Today on the Book More Show, Lydia Sugarman from Venntive joins me to explore breakthrough approaches to identifying and converting website visitors. Our discussion reveals how businesses can transform anonymous web traffic into valuable leads by leveraging advanced contact and behavioural data. We also examine the critical balance between technological insights and ethical data usage.
Our conversation dives into the evolution of sales strategies, moving beyond traditional cold calling to data-driven engagement. We spotlight Ventev's comprehensive RevOps platform, which integrates marketing, sales, and customer support tools for more targeted interactions. The discussion highlights practical methods for businesses to personalize outreach and improve conversion rates across different industries.
We conclude by examining creative strategies for managing email marketing and database systems. Lead Sherlock's Inbound 2.0 approach offers innovative ways to connect with warm leads, transforming how businesses approach customer acquisition. Our exploration emphasizes the importance of genuine connections and strategic outreach in today's competitive market.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
We discuss the potential of Lead Sherlock, a tool designed to identify anonymous website visitors and provide valuable contact and behavioral data, transforming lead generation for B2B companies.
Lydia Sugarman highlights the shift from traditional cold calling to data-driven insights, emphasizing the importance of prompt and personalized follow-up for effective lead conversion.
We explore Venntive's comprehensive RevOps platform, which integrates marketing, sales, customer support, and operations tools, offering a holistic business strategy.
There is a focus on maintaining data quality in email marketing and database systems, with creative engagement strategies suggested for effective management.
Lydia introduces the concept of Lead Sherlock's Inbound 2.0, which enhances sales interactions by targeting warm, website-qualified leads for more personalized engagements.
The ethical considerations of using data from tools like Lead Sherlock are discussed, ensuring alignment with evolving consumer expectations.
We talk about the importance of orchestrated outreach strategies, using platforms like LinkedIn to foster genuine connections and meaningful discussions with prospects.
Venntive's accessible pricing model is noted for democratizing advanced tools, making them available to businesses of all sizes across various industries.
There is an exploration of how web and conversion tracking features in Venntive can provide businesses with valuable insights for tailored interactions.
We emphasize the potential for businesses to use Lead Sherlock and Venntive in a coordinated manner to optimize their sales tactics and business operations.
Book Blueprint Scorecard
Don't forget, you can see how your book idea stacks up against the Book Blueprint by going to BookBlueprintScore.com and, if you want to be a guest on the show to plan your successful book, just head over to 90MinuteBooks.com/guest
Ready to get started: 90MinuteBooks.com/get-started
Be a Guest: 90MinuteBooks.com/guest
Your Book Blueprint Score: BookBlueprintScore.com
Titles Workshop: 90MinuteBooks.com/Workshops
Interview Shows: 90-Minute Books Author Interviews
Questions/Feedback: Send us an email
Extra Credit Listening: MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com
Lydia Sugarman:
LinkedIn: Lydia Sugarman
Website: Venntive
TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Stuart: Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Bookmore Show. It's Stuart Bell here, and today joined by Lydia Sugarman. Lydia, how are you doing?
Lydia: Doing really well. I'm in air conditioning, so I'm happy about that.
Stuart: We're both up in the Northeast right Pennsylvania, you're. New York, actually Near Pennsylvania, 40 miles outside of the city, in Hudson Valley, in a little town called Warwick Beautiful.
Lydia: And yeah, it is, it is, but it's quite warm and humid. And yeah, it is, it is, but it's quite warm and humid.
Stuart: So we're not used to it. I've been to. I haven't been to Warwick up there, but I've been to Warwick in the UK and that's definitely not as hot and humid as it feels here today. This is going to be an interesting show because it was. The service that you offer is very, very different from anything that we've talked about here before, so I'm excited to share the idea with people. We were talking about this idea of starting conversations with people and understanding the opportunities to engage with them. The opportunities to engage with them but lead sherlock from the tools that you run is quite an interesting approach to understanding who visits your site. So why don't we dive in and um talk a little bit about what brought you to this particular part of the market and then we can talk about the tool and how it kind of could impact the authors that we're working with?
