How David "Ledge" Ledgerwood Turns $0 Podcasts Into $150K+ Enterprise Deals

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santia Esteban and I am your host. Our special guest is Mr David Ledgerwood.

[00:00:11] Hector: ledge. Thank you for being here today. What would you describe when people ask what you do? you know, because it's, not that it's nuanced, but I think you do, uh, something in a very innovative sort of creative way, especially when it comes to business development and scaling.

[00:00:28] Hector: So why don't you catch us up on what it is that you guys do and maybe also importantly, how you got into that as well.

[00:00:34] Ledge: Yeah, let me tell it as story. thanks for having me on. It's, super cool to be here. I love scaling and I scale particularly around the B2B services realm. And, we can talk podcasts because I originally got into podcasting because I realized. some, gosh, this has got to be 10 years ago.

[00:00:53] Ledge: Now, I happen to be at that point, I was running sales for, um, what was essentially a very, very expensive staffing agency for high end developers. And so we're talking, you know, people that charge, 150, 250 an hour. And it was right around that time when near shoring became hot. And, all of a sudden you could buy developers for 15 an hour from, Central America, South America and great, great talent.

[00:01:19] Ledge: You know, there was nothing wrong with that. And so I. It was in the unique position of having to say, well, why should somebody buy a thing for 10, 20 times as much, and what was the actual benefit there? There was no standard marketing message or outbound message or anything that was going to cut through that.

[00:01:37] Ledge: And I, at the time, did what was novel and is no longer novel because people have caught on and are doing this, but essentially became what we now know as a B. M. Podcasting. So I made a podcast about software engineering and featuring software engineering leaders who happened to actually be my target market.

[00:01:57] Ledge: Customer and I would have them on and we used our outbound engine to book those people to come be featured on the podcast and that became rather successful. And I did some millions of dollars of business directly with the guests who were my ICP. And I simply had no business being able to reach out to these people.

[00:02:18] Ledge: Otherwise, like marquee accounts like Stripe and Cisco and, you know, companies that just simply wouldn't have done business with us. We develop relationship first based on adding value and presenting content, that just showed them in the most. positive light. So, fast forward from there, I moved on and started a company called add one zero and from my sales experiences in many different startups, from especially in the services space.

[00:02:43] Ledge: So agencies, professional services. consultancies, things like that, tech companies, I found that I, was interested in thinking, Hey, executive fractional, you know, sort of consultants exist in every space. Like, you can hire a fractional CFO, COO, you can hire all kinds of different things. Why can't you hire a fractional chief revenue officer and sales team?

[00:03:04] Ledge: So I wanted to do that. And subsequently, we've. Successfully done. So, it does not scale remarkably. Well, I can see why people wouldn't want to do that. But companies, agencies, consultancies, accounting companies, things like that. They hire us to come in and run all their revenue function. So straight on down to like, I want somebody that can actually close deals.

[00:03:24] Ledge: I do that role, and then I ended up doing that for a bunch of agencies that were related to podcasting, so became intimately into, Hey, I was a podcaster. I get this. And we productized that service that, I previously had the playbook. I'd run myself at a large agency called content allies, and then from that adventure, we discovered a lot of things that agencies and podcasters and particularly B to B podcasters needed.

[00:03:49] Ledge: Which was related to, you know, I got to grow my show, I have to show ROI and I have to provide, detailed business intelligence that passes scrutiny with, high level marketing people who actually fund. These content channels. So from that, we spun out a company called, listen network.

[00:04:07] Ledge: And primarily I'm working on that now. And that's, that's exactly what that company does. So, deeply in the scaling B2B services, agency services, back end agency services, things like that. And along the way I've had to, deal with all the other things that are not product that are not selling and, running operations, running finance.

[00:04:26] Ledge: all the nature of those businesses. So I think there's no better experience than having to have figured that out, from scratch a bunch of times. So glad to be here and talk about it.

[00:04:36] Hector: Yeah, I'm glad you're here because usually I'm the one sort of trying to blow the horn that you are, if you will. so one of my, questions for you, and I'm curious, your perspective is, connecting media to R. O. I. You know, that was sort of the big thing that I realized when we got into the space is that in doing something like Facebook ads or doing something like even SEO, to an extent, you can really track the conversion.

[00:05:02] Hector: You can say someone came here, they clicked here, they went there, they gave me their credit card here. And, the attribution was much clearer. It's gotten a little fussier over the last couple of years because of the iOS changes and things like that. But, yeah. When it comes to content or media, it's even further.

