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dnsUNFILTERED: Vincent Roberts
Podcast > Episode 49 | March 16, 2026
Mikey Pruitt (00:00)
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. I'm Mikey Pruitt, today joined by Vincent Roberts. What are you, head of growth?
Vincent Roberts (00:10)
That is my title, but...
Mikey Pruitt (00:10)
Head of growth
at US Digital Partners. Let's first unpack that. What is head of growth mean?
Vincent Roberts (00:17)
That's a good question. don't really know either. it essentially just head of sales, but I've kind of overseen building an outbound channel for a digital marketing agency, US Digital Partners. So that's kind of been my role and that's that encompasses a lot of different things, but that's kind of what it means really.
Mikey Pruitt (00:36)
So today is going to be all about sales and marketing. So listen up, MSPs, IT nerds. We're going get the dirty details from Vincent. So you kind of started off like in a sales role, from what I understand, from my extensive research on LinkedIn. And you've migrated into this more marketing ⁓ GTM, go to market kind of.
Vincent Roberts (00:47)
Sounds like a plan.
Mikey Pruitt (01:03)
role. So what does that transition look like? How, why did you pivot between those?
Vincent Roberts (01:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great question. So it's funny. I thought I was going to be in cybersecurity. I had actually started a master's degree at the end of college in cybersecurity ⁓ and had some internships lined up and then COVID happened. And at the time I was making side money driving Uber and I met a guy who was in sales ⁓ and it was a quick car ride and he said, well, why don't you apply for our company? Like we're hiring for some role, you know, for some internships.
Ended up applying, stayed in touch with him. worked, so I was actually hired on there as a tech writer. It was a software company, end-to-end file transfer. ⁓ And really did not like tech writing, but saw how cool the sales guys were. And ⁓ realized I needed to get into sales. They were so small in the terms of the sales team that there was no option there. So I actually quit that job after a year.
and got a all commission job selling solar commercial, residential solar door to door in South Dallas in the summertime, which is hot as heck and not necessarily the nicest area of Dallas and really cut my teeth selling to homeowners like residential solar systems. And, ⁓ was pretty good at it and, ⁓ had the opportunity to interview for more of a enterprise level selling job through a friend.
Mikey Pruitt (02:08)
Wow.
Vincent Roberts (02:32)
at Allstate and it was selling health insurance. So this is a big pivot.
Mikey Pruitt (02:37)
From solar to health insurance. Okay. What's next Bitcoin probably right some kind of crypto
Vincent Roberts (02:40)
Yes. Yes. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah.
So I, ⁓ I interviewed well and I actually got hired on. was the youngest guy on the mid market team for Allstate benefits. Now it's that, that whole organization was acquired by nationwide insurance, another national carrier, ⁓ and did pretty well there. I was there for almost three years. ⁓ had a pretty good final year before I left. left mid year and, ⁓ was hired on at us digital partners, another small world connection. knew.
David Brie count the founder, co-founder and CEO of US Digital Partners through his nephew who I went to college with and we had always kind of stayed in touch and they've kind of, he kind of from a distance saw my, my progression in sales. And at the time our COO and David both knew me in common from different, different angles. And they're like, well, we need a kind of go to market person and we both know Vince and know he's pretty good at this. And so they ended up making me an offer and it was.
Perfect timing on my end. so I've been here almost two years and it's been quite an experience.
Mikey Pruitt (03:43)
Well, what do you think the difference is just between sales and marketing? Because I'm like, I live in marketing now, which I definitely don't belong here, but that's where I'm at. there's like, we, in reality, we should be working very, very much together in a single motion. But in reality, sometimes that gets lost. like, what are the differences between sales and marketing that you see?
Vincent Roberts (03:47)
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a great question. So when I was getting ⁓ hired on here, that was one of the questions that one of the partners asked me is, know, do you see this kind of tension between sales and marketing? And by this point in my, my career and in my head, I kind of think to be a good marketer, you have to think like a salesperson. And so I'm in a weird boat now where I'm a salesperson who sells marketing. ⁓ But
So much of our modern ecosystem for selling, like the kind of old school style of selling where you'd, you know, like going door to door, like, if know, phone calls to work, that model isn't kind of what works anymore. Like the, we're seeing more of a trend towards social selling, ⁓ marketing yourself, like building a personal brand, ⁓ that people really want to do business with a real person, ⁓ not necessarily like a company.
And so building that personal brand is kind of like marketing and you're still selling. You have to do all the kind of fundamentals of selling, you know. ⁓ But to me, it seems like they're kind of becoming very, very closely matched. ⁓ But does that kind of answer your question? We can go wherever you want there.
Mikey Pruitt (05:18)
Yeah,
no, that makes sense. you're saying sales and marketing are kind of merged into what is now like a personal brand that is kind of the sales motion, perhaps, the future.
Vincent Roberts (05:31)
Kind of. Yeah,
think so. it was this last week, the Apple update came through and a lot of cell phones got this update of call screening. And so I've noticed in the cold calls I'm making, people I'm calling on their cell phones, hey, hey, leave your name and maybe we'll patch it through if they like you. But you don't get that response where somebody picks up the phone and goes, who's this? Which kind of...
Mikey Pruitt (05:54)
It's like,
don't know how like, know, legal your family is, but if you've ever gotten a call from like prison or something, it'd be like, or a collect, let's just say collect call. Sorry, that was too far. ⁓ But yeah, would you like to accept the collect call from Mikey Pruitt? you know, it's that every call can be like that now if you have an
Vincent Roberts (06:04)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think we're all seeing the fit. Like another example, like email marketing or email kind of, ⁓ outbound email was awesome. Three, four or five years ago, you you saw really great response rates. And now with the use of AI, I think a lot of people are kind of getting fatigued by that.
And you're seeing just lower response rates. That's not to say good content and good email copy can't kind of break through the noise. I've experienced this selling on LinkedIn and DMing people. get a 40 % response rate on average, but like email has kind of gone down because I get a hundred AI emails every day. People trying to sell me stuff and I kind of tune out the noise. the future of sales and marketing is kind of just, you got to cut through the noise. Like the best marketing.
The best website really speaks to the person quickly and cuts through all the just blase, bland noise that's out there and talks to you as a person in the way that you need to be talked to so you understand the message and resonate with it and have an emotional reaction and make a buying decision, make an action.
Mikey Pruitt (07:35)
So this is what I do. And it's kind of cheating, I'll admit. But this is like a tip for those out there. Like what you were just saying about you kind of want to use the language of your prospect. And you may not know that language. You may, but you more than likely won't. Like say you're a managed service provider and you're trying to pitch health care of some sort, dentists. In the MSP land, everybody likes to rag on dentists. So we'll do that.
Vincent Roberts (07:47)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (08:04)
You don't work at a dentist's office. You don't know how they talk. You don't know the acronyms they use. But I tell you who does. Reddit, Twitter X, and other social media platforms know exactly how they talk. And even if you get into some private Slack channels or Discord channels, you can see it. But you can also use research steps with the AI tools that we have now and do comb those websites.
Vincent Roberts (08:14)
Mmm.
Mikey Pruitt (08:32)
for the language that is being used by the people in those fields. And then use that language in your marketing.
Vincent Roberts (08:36)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. I, problem we see with so many, cause we work with mostly B2B companies is most, even today, most B2B companies have terrible messaging on their websites. Like the way that they talk about themselves, just one doesn't make sense. Like if you had an average person come to your website, they should be able to understand what you do and the value you offer to anybody within three seconds. If you got to figure it out or be like super industry specific.
You're probably not going to convert as many people from your website. Uh, but it's pretty amazing. Just like all these B2B companies out there that they talk about themselves rather than explaining how their company solves a problem for their customer. That's what your website's for. It's your 24 seven salesperson. So that's kind when I think about marketing too, it's like marketing is the support infrastructure for your sales team or your salesperson. Like it's doing all that tertiary secondary work.
from the salesperson making the genuine human connection to tell the story about the value that you offer in the market or to your customers.
Mikey Pruitt (09:48)
Yeah, you're preparing the groundwork. So I've seen ⁓ US digital partners, they kind of call themselves an execution agency. And up until now, we've been talking about the strategy and the execution. It's a lot more important. And ideas are a lot less valuable than people think it is. It's really execution. So what do you see? ⁓
Vincent Roberts (09:51)
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (10:13)
Like how have you seen agencies kind of flip that and become the execution agency?
Vincent Roberts (10:20)
That's a great question. A lot of agencies, at least in Cincinnati, are focused on the kind of creative branding ideas part. that's good and that's important, but that's not where the value is. It's in the work. And finding kind of the niches, I guess, of where you can execute and have a lot of success. Like right now, and we maybe want to get into this with AI, is
executing the content and the technical SEO aspects of a website and your social so that your company and you as a person actually show up in an LLM or like a chat GPT or an AI search. There's all these platforms, chat GPT, Gemini, Google, Grok that are starting to recommend companies.
Based on all that stuff like what we've been talking about, like Reddit, these forums, they're looking for what real people are talking about and trying to suggest the best thing for you as a person. Unlike what, you know, what 10 blue links on Google used to do. ⁓ So for like an execution side, that is a huge opportunity for most businesses and agencies to start, you know, doing the work there and actually like, you know, writing the content.
making the technical changes to your website and your pages and things like that to actually be listed.
Mikey Pruitt (11:49)
So you basically need LLM friendly content because that's going to become the storefront and almost already is really.
Vincent Roberts (11:57)
Yeah, I mean, well, I think in 2025, we saw about 53 % of adults in the US are using some kind of AI chatbot every day. Not like on a website, like they're using ChatGPT as a personal assistant to do their work, write their emails. And you better believe they're using ChatGPT or all these other platforms to do searching and get answers. So for instance, your audience is like, you know, IT professionals,
their clients are looking for the next firm that they want to work with using these platforms instead of Google. They're searching who to work with and they're getting recommended companies based on what the LLM thinks is the right fit. So how do you tweak your content? How do you tweak your presentation as a business to actually be the one that's recommended? And there's a whole bunch of stuff behind that. It's not like right good content. That's part of it. It's having accreditation. It's having ⁓
having a lot of reviews on relevant platforms. It's being like in Reddit, you know, being in forums, having recommendations. So there's a ton of stuff that goes into that. yeah, this is, think, the future. it's still a huge opportunity for a lot of businesses because it's going to be very saturated soon. And it'll be back like Google, where it'll take a ton of work to even be listed on the front page of Google, let alone the first three results.
Mikey Pruitt (13:22)
And then it'll change once you figure that part out. So you're saying to tweak your content, we've been looking at this at DNS Filter. You really have to be, if you want to get found where the people are, like where humans mostly are still talking. Like we know there's bots on Reddit and X and Mastodon. we know, and LinkedIn, there's bots all over the place.
