Podcast Transcript: 

[00:02:15] Sean Steele: Well, welcome back everybody to the ScaleHQ Podcast. Welcome back to our regular listeners, of course. And to anybody joining us for the first time, we are thrilled to have you. And my guest this week is Morgan Ingram, who's actually been named a LinkedIn top sales voice four times. Morgan, you're an advisor to lots of companies on revenue generation, and you are the Founder and Chief Edutainment Officer, which I did notice there was little sort of brackets for CEO. It's nice play on the CEO title at AMP, Ascension Media Productions, your company, that focuses on innovating what you would consider to be, I guess, outdated marketing and cold outreach strategies by really creating immersive videos and event activation strategy to drive revenue and bring people through the buyer's journey. How are you today?

[00:03:02] Morgan J Ingram: I'm doing fantastic. How about yourself?

[00:03:04] Sean Steele: Mate, I am awesome. I am awesome. Sunday night for you, Monday morning for me, you're in Atlanta, and I'm on Sunshine Coast of Queensland. And it was a perfect day for us to have this conversation. What I might do, Morgan, is just give a bit of context for our audience as to how we kind of got to this conversation and what I want to cover with you today. I first heard you on Luigi Prestinenzi, who is an old friend of mine, his podcast, one of his podcasts. First back in 2019 on his Sales IQ Podcast. And then again, this year, I think you're on in May on his, I think it's now called How To Sell Podcasts where you were talking about creative marketing strategies. And I was listening to that and I really poked up when you were talking about getting clear about what you want to be known for having pillars, you know, maybe five pillars of content that support that space that you're trying to be known for. And then being really creative in the execution of that, of the strategy to generate leads around it, including events in a video, which we're obviously going to talk about today. But I am on like on a mission at the moment, because I'm noticing in the sort of seven-figure Founder audience that we have, I see a lot of Founders get to somewhere between 5 and 10 million very successfully without a scalable customer acquisition system, you know, reputation, word of mouth, just they've been in the business, blah, blah, blah, and then it just starts to Peter out. And all of a sudden, they don't have a system that's going to allow them to actually keep scaling. And if they want a eight-figure business in revenue evaluation, they are going to have to have a systematic way of doing that. Obviously, there's lots of ways to do it, but you posted a week ago. This is October that we're recording this in 23. And I'm paraphrasing, but you basically said. “Emails and generic LinkedIn messages are losing their edge. The new space is event activations and video content and how to use these to rise above the noise and the clutter.” So, what I wanted to unpack today with you was your thinking and your frameworks and make sure that our audience leaves with really practical stuff that they can go and implement themselves. How does that sound as a setup?

[00:01:18] Morgan J Ingram: Sounds good to me. Let's dive in.

[00:05:04] Sean Steele: Sweet, mate. Okay. Well, one of the things that you mentioned, was you said that traditional outbound is at a pivotal crossroads and less than 30 percent of sellers are hitting their numbers. I didn't know that. That's pretty interesting. Do you think that is a new, is that a change in a trend? Do you think that has always been like that or do you think that's actually getting worse? And can you share a story that sort of illustrates what you think is going on here? Like what's the shift that's happening?

[00:05:29] Morgan J Ingram: Yeah. Let’s unpack there. So, I'll give three different scenarios. Before I go into that, when I say these claims, this is not because. I'm just saying them to say them to get attention. I've done sales training for the past three and a half, four years. I trained Salesforce, Zoom, Slack, every top growth tech company you can think of. I've gone and trained them on top of the funnel and their entire SDR team. So, I've seen all the messaging. I've seen the results. I know what the conversion rates are. Like I know these leaders and I've spoken to them and I've seen the teams and number one, the reason that I bring in this up is because I started to notice that the buyer is changing. They're not engaging with the email and the email deliverability is coming difficult. And when I say these things, I'm not saying that it's dead, because that's where people go wrong on this. I'm just saying the ways that you're thinking about it are dying and you're going to have to change, right? Because the buyer is changing. They are not engaging with those mediums anymore. I know a lot more people that are proactively reaching out to apple to block unknown numbers that don't exist in their contact book, so it doesn't even get to their phone. Apple has spam risks. Now I'm a massive fan of cold call, so I'm not just saying, oh, like… I'm just telling you the facts here. And then you look at everything that's going on in terms of LinkedIn. You can connect with people on LinkedIn, you can get engagement, et cetera, but due to AI and spam, the inbox are starting to get even more flooded. Being tailored and being personalised, you can still get through the noise. I'm just saying it's getting harder because people are taking shortcuts, and the buyer is getting more annoyed. So there has to be a way to connect with them. And then the second thing is that, I have people that are sales leaders and they've been in tech for a very long time, and even some people who have led a 100 person teams, and they're telling me that they're cutting their entire SDR team. Now these aren't a 100 person teams. I'm just giving context. And I know someone who's led a 100 person sales development team and they went to a new organisation that about like 5 and they got rid of that entire team and they said, they'll never have SDRs ever again. And I've heard that from multiple people, and these are credible people. These aren't random people that just started. These are credible people. And they're saying that their pipeline is similar if not more, when they got rid of the SDRs.