Lydia: yeah, um, well, my primary business, my, is ventive v-e-n-n-t-i-v-ecom, and it's it's a complete business platform with marketing and sales and customer success and support and operations tools all in one. But when I saw this technology that is Lead Sherlock, I was like, oh, this is a missing piece, because it's one thing to have all the tools to build and manage a database of contacts, but where do you get those contacts? And so what LeadSherlock does is identify anonymous visitors to your website, and it has about a 25 to 30% success rate of identifying those individuals and actually providing the name and contact information, demographic and psychographic data, the pages they visited on your website and how long they spent.
Stuart: So it's a treasure trove of information, and considering that research shows about 95% of visitors to your website are anonymous, suddenly knowing who 30 of those are is a game changer, yeah, and this idea of understanding who they are, I mean not maybe a little bit on the nose if you then email them and say, hey, I saw, you were just looking at the website. That's maybe a little bit on the crosses, that line of creepy. But when you think about a linkedin outreach campaign or if you have some marketing activity that you're particularly trying to target a group of people and then you start seeing that feedback from that group that you're targeting, the insights that it gives you, it's really adds so much color to what otherwise would be a bit of a kind of send out and hope, a finger in the air type.
Lydia: Um, oh yeah, absolutely. Um, I you know, and I think, particularly b2b, it's not it. I think the creepiness, the creep factor kind of goes away. I mean, we all know already that we're being tracked and consumers might be a little freaked out if you, you know, if they all of a sudden get a phone call from somebody, um, but I, I think even that's becoming less and less, so they're used. You know you're getting, you're getting accustomed to being tracked online and you know you look at something on amazon and all of a sudden you go to another website.
Uh, that's completely unrelated and there's an ad for the thing that you were just looking at on amazon.
Stuart: So um, my wife will occasionally ask me if I've been looking at things, because all of a sudden she'll get a random feed full of stuff. So it's kind of it can uh, it can trip you up sometimes yes, you probably.
Lydia: If you, yes, if you share, you probably should be uh careful about what you're, what you're looking at, or at least you know open up in an anonymous window and cry right.
Stuart: I like this idea.
I mean you mentioned there that in a b2b world, people are more and more used to the fact that there's some connection which leads to sales calls coming through at some point.
So certainly if you're getting the insights that people are visiting and you're seeing the information they're sending through, given that most of us in and most of the people listening to this who are on our list, are B2B in the sense of dealing with a smaller number of individuals or maybe even B2C, but a smaller number of individuals we're not people who think about writing a book. It's not typically the people who are serving that mass market of commodity type business, of commodity type business. So the idea that you can reach out to people with the book as a lead generation tool, with specific calls for actions there that will lead people back and then having those insights, do you see people using it in that orchestrated way? Or are people more using it for kind of like the demographic psychographic side of things and at scale, kind of getting an demographic psychographic side of things and and at scale, kind of getting an inference of what's going on, or is it more very specific, kind of one-on-one interaction with people?
Lydia: it's, it's, it's very, it's very specific, but you know what's really. I mean that's it. I mean it is call it inbound, inbound 2.0. Because inbound marketing and following up from leads, from people that submit a form, that's been something we've been doing for years. This takes it a step further. What's really?
There have been a lot of interesting conversations I've had, you know, I've um, I had one company actually they do, they set appointments. They set they are lead gen, uh business appointment set, uh appointment centers for b2b companies and we had, they did the trial and they're like, oh, we're not going to move ahead with this. I was like, why not? What can? Can you tell me, uh, your about your hesitation? Well, we're seeing a lot of uh dot edu emails of people right, and I'm like, well, what do you think that might be? And and it completely it couldn't be further away from the kind of they were. It was almost blaming the results, the actual results, shooting the messenger, yeah, shooting the messenger, exactly. And I was like, well, obviously you need work on your SEO. Yeah, the moral of the story is that you might not be safe. You can learn a lot from the people that are visiting your website and they may not be who you're expecting, and that is an indication, that's a red flag that you need to fix your website.
You need to change your messaging or you know another one. Well, we already know all of these people. Okay, are they customers? Yes, what pages are they visiting? Why are they? Why do you think they're visiting those pages? Are there contracts coming up for renewal soon?