Vincent Roberts (13:24)
Exactly, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (13:51)
But there are still humans on those platforms communicating. And I think we're saying you need to be there. need to show up there, perhaps as yourself. And sales may kind of result, trickle out of.
Vincent Roberts (14:08)
Yeah, yeah. mean, we've so for ourselves as an agency, not even for our clients, for ourselves, we realized how important this was to start getting listed and having our articles kind of cashed in Chachipiti. And we went from getting no leads from Chachipiti to last year, we finished getting 20, 24 ish percent of our leads from Chachipiti. Where somebody was looking for digital marketing services, Chachipiti recommended US Digital Partners.
Then they reached out and we sold them.
Mikey Pruitt (14:40)
Wow. So, OK.
Vincent Roberts (14:41)
Crazy. And that was in seven
months of writing a ton of content that answered specific questions. So this is different than the traditional SEO where you're stuffing keywords into an article so that Google picks up on those keywords or there's some backlinks. That stuff is all good and relevant. But what the LLM is looking for is do you, as an authentic source, answer a specific question that this buyer has?
Are you a credible source to answer this question? And can ⁓ we give that answer to this person? So the content side of that, looks like writing specific articles, not necessarily for SEO keywords, but for that question and answer. This is this FAQ page work that we've cranked out over 50 articles last year, and then those are getting listed now. And that's how we're starting to see these leads, as well as doing some other back linking and traditional SEO work.
Mikey Pruitt (15:25)
Mmm.
Vincent Roberts (15:38)
That's the crazy opportunity that businesses have where, you know, a 27 person agency like us digital partners can start getting recommended for these companies on chat to BT and Gemini and these other places.
Mikey Pruitt (15:52)
So let's back into that for a second. US Digital Partners is 23 years old. How old are they? 27?
Vincent Roberts (15:58)
We're 20, almost 25 years old. We got started early 2000s.
Mikey Pruitt (16:02)
⁓
So what are some of the, so like we're talking about like chat bots and LLMs, AI, and that wasn't even a thought back then, but like there's got to be some strongholds that have stand at the test of time throughout, you know, US digital partners history. And what are those? Like give us the pillars.
Vincent Roberts (16:10)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yes.
So we got started really as a website agency and the four guys who came together to found the company, know, one was a designer, one was a technical guy, David, the founder and Mark, they were the kind of the sales guys relationship. So we kind of got started building websites and that really has been that through line. We're fantastic at building websites. You know, we saw the, when Facebook came online, you don't need a website anymore. It'll just be your Facebook page.
Mikey Pruitt (16:49)
I
hate when, especially restaurants just rely on a Facebook page. But anyway, side rail.
Vincent Roberts (16:54)
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So
there was a whole like, you know, fad of that was going to be the thing. We were kind of seeing this now. I am more convinced now that websites will be even more important for small and mid-market businesses today than they have been for the last 15 years, because your, this will apply to tech people, your website is your endpoint on the internet. It is the source of truth for you as a company to the internet. It's the endpoint. It's the node.
And unless you have all the stuff that you need to tell your audience about in that node, you're not going to be found. So having a, having a fantastically built website for computers, and then also for humans where it has all these answers, it's going to be even more important than it has ever been, I think. so I feel very confident in our positioning as a technical.
you know, marketing agency that can build really good websites, but we're also, you know, technical behind scenes people. ⁓ so that's kind of in the main through line. We have added on all these additional kind of connected services. So we've become kind of full service. we, we really nowadays we work with people as almost a fractional marketing team. So rather than a company hiring, you know, a marketing manager, they can hire our team of 27 people for the same cost of that one full time hire.
but we also don't do long-term contracts. So it's a month-to-month, we're gonna win the business, we're gonna bring all this experience of 25 years and all of the clients we've worked with like Gorilla Glue and Kroger and NASA and all these people to bring to bear on your business without having the constraints of a full-time person that has. But that's kind of our model and what we're seeing right now.
Mikey Pruitt (18:42)
So I want to highlight something you just said, especially to the audience, all you IT nerds out there, guys and gals. Did you hear what Vincent just said? He used the word endpoint and the word node and described working with their company as like a network of sorts. like he is speaking the language, like he is doing the thing that we're saying this is what you should do when you're reaching out to whatever industry it happens to be.
Vincent Roberts (19:01)
Yeah
Yeah, you gotta know what you're talking about.
Mikey Pruitt (19:11)
And that's probably because you're an IT
nerd yourself and not necessarily.
Vincent Roberts (19:16)
It's because I wrote technical documents. That helps.
Mikey Pruitt (19:18)
Yeah.
So let's just take a managed service provider, for example. They're typically great at the tech, not great at the marketing and the sales. What do you think the first thing that you or ⁓ US Digital Partners would fix if an MSP hired you tomorrow?
Vincent Roberts (19:40)
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. ⁓ Honestly, I would start with what we've been talking about. So when you optimize for AI for LLMs, you're optimizing for humans, ultimately. that's where, like most businesses, their best sales are referrals or inbound leads. That's where most businesses are reliant on those referrals and inbound leads to maintain their revenue. ⁓
Unless you have a very strong sales organization, that's where you're making your money. So how can you optimize that channel to build one, the quality of the leads you're getting today, but actually convert more of them. So when you're optimizing for AI, you're doing things that most companies aren't doing. You're answering the questions that your buyers already have today. You're speaking their language. You're showing what others won't show. That could look like how they work with you, what it's like working with you.
how much it costs to work with you, the time, the materials, the involvement, things that most businesses are scared to show. That's really good marketing actually. ⁓ So showing the things, pulling the curtain back and actually talking about your business in a transparent, authentic way. That kind of material and content does fantastic for AI, but it also does fantastic for humans. It helps you...
Mikey Pruitt (20:39)
Mmm.
Vincent Roberts (20:58)
be found better. And then when people do find your website, and again, going back to your website is your 24 sales, 24 seven salesperson. If the buyer, and this is kind of modern trends in buyer behaviors, people don't want to talk to a salesperson before they have like 99 % of their questions answered. They already know they're making a buying decision. They've done their homework and they're coming to you just to feel out, is this the right fit?
Mikey Pruitt (21:22)
It's like they're
giving you an opportunity to give them a reason to say no. And if you don't screw it up, we're probably going to buy.
Vincent Roberts (21:27)
Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly. And so if you can answer all those questions and remove all the barriers to them working with you and make that as smooth a process as possible, you're going to convert more of your inbound leads and you're going to get more leads to begin with. From a sales standpoint, ⁓ if you have a outbound sales motion, all of that work.
is going to support the salesperson and the sales team. It makes their job so much easier because they're just an announcer of what's already been done. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. They're not trying to hide things. They can be very transparent and authentic and just focused on building real relationships because their questions are already answered. You know how much it costs. You know what this is going to be like. And that's what we've seen. That's what I've seen selling for you as digital partners as well.
Mikey Pruitt (22:19)
So you're saying ⁓ being transparent, pulling back the kimono, so to speak, a little bit more than you're probably comfortable with because the buyer is maybe 80 or 90 % there in their research for you and your competition. And they're looking for that last mile, the human part of it. So I've done all the grunt work because grunt work is easy now.
Vincent Roberts (22:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (22:46)
three minutes in a chatbot and you pretty much got all the lay of the land and you can dive deeper off the different branches and all that. But like when you see them, especially when you get face to face with them like we are, you're now convincing them, hey, we're nice. Like we're great to work with. Like we are humans, like you're a human. Because like all the bot, all the research stuff has already been kind of finalized.
Vincent Roberts (23:04)
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. kind going back to sales, the traditional sales model is I got to get a meeting with you before you get to know anything. Yeah, like that's kind of been the whole mentality and still for so many businesses that we're running into all the time that they don't want to reveal their pricing. They don't want to reveal ⁓ what the project looks like because they think maybe all our competitors are going to come in and steal this or we're going to be undercut.
Mikey Pruitt (23:22)
You gotta take me to dinner first. Come on.
Vincent Roberts (23:43)
Not really. One, they're not going to do that. So if you do that, now you have a complete upper advantage. But think about yourself as a buyer. Like I know for myself, if I'm buying or say I'm going out to dinner, it really pisses me off if I don't know how much the food costs before I order.
Mikey Pruitt (23:59)
We got like two chilies or like whatever the thing is. Two spaghetti noodles.
Vincent Roberts (24:02)
Exactly. Yeah. Like I have no idea what this costs.
Same thing with like if I'm shopping. ⁓ for a total relevant example, I have a pool in my house that I need to get cleaned. And I have looked at, I swear, 100 websites for pool cleaners near me. And not one of them has their price. If one of them had their pricing, I would have gone with them. Because I don't know, maybe one's 300, maybe one's 50, 20. Like, who knows what the price differential
If I had one that gave me tier pricing, I would have gone with them immediately. And I found one company that would do that and that's the one I hired.
Right? Like as a buyer, that's kind of how we feel now. I want to, like, I can see the review. Yeah. Cards on the table. I can see your reviews. I see what people are saying about you. You know, when you're looking for a mechanic, you do this. Any service related business, just put it out there. Like everybody wants to know about what you do. And they're probably already finding the answers, but if you can eliminate those barriers to entry, it just is going to make it so much smoother for your buyers. And they're already going to like you.
Mikey Pruitt (24:43)
Yeah, it's like cards on the table.
Vincent Roberts (25:09)
A lot more.
Mikey Pruitt (25:10)
That's true. You're already winning. ⁓ So like that's kind of along the lines of my next question, which was about mistakes that people make in their marketing and in their sales. And one of them is clearly not being as transparent as you should be to get the buyer to where they need to be to make that purchasing decision. But what are some other mistakes you see people make routinely?
Vincent Roberts (25:34)
Oh man, we see a lot. One of the biggest, so one of the things we do for clients or if we're talking to somebody that's interested in working with us is doing, if they're running any paid advertising or just their current site is doing like an SEO or a paid audit. And we find so much of the time that people are wasting money there. So if you think you're doing the right thing, have a third party look at it. A lot of agencies will be able to take a look and give an outside opinion.
But a lot of companies waste tons of money on Google by targeting just the wrong people, not doing their due diligence when hiring an agency to do that. A ⁓ lot of agencies will take a percent of ⁓ advertising spend. ⁓ You may have seen this. Yes, that's something we don't do. Yes, yes, exactly. So if you're doing paid advertising, make sure that you're
Mikey Pruitt (26:21)
I've recently seen this. And a retainer sometimes.