[00:08:00] Sean Steele: Because they'd implemented a new strategy or?

[00:08:02] Morgan J Ingram: They implemented a new strategy. I mean, good things we're going to talk about. They implemented more partnerships, they got more aligned on channel, which some organisations, you may not be able to do that, but they did that. They lean more on content from the Founder. 

[00:08:15] Sean Steele: Can you just give us an example of channel, some of our Founders will not really be sales professionals. So, some of the vernacular won't make sense.

[00:08:23] Morgan J Ingram: For sure. I know tech like channel ABM SDM. Yeah, I know, we got to break it down. So, channel for example, would be, I go to a company. And their sellers sell on behalf of our products. So, it'd be like white labelled or white listed or whatever, and they sell on behalf of our organisation. So that would be example of the channel. That takes a while to do. And most organisations, they don't want to do that because it's going to take a while, but that's just an example for that company, that's what they did. So, there's just other channels that are evolving that are helping them along the way. And the third thing is that the sales motion and the way that people interact is also changing, I do believe that we're going to have more people go to full sales cycle roles. I'm already starting to see it where SDRs not coming in as SDRs, are coming in as full sales cycle S&B reps.

[00:09:19] Sean Steele: Okay. Can you just unpack that? What's the difference?

[00:09:21] Morgan J Ingram: So basically, a full sales cycle S&B would be small to medium business and what they're doing is they're doing prospecting and they're closing, versus, an SDR would come in a sales development rep would come in and just prospect, they wouldn't close. So now they're coming in to learn the prospecting and the closing and more sellers are moving in that motion, which then leads to, you're going to have to change the way that you go about your emotion and your traditional way of doing it is not going to be as impactful. So those are three things I'm hearing, I'm having conversations. I'm unpacking it with people and that's where their focus is.

[00:09:57] Sean Steele: I'm hearing a lot also, as you mentioned in there about partner sales strategies, and I just wonder how much of this is, you know, kind of coming out of COVID, everything moving online, and then all of a sudden just the amount of volume increasing and the quality reducing and as generative AI just like kicks that thing along with like at 1000 miles an hour, quality gets even worse, so people's trust is probably going down. So, how do you get through all of this noise to kind of get trust? And so, one way, obviously, as you said, it's just making sure that there's a personalised strategy, but another way partners bring a lot of credibility, events give you an ability to interact with people, get to see you in a very different way that elevates trust. Okay. So yeah, so this feels like there's a bit of a trend and that makes a lot of sense to me. So, talk to me about what do you think of the things that are working now and why?

[00:11:01] Morgan J Ingram: I would say, you mentioned it, and this isn't what I'm even diving to, because I want to call this out, they’re leading the charge right now, Nearbound, they've even like made it a side, et cetera. So, the whole concept around that is partnerships. So, getting deeper with your partners, right? If you already have someone that likes your service or whatever, you should find ways to find their partners, so they can introduce you to those people, and then that leads to like more revenue, et cetera. So, I believe partnerships are what's going to be very, very critical and important moving forward when it comes to what's working. So, I'd say that's like number one. We already mentioned some stuff. Channel, if you can set up a channel program based on what I said, you could do that. I can't give you advice on how to set up a channel because I've never done it. But I know people have done it and they say it's successful, and I've heard that through the grapevine. So, that's a big piece of it as well. Three is getting more serious about your content and involving your employees and some may say, well, that only works in certain industries, I believe it could work in any industry. So, it's essentially getting one of your executives or multiple executives creating content and then getting some of your sales reps active and creating content, that's going to be a way that you're going to move in the right direction. At our organisation, we call them revenue amplifiers. I'm not trying to build you into an influencer. I'm just trying to get you to create content so you can amplify your revenue. So, we help you in that regard. And then, you know, what we'll talk about and what we're doing is event activations. We just did one. I just came back from one, and I believe that most people waste their money at events, they spend X amount on a booth and they just sit there, they twiddle their thumbs and they don't do anything. I do not get it. So, I believe that having an event activation and for an example, to give context is we film a live podcast show, or we do something that's unique and different, right? That brings our potential clients and clients to the booth where we're going to get a lot of traffic and we're going to acquire new customers and people in our database as well. So those are just examples right at the gate that are working. What I'm hearing from people on how they're being successful right now.