Stuart: Yeah, it's actually such an interesting insight because that initial response of people saying that, oh, this isn't useful without actually thinking about what the data is, it's kind of almost trying to fix a problem and then seeing whether the data fits the whole, rather than saying, okay, here's the data is. It's kind of almost trying to fix a problem and then seeing whether the data fits the hole, rather than saying, okay, here's the data, and what hole have we got?
Lydia: that needs to be, that needs to be plugged or fixed it's like there is no such thing as not useful data from this it's. You may not, you may not be getting what you want, what you thought you wanted, but you're getting data, you're getting information that's going to help you be successful one way or another. And the best case scenario it's what if it's people from companies in your target list, your target prospect list? You know exactly who they are. So many of our competitors most of the competitors will say oh, we'll tell you what companies are visiting your website. Well, bfd, that doesn't.
Stuart: It doesn't necessarily help you get to the person. That narrows it down to a large mailing list.
Lydia: But you know if you're going after enterprise, if your prospects are enterprise companies, say, you know, somebody from apple is on your website and it could be, and they give you a list and you start playing whack-a-mole and it's useless. Uh, uh, the other thing I, I mean I've, I've been doing sales forever. I mean I've been doing sales from the time when it was you start a new job and and the training was there's your desk, there's the phone, there's the phone book, or you, if you were lucky, you got a computer printout of a zip code to people to call and to work, and now it's like to work, and now it's like.
I've had people say, well, yeah, we, it didn't work out. Well, I was like, well, how did you follow up? Well, we sent an email. I was like I'm a huge fan of email but we all know, within BAM marketing, somebody, the moment, from the moment somebody submits a form, the moment somebody is on a page, you, your chance of converting that lead goes down precipitously every minute you delay contacting them. It's pick up the phone and say, hey, hi, this is is, is this uh, is this Stuart? Uh, yes, well, this is Lydia Sugarman from Veniv, and you were just on our website and you visited these pages and I just wanted to, you know, have a conversation and find out what, what attracted you to the website and and you know what, what are you thinking these days?
Stuart: right. You can imagine a scenario where you have that list of the clients that you want to really target and a an alert set up, so that's either physically, electronically or manually, but alerted when those people, those clients, do something for the book clients who have written books, overnighting a copy of a book to that prospect with a handwritten note, anything to get past the, to start the conversation and get past the gatekeeper and just differentiate yourself from the information that's out there, particularly with knowing what web pages they visited as well, so to be able to tailor that message to the thing that they were really, really interested in or looking for, such a. Like you say, there's no such thing as bad data and if people take that little extra step to analyze it and think what the lessons are that come from it, much more than just, oh, we had a list of people, we send them an email and then nothing happened.
Lydia: Well, there's more opportunities than that yeah, yeah, you know, I, I call, I call these uh websites like qualified leads. Uh, you again, we're talking about lead generation and it, it's fine and dandy for you know an outsource company or call center or whatever to make to set meetings with quote unquote prospects, but the conversion rate we know is really really poor because they've been, they've been cold called, they've you know, they've agreed, for whatever reason they've agreed to a meeting. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean not only does it mean it's not reason they've agreed to a meeting, it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean not only does it mean it's not necessarily they're going to buy, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to show up for the meeting even even if you reconfirm.
Stuart: But when you have all of this, when you have all of this information about somebody that was actually on your website, yeah, yeah, that marrying up of intent, particularly to say when so much of the data out in the world that used to be available has been anonymized out anyway. So when you think about the information again, google analytics now is, it's very little compared with before the targeting that you can do in facebook, and still better than some of the other areas, but it's so narrow compared with other areas, particularly for um restricted industries like um real estate agents and housing or medical anything like that. Where it's it's there's more legislation or regulation around being able to reach out. So to have those indications from people. Um, tell me about how it ties in with Ventive then, because Ventive is pretty interesting as well because of the breadth of the suite of tools that it's, of opportunities that it covers.
