It's All About Relationships

Carlos Gil is CEO of Gil Media, a digital media company that specializes in video production, influencer marketing, social media community management, talent management, and content marketing. Carlos is a first generation Latino marketing executive, award-winning Snapchat storyteller, and author of a recent bestseller: "The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI," available on Amazon. He presents bilingual keynotes at major marketing industry events.

In this interview, Carlos reviews his unconventional path to success, the importance of passion, and the long-term humanizing person to person linkage that creates business opportunities. There are no shortcuts. He believes the strength of a company is in its employees. He hopes his book will help companies future-proof their brands and their businesses for the long term.

In 2008, Carlos lost his job in the financial industry – the same day that he joined LinkedIn. A couple of days later, he started an online LinkedIn group job board, JobsDirectUSA.com., and promoted awareness through social media (which was in its infancy). He learned how to build relationships through social media and enabled thousands of mid- to senior-level career professionals to find jobs. Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and numerous trade publications featured his work with this startup. In 2010, Fast Company recognized him as one of the Top 50 "Most Influential People Online".

Carlos worked for a couple of grocery stores chains, developing their social media platforms, before joining LinkedIn to run social media for their Sales Solution business unit. His personal brand grew as he was repeatedly tapped to speak at marketing industry conferences.

Carlos took one final corporate job with BMC Software because he wanted the opportunity to work with Nick Utton. Used to battling the status quo in highly-structured hierarchies, Carlos had been frustrated by bureaucratic foot-dragging when he tried to get things done. Nick taught Carlos to "Fail fast, learn from that failure, and keep moving forward to what does work." Carlos says that it is important, wherever you are in your career, that you have a leader who really supports you.

Today? A best selling book . . . A résumé showing over a decade of experience running digital and social media marketing for enterprise brands . . . A highly-successful agency working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients . . . Worldwide speaking engagements. For a man who dropped out of high school, got his GED, and jumped into an MBA program at age 30, Carlos has far exceeded expectations. He credits getting laid off in 2008 as the springboard for what has become an amazing track record of accomplishments. In the face of Covid-19, Carlos is one more entrepreneur re-inventing himself for these challenging times.

For those who have questions, Carlos can be reached at @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. (Just let him know you heard him on Rob's podcast), on LinkedIn, or by email . . . at carlos@gilmedia.co. To view Carlos interviewing his mentor, Nick Utton, (9/25/2018, topic "How to Sell to a CMO and Marketing Truths with Nick Utton."), see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql733a53xa0

Transcript Follows:

ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carlos Gil, CEO of Gil Media. He's a keynote speaker, an author of the recent bestseller, The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI, and he's based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos.

CARLOS: Hey, Rob. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

ROB: Sure, glad to have you here. Wish we were in person in Austin, Texas as we had planned, but the coronavirus had other plans. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your own journey into the world of marketing agency speaking origins?

CARLOS: My career in marketing actually started in 2008. I started my career in the early 2000s working in the finance and banking industry. It was right around the fall of 2008 that the banking industry took a turn for the worse. I was laid off. I was working for AIG at the time. The same day I lost my job is the same day that I joined LinkedIn.

To put it into context for everyone listening out there, the moment I lost my job, hundreds of thousands of other Americans lost their jobs too, and the irony with what we're seeing happening today in this current crisis is – It reminds me a lot of what I went through about 12 years ago, early on in my career. I joined LinkedIn the same day I lost my job, and I became really inspired to help others find work.

I knew that the likelihood of my finding a job in banking any time soon was probably not going to happen. It was looking really bleak. Within just a few days of joining LinkedIn, I became inspired to help others find jobs, so I started my first business, and that was an online job board.

Now, to put this in perspective for you, I was 25 years old at the time. I had no experience running a business. My parents are serial entrepreneurs, so I knew that entrepreneurship and running a business isn't easy by any means. But the point where I was at in my career, where I didn't have experience running a business, I didn't have any seed money or real savings, and I definitely didn't have experience building websites or coding – or marketing, for that matter – the cards were really stacked against me. But I was really passionate about helping others find work.