[00:13:15] Sean Steele: So, let's talk about the event stuff. Because look, I'm a big fan of events and I think, again, I actually think the timing is really good because people are getting a lot less face-to-face. Like I support an organisation that of course had to go to everything virtual, and I've been watching their virtual programs get much harder to fill and their face-to-face programs massively increasing again. And this sort of just feels like there's a tide that's shifting back towards face-to-face. And now there's a bit of an issue, I think, because people are attached to the efficiency of working from home, but they're actually really missing the connectivity with people. And so they're less likely to maybe want to just go for a coffee somewhere, because actually the inconvenience of leaving the home to get to the city and then through the coffee and go back now, all of a sudden, it's like half a day's activity. That's just not efficient, but actually going to an event where they get a lot of connectivity in one, like in one chunk and one block, it's actually quite efficient, but also super connective. So, yeah, I think there's a big tailwind behind events, in general. So, I'm interested to like, let's unpack what you would consider an event a successful event activation strategy or a way to use events and to the way that you create that engagement to create revenue generating opportunities, maybe give me a story or an example that would help people understand how you think, what would be like a best in class, great example to unpack?

[00:14:40] Morgan J Ingram: I'm going to give you all examples of things that I've been a part of. And then also as well, like, I'm going to start from like simple, all the way to like, you know, probably something where it's like, that's a lot, but like, you will get more out of it, obviously. So, the most simple thing, and when I say simple, it's like easier to execute, not more money wise, but actually just easier to execute, is, any event that's going on in your space. I know everyone has different events. Like the finance world has a massive events, right? The tech world has their massive event, manufacturing, et cetera.

[00:15:17] I don't know all the events, but I’m just giving an example. Instead of getting a booth, get a space that's near the event. So, I'll give you an example. So, at DreamForce, I was working with a client and instead of getting a booth, what they did is they decided to rent out a bar, like just an entire bar that was five-minute walking distance from the event. And so, they set up their own lounge, they call it was a lounge and they set up content in the lounge. And it had a mini conference outside of the event itself. So, to rent out that space, it was less than getting the booth and they controlled the space. So, anyone would come in, they had TVs on like the wall, and if someone wanted to go demo, they could go demo. They had drinks customised based on the name of their products, companies, et cetera. And then in the back, if you wanted a private conversation, they had that set up as well. So, it ended up being a very vibrant and active space because you're like; okay, I can hang out here and get a drink, if I want to talk to a client, I can bring them over here, if a customer is there, et cetera, I could do all those things. And I found that to be extremely successful as I was a part of it. And also, I moderated two panels while I was at this activation. So, it allowed for them to get content as well, and I found that to be extremely beneficial and extremely helpful, and I believe a lot of people got a lot out of it. And that is a great way to do an event activation because people are going to be like, wait, oh my gosh, I don't want to go to this event. I might not have the money. It's too hectic, et cetera. To go to this event. it was free just to walk in the room. I didn't have to pay the $2,000 - $3,000 to get into this event. So that's like easier to do because you just, you know, you hit up the bar and say; Hey, can we rent this out? And if you're the funds, you have the funds, right? That's where we come, maybe you got to get a lighter spot. Maybe it's a little bit more away, but I found that to be massively helpful because now you can invite whoever to the activation, you can have a conversation.

[00:17:24] Sean Steele: I really like that. And, you know, one of the things I noticed about events is that, there's plenty of people who go there who want to be connected with others, but often it's not actually well facilitated at the event. So, they're kind of hoping they're going to build a network at the event, but actually they're introverted or they're shy when it comes to introducing themselves to somebody else, and so they actually don't make many connections. So, I imagine that's also a really interesting way of capturing the attention of if you've got a really clear idea of customer profile and you can communicate that that's actually the people who are going to be at this thing, and we're going to help facilitate conversations and connections in a far more casual, and in interesting space. That could be really, even if it's like this is happening at lunchtime or this is where the drinks are happening afterwards or whatever. That's a really interesting way of capturing people. 

[00:18:10] Morgan J Ingram: You're controlling your space. You're comfortable. Amazing for the introverts out there.

[00:18:18] Sean Steele: Yeah. Okay, so in the actual … look, I used to be a bit of an event junkie, like with the very first business that I had to build a sales and marketing system for from scratch, it was an education business and we had to go to all the careers, exhibitions to recruit students. And so, we had super clear lead targets. We had all sorts of engaging, prizes and this and that. We were no like just sitting around waiting for something to happen. And we essentially built an entire business off the back of that strategy and doing well. So, I'm a big fan of actually leveraging events if you've got them available to you. What are some of the things that you've found really important in creating the, so you're creating this great experience, people are coming to your event, you're controlling the content. What about the capturing of the details that create a path to a conversation afterwards to lead someone into, perhaps a business opportunity that comes out of it and a revenue opportunity?

[00:19:19] Morgan J Ingram: Yeah, this answer, most people may not like, because you really got to think about this one. So, when I go to events, everyone's always just looking to capture everything like, oh, can I scan your badge? And it's like, well…

[00:19:35] Sean Steele: Barcode. Barcode. Barcode.

