Quote of the Show

Creating evangelists is like a brand. It's going to take a while, but if you start there, you can see incremental improvements over time.

Key Takeaways

 

• Not everything needs to be scalable; unscalable activities can have a significant impact on building relationships and creating evangelists.
• Personalized gestures, such as sending gifts or acknowledging life moments, can turn customers into evangelists who promote your brand.
• Identifying internal evangelists, leveraging product usage data, and listening to customer feedback can help identify potential evangelists.
• Benchmarking referral data and tracking social mentions can provide insights into the impact of unscalable activities.
• The future of the community is promising, with a growing focus on strategy, intentionality, and creating meaningful connections.

Transcript

In this episode of Revenue Today, Leslie Greenwood joins Jared Robin to discuss the power of unscalable activities in go-to-market strategies. She debunks the myth that everything needs to be scalable and shares examples of unscalable tactics that have had tremendous success. Leslie emphasizes the importance of human connection and intentionality in building relationships and creating evangelists. She also highlights the need for a holistic view of the community beyond demand gen and customer success.

[00:00:40] Hey, dear friends. I’m joined by an incredible guest, um, for this week’s episode of Revenue Today. She has been a leader in CS for many years, um, and transitioned to. Working for pavilion in a similar role, which is a phenomenal community of revenue professionals. And right now, she has started her own chief evangelist consulting as the founder and CEO.

[00:01:14] Welcome Leslie Greenwood. How are you? 

[00:01:16] Leslie Greenwood: Welcome. Well, thank you for welcoming me, Jared Robin. I need more coffee, obviously. 

[00:01:23] Jared Robin: I just gave up coffee, uh, as of two days ago. And the irony is, um, I I’ve,  like woken up earlier, just not by alarm by subtle anxiety, as I call it. Um, and, uh, and like, those are the days I’m saying no to coffee.

[00:01:42] So it makes me really, I know I have to be serious about Scaling it back, so to speak, 

[00:01:51] Leslie Greenwood: sounds horrible. I’m not, I’m not co signing with you on that. I’m, 

[00:01:55] Jared Robin: I’m TBD. I don’t need extra coffee though in the morning for those that know me, but really excited to have you excited to learn from you and, you know, just want to come out with a bang.

[00:02:10] Like, we’d love to hear it. You debunk a myth about GTM. 

[00:02:17] Leslie Greenwood: It is a great question. And, um, if we’re in talking about primarily SAS people, there’s a lot of myths, but the one that I’m probably the most passionate about is that not everything needs to be scalable. We do not, we’re going to try something. And the first question out of someone’s mouth is like, is that scalable?

[00:02:39] I’m like, we haven’t tried it yet. Why? Why? We don’t need to talk about that. 

[00:02:44] Jared Robin: Hold, hold, please. And this is, this is big. Like so, so many companies early on say do what isn’t scalable, but you’re saying just continue it throughout. I 

[00:02:57] Leslie Greenwood: mean, it depends on the situation. If you can’t prove ROI at some point and it, there is a time when some things have to move to a scalability, but I think so many people put it up as a roadblock.

[00:03:07] In order to even begin the process, and there are things in my opinion, of course, we’re going to talk about evangelists, which are seem unscalable, but they actually are scalable that we just, you just need to do. And that’s, there’s a whole movement of what’s old is new. I’m seeing, I don’t know if you’re seeing that too.

[00:03:28] It’s like, You know, the human connection talking about, you know, being more intentional with that and stop calling everybody at SQL and MQL and kind of going back to basics. Everything you do on that is pretty unscalable. And so I’m saying, let’s capitalize on that and. And, and go for it 

[00:03:50] Jared Robin: and, and, you know, being a community person, I, I couldn’t agree more now.

[00:03:56] Now you’re a community person as well. And evangelism person, um, would love to hear some examples of some of the unscalable things that you’ve seen have tremendous success. 

[00:04:09] Leslie Greenwood: Yeah. Um, one example, I mean, is an example from when I was with pavilion. Um, you know, I was there when we went from 2000 to 10, 000 members and was in charge of everything post enrollment.

