E52 – Dark Social, AI, and Relationship-Driven Demand Gen with Scott Wasserman

E52 – Dark Social, AI, and Relationship-Driven Demand Gen with Scott Wasserman

In this episode of the Pipelineology podcast, Gary interviews Scott Wasserman of Wasserman Revenue Advisors, a fractional CMO for B2B SaaS and PE-backed companies focused on pipeline-driven growth, dark social, demand gen, and rev ops alignment. Scott shares his unusual path from owning a successful Hair Club for Men franchise to building a digital marketing consultancy by learning inbound marketing through HubSpot as metrics and measurable channels emerged. He explains how buying behavior has shifted to “dark social” touchpoints – Slack, podcasts, private messages, and algorithm-driven platforms, making attribution harder, and suggests adding “how did you hear about us” back to forms to regain signal. They discuss AI’s impact: it accelerates work like metrics and content creation but can create “AI slop,” requiring a human voice and careful use. Scott emphasizes streamlining, testing ideas, and relationship-based networking rather than pitch-heavy outreach, and advises contacting him via LinkedIn.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

01:01 Scott’s Unusual Career Start

02:13 Digital Marketing Metrics Shift

04:29 Paid Ads and Hidden Touchpoints

06:25 Dark Social Explained

11:14 What to Do About Dark Social

13:04 AI Changes Content and Work

15:50 Avoiding AI Slop and Staying Human

17:33 AI Efficiency vs Job Fears

20:13 Jurassic Park Moment on Reporting

21:02 Streamline With AI

22:22 Test And Learn

24:00 The AI Fix

25:01 Talk Like Humans

26:00 Real LinkedIn Networking

30:07 From Chat To Business

32:12 Everyday Conversation Skills

38:52 How To Reach Scott

40:26 Final Wrap Up

linkedin.com/in/scottwasserman

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of the Pipelineology podcast. Today I am excited to be joined by Scott Wasserman and Scott’s from Wasserman Revenue Advisors. When I asked him, what’s your title? He’s like, well, you know, I do a lot of things. So I’m gonna do something a little different today, and I’m just gonna read right from his LinkedIn profile.

Kind of give you, give you an idea of what, what Scott’s up to here is he is a fractional CMO for B2B SaaS and PE-backed companies. Pipeline driven growth, does dark social. Dark social and demand gen and rev ops alignment. I feel like that’s a whole lot to unpack, but before, 

[00:00:38] Scott Wasserman: is a mouthful. It is a mouthful, isn’t it?

[00:00:40] Gary Ruplinger: welcome to the show.

[00:00:41] Scott Wasserman: Thank you. And thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. This is

[00:00:44] Gary Ruplinger: it’s great, great to have you here.

So. I’m excited to, to chat with you. I know we were chatting just, just a few minutes ago and it was like, I was like, we better push record here because a lot to talk about. 

[00:00:53] Scott Wasserman: Starting. Push enter,

push go. 

[00:00:56] Gary Ruplinger: So, real quick before we jump into kind of, all the stuff we want to talk about. For anybody who’s not familiar with you or your work, can you kind of give people that, you know, one or two minute kind of background,

here’s how I, here’s how I got to be at, the, the managing director of, of Wasserman Revenue Advisors?

[00:01:13] Scott Wasserman: Okay. I’m gonna have to see how I can. Compress this. Well first, as you know, well, you don’t know. I’m actually living, I live where I live. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m a Boston boy at heart. I’ve been down here four years, but I was born and raised in Boston. And just as a quick history, and this throws, especially when I go on all these podcasts and people ask me, it kind of throws a, a wrench into this. I didn’t, even though I was a marketing major back in school, I didn’t start off marketing. I started off, believe it or not, working, a few years out of school at the hair club for men, men’s hair replacement. I’m not even sure if you knew that. It’s at the bottom of my LinkedIn, but it’s, you know, I did that and then I bought a franchise and had that for 10 years and it was very, very successful.

It was great, actually. Yes, I had hair at that point, not mine, but if you’ve seen the commercials, that’s what it is. And I was always though, still, you know, a gadget geek and, and, you know, love marketing. I did a lot of marketing for the, with the parent company and, and the franchisees, pushed, wanted to push in certain directions, and then around 2008 when things started to like, on the digital end, marketing became much more digital. So now you’ve got social media, now you’ve got paid ads, now you’ve got email, email marketing. You can actually measure all these things actually had metrics, and metrics were always the answer to everything. In a marketing, traditionally you, you couldn’t get those metrics so. Once they started to happen, I started to like really start focusing on this stuff. I’m like, wow, this is so cool. You can actually see for the first time, because I did a lot of marketing for the hair club locally as a franchise and, you know, paid into a national, a national thing. And, you know, you can measure it by, okay, here’s the phone number.