The first thing I did was I started up a group on LinkedIn called Jobs Direct USA, and then that group morphed into what was the basis for my online job board, and then eventually an events business. For about 3 years, I forced myself to learn how to use social media. Again, to put it in perspective, not having any real experience in corporate marketing at that point, social media was really new. We're talking about the years of 2008, '09, and '10, when businesses weren't really using Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn like they are today. I really learned how to use social media to form relationships, and it was those relationships that eventually helped me gain clients and grow my business and led me down this path of corporate marketing.

I ended up getting hired by one of my clients, Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I lived at the time. They ended up hiring me to start up social media for them in 2011. I was at Winn-Dixie for a couple of years; ended up going to another supermarket chain called Save-A-Lot in the Midwest, where I was the Director of Digital.

Then things really skyrocketed for me when I was hired by LinkedIn and relocated out to San Francisco to run social media for one of their business units. It was around that time that I worked for LinkedIn that I started getting hit up to speak at different conferences, Social Media Marketing World, South by Southwest, various industry conferences, and I started investing more into building a personal brand.

Fast forward to where I'm at today, which is 2020, like you mentioned before, I've got the bestselling book The End of Marketing, which came out at the end of 2019. I have an agency, Gil Media Co., and I have this great résumé which spans now over a decade running digital and social media marketing for various enterprise brands – and now I have the pleasure of working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients.

None of it would've been possible, Rob, without first of all losing my job in 2008 during a crisis and really turning to social media to brush myself off and build the brand that you see today, which is Carlos Gil.

ROB: It's quite a personal brand. A lot of people have probably heard you speak, seen you on conference rosters. It seems a fascinating theme in your journey is that when you have your back against the wall, you're a guy that finds your way out.

One of the times I became aware of you was when you were running social media for BMC Software. BMC Software doesn't resonate in most people's minds as a titan in social media, but you had a lot of interesting things to talk about, and they probably to an extent had their back against the wall to figure out how to do something in social media. Not engaging was not an option, but I imagine figuring out how to engage was a real challenge for them.

CARLOS: I'm so glad that you brought up BMC, because BMC Software is the last corporate brand I worked for full-time as an employee. When I got hired by BMC, I was at this crossroads in my career. I went to go work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn was a great opportunity, but ultimately it wasn't going to be the end-all, be-all for me. I was at this crossroad where I was like, do I go out on my own? Do I go work another gig?

The reality is that when you run social media for a brand – an enterprise brand like the Winn-Dixies, Save-A-Lots, BMCs of the world – it's all the same job. Creating content, managing a community, influencer relationships. It's all the same gig. It doesn't really change outside of the logo that you represent.

What really steered me to go work for BMC was the CMO that hired me, Nick. He was a former CMO of MasterCard, worked for E-Trade, JP Morgan Chase – this is a guy that lives, breathes, and eats marketing, and I think it's really important, regardless of what stage you're at in your career, that you have a leader that really supports you.

If you have a boss, you should have a boss that supports your growth, supports your endeavors, and really is your champion internally. One of the challenges is there's always this hierarchy that you have to work against. You're constantly swimming against the current. You have all these ideas, like right now, a lot of clients are coming to me and they're asking me about TikTok. So, I'm advising them on what they should or shouldn't do. Any time there's this emerging new channel, a lot of marketers are eager to jump on that channel, and then they're met with resistance.

Whereas my boss at BMC, Nick, understood that if you want to constantly evolve, you need to be trying new things, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You fail fast was his mantra, and you learn from that failure and then you keep moving forward to what does work. What I enjoyed about working at BMC in the 2 years I was there is that as an employee, they really gave me full autonomy to do my job.

And now, as a business owner, it's that autonomy that was given and that leadership that I was surrounded with that's really helped me and my business, imagining the employees that I have and really growing my business with the mindset that employees are our greatest asset. It's not the products, it's not the services, it's not the logo, but it's the employees that make us who we are.