Lydia: Well, and the connection between Lead Sherlock and Ventive. Among many other features, ventive includes web and conversion tracking and it will. It's you know. You drop a snippet of code in your website and it tracks all the visitors to your website and it will. When somebody that's in your Venev database is visits your website, it will tell you who that that that person that's interesting visited these pages. But again, the vast majority of the traffic is going to be anonymous and we can say you know, visited these pages today on your of your website, and here are the 10 people that are in your database. Or actually, when you're logged into your event of instance, there's a scroll across the top of the screen that says someone from New York City has visited this page, right. Okay, it says someone Right If it's in, or otherwise, it might say Stuart Bell just visited these pages, right, and we capture all of that.
So lead Sherlock was a natural compliment to Venom. What Venom is is it is a complete business management system. I refer to it as the only complete RevOps platform on the market because it has a full complement of marketing, sales, customer support and success and operations tools, all deeply integrated in one platform, one seamless user interface, a single source of truth for all of the data across your entire company, and it's eminently customizable, so we don't focus on any particular business vertical. We have, you know, everything from arts organizations and nonprofits to software companies, to manufacturing companies, real estate cities. Actually, phoenix Arizona uses Ventev. A lot of people think that Ventev isn't enterprise, but it is, but it's priced for the little guy. We believe in leveling the playing field, so the pricing is based on the size of your database and the number of seats, and every account includes every feature.
Stuart: Oh, that's Particularly when you compare it with the competition, that ability to include all the features even at the smallest number of contacts and the smallest number of seats. It just makes it much more accessible to people.
Lydia: Imagine getting Okay, imagine getting HubSpot enterprise for 150 a month. Right?
Stuart: and those very real comparisons. I mean, is it things like hubspot and keep, are they their competitors that people, people might be familiar with?
Lydia: uh salesforce marketo um active which are relatively complicated tools as well.
Stuart: It's not Infusionsoft, confusionsoft, for no reason true.
Lydia: Well, you know. That's why, when Infusionsoft was bought by a private equity firm, they changed the name to Keep and they offered no explanation about the name change because they wanted to separate themselves from that reputation 20 years ago. Uh, you know they were. They were good, they were very pricey, uh, but they didn't keep up with the times. Um, just like salesforce. I mean, salesforce is a 25 year old crm application that requires a lot of other applications and to be a complete solution, as well as any customization, has to be hard-coded. With Vennit, if you want to add a user field, you go to the user field page and you fill in the fields and you hit save and you have a new user field.
Stuart: Right, which means that personalization across your particular use case is so kind of detailed, the ability to take those fields and add them into a campaign to make sure that the message is as tailored as possible. I always think that I received a letter the other day. Where was it from? It was from somewhere Terrible example, because I can't remember the details but it was from somewhere that should know better. I remember thinking that at least, and on the envelope it was addressed personally to me, but the letter on the inside was dear member or dear user or something that was so unpersonalized, and that's on a field that was obviously built into their database, just the main field.
So when you think about the use case of being able to take it in and blending the two things together, maybe the lead show log information is gathering the data of the people it can find, but knowing what they're interested in. So to be able to customize your database and add those fields in, so you're delivering the message with, uh, with an interest variable instead of just a general broadcast. Right, idea of conversation, starting of imagining that you were able to see these people in the line at Starbucks or the supermarket or whatever, but add those extra steps. Do you see most people doing that level of customization, or is it more? It takes them a little while to get to that level of thinking I think it takes a little while and it takes it.
Lydia: It. You know everybody wants things to be fast. You know it's like choose two out of three quickies fast, easy or cheap. Uh, I mean, and it's that's not a, that's not a good analogy here, but it's it's like you know there is work involved up front and even you know, even if you've been sending emails forever, a lot of time we forget to send test emails to ourselves, right, and that's when.
Stuart: That's when it hits the fan yeah, it is you kind of want it. People think if it's not broken, don't fix it, but then sometimes they don't realize when it does break. So that kind of we've been doing the same thing for years without necessarily checking or revalidating the use case for it or the job of work.
Lydia: Well, and not every database is complete. Not every database is necessarily going to have a first name, or it should, but it doesn't, or whatever, and a lot of applications don't offer an option to have a generic alternative in case that piece of data is missing. We've had that forever. You know, this platform actually started in 2001 as an email marketing application and it's grown from there.
