearbound motion. You probably have an idea,

you have some hunches on your ICP, go to some of

those folks that you think you have some overlap with, start creating some

content together. That's quick you can iterate on. You can push out

there. You can get some feedback from the market, and you can kind of build

in public, as they say, and learn out loud. And you may

actually be able to go back to phase one and better define

and refine your ICP by doing some of this co

marketing in public with some of the folks where you're like, I think you're talking

to the same people, we're kind of saying this what's really

resonating? They might say something and your audience is like, oh, that really

resonated. And you're like, hold on, those five people that gave us that feedback,

they're all this persona, or they're all in this type of

organization, it can actually work together

even if it's not completely linear. So you bring up a really

good question there, Kenny. Well, that's what I'm here for.

That's why they pay me the medium bucks.

The medium bucks? Yeah, for the tens of

listeners. But

I'm glad you said that, because with the phases, which

I think is great to understand the progression, but it

sounds like you're giving permission to

people but really telling

them, hey, if you don't have it exactly nailed down, that's okay.

Sort of start with what you got. Start with your

idea and then go out to the market and test it. Get that, just

shorten the feedback loop. And then you can always come back and refine phase

one with the ICP. You can refine phase two. I would say for

me, I've been doing a lot of refining of phase

one, and I was talking to

our mutual friend Pete Caputa at Databox about

the phase two part of just having a point of view. He's

talked a bit about how he's refined that over the last twelve

months and how much good it's done for him. And of course he's doing

some collaborative growth stuff and near inbound and he's a fan of

it. But that's the part that

I feel like I'm trying to figure out

and sort of test the waters in a few places

because I know that the second you have a point of view, it's going to

attract the right people and repel the wrong ones. It needs to

be a bit divisive, not in a mean spirited way, but

it needs to take a stand. So

if somebody listening is saying, yeah, I'm all in, and I think you've already

given quite a few answers to my typical

question, but what is the very first step? Somebody

in 24 hours, whether they're professional marketer,

their agency, their solopreneur, whoever they may be, if

they wanted to take their first steps and feel some of the

motion of going towards nearbound, what would you

tell that person? Yeah. So this is something that

I actually shared on the podcasts here

recently. And then I was doing an interview, actually earlier today

for the other podcast that I host called Agency Life,

and I was talking to Sam Dunning, who's with Web Choice. He's a co owner

at an SEO and web development agency based in the UK. And

he described it one way. I had described it unbeknownst to him in

a similar way on another podcasts very similarly. And

here's what we did. Short form video is very hot

right now. As we mentioned earlier, it's easier to

create than ever before. Now more than ever.

See what I did there died a. Little on the

inside. And at the same time,

the idea of nearbound is all about trust, right? And when people see

faces, they see that it's not AI generated. Then

there is some more trust that happens there. And a podcast like this one is

a great way to create short form video clips

individually or with a guest, that sort of stuff. But especially for

a small business owner or an agency that doesn't have a ton of time to

invest in their own marketing, it can be a lot to dedicate to. We're going

to do a podcast every week, we're going to promote it, all these sorts of

things. I mean, you know, right, but you can still use that

motion to move quickly. And so Sam actually talked

about do a series for LinkedIn

and just say, hey, we're going to do a series of videos, short

form under a minute over the next couple of weeks and we're just

going to answer some of these questions that are

applicable to our audience. I mean, just go

refresh yourself on they ask, you answer from Marcus Sheridan and you'll come

up with 510 questions. Really, right? And so go to

some of those people who you think could be your nearbound

partners. And so I might approach you, Kenny, and say,

hey, we're both trying to reach agency owners. I've come up with ten

questions about the struggles of running an agency. I know you

have some expertise in the operations and the system. I'm going to ask

you these ten questions. We're going to hop on Riverside FM, same

platform we're using to record this podcast. But you can record

just a conversation where you don't care about

the long form. It doesn't matter. It's not going to be on Apple and Spotify

and everywhere. You're just going to ask these ten questions. And because you

know you have a set number of questions, you know where the clips are going

to be. You fill out those clips and you have a recurring

series over the next two weeks where you and I, we have ten videos. We

can each post them. So we've got 20 opportunities for

posts and we look at what the feedback is. What did people

respond to, what did they question, what things did they ask that

could help us refine our ICP or refine our

positioning? Those sorts of things. That's something you can do very

lightweight with a tool like Riverside FM, plus either Descript

or even an AI tool like Opus Clip or Momento

and put out a bunch of content really quickly without

dedicating to a whole campaign or we're starting a podcast and we're going to

do 52 episodes this year. And you can just approach. People of,

hey, Kenny, show up. I'll ask you some questions. We'll create some videos, make

you look good. All I'm asking is that you commit to this posting plan.

We'll do the same, and then we'll see what it looks like after a. Couple

of does that even

though, as you mentioned towards the beginning of our conversation,

the barrier to entry has never been lower. But I do

think people feel the

pressure to produce things at a certain quality

and a certain velocity. And so having a plan like

that really, I think, takes the sting out of

this big production thing. And I got to get all this. It's like no, it's

like one or two subscriptions and just a little bit of thinking

time and the courage to reach out to somebody and

say, hey, do you want to do this with me? And so far, what I

have found is most people are willing to say yes and have that

conversation. Well, Logan, this has been tremendously helpful,

and I'm pretty sure that we could keep going for quite a while. Nerd out.

Talk about insane clown posse. I feel like that's going to become the

title somehow.

But if people want to know more about you, the

work you're doing, whether it's with Teamwork.com or the

Nearbound Podcast or anything else, where would you send them? Yeah, so

three ways connect with me on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to find there.

Logan Lyles last name is L-Y-L-E-S.

Then the two podcasts that we mentioned, sorry for all the shameless plugs,

but it really did fit into this conversation. So I host a weekly

podcast called Nearbound Marketing on Thursdays, where we're talking

about this concept that we're really exploring here with your great questions,

Kenny. And then actually, excuse me, those drop on Friday

and then every Thursday. I am also the host of a

podcast from Teamwork.com called Agency Life. So if you are

an agency owner, founder, you're helping lead an

agency. We're talking some marketing there that overlaps, but

also operations, how to sell as an agency

owner, managing capacity, dealing with

frustrating clients, how to fire those clients at times, all that sort

of stuff. So LinkedIn, Agency Life,

and Nearbound Marketing, wherever you get your podcasts, you can find me on those

two each and every week. Awesome. We'll be sure to link all of that

up in the notes. One final question.

It's a bonus one just for you because you hit me

with this dad jokes.

Do you have a joke for us to close on? Absolutely.

And it's interesting, every time you and I swap

dad jokes, I remember the first time I met Pete

Caputa one on one because he said, hey, have you heard of

this YouTube channel, which we both now know that we're fans

of, called Doc Talk, where these guys exchange dad jokes? And the

guy's name is Logan lyle Lisle. And

Pete was like, you're not him, right? I was like, no. Different spelling, different

pronunciation. Anyway, all that being said, two

goldfish were sitting in a tank, and one looks to the

other and says, do you even know how to drive this thing?

Thanks for hitting me with a clap. I'm sure our audience rolled their

eyes and we cannot hear that, so we'll end right there.

I am unbothered by that. Well, thank you so much. And to those

of you listening, I hope this has been helpful. Keep your

eyes and ears open for some social media

posts. Let us know what you think or any questions you may have for

Logan to dig into this. But until next time,

change the way you think. You'll change the way you lead. We'll see you next

time.