[00:05:19] Hector: And at least in the traditional senses, a lot harder to track that conversion. I'd love to maybe talk about the practicality around it, but how do you even help, executives, business leaders start to. Bridge that gap, even in their head where they see how creating content or creating media or having something like a podcast can actually drive ROI.

[00:05:40] Ledge: Yeah, there's a bunch of elements to that. And I think anybody that's listening to knows anything about content marketing, you've had to have that argument sort of in a marketing or budget meeting is like, why do we. Let's go back 10 years ago or 12 years ago. Like, well, why do we have a blog?

[00:05:54] Ledge: This is stupid. You know, why do we need to have, now it's podcasts or social media, like all those things. If you're old enough and gray enough, have you seen this process go over and over again? Well, there's no attribution and we can't prove it. And then, people come out and say, well, what about dark social?

[00:06:10] Ledge: then, well, what about brand awareness and demand gen and, kind of all those things. you're right. And I think, in the same way that we're all hooked on having, a watch around our wrist, what gets measured gets managed, right? So now we can say, Hey, you know, now that we know how to tell time, well, we can determine, did we use time?

[00:06:28] Ledge: Well, or did we not use time? Well, but we never addressed the question of, that even a reasonable thing to measure? It's the easiest thing to measure. And that's the same thing with performance marketing and conversion based. Marketing behaviors, It's like, well, this is amazing.

[00:06:42] Ledge: We can track the click. We can track the conversion. We can do Google analytics. We can say exactly what it costs and the cost of the ad all the way to the cost of, the acquisition of that customer. And those are all great things. But that does not remove the need to talk about brand awareness and multi touch campaigns and content marketing.

[00:07:02] Ledge: And I think that's where podcasting got a bad name or rather, I think some of we bear some responsibility as an industry for kind of selling downloads as a standalone thing. And we know we should build audience so all that stuff, but the easiest thing to count was download. So we did.

[00:07:20] Ledge: and that's an artifact to, uh, Podcasts exist in an open ecosystem. It's RSS. It doesn't have a data payload. There is no way to track anything. And then it's largely gate kept by, any of the data that might be available lives on an apple or a spotify and they have no interest in giving you any good data, because they want to keep you in their walled garden.

[00:07:39] Ledge: But the innovation that we put in place on listen network is saying, well, look, we all agree that even if downloads isn't the right thing to necessarily sort out. Be the best measurement. It is a measurement. And in fact, it does have, you know, a reasonable correlation to, other behaviors that we want.

[00:07:56] Ledge: So cool. Let's all agree that we counted downloads and we can Google about if that's a good thing or not a good thing. But. What's lacking and what makes that what I, you know, people say downloads are just a vanity metric doesn't mean anything for your audience. Okay, fair enough. What if it did? And we want that number to go up anyway.

[00:08:14] Ledge: Well, how can you do that? Well, okay, we need data and data shows that a particular audience or set of your downloads comes from exactly this target market. Podcasts don't have that data. Podcast hosts don't have that data. And we then run into the wall of like, well, we can't prove it. But if you want a number to go up and it's based on conversion, we just said that, Hey, you click an ad, a thing happens, you track the thing.

[00:08:41] Ledge: If you have the right technology in place, you can then track the thing and say a download happened. Conceptually, I know who it is. I know their demographics. I know what topics they were interested in. If I use a tool like LinkedIn, I can then track all the data of what company are they from?

[00:08:59] Ledge: What's their job title? we can add a layer of business analysis and ROI on top of that download number. So now it's no longer just vanity. It's fast. It's linked exactly to the place we want it to be linked to. at Listen Network, what we built was that bridge that allows you to then have, essentially the market facing middleware and reporting and infrastructure to say, well, now we know we got at least a thousand new downloads because that's exactly what we said we were going to do.

[00:09:28] Ledge: And it came from a set of ads that are run and managed well through LinkedIn. Therefore. We have a thousand new listeners that match our exact ICP profile, and we pile all the analytics and business intelligence on top of that. If you then take those charts and that data into your next marketing meeting, you can now compete with and look intelligent in front of the performance marketers who have same orders of magnitude and same pretty charts, graphs, everything goes up to the right.

[00:09:57] Ledge: We know things about our audience. And you now added strategy and, audience intelligence on top of , that number. So it isn't that number is wrong. It's that arbitrary growth of measurement of that number without context is wrong.

[00:10:11] Hector: Yeah. I think another thing that comes up is like expectations. Because you think about, you know, in business, there's the, total addressable market, There's like a sort of thing in podcasting There's only a total, addressable audience. And sometimes in certain and for certain businesses, that potential audience is it could be pretty small.

