Episode 72 How to Use Content to Start Conversations

Jack Hubbard:  I've had the privilege of being in banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from ledgers to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

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Jack Hubbard: Happy Thursday, everybody.

Brynne Tillman: Hi Jack. I am so happy to see you. 

Jack Hubbard: Always good to see you. You know, it's this is going to be a great program because bankers always say, all right. Do you make any sales on LinkedIn? I don't know the concept, but I do know that I add value to LinkedIn. So I'll tell you a quick story because today we're going to talk about how to use content to start conversations.

So it was a Sunday and I was going through my feed and I saw this interesting thing from a guy named Neil Ford for and his story was about this restaurant in Japan that hired people that were that had dementia. And they were waiters and waitresses. And that the upshot of the story is there were a few mistakes made, but people didn't care because they knew the people came from this home where they were isolated. And so with a happy ending. 

So my point is, I meet Neil and I say, you know what? I got to interview you for Jack Rants with Modern Bankers every Wednesday. And he said, Yeah, and we just got finished with over an hour of conversation with the guy and it's amazing. You have to follow Neil's content.

My point is that I use the content to start a conversation with Neil Ford. And I'll add one more thing. As you know, we're building a house. And so we have a tree that had to be taken down, which I hate. It's a 250-year-old shagbark hickory. And I was thinking, you know, as we prepared for this program, it took 250 years to grow that tree.

But it's going to take one day to take it down. And you work so hard to build relationships in. And if you don't have the right content, if you don't have the right conversation, you can ruin a relationship in a very short period of time. So that's my philosophy for the day. What would you say about using content to build a facetious heart?

Brynne Tillman:  Hard to follow you Jack Hubbard but you know, so I love like, we've gone already so deep in the content it helps to build relationships, not just conversations. So I love that, kind of little twist at the beginning of this podcast today. I think that's really powerful. But here's the thing. We have to earn the right to get these conversations.

Often I'm so surprised I talk with bankers and like, I don't know why. They just want to have a conversation with me. It's a free conversation where I can bring them value. And I think, well, first of all, it's not free because they have to invest their time to talk to you. And time is the one resource we can never get back.

Number two, if they're not taking your call, if you haven't earned the right, then they don't know or believe or feel that it will be worth their time to talk to you. So content is the thing that can help us to earn that right. It's a small investment of their time to vet us, you know? And so I really believe that that that's the core of content from the top of the funnel, right from that, how do we get to the first conversation?

But you know, we've talked about this before. There's lots of different content, and lots of different points in the sales cycle. But if we're talking about the first conversation, it's really about bringing value in the eyes of the consumer. Not just because you think it's valuable doesn't mean they'll think it's valuable. 

Jack Hubbard: That's really true. Let's talk about the kinds of content that might go into a post or something that you might share. Give me a sense of a few of the different kinds of content that you found to be successful. 

Brynne Tillman: So let's start all the way back at the beginning, which is what is happening inside of your prospect's company that gets them to start thinking about the need to change banks, the need to get a line of credit, the need to get a commercial line you get it needs more capital.

But not at the point where they're like, okay, we need to go talk to our banker. What's happening before that? Are they hiring a lot of people? Are they expanding operations? Are they bringing on a new product or service? Did they close a new business that they may now need more inventory? So you have to understand your client, and your prospect, and you need to know what happens in their environment before they know they need a new bank or before they know they need a new banking relationship.

So that's that first piece of content. I don't know if you want to talk about that or keep going with that. You go ahead. So the second piece of content is now they're searching, right? So what kind of content? When they are searching, what are they searching for?

And I hate to use, like, all the marketing terms of search engine optimization and keywords, but these really matter, right? Because we want our content to be found when they are looking for us. So what kind of content can we talk about here? This could be, you know, the five questions you should ask your banker before you sign on the dotted line.

Right. So actually that pre-content we need to discuss what's happening there, what matters to them, and how they can start thinking about maybe it's the ten things they knew they needed to do before or as soon as they brought on an enterprise or complex client for inventory purposes. Right. So you're talking about that. The next one is the things to ask for your banker.

But there's other content that creates more conversations down the way. We need content that speaks to all of that. But influencers inside of that organization, if the CEO, the CFO, maybe, you know, maybe there's procurement or purchasing or someone in there that you know, has to have the funds to actually buy the inventory, you know, think through who is going to touch this deal and what do they care about.

