This Is for Those of You With the Freedom, Autonomy, and Trust To Do Things Differently at Your Company
When you do the things I’m talking about, the funnel goes away. It becomes a spectrum of buy-in—not a vertical process to shove people through.
60-second read
What I preach on here, I practice at my company, Before You Apply—and this post itself is Example A. Think of this as me showing my work—and an invitation to borrow my tactics for your own work.
Our GTM approach is focused on brand marketing and being SMEs in our space. You can apply these strategies to sales, marketing, recruiting, and employer branding.
I’ll start with the results:
Lead numbers are low.
Lead quality is high.
The sales cycle is short.
In practice, it’s rare that I talk to a prospective buyer who doesn’t already have a strong relationship with our brand, my content, an existing customer, or a mutual relationship.
Nearly everyone I talk to is already aligned with our approach.
My calendar isn’t filled with unqualified meetings. Therefore, I have the space to do all the things that continue to drive these types of results.
Here’s what I’m currently doing:
Posting 3X a week on LinkedIn (Organic)
Sending all my posts out via this email newsletter (Organic)
Joint content with industry peers (Organic)
Podcast (Organic)
Video clips from real conversations (for LinkedIn organic content)
Ongoing market research: 5+ calls with talent leaders, recruiters, and EB folks each week.
Key insight: I use the term “top-of-funnel” a lot on here. I do this because I know my audience and this terminology is relatable for them.
But when you do the things I’m talking about, the funnel goes away. It becomes a spectrum of buy-in—not a vertical process to shove people through.
This is how Recruiting and Sales should work. But Recruiting and Sales teams don’t experience this because they spend all their time grinding through outreach and talking with people who aren’t bought in.
A simple example:
I talk about Talent leaders creating the consumer buying experience they’d want to have themselves.
At Before You Apply, we’ve taken that exact approach with our buying experience:
Go to our website. Click “For Employers,” then click “See details and pricing.”
There’s nothing we don’t share. Prospects get 90% of the information they need to make a decision—without having to talk with a person.
No surprise, this level of transparency is applicable to recruiting, too. No dev hours needed. We just used Notion.
This all might sound hand-wavy, but, again, I think it’s useful for me to show my work.
I’ll be testing a lot more and sharing new ideas. Stay tuned.
...And to everyone who still thinks I’m full of it, at least you know what I’m doing now. I hope this all resonates, but if not it’s probably time to unfollow me.
P.S. The best examples of this approach in the recruiting industry are James Hornick and Hirewell. Follow them.