[00:10:33] Hector: and, equally, the weight of those downloads are not the same as, a typical comedy show or, these other things, it's. And so I think that has to be taken into account as

[00:10:43] Ledge: Right. Exactly. And I think the key thing for us was just to say, like, well, look. If there's only 500 people in the world that you want to sell your thing to, and in some cases, some large sort of enterprise statuses, like we did work with AWS, like how many people in the world can spend a billion dollars on cloud there just isn't, but let's get those 500 and let's make sure we are always in their face that you need to listen to that podcast, like that's the one.

[00:11:08] Ledge: And it combines that idea of brand awareness and that we have all the thought leaders and that we're the ones talking about this at scale. And some of them are going to click convert and download that podcast. And if you put all that together, you just extended that entire awareness chain. It's not just about the download.

[00:11:28] Ledge: Maybe they didn't even listen, but it took 120, 000 impressions in front of exactly the right customer to get those listeners. We pretty damn well know it came from the right. So why not co brand your ad campaigns in a way that also grows the other number and then connect all that data together. So it's just a different way of thinking about putting together even a small audience, let's get exactly the audience we want.

[00:11:54] Ledge: Do we want mid level managers who have engineering titles at aerospace companies? Damn right we do. And there's only a thousand of them. So let's go get them. And that makes it really worthwhile because now it matches against the profile of who we do want in the funnel, as opposed to just the arbitrary, like, I don't know who that thousand was, which was what a lot of the solutions were doing, prior to this,

[00:12:17] Hector: Yeah. the other thing that see becoming a challenge is the deep prioritization of the actual content. And what I mean by that is that sometimes you got to throw stuff out the wall to see what sticks, but you don't want to keep launching crap at the wall. I mean, eventually you want to improve it a little bit.

[00:12:36] Hector: how important is the, let's just call it for lack of a better term, the quality of the content. You can take that in all the different ways. But is that something that in this process, is priority or is that sort of secondary to what you're talking about in terms of the targeting and the top of mind is,

[00:12:54] Ledge: Yeah. I think of that as a, maybe the way you might think of a marketing funnel or like a left to right process. So we do want to attract the right audience. We do want to make sure we drive the right audience into the thing. But after that, there's nothing we can do except either keep paying and keep driving people in, or we call it organic retention because the content's good.

[00:13:16] Ledge: It's actually interesting. It meets at least the threshold where we're like, it doesn't make you cringe when you listen to it because there's a bunch of background noise and maybe the videos in, and actually. Decent shape, and these are actually interesting things to listen to, some of the more, let's say, less compelling, business podcasts, you're probably going to have to keep paying because honestly, like your attention is going to suck and you should have people listening to at least half of these episodes and if they're not or half of an episode on average, you want to set those thresholds of consumption rate. You want to set how many return listeners do you have? Like your audience will not grow except relative to a linear value of how much money you spent, unless the thing is good enough to retain them having not had to acquire that again and again and again and again.

[00:14:06] Ledge: And that's the same concept of. It's expensive to drive the first sale. It's hopefully not expensive and you have a good business model and subscription follow through upsells. Like these are all business tactics that you would use anyway. If you had to reacquire a customer every time they bought a 10 widget, that would be absurd.

[00:14:27] Ledge: Nobody would do that. So there are behaviors. Of quality and experience that you would do in any business context, you ought to do that in podcast to like a podcast is immediate business subsidiary. It also drives all kinds of other content and strategy and interesting things that you can do, for brand awareness and marketing.

[00:14:45] Ledge: But, I think it behaves a lot more like, might do for a startup.

[00:14:48] Hector: yeah, we've seen. Some let's call it alternative benefits in the sense of, for a number of shows, it's been a great recruiting tool,

[00:14:58] Ledge: Mhm.

[00:14:59] Hector: attracting talent. And then also, we've seen specifically applicants who are doing research on the company. They go in and listen to the show and now they have a totally different perspective on the leadership And, the, the company as a whole.

[00:15:16] Ledge: Um, you know, what's it actually like work there? do they encourage certain types of thinking? How does it align with the strategy? Is this a company that looks like they have their act together? I mean, again, like all of that is effectively brand building. you're doing brand building for a different constituent group.

[00:15:31] Ledge: As long as they can find it organically and, all those things, that's important. You also might imagine that, let's just, take it back to place we live. I haven't seen this use case, but you could certainly imagine like, hey, we're trying to attract the best engineers in, aerospace digital twinning.