Vincent Roberts (26:31)
the agency you're working with is not taking a percent of your ad spend. They should have a flat fee based on their time to manage the ads accounts, but a lot of agencies will take a cut. So if they're telling you, we need to spend more, sometimes they're making more money as well. That's not good. There's yes, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, we see that a ton. Another one that's not as big of a deal is ⁓ the ADA ⁓ side of a website is something that
Mikey Pruitt (26:44)
Yeah, and there's some that take both, believe it or not. I was very surprised.
Vincent Roberts (27:01)
can really actually get you in your business into hot water. There are like ambulance chasing attorneys that will go after you if your website is not ADA compliant. And a lot of people don't know that that's a thing, but you your colors have to be ADA compliant. You have to have, you know, the page be readable to a bot. So if somebody's visually impaired. So there's all these things and there are lawsuits that happen every year for small companies that were not compliant with the ADA.
That's a small one. I don't usually lead with that
Mikey Pruitt (27:32)
It's clever
business idea for the ambulance chasing lawyer though. That's clever.
Vincent Roberts (27:37)
Yes, yeah, and
you better believe with these tools now they're going to find them a lot faster because there's a lot of like
Mikey Pruitt (27:42)
Yeah, and with
the tools we have now, you can also fix it a lot faster too. Just like here's a link to the ADA requirements for websites and here's my website. Do an analysis.
Vincent Roberts (27:46)
Exactly.
Exactly. Lighthouse is
a good one that you can, I think you can also get it as like a Chrome extension to check your own website. Yeah. And then the biggest thing really is just that homepage hero messaging. Most companies talk about themselves as the hero. So instead of, know, as the client being the hero, ⁓ what that looks like is language like, you know, we've been in business this long. We're, ⁓
Mikey Pruitt (28:09)
I'm going to look at art right now.
Vincent Roberts (28:20)
We're awesome. It's kind of the language of talking about us and why we're great and trying to convince you that you should work with us rather than like good met hero homepage messaging should tell the buyer why they should want how you're solving their specific problem. And it should take like three seconds for them to figure out because really statistically you have three seconds to catch somebody's attention if they come to your website. So that that one H one HTML text of you know what you do.
should be very clear and to the point of what you do and how it serves your ideal client.
Mikey Pruitt (28:55)
I think we should do a roast of DNS filter.com, but we're not, we're not going to do it. Cause I just looked at it and it's like, it's borderline. Our headline is protect every click. I think we have some AB tests running too. they, they, you know, flip in and out different things, but it's like borderline where we're kind of talking about you as the viewer of the webpage, but we're kind of talking about ourselves too. So like, I'm going to take that back to the team and say, Hey, maybe we should do a little messaging research.
Vincent Roberts (28:58)
Hahaha!
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's some,
it's really actually, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
It's called the story brand framework and it lays out essentially how to build a messaging framework for your website or your company that positions you as the guide to the hero, which is your client. In all of literature, there's always this hero's journey that people take Luke Skywalker, ⁓ Ferris Bueller's day off, any story that resonates with people, know, Braveheart, there's
The hero starts out, he meets a guide and the guide gets him and basically like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker is a great example of this. Luke Skywalker doesn't know that he's the son of Darth Vader. Obi-Wan Kenobi has all this context of the world that Luke is living in and shares a little bit of this and points him on the journey to where he needs to go. But he doesn't take him all the way there, but like he gets him on the journey and kind of opens the world to him. That's your job as a business. That's what your messaging is supposed to do.
Helping Luke Skywalker get to where he needs to go. You're opening the world up to him and solving his problems. That's how your messaging should be structured.
Mikey Pruitt (30:34)
That's pretty good. That's a good way to think of it. And I wanted to point out that how good AI is now because I did a little bit of, did some research on you, Vincent, and your company through Claude, the desktop app. And what I gave it was essentially your website address, your email, your LinkedIn page. And it came back with a lot of stuff. I had to verify some of it. So it was a little crazy. One of the things it says is,
Vincent Roberts (30:42)
yeah.
Go.
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (31:04)
Story Brand, the famous for Story Brand messaging and it links to the book. That's how good AI is right now, especially for research. But anyway, just a little pointer.
Vincent Roberts (31:09)
There you go. There you go. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I know it's,
it's, it's fantastic. And for doing messaging too, like if you're on a budget, can, you can get pretty good copy. It's the unfortunate thing we're finding with AI is we thought, ⁓ this is going to be awesome. can use AI to do all of our messaging, but AI is an average. It's an average of the best, you know, you want, so a human is still not replaced yet by AI because humans can think abstractly and on the outside of the
Mikey Pruitt (31:35)
Yeah.
Vincent Roberts (31:43)
you know, of this average curve of the bell curve. And that's where you get the best, the extreme. So it's an average. So it's still, it's still pretty good. If you're on a budget, no, you don't want to be average, but if you need, you know, if you're on a budget and you need good messaging, AI can be great. And if you prompt it the right way and prompt it towards the end of the bell curve, you're gonna, you're gonna get pretty good results, but that's why we don't write pretty much anything with AI. have, you know, full-time copywriters to do that because we see a better result.
Mikey Pruitt (31:52)
Right. And you don't want to be average.
So you mentioned something earlier about ⁓ niches. And there's the saying, like, the riches are in the niches. And a lot of the, especially the MSPs that I talk with, they kind of struggle with that because they're like, everyone needs IT services. And DNS filter, we even have this problem because everybody uses DNS. Like, we're using it right now. But how do you convince ⁓ someone to look at the niche? And then how do you?
Vincent Roberts (32:34)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (32:42)
I guess justify that it's revenue positive.
Vincent Roberts (32:48)
Yeah, geez, that's a great question. I you see this a lot in like the startup world that sometimes the business thinks that they are serving this client and or they have a huge, you know, total actionable market. They have a huge TAM, but they don't. ⁓ Who actually is going to buy their stuff is a lot smaller and they find a lot more success. Like I talked to a guy I know locally who he was doing general SEO for anybody.
And he found not long ago that he really had built an expertise working with lawyers specifically. And he has doubled his business, if I'm not forgetting this right, I'll probably roast me in the comments. But by specifically focusing on attorneys and speaking to them and building out that niche for his business that he knows exactly the same problem that they're going to have over and over and over again. We did the same thing when I came on board.
We had such a huge team, marketing's for everybody. What we did is look back and say, you know, we didn't even know industry size, like who are we working with? And we looked back and said, who are our favorite clients? If you've already been in business for a while, this might be a good way to kind of figure this out. It's like, who have actually been your favorite clients? Who have you enjoyed working with the most? Who gets the most out of your services and your product? And then...
Mikey Pruitt (33:50)
Yeah.
Vincent Roberts (34:15)
If you do the work and kind of map that out, there'll be overlaps. So like for us, we've done the billion dollar brands. We've worked, you know, like I said, Kroger, Gorilla Glue, built websites for those guys, but they're not as fun as the hundred million, $50 million revenue clients that we have. Like we found those are our favorite clients because they really let us in the weeds. Like we become an extension of their team or their marketing team. And they, they give us the freedom to, to do the work that we know that they need.
and can get real results. it's totally beneficial both sides because they see the results, we see the results. It's a mutual thing. for us, that's what we found is looking back at our clients. And then once you know what that is, you can double down. You're not shotgunning the market anymore. You can say, I'm going after these types of businesses now. And that's it. It's like playing darts, you know, like the whole point of darts is to hit the bullseye. At least that's how I play darts.
⁓ You can get triples. It's true. Yeah, you want to get triples
Mikey Pruitt (35:16)
There's also a strategy if you actually know the rules, I think, but I don't know what they are.
Vincent Roberts (35:20)
and doubles too. That is fair. But you want to narrow it down so that you can maximize. So this goes to the selling and marketing piece. Once you know your ideal client profile, your ICP fit, you can build an outbound motion around that. You can build your marketing around that, your copy, ⁓ your advertising.
Like especially for if you're to spend any dollars on advertising, which you should as a business, it gets, you know, a good return. You do it right. You can only do that if you have a tight ICP. If you know who you're selling to, this is how the tech is amazing now is if you have that ICP, you can really target them like down to the individual almost with really good copy that speaks to them specifically. So yeah, I think it's so important.
You can't really do good sales unless you have a good fit and good niche.
Mikey Pruitt (36:18)
How do you say that word? I have no idea. Niche. like you're doing, yeah. Is it French? Probably is. So it's kind of like you're describing like an automation. Like I know IT nerds, like I like to automate things. know, ⁓ I did this thing three times now. And now I need to figure out how to make it do it, the computer do it.
Vincent Roberts (36:21)
I like niche. It's a little easier Americanized. It's a French word.
Yeah, niche, I think.
Mikey Pruitt (36:41)
And the way you're describing this self-reflection ⁓ exercise where you determine your best customers and whatever metrics that means to you and to them, ⁓ isolating them, what matters to them, how they talk.
and then pushing that into all of your messaging. And this could maybe be like a satellite endeavor perhaps to begin with, because maybe you're scared to just say, I'm going all in on lawyers or whatever it is. But it's a good exercise to do that self-reflection just so at least you know which customers are currently best fit for your business.
Vincent Roberts (37:08)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, 100%. 100 % because then you, you, one you have, or what happens from that is you can kind of have like economies of scale type stuff where if you know your niche, you can double down on it. You can start going after that only. You don't waste time going after bad, bad fits. You say, you say no to the wrong clients, which is a crazy thing to do, but it's, it's what you need to do. If you, once you figure out.
who that is. And then you can double down and continue to reinvest in that niche, ⁓ building a copy, a better website that speaks to them, ⁓ training your salespeople to sell to them, ⁓ speaking their language, like as you've been saying. And the other thing is it becomes easier to sell to them because now you have even more street cred because you have all these case studies of ⁓
success with that specific type of business. So your salespeople have more success selling to them. So it just becomes a flywheel of momentum for your business because you can talk to that kind of company, that kind of business in a way that clicks to them. They understand it. And you get more revenue that way.
Mikey Pruitt (38:43)
So we started off talking about personal brands. And I wanted to go into how do you make that a thing that is ⁓ not natural, but just a thing that happens, specifically talking about soft skills and
How do you ⁓ train, I guess, to be better at those soft skills? Is there a way to be more human? guess is a good way to say it.
Vincent Roberts (39:12)
Mmm.
Yeah, that's a good question. There is kind of a thought in sales that you can train a salesperson, the technical skills of selling, but you know pretty quick if somebody's going to be good at sales or not by their soft skills. Like, can they hold a conversation? Are they able to build a relationship with somebody quickly and naturally? ⁓ Because the skills of like asking for the business and following up and making cold calls.