Let’s see who dials the phone number and how many people saw it from this ad or. Whatever. And there’s so many different things that really weren’t accurate. It was more like, let’s just guess, you know, guesstimate on what this is, and now you could actually see numbers. And that just blew my mind. So I sold the hair club kind of on a, I don’t want to say a whim, but it took a little few months to think about it, but sold it and jumped out of the plane and just built the parachute on the way down and started doing. Some consulting, so to speak, and I learned everything that I learned from, HubSpot. HubSpot was putting out so much information, blogs, webinars, I mean you name it, to teach you about inbound marketing, of course, to sell their platform, which I did, and I became a reseller for them as well. And taught me everything.

I mean, it started off as digital marketing, then inbound marketing, then Demand Gen came along eventually, and digital was part of Demand Gen. I mean, you know, it’s had some transformations along the way, but it’s something that has changed so dramatically even since 2009, 2010. I mean, wow. I mean, from when I started to now, it’s just amazing.

And if you don’t keep up, you know, you’re out of the game. It’s that simple. Things change so rapidly based around how people buy. That’s what it’s all based around, and people don’t buy now the same way they did even two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. It changes. If you’re still stuck in that mindset of, you know, yeah, let’s put those paid ads up and let’s keep cranking them up and let’s cranking them up and put all that money out. You know, the returns to me that I’ve seen on paid ads now, and I’m going off on tangent saying no, but, the, the returns now, if you’re even lucky to break, you know, break a one-to-one return on that, you’re lucky. In my opinion, I’m not saying some, some companies can’t. B2C tends to be a little better in that case, but B2B not as easy.

And people just see it, oh, well, let’s throw more money into that. You know, let’s just throw more money. Oh, we saw them on, you know, on the, trip. On, in, in, for example, in HubSpot, it would, it would actually link down. Okay. How did they get here? Oh, they came into that paid ad. I can virtually guarantee that wasn’t their first touch at this point.

It may have been years ago, but not anymore. That leads into the whole conversation. We talked about dark social, how people buy differently now than they used to.

[00:05:25] Gary Ruplinger: I remember even, I guess it probably, 10 years ago when Google was kind of talk, you know, trying to explain to people that it’s not just run an ad and then they come to your site and buy, and this was in the automotive space, and they said,

you know. These people are, going through, because they have all the data, right?

They’re tracking everybody. They can see it through everybody’s analytics and say it’s about 22 touch points.

And most of them are invisible to you before they, you know, their decisions are happening on YouTube and industry

things and, word of mouth and they’re talking to their neighbors and all the stuff that you, can’t see.

But that’s, that’s how many different places they’re going to, and this is how much time they’re spending. and You know, you’re, you can’t, you can’t see that. You can’t measure that.

[00:06:12] Scott Wasserman: You can’t measure a lot. Yeah. it’s, you know, there was a time you could measure more and get a better, but now it’s even tougher to measure. I mean, you can put together attribution models, but. you know When things are behind the scenes now, there’s Slack channels, there’s so many of them where people get on there and they chat about different things. they may, let’s say hypothetically I post, a LinkedIn article, which I try to do three to five times a week if I can. and you know, people start commenting and messaging in the comments, and then they may get offline and someone might see something that somebody said and message them. You know I mean, a great example is, not of this, but you had somebody, and we talked about this the other day, you had somebody in your podcast the other day, and I forget his name, the guy that did that, that recommended that peacock book. 

[00:07:03] Gary Ruplinger: The Peacock’s Echo. 

[00:07:04] Scott Wasserman: Yeah. 

So, but you know, I listened to the podcast, but then that was interesting. The book was interesting. So I messaged him and then we’ve been chatting periodically on and off since then. You don’t know about that. You know, you wouldn’t.

[00:07:17] Gary Ruplinger: No idea.

[00:07:18] Scott Wasserman: Exactly. So, you know what I’m saying? So it’s not like you can measure that.

Let’s say that was, you know, discussing something that I wrote about or, you know, actually he had, you know, said something that I wrote about and you, you wouldn’t know about that. Nobody would know about that. So, and when you and I talked, I had mentioned that, you know, it, it almost has gone full circle in a sense. Meaning, you know, I just talked about how years ago, you know, you don’t always know how somebody got to you. You know, in early days of the web, you would sit there and even still ask that question, how did you find us? Or even if it was, forget the web, if somebody came into your office, you know, you’d have a, right like back at the hair club for example. You know, we had a question, you know, we had a normal questionnaire and somebody came in and it said, how did you hear of us? It was never a guarantee, but it was on there. Well, now since people are talking on Slacks, people are listening to podcasts. People are commenting and just messaging each other individually, you know, things that you cannot see. All the different, you know, video channels, Insta and, TikTok and all these things that they just kind of get into these own private conversations. This gets back to the research that people are doing, and they know what they need. These high intent buyers know what they need, and as opposed to them now going on Google, which was the, in a sense, the only search engine. And when I say search engines, I’m not talking about Yahoo versus Google. I’m talking about that all these LinkedIn is a, in its own way, a search engine, YouTube, TikTok, Insta all these things are, you know, have search engine capabilities and you know, there’s an algorithm that’s built around. So when it starts you start seeing things that you want to see as opposed to, you know, something else. So you don’t know what I’m watching. You don’t know what I’m seeing unless I’m commenting. So, as I said before, there was a, study. Several years ago, or not even several, a couple years ago from, Gartner that said, something like, and again, I hope I’m quoting this properly, 87% of all VP and C-level execs do their research before they actually contact you. So they’ll look at your website, but you know, you know about bounce rates on blogs, on websites You know, we always want that blog out there. Old school is, get that blog out there, get that content out there. Get on that first, you know, that first page of Google, all that stuff. Well, today, blogs, if you’re lucky, you know, you’ll get less than a 80, to 90% bounce rate on that. I mean, people might look at it for five seconds and that’s it,