Stuart: And you know, at the end of of the day, it's all about database management yeah, there's no silver bullet, just a quality issue of making sure that the information is what you think it is and is kept up to date exactly so, like, for example, when you're if you're setting up a group in fandive which is, um, it's more than just a list.
Lydia: A group actually can function as a separate account, almost with unique, with unique characteristics. And you're setting up a group and one of the fields is what? What do you want to call people if you don't have their name?
Stuart: okay, yeah, and that that gives a good opportunity to I mean, it's not going to be universally applicable, but it's a good opportunity to have some, particularly if you you have any kind of community to name your community members. Um, I'm trying to think of an example of where I was, where I saw it. Um, um, I'm blanking again. Oh, my god lady.
Lydia: Lady gaga's community are little monsters okay, exactly, that's a perfect example.
Stuart: But that's it gives a good opportunity to have some fun with it and again, it's keeping this engagement going and imagining that you were speaking to a real person. It's just you're using some amount of scale to to get the message out. Yeah, yeah, the idea of connecting all these pieces together. I always, often think that there's um, what's the opposite of the tom, um collins, approach the um. Don't let perfection be the killer of goodness or whatever.
Lydia: The actual well, good enough is good enough right, yeah, yeah, that's a great point.
Stuart: So this idea of people getting caught up, knowing can kind of see what the perfection is they want but aren't able to quite get there, either from a data quality issue or time or a skill issue, how easy is it for people to get started and kind of have those minimum viable campaigns and connections set up? Is there a big list, from kind of zero to something, or is it very gradual?
Lydia: um, are you well with lead? Sherlock, we recommend that you have at least 1,000 unique visitors per month for it to really be of value. But that's not a hard-to-ask rule, because you pay per WQL or website-qualified lead, and you're only going to see them once. Lead and they're you're only going to see them once. You know. So if somebody is there many times, you're not going to pay more than once on that person. Um and then um. So there's that um, and I just lost my train of thought and you can oh with oh and you and with that.
You can oh with oh and you and with that you can specify. You can specify pages that you want to be tracked. You can set a budget either of leads or a monetary budget, so you have control over what that, that investment is with lead, sherlock, and then vetted, yeah, go ahead.
Stuart: I was just gonna say that's a super interesting way of doing it as well and makes it much more accessible. Because if you're in uh, if you have customer facing pages that you know you don't want to track because they're customers and you're just interested in the lead side, so narrowing it down to the area and then being able to say, hey, I'm happy to pay for 25 new website qualified leads a month, it's much easier than um or there's much less risk, rather than turning it on and and it running away above and beyond what you can control, both from a monetary point of view and uh time based. If you want to kind of like double down on 25 people and that's the capacity that you've got, then at least you can ring fence it to that and then extend later as you're getting more right. Learn to ride the bike first I mean just getting started.
Lydia: We give you, we the, we give you a trial, 14 days or 25 leads, whichever comes first, right, um, you know, and it's more, it's, and it may not be, and you know, it may not be mind-boggling, you know, it's like you, you know, but you get an idea, you get a very good idea of how it works.
Stuart: Right.
Lydia: And then you can define your parameters and go from there.
Stuart: Yeah.
Lydia: And for B2B leads at $5 per website qualified lead. I mean that's not your whole customer acquisition cost. I mean that's not your whole customer acquisition cost. But you know, if you have a product, that is, if you have a yeah, if you're B2B, I mean your product is certainly going to support that as a portion of your CAC.
Stuart: Yeah, exactly, and I think that's where there's a sweet spot with the audience listening here, because for the majority of us it's like we say the book isn't the product, the conversation is the product, because that leads to actually selling the product that you're selling. So, the same as printing a book it's probably four to five dollars by the time you've shipped it to your house and then mailed it on to someone else. So that similar cost, that similar investment to know who the person is, on one hand, and to be able to engage with them, on the other hand. I think most of the most people listening are in the annual lifetime value of a client of well north of a thousand dollars. And even at that price it's, it's very worthwhile and, oh, absolutely effective way. Again, assuming that you're actually doing something with it afterwards. It's not a silver bullet where it's magically going to convert people, but to get that level of detail and that level of insight I think you'd struggle to find it. It's trying to find anything similar anywhere else and you can have that.