[00:04:22] So, you name it, I might have called you for collections at some point, totally not scalable and not a job I wanted to do, but, you know, we would, we kind of, we called it roam the halls of slack and we would find little nuggets about people. Someone got a new job. Someone had a baby. Someone got married and we would literally log into wine.

[00:04:41] com or printful and send them a t shirt or a bottle of wine. Totally not scalable. This, we had a spreadsheet this long, we had a budget, and we just worked through the items every, every month. But what that did was, those people, if they weren’t an evangelist, or they weren’t somebody that would go talk about pavilion.

[00:05:06] In public, they would now because they’re going to post that thing on LinkedIn and, um, that drove so much business and I’m, I’m experiencing the same thing. Now, I send every 1 of my podcast guests and some customers grow cookies. If you go into my feed and see what I’m tagged in, I am over 50 percent of the cookies I’ve sent have ended up on LinkedIn.

[00:05:31] What is that for me? 33 cookies equals. Hundreds and thousands of dollars of free advertising because it’s personal and it actually is not 

[00:05:44] Jared Robin: unscalable. This is so incredible. Like, um, do you know, like what percentage of folks that you surprised and delighted, um, would post and, and, and all those numbers and, and, and some of the, some of the loops around that?

[00:06:03] Leslie Greenwood: You know what? I don’t know. I’m guessing it’s 50%. Of everyone I’ve sent has said something and then it hits their networks and you know, I have pretty decent guests on so they have really good networks like when Sam McKenna or Matt Green post about my, my gift to them. I’m getting a lot more views than I’m getting off my own off my own stuff.

[00:06:24] The other thing it does is it cements a relationship and those are the people that will go and refer me to other people. So that 1 little thing actually. I have not measured the ROI, but that one thing makes a huge difference in my business. 

[00:06:40] Jared Robin: And you mentioned, um, you know, before hopping on like us and technology and your work there and, um, a phenomenal organization.

[00:06:51] Is there anything you could share about like, The early go to market advice from your evangelism and community mind, um, that might not be scalable as well. Yeah. 

[00:07:03] Leslie Greenwood: Um, so this is what we’re working on right now. We’ve rolled out an ambassador program, which when I talk about ambassadors, I oftentimes consider them a paid person.

[00:07:13] You know, they might get equity or something. It’s more of a formal program. These are actually evangelists. They’re just people that love the program. Yeah. Um, and so right now we’re in the middle of posting one by one individual messages or individual posts on LinkedIn and Instagram, highlighting the people.

[00:07:31] What do I need them? What do I need every person that works at us in tech to do? Go and like and comment, make them feel special. Like that is a huge part of like our next level of growth strategy. And so that’s 1 example. And if you’ll permit me another example. Um, 

[00:07:51] Jared Robin: we want all the 

[00:07:52] Leslie Greenwood: examples, all the examples.

[00:07:53] Okay. So I’m also an advisor for porch. It is a community out of Canada. It’s for international immigrant entrepreneurs moving to Canada. It’s basically like their line as they’re working through the visa process, they become part of this community, they meet people, and then they, when they, you know, end up in Canada, they already have a network.

[00:08:13] They know where to find an immigration lawyer. They’ve already connected with an immigration lawyer. Like there’s so many benefits that they have. And, um, the community launched eight months ago. And last month I counted because LinkedIn, for some reason, has no good way to figure this out. How many members?

[00:08:32] Posted about their community tagged porch in a community. It was 51 in one month. They don’t have thousands of members. So 51 people, just because they love porch, go out and talk about it. And that’s because of the extra care, extra service and delivering an experience beyond expectation. And they’ve they’re benefiting greatly from that.

[00:09:02] Jared Robin: Yeah. It seems like, um, there’s, there’s a couple nuances going on. 1, um, surprise and delight from, um, pavilion you have, uh, in porch, just giving them a really good experience and them doing it. And the 3rd us and technology, it sounds like you’re picking out people that have had. Good experiences or, um, have been active, I’m guessing on social, but could be anywhere in slack or whatever network.

[00:09:38] Is that right? Are there 3 different, slightly different use cases there? Yeah. 