if that. Most people, they want to put their content. Other places. You have to put that content where people are gonna be. So they know your website is in a sense, a sales tool, it always was. But you know, I’d rather have, as opposed to, let’s say, hypothetically a hundred leads a week as opposed to a hundred people clicking that demo or want to speak to somebody or whatever. And then. Half of them are garbage and, you gotta, you know, kind of fish through and see what’s up. I’d rather have only 20 people hit it, meaning they come to the site, they hit it, they basically say, okay, I’m 80% there, let’s get to a hundred percent. They know what they want. Buyers know what they want and they do their research first.

[00:10:39] Gary Ruplinger: When you had, initially we had talked about bringing you on the show. I know one of the, you’d kind of mentioned, you know, some, some of the things you could talk about. One of them was, was dark social, which is the thing I’m talking about now. And I said, what, what, what even is this? And because is this, is it like something I can even have on the show?

But, you know, but no,

I I, I, I’m getting, I’m getting it now, but my, I guess my question is, is what, what do you do about it?

[00:11:05] Scott Wasserman: What do you do about

[00:11:07] Gary Ruplinger: The how do you, the, the, the dark part of that?

[00:11:11] Scott Wasserman: The only way that I can see, and let me just, let me, let me preface this by saying this isn’t something I created. I heard the term first and I don’t know if he created or not by this, guy, great guy named Chris Walker. Chris Walker was either the founder or CEO of this, high-end demand generation, agency called Refined Labs.

He has since stepped back and doing something else, but I started to hear. Or see his posts and he always did a video along with it and he started talking about it. I’m like, wow, that is really cool. And it’s true. You know, you really don’t know how people are getting to you sometimes. And we all think we have the answer, but it’s not necessarily there.

So as I started to see, it becomes It’s comes full circle. Whereas now, like we’ve been putting back into those forms, when somebody does get on your page and they fill out a quick, you know, name, email, this, you know, how’d you hear of us? You know, put it back on there and put those things on there that are common.

You know, just Google search, but also, TikTok, Insta, Slack channel. somebody told me. So now we kind of have an idea again and again. It’s not, you know, perfect or a perfect science, but you get a better idea. So if you start seeing, okay, I’ve put like, simple snippets from a podcast on. Instagram or, YouTube or whatever, you start to get a, an idea as far as, okay, well let’s start focusing on that particular channel as opposed to this channel, because we seem to be getting a much bigger hit over there. and, that’s what it is. So it’s kind of like partly a guessing game, but you get a better idea as far as what’s hitting and what’s not.

[00:12:56] Gary Ruplinger: Very good. So I guess that kind of brings me to my next question here then, is AI, how has that been impacting this? Because now I can look at a podcast and say, oh, that sounds interesting, Claude, go summarize that for me. I, don’t even have to go listen to it. I can see the title and say

hey Claude, this is on, that, Spotify. Go, transcribe it, summarize it, and give me the key takeaways, that I should know.

[00:13:29] Scott Wasserman: Right. So 

As far as, well, I mean, AI, God, it’s, affected so many things in our lives, you know, but let’s just focus on. you know You and I have talked about what AI can do and you know, people use ChatGPT as a therapist. it’s kind of crazy. And I mentioned, you know, ChatGPT being kind of a, I’ll say it, I hope it’s okay being kind of a kiss ass where it always agrees with You I switched, I was on chat, I’ve been on Chat GPT for several years. I knew how to work it, I knew how to, you know, build things through it. But it was very simple. Somebody finally kept saying to me, why don’t you get on Claude Code? or Claude itself and, get into Claude Code. And I, always thought it was like, you know, apples, oranges, whatever, Claude, you know, ChatGPT but it really wasn’t.

And the things that I’ve started to build on Claude and on Claude Code and on Cowork is just incredible, you know? And, if you learn and do it right, it’s great. Unfortunately, as you had mentioned before, people in many cases are doing it wrong. They’re using, okay, write a blog for or an article for me on this.