Those are teachable skills, but the soft skills are a lot harder to teach. And I've seen this with, ⁓ in the teams I've been on, the people that, didn't, that, kind of washed out in sales, least didn't have the soft skills. They, they, they were really trying to learn the technical skills, but without the soft skills, they just weren't making the connections. ⁓
That being said, don't believe I'm a growth mindset person. So I think ⁓ for me, at least I forced myself to learn some of these soft skills. Cause I was terrified of people growing up. Like I like talking to adults, like people my age not into it. And I literally would go to the mall. Sometimes I would drag somebody, somebody along with me and just go up to strangers and talk to them. Cause I was just like afraid to do that.
And, you know, over time I built kind of the ability just to talk to anybody and learned kind of these soft skills. I'm not like when I was growing up, maybe I'm autistic. I don't know. I like didn't understand how a joke worked. So I would listen to comedy. that was instead of music, I would just listen to comedy on Pandora over and over until I kind of understood the cadence and like, you know, how the joke sounded and landed. So for me, I,
Mikey Pruitt (41:07)
First you're like,
why is that funny?
Vincent Roberts (41:09)
Yeah, like, like, like,
in school is weird, because like, I didn't I didn't get the jokes a lot of times, like people make a joke, I just didn't get it. ⁓ So for me, in my experience, doing stuff like that, like, I've learned kind of these soft skills, you know, understanding, you know, how much eye contact to give people like thinking about that. ⁓ Smiling, you know, trying not to interrupt these kind of things. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt (41:37)
You
Vincent Roberts (41:40)
They are somewhat learnable, but it takes a lot of work. sometimes it takes really getting out of your comfort zone to build them.
Mikey Pruitt (41:49)
So it's like a brute force methodologies at least won't work for you. Getting back to the IT nerd language and messaging, a brute force attack on yourself.
Vincent Roberts (41:52)
Yes
Yes, it was a brute force.
Yes, exactly. Just put yourself in those scenarios and eventually it'll be okay.
Mikey Pruitt (42:06)
So I wanted to, let me see if I have anything crazy open on my desktop real quick. Here we go. I don't want to give away all the secrets. no. All right. Here we go. OK. So one of the reasons I asked you that question is because of how Vince and I met on LinkedIn. ⁓ Our soft skills at play, I guess you could say.
Vincent Roberts (42:14)
Your glasses are giving you away. I was kidding.
Mikey Pruitt (42:34)
So you and I can't tell these were your friends or just kind of organically happened. So you and several other people started posting 90 % of all LinkedIn content. Looks like it's been piped through chat. GPT. was hilarious. I actually saw it on somebody else's thing that had your picture in it. And I was like, then I clicked through to each of those people and I was like, wait a minute, this is like a, this is like a thing. Like, what are they doing?
Vincent Roberts (42:41)
Hahaha
You
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (43:02)
Are they in on this? Do y'all work together? I was like, no, they don't work together. This is so weird. then Vince and I were going to meet a few days ago. So I posted this just as like an icebreaker to say, hey, look, I did it too. And I want to point this out to the audience. This is completely silliness, right? But look, almost 3,500 impressions, 14 comments, one repost. Let's look at these analytics.
Vincent Roberts (43:05)
huh.
Yeah.
Yeah. 100 % silliness.
yeah, mean, this is...
Mikey Pruitt (43:33)
Like, you know, whatever. Like this is,
this is better than average for most of the minutiae I post on LinkedIn. And I'm sure it was even ⁓ more potent, so to speak, for you and the original crew that started this conga line, I believe you call it.
Vincent Roberts (43:50)
Yeah, I've, if you don't know, follow Matt, he's had some hilarious LinkedIn content. He's a sales trainer for SDRs for SaaS sellers. but he has a phenomenal LinkedIn page to follow. So, ⁓ I saw that post and I like, this is hilarious. I'm going to just jump on this in the morning. And I swear by the end of the day, it was already like a hundred likes. It had like blown up and I was getting, it's funny. Some of the, accounts that picked it up.
which were some very large accounts. Some of them did well above what I did originally, but yeah, it's funny. It just dominated some feeds for a while. I'm still getting notifications about people reposting that because it just blew the heck up. yeah, mean, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, which has been, I'll say a work in progress for the last year, I've been tracking it and trying to get better. Same here. When I started, I would get maybe 20 likes on a post.
And in the last five weeks, I've averaged about 50,000 impressions a week and have gotten posts to hit at least 100 likes every week. Like I had my best post ever on Saturday that hit over 300 likes and like 70,000 impressions. ⁓ So it's totally, this is the personal branding thing. It takes time. It takes engaging with people's content.
Like I do a lot of commenting on people's posts, liking their posts. Sometimes I have a comment from last week that did 10,000 impressions, a comment on somebody else's post. yeah, LinkedIn is such a guy. I Asher Dixon posted about this today on LinkedIn that right now there's such a golden opportunity for salespeople, for anybody, business owners, IT people. LinkedIn is very underused today.
Mikey Pruitt (45:32)
Ahem.
Vincent Roberts (45:48)
there's still not a lot of people on LinkedIn considering how big the population of the world is and how many people could be on the platform. So right now, if you build kind of a brand and a following and are connecting with people, like Mikey, you've built a great account. If you build that and increase it and increase your kind of connections with people, you're setting yourself up so well for the future and building that brand around yourself.
I'm a hundred percent convinced as we continue to move into this AI age, as we've already seen with AI video, like this, this could be an AI video right now. It's so good. Like I wouldn't be able to tell. And LinkedIn is one of the few places that you can know a person is real because one, they're verified. They have a way to verify based on your ID. So, you know, you're talking to a real person. If you take photos of yourself and engage with people and you engage, you know,
in their comments, they know they're talking to a real person and that's what people are craving more and more and more. ⁓ So I think LinkedIn is one of the most insane opportunities for anybody right now to jump on and just post and engage and grow a brand.
Mikey Pruitt (46:59)
So I call this the luck surface area. I've heard this from an old podcast. I think it was called Techzing. I don't know. Anyway, look it up. It's pretty old. But the luck surface area is like doing things that have the potential to increase your audience or footprint or whatever.
And this LinkedIn example, the conga line that you were part of and got some massive growth off of ⁓ is a perfect example of that because it resulted in this conversation that we're having right now. And now a few hundred more people are going to know about you, Vince, and your company. ⁓ that can't be bad, right? Like LinkedIn, it's kind of silly. We all know it's kind of silly. It's like work.
Vincent Roberts (47:45)
No. Yeah, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (47:53)
Like there's even accounts that kind of make fun of having an office and it's like the TV show, The Office and like, I work in HR and I do this. But it's also fun and the humans are there. They're having actual genuine conversations. I have an argument going on right now on one of my threads with one of our customers. Tim. So we're having a back and forth about AI ⁓ coding and is it good, is it bad, security vulnerabilities.
Vincent Roberts (48:06)
Mm-hmm.
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt (48:22)
But like it is real conversation and like, unfortunately we can't talk to everybody like in the same room anymore. Cause you know, we're, we live in disparate places. There's things going on in our lives, but you know, the 10 or 15 or one hour that we have to spend on social media for the day, we can ⁓ make genuine connections. Yeah. Right. There's a rookie numbers.
Vincent Roberts (48:41)
Those are low numbers. Gotta
get those up. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well, and it pays dividends. Like I have people liking content I put out two months ago. Like I'll see a random, you know, engagement with a post that LinkedIn's, recirculated. That just gets more brand awareness to our company, to me, the people, the person that they're actually gonna meet if they wanna work with us. Yeah, so it's.
It's a no brainer. the thing I love about LinkedIn is it's moving in the direction. It was always kind of a stagnant professionalism platform, but it's moving in the direction of being really human and being more silly. Like the best posts I have that get engagement, that get people to reach out and have conversations are the silly ones. Like I made a fake post about emailing the CEO of LinkedIn last week.
Recommending a change like adding a secret like button like that did that did fantastic because people know that it's funny It's satire like your reaction right now, and I am so convinced that Nobody wants to work with somebody. They don't like they will only work with somebody they like so why not be likable You know put yourself out there be a funny person then You'll you'll do better
Mikey Pruitt (50:05)
I'm looking at this post
of yours right now. That's awesome.
Vincent Roberts (50:12)
About 30 minutes of time and that's what we got.
Mikey Pruitt (50:15)
yeah, apparently I have rookie numbers. man, gotta work on that. So give the audience, if you have, let's say 30 minutes a day to work on your personal brand, probably on LinkedIn, but anywhere, what is the most impactful thing you can do to get more traction, more luck service area?
Vincent Roberts (50:18)
Hahaha
That's a great question. ⁓ I was super lucky when I, in the first week of starting here, I literally was sitting on my apartment floor with no furniture and I got to talk to one of the largest accounts on LinkedIn, a guy named Eric Particker, if you want to look him up. ⁓ I'd gotten connected because he actually was ⁓ coming to us to help him before he really blew up on LinkedIn to help him with some SEO and maybe some advertising for his brand.
He sells kind of like executive coaching, does talks all over the world. His accounts got like a million followers and he was generous enough to spend, you know, 30, 40 minutes of his time and talking to me. And the things that I took away from that conversation was that he made very clear is you don't have to post every day, but you need to start posting. But the thing that you need to do when you post is have content pillars that you stick to. You don't go outside of those pillars and you got to figure out what those are for you and your brand and as a person. So for me, it's kind of like sales humor, marketing humor.
real insights about marketing like today I posted, I'm making a series on like the coolest websites I'm finding on the internet. ⁓ And I still, have these content pillars I stick to. don't, you know, I don't talk about politics. I don't talk about ⁓ HR, things I don't know about. I don't talk about baseball and sports, you know, cause I don't follow those as closely as I should, but people do. And like if that's your brand, you lean into it ⁓ and stick to those content pillars and post.
I would say if you want to do this, start posting once a week. I try and post six days a week. I take off Sunday, but I try and put something out there every day. Just, you know, it could be a silly post. Sometimes I'll just post a meme, but sometimes I'll post a more serious post. and that, if you start doing that regularly, you'll start to see progress and you'll start to see, you know, your followers go up, your impressions go up. And, you know, I remember the first post I had that went viral and it was like,
wow, this does work. And then it starts happening more often and more often and more often and more often. And I'm on that exponential growth curve right now. I'm seeing the fruit of what I've done for seven, eight months now, really leaning into LinkedIn and doing this, it works.
Mikey Pruitt (52:48)
So it's silly, but it works, and it's kind of fun.
Vincent Roberts (52:51)
Yeah, silly, works, kind of fun, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (52:54)
Well, Vince, thank you for spending the time today with myself and the audience and giving us some sales and marketing tips and a little LinkedIn joy. So I appreciate it.
Vincent Roberts (53:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, Mikey, this has been a pleasure and I'm thankful you reached out and we got to do this.
Mikey Pruitt (53:10)
Absolutely. ⁓
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of DNS Unfiltered. I'm Mikey Pruitt, today joined by Vincent Roberts. What are you, head of growth?