[00:09:43] Leslie Greenwood: Yeah. Um, yeah, there’s different parts of the journey. So the, um, when I talk about evangelism, like there’s identify, engage and amplify. So in, in us, in technology, we’re on amplify because we found the people, they filled out a form, they told us why they wanna be an ambassador.

[00:10:05] We put those quotes on their, on our graphic, and it’s like, it, you changed my life. You gave me an opportunity. I’ve met so many friends and now we put them out and our goal is, you know, we want them to feel special. We want them to feel, you know, like part, really part of it. And also then they’re going to tell more people about it.

[00:10:27] More people are going to see it. More people will know the name of some technology. And then, you know, those are the people that we rely on to get feedback and have one on one calls with. So that’s the amplification part. Um, the pavilion was the identify part. So I may go and look and see who’s really active.

[00:10:48] And I’ll find that person and if they’ve had a, um, a life moment or if they’ve just been doing great, send them a t shirt. That’s the engage part. And then right now, the identify part really is Porch. Who are the people that are constantly showing up, etc. And then, then it’s engaging them and helping them be more confident to post about Porch.

[00:11:14] So really, it’s kind of the same thing. But there are different stages of the journey to get to the evangelism part. 

[00:11:24] Jared Robin: The, yeah. My, my biggest question always was, um, when you’ve scaled, how do you identify the people, um, to make evangelists? 

[00:11:36] Leslie Greenwood: Hmm. I have so many ideas, so, okay. Do you wanna talk about in community first or if you don’t have a community first?

[00:11:42] If, 

[00:11:43] Jared Robin: if you’re a SaaS company, Your SAS company and then, and then in community, because that’s just my personal wanting to know 

[00:11:50] Leslie Greenwood: that. Of course. Of course. So if you’re a SAS company, you have no community right now, you can look at, um, product usage data. So who’s in there every day and and who’s so who’s your internal evangelist.

[00:12:05] So you have 10 seats, 3 seats are being used and you have 1 super user and it’s probably not the champion or the person that wrote the check. How do you get to that person so they can influence more people to use seats, which makes the product stickier, renew better, et cetera, or what kind of feedback can you get from them on how you might overcome the renewal conversation?

[00:12:27] Um, so that’s 1. It is also, um, who’s leaving you NPS comments. I don’t really care about the numbers. The numbers don’t tell me anything, but if you took time to write a comment and you had a suggestion or feedback, then I want to talk, I want to know your name. I want to figure out who you are. Why did you say that?

[00:12:45] And then are you a candidate then to be that evangelist for me? Um, the other place, you know, support feedback. Then ask your customer success people, ask your support, your tier one support knows who are your frequent flyers, who calls every day, who gives you the feature requests that you may not want.

[00:13:07] But they’re so invested in the product that they give it to you anyway, who’s that person. So, you know, that’s, that’s how I would find them start to find them in, without a community in a 

[00:13:18] Jared Robin: community. Well, then, and then the second part, um, of that is, um. For like growth purposes. So, um, you, you laid out really nice way to grow the account.

[00:13:30] I want to say growth purposes for marketing purposes. Is there anything that you would add? Oh, 

[00:13:38] Leslie Greenwood: like to use that data on, um, from a marketing perspective going forward. 

[00:13:41] Jared Robin: Yeah. Like, like to help, to help, uh, generate demand. 

[00:13:45] Leslie Greenwood: Yeah. I mean, customer you test your normal testimonials, um, et cetera. Um, people are, you know, this from running rev genius that people love having an elevated status.

[00:13:59] So if the person is the right persona, once you post their testimonial on LinkedIn, tag them, make them feel special, give them, um, a little bit of authority within that. And that’s now perfect word of mouth marketing. And now you’ve probably re cemented them as an evangelist for you as well. Just one idea.

[00:14:22] Jared Robin: I love it. Uh, KPIs, like how, how do we know these not scalable activities are going in the right direction? What, what, what do you like to, to roll out? Yeah. It 

[00:14:35] Leslie Greenwood: depends on where the company is. So, you know, I’m oftentimes working with either new Companies or people revamping their, um, their kind of the way they go work their community.

