Have you ever considered that society might trust individuals more than your brand?
If you’re not thinking about influencers and community advocates in your marketing, you might be missing a huge opportunity to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Today we’re diving into the power of influencers, the unique challenges of B2B advocacy, and pushing past fear in business.
Host Greg Kihlstrom welcomes Chris Savage, CEO and Co-Founder of Wistia. Today, we’ll explore how trust, community, and courage are reshaping the way companies approach their audiences.
About Chris Savage
Chris Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia, a leading video platform that enables business teams to harness the connective power of video. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in Art-Semiotics, Chris and his co-founder, Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Brendan’s living room in 2006. Wistia has since grown into a multi-million dollar business with over 120 employees and 500,000 customers.
Resources
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Have you ever considered that society might trust individuals more than your brand? If you’re not thinking about influencers and community advocates in your marketing, you might be missing a huge opportunity to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Welcome to today’s episode where we’re diving into the power of influencers, the unique challenges of B2B advocacy and pushing past fear in business with Chris Savage, CEO and co-founder of Wistia. Today we’ll explore how trust, community and courage are reshaping the way companies approach their audiences. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, looking forward to talking with you about this. Why don’t we get started though with you telling us a little bit about yourself and your role at Wistia.
Chris Savage: Yeah, so I’m co founder and CEO of a company called Wistia. Wistia is a video marketing platform. Most people know us because a lot of the content we’ve made over the years to like, help educate on like, how should you script? How should you light? You know, how can some of the early videos we made that took off for things like, how do you take a conference room and turn it into a studio? And for most of the period of time that we’ve been around, we’ve been around a long time, 18 years, but most of the time, we’re kind of like a video hosting and management platform. So like, give you a custom player that has no ads on it matches your brand and calls to action, all that kind of stuff. And then Since 2020, basically, we’ve been really revamping and rebuilding and broadening the types of problems that we solve. So now, we have editing built into the platform, we have recording, single person and group recording, we have a webinar platform. And our goal is to help people who are using video in their marketing, or just using video to communicate better, and they have to use like 10 or 15 tools to get the job done, we’re trying to help you cut that down to maybe like three. and get a lot of benefits and workflow and stuff like that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice, great. Well, yeah, so let’s, we’re going to talk about a few things, as I mentioned, but I want to start with this, this idea of, you know, people trusting people over brands, right? And, you know, this, this ties into a few things. I mean, influencers being one of them. So, you know, you’ve observed that society tends to do this to, you know, rather than a brand It’s kind of, you know, the old school advertising and all that stuff certainly has a place. But, you know, people tend to trust individuals more than than brands. Why do you think the shift has happened? And, you know, more importantly, maybe what does it mean for companies that are trying to build that credibility with their audiences?
Chris Savage: Oh, yeah. So I think the highest level shift comes from the fact that for a very long time, we’ve always trusted word of mouth. Like, if you know somebody, and they are like, if you have a friend, and they work out all the time, and they’re like, this is a great gym, this is a great program, this is a great thing. You’re like, I trust you, because you’re my workout buddy. And then but if you don’t have a friend that is the workout person, like you’ll trust ads, you’ll trust other things. I think that’s always been true. And slowly over time, what’s happened is that companies figured out like, oh, like, people could trust us. And so we saw this with large, basically only large businesses could do it where they would do a lot of press, a lot of PR around their CEOs, and try to get you to get to know the CEO and how they think an example of this is like, probably the best example is Steve Jobs of Apple. this guy cares deeply about design and he cares deeply, you know, the computer is a bicycle and all this stuff. And so you start looking at all the decisions Apple is making, and you try to guess what they’re going to do based on Steve Jobs. Tim Cook comes in and everyone instantly thinks, oh, Apple’s going to do different stuff because Tim Cook is here. And it’s going to be more operationally focused and more focused on pricing and they’re not going to invade. And it’s kind of true. Like, you know, if you look at those things, right? But this is something that only big companies could do. Now what’s happened is that our entire culture has shifted. And we have like an internet first culture, and distribution is free. And so what one of the results of that is that anyone can get out there and anyone can make content. And so where before you’d have that friend who was the workout person, now you have the friend, they’re just online, you’ve never met them. Right? Right. And our social media has gotten us to a place where basically, we just see individuals all the time, we decide who we trust and who we don’t trust, what types of topics we trust them on. And someone might represent like 30 seconds of your day or a minute of your day, yet, like it might be that one minute, that one topic that you like really trust somebody on. And so then if you see someone online who makes a recommendation, and they’re your workout person, then you are more likely to get the workout stuff.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so that And I think we’re certainly all or most of us are familiar with that from, you know, often called influencers or, you know, other things like that as well. And they’ve been very effective with B2C brands, but where do influencers and maybe, you know, community advocates, other, maybe other names for the same thing, but you know, where do they fit in when it comes to B2B marketing?