And it’s not in their language, it’s not how they speak. it’s not how they do it. And it becomes that new term AI slop, you know, which is all over LinkedIn, for example. I mean, I even noticed and we’ve, you know, nobody again knows how the LinkedIn algorithm works, but people that are using it improperly, because they, oh, I can now post on LinkedIn all the time, but if it’s garbage, it’s garbage And When it’s garbage, it now becomes just like, you know, remember when there was no cable? Let’s go way back. Three, four channels on TV and that’s it. Now then there were hundreds of cable channels. Now there’s streaming channels. There is so much out there, it spreads it very thin as far as you know, who’s watching what and who’s seeing what and who’s doing what.

So, well that same thing goes with this. If people are, you know, just see all these things in their feed. They click on it, you know, it’s gonna limit my impressions. It’s gonna limit your impressions because it’s just so much. Does that make sense what I’m saying in this? You know, it’s just, there’s so much content, garbage or not, it limits your reach in some cases.

So becoming, you know, an individual, being that individual, being not the same as everybody else is important. So many of the stuff that you read, so much of the stuff that you read is general, it’s basic. It’s not you, it’s not your thoughts, it’s not your beliefs. And that’s something that I try to focus on.

I certainly use Chat, not chat, Claude when I’m working on my articles, but I also go through them and tweak them and make sure that they’re right. You know, you have to spend that time sometimes.

[00:16:15] Gary Ruplinger: I know I’ve, I’ve certainly used it in, you know, with kind of structuring and, you know, trying, sometimes it’s just for ideation, you know, like, I’m, I got, right. I’ve got writer’s block. I’m like, I need this, or I need some more information to, from here.

What, what, what can you bring in? And, but then it’s. It’s back to, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get my pen back out and I’m gonna jot some notes down and say, I like that.

I like that. Okay. And you can start piecing it back together and you write it.

[00:16:43] Scott Wasserman: Yeah. Or just say, okay, like let’s focus on this part. Let’s focus on this part. You know, let’s redo it again, but add in this and add in this. So it is you.

You know, I mean, when I have, you know, shown people my articles from, I’ve written for years, my own stuff verses, what I put through, let’s say Claude, or, you know, people don’t know the difference or I put them through just for fun.

I put them through those ia, I a, oh my God, AI, what’d I say? Ia, AI, authenticator, so to speak. You know, is it AI or not? And I just, for fun, I just to keep up, you know, is this AI? No, this is a human voice. You know, and good it should be. You know, that’s what it should be. There’s nothing wrong with it. But AI has also done a lot more, not just in content. I mean, content is what everybody, 90% of the population uses it for is for content, whether it be for an email or this, which is great. It’s a time saver. Without a doubt. There were some basic things that you can do that are tremendous time savers, but also doing things like metrics, putting together, presentations, you know, putting together trainings, putting together just it’s endless as far as what you can do. From a marketing standpoint,

it’s amazing. It’s doing things in so much less time that you would do, you know, could do them before. You know, in putting these numbers together in a matter of seconds. It’s great. Now, the good part about that is that I think it gets us more authenticity, more accurate, more accuracy as far as what we’re doing, authenticity as far as what kind of content we’re putting out. but also on the, on the bad side, a lot of marketers and well no not just marketers, a lot people through the country, you know, around the country in different, kind of jobs, are scared that they’re gonna lose their job over this. There’s just, there’s no reason to have 10 people. when you can have the same five people do the job, or three people do the job. And I disagree with that. It should be, either it shouldn’t be all or nothing. You know, it should be, it shouldn’t be. First of all, if a company’s saying, no, no AI, it’s bad. We don’t trust it, this. Well, in my opinion and other things I’ve read, you’re gonna be out of business in three years. You know, it’s just the way it is.

Whether you’re not, if you’re not using this for marketing, you’re not using this for other parts of your company, you’re gonna just fall way behind. Everyone’s gonna be way ahead of you. On the opposite end, you shouldn’t go in, I mean, going into it a hundred percent just because it’s there and you think, oh, I can save all this money as a CEO or a founder.

I can, you know, get rid of so many people and just do this. You still need the human touch, in my opinion. You still need the human touch. So there’s a middle, a middle ground that you can do with AI and you know, will it change over the years? Of course, it’s changing daily. It’s almost scary how fast it’s changing. But at least for now, you know, you still need that human touch in there When, and I always joke you know, I’m very cautious and careful when I’m, typing into Claude. And I always say please and thank you. Because you know, when the, I think I told you the other day, just like the Terminator man, when the robots rise up, I want to be on the right side of the game.

You know, I don’t want to be on that bad side that I’ve been, you know, throwing garbage at them for years, and now they’re gonna come back and kill me, you know? So, yeah.

[00:20:04] Gary Ruplinger: So it kind of, kind of gets me to my next question then here is kind of around all the, all the things you can do and all of the new capabilities

and, and things that you have. Some of it kind of, I, I start thinking like Jurassic Park, you know. The, the nine, you know, Jeff Goldblum’s character, and he says, you know, you spent all this time thinking about if you could, you forgot, you didn’t consider if you should

do, do this.