[00:14:47] So there are 2 things that I look at. 1 is benchmark your referral data. A lot of people, their referral data, they don’t have it. They don’t know it. They couldn’t give me a list of the people we can find them. If you have an open hub spot form in your. Call, we’ll just download that and see how many John does, you know, show up and let’s, let’s find them.

[00:15:09] So you benchmark that. And then as you start doing some of these evangelists growing processes, how does that change? Do their names start showing up more? And so see if your referrals go. Um, increase. The other thing is social mentions. So if you’re doing that and you’re making people feel a certain way about your brand, which I’m very much into, like, what does it feel like to be a customer of X?

[00:15:35] What does it feel like to be a member of RevGenius or RevRoom? What does it feel like to be a customer of a certain company? Do you make me feel attached more than others? So then it’s looking at those social mentions. Are people talking about you? Um, what does that look like? And then what is your word of mouth kind of, um, I don’t know results look like, so that’s that’s where I start because you can’t measure it.

[00:16:04] I mean, they’re not going to end up on a dashboard for a long time because creating evangelists is like, you know. It’s like brand. It’s going to take a while, but if you start there, you can see some incremental improvements over time. For sure. 

[00:16:16] Jared Robin: That’s super helpful. Now, um, what’s keeping you up at night?

[00:16:23] Leslie Greenwood: Um, what’s keeping me up at night? Okay. So I am currently, um, a founder of my one company. I have just co founded another company, Wednesday women. So business development is always, you know, top of mind, but more than that, I’d say it is balancing as a solopreneur, all of the things that I need to do. I need to deliver client work.

[00:16:50] I need to have phone calls. I need to, um. You know, keep, keep in touch with my evangelist who refer me and I need to do some outbound, you know, outbound stuff. I have nothing. I don’t even have a, I don’t have a, any thing set up in HubSpot for marketing. So it’s like, how do I balance all that stuff out and still feel very fulfilled in my job and still do the things I love, which is like, I want to work in community.

[00:17:16] I want to talk about community. And I don’t want to post freaking my podcast on LinkedIn and all of this kind of stuff. And I’m in that stage where, you know, I’m not making enough to like hire someone, but not hiring someone is, is stifling me. So that’s, it’s like that growth. Oddly enough, I think it’s scaling, which is keeping me up at night.

[00:17:39] Isn’t that a little crazy crap? 

[00:17:42] Jared Robin: The, the, the irony. Yeah, is it lost? I mean, like, what, what, what, what advice would you give for others in the same situation? Like, what, what, what have you learned? 

[00:17:54] Leslie Greenwood: I have to time block. Number one, I have to time block and, you know, really focus in on the things that make the biggest difference.

[00:18:01] I think as, and probably you saw this too, when you were first starting out, there are so many things you could be doing. That may seem important, but they’re not that 80%. They’re not the big rocks that need to be moved. And that’s kind of how I’ve started organizing my, my to do list. It’s like big rocks tasks.

[00:18:19] I gotta be moving on the big rocks, you know, every day. Otherwise the task will overwhelm me. And so it’s really that kind of organization that’s, that I’m trying to, um, Put into place, not necessarily a hundred percent successful yet. 

[00:18:35] Jared Robin: It’s hard, uh, for sure. And, um, as a founder, you could have something to do every second of every minute of the day.

[00:18:47] Um, you hit the nail on the head with, with focusing, uh, figuring out. Where that focus should be is, is, is the first step because, um, it’s not always, who’s going to give me money and who’s not there. There’s leading indicators as well. Right. And, uh, that’s, that’s big, but what excites you about the future, uh, of, of the whole SAS space, evangelism, whatever.

[00:19:15] Leslie Greenwood: I think we’re going to see a new realm and community. So like, you know, I have lots of talks about, I love talking. To commute to early stage founders about community because they love it and they get it now. Oftentimes I can’t quite afford it yet, either in time or money, but I love that. They’re having these conversations.

[00:19:33] Like, if I could talk to forward thinking sass founders that are probably, you know, post seed round all day that are open to the idea of community beyond. Um, as we talked about this a little bit before, beyond demand gen, beyond customer success, they can take this holistic view of it and think about it for brand.