[00:15:48] Ledge: Like, well, that's not a popular thing, but what if we targeted an episode or episodes about the internal engineering culture at company X? episodes ought to be presented on linked in in front of the people who maybe aren't even looking for a job, but might be susceptible to look for a job. So you could use it as a sort of a preemptive pipeline building mechanism prior to them coming out and searching, what jobs are Available so you can keep its pipeline filling, just like why not put that message out there in front of the right audience with far more lift than the intent based audience, which is saying I'm searching for a job, not unlike the audience is saying I'm searching for a solution to buy. Right now, maybe that's 5 percent of the market, 10 percent of the market.

[00:16:35] Ledge: Well, how are we building, awareness and interest in the brand and culture and whatever thing that we're talking about for the other 90%. And I think again, behaves just, based on the market economics of the B2B acquisition structure there.

[00:16:53] Hector: Yeah, this is really cool. know that there's a lot of listeners who are going, yeah, that's great, but it's kind of hard to see, the forest through the trees, or I'm trying to think of a good analogy in the sense of there's so many pieces. To put together, let alone with the podcast.

[00:17:10] Hector: And then I think both you and I sort of understand that the podcast is one piece of it, that there's other components, to leverage, whether it's promotion or, you know, and all the different things. And so If it were possible, how would you help someone to see the landscape of what they're trying to put together?

[00:17:27] Hector: the easiest thing to do is obviously to go and, hire an agency like you or work with a company like yours to do this for them. But, If you were to say, well, here are all the components that we're going to put together, here are all the key things that we're going to sort of put in place.

[00:17:40] Hector: What might those things look like?

[00:17:43] Ledge: Well. content strategy in general, right? Is saying that there's a couple pieces of content, Content comes from production costs. It's like I need to pay humans or other resources to create this asset, in the first place. Then there's distribution and distribution comes in the form of what I like to use the peso model.

[00:18:05] Ledge: It's from spin sucks. Jeannie Dietrich, right? So P. E. S. O. Paid, earned, shared and owned. And if we think about all of our media and assets in that manner. It seems odd that in this context, we would just go forget about paid. We would never do that. Okay, fine. well, we can't do earn cause nobody knows about us then.

[00:18:27] Ledge: it doesn't exist, right? Like you can't earn media attention unless there's a message that someone has been reached by. In order to tell their friends or what have you, okay, then we have shared and we have owned fine. You have a podcast. It's up. Cool. You own it. Now what? Well, let's share it on social and build some other stuff.

[00:18:44] Ledge: Fair enough, but you just cut off half the legs of the essentially promotional cycle. And I liken that like content marketing ought to be thought of as like each asset. Like I still need to make people aware of that thing. If I was making a startup. And I hung out my shingle and my investment deck, and I said, Hey, everybody, we spent all our money building this thing, but don't worry about it.

[00:19:09] Ledge: We're going to tell everyone that it's ours and I'll post on social once in a while. that doesn't compute. We wouldn't do that. You wouldn't tell entrepreneurs, please start a business or make an asset, but don't in any way think about spending some of your money on paying for distribution and reach.

[00:19:28] Ledge: That just sounds foolhardy, yet we do that in content, all the time. Forget about podcasts. Forget about whether anybody wants to do business with us. Like this is the problem that we're trying to solve. And you see all the social platforms. Let's crush their reach. LinkedIn just did this. Let's crush their reach of organic stuff.

[00:19:46] Ledge: So they have to pay for, now we're calling it content. thought leadership ads. So organic reach Facebook did this years ago, so shared is being cut off at the knees. So now your posts, instead of getting a hundred or 200 or a thousand impressions, it's going to get 10, maybe 50 to your network, even though you're followed by all these people, Why? Because they want me to pay for distribution. Everybody knows this is the game and you can't make content and rely only on free ways for people to get to that. Content in order to learn about your brand in order to cause earned media exposure, et cetera. Like there's kind of nowhere else to play.

[00:20:27] Ledge: So I think our argument is let's just be honest about that. that's the system and the field on which we're all playing. Therefore, paid distribution makes sense. Paid distribution without context, without building audience intelligence doesn't make sense. Let's build the most data rich thing that we can, I think it's hard to justify because of the way that we've all trained ourselves that reach is free and reach isn't free. And if you ever built a startup and didn't tell anybody about it and didn't do marketing, I'll tell you I have You know, that's how I learned about marketing. It's the hard way.

[00:21:00] Ledge: Like, cool. I have a business and my business and this thing I do is awesome. And my product is awesome. I'm not going to tell anybody about it. I'm not going to pay for any re reach, but I'm sure the phone will ring or, my lead form will get filled up and it's just simply preposterous. So why do we do that in media?