Chris Savage: So I think, yeah, B2B is really lagged here. And I think it’s because the topics that you would need to talk about as an influencer are so much more niche than the topics you would need to talk about as an influencer for B2C. B2C basically is like, you can be in shape, you can look great, feel great, attract a mate. What is that in B2B? What are the broader topics? But it turns out that there are some, and I think a lot of them have to do with helping people in their jobs, and helping people grow in their career by learning content online that’s also entertaining. We see a lot of building in the open, if you want to call it that, where people are sharing about actually like, Hey, this is this campaign I did, and this is what worked, and this is what didn’t. And a lot of that content is really about helping somebody in their career. And it’s just that now on the internet with free distribution, and so many, you can have a group of, let’s say 100,000 people who do a specific job in the US, and obviously more globally, that’s actually enough that if you are influencing that group, and you’re talking about that group, there’s enough people to pay attention, you can monetize it, you can get subscriptions, there’s different business models to actually pay someone who is an influencer to that space. And I think the thing that actually hasn’t been figured out yet is happening right now is this group has a lot of money to spend. And the decisions they make are not about like, $50 athletic athleisure, right? Like they’re about like a $50,000 software purchase, they’re about a $200,000 manufacturing decision, like they are. But the scale is much greater. And so we’re at the very beginning of this. But I think like, that’s why it’s starting to show up now.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, it seems like, I mean, to your point, it kind of mirrors the the sale in a B2B versus B2C. I mean, it’s generally going to be a much larger sale. But also, I mean, the other thing you’re touching on is to get notice. I mean, this comes down to algorithms in some cases as well. It’s like if you’re super niche, maybe you’re going to have a a harder time showing up, right. But like, there is, there’s a lot of appetite. I mean, if clips of the office say nothing else, it’s like, people have an appetite for talking about work on on social media. It’s about guilt, I think a little bit in there.
Chris Savage: You know, I was talking to somebody who was saying, like, they’re scrolling on TikTok. And I’m like, man, I feel guilty. So I went to LinkedIn and looked at the vertical video feed, because they felt like maybe they’d learned something said have less guilt. And then they’re scrolling on LinkedIn, and the content is similar in a lot of ways, but is more work related. And so actually, you’ve relieved a little guilt, and you feel like maybe you’re going to learn something. Yeah. And I think that’s what the surprising thing is, you can have these niches that are so small, and yet everyone in them cares very, very deeply about what they’re doing. And so if you can find a way to speak to that group, it can really work.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, because I mean, people, you know, they spend a lot of time at work, right? And it’s like, it’s a it’s important that they I I’m an optimist, I guess I think most people want to, until they get maybe completely disillusioned in their job. Like I think they want to do a good work and feel valued and feel like they contribute. Right. So doing something that would help them do that better seems like a win-win. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, this also kind of brings us to, you know, who are these influencers in the B2B world? Cause you know, there’s celebrities, there’s, there’s all kinds of people in, in the B2C world that are doing these things. But what about the role of the employee or the employee advocate in this? Is this, you know, where do you see this as an influencer in the B2C or the B2B realm?
Chris Savage: I mean, I’m seeing it come from everywhere. So I think like the most obvious ones are people who were basically the same people who are giving talks at B2B conferences before. And it’s kind of a good example. It’s like, why would Pete do, would it make sense to put on a conference for like 300 people at such a small amount? It’s like, well, actually, if they’re all B2B, it makes tons of sense. And then there’s people giving talks at those things. And some of them are consultants, and they’re doing it to like, help educate and entertain. And then hopefully they after the fact, they want someone to hire them to be a consultant. Some of them are like, you know, founders and stuff who are telling stories, their businesses, but a lot of them are people in the job. who are pushing the boundaries within their day-to-day work, and they’re realizing like, hey, there’s an opportunity if I get out there, and I share what I’m learning at these conferences, then one, people will know me and that might help with partnerships, that might help with future jobs, that might help get customers for my current business. And two, it’s it’s a way of like getting this other recognition. And so that’s always been happening. Now it’s just like, I see it just flipping to the, you don’t have to get approval to give a talk. And that’s very different, right? It’s like anyone can do it. So I see all different types of folks doing it. And it’s really about who enjoys it. And that’s kind of what it comes back to. It’s like, all this stuff does take a lot of work, like you get to know influencers, and they’re basically like, they’re working hard, they’re making a lot of content, they’re talking to their audiences, they’re trying to figure out what are the other things that they can help with in the future. And it’s like anything else, it’s like becomes a product. And so I think it really comes down to, can you feel the reward? Can you actually enjoy it, but I see it really coming from everywhere.