[00:19:57] Think about it for creating evangelists, which will drive, you know, I feel a lot of money and a lot of revenue downstream, but it’s going to take some time. And they’re willing to make those commitments. Like if I could talk to people like that all day. I mean, that’s what I’m excited about. I’m excited about having those conversations, which I think are a leading indicator to more conversations.

[00:20:17] I’m also excited that, you know, we had community 1. 0, you know, that’s, that’s when, you know, a lot of communities were born, they threw up a Slack instance, or they put up a mighty network or whatever, and they called it a community, those are folding or have already folded. And I think there is a big opportunity for community builders and communities that really want to double down on throwing in strategy, having a point of view.

[00:20:48] Et cetera, to grab up a lot of this, these community people that are still looking for their, their group, but they lost it, um, somewhere else. So I think there’s a, I think there’s big momentum and in the future for 

[00:21:02] Jared Robin: community and you’re referring to third party communities away from companies when you say that.

[00:21:10] Leslie Greenwood: Uh, no, I could be talking about companies too, because I mean, the number of people I talked to that say, well, we tried it, but it didn’t work. Well, that’s because no one talked about, well, no, people did. People were always talking about community strategy, but not in this earlier stage SaaS world. They weren’t talking about like, we knew Salesforce had a great community.

[00:21:31] We knew HubSpot had a great community, but nobody of the size in the, you know, 1 to 50 million was talking about. Community and so those are dying or dead and they’re there, they have a community, but I wouldn’t say that it’s, you know, they’re, they’re not all fabulous. Let’s put it that way 

[00:21:51] Jared Robin: agreed. And I’m what gets me the most curious because I’ve spoken to some early stage folks as well when they become a series B company with a little more VC and a little less, a little more people in the boardroom.

[00:22:09] Does that conversation change? Yeah. Because they don’t have the money to invest now and then when other people come in, are they saying, Oh, give me 15 million. I’m going to invest in community. Um, or are they saying, I’m going to invest in what’s going to generate revenue? 

[00:22:27] Leslie Greenwood: Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s going to be a balance.

[00:22:29] I mean, I think that they have to really understand if they can understand the longterm play of that, because I will straight up tell people when I’m, I’m working with them, there’s nothing that we’re going to do that you’re going to put on a board slide the next few months. I’m very upfront about that.

[00:22:44] Now, it’s not going to cost them 15 million to do a community, but, um, that’s why I’m excited that these community conversations are happening because I think they will become more accepted by the board. You say I’m going to have a community. You give them the strategy in which you’re going to build the community.

[00:23:00] And I think they’re going to start understanding. I think what happens is especially, and you probably hear this as well, but like the people I talk about community. There’s 75 different versions of what people call community. It’s like when we call every tissue a Kleenex, well, some are scratchy and I don’t want to use them.

[00:23:17] And some feel like a dream. And that’s exactly the way that we’re using community right now. 

[00:23:23] Jared Robin: Yeah. And it’s funny because the community leaders I’ve spoken to, it’s not funny. It’s normal. Um, if they’ve worked for three communities, they’ve had three different game plans and there’s, it’s not a rinse and repeat.

[00:23:37] It’s understanding the market. Building something for the people, um, pavilion, um, member is going to be different than a GitHub member is going to be different than a Zapier member. 

[00:23:54] Leslie Greenwood: They all need their own recipe. So like

[00:23:59] Jared Robin: having, having like a listening stage and stuff like that. I think, I think, yeah, I think you’re spot on. I think, um, community is going to have to come from SAS companies building it. Yeah. I 

[00:24:13] Leslie Greenwood: mean, it’s just that we have to, BDC has been doing it forever. B2C does it great. They have great communities and they have advocates and they have people talking about them all the time.

[00:24:23] And just, it just has not, you know, come down to the normal size B2B in the way. You know, the way it could, um, when you think like what you’re just said, it’s like a hundred percent different. So like, I’m going to work on engagement highly in some of these third party communities and other communities.

[00:24:41] I’m going to talk about. Acquisition upsell success, it could be a, I don’t really work in customer support, but like, are you offsetting support costs? Like there’s all these different and people don’t usually choose one. It’s like, maybe you choose one as a main and the second in a tertiary. Every recipe is different and then how we go about executing on that strategy is totally different and is about 75 steps for anybody that’s curious and thought they’re just going to go and start a community tomorrow.