Vincent Roberts (00:10)
That is my title, but...
Mikey Pruitt (00:10)
Head of growth
at US Digital Partners. Let's first unpack that. What is head of growth mean?
Vincent Roberts (00:17)
That's a good question. don't really know either. it essentially just head of sales, but I've kind of overseen building an outbound channel for a digital marketing agency, US Digital Partners. So that's kind of been my role and that's that encompasses a lot of different things, but that's kind of what it means really.
Mikey Pruitt (00:36)
So today is going to be all about sales and marketing. So listen up, MSPs, IT nerds. We're going get the dirty details from Vincent. So you kind of started off like in a sales role, from what I understand, from my extensive research on LinkedIn. And you've migrated into this more marketing ⁓ GTM, go to market kind of.
Vincent Roberts (00:47)
Sounds like a plan.
Mikey Pruitt (01:03)
role. So what does that transition look like? How, why did you pivot between those?
Vincent Roberts (01:08)
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great question. So it's funny. I thought I was going to be in cybersecurity. I had actually started a master's degree at the end of college in cybersecurity ⁓ and had some internships lined up and then COVID happened. And at the time I was making side money driving Uber and I met a guy who was in sales ⁓ and it was a quick car ride and he said, well, why don't you apply for our company? Like we're hiring for some role, you know, for some internships.
Ended up applying, stayed in touch with him. worked, so I was actually hired on there as a tech writer. It was a software company, end-to-end file transfer. ⁓ And really did not like tech writing, but saw how cool the sales guys were. And ⁓ realized I needed to get into sales. They were so small in the terms of the sales team that there was no option there. So I actually quit that job after a year.
and got a all commission job selling solar commercial, residential solar door to door in South Dallas in the summertime, which is hot as heck and not necessarily the nicest area of Dallas and really cut my teeth selling to homeowners like residential solar systems. And, ⁓ was pretty good at it and, ⁓ had the opportunity to interview for more of a enterprise level selling job through a friend.
Mikey Pruitt (02:08)
Wow.
Vincent Roberts (02:32)
at Allstate and it was selling health insurance. So this is a big pivot.
Mikey Pruitt (02:37)
From solar to health insurance. Okay. What's next Bitcoin probably right some kind of crypto
Vincent Roberts (02:40)
Yes. Yes. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah.
So I, ⁓ I interviewed well and I actually got hired on. was the youngest guy on the mid market team for Allstate benefits. Now it's that, that whole organization was acquired by nationwide insurance, another national carrier, ⁓ and did pretty well there. I was there for almost three years. ⁓ had a pretty good final year before I left. left mid year and, ⁓ was hired on at us digital partners, another small world connection. knew.
David Brie count the founder, co-founder and CEO of US Digital Partners through his nephew who I went to college with and we had always kind of stayed in touch and they've kind of, he kind of from a distance saw my, my progression in sales. And at the time our COO and David both knew me in common from different, different angles. And they're like, well, we need a kind of go to market person and we both know Vince and know he's pretty good at this. And so they ended up making me an offer and it was.
Perfect timing on my end. so I've been here almost two years and it's been quite an experience.
Mikey Pruitt (03:43)
Well, what do you think the difference is just between sales and marketing? Because I'm like, I live in marketing now, which I definitely don't belong here, but that's where I'm at. there's like, we, in reality, we should be working very, very much together in a single motion. But in reality, sometimes that gets lost. like, what are the differences between sales and marketing that you see?
Vincent Roberts (03:47)
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a great question. So when I was getting ⁓ hired on here, that was one of the questions that one of the partners asked me is, know, do you see this kind of tension between sales and marketing? And by this point in my, my career and in my head, I kind of think to be a good marketer, you have to think like a salesperson. And so I'm in a weird boat now where I'm a salesperson who sells marketing. ⁓ But
So much of our modern ecosystem for selling, like the kind of old school style of selling where you'd, you know, like going door to door, like, if know, phone calls to work, that model isn't kind of what works anymore. Like the, we're seeing more of a trend towards social selling, ⁓ marketing yourself, like building a personal brand, ⁓ that people really want to do business with a real person, ⁓ not necessarily like a company.
And so building that personal brand is kind of like marketing and you're still selling. You have to do all the kind of fundamentals of selling, you know. ⁓ But to me, it seems like they're kind of becoming very, very closely matched. ⁓ But does that kind of answer your question? We can go wherever you want there.
Mikey Pruitt (05:18)
Yeah,
no, that makes sense. you're saying sales and marketing are kind of merged into what is now like a personal brand that is kind of the sales motion, perhaps, the future.
Vincent Roberts (05:31)
Kind of. Yeah,
think so. it was this last week, the Apple update came through and a lot of cell phones got this update of call screening. And so I've noticed in the cold calls I'm making, people I'm calling on their cell phones, hey, hey, leave your name and maybe we'll patch it through if they like you. But you don't get that response where somebody picks up the phone and goes, who's this? Which kind of...
Mikey Pruitt (05:54)
It's like,
don't know how like, know, legal your family is, but if you've ever gotten a call from like prison or something, it'd be like, or a collect, let's just say collect call. Sorry, that was too far. ⁓ But yeah, would you like to accept the collect call from Mikey Pruitt? you know, it's that every call can be like that now if you have an
Vincent Roberts (06:04)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think we're all seeing the fit. Like another example, like email marketing or email kind of, ⁓ outbound email was awesome. Three, four or five years ago, you you saw really great response rates. And now with the use of AI, I think a lot of people are kind of getting fatigued by that.
And you're seeing just lower response rates. That's not to say good content and good email copy can't kind of break through the noise. I've experienced this selling on LinkedIn and DMing people. get a 40 % response rate on average, but like email has kind of gone down because I get a hundred AI emails every day. People trying to sell me stuff and I kind of tune out the noise. the future of sales and marketing is kind of just, you got to cut through the noise. Like the best marketing.
The best website really speaks to the person quickly and cuts through all the just blase, bland noise that's out there and talks to you as a person in the way that you need to be talked to so you understand the message and resonate with it and have an emotional reaction and make a buying decision, make an action.
Mikey Pruitt (07:35)
So this is what I do. And it's kind of cheating, I'll admit. But this is like a tip for those out there. Like what you were just saying about you kind of want to use the language of your prospect. And you may not know that language. You may, but you more than likely won't. Like say you're a managed service provider and you're trying to pitch health care of some sort, dentists. In the MSP land, everybody likes to rag on dentists. So we'll do that.
Vincent Roberts (07:47)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (08:04)
You don't work at a dentist's office. You don't know how they talk. You don't know the acronyms they use. But I tell you who does. Reddit, Twitter X, and other social media platforms know exactly how they talk. And even if you get into some private Slack channels or Discord channels, you can see it. But you can also use research steps with the AI tools that we have now and do comb those websites.
Vincent Roberts (08:14)
Mmm.
Mikey Pruitt (08:32)
for the language that is being used by the people in those fields. And then use that language in your marketing.
Vincent Roberts (08:36)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. I, problem we see with so many, cause we work with mostly B2B companies is most, even today, most B2B companies have terrible messaging on their websites. Like the way that they talk about themselves, just one doesn't make sense. Like if you had an average person come to your website, they should be able to understand what you do and the value you offer to anybody within three seconds. If you got to figure it out or be like super industry specific.
You're probably not going to convert as many people from your website. Uh, but it's pretty amazing. Just like all these B2B companies out there that they talk about themselves rather than explaining how their company solves a problem for their customer. That's what your website's for. It's your 24 seven salesperson. So that's kind when I think about marketing too, it's like marketing is the support infrastructure for your sales team or your salesperson. Like it's doing all that tertiary secondary work.
from the salesperson making the genuine human connection to tell the story about the value that you offer in the market or to your customers.
Mikey Pruitt (09:48)
Yeah, you're preparing the groundwork. So I've seen ⁓ US digital partners, they kind of call themselves an execution agency. And up until now, we've been talking about the strategy and the execution. It's a lot more important. And ideas are a lot less valuable than people think it is. It's really execution. So what do you see? ⁓
Vincent Roberts (09:51)
Exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (10:13)
Like how have you seen agencies kind of flip that and become the execution agency?
Vincent Roberts (10:20)
That's a great question. A lot of agencies, at least in Cincinnati, are focused on the kind of creative branding ideas part. that's good and that's important, but that's not where the value is. It's in the work. And finding kind of the niches, I guess, of where you can execute and have a lot of success. Like right now, and we maybe want to get into this with AI, is
executing the content and the technical SEO aspects of a website and your social so that your company and you as a person actually show up in an LLM or like a chat GPT or an AI search. There's all these platforms, chat GPT, Gemini, Google, Grok that are starting to recommend companies.
Based on all that stuff like what we've been talking about, like Reddit, these forums, they're looking for what real people are talking about and trying to suggest the best thing for you as a person. Unlike what, you know, what 10 blue links on Google used to do. ⁓ So for like an execution side, that is a huge opportunity for most businesses and agencies to start, you know, doing the work there and actually like, you know, writing the content.
making the technical changes to your website and your pages and things like that to actually be listed.
Mikey Pruitt (11:49)
So you basically need LLM friendly content because that's going to become the storefront and almost already is really.
Vincent Roberts (11:57)
Yeah, I mean, well, I think in 2025, we saw about 53 % of adults in the US are using some kind of AI chatbot every day. Not like on a website, like they're using ChatGPT as a personal assistant to do their work, write their emails. And you better believe they're using ChatGPT or all these other platforms to do searching and get answers. So for instance, your audience is like, you know, IT professionals,
their clients are looking for the next firm that they want to work with using these platforms instead of Google. They're searching who to work with and they're getting recommended companies based on what the LLM thinks is the right fit. So how do you tweak your content? How do you tweak your presentation as a business to actually be the one that's recommended? And there's a whole bunch of stuff behind that. It's not like right good content. That's part of it. It's having accreditation. It's having ⁓
having a lot of reviews on relevant platforms. It's being like in Reddit, you know, being in forums, having recommendations. So there's a ton of stuff that goes into that. yeah, this is, think, the future. it's still a huge opportunity for a lot of businesses because it's going to be very saturated soon. And it'll be back like Google, where it'll take a ton of work to even be listed on the front page of Google, let alone the first three results.
Mikey Pruitt (13:22)
And then it'll change once you figure that part out. So you're saying to tweak your content, we've been looking at this at DNS Filter. You really have to be, if you want to get found where the people are, like where humans mostly are still talking. Like we know there's bots on Reddit and X and Mastodon. we know, and LinkedIn, there's bots all over the place.
Vincent Roberts (13:24)
Exactly, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (13:51)
But there are still humans on those platforms communicating. And I think we're saying you need to be there. need to show up there, perhaps as yourself. And sales may kind of result, trickle out of.