Going back to at BMC, which is very much B2B focused from a marketing standpoint, relationships are paramount. My mantra, Rob, before I turn it back over to you, is in this world of marketing that we're in today, you don't need to have the most followers. You don't need to have the most engagement. But what you do need to have is an engaged community of customers, clients, and fans – even if it's five people.

ROB: Indeed. That's quite a range, going from Winn-Dixie, which is a consumer brand that is for everybody within the region of that grocery store chain – I spent middle and high school in Tampa, Florida; I know Winn-Dixie well, a lot of my high school friends worked there – to BMC, which is enterprise software. And it's not even – Zoom is having this moment because everybody needs to talk to everybody. BMC is not in a moment where everybody is still going to need it. Certain people are still going to need it.

I think it flows nicely into your book. One of the themes of your End of Marketing book is really knowing where your target customer is. I think you've taken this lesson you learned in going so far between consumer and enterprise and taken a really good general lesson. It seems like maybe the book itself is some of these general lessons you've extracted that can apply to anyone. How do you think about that book in our current moment?

CARLOS: I don't want this to come off as a cheap plug for The End of Marketing, but I think right now, humanizing your brand is going to be what keeps your brand in business. It's something that throughout my book and even throughout my keynotes now, I state upfront the reason why I wrote the book in the first place is to help future-proof your brand and your business for the long term.

When I started writing The End of Marketing at the beginning of 2019, at no point did I ever think a year into being a published author, there would be coronavirus or I'd be quarantining and staying at home. But the premise of The End of Marketing and the methodology behind how you market as a human versus as a brand is that at the end of the day, people relate to people. Since the beginning of time, people do business with who they want to do business with, who they like, who they trust. For example, you had never heard of me, seen me speak, or even like what I have to say, you wouldn't invite me on your podcast.

It's that basic. It's that simple. And it's not a hard methodology, but I think marketing has become so fragmented and marketers themselves have gotten so far away from the basics, and we get so wrapped up with having that content constantly flowing out – I refer in The End of Marketing, my book, to social media and the internet being this noisy digital ocean. And it is, because we're constantly facing this pressure to have to push out content. We're constantly looking at metrics. We're constantly comparing our wins and our highlights to someone else's wins and highlights.

At the end of the day, if you focus on reaching individual people like a human being, not as a brand, over time they will show love for you. They will show an affinity for you. And that is how you grow your business. It's one person at a time. It's one-to-one marketing; it's not one-to-many.

ROB: It's awesome how that probably ties straight back to that job board that you built, because you didn't set out to build a job board for the world. You were in a moment – and you were in finance; people may not remember just how bad it was to be in finance in 2008. It would be like being in a restaurant for this month when everything's shut down. You can't go out and get a restaurant job right now in this coronavirus pandemic.

But you started block by block, person by person, connecting people to each other, connecting people to jobs, also in a very human business in Winn-Dixie. It now probably is tying right into the work you're thinking about for brands now, helping them realize how human they need to be in this moment.

CARLOS: Yeah. I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's funny because I'm here thinking, maybe I need to dust the cobwebs off my Jobs Direct USA business plan and maybe bring it back. It's hard times right now. You've got a lot of people in hospitality that are being hit hard by this crisis.

You've got a lot of people all over the board – I was just sharing this with you before we jumped on here; as a speaker, my entire business has been wiped out for probably all of 2020. Yes, conferences are saying they're going to reschedule, yes, they're saying they're looking into other plans, but the reality is that we're in this for the long haul.

I think what's most important for anyone that's sitting out there listening to this is that you start thinking about how you're going to get to the other side. I will tell you this: the Great Recession, 2008, '09, '10, were some of the worst years of my life financially speaking, but what it did help me do is first of all build character because I was able to survive it and get through it, and that in itself helps you build tough skin in other scenarios throughout life.

But really what it helped me do is acquire knowledge, and it helped me acquire experience. I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize. Right now, even though times are bleak and tough, you have all this time on your hands that you can be using to learn something, whether it's reading a book, whether it's going on LinkedIn Learning – if you want to look me up there, I have courses on LinkedIn Learning – whether its going on YouTube and watching and consuming.