[00:25:10] If you want to do it, right, it’s not going to happen in, uh, by turning on a button. 

[00:25:15] Jared Robin: Yeah, I, I, I think I’m excited about the future of community too, because I do think the light has been turned on. And that’s, that’s an important step. I think that there’s a massive opportunity because not a ton of folks.

[00:25:32] No community and can do it, but I do, I think there’s a massive opportunity to teach folks as well. And, um, and, and I think it’s, I think it’s an exciting time. All right. I want to transition, um, this, like the first half we learned from you of this podcast. I want to learn about you. Who are you? Leslie? 

[00:25:56] Leslie Greenwood: Who am I?

[00:25:56] Well, it’s funny. I have answered this question in interviews before and I’m sitting in front of a CEO and they ask, you know, who are you? And my answer always is I’m a mom, like at my core. I’m a mom. That’s how I will describe myself all the time. Now. That’s a boat. That’s a benefit. You know, and there’s also this part of me who’s like, when someone says, Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m talking to you.

[00:26:20] I’m like, why? I’m a Midwestern housewife, like, you know, ex stay at home mom is on my LinkedIn profile. Because I was making fun of all the ex Google people and stuff. So I’m like, I’m an ex Danville mom. Um, so like, first and foremost, I’m a mom. I am passionate about, um, diversity in tech. I have a multiracial family.

[00:26:42] And so I want my family to have more opportunities than what people are having now. Um, to get into tech and to not just get into tech, but actually grow in the ranks and make it beyond director, just like women. Um, I want to see more women in the C suite. So I’m just like, that is something I’m super passionate about, um, working with underrepresented founders.

[00:27:06] And, um, other than that, you know, I’m, I’m a little, I’m a little, uh, I’m a little opinionated. I have a lot of ideas. Um, I’m a DC on the disc, which means I’m direct and like data. So I explained that is I’m, uh, I think I’m right. And I’m probably going to tell you why. Um, so that’s, uh, that’s, that’s 1 of my personality traits and.

[00:27:34] Yeah. And I like to work and I have very bad boundaries. I don’t keep my personal boundaries very well. I’ll say yes to too many things, but 

[00:27:41] Jared Robin: I think community people are all guilty of that. By the way, I think, I think, I think it’s a similar trait. Like, Oh, that looks cool. Any qualification. I like them. Like that’s Like, I like the person that’s the qualification.

[00:27:55] Let’s go. Um, I just, somebody asked me to be an advisor today. I told them, um, I don’t care if the product works. I like you that much that I need to. Um, normally I’m a little more, um, Pragmatic. But this person was great. Uh, 

[00:28:15] Leslie Greenwood: there’s a, there’s a good human bonus system. Like if you are just a good human, like at your core, you’re kind, you do things for others.

[00:28:24] You help people like that. Honestly, we’ll get just like what you were describing that will get you so far. I will go move mountains for you if you are just a really good 

[00:28:33] Jared Robin: human karma. Yeah. And I think, uh, so. Tell me about the companies you mentioned a couple. I want to learn more. Um, your, your main gig, your, your women’s gig, Wednesday, women and, and anything else that I missed 

[00:28:53] Leslie Greenwood: advisory, just advisory roles.

[00:28:55] Um, but those are the two, um, officially official in. So yeah, chief evangelist consulting, uh, launched last November. Um, basically working with, um, companies or communities, so either networking or communities of practice or companies looking to build or revamp their communities, go in and most of the time do an assessment and see what’s going right, see what’s going wrong, see if do we even have the sticky glue to build a community, because I would say every four calls, I’m like, do some research and then come back to me later because they don’t have the glue to keep a community together, and so we’ll, we’ll work on that and we’ll, um, yeah.

[00:29:32] Um, strategically plan and then implement it through our, um, through launch and then, um, same thing with, um, sorry, now see, we talked about this now I’m saying, um, 8, 000 times and it’s probably 

[00:29:45] Jared Robin: all for everyone listening. Leslie is a phenomenal public speaker, but she, uh, like, like us all have some flaws and I, I, I, I.