[00:19:37] Morgan J Ingram: Yeah, it's like, but I'm not even really your buyer so this is not really going to help you, right? Like, why are we doing this? But you feel obligated to do so, but this isn't going to help you. Why are you doing this? And so, what you need to do for everybody from, especially every Founder listening on this call right now, and I just did it at an event I just was at, you have to come with a set of questions that's like pseudo discovery to figure out is this person even like someone I want to talk to moving forward, because they may not be a fit and you as a Founder seller, you need to be able to disqualify within like 5 to 10 minutes. Like, okay, this person just isn't ready. So, it saves your time of the badge scan. Because what happens is people have like, oh, we need to get 350 people scanned. Okay. Well, if you scan 350 people, but 300 of those people are not good, how does that help you? It doesn't, right? That doesn't help you at all. So, what I recommend people to do is get a set of questions that you need to ask. So, you can figure out if this person is legit. Number two, if you can bring a unique business card. At my old company, we had poker chips. Now, we're looking to get, you know, have you been to the arcade before? You don't have the arcade coins. Yeah. We're trying to get the business cards that like that are arcade coins. So, we're working on, I'm trying to figure out where to get them, but we're working on it. So, you want to have a unique card, so they don't throw it away. Or you could do something digital. It's fine too. And then the third thing, right? If you look at this, is that you want to do something at the event itself, that is memorable, which kind of leads into like a couple of ideas that y'all could take here, which I have a lot, but I have two. So, number one is let's say that you got a ticket, but you didn't get the booth. Okay. So, you got in the event. Great. You want to network? What are you going to do to stand out? Now, if you're introverted, you may not like this idea, but what you want to do is everyone is walking around, and they're for intention. Take the questions you were going to ask someone and then ask them, but then maybe make it a constant series and just film it. You could easily get a stand and film it. You can easily sell for the video and film it and get content that way. That's a good way to get answers. You can give them the content and then that's a good way to like start talking to people and getting good conversations. So, you get your discovery and your content. So, you can do that. The other thing that I recommend people to do is go to sessions that are talking about the things that your product can solve for. And if you're introverted, this is great because after the session is over, you could just talk to the person, say; Hey, what did you think about X? You're in a comfortable setting because already in that room, and that's a good way and that's not constant related. That's just like selling, right? That's a good way to do it. And then extended on that, another way that you could do this, and I actually saw someone do this and I thought it was a great idea, and I'll kind of tell you what we just did too so it kind of plays into it. I was at DreamForce and one of the booths, they had a silent, they treated the booth like a silent disco. And so, everybody at the booth would get headphones to listen to the demo. I thought that was good because it shows intention that you're listening to them across the board, and so you put your headphones in, you can hear the demo. They're walking things through. You could click a button if you had a question. So, someone would come to you from the team and talk to you and then obviously like you could take your headphones off and have a conversation. I thought that was very, very smart, right? At the end of the day, if you're at a massive event like that, you need the clarification. And then the last thing, and then we'll get back into distilling everything I've said here, but I want to give you all tactical things to think about. This is like the highest in and we just did this. So, if you add your organisation, let's say you're a Founder right now, you're listening in. You're like; Hey Morgan, I've really wanted to start a podcast, but I don't know where to start, but I want it to be different. What we did at this previous event. Y'all probably have seen the show Hot Ones. So, we took that concept of the Hot Ones, which basically, if you haven't seen it, there's like five to seven wings. They have hot sauce on the wings and they eat the wings as the host asks them questions and people borderline kill themselves. So, we took that concept and we did it at this event. We called it Hot Intros because their product focuses on like go to network, partnerships, et cetera, things we're talking about, like, you know, breaking through the mold. And so, we had 17 people come through the booth to do this Hot Intros interview. Through that there were five wings and five hot sauces they had to go through. The hot sauce was customised based on certain names in our industry, which was fun. But that was five wings. Most people made it through all five wings. So, if you do, 17 times 5, public math here. I believe that's 105, if I'm correct. I could be wrong, but I think that's, wait, it's 105 or maybe 85?

[00:24:48] Sean Steele: 17 times 5 is less than, yeah. About 85.

[00:24:52] Morgan J Ingram: Right. So, that's how many clips, piece of content that we got off of two days of the content. And then that's 17 episodes. You can start off with your podcast. So, now not only are we getting, we got actually the most traffic at the booth. We had everyone surrounding the booth that we could pull in customers that they wanted for the client and say; Hey, you want to talk to that person? Cool. Just invite them on the show. So, now we're getting pipeline and we have five months of content from two days. That's where most people are not thinking about this appropriately.

[00:25:29] Sean Steele: I love that idea.