Lydia: You can have that. Those leads serve to you in a number of ways. It can be, you know uh downloaded to a csv file. You can integrate with any one of uh 18 other applications, plus ventive uh using uh zapier mean that opens up the whole world.
You know you can have it. You could have it go. You can have it, go into Google Sheet and have a zap between Google and whatever other application you're using, like, and if you, for example, excuse me, send it into a ventive group, your your lead sherlock ventive group and have have a workflow set up with that triggers uh, uh, drip, campaign and follow, and an alert to somebody to pick up the phone now.
Stuart: You can imagine a scenario. I mean, zapier just opens up the whole world. So Leachia Lockley is coming in to Zapier. That triggers one of those cookie delivery services that sends overnight to the person a cookie the next day and then someone phones them up and says, hey, have you enjoyed the treat and got a chance to sit back and consume some more of the content? It just opens up the Zappy. I mean, whether it's Zappy or Make, I guess.
Lydia: I mean, it's just all kinds of. You're only limited by your imagination, right? Yeah, I mean the cookie idea is adorable. I hadn't thought of that.
Stuart: The cookie idea is adorable.
Lydia: I hadn't thought of that, especially if you can get it to them like the next morning.
Stuart: Right and that speed of execution on things now being so much faster than the ability to do it, so much faster than we could do in the past, is such an amplifier and I think the benefit, particularly to the audience listening, because we're kind of self-selecting in a way of these people have raised their hand as being interested in a book and some of them are customers, but they've identified themselves as willing to take the extra step or do something different. So that speed to execution, the speed to market, the speed to the conversation, for those people who do kind of think about it just one step further than the push-button solution and think about how things can stitch together, it's such an advantage. We work with a number of realtors in a slightly different area of the business but they'll often say the Zillification of the world is a problem because Zillow's whole thing is okay, click here and two agents will call you back, and whoever gets there first, there's a, there's a pressure that comes along with doing things immediately and I think that is across the board.
Lydia: You were saying before about as someone feels in a form, their intent or their enthusiasm falls off precipice oh, as the time goes on, I was looking at changing car insurance recently and I submitted one of those forms and, oh my God, it's just like a tsunami of responses from and it's coming at you in email and text messages, in phone calls and it's just, it's just too much. I don't yeah, unpersonalized.
Stuart: Even with them having the data and knowing what you're looking at, it's still a lot of. We actually did the same a couple of weeks ago. It's still very generic and not and comes across as very salesy and it's just trying.
Lydia: It's it comes across and again, it might be because we're insiders, but you get the feeling that it's just a numbers game and they're just churning through the biggest volume possible in the hope that the overall conversion well, they are you know, and customer prospects and prospects, customers, future customers are just a commodity, and I think you know this is a problem that so many sales teams are experiencing, particularly in the software space, where they have these, you know, teams of SDRs they have these, you know, teams of SDRs and those they're expected to make anywhere from 50 to 100 calls a day, right, and or touches at least, it's just like such a numbers game. And there's only about 25% of companies that are hitting quota Right. What's, what's that about? You know it.
People don't want to feel like commodities, commodities, the reality that there's only about 3% of the market that's really shopping at any given point in time for anything Granted. We're going to be coming into third and fourth quarter, uh, and things are going to speed up, I think. Even I don't think there's going to. There'll be a little bit of a pause, a little bit of slow down over the summer, but not a lot, I don't think I hope.
Maybe that's wishful thinking, but there's still cold calls, and cold calls are just not fun.
Stuart: They are, no matter how good you are, and the idea of Lead Sherlock's Inbound 2.0, calling a warm website-qualified lead game changer for everybody, like you're saying, for everyone, the clients included, to be able to receive a call that's tailored to the, the purpose that you were there.