So, I mean, I could go on and on all the way through. How do you overcome objections to content? How do you avoid negotiation with content, you know, and ultimately, how do you even get more business either internally as you call it, cross-solving, or how do we get, you know, additional opportunities and content plays a role in all of these. So I'm going to throw it back to you, Jack.

Jack Hubbard:

That's very true. I talk about one of the things that I think is a very misused or underutilized tool in content is pulling. And so, as you know, I'm on the board of a bank. And one of the things that we talked about in a meeting recently is let's do polls. And as they were structuring their polls, was all about products.

There is a real art to doing polls first of all, it's underutilized. Secondly, if you look at the algorithm report that Richard Vander Blom did, it's it's becoming more powerful. Talk about polls as a way to create content and maybe get to conversations. 

Brynne Tillman: Yeah. my gosh. I could go so deep on polls. But first of all, right, the poll has to hit a couple of notes.

The first one is it needs to be a poll that your prospect wants to vote on and wants to know how other people are voting on it. So if it's product-driven, our prospects don't care about that. And so what'll happen when you're product-driven is you're going to get lots of other bankers voting on that, not actual prospects voting on that.

So it could be something around where you see the economy going. It could be like it doesn't have to be about banking or, you know, do you plan do you play what is your 2020, 2024, 2025 plan? Look like? Are you growing, staying the same, or choosing to shrink others sharing comments? Right. So we lead to a conversation, but we're not leading with our stuff.

So that's the first thing. So one of the things that LinkedIn does really well is you can't see how people have voted until you vote. So if your question gets your prospect to want to know how other people are voting on that, they're going to vote. And so, you know, that balance is really important. But to your question, how do you create content from that poll?

So the poll itself is a version of content, but you can really do a few things from here. If you gather insights that you can share in a white paper and an e-book in a blog post, however, you want to do this. And bankers, I'd say, partner with marketing on this, right? Talk to them and say, I'm really looking to create a report.

Maybe you can even call it a small mini benchmark report on what's happening in your community. Right. And this poll will help to gather some insights. But here's the thing. Once you've got this e-book going and you've got the insights going, reach out to the people who voted and get a little deeper insight into why they voted that way and their perspective and where they see the topic going, you will start to build those.

You're getting conversations, right? That's the name of today's content to conversations. Right? So that poll gets you conversations. You start to build a relationship. It's not a sales conversation. It's a relationship-driven conversation where you get to learn about them. And of course, there's a little discovery in there, but the goal is really to amplify their perspective in the content that you publish, and then we can do so much with that to start conversations with other people in your community based on the quotes of the people in your community.

So it just builds on itself. Jack, I have so much fun with this topic. 

Jack Hubbard: Yeah, this is a great topic and I really like it and I was going to ask you about that. You know, there's a fine line between sales and stocking, so you've answered my question. My question would have been so I know who answered the question right.

When I reach out and say, Hey, you answered my question this way. If you don't do that in the right way by adding additional value you do, you can be viewed as a stalker. But I also think you you could say, you know, since you answered it this way, I found in an article about using robotics and I thought this might be interesting and so takes that stalker-ish thing kind of off.

I want to ask you, you're so good at this and you're phenomenal on a video and you're so good and creative just off the cuff. I'm curious about content where you do write written content, and share other people's content that's written. But what about a walk and talk? I've seen some people do this pretty well. And I'm curious, Brynne, about your opinion between written content and video content.

Brynne Tillman: So, you know, video is all the rage with all the kids. These days, right? Like as the younger element says. So I'm a huge fan of video and you know, we take all our live streams and we create little mini video vignettes from them and we create, you know, we have a whole team of marketing groups, part of our team at does lots of things, but bankers, you don't lead all of that the walk and talk well, so I can't chew gum and walk.

So walk-in video is probably not great for me, but I do love the video from the car or the video from outside the building. So one of the things I say to bankers is if you stick a sign in the ground, create a video with the sign and the building and how excited you are to work with this customer, right?

That you create that video from the car. Well, I'm not in the car as much as I used to be, right? But pre-pandemic I was really driving locally even for prospecting calls, so I would actually get out of a call In bankers, you're still doing this, right? So you get out of the call. You don't have to say who that prospect is.

They're not your client. You didn't stick a sign in the ground. Don't mention their name. It's not permission yet. You didn't get permission yet, but you can say a local manufacturing company. And this was the challenge. And these are the things we're talking about and this is what I'm hearing. And then have a call to action in your video.