[00:25:32] Morgan J Ingram: If you're going to spend 45 to 50K on a booth, and then you don't come out with any content and everyone you want to talk to is at this event and you could just have a live conversation with them. Why would you not do that? So, these are just things that, again, there's a lot of this covered, but I'm giving you all examples of what to do and what most people are just not doing. It's very, very baffling to me.

[00:26:58] Sean Steele: That's so interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me to leverage the … because number one, you're obviously creating a very different engagement, , with that person, which to you, as you said, is going to be a memorable. And two, you've just built a whole bunch of really quality content that's not coming from you telling everybody how great you are and so on. It's actually coming from people getting to listen to other people in their same space with the same problems. And that's just so much more interesting, isn't it? Then listening to somebody rabbit on about how wonderful they are. Really like that. High engagement. Okay. So, and what have you noticed…I mean, ultimately when you're advising companies on these sorts of things, I'm sure that, and you know, you've grown up in a world where you're having to measure absolutely everything. How are you seeing ROI being different in this stuff. Like, I mean, sometimes it can be more difficult to measure in some other ways, it's not, I guess if you're able to kind of allocate all the costs to that specific event and so on, like, how are you seeing this turn up in metrics or ROI for companies?

[00:27:55] Morgan J Ingram: So, the grand question, right? What's the ROI? Because it's like, yeah, Morgan, that sounds cool but like, what are you actually doing? So, I always say ROI is contextualised to the buyer. Some people's ROI is like, I just want a ton of content and they're cool with spending the money. Some people are not. So, I'll give you all a baseline of three to five things that we look at and in a way that we articulate this is through our three A's. So, Amplify, Acquire, and Advocate. So, we believe that you're going to amplify something you're already doing. It's easy for somebody to do something more of something they're already doing than convincing them of something new that they're not. So, if you, for example, if I went to this company and said; Hey, you've never bought a booth, and I want you to go buy a booth at a conference and then do a live podcast, there's no way that's going to happen. But if you're already buying these booths, but you're not doing anything, it's easy to convince you to do a little bit more. And then the second, so that's the ROI of just doing more, which leads to more traffic, which is the second piece, which is acquire. So, the way we're tracking it is, are you getting more boot traffic than you typically could get? Are you getting more quality people show up because we did an activation, and are the right people showing up that you wanted coming through that you couldn't get before. So, instead of a sales rep saying; Hey, we're a booth 313, check us out… Okay, I don't care… But hey, we have a show where we're going to do like, we're going to eat five ice cream flavours, and we want you to come through and answer these questions. We'll give you the content after. Most people now in the market that's an executive, they're hearing the whispers. They know they need to create content. They'll go do that. And guess what? The questions you're going to ask is your discovery questions. You would typically ask if you were selling. So now, we're getting more quality guests. So that's how we look at that. and then advocate is how many people are talking about it. So, the five KPIs to give you all the context, you're like Morgan where are the KPIs? Number one is, increase in the booth traffic. Plus, the quality of people that we are now going to get and scan. And I mentioned the questions, you know, I make sure I start questions. Two is the content output that you're going to get out of this. From two days of the event, we have covered for this client. Like for the next six months, they're good. They could do nothing and they'll be fine. Not a lot of companies can say that. So, we're giving you your content calendar so you don't have to worry about it. The third piece is your impressions and social awareness and your website traffic. So, from the post concept that we create for you now, you're going to get more engagement on social, your company page is going to increase, right? Your website traffic's going to increase because you can talk about more. Four, which is getting to the pipeline. We should see accelerated pipeline in deals come from this as well. If we are getting people to inviting them on the show, getting them active, they're talking with guests and they're excited about what just happened. They should be more willing to buy because of what you did. The excitement, the more quality conversations, it's contained, everyone is fired up. So, we're seeing that. And then number five is you're seeing increase in content. And this is kind of like what I said earlier on like three, but you're seeing an increase in content for selective people in your organisation. So, if it's a Founder, executive, now they're getting more content because they're creating content, they're getting more inbound traffic, which then leads to ROI. So, it touches multiple pieces here, but those are the five KPIs that we're looking at when we're doing these event activations. Again, some people look at maybe two of those or three of those, but those holistically is what we're looking at.

[00:31:43] Sean Steele: That makes a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of being able to use that, as you said, when you think about the pipeline impact of that one is you're going to be attracting new people that you don't know because, and you're able to actually qualify them through the process. Like; Hey, we're going to be interviewing seven-figure Founders who are trying to climb to eight figures but don't have a clear strategy yet, and we want to talk to them about the issues that they're facing. Great. Now you've just qualified people before they've gone into this, you know, if you're doing a live podcast or something and you can also invite customers who are in the pipe, especially if you end up doing this. So that I guess one is whether you're doing it in the booth in the event. But if you, let's say you had your bar option, obviously there's no reason why you couldn't be doing this at the bar and inviting customers that are in the pipeline who are not going to this event and going; Hey, we're going to be doing a show, we'd love you to come down and be interviewed on it. That's a really interesting way of bringing people through the pipeline that are already in it, but maybe a bit further on the funnel. Cool. So that's kind of advanced, but you're also really big on video. Where does video sort of fit into this? Do you think it is two separate things? Like talk to me about your sort of philosophies around video and how you're thinking about that as part of revenue generation, as an opportunity.