And,

you know, and

I’m, and I’m, I’m like, oh, okay. And I, I, I think about like in my corporate career, we had, you know, these proprietary CRMs that had dozens, if not hundreds of different reports that could generate for you. and the thing was, is that they were almost all. Pretty useless. Like my boss had me do like spend hours and hours every month doing a custom report.

That was one page, but it had just the things we wanted on it that were not in, we, we couldn’t get out of our CRM, even with the like custom build it tools. So I know one of the things you say is that you say marketing teams, they’re, not lacking activity. They’re busy, but they’re not measuring the right things.

So with all of our newfound superpowers essentially. What, should we actually be focusing on? What should we take our, limited time and attention and put it on.

[00:21:23] Scott Wasserman: I, think first of all, simplification of your, I mean I think, was it you and I that spoke about this, about streamlining? I’m not sure if it was, I’m a big believer. I’ve always been a big believer way before, you know, AI became a thing. because AI has been around for a long time, but before the public really got into it that you can streamline things and. Get things done such as, you know, automate email responses that are standard, things that you may, you know, have to do all the time or, you know, really pick up on content, really, pick up, you know, set up a, quick app on metrics so we can actually read your metrics very quickly as opposed to pouring through, you know, Google Analytics and seeing what’s going to your website and what’s not.

And you know, there were just so many different things, competitive analysis about different companies. You know, anything you can streamline. To get it out of the way. You can now focus on other things, you know, focus on things like most marketers, you know, they’re, they’re much bigger dreamers and creators than they are just numbers, you know, at least I am, you know, I mean, metrics are critical, but I’m a big believer in try it. People are afraid to try new things, and I’m always, always, always telling CEOs and founders, it’s like, you know, you have to be willing to fail in order to succeed. I know it’s an old term, but you know, people don’t, they’re scared. Some people are scared to try new things because they don’t want to look like a failure. Well, that’s okay. I’m not saying to blow it up and, you know, try it on a massive scale, but test it. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn’t work, dump it and move on. It’s how you learn and it’s how you see what’s gonna work and what’s not gonna work. You may have a great idea in your head and think, ah, this is gonna be awesome. You do it and it crashes and burns. Yet you might have an idea that, okay, we just, let’s just do this and you’re not expecting much of it and it blows up in a great way, you know? And you say, wow, I didn’t know that was gonna happen. Well now the nice part is, and I’ve run these scenarios three way, I first just to test it and. Get feedback from it and, and see what other, you know, companies are doing and do some competitive analysis on what companies are doing. And it shows you that, you know, okay, if we try, this is a good chance that it’s gonna work, as opposed to just, you know, so take that dream and put it in there and see if it can become a reality or not. You know, one thing I just started to do recently, outside of my complete fractional work is, you know, people always say to me, Scott, how did, how do you do all that so fast to do this so fast? Not just marketing, just the basic stuff that you have to do every day. That is time suck, you know? And I showed them how to do it.

I said, well, if you do this and you do this, and you do this, you’re gonna save so much time, you know, on what you’re doing. You can now focus on the things you need to focus on, as opposed to that, you know. Hamster wheel of over and over and over again. So I started doing something I, I, I, you know, briefly, I’m calling it the AI fix, basically just to fix you, you know, and get you to the point where you can focus on those things, where you can set up those things that bother you and get rid of them, put them aside, because now they’re so automated, it’s done, and now you can focus on what needs to be focused on.

[00:24:44] Gary Ruplinger: I know, I remember we were kind of talking earlier, like AI’s doing all these good things for us, and I, I’d mentioned it. One thing people need to actually go do is they, they need to go talk to people though.

They go to a bar and actually have a conversation with somebody you don’t know. Because I look, look at like all the messages that I get in my inbox and things like that.

I’m looking, And so you, you don’t, you don’t talk like that. That’s not how you talk to somebody. You can tell like, and AI either wrote it or helps write it. It is like, you, you need to go touch some grass,

you know, talk to a real human

[00:25:19] Scott Wasserman: Yeah.

[00:25:20] Gary Ruplinger: and, and actually do that because, you know, all, all this AI stuff is, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s making you a bad communicator.

[00:25:28] Scott Wasserman: It’s just, and it’s also we, but we’ve been doing that for a while. I mean, people haven’t communicated in years in person. It’s through social media, it’s through texting, it’s through, oh my God, dating, thank God I’m out of that, you know, Whirlpool.

[00:25:42] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah. Thank goodness.

[00:25:43] Scott Wasserman: It’s not like it was years ago, you know? I mean, it’s, you don’t even, you don’t even know if you’re talking to a real person or not in many cases. But, yeah, you know what, what I love to do still, and this, you know, when I’m networking on LinkedIn, it’s not just to sell somebody what I’m doing. It’s to learn what they’re doing. You know, it’s to meet them and as a person, so if I’m, if somebody connects with me or I connect with them, you know, I ask them, first of all, what made them decide to connect, what you know, what made you want to connect?