Greg Kihlstrom: do you see an increase in B2B influencers? Like, is this a steady thing?
Chris Savage: I’ve seen a huge increase. Yeah. I’ve seen a huge increase in B2B influencers. It’s kind of surprised me how much more suddenly there, it seems like there is. And it’s the interesting thing is it’s like, there’s more people who are doing this who are they basically do it for the it’s I think often because they’re like doing it for fun. And they do it on the nights, nights and weekends. And then suddenly they realize like they’re talking to some really niche sass, like integration tool or something. And it takes off like this is crazy. Like why is this taking off? It’s like, yeah. you know, then they often get like some hit, and they feel it, they feel the dopamine, like, oh, man, this is exciting. And then they keep doing it. And yeah, it just seems like there’s way, way, way more. And it’s partially I think, like, we’re ready for it. B2B always lags B2C. But another reason is that the social platforms they can basically what always happens is, at least I’ve seen this is, you know, it happened on Facebook, it’s happened on Twitter, it’s happened on LinkedIn, it happens seems to happen everywhere is like, initially, it’s free for anyone to post. But eventually, the platforms can basically say to the brands like, hey, you have money, like, we don’t need to give you a lot of organic reach, but you can pay to advertise and get rich. And they do that. And it works. If the social platforms do that to the individuals, they kill all their content. So part of it, I think, is simple math, which is just basically like brands have to pay to get in front of people. And if you can find a path towards doing it, you’re going to do it. But individuals, if they throttle individuals too much, they’re never going to have the content that keeps people coming back. And so if you can be an individual talking about brands, you have a much better chance of getting a lot more organic reach than you do as just check your company brand.
Greg Kihlstrom: So how do brands, I mean, it’s like building a community, right? I mean, an influencer may not, they may talk about a bunch of different things, but how should a brand think about almost curating a community to help them?
Chris Savage: I think the first thing you need to do is really start looking. And you this is where I think you’ll be surprised is that start looking and I would not be in most cases, I think you’ll find somebody who’s already out there already talking about the topics that you want to talk about. And when I say talking about the topics, I mean, yeah, sometimes it’s your product, but usually it’s not. Usually it’s the stuff around your product. It’s like the things you would want to advertise on. Like, that’s a simple way to think about it. It’s like, you know, if you’re a marketer and you want to be on like Morning Brew or something like, you don’t assume everything that they write about is going to be totally relevant to your business. But if you sell to marketers, probably a good place to advertise and a place that you should pay attention to. And so in this world, it’s like, what are the places that you would want to advertise on? And if you’re making that content, it’s going to be a step removed from what you do. But that one step removed is not much. And that might mean that there’s a very high target audience. So I would look for the people out there who are already talking about this stuff. I’ve also seen companies do it really well, where they basically announce they’re going to have a creator program. And they’re going to say, like, hey, this is how much we’re going to fund content being created that’s within these topics. And that’s a good way to bring people to you to say, try to sort through if you have any audience at all, or any brand, come to us. And if you think that there’s things that might be relevant that we would basically want to advertise on, we’ll fund you to make it. And Yeah, so there’s, I would say, look for the people who are already having the conversation, look at your own company’s posts, and look at how much engagement you’re getting, and then try to find those people. Usually, you’ll see that those people have more engagement than you do. And then also, I think you can you can kind of put that message out in the world to try to bring people back.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So who do you think is doing this? Well, I mean, what, you know, do you have, are there some brands that seem to get it?