[00:33:00] Morgan J Ingram: They play together, and my take on this is and some people may not like this, but I'm just giving you all a heads up. I'm getting you prepared emotionally of what you're about to hear. 

[00:33:10] Sean Steele: I love it.

[00:33:12] Morgan J Ingram: I see AI taking over a lot of written content. I said a lot of, not all of it. So, most people just my words and they think it's a holistic thing. I don't believe in absolutes. There's only very, very, very few absolutes in life, and we know what those are. So, to say it's going to eliminate all writing content. No, because there's a very skilled writers, screenwriters, copywriters, ghostwriters that are just great at what they do. However, AI will catch up in time and be able to write really good content. I've seen the deep fakes. I don't see it touching a good, not even like a great, a good video content creator. And it's very hard to replicate in-person content to AI and deep fake it. And so that's why they play together. This isn't just video content we do virtually, we do that that's a component, because we always can be in person. I get that. But when we do something in-person, it's going to pop more because you see the person. You feel the energy. You have more trust on the brand. I've looked through the majority of LinkedIn company pages and they don't have real people talking on videos or videos at all. And so video allows for you to build that trust, connect with the audience and sell in a different way. So that's where video plays into this because we don't want to just have an in-person event and not capture it. We want to have in-person event and always capture it so it can live on past the event. Most companies would dominate social if they just focused on the post of that event and lived beyond the event. Most people, everything dies at the event and the follow-ups from the SDRs or the sales reps are never good. That's how I think about it. And then video also plays a huge factor on other platforms; LinkedIn, it may not have the biggest reach, but you will stand out because people will be able to see you. You could even go to YouTube, a lot of B2B companies are shifting their shorts, reels, TikTok, et cetera, that builds trust. And so, we just see video being a huge advantage for Founders, sales reps in their sales process, because it's going to help you stand out. And if you get comfortable in that skill, you're going to be ahead of the game because most people are just not comfortable in that skill.

[00:35:30] Sean Steele: And I bet most Founders, they're all on some kind of social, whether it is LinkedIn or it's Instagram or TikTok or whatever, or, you know, maybe the new Threads

[00:35:40] Morgan J Ingram: Yeah. Or maybe not.

[00:35:42] Sean Steele: Unless they want all their data to be everywhere. I'm not there yet. I'm not sold yet. But they've probably got people in this space that they already really admire. Because one of the things I was thinking when you were talking was, lots of Founders are a little bit scared of video purely because they don't know what good looks like. They don't know who to hire. Like, how do I do this in a cost-effective way that makes sense? And who have I got around me? But they usually probably don't realise that they're already following a bunch of people that actually are producing content in a particular way that they can actually replicate, obviously, with their own style and authenticity and all the rest, but from might be in a completely different market, so I'm not sure that it says the stuff that really gets your engagement up when you're watching video is the stuff that you kind of want to replicate. It's like, don't forget about what actually gets your attention and then go and do something so poorly, you know what I mean? Like it's easy to disconnect those two things, I think.

[00:36:40] Morgan J Ingram: That is what is the most baffling to me, just in general, in most industries. People will do things that they would never respond to. It just doesn't make sense. People do it a lot. And so, just think about what would you respond to. And I believe that people respond more to the human connection and the touch than just some generic thing. And video allows to bring that to the highest degree. So yeah, I encourage you to really ask yourself that question. Like, what do I consume? Due to the data, YouTube is the only social channel that has out of all the demographics, so like the age groups, is the only channel that has an increase for all of them, which means that more people are consuming video, whether people like to say this or not, I'm just looking at the data and it tells me billions of people are watching more video than they are consuming other things. So, that tells you something.