[00:29:55] I, I, I can’t, can’t wait, uh, to not listen to how many times I probably set up . 

[00:30:03] Leslie Greenwood: Yes. So the, okay, now I forget Mark Clip to change this. What is your, what was your question again? I got myself 

[00:30:12] Jared Robin: lost. Uh, so we talked about, uh, oh, the Business Chief Evangelist Consulting and now, uh, Wednesday women. 

[00:30:19] Leslie Greenwood: Okay, perfect.

[00:30:20] And then the other company that we actually just launched is Wednesday Women, and it really is a passion project. Um, we have this group of women that I’ve actually started scraping about a year and a half ago. Every time someone would post, who are the women CEOs I need to know? I don’t know enough.

[00:30:38] They’re not in my feed. And as people tag people, I either personally or I hired someone from Fiverr eventually to go in and scrape their names. And I have a database of 600 people that have been peer nominated as women to follow. And so I was just, you know, playing around with that. I had it, I’d post it here and there.

[00:30:56] And then I think I ended up on Melissa Moody’s post from the CMO and co founder. Yeah. She’s my partner. Like, so we’re co founders. I 

[00:31:05] Jared Robin: just sent her an email this weekend. 

[00:31:07] Leslie Greenwood: Great. Yeah. So she’s my co founder. She’s like, you want to do something with this? And you know, she’s have the strategic plan. We have this, we have marketing, we have a website and it’s all about every week.

[00:31:19] We feature one to two women on Wednesday. We tell about them and we tell about them more than just their, their, um, You know, professional accolades that you could talk about on LinkedIn is really just to gain more visibility for them. Um, I want to see more women on panels and speakers, et cetera. And so just amplifying their profiles.

[00:31:41] So they get more. More visibility. And that’s where we’re starting and we’ve grown really fast, which is very interesting and 1600 followers. And I don’t know how many weeks, five, six weeks on a business page. So, um, so we’re looking to take that to the next level, just see where it goes. 

[00:32:01] Jared Robin: If I could help in any way, like I would love to, um, I have so many thoughts.

[00:32:08] Uh, I think, um. Women, uh, investors would be an interesting angle because when, when the money comes from women, you know, it flows, you know, a certain way and, and, and, and not just women, like, like more diversity amongst the investors in general, um, is something that I think could solve a lot in general. And, um,

[00:32:36] yeah, I, I. I love the idea. It’s, it’s awesome. 

[00:32:42] Leslie Greenwood: Thank you. We’re looking for our first sponsors, so I probably need to pick your brain. You’re good at getting sponsorships, so I should probably talk 

[00:32:50] Jared Robin: to you about that. We could talk, we could, we could absolutely talk. And, um, yeah, that, that would be so exciting because I, I, I think it’s, it’s a great thing.

[00:33:02] Is it just, does it just come out in a newsletter or is it on LinkedIn or Twitter? 

[00:33:09] Leslie Greenwood: Right now it’s just on LinkedIn. Cause it’s seriously, we are both founders of other companies. We are doing this, like I’m slacking her at, you know, 11 PM at night. And we’re making carousels and trying to comment on things.

[00:33:21] So right now it is the on, on LinkedIn. And then we have a website Wednesday, women. org. Which has a little bit more information, but we, we need development. 

[00:33:33] Jared Robin: What do you think, uh, as, as of now, what do you think the goal is outside of lifting women? Like, is there, is, is there any, uh, target or. Yeah. Goals that you’ve set up to, 

[00:33:46] Leslie Greenwood: we have all kinds of plans.

[00:33:48] Um, like the, there’s some easy ones. There’s some longer term ones, but there are, um, more like a database. So let’s say, you know, people like I couldn’t find a great speaker of X and that’s, you know, the reasons why they don’t have a diverse panel. Well, there’s no excuse for that because we want in people’s minds, I would need to go find, Okay.

[00:34:08] And the expert speaker, and I’m looking to have a diverse panel. Oh, yeah, I should go to Wednesday. That’s what we want to be known for. We want to be known that that’s that’s where you go to get access to, um, the women and, um, yeah, I mean, there’s just. Okay. I’ll, I’ll leak out something 

[00:34:29] Jared Robin: I’m waiting for it because you two are just powerhouses.