Vincent Roberts (14:08)
Yeah, yeah. mean, we've so for ourselves as an agency, not even for our clients, for ourselves, we realized how important this was to start getting listed and having our articles kind of cashed in Chachipiti. And we went from getting no leads from Chachipiti to last year, we finished getting 20, 24 ish percent of our leads from Chachipiti. Where somebody was looking for digital marketing services, Chachipiti recommended US Digital Partners.
Then they reached out and we sold them.
Mikey Pruitt (14:40)
Wow. So, OK.
Vincent Roberts (14:41)
Crazy. And that was in seven
months of writing a ton of content that answered specific questions. So this is different than the traditional SEO where you're stuffing keywords into an article so that Google picks up on those keywords or there's some backlinks. That stuff is all good and relevant. But what the LLM is looking for is do you, as an authentic source, answer a specific question that this buyer has?
Are you a credible source to answer this question? And can ⁓ we give that answer to this person? So the content side of that, looks like writing specific articles, not necessarily for SEO keywords, but for that question and answer. This is this FAQ page work that we've cranked out over 50 articles last year, and then those are getting listed now. And that's how we're starting to see these leads, as well as doing some other back linking and traditional SEO work.
Mikey Pruitt (15:25)
Mmm.
Vincent Roberts (15:38)
That's the crazy opportunity that businesses have where, you know, a 27 person agency like us digital partners can start getting recommended for these companies on chat to BT and Gemini and these other places.
Mikey Pruitt (15:52)
So let's back into that for a second. US Digital Partners is 23 years old. How old are they? 27?
Vincent Roberts (15:58)
We're 20, almost 25 years old. We got started early 2000s.
Mikey Pruitt (16:02)
⁓
So what are some of the, so like we're talking about like chat bots and LLMs, AI, and that wasn't even a thought back then, but like there's got to be some strongholds that have stand at the test of time throughout, you know, US digital partners history. And what are those? Like give us the pillars.
Vincent Roberts (16:10)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yes.
So we got started really as a website agency and the four guys who came together to found the company, know, one was a designer, one was a technical guy, David, the founder and Mark, they were the kind of the sales guys relationship. So we kind of got started building websites and that really has been that through line. We're fantastic at building websites. You know, we saw the, when Facebook came online, you don't need a website anymore. It'll just be your Facebook page.
Mikey Pruitt (16:49)
I
hate when, especially restaurants just rely on a Facebook page. But anyway, side rail.
Vincent Roberts (16:54)
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So
there was a whole like, you know, fad of that was going to be the thing. We were kind of seeing this now. I am more convinced now that websites will be even more important for small and mid-market businesses today than they have been for the last 15 years, because your, this will apply to tech people, your website is your endpoint on the internet. It is the source of truth for you as a company to the internet. It's the endpoint. It's the node.
And unless you have all the stuff that you need to tell your audience about in that node, you're not going to be found. So having a, having a fantastically built website for computers, and then also for humans where it has all these answers, it's going to be even more important than it has ever been, I think. so I feel very confident in our positioning as a technical.
you know, marketing agency that can build really good websites, but we're also, you know, technical behind scenes people. ⁓ so that's kind of in the main through line. We have added on all these additional kind of connected services. So we've become kind of full service. we, we really nowadays we work with people as almost a fractional marketing team. So rather than a company hiring, you know, a marketing manager, they can hire our team of 27 people for the same cost of that one full time hire.
but we also don't do long-term contracts. So it's a month-to-month, we're gonna win the business, we're gonna bring all this experience of 25 years and all of the clients we've worked with like Gorilla Glue and Kroger and NASA and all these people to bring to bear on your business without having the constraints of a full-time person that has. But that's kind of our model and what we're seeing right now.
Mikey Pruitt (18:42)
So I want to highlight something you just said, especially to the audience, all you IT nerds out there, guys and gals. Did you hear what Vincent just said? He used the word endpoint and the word node and described working with their company as like a network of sorts. like he is speaking the language, like he is doing the thing that we're saying this is what you should do when you're reaching out to whatever industry it happens to be.
Vincent Roberts (19:01)
Yeah
Yeah, you gotta know what you're talking about.
Mikey Pruitt (19:11)
And that's probably because you're an IT
nerd yourself and not necessarily.
Vincent Roberts (19:16)
It's because I wrote technical documents. That helps.
Mikey Pruitt (19:18)
Yeah.
So let's just take a managed service provider, for example. They're typically great at the tech, not great at the marketing and the sales. What do you think the first thing that you or ⁓ US Digital Partners would fix if an MSP hired you tomorrow?
Vincent Roberts (19:40)
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. ⁓ Honestly, I would start with what we've been talking about. So when you optimize for AI for LLMs, you're optimizing for humans, ultimately. that's where, like most businesses, their best sales are referrals or inbound leads. That's where most businesses are reliant on those referrals and inbound leads to maintain their revenue. ⁓
Unless you have a very strong sales organization, that's where you're making your money. So how can you optimize that channel to build one, the quality of the leads you're getting today, but actually convert more of them. So when you're optimizing for AI, you're doing things that most companies aren't doing. You're answering the questions that your buyers already have today. You're speaking their language. You're showing what others won't show. That could look like how they work with you, what it's like working with you.
how much it costs to work with you, the time, the materials, the involvement, things that most businesses are scared to show. That's really good marketing actually. ⁓ So showing the things, pulling the curtain back and actually talking about your business in a transparent, authentic way. That kind of material and content does fantastic for AI, but it also does fantastic for humans. It helps you...
Mikey Pruitt (20:39)
Mmm.
Vincent Roberts (20:58)
be found better. And then when people do find your website, and again, going back to your website is your 24 sales, 24 seven salesperson. If the buyer, and this is kind of modern trends in buyer behaviors, people don't want to talk to a salesperson before they have like 99 % of their questions answered. They already know they're making a buying decision. They've done their homework and they're coming to you just to feel out, is this the right fit?
Mikey Pruitt (21:22)
It's like they're
giving you an opportunity to give them a reason to say no. And if you don't screw it up, we're probably going to buy.
Vincent Roberts (21:27)
Exactly.
Exactly. Exactly. And so if you can answer all those questions and remove all the barriers to them working with you and make that as smooth a process as possible, you're going to convert more of your inbound leads and you're going to get more leads to begin with. From a sales standpoint, ⁓ if you have a outbound sales motion, all of that work.
is going to support the salesperson and the sales team. It makes their job so much easier because they're just an announcer of what's already been done. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. They're not trying to hide things. They can be very transparent and authentic and just focused on building real relationships because their questions are already answered. You know how much it costs. You know what this is going to be like. And that's what we've seen. That's what I've seen selling for you as digital partners as well.
Mikey Pruitt (22:19)
So you're saying ⁓ being transparent, pulling back the kimono, so to speak, a little bit more than you're probably comfortable with because the buyer is maybe 80 or 90 % there in their research for you and your competition. And they're looking for that last mile, the human part of it. So I've done all the grunt work because grunt work is easy now.
Vincent Roberts (22:37)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (22:46)
three minutes in a chatbot and you pretty much got all the lay of the land and you can dive deeper off the different branches and all that. But like when you see them, especially when you get face to face with them like we are, you're now convincing them, hey, we're nice. Like we're great to work with. Like we are humans, like you're a human. Because like all the bot, all the research stuff has already been kind of finalized.
Vincent Roberts (23:04)
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. kind going back to sales, the traditional sales model is I got to get a meeting with you before you get to know anything. Yeah, like that's kind of been the whole mentality and still for so many businesses that we're running into all the time that they don't want to reveal their pricing. They don't want to reveal ⁓ what the project looks like because they think maybe all our competitors are going to come in and steal this or we're going to be undercut.
Mikey Pruitt (23:22)
You gotta take me to dinner first. Come on.
Vincent Roberts (23:43)
Not really. One, they're not going to do that. So if you do that, now you have a complete upper advantage. But think about yourself as a buyer. Like I know for myself, if I'm buying or say I'm going out to dinner, it really pisses me off if I don't know how much the food costs before I order.
Mikey Pruitt (23:59)
We got like two chilies or like whatever the thing is. Two spaghetti noodles.
Vincent Roberts (24:02)
Exactly. Yeah. Like I have no idea what this costs.
Same thing with like if I'm shopping. ⁓ for a total relevant example, I have a pool in my house that I need to get cleaned. And I have looked at, I swear, 100 websites for pool cleaners near me. And not one of them has their price. If one of them had their pricing, I would have gone with them. Because I don't know, maybe one's 300, maybe one's 50, 20. Like, who knows what the price differential
If I had one that gave me tier pricing, I would have gone with them immediately. And I found one company that would do that and that's the one I hired.
Right? Like as a buyer, that's kind of how we feel now. I want to, like, I can see the review. Yeah. Cards on the table. I can see your reviews. I see what people are saying about you. You know, when you're looking for a mechanic, you do this. Any service related business, just put it out there. Like everybody wants to know about what you do. And they're probably already finding the answers, but if you can eliminate those barriers to entry, it just is going to make it so much smoother for your buyers. And they're already going to like you.
Mikey Pruitt (24:43)
Yeah, it's like cards on the table.
Vincent Roberts (25:09)
A lot more.
Mikey Pruitt (25:10)
That's true. You're already winning. ⁓ So like that's kind of along the lines of my next question, which was about mistakes that people make in their marketing and in their sales. And one of them is clearly not being as transparent as you should be to get the buyer to where they need to be to make that purchasing decision. But what are some other mistakes you see people make routinely?
Vincent Roberts (25:34)
Oh man, we see a lot. One of the biggest, so one of the things we do for clients or if we're talking to somebody that's interested in working with us is doing, if they're running any paid advertising or just their current site is doing like an SEO or a paid audit. And we find so much of the time that people are wasting money there. So if you think you're doing the right thing, have a third party look at it. A lot of agencies will be able to take a look and give an outside opinion.
But a lot of companies waste tons of money on Google by targeting just the wrong people, not doing their due diligence when hiring an agency to do that. A ⁓ lot of agencies will take a percent of ⁓ advertising spend. ⁓ You may have seen this. Yes, that's something we don't do. Yes, yes, exactly. So if you're doing paid advertising, make sure that you're
Mikey Pruitt (26:21)
I've recently seen this. And a retainer sometimes.
Vincent Roberts (26:31)
the agency you're working with is not taking a percent of your ad spend. They should have a flat fee based on their time to manage the ads accounts, but a lot of agencies will take a cut. So if they're telling you, we need to spend more, sometimes they're making more money as well. That's not good. There's yes, exactly. Exactly. So yeah, we see that a ton. Another one that's not as big of a deal is ⁓ the ADA ⁓ side of a website is something that
Mikey Pruitt (26:44)
Yeah, and there's some that take both, believe it or not. I was very surprised.