I’m open to talking or hearing more. I honestly want to get on a call with them. I want to get on a call with them, even if it’s for 15, 20 minutes just to meet them. Because how many times, I mean, I don’t know how many LinkedIn connections you have or followers you have. Has anybody ever come to you and said, you know, Hey, I’m, I’d like to talk to this person.

I see we have is a mutual connection. You know, do you know, do you know them? And the, you know, I, I don’t know percentages, but the majority of the time it’s like, no, no, not really. They’re just a connection, you know? Well, I’d rather have, you know, connections that I know. That I’ve talked to him and said, oh yeah, I talked to him.

He’s a great guy. You know, he’ll help you with this. Oh no, she’s wonderful at this, this, and this. Oh, absolutely. I’ll give you an introduction. You know, I, you know, she’s great. You know, that’s, I think, very important. You know, it’s, it’s not sitting on the grass, unfortunately and talking to somebody, but you know, if you are gonna be reaching out, if you are gonna be talking to people, networking with people. You know, I want to be able to offer them not just my services, but say hey, listen, if you need a new vendor or if you need, you know, a junior marketer that, that I might know or, or something to help you out, I’m happy to help. You know, by all means. And if hopefully I can reach out to them if I need something from them.

Like I’m looking for something, do you have access to this? You know, it’s getting to know somebody. It’s about relationships. It’s still, it’s, it always comes back to relationships. And I think we’ve gotten away from that, totally away from that.

[00:27:43] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, things. Things are a lot easier if you’ve got existing relationships in place where you can actually reach out to somebody when you’re not just trying to, pitch them right.

[00:27:54] Scott Wasserman: I mean, how many pitches do you get in your inbox every single day? You know, people will sit there and write a, script about something and give them their calendar, give them their website, and get, it’s like, no, no. I don’t even know who you are. You know, I don’t even know who you are.

Why would I sit there and go ahead and want to talk to you until I know who you are. It’s not being mean or being a jerk, it’s just life. You know? I mean, it’s not the way to talk to me. You know, if I’m reaching out to somebody, it’s like, you know, I saw we were doing this, this, and this. Love to connect. If you’re up for a quick 15 minute, you know, minute talk, no agenda, just, you know, just to meet and that’s it. And there was never, for me on that first call, there’s never an agenda. If we seem to have some kind of a, you know, connection in, you know, whether what I’m doing is gonna help them, what they’re doing is gonna help me, what we could, how we could help each other, how we can maybe even work together. And I’ve, you know, actually worked with several different people I’ve met. Not like to just help me or to help them, but it kind of just made life easier for both of us to work together. I mean, I work with other fractional COOs, you know, in a sense that they may be doing something to help a company, you know, get organized and get structured, but they also notice that they need a marketing person in there that they don’t have yet.

Or vice versa. I go into a company as a fractional and I, you know, talk to them and see that the company is just a mess because, you know, most founders and CEOs, especially in a B2B Tech, SaaS world. Many of them are engineers, you know, many of them are just, they know what they want to do. They have great ideas, but they don’t know how to put them into a, you know, form a company that can actually run properly. So I’ll bring in a COO that can say, you know, something, I have a, you know, a person I know they’re fantastic, fractional, COO to help get you started and help get you going. And yeah, why not? Certainly cheaper than hiring, a full-time you know, COO to begin with, and then maybe helping them find. Or search for a full-time COO when everything’s in place, and they can afford it.

[00:29:53] Gary Ruplinger: That, that’s a very, I think that’s a, a really good approach. The thing I I, I’ve, I’ve found with people is this, they, they don’t know how to kind of figure out which conversations are. The ones that they can move forward. because they, they get too timid to ask. They’re, they’re like, somebody, somebody told them, you need to go network.

And they said, yes, I do. That’s a great idea. I need to, I need to brush up on that skill. I need to learn how to talk to people. And they, they embrace it and then they start talking to people. And, I won’t, I won’t mention who this person was, but man, I got on on with her and she said, so what’s your favorite color?

I’m, I, I, I’m, I’m like, I’m, I’m sorry, what was that? I, I, I was like, I don’t understand. Oh, I’m just, you know, I’ve just, it’s part of my networking and I’m like, this is, oh, man. And she, she, she was like a true believer that, you know, asked these like banal questions.

[00:30:52] Scott Wasserman: Like what’s your sign?

[00:30:53] Gary Ruplinger: Right, basically. And then it’s, oh, I’m, I need to introduce you to these people.

You need to talk to them too. And I’m like, they’re, they’re really not relevant conversations for me. So I I I’m curious how you kind of approach the, okay, this person is a good fit. You know, we’ve identified that without it feeling, I think that’s the thing is they don’t want to feel too salesy or they feel like you’d been sleazy

at that point.