This is a prime opportunity for you to enrich your mind and allow that enrichment to be able to carry you on to what you're going to do on the flipside of this crisis.

ROB: Indeed. It's hopefully a time where people figure out to watch more than just Netflix. Now, we were originally scheduled to meet up in person in Austin. You were going to be at South by Southwest as a mentor and also at the LinkedIn Studio there, providing a talk on the future of work. Share with us a little bit what you were intending to speak of in that talk, and even maybe some additional things – how you're thinking it may have evolved since then.

CARLOS: I was going to be first of all doing mentor sessions at South by Southwest. Throughout this recording, I want to make myself available to anyone out there, whether you were going to attend South by Southwest or not. If you want to meet with me one-on-one, if you've got any questions, I'm really easy to find. You can go to @carlosgil83 on Twitter as well as on Instagram. Just let me know that you heard me on Rob's podcast. Again, any questions I can answer for you, any advice that you need, marketing-related, crisis-related, whatever it might be, let me know.

But going back to South by Southwest, besides the mentor sessions I was going to do, I was also going to speak at LinkedIn's activation there called the LinkedIn Studio. It was going to be on the future of work. A lot of what I was going to talk about wasn't so much the technology aspect, because I think we all get it that work, whether coronavirus happened or not, eventually was going to move more to this virtual world that we're seeing happening right now, using tools like Zoom and Skype and Slack and other tools out there.

But I think, again, my piece is you don't need a college degree from Harvard in order to get the really sexy brand marketing job or agency job. You don't need to have all this formal education in order to be able to run your own business, because I myself am a high school dropout that has a GED. I myself didn't go to college until I was 30 years old and I got into an MBA program.

My point that I'm trying to make, Rob, is that you need to be able to get the basics and actually implement the basics and keep moving forward and keep learning and keep growing, and you do that by getting the opportunities that come your way and making the best of them.

Relationships are paramount. I wouldn't be on this podcast right now, I wouldn't have the career I have, if it wasn't for the relationships I started building in 2008 as a result of a job loss. Again, when I think of future of work, I think it's not going to be based on where you went to school. It's going to be based on not just who you know, but who knows you. That's where personal branding is paramount.

It's funny because I am a big proponent of personal brand, hence why I've invested so much into my own personal brand. Your personal brand is your new résumé. When people think about doing business with you, what they're going to do is google you, and within a few seconds they're going to learn everything that they need to know based on what Google gives them. And if you don't have a presence online, it's going to make it hard for people to be able to find you.

Case in point, going back to the agency world, I run a successful agency that I started 3 years ago when I left my corporate job. I do very little business development. I do zero traditional business development from the standpoint of cold calling, pitching, RFPs. I participate in zero RFPs. The way that I've been able to grow Gil Media is through the content I create that lives through my personal brand channels.

So think of my personal brand. Everything that you see on my Instagram, my YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook and LinkedIn – it's all funnel. That's to create that top of the funnel awareness, as we call it in the B2B world, and then as you subscribe to my content – and you subscribe by hitting a "follow" button – then at that point, I'm able to get you hooked. You're able to see who I am as a real person. You're able to see how I speak. You're able to learn a couple nuggets from me.

That is something I've found is the way to circumnavigate the traditional business development activities to be able to get business.

ROB: Perfect. One thing I wonder about a little bit – a lot of the people listening who are in the marketing agency world, and even with our own clients, when I think about our clients, I think about a person, I think about a name, I think about a relationship. And I think that's true easily on the consumer side and easily on the enterprise side, where the deals are large.

Then there's I think this middle that can be somewhat mechanistic, the world of hundreds of outbound cold emails and SDRs and that small- to mid-scale SaaS play. When you're thinking about a brand in that kind of market, where people show up and put in the credit card, how do you think about humanizing and making that sort of brand personal in marketing?

CARLOS: I think you still need the emails just to keep your name on the radar and stay in front of people. You still need to be out there, all over social media. Again, like I said before, social media and the internet is a noisy digital ocean. These aren't my rules; I just play by the rules of the house, if you will.