[00:37:39] Sean Steele: Well, you can see why, you know, like Spotify has obviously moved to video. So, my podcast on Spotify is on video and same, like everybody has realised that that's the way that people want to get, but it also makes it harder, right? Because the attention span is so short, and so you have to do, you actually have to really think that out well. There is a guy, you probably will enjoy watching his videos because there's not many video ads that make you laugh, or that are so well put together and so well thought out that you go, that's outstanding. It's so interesting. There's a guy in Australia called Sabri Suby, who has a company called King Kong Digital, I think it is basically a digital marketing agency, but he's written a book called, something. It's a red book. Anyway, type in Sabri Suby and you'll find it very quickly. His videos like I have paused and rewatched those videos because I was like they're just so well put together. They're so engaging. They're so funny. But they still hit on all the things that you would hope for. So, if anyone in Australia is looking for a few examples, I would be…if you could build videos as well as he does, I think you'd get some pretty amazing outcomes on your lead gen. I'm conscious of how much time we've got, Morgan. I would love to hear a bit more about where you, you know, one of the biggest challenges for Founders who haven't come from a sales and marketing background, who've come out of whatever technical space they were in, they started a business, they're doing well, they're building off their reputation and quality and all the other stuff. And there's many Founders that can get to 1 to 10 mil without really much sales and marketing now, but they're not going to get to 30 mil and they're not going to get to 50 mil and they're certainly not going to get to 100 mil without great sales and marketing. But one of the challenges that they find on the way up is actually they don't know who to pay attention to. I don't know how to stay on the front of actually what's changing. So, in addition to you, of course, in the context of stuff that you're producing, what sort of sources of information do you listen to or would you encourage Founders like that to kind of stay connected to, to keep them thinking about stuff that's changing, keep them current, keep them innovative?

[00:39:54] Morgan J Ingram: It's a really good question. I think, so I could give you people and I will. But the people I might give you might not resonate with your style. So, it might turn you off. So, before I give you the people, I want you to think of the concept of how I view things. So, there's always a leader in anything. Someone who just decided I'm going to do this before everyone else, and they just get so far ahead. So, I believe the hardest channel to grow, in my opinion, is YouTube. There's a lot that goes into it, right? The strategy, the timing, the video, the pace, actually doing the video. It's very difficult. It's not easy to create videos. I'll put that very plainly. So, I go to YouTube a lot to see what are people doing. I've noticed that a lot more people that are big YouTubers, they would do virtual podcasts or audio only, are now switching to in-person podcasts. They're renting out studios, they're going to people's house, they're flying to them or they're flying them in and their numbers skyrocket. And I've seen this on multiple scenarios. So, I'm giving you all this example as in, I was like, okay, well, if they're doing it, if I bring that to a space that people are just now getting into podcasts and understanding that that's important, what if we just brought that energy to here and we just took it there? That's how I always stay innovative. I look at platforms like a YouTube or a TikTok, and I pay attention to the content, but I pay attention to what they're doing. So, Gary Vee says this a lot. I'm a huge fan of him. He says, “Don't listen to what I have to say. Watch what I'm doing.” And that's where most people go wrong. Yes, you should listen to people and their advice. It's good. But if you watch what people are doing, you get further ahead. So, what I'm telling you all is. How do you stay innovative? How do you stay creative? Watch what people are doing, not what they're actually saying sometimes. Like, finding people in your space where you're like, okay, why is this person creating videos now? What’s the purpose here? What are they thinking? Or, okay, well, this person is doing, I'm not saying everyone is to do this because some of your products may be too technical, you should do it, but they're doing a lot of memes. Why are they doing a lot of memes? Should we add a little bit more humour to what we're doing? That's interesting. So that's how I think about being innovative. I just see what's trending and why it's trending. What is the direction of how people are consuming their content in that way, especially buying, here's another way to think about it. I'll give you all examples here in a minute. So that's a marketing. When I think about how is selling evolving, think about how are you buying things. Right? So, I look at my own self. How am I buying something? Well, I'm only really buying something if the reviews are good. Someone recommended it to me. I really go out of my way to go find something to buy unless I really need it. And if I do, I'm going to text someone and say, what should I get? What have you done? What have you considered? I'm not going to really vet it out too long. I'm just going to ask someone else. So, if I'm doing that, most of you might be doing that before you make a decision. Okay. That's how people are buying. How do you correlate to that? It goes back to what I said. Partnerships, could be a channel, you need to create more content, you need more visibility, you need more awareness, so people mention your name. Because like the selling or the buying is happening in a back channel. It's not happening just like I decided to make this decision, unless it's like, I don't know, you're buying toothpaste. That's pretty simple decision. But like for other products and things of that nature, you're probably back chilling with other people to figure out what should I do? Conversations with people, is this person the person or company I should be vibing with? So, that's the way I think about it. In terms of people that I am following that I think are doing a good job is, His name is Bedros Keuilian. The reason for that is he has a studio where he does a solo podcast episode and he's blown up. You know, when I first saw him, he had like, I don't know, like a 100,000 - 80,000 subscribers, anything crazy. Now he's at like 700,000 subscribers within the past like 10 months, because he just changed his concept of the show. 

[00:44:20] Sean Steele: Right.