Chris Savage: Yeah. So HubSpot is doing this incredibly well. And disclosure, like my podcast is in their podcast network. So like this would be, this is something that they, how they would think about it. But basically what they figured out is like, all right, we can find they podcast, they have YouTube channels and creators that are already out there that basically want more help in terms of like building their audiences. And so by creating a little network of folks, you can do cross promotion, you can do learning amongst those people, you can create a community. And they’ve just so how’s us doing done an incredibly good job. Like if you want to see what this looks like at scale with someone doing it really well, I would go and pay attention to what they’re doing. Yeah. I see lots of different companies doing this in different ways. Zapier has also done an amazing job. So go to TikTok, go look for Zapier, and you’ll find all these people talking about really specific workflows of how to take Zapier and plug it into other things. But the thing that’s the most shocking is the engagement you’ll get on the posts. So they have some posts that have hundreds of thousands of likes on them. unbelievable, you would never think that it had, they could have this much interest. And yet when you actually dig into it’s like, what is someone really saying a lot of these cases, it’s something like, if you take Zapier, you take these other three tools, you put them together, I’m going to save you five hours a week at your job. All right, well, I would love five hours a week at my job. And that would if especially if it’s like busy work, I can do higher impact things. Better for me better for my growth, better for the company, all the things.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice. Yeah, totally, totally agree about HubSpot as well. I mean, I even early days with them, like they’re like the Academy and all that stuff that they put a lot of effort into that type of educational content and stuff. Definitely. No, that’s great. Well, I want to talk about this a little bit of a tangent here. But you know, want to talk about another topic here real quick, because it’s something that you’ve talked about quite a bit. And it’s pushing past fear in in business. And you know what exactly that means. So I guess maybe maybe we just kind of start there. And yeah, you know, how do you define that?
Chris Savage: I think a lot of times running a company or basically being in any role where you’re managing anybody, right? There’s stuff you know, you have to do that you’re afraid of doing, right? It might be letting someone go, it might be making a really hard prioritization call, it might be talking to like a really upset customer. It could be anything. And I what I’ve seen is that a lot of times people get paralyzed by those types of decisions, like they try to ignore them to try to push them down, they try to delay them. And at some point, I learned and you know, I’m a first time entrepreneur, like I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s been 18 years started when I was like 22. Yeah. But I certainly felt so much fear in the early days, every time those we hit some new milestone, and then it was like, Oh, man, this is how we’re supposed to deal with this. That basically, a lot of times, like There, there’s no way out of doing the hard thing. It’s just delays. Yeah. The most classic biggest example is people who know there’s a problem with their business. And so they try to sell their business. And so they think they won’t have to deal with the problem. But in like, the vast majority of cases, when you sell your company, you’re still working for the acquirer. And the first thing they tell you is fix these problems, and then you have to fix them. Right. And so like, you’re you’re trying to delay this because you don’t want to deal with it. And then you still have to. That’s, that’s so it’s so common. And so when you start thinking about it like that, really, what you want to do is, is minimize the amount of time that you’re living with the fear. And so that means usually just tackling it absolutely head on. And I’ve learned that if I’m afraid of anything, I should run absolutely directly towards it as fast as I can. And that is usually the secret. And what it actually does is it compresses the amount of time you’re dealing with this uncertainty. And you might even get a bad, it might be really bad news, like it might be horrible news that you uncover. But then you can start dealing with it, you have more time to deal with it. So I think about a lot of this, a lot of entrepreneurship is around how can you get things done more quickly? And how can you make sure that the mindset that you have, as you’re building the business is like the right mindset that you need to actually build something great, which usually means like, somewhat optimistic, excited, willing to run through walls, like enjoying the work, all those types of things. And fear obviously stops all that. So minimizing the time and the fearful zone is very important.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, I, I’ve always found it’s, you know, that whether it’s good potential, bad potential, or I mean, if it’s hypothetical, you never know, but it’s still hanging over your head, right? So it’s like you’re dealing with it, whether you’re running away from it or not, right? Yes.
Chris Savage: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You’re and it’s and it usually is making everything else worse, right? Right. You know, this is this is this is kind of related, but I think it’s worth saying is like, I’ve noticed a lot of times that someone will be someone who’s a high performer, and then suddenly they’re not performing well. Yeah, what’s going on? And almost always, it’s something that happened in their life, that’s like upset them change their mindset, some really sad things, some really hard thing. And it’s often just like letting them be understood, that allows them to everyone to understand, oh, wait a second, this is why things have changed. And now that you’ve like said the thing, and we understand where we’re at, it’s much easier to end up back into a good spot. And so I think that’s like true for someone you’re managing. But I think it’s true for yourself, too, which is like, if you can’t actually admit the challenge, and then run towards it, you get stuck versus like, if you admit it, and you can have a plan. A lot of times, that’s actually what it takes to reduce the fear and reduce the stress.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So I guess what would you what would your advice be to someone that is having a hard time with like, what could they start by doing?