And how do you, how do you pivot that? I know it’s the kind of little bit of a tangent here for 

usa 

[00:31:19] Scott Wasserman: No, that’s great. That’s a great,

[00:31:20] Gary Ruplinger: but I’d love, I’d love to kind of get your, your take on that because

I, I talk to so many people who will do, they’ll have meetings and they say they’re, I, I, I’m just not, I’m not bringing in new business from

them.

And ultimately we we’re all out here to, to eventually do business. Maybe not that first call or that second call, but eventually

somebody, somebody’s gotta buy something.

[00:31:40] Scott Wasserman: Abso- yeah, eventually. But people buy from people they like and buy from people they know. And I’ve been very fortunate in, I, as you can probably tell, I. You know, I have no problem speaking or talking. I may go off on a tangent or tear or down a rabbit hole, but I will talk to anybody. I mean, I am the kind of person that is, you know, walks into a store, walks into, you know, Trader Joe’s or something, and. If I’m standing next to them, you know, I’ll, I might say something, I don’t know, make a comment, you know, make a joke about how could they put this out here or something, you know, or I see a kid that’s, you know, looking at me.

I, I mean, I love, you know, my girls are grown, so, you know, I see young kids and they’re just looking funny or something, and I’ll, you know, crack a smile and make a, you know, a quick joke to them. And 99% of the time the parents laugh and they think it’s funny. And then I. Talk to the parents or, you know, it’s just, I will talk to anybody, you know, when I see somebody, let’s use Traders as an example.

It’s rare that the, you know, if you’ve been there, if you go there on a regular basis, you know, the, the people that you know cash you out, they’re usually in great moods, but sometimes they’re not, or any store people, sometimes they’re like that. You walk in, it’s like they just have an attitude or they’re upset.

You can, but you know, you don’t know what’s going on in their life. So I may make a comment or you know, a joke or something. I want to get them to smile. I want to see if I can get them to smile. Well, you know, going back to your point about networking, it’s, it’s in a sense the same thing. You know, I’ll find somebody, I’ll see somebody and I’ll make contact to say hey, we obviously got a lot in common.

I’d love to, you know, meet people on a regular basis just to learn who they are and not just connect with them and never find out who they really are except for what they post. I, yep, for like a 15, 20 minute, you know, intro call, just to say hello. No agenda, just, just say hello and you know, I’ve been on a lot of those. I mean, I probably talked to about three to five new people a week on average. sometimes it was more, sometimes less, but and sometimes, you know, most of the time it’s a great conversation. It’s a great little talk like you about, you and I have had talks in the, you know, in the past or recently and other times it’s a complete dud.

And I’m like kind of trying to pull it. I’m trying to learn about that and learn what they do. And it’s like pulling teeth, you know? And if that’s the case, huh, okay. So I met them, I talked to them, I lost 20 minutes, whatever. You know, it is what it is. But I’ve also gained so much with these other people, and you get to meet some great people.

You really do. You know, not just on the business end, what they like personally, you know, who’s gonna win the Knicks or the Spurs, you know, that kind of thing. You know, just talking about stuff like that. you know, and it’s just, it’s just fun. It’s just, it, it’s just. I don’t know. It goes back to just, you know, meeting new people.

Stop hiding behind your phone. Stop hiding behind your computer. Stop hiding behind all these different things. Get out there and talk to people.

[00:34:37] Gary Ruplinger: I think that’s, that’s great. Is there a point where you get to, in a conversation where you say, you know, this might be a, you know, does it make sense to talk about this, or you kind of let them make the first move. It’s like, oh, I might be interested in that, Scott. Do you, or just kind of curious, where, where, does that shift?

[00:34:54] Scott Wasserman: usually toward the end. I mean, you know, the calls I try to keep and respect people’s time and my own time of course. because you know, we can go off forever, but let’s the time is very valuable. And, you know, toward the end I’ll sit there and certainly offer anything I can offer, not just about me, but like I mentioned, you know, listen, if you ever need a great vendor, I have a lot.

I’ve got a deep bench from all my consulting days. if you ever need like a junior marketer that I’ve been talking to, because I talk to anybody, I don’t care who I talk to, they don’t have to be, you know, on a, on a, you know, you know, CMO level or anything like that. I’ll talk to a young, you know, junior marketer just starting out. I can learn from them too. And I, that’s important to understand. You can learn from people that may not be, have had 20 years of experience. Maybe they are just starting out, but they might have the best idea in the world. So, you know, you might get that information. But I’ll tell them, listen, if you need this person or this or this. Hit me up, you know, I’d be happy to help you out. And then in most cases, people will, you know, kind of reciprocate and, say, yeah, if I can ever help you out, or this or that. And, you know, sometimes if the conversation natural, has a natural lead in towards what you do, and you know, maybe we get into business and maybe we get into, you know, what their pain points are, you know, what’s keeping them up at night, things like that, then we can talk about that.