But I'd say one-to-one interaction is where it's at. If you have someone that you want to do business with right now, or if you have a general idea of the type of client it is that you're trying to reach, your objective is to get in front of that person, one way or another – whether it's an email, a Facebook ad, or a direct message on Twitter or Instagram.

Where most people mess up is they're relying on LinkedIn and they're running ads and pumping out content on LinkedIn, and they're spamming, quite frankly, through direct message, everyone that they can on LinkedIn. Here's what I can tell you as someone that has worked at LinkedIn as an employee and teaches on LinkedIn's platform: LinkedIn is a phenomenal directory to find who it is that you want to do business with. But it's not where you go to actually network.

What you need to do is to see if the individual that you're looking to do business with is on Twitter or if they're on Instagram. If they're on one of those platforms, or both, follow them. Consume their content for a period of time so you know what they're into. You want to know what their hobbies are, what their interests are, and you want to organically form a relationship with them.

The reality is that when you talk about any sizable business deal, whether it's SaaS, agency work, whatever it might be, people are not going to meet you on the first date and agree to do business with you. And they're definitely not going to sign off on a high 5- or 6-figure or 7-figure deal with you just because you direct messaged them on a social network.

It takes time to build that relationship. That's real talk. And I can tell you for a fact that I've never messaged someone out of the blue and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, here's a 6-figure deal for Gil Media!" It just doesn't work that way.

But what I will tell you is a good strategic path is think of all your prospects as seeds in a garden. Right now, I can tell you that I've got dozens of seeds that have been planted over the last several years, and even before that, when I was still working in corporate marketing and I knew eventually I was going to go out on my own. Those seeds you plant in the garden, and as you engage, as you mature the relationship, that harvest starts to bloom. Some of those trees grow bigger than others. Some of those trees sprout dollars on the branches. Some of them just stay as little buds, little bushes.

But my whole point I'm trying to make is that you need to really think about going wide and also going deep – going wide in terms of you want to be able to have a lot of prospects, but you also want to go very deep with the relationships and not think about relationships as being transactional. When you start thinking about relationships as being about money and transactions, at that point you don't have a relationship. You just have a transaction.

In this market, especially this market now where people are going to be tighter with budgets, I'm telling you, the relationship is going to be worth gold.

ROB: So true. I think sometimes the thought leadership we get is from companies that are in a hot category. If you are out there selling marketing automation and everyone feels like they have to have a marketing automation or maybe two of those, then maybe you can get by with being a little bit transactional. But unless you're selling toilet paper right now, you probably can't be very transactional. It seems like very much a time to plant rather than to harvest, except in very rare situations.

But as you're talking, I'm listening and it sounds like – I get what you're saying about planting seeds, but casting a wide net while planting seeds sounds overwhelming. How do you think about relationship across a wide range of people that you're working to build real, authentic relationships with, but recognizing that it's going to take some time?

CARLOS: It's removing the transaction out of the relationship altogether. It's actually connecting and forming an authentic and organic relationship, asking someone, "How are you? How are you weathering the storm? How's your company doing? Is there anything that I can do for you? Hey, I work for this company; I'm not really trying to sell you anything, but I just want you to know that I exist."

The irony in all this is that since we started this crisis, since work from home became a thing, I haven't sent out one email yet. I haven't sent out any piece of communication selling anything to anyone. Yes, I had an email that went out letting people know that my book is on sale on Amazon, and yes, I've got this course on LinkedIn that you can watch, but in terms of actually selling agency services, nothing's gone out.

I told my team, "You know what? Let's chill. Let's not be aggressively pitching to anyone, and let's let the game come to us." No kidding, in the last 2 weeks, I can't tell you how many CMOs, CEOs, C-suite executives have been hitting me up personally to help them with their crisis comms plan on social – what to say on social, do an audit, review. It's crazy what happens when people don't perceive you as being the cheesy salesman and instead they perceive you as the good guy, the advocate that's here to help them.

I think regardless of where you sit in an organization, whether you're an account executive, a sales rep, a CMO, owner – whatever your role is, make business about the relationships and the people that you're truly trying to serve and not about the transaction. When you start operating with that mentality, you're going to see how business is going to start coming your way when you least expect it.