At least it's dialed in. I mean, there's always that kind of resistance sometimes where people take in any sales calls and being slightly switched off to it, but they happen anyway. So if you've got the choice of making 25 calls a day to the the printed off list that you were talking about before from the phone book right, versus 25 leads who have actually at least visited the site and consumed some stuff for some reason, I mean even more so if you tailor in the particular landing pages on the site. So, again, depending on volume, but if you're really interested in the pages that relate to things that are further down the funnel, things that are closer to completion, again, it's just that level of insights and it's why I really wanted to share this idea with people, because I haven't heard any other service that has this level of detail. There's numbers and generic information, but to have the specific details of the person, it's yeah, it makes it all very powerful, indeed.
Lydia: Thank you, yeah, thanks, for giving me the opportunity to talk about it. I think it's incredible.
Stuart: Yeah, it's so exciting. We'll leave some links in the show notes so people can follow through directly. But I think anyone who is interested in having a conversation with you, if they're a client of ours or I mean even if they're on our list, but if they're listening to us from this podcast, I'd be more than happy to jump on a call with them once they've got some data coming back in and then we can kind of tie back in the book process and their overall campaign of what they're trying to do in this outreach and try and link those two pieces together. So yeah, as you're listening to this, if you do go down the lead Sherlock route, then absolutely let me know, because I'd be very interested to, uh, to help kind of ideate some of these things and the lead Sherlock page is really, really simple.
Lydia: It's just a really simple landing page with a form to a simple form to submit, um, and so we're going to beef it up we're in the process of beefing it up, but but in the meantime, uh, you know, uh, if you're, if you're curious at all, we can have a low-key conversation if you, if you're curious at all, we can have a low key conversation if you submit the form or just you know, hit me up on LinkedIn.
Stuart: Yeah, and I'll make sure that in the show notes and on the notes and the podcast players there's the links to the websites and to your LinkedIn profile as well, and then the Ventive site as well. So Leedsherlock is leadsherlockco and Ventive is Ventivecom. It's V-N-N-T-I-V-E, but we'll put links below. But those two tools together I think there's, as we've described, leedsherlock and the Ventive site is more built out, so there's more information there. But I just highly recommend everyone listening to think about the journey that we go on with the books to start these conversations and now the tools to join the conversations together in in more of a, an orchestrated way than perhaps kind of manually trying to glue things together in a in a bit of a rube goldberg machine. Um, this is a nice solution that is all in one place.
Lydia: Lydia, it is. Thank you so much. I love having a conversation with you, stuart. I'm so glad that we met I know right.
Stuart: Well, I mean, we should share that with people as well. We met through I think it was just a LinkedIn conversation that we were having through a third party. But if I would say, the books aren't the product, the conversation's a product. And this idea of starting conversations in so many different ways yeah, I get so much outreach on linkedin, which is just generic stuff, but to be able to connect with someone to have a quick chat, it just moves conversations like this forward. So, again, that's another thing that I'd suggest people do more of exactly I.
Lydia: I have to say that I've met a lot of really delightful, smart people on linkedin, where it sometimes just like sure, let's have a conversation, let's get acquainted and uh, I definitely I've. I've spent my time on linkedin versus networking groups and zooms. I'm just uh, I find linkedin a much more satisfying experience all the way around in terms of meeting and meeting business professionals.
Stuart: Yeah, it'll be interesting to look back in a few years because you kind of think that it's almost a in terms of meeting business professionals. Yeah, it'll be interesting to look back in a few years because you kind of think that it's almost a peak LinkedIn. Twitter was never really my thing back in the day, but you'd hear people talk about the early days of Twitter and it really being like you're having a conversation with a group of friends before the trolls moved in.
So LinkedIn definitely seems like that in the moment. It's past, that it's no longer. I mean, I'm old, you can talk about the gray and the beard. I'm old enough as well to remember when it was really a kind of resume site and a resume sites and not much else. But there really does seem to be now a peak of interesting conversations and and touch wood. No trolls around or very, very few. So, yeah, it's the place to be well, they get.
Lydia: They get blocked really fast on linkedin. Um, yeah, twitter, I was really really early and it to the point where I felt like I had almost connected with everybody there. It was that small, yeah, and I had over 10,000 followers and, yeah, they blocked my account and they won't give it back even though, huh, I was just gonna say that as well as a challenge as well, isn't it?