But I prefer that call to be, at least when I, when I, promote the call, I, want to listen 80% of the time I want to know and ask questions and get to know them better. That way I could sit here and talk and talk like I am now, and I’m not gonna learn who they are.

[00:36:26] Gary Ruplinger: Awesome.

Appreciate you kind of giving, given those insights. I know, I, I work with a lot of people and that’s a lot of what they end up doing is that they end up, you know, we help them talk to people.

but sometimes it’s, it’s hard for them to, to make that next step with it. And I, I tell people, I’m like the third worst network or third worst marketer on the planet.

So you don’t, you know, I’m not networking. I’m not a networking person.

[00:36:50] Scott Wasserman: Right. And a lot, and a lot of people aren’t, they’re not natural networkers, but you have to be able to try, you know, be willing to try and see. You know, just get out there and, and talk to people and it’s, you know, it’s a different world than it used to be. I mean, unfortunately, you know, people going into bars and places like that where you would talk to people, and I’m not just talking about dating or picking somebody up, but just talking to anybody.

Like I said, I go into stores and I talk to people. I cash out and I talk to people. I have no problem with it, you know, just, I will say this, it’s, it’s like I said, I’m from Boston. So if you’re, if you know Boston and you’re from Boston, if someone starts talking to you like that, they’re gonna say, what do you have up your sleeve?

Like, what do you want When I move to the south, you know, it’s a little different. People, they may, you know, people down here joke about, oh, they’ll talk to you, but behind, you know, behind your back, they’re gonna say, that guy’s a nut. You know? and that’s okay. I don’t mind, you know, but I, it’s, it’s, the way I’ve gotten to know people.

I mean, I. I walk into the drug store, I walk into the, I gotta pick up something from the pharmacist or something, and, and I know the pharmacist. Why? because I’ve talked to them. It could be about garbage or something. But I’ve talked to them and it’s so funny, you know how you walk in and you have to pick up a script and they say, what’s your birthday?

You know, this one, this one pharmacist, now just knows my birthday. She really, I might not see her for months, you know, but she knows my birthday and I don’t know how, you know, it’s very, very funny. Or you know, she said, well, you know, hey, how you doing Scott? What’s the last time I’m gonna see you for about a, a couple months?

I said, how come? And she said, you know, well, I’m, I’m having my baby. I said, what baby? I couldn’t, you know, they were on that behind that counter. I couldn’t tell. And she like turned to the side and said, see, you know, I’m my fourth boy. I’m delivering on Saturday. You know? Oh, congratulations. You know? So I don’t know, like 

[00:38:40] Gary Ruplinger: Very, very cool. Scott, for somebody who’s maybe looking for some help with, you know, demand gen and

kind of figuring some of this stuff out. Because they say, you know, I, you know, our, our numbers aren’t what they used to be. Or, you know, yeah, this dark social thing certainly seems like it’s got some legs to it.

[00:38:57] Scott Wasserman: Yeah. 

[00:38:58] Gary Ruplinger: We could certainly use some help. What, how should they get in touch with you?

[00:39:02] Scott Wasserman: Best way is through LinkedIn. You know, it’s, under Scott Wasserman. That’s my, you know, thing. It’s, I had it for year, I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long, long, long, long time. So I still have that ability to do Scott Wasserman. Probably the best way to do it is just go on there and message me and, you know, check out what I’m reading. My podcast stuff’s on there. You can see what I’m all about. I don’t know, just that’s the best way to reach out, I think.

[00:39:28] Gary Ruplinger: Oh, that’s, that’s easy enough. I’ll make sure we link to that in the show notes. 

[00:39:31] Scott Wasserman: I appreciate it. 

[00:39:31] Gary Ruplinger: just look, look up Scott Wasserman. Wasserman is W-A-S-S-E-R-M-A-N.

[00:39:37] Scott Wasserman: I, yeah, I, I, no, I love, I love to help people and talk to people whether we develop like a, a working relationship or not, that’s fine. But, you know, I just want to learn if I can help somebody, great. You know, I mean, I’m big into helping owners and founders that really haven’t gotten marketing started yet, or they don’t know where to go, or maybe they have a couple sporadic marketers here, but there’s no organization, there’s no structure. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to get it to that next level and scale everything. And that’s, that’s what my sweet spot, that’s what I love to do, you know, is help advise and just make sure they’re going in the right direction. And if they’re going in the right direction, then I’m happy.

That’s the idea.

[00:40:15] Gary Ruplinger: Perfect.

Well, Scott, really appreciate you hopping on today. Anybody’s looking for help, getting, getting in the right direction. Find Scott on LinkedIn, get in touch. You already know he’s probably, he’s probably willing to talk to you, so.

[00:40:29] Scott Wasserman: I promise I won’t talk as much when I’m talking one-on-one, so,

[00:40:33] Gary Ruplinger: Well, thanks, Scott. This has, this has been a lot of fun. Appreciate you hopping on.

[00:40:36] Scott Wasserman: Thank you. You have a good day.

Thanks Gary.