Vincent Roberts (27:01)
can really actually get you in your business into hot water. There are like ambulance chasing attorneys that will go after you if your website is not ADA compliant. And a lot of people don't know that that's a thing, but you your colors have to be ADA compliant. You have to have, you know, the page be readable to a bot. So if somebody's visually impaired. So there's all these things and there are lawsuits that happen every year for small companies that were not compliant with the ADA.
That's a small one. I don't usually lead with that
Mikey Pruitt (27:32)
It's clever
business idea for the ambulance chasing lawyer though. That's clever.
Vincent Roberts (27:37)
Yes, yeah, and
you better believe with these tools now they're going to find them a lot faster because there's a lot of like
Mikey Pruitt (27:42)
Yeah, and with
the tools we have now, you can also fix it a lot faster too. Just like here's a link to the ADA requirements for websites and here's my website. Do an analysis.
Vincent Roberts (27:46)
Exactly.
Exactly. Lighthouse is
a good one that you can, I think you can also get it as like a Chrome extension to check your own website. Yeah. And then the biggest thing really is just that homepage hero messaging. Most companies talk about themselves as the hero. So instead of, know, as the client being the hero, ⁓ what that looks like is language like, you know, we've been in business this long. We're, ⁓
Mikey Pruitt (28:09)
I'm going to look at art right now.
Vincent Roberts (28:20)
We're awesome. It's kind of the language of talking about us and why we're great and trying to convince you that you should work with us rather than like good met hero homepage messaging should tell the buyer why they should want how you're solving their specific problem. And it should take like three seconds for them to figure out because really statistically you have three seconds to catch somebody's attention if they come to your website. So that that one H one HTML text of you know what you do.
should be very clear and to the point of what you do and how it serves your ideal client.
Mikey Pruitt (28:55)
I think we should do a roast of DNS filter.com, but we're not, we're not going to do it. Cause I just looked at it and it's like, it's borderline. Our headline is protect every click. I think we have some AB tests running too. they, they, you know, flip in and out different things, but it's like borderline where we're kind of talking about you as the viewer of the webpage, but we're kind of talking about ourselves too. So like, I'm going to take that back to the team and say, Hey, maybe we should do a little messaging research.
Vincent Roberts (28:58)
Hahaha!
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's some,
it's really actually, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
It's called the story brand framework and it lays out essentially how to build a messaging framework for your website or your company that positions you as the guide to the hero, which is your client. In all of literature, there's always this hero's journey that people take Luke Skywalker, ⁓ Ferris Bueller's day off, any story that resonates with people, know, Braveheart, there's
The hero starts out, he meets a guide and the guide gets him and basically like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker is a great example of this. Luke Skywalker doesn't know that he's the son of Darth Vader. Obi-Wan Kenobi has all this context of the world that Luke is living in and shares a little bit of this and points him on the journey to where he needs to go. But he doesn't take him all the way there, but like he gets him on the journey and kind of opens the world to him. That's your job as a business. That's what your messaging is supposed to do.
Helping Luke Skywalker get to where he needs to go. You're opening the world up to him and solving his problems. That's how your messaging should be structured.
Mikey Pruitt (30:34)
That's pretty good. That's a good way to think of it. And I wanted to point out that how good AI is now because I did a little bit of, did some research on you, Vincent, and your company through Claude, the desktop app. And what I gave it was essentially your website address, your email, your LinkedIn page. And it came back with a lot of stuff. I had to verify some of it. So it was a little crazy. One of the things it says is,
Vincent Roberts (30:42)
yeah.
Go.
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (31:04)
Story Brand, the famous for Story Brand messaging and it links to the book. That's how good AI is right now, especially for research. But anyway, just a little pointer.
Vincent Roberts (31:09)
There you go. There you go. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I know it's,
it's, it's fantastic. And for doing messaging too, like if you're on a budget, can, you can get pretty good copy. It's the unfortunate thing we're finding with AI is we thought, ⁓ this is going to be awesome. can use AI to do all of our messaging, but AI is an average. It's an average of the best, you know, you want, so a human is still not replaced yet by AI because humans can think abstractly and on the outside of the
Mikey Pruitt (31:35)
Yeah.
Vincent Roberts (31:43)
you know, of this average curve of the bell curve. And that's where you get the best, the extreme. So it's an average. So it's still, it's still pretty good. If you're on a budget, no, you don't want to be average, but if you need, you know, if you're on a budget and you need good messaging, AI can be great. And if you prompt it the right way and prompt it towards the end of the bell curve, you're gonna, you're gonna get pretty good results, but that's why we don't write pretty much anything with AI. have, you know, full-time copywriters to do that because we see a better result.
Mikey Pruitt (31:52)
Right. And you don't want to be average.
So you mentioned something earlier about ⁓ niches. And there's the saying, like, the riches are in the niches. And a lot of the, especially the MSPs that I talk with, they kind of struggle with that because they're like, everyone needs IT services. And DNS filter, we even have this problem because everybody uses DNS. Like, we're using it right now. But how do you convince ⁓ someone to look at the niche? And then how do you?
Vincent Roberts (32:34)
Mm-hmm.
Mikey Pruitt (32:42)
I guess justify that it's revenue positive.
Vincent Roberts (32:48)
Yeah, geez, that's a great question. I you see this a lot in like the startup world that sometimes the business thinks that they are serving this client and or they have a huge, you know, total actionable market. They have a huge TAM, but they don't. ⁓ Who actually is going to buy their stuff is a lot smaller and they find a lot more success. Like I talked to a guy I know locally who he was doing general SEO for anybody.
And he found not long ago that he really had built an expertise working with lawyers specifically. And he has doubled his business, if I'm not forgetting this right, I'll probably roast me in the comments. But by specifically focusing on attorneys and speaking to them and building out that niche for his business that he knows exactly the same problem that they're going to have over and over and over again. We did the same thing when I came on board.
We had such a huge team, marketing's for everybody. What we did is look back and say, you know, we didn't even know industry size, like who are we working with? And we looked back and said, who are our favorite clients? If you've already been in business for a while, this might be a good way to kind of figure this out. It's like, who have actually been your favorite clients? Who have you enjoyed working with the most? Who gets the most out of your services and your product? And then...
Mikey Pruitt (33:50)
Yeah.
Vincent Roberts (34:15)
If you do the work and kind of map that out, there'll be overlaps. So like for us, we've done the billion dollar brands. We've worked, you know, like I said, Kroger, Gorilla Glue, built websites for those guys, but they're not as fun as the hundred million, $50 million revenue clients that we have. Like we found those are our favorite clients because they really let us in the weeds. Like we become an extension of their team or their marketing team. And they, they give us the freedom to, to do the work that we know that they need.
and can get real results. it's totally beneficial both sides because they see the results, we see the results. It's a mutual thing. for us, that's what we found is looking back at our clients. And then once you know what that is, you can double down. You're not shotgunning the market anymore. You can say, I'm going after these types of businesses now. And that's it. It's like playing darts, you know, like the whole point of darts is to hit the bullseye. At least that's how I play darts.
⁓ You can get triples. It's true. Yeah, you want to get triples
Mikey Pruitt (35:16)
There's also a strategy if you actually know the rules, I think, but I don't know what they are.
Vincent Roberts (35:20)
and doubles too. That is fair. But you want to narrow it down so that you can maximize. So this goes to the selling and marketing piece. Once you know your ideal client profile, your ICP fit, you can build an outbound motion around that. You can build your marketing around that, your copy, ⁓ your advertising.
Like especially for if you're to spend any dollars on advertising, which you should as a business, it gets, you know, a good return. You do it right. You can only do that if you have a tight ICP. If you know who you're selling to, this is how the tech is amazing now is if you have that ICP, you can really target them like down to the individual almost with really good copy that speaks to them specifically. So yeah, I think it's so important.
You can't really do good sales unless you have a good fit and good niche.
Mikey Pruitt (36:18)
How do you say that word? I have no idea. Niche. like you're doing, yeah. Is it French? Probably is. So it's kind of like you're describing like an automation. Like I know IT nerds, like I like to automate things. know, ⁓ I did this thing three times now. And now I need to figure out how to make it do it, the computer do it.
Vincent Roberts (36:21)
I like niche. It's a little easier Americanized. It's a French word.
Yeah, niche, I think.
Mikey Pruitt (36:41)
And the way you're describing this self-reflection ⁓ exercise where you determine your best customers and whatever metrics that means to you and to them, ⁓ isolating them, what matters to them, how they talk.
and then pushing that into all of your messaging. And this could maybe be like a satellite endeavor perhaps to begin with, because maybe you're scared to just say, I'm going all in on lawyers or whatever it is. But it's a good exercise to do that self-reflection just so at least you know which customers are currently best fit for your business.
Vincent Roberts (37:08)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, 100%. 100 % because then you, you, one you have, or what happens from that is you can kind of have like economies of scale type stuff where if you know your niche, you can double down on it. You can start going after that only. You don't waste time going after bad, bad fits. You say, you say no to the wrong clients, which is a crazy thing to do, but it's, it's what you need to do. If you, once you figure out.
who that is. And then you can double down and continue to reinvest in that niche, ⁓ building a copy, a better website that speaks to them, ⁓ training your salespeople to sell to them, ⁓ speaking their language, like as you've been saying. And the other thing is it becomes easier to sell to them because now you have even more street cred because you have all these case studies of ⁓
success with that specific type of business. So your salespeople have more success selling to them. So it just becomes a flywheel of momentum for your business because you can talk to that kind of company, that kind of business in a way that clicks to them. They understand it. And you get more revenue that way.
Mikey Pruitt (38:43)
So we started off talking about personal brands. And I wanted to go into how do you make that a thing that is ⁓ not natural, but just a thing that happens, specifically talking about soft skills and
How do you ⁓ train, I guess, to be better at those soft skills? Is there a way to be more human? guess is a good way to say it.
Vincent Roberts (39:12)
Mmm.
Yeah, that's a good question. There is kind of a thought in sales that you can train a salesperson, the technical skills of selling, but you know pretty quick if somebody's going to be good at sales or not by their soft skills. Like, can they hold a conversation? Are they able to build a relationship with somebody quickly and naturally? ⁓ Because the skills of like asking for the business and following up and making cold calls.
Those are teachable skills, but the soft skills are a lot harder to teach. And I've seen this with, ⁓ in the teams I've been on, the people that, didn't, that, kind of washed out in sales, least didn't have the soft skills. They, they, they were really trying to learn the technical skills, but without the soft skills, they just weren't making the connections. ⁓
That being said, don't believe I'm a growth mindset person. So I think ⁓ for me, at least I forced myself to learn some of these soft skills. Cause I was terrified of people growing up. Like I like talking to adults, like people my age not into it. And I literally would go to the mall. Sometimes I would drag somebody, somebody along with me and just go up to strangers and talk to them. Cause I was just like afraid to do that.