ROB: That's perfect. When I think about what you have done yourself, when your name shows up in their inbox, without you saying a thing about your business, they already know who you are and what you can do for them. They have a sense of brand, of what you can do there. But it's also worthless without the staying on their radar part.

I know for myself, when I think about partners we have, people we work with, people we go in together on deals and help serve customers – the ones I think about are the ones who have spoken to us most recently, and it's not the folks that say, "Hey, just checking in." It's the folks I've built a relationship with but have also stayed on my radar so that I remember them, so that when an opportunity crosses the path that I can't do myself, I pick up the phone and I talk to them. So it is that planting and that harvesting. It really makes sense.

How do you think about avoiding that "just checking in" dynamic? I think right now, "How are you?" is perfect. We are all I think looking for someone to tell how we are with trust. How do you think about that when it's less obvious? How do you keep that relationship? Because people will tell you, "Find this article, send it to them" – sometimes it still I think feels kind of fake, cheesy, and forced.

CARLOS: That's such a good question. I think in this market right now, we operate with a servant mindset. It's about giving, not taking. The more that you give, the more it'll pay itself off tenfold. It's using social media to listen to what people are saying. It's going in the right groups, running the right searches, paying attention and swooping in with solutions to people's problems.

I'll give you an example. I have a lot of downtime right now. Because I have that downtime, I'm looking to make use of that downtime. One of the objectives on my plate is getting on more podcasts. I didn't go out and run an ad on Indeed or LinkedIn or even post some looking for a virtual assistant; instead, I just went on Twitter and I ran a search for people that do VA work. I was able to connect with someone right away – and again, it's different because I'm not selling anything to them. On the flipside, I want to give them money so they can do work for me.

What I'm trying to say is those are the type of opportunities that happen when you, in this case, have a solution to someone's need or someone's problem.

ROB: And you're probably also getting more inbounds right now, which probably helps tip your own brain on what to be thinking about. When there's an uptick in the data on something technical, there's an uptick in the human factor of that as well.

CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. It goes back to what I said earlier. We're all people, we're all in this together, and at the end of the day, people do business with who they like and who they trust. Regardless of what services it is that you sell, your objective as a salesperson, as someone who's trying to drive and increase revenue, is to be able to connect your buyers with solutions to their problems.

This is probably not the best time to be cold calling and cold pitching and hard selling, but this is the time to be connecting with those individuals and just get on their radar.

ROB: Absolutely. One thing we're definitely seeing, if you look in the tea leaves – we'll email a certain number of people every week to look at future bookings for the podcast, and I can tell you, it's typically cold contact. A lot of people will say yes because they want these conversations, they want to share their journey, they want the exposure. But I'll tell you, the accept rate is basically double what it was 3 weeks ago. The information is there in the detail. I like how you talk about these searches and these platforms and LinkedIn as the tools to help you understand how to be a better human to other humans.

CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. Podcasting especially right now, it's really high. I'm sure that between last month and this month, you're going to see a big increase in downloads, subscribers, and listens because you've got more people that are tuning in. You've got more people that need content to consume that's not just news and doom and gloom.

I think right now, podcasting is a blue ocean. If you can find your niche, you can carve a lane for yourself in that niche, and you can find ways to monetize with, again, brands or advertisers that normally are trying to get in front of a certain audience, and they're finding ways to pivot or reallocate their budget. If you're able to bring a specific audience, then man, a podcast could actually be quite beneficial from a revenue standpoint.

ROB: Absolutely. Carlos, you shared earlier a very generous offer to connect with listeners. Remind us all, when we want to go out there and find you – other than obviously your immediately findable personal brand – what's the best way for folks to connect with you? You said @carlosgil83 on Instagram, Twitter. Google you, I'm sure they'll find you. Anything else?

CARLOS: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also send me an email, which is carlos@gilmedia.co.

ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Carlos. You have dropped gold. I know you're sowing seeds for a tremendous future already in the midst of all this, so congrats on being ahead of the game there.

CARLOS: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

ROB: Thank you.

Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.