Stuart: I mean, it's another reason for being able to we're talking about email and reach out to people directly but there is something to be said for off-platforming people and making sure those connections live outside of just the one place, because, god forbid, if anything happens to that one place, it's, it's impactful, and there isn't a phone number that you can call up twitter or linkedin or elon or whoever else to say, hey, really, it's me um, but I a big fan of Substack and threads Right.
Lydia: Substack, particularly, is great.
Stuart: Yeah, and that's an interesting environment as well. Does LeadShield work on Substack as well as a destination? I guess you can't put the required code onto the Substack, page no.
Lydia: Yeah, you don't have access to that. Yeah, to put the no yeah, you don't have access to that.
Stuart: Yeah, to put the details in? Yeah, but it's interesting pushing the boundaries of the thought process going okay, it doesn't work there. Okay, so how can we move the audience to a place where it is trackable? I mean that as an option as well. Can you put links in Substack? I'm a receiver of a number of Substack things, but I can't remember I haven't posted there. Can you put links to external sources in Substack? Sure, yeah, I mean that would be a way of doing it as well, if you were very active in that community and then you had the very clear next step, or the carry on or the. You put the shorter version there and then a longer version or a complimentary version somewhere else. You put the shorter version there and then a longer version or a complimentary version somewhere else. There's lots of ways to push the edges of the system and then push people to the place that you own that you can then trace through.
Lydia: Well, and you can. You can do that on LinkedIn as well, you know, right, yeah, so because you don't want to publish the same thing in multiple places, you can be different versions of on a topic and even that, um, even that from a context point of view.
Stuart: So having the same information but just switching the context up, so it's, it's a similar message, but just the context varies for the platform and the audience. That's an opportunity. I mean, we see it with the books as well. People have a sometimes think about a, a be all and end all a complete thing, whereas we're saying now this is a piece of the puzzle and then there are other ways of widening the audience.
So one classic example is people will say I recorded a, I've got a presentation I deliver all the time. I just want to reuse that. Well, I mean you could do, but it doesn't translate particularly well because the context changes. So I recorded, I've got a presentation that I deliver all the time. I just want to reuse that. Well, I mean you could do, but it doesn't translate particularly well because of the context changes. So instead, why don't we create something new here and then use this as supporting information and amplifying information to kind of move that story even further forward? So the same goes for LinkedIn posts and Substack posts and even tweets or Xs or whatever we call it now. Yeah, in posts and sub stack posts and even tweets or X's or whatever we call it now yeah.
Lydia: It'll always be Twitter to me.
Stuart: If I yeah that block.
Lydia: How could you, how could you replace a cute little bird, a cute little bird, with this menacing black X?
Stuart: It's to prepare us all for the robots when they come and take over.
So well, elon's working on that right, yeah, we'll, uh, we'll circle back and talk about that next time okay, you're super glad to have made the connection in the first place and to be able to share this idea, because I think, for the people that are thinking about it just to dive in and understand what that data starts to give and the doors that it opens up and again, as someone's listening to this from our audience and wants to do it, I'm more than happy to jump on a call with people.
Lydia: I can't emphasize how much smarter I think, how much smarter it is to use lead, sherlock, you know I mean. Again, people talk about creating, creating target lists of your you know your dream 100 or whatever, and using zoom info or or other resources to gather data about them. Well, guess what? We use zoom info to provide info on uh through lead sherlock on contacts that have actually been on your website.
Stuart: So hey, yeah, yeah, exactly get all that data. But now onto the ones who are actively raising their hand and visiting the sites.
Lydia: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Stuart: Such a great call. We'll definitely have to circle back in a few minutes down the track and kind of carry on the conversation, but in the meantime, everyone, I'll make sure that links through to Lydia's LinkedIn and then the two websites are in the show notes and in the show notes and on the podcast players, so just click straight through and keep me posted as well. Really interested to see how people are using it.
Lydia: Lydia, thank you for your time.
Stuart: Thank you, thank you and we will catch everyone in the next one.
Lydia: Yes, absolutely, bye-bye.