You know, if you are in the local Albuquerque area and you know, you're finding this to be a challenge, I'd love to hear what you're doing in comments from the car. So you know, that that natural just record you record the video, no editing. And by the way, LinkedIn, now you upload a video, it will transcribe it for you.

So if you choose to, it's a little button that you choose and you can edit it. If they spell your name wrong, like there are lots of things you can do, but just getting folks to learn about you understand you connect with you. I'm sure I've said this on the podcast before, but a few months ago, little more than that now.

I was at the Sierra Conference where I was one of the keynotes and this woman came up and gave me a huge hug. And at first, I'm a hugger, so it's okay, right? But at first, it's like, I don't know, you were or more like, Do I know you? And I forgot which is worse, right? Like woman. But she's like, I've been watching your videos for so long.

I just, like, she felt connected because of that video. So is a banker who wants, you know, you're going to networking meetings for exposure. You're going to conferences. You're right. You're joining local boards for exposure. Video gives you so much exposure and people get to know you.

Jack Hubbard: Wow, that's that's really good. What if you were at a not-for-profit meeting or a chamber meeting and you walk in and you get with permission, you have all the people in the background, you say, hey, we're talking about economic development here at the West Orange Chamber of Commerce.

Really looking forward to this conversation. And look at all these community-involved people. Congratulations, too. And so it's not congratulations to me. It's congratulations to everybody. That's a that's a great point. And let me let me remind everybody of the subtlety. Brynne said here. So you're in the car, you've had this call and you're talking about some of the issues that you just learned in the comments section.

You didn't say no. If you're interested in talking to me about how I can help you. You didn't say that. You said, I'm interested in knowing some of your issues and how they compare to this company. I just called that. That is a real subtlety and now it becomes about them and not you. That's really good. Yeah.

Brynne Tillman: Okay. Well, that's all right.

Jack Hubbard:  Let me, let me go. Let me go down a different path. So I'm a banker and I'm struggling with content. I don't follow a lot of people. I don't share a lot of content. I can't write content, whatever the case might be. COP Let me say it this way Comments are content. So if you did nothing more than go through people you follow where you've run their bell, you get notifications and you go through and you make some really good commentary that really helps everybody.

But more than seven words tagged the person. If it's a company post tagged the company brand, you do this really well and you've talked to me about this a lot. Comments are content. 

Brynne Tillman: Yeah, I mean, your comments, if you look at the newsfeed of your home page, much of what you see is also Jack Hubbard commented on this, right?

You're seeing that as if it were a whole post. So LinkedIn puts a lot of emphasis on that comment. It also obviously is going to get you engaged with the author, but that author often I look at as a keynote and all the people commenting are the people that came to listen to that keynote. So you want to network with them as well, commenting just to the author.

Okay, that's great, but commenting to the commenters creates additional rapport-building. You don't have to deal with everyone, but you can read it out and say, Is this someone I want to have a conversation with? So that's when you start the conversation online. And then one of the things you said, and I'm going to kind of repeat that back in here is let's say Jack Hubbard is the keynote.

And I see all these people engaging. And I go, look, Tracy, engage. I'd love a conversation with Tracy. I'm now going to go out and find another piece of Jack Hubbard content. I'm going to reach out and say, hey, you know, hey, Tracy, I see we're both big fans of Jack Hubbard. I recently listened to or came across Be Authentic upon cast that he hosted with Chris Nichols and I thought you might get some value from it.

If you're interested, let me know. I'll send that your way. And now I'm starting a conversation around content that I didn't create. It's content that we have in common, and that has a huge impact on starting those conversations. I may say, Who else do you follow? Right? Or I thought and then down the road now I thought you might get some value from this content that our bank put out.

Let me know. Ask permission. Let me know if you're interested. I can send you that. And we're really having a full-on conversation that leads to a phone or a Zoom conversation. But we've got to slow down our outreach to speed up the outcome. We can't pitch too soon. We need to bring great value and start a real conversation.

Jack One of the things we say all the time is to treat the person on the other side of the message the same way you would if they were on the other side of the table. 

Jack Hubbard: Yeah, no doubt about it. And there are other ways to be able to do content because in a personal way, too often what people will say is, well, cheese.