[00:34:32] What? 

[00:34:33] Leslie Greenwood: Web talks. So like Ted talks, these are Wednesday women. So web talks, like getting, you know, having these women to have the showcase, you know, if they don’t have a speaker reel already, that’ll get them a speaker reel so they can get more speaking, um, engagement. So yeah, I could go on 

[00:34:50] Jared Robin: and on Wednesday.

[00:34:51] Why Wednesday is the day 

[00:34:55] Leslie Greenwood: Melissa, um, genius CMO thought it was a great idea. So I defer to her on all marketing things. 

[00:35:04] Jared Robin: This has been an incredible conversation. I, I am so happy. We were able to peel back the onion, like what’s going on with Wednesday women. Cause I know a lot of people are really, um, Excited for it.

[00:35:17] And, uh, and we know that you two are so brilliant that it’s got to be more than just posting great women. Like how, how else are you doing that? And that’s going to be fun to fun to 

[00:35:26] Leslie Greenwood: watch. We’re, we’re, we’re excited. We just need, we just need time. 

[00:35:33] Jared Robin: That’s incredible. And I’m excited too. So what I’m most excited about in the future is seeing how that, um, how that helps lift women, um, in the space and hopefully other spaces too.

[00:35:45] Oh yeah, 

[00:35:46] Leslie Greenwood: we’re expanding. I mean, Jared, you know, we can’t stay in SaaS. We’re gonna run out of women to executive women to, um, feature in like four weeks. So Oh 

[00:35:55] Jared Robin: my gosh. I mean, but, but, but like training programs to get women up, um, to executive, uh, uh, politic, not politicking, uh, you know, lobbying big companies to like, like change how they hire and stuff.

[00:36:13] Mm-hmm. and, and all. Educating big companies, I should say on how they change part of the choice of words, but, um, that’s exciting. And unfortunately, unfortunately, what you’re doing is needed, but fortunately, you’re doing it. 

[00:36:29] Leslie Greenwood: Yeah, well, our goal right now is small ripples, you know, yeah, it’s just on LinkedIn, but it’s a small ripple, but if.

[00:36:36] One of our Wednesday women get an opportunity to speak from it. They increase their followership by a couple hundred people, which increases their reach and brings them more opportunities. Like it’s a huge win. Um, and that’s why we’re focused real small and real niche right now. It’s just to, you know, we want to make these small ripples that’ll eventually lead to big change.

[00:36:55] Jared Robin: Let’s set up, uh, let’s talk offline about this in more detail. Uh, I, I want to help wherever I can, but in closing. How can people get in touch with you? Well, 

[00:37:07] Leslie Greenwood: there’s, according to my screen time on my phone, there’s one place that you can find me an awful lot. And that is on LinkedIn. So, um, just Leslie dash Greenwood on LinkedIn, hit me up on LinkedIn.

[00:37:19] Um, I have a website, Wednesday, women. org and the chief evangelist. com. Um, or other ways, but yeah, just hit me up on LinkedIn or if you’re in one of the communities I’m in, you know, you’ll find me on Slack somewhere. 

[00:37:31] Jared Robin: Leslie, this has been so great. Thank you for coming on today. 

[00:37:35] Leslie Greenwood: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

[00:37:37] It was nice to, nice to meet you. Finally, 

[00:37:40] Jared Robin: uh, this, this is only the first of, of our discussions and, and I’m excited to see, um, Well, we could do together and for everyone listening, thank you for listening. If you learned something or you liked it, give it a like, share it with some people, evangelize 

[00:37:58] Leslie Greenwood: it.

[00:37:58] Yeah. Let’s build some evangelists here, Jared. 

[00:38:00] Jared Robin: Evangelize it. Uh, want to learn more about Leslie? Um, you know, she, she outlaid all the spots that she could be found. Thank you for coming today and have a great day. We’ll see, we’ll see you next week.

[00:38:16] Thank you friends for joining me. That was another great episode of revenue today. If you’re looking to listen to more episodes or for the show notes, go to RevGenius. com. For all my friends in the RevGenius community, it was awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback or ideas for future podcasts in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn.

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