Chris Savage: What you want to do is figure out how to start making a plan to move forward. Sometimes plans are all it takes, actually. I’ll give you an example. So we had a moment when we almost sold a company. And my co-founder and I were looking at this, thinking we should be happy about selling the company because that’s why you start a company is often to sell it. And we were really stressing. And it actually wasn’t until we were about to sell that we could admit to each other like, why are we even looking at selling? It’s like, oh, I’m unhappy. And he’s like, he’s unhappy. And we didn’t want to admit to each other that we were unhappy, because we thought that like, if I admit we’re unhappy, then it would be like a really big problem. Yeah. But it took admitting that we’re both unhappy to be like, why, why, why? And it was very scary to say it out loud. But then once we said it, I was like, Oh, well, we’re running really negative, like we’re running at a loss at that moment, we’re searching for way more growth that wasn’t showing up. We had like a lot of chaos inside of the business. And we decided that actually, what we would do is we would not sell the business. And we’d instead we’d fix the company, like we admitted the problem and said we’d fix the company. Well, how will we fix it? And within a pretty short period of time, we came up with a plan. The plan was we’re going to get back to being profitable. We also want to get a return for our investors, because we’d had angel investors, they wanted us to sell, we want to get a return for the employees, because we’d give an employee stock, but what they want us to sell. So we hit on this idea of like, we’re going to do this buyback, we’re going to raise debt, we’re going to do a buyback on the company to get back control. Now we have debt, which is going to force us to be profitable. Once we’re profitable, though, we think we’re gonna be more focused and more creative in the business going to do better. And I remember the feeling of like, I was having sleepless nights. Up until that moment. And then we made the call. We were still losing a bunch of money the next day. Like we were losing a ton of money. We had a lot of stuff to fix, but I was not having, I started sleeping like a baby. Cause I knew, well, maybe not a baby. Babies don’t sit that well. I started sleeping like a well adjusted, like seven year old. Um, but like, I knew like we had a plan. We were going to, like, we’re going to move forward on the plan and the stress went away and it went actually to like excitement and moving forward. And it took us like six months to transition the company to a better place. But never once we made that initial call, did I have stress. I was like, this is just I felt comfortable with the decision. And so I just think that’s an example of like, a lot of times what it takes is admitting the issue and then coming up with a plan. And sometimes that’s enough that you can then shed the fear. You can shed the stress to some degree. And you can know how to move forward. Obviously, everyone’s wired differently, but that’s that’s that works really well for me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I mean that doing that. you can at least see it. You know, there’s something tangible that you can say, okay, well this is what we’re going to do. You can come back the next day and say, Oh, well maybe we tweak this or whatever, but it’s, it’s the, it’s not this thing, this nebulous thing hanging over your head that is just all like all consuming and yet kind of being ignored at the same time. It’s, that’s a paradox, but you know what I mean?
Chris Savage: Yeah. I think that’s why having a vision of what you’re trying to do as an individual or as a company is actually extremely helpful. Because it puts everything else in like reference to that makes it easier to make progress.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining here. One last question for you before we wrap up. I would like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role? And how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Chris Savage: I mean, yeah, for me, it’s about like talking. It’s a few different things. I think like sleep really matters a lot. If I’m like really stressed out about something, I often ask myself, like, did I actually just not sleep that well? And often that’s the answer. I think like, the stress that we manage is like, it’s all connected, whether it’s mental stress, or it’s physical stress, like you have one body, right. And so I focus a lot on like having routines and workouts and things that like help me kind of manage more stress. And then I think like I look to people, I look to try to get advice from different groups that help me stay agile. So it’s like senior management team inside of the company. It’s advisors that know the business well that are connected to the business. It’s peers at other companies who care about me. They understand Wistia, but they’re really giving me advice for me. And I think it’s just really important to have inputs and feedback from all those different types of groups. People who know you well, people who are connected to the company, people who you grew up with. You need to have a mix. And I think that helps you get to a place where you have a better sense of really where you are. And a lot of this is just being able to give and receive feedback and actually hear it. I think that’s a big part of staying agile. someone gives you feedback, can you really listen? Can you really hear it? And are they actually right? And if they are, it often is actually not that hard to change. But we don’t always let it in. And so I think that’s how I think about it.