My message is out there for everybody to see and it's very general. I'm giving the example next Wednesday. I have a great guest on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. It's Kay Miller who wrote a tremendous book about a copy of the sales process. And one of the best things is to find your moves. Well, that sounds unusual. It's a different way to say target your opportunities.

Yeah. So one of the things I'd love for you to comment on is I found most it's bankers, it's bank CEOs, it's bank executives. I can by using LinkedIn in an intimate way, I can actually send content to them. Brim And I think that is a significantly underused ability to do that one-on-one.

That personalization, that building a relationship. Talk about your ability to do that and how you do it. 

Brynne Tillman: So there are a couple of ways to do this, but the first thing we need to do is take inventory of our connections. We have to identify who we know that we want to send this to Now, what's nice is even in the free LinkedIn, you can search your first-degree connections by industry and by title.

So maybe you've got a piece of content, maybe your moose is manufacturing. You may have more than one moose, you may have manufacturing, right? And you might have logistics or, whatever that might be. But you can categorize even in the search by moose. I love that because I love it. Right. And the plural of moose is most, by the way.

Yeah. Actually, when I talked to Kay, I asked her, do you say, well, since we're moose, so so I love that. And I and she's fantastic. But what you do is you find either you curate a piece of content create a piece of content or put out a poll for a moose. Right? And then you get that in the inbox of all the moose that you're connected to that would get value from not just voting on the poll, but seeing how other people are on the poll.

And you could break it down by geography. Maybe you're losers, small business owners in your zip code in your greater area. So it doesn't always have to be industry. But then when you want to make sure that the content that you are getting into their inbox is relevant based on their moose category. 

Jack Hubbard: Yep, that's very true. And once you find your moose, this is why it's so important to connect with as many people as possible in the right moose area as possible because then you can send them some content and do that in a one-on-one way and you can send a message and that that becomes a powerful way to potentially share, to start a conversation. It's it's it's vital to be able to do that. Yeah, it's fantastic. 

Well, this is great. We've covered a lot of ground here. I love you to kind of sum up what what what we talked about today. And I'd like you to talk about what's really important. What resonates with me when I always talk to you is insights and the power of insights, but not insights to make you feel good, but make for insights to make other people feel good. So kind of summarize some of the things we've talked about today. 

Brynne Tillman: So I guess kind of piggybacking on that, we have to stop talking about insights that we think are going to resonate. We really have to identify what insights they care about. So rather than sharing what we want them to know, and sharing content around what they want to consume, we don't have to lead with our solution every single time.

In fact, we shouldn't. We should lead to our solution through conversation, through sharing what matters to them. You know, you talk about a local chamber just talking about a local event that you're going to as content if you're especially if you can invite people to that event, right? So stop thinking about content as just a blog post or just an article.

It really is anything that will attract, teach, and engage your prospects. And so if you can do that well, your content will convert to conversations. 

Jack Hubbard: Just awesome. You know, at the end of every one of my shows, I always ask the person that I'm interviewing to tell me about some people you follow. Tell me about books you're reading, etc. I have to tell you, that I've had over the past week three of the most amazing interviews, and I really urge you to follow these people.

Number one is Richard Bliss. Richard is so awesome. He does a lot of speaking on LinkedIn and gave a lot of practical ideas and that's going to come out shown a little later. So follow Richard Bliss. I had an amazing interview with a guy named Dave Brock. Dave is so thoughtful about sales and my friend Ned Miller introduced me to Dave.

Dave is somebody that you should follow on LinkedIn. He posts a lot of very, very thoughtful articles. And then Neil Ford, Neil Ford's posts are videos and they're short. It's like the wedding toast and the perfect game and things like that. The best bartender in Chicago, little short videos. And so please follow Neil Ford and follow Brynne Tillman because her content is absolutely amazing.

Always great to see you, Brynne. This was fun. 

Brynne Tillman: This is always so much fun. I love it all right. 

Jack Hubbard: Well, everyone, we will see you next week.

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Outro

Thanks for joining us for Jack Rantz with Brim, brought to you by our good friends at Vertical IQ and Real Pro. We're live on LinkedIn every Thursday at noon Eastern time, helping bankers turn connections into conversations. Don't miss an episode. Visit the modernbanker.com slash team a podcast. Leave us a review, if you would. You can also listen to this program and the new Jack Rabbits with modern bankers on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, and iHeartRadio. We're on YouTube as well. Subscribe at YouTube.com slash at the Modern Banker. Finally, don't forget to make today and every day a great client day.