And, you know, over time I built kind of the ability just to talk to anybody and learned kind of these soft skills. I'm not like when I was growing up, maybe I'm autistic. I don't know. I like didn't understand how a joke worked. So I would listen to comedy. that was instead of music, I would just listen to comedy on Pandora over and over until I kind of understood the cadence and like, you know, how the joke sounded and landed. So for me, I,
Mikey Pruitt (41:07)
First you're like,
why is that funny?
Vincent Roberts (41:09)
Yeah, like, like, like,
in school is weird, because like, I didn't I didn't get the jokes a lot of times, like people make a joke, I just didn't get it. ⁓ So for me, in my experience, doing stuff like that, like, I've learned kind of these soft skills, you know, understanding, you know, how much eye contact to give people like thinking about that. ⁓ Smiling, you know, trying not to interrupt these kind of things. ⁓
Mikey Pruitt (41:37)
You
Vincent Roberts (41:40)
They are somewhat learnable, but it takes a lot of work. sometimes it takes really getting out of your comfort zone to build them.
Mikey Pruitt (41:49)
So it's like a brute force methodologies at least won't work for you. Getting back to the IT nerd language and messaging, a brute force attack on yourself.
Vincent Roberts (41:52)
Yes
Yes, it was a brute force.
Yes, exactly. Just put yourself in those scenarios and eventually it'll be okay.
Mikey Pruitt (42:06)
So I wanted to, let me see if I have anything crazy open on my desktop real quick. Here we go. I don't want to give away all the secrets. no. All right. Here we go. OK. So one of the reasons I asked you that question is because of how Vince and I met on LinkedIn. ⁓ Our soft skills at play, I guess you could say.
Vincent Roberts (42:14)
Your glasses are giving you away. I was kidding.
Mikey Pruitt (42:34)
So you and I can't tell these were your friends or just kind of organically happened. So you and several other people started posting 90 % of all LinkedIn content. Looks like it's been piped through chat. GPT. was hilarious. I actually saw it on somebody else's thing that had your picture in it. And I was like, then I clicked through to each of those people and I was like, wait a minute, this is like a, this is like a thing. Like, what are they doing?
Vincent Roberts (42:41)
Hahaha
You
Yeah.
Mikey Pruitt (43:02)
Are they in on this? Do y'all work together? I was like, no, they don't work together. This is so weird. then Vince and I were going to meet a few days ago. So I posted this just as like an icebreaker to say, hey, look, I did it too. And I want to point this out to the audience. This is completely silliness, right? But look, almost 3,500 impressions, 14 comments, one repost. Let's look at these analytics.
Vincent Roberts (43:05)
huh.
Yeah.
Yeah. 100 % silliness.
yeah, mean, this is...
Mikey Pruitt (43:33)
Like, you know, whatever. Like this is,
this is better than average for most of the minutiae I post on LinkedIn. And I'm sure it was even ⁓ more potent, so to speak, for you and the original crew that started this conga line, I believe you call it.
Vincent Roberts (43:50)
Yeah, I've, if you don't know, follow Matt, he's had some hilarious LinkedIn content. He's a sales trainer for SDRs for SaaS sellers. but he has a phenomenal LinkedIn page to follow. So, ⁓ I saw that post and I like, this is hilarious. I'm going to just jump on this in the morning. And I swear by the end of the day, it was already like a hundred likes. It had like blown up and I was getting, it's funny. Some of the, accounts that picked it up.
which were some very large accounts. Some of them did well above what I did originally, but yeah, it's funny. It just dominated some feeds for a while. I'm still getting notifications about people reposting that because it just blew the heck up. yeah, mean, if you look at my LinkedIn profile, which has been, I'll say a work in progress for the last year, I've been tracking it and trying to get better. Same here. When I started, I would get maybe 20 likes on a post.
And in the last five weeks, I've averaged about 50,000 impressions a week and have gotten posts to hit at least 100 likes every week. Like I had my best post ever on Saturday that hit over 300 likes and like 70,000 impressions. ⁓ So it's totally, this is the personal branding thing. It takes time. It takes engaging with people's content.
Like I do a lot of commenting on people's posts, liking their posts. Sometimes I have a comment from last week that did 10,000 impressions, a comment on somebody else's post. yeah, LinkedIn is such a guy. I Asher Dixon posted about this today on LinkedIn that right now there's such a golden opportunity for salespeople, for anybody, business owners, IT people. LinkedIn is very underused today.
Mikey Pruitt (45:32)
Ahem.
Vincent Roberts (45:48)
there's still not a lot of people on LinkedIn considering how big the population of the world is and how many people could be on the platform. So right now, if you build kind of a brand and a following and are connecting with people, like Mikey, you've built a great account. If you build that and increase it and increase your kind of connections with people, you're setting yourself up so well for the future and building that brand around yourself.
I'm a hundred percent convinced as we continue to move into this AI age, as we've already seen with AI video, like this, this could be an AI video right now. It's so good. Like I wouldn't be able to tell. And LinkedIn is one of the few places that you can know a person is real because one, they're verified. They have a way to verify based on your ID. So, you know, you're talking to a real person. If you take photos of yourself and engage with people and you engage, you know,
in their comments, they know they're talking to a real person and that's what people are craving more and more and more. ⁓ So I think LinkedIn is one of the most insane opportunities for anybody right now to jump on and just post and engage and grow a brand.
Mikey Pruitt (46:59)
So I call this the luck surface area. I've heard this from an old podcast. I think it was called Techzing. I don't know. Anyway, look it up. It's pretty old. But the luck surface area is like doing things that have the potential to increase your audience or footprint or whatever.
And this LinkedIn example, the conga line that you were part of and got some massive growth off of ⁓ is a perfect example of that because it resulted in this conversation that we're having right now. And now a few hundred more people are going to know about you, Vince, and your company. ⁓ that can't be bad, right? Like LinkedIn, it's kind of silly. We all know it's kind of silly. It's like work.
Vincent Roberts (47:45)
No. Yeah, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (47:53)
Like there's even accounts that kind of make fun of having an office and it's like the TV show, The Office and like, I work in HR and I do this. But it's also fun and the humans are there. They're having actual genuine conversations. I have an argument going on right now on one of my threads with one of our customers. Tim. So we're having a back and forth about AI ⁓ coding and is it good, is it bad, security vulnerabilities.
Vincent Roberts (48:06)
Mm-hmm.
Hahaha
Mikey Pruitt (48:22)
But like it is real conversation and like, unfortunately we can't talk to everybody like in the same room anymore. Cause you know, we're, we live in disparate places. There's things going on in our lives, but you know, the 10 or 15 or one hour that we have to spend on social media for the day, we can ⁓ make genuine connections. Yeah. Right. There's a rookie numbers.
Vincent Roberts (48:41)
Those are low numbers. Gotta
get those up. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Well, and it pays dividends. Like I have people liking content I put out two months ago. Like I'll see a random, you know, engagement with a post that LinkedIn's, recirculated. That just gets more brand awareness to our company, to me, the people, the person that they're actually gonna meet if they wanna work with us. Yeah, so it's.
It's a no brainer. the thing I love about LinkedIn is it's moving in the direction. It was always kind of a stagnant professionalism platform, but it's moving in the direction of being really human and being more silly. Like the best posts I have that get engagement, that get people to reach out and have conversations are the silly ones. Like I made a fake post about emailing the CEO of LinkedIn last week.
Recommending a change like adding a secret like button like that did that did fantastic because people know that it's funny It's satire like your reaction right now, and I am so convinced that Nobody wants to work with somebody. They don't like they will only work with somebody they like so why not be likable You know put yourself out there be a funny person then You'll you'll do better
Mikey Pruitt (50:05)
I'm looking at this post
of yours right now. That's awesome.
Vincent Roberts (50:12)
About 30 minutes of time and that's what we got.
Mikey Pruitt (50:15)
yeah, apparently I have rookie numbers. man, gotta work on that. So give the audience, if you have, let's say 30 minutes a day to work on your personal brand, probably on LinkedIn, but anywhere, what is the most impactful thing you can do to get more traction, more luck service area?
Vincent Roberts (50:18)
Hahaha
That's a great question. ⁓ I was super lucky when I, in the first week of starting here, I literally was sitting on my apartment floor with no furniture and I got to talk to one of the largest accounts on LinkedIn, a guy named Eric Particker, if you want to look him up. ⁓ I'd gotten connected because he actually was ⁓ coming to us to help him before he really blew up on LinkedIn to help him with some SEO and maybe some advertising for his brand.
He sells kind of like executive coaching, does talks all over the world. His accounts got like a million followers and he was generous enough to spend, you know, 30, 40 minutes of his time and talking to me. And the things that I took away from that conversation was that he made very clear is you don't have to post every day, but you need to start posting. But the thing that you need to do when you post is have content pillars that you stick to. You don't go outside of those pillars and you got to figure out what those are for you and your brand and as a person. So for me, it's kind of like sales humor, marketing humor.
real insights about marketing like today I posted, I'm making a series on like the coolest websites I'm finding on the internet. ⁓ And I still, have these content pillars I stick to. don't, you know, I don't talk about politics. I don't talk about ⁓ HR, things I don't know about. I don't talk about baseball and sports, you know, cause I don't follow those as closely as I should, but people do. And like if that's your brand, you lean into it ⁓ and stick to those content pillars and post.
I would say if you want to do this, start posting once a week. I try and post six days a week. I take off Sunday, but I try and put something out there every day. Just, you know, it could be a silly post. Sometimes I'll just post a meme, but sometimes I'll post a more serious post. and that, if you start doing that regularly, you'll start to see progress and you'll start to see, you know, your followers go up, your impressions go up. And, you know, I remember the first post I had that went viral and it was like,
wow, this does work. And then it starts happening more often and more often and more often and more often. And I'm on that exponential growth curve right now. I'm seeing the fruit of what I've done for seven, eight months now, really leaning into LinkedIn and doing this, it works.
Mikey Pruitt (52:48)
So it's silly, but it works, and it's kind of fun.
Vincent Roberts (52:51)
Yeah, silly, works, kind of fun, exactly.
Mikey Pruitt (52:54)
Well, Vince, thank you for spending the time today with myself and the audience and giving us some sales and marketing tips and a little LinkedIn joy. So I appreciate it.
Vincent Roberts (53:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, Mikey, this has been a pleasure and I'm thankful you reached out and we got to do this.
Mikey Pruitt (53:10)
Absolutely. ⁓