[00:21:17] Ledge: Why do we do that in content? don't know. Because reach used to be cheaper or free. I'm not sure. But how did we learn this bad habit that is now impossible?

[00:21:26] Hector: I think that's exactly it. That it used to be free and we're going, Hey, it used to be free. And you know,

[00:21:33] Ledge: I mean, I also prefer that it would be free, but, like, cool. Build your thing and post it on product hunt and pray, that's just not real.

[00:21:42] Hector: yeah.

[00:21:42] Ledge: so I think, again, treat it like a startup and the insane proposition that we tell people is that I can make content and everybody's just going to know about it.

[00:21:50] Ledge: I don't think that's a reasonable. Thesis in the current environment.

[00:21:55] Hector: Yeah, I used to use the analogy of it was like it would be setting up a restaurant out in the middle of the desert and hoping people would come and then people started going to Burning Man and I was like, shit, I gotta

[00:22:05] Ledge: Yeah, right, right,

[00:22:08] Hector: uh,

[00:22:09] Ledge: a burning man got a lot of earned media by spending a lot of money making shit happen in the desert and okay. I would argue that the next six ones that tried to do something in the middle of a different desert, maybe we don't know the name of that one, so you can get away with like being a first mover. The vast majority of us are not, so

[00:22:28] Hector: yeah, I think that there were a brilliant case study in marketing. I say that in jest. I got a couple more, more questions. One of them is, In marketing, there tends to be this white space and it tends to evolve and it's like what we talked about this, these sort of things that are there that aren't there anymore.

[00:22:47] Hector: And usually there's a small window, for a while it was tick tock for a while. It was, you know, linked in and whether it's anywhere on that scale that pace of model. are there gray areas that you're seeing there's sort of outsized opportunity for people who are willing to play in that space because just people haven't caught on to it quite yet.

[00:23:09] Ledge: yeah. And I think it comes from the, let's call it the zooming in, right? So you maybe can't see giant white areas that are unattached right now, but what happens when you zoom in on that landscape and you see, Hey, you know what? There's a pretty decent plot there. And I think we call that in our world, we call that niche, Niche content, there just simply isn't room for more, everybody wants to be the Joe Rogan or, what have you, right? there are always going to be the 0. 1 percent that are a terrible analog for anything that anyone's trying to achieve in business, for. The fact of, but I've talked to, you know, dozens and dozens of creators who are in this space of, you know, Hey, I talked to a niche audience and that's really valuable.

[00:23:53] Ledge: So it goes back to your point before. It's like, well, what if my audience is small? Well, if your audience is small, but it's dedicated and. It addresses this direct need for content that there may only be a thousand or two thousand people who care, but they really, really care. And those people are adjacent audience to buy something else, and that that is the white space that we now have the ability and, the commoditization, if you will, of production.

[00:24:21] Ledge: not to say that agencies shouldn't exist. Like, there's a good reason. Like, it's, hard to do this by yourself, you know? So I still don't think that it's gone yet, but I mean, all of us in agency space are always going to be five years from extinction if we don't evolve to, you know, there's, there will come a time where you mean everybody else can flip a switch and a podcast just happens by some AI agent look at notebook lm, the writings on the wall, like this thing sounds pretty damn good. so in that context, what's the only thing you have left is your actual authentic conversations with actual authentic people in a smaller and smaller bucket that only you have trust and credibility with.

[00:25:06] Ledge: So my argument would be everyone should be doing this in the same way that Everybody should have started and stayed with the authoritative blog in their tiny little area back in 2007. They really, really wish they did that because now. Up until maybe, you know, if SEO is in trouble or, whatever happens to search traffic, like you would have had a pretty damn good 20 year run of having an outrageous domain authority.

[00:25:36] Ledge: I think podcasting is at that point. So why would you not want an authentic voice out there that can reach the people, that you want to be reaching? I think that's my argument just go smaller, go niche. That's exactly what you would tell a business to do. You know, have a very, have a niche that's so small that 99 percent of people say that's not me upon reading the first headline because now the other 1 percent is in play.

[00:26:01] Hector: Yeah, this is great stuff. Fledge. if people want to get more connected with you, they want to find out more about what you guys offer and your services and stuff. Where's the best place for people to go?

[00:26:11] Ledge: David ledge ledger wood on LinkedIn, very active. They're always happy to connect with anybody in the B2B services space in the podcast space. I love talking about this stuff. And if what we're talking about for Alyssa network is appealing to you, it's Alyssa network. co.

[00:26:28] Hector: Awesome. We'll link all that up in the show notes as well. And, uh, appreciate you guys hanging out with us. We'll see on the next one. Later y'all.