[00:44:21] Morgan J Ingram: I think his name is Chris Williamson. I think that's what his name is. My business partner is a huge fan of him. He basically rents out these like warehouses, studios, et cetera, in location where the person is at, and he interviews them, extremely high quality. Like the quality is next level. You're like, wait, whoa, this is crazy. So, there's that. There's another guy named Crimson, Crimson Wave. I think that's what his name is. He talks a lot about like being an executive producer, et cetera, and he does like talking head content, but it's extremely quality. And I'm like, that's interesting. He has really good traction. So, I just look at what people are doing and that's the case. Now I will say this, there are other people out there that do extremely raw transparent videos and they don't have a lot of editing and they don't have a lot of cuts and they do well too. I think it depends on your industry and what you're doing and how credible you are and how you're sharing your content. But those are just things that I'd look at right across the board. And there's a lot of other people too, that you can go consume and do that. But I just think about what is someone else doing another space that's further ahead I can take that and put it in mine, and I can execute it because that's important. And then selling, I figured out, okay, how are people buying? How am I buying? How's my team buying? And then that's the way that you should think about selling.

[00:45:37] Sean Steele: It's interesting. Yeah, everything that you've said makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm thinking about some of the takeaways for me today, and I just want to summarise some of them for our audience. First of all, partner led sales, channel sales, involving your employees in content and just kind of revenue amplification. All of that says to me... The world may be running away with AI, but actually there is a high risk of a significant, if you're already feeling overwhelmed with the amount of content that comes into your space, just think about what that's going to be like. And if AI is learning from stuff that's being produced by AI, actually the content quality is going to continue to go down from my perspective, there's not going to be much innovation. It's actually going to be a lot of the same stuff going out and out and out. So, your opportunity, so you need to cut through. And then how do you cut through? If people stop trusting kind of what they're reading, then they're going to be continuing to trust their people, and building trust in people more. And there's two really interesting ways that you talked about today that help you build trust with an audience. One, experiential stuff like leveraging an event, you know, using it to build content with potential customers, building advocacy, bringing people through the pipeline, but it's also giving people an access to experience you, to hear you, to see you, to understand your philosophies and to engage with you in something that's memorable. And why does video make sense? Video makes sense because people buy from who they like and they buy from who they trust. And so, in circumstances where you have a business, where you have no video content as part of your strategy. How are they supposed to get a sense of who you are without a huge amount of effort on their part to overcome a lot of bridges to get there. Whereas all of a sudden when they're able to tap into video, it points through the pipeline from all the way from the start towards the end. They're getting a chance to experience you and getting a sense of whether they like you and trust you, because people have got a pretty good radar I think generally when they can see videos, you get a pretty quick gut feel and sense. And so, I think there's opportunities to elevate that. And for Founders who aren't doing any video whatsoever, maybe you're a little bit shy about doing this video. It's like people are buying into your vision for your business, the problems that you're solving, the reasons you've built this thing in the first place, and to your point around the opportunities that are probably already happening in your business that you're not leveraging. You're probably having conversations with the customers every day. Your people are having conversations with the customers every day. That is actually fascinating for a customer to hear somebody from your business talking to another customer and that tells them that's the kind of interaction I'm going to have. Like this video availability right there or any live event that you've ever done or that you go to today, all of that stuff can be recorded. And to your point, it produces heaps of content for the future, and can be using all sorts of parts of your pipeline. So interesting. I know we're out of time today. I could chat to you for a lot longer, Morgan. I really appreciate your time. And I want to just acknowledge you for what I've, you know, when I look at your career, whilst you've kind of remained dedicated to this revenue generation space, I can see that you are continuing to evolve and push boundaries and try to be on the front of what's coming, and I know that actually takes a lot of courage and there's a lot of risk in that. And I really appreciate you taking that so that we get to learn from you because that means you're out there making mistakes before other people are. And we get the benefit of all of that wisdom and the battle scars and stuff. So, thank you for sharing that with us today. Hey, if people wanted to get in touch with you or follow along with what you're doing, where would you direct them to?

[00:49:10] Morgan J Ingram: Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of balance costs for sure. LinkedIn, Morgan J Ingram. That's where you can find me, also as well, Morgan J Ingram on all other social; Instagram, YouTube, et cetera as well. And if you want to just tap into event activation, that's something you want to do, AMP and things of that nature, but I'm hoping that this got you all thinking about something different. I know that this is different and it's a completely new world for maybe most people, but I genuinely believe this is where we're going, and to learn this now and get this foundation is important.

[00:49:44] Sean Steele: I'm with you, mate. I really appreciate that insight, and I think the tides are shifting, and so, this is one potential strategy, well multiple strategies that people can be leveraging. But I think the core themes of this going to become more and more and more prevalent. We're going to see more partner stuff, more event stuff, more video stuff, stuff that builds human connectivity and the less boring, generic automated stuff. Don't just put out content. Think about it. Thank you so much, Morgan. Can't wait to chat to you again and remain connected. Really appreciate your time today. And that's it for this week on the ScaleHQ Podcast, everybody. I will see you next week. Thank you very much for listening. Make sure you check out Morgan, and good luck in implementing. Thanks again, Morgan.

[00:50:27] Morgan J Ingram: Cheers. Appreciate having me on.