Connecting B2B Brands with Reputable Influencers: Hector Forwood from Flooencer

Eric M. (00:05.856)
Hector, man, good to see you. Happy that you're joining the show today.

Hector Forwood (00:10.126)
Thanks so much for having me, Eric. Good to be here.

Eric M. (00:12.928)
Yeah, I'm going to read a little bit about your background so the audience can get an understanding of who you are. Hector is the founder of Fluencer, which is a business influencer marketplace. If you're looking to work with B2B creators who are on LinkedIn or TikTok, then this is a great platform where you can not only find them, but you can also manage the campaign from beginning to end. Prior to Fluencer, Hector started Revenue Syndicate. It's a community of 700 plus go -to -market experts in the UK.

who co -invest into tech and they will be to be tech companies. And lastly, Hector is sort of an adrenaline jucky, which I just learned. We're talking crazy stuff here, like windsurfing. And I think when you were younger, you used to do like motocross, right?

Hector Forwood (00:57.422)
Yeah, I am either about two or three years doing motocross until I was showing off to the friend I managed to crash into a tree and break my shoulder, but I still love motorbikes.

Eric M. (01:06.176)
Now, is this hereditary? Is your dad an adrenaline junkie too? Or did they urge you into these kind of sports?

Hector Forwood (01:15.534)
I think that my dad is, let's say, pretty traditional English and he does like sailing and things like that. But actually I would say my mum's the wild one, like her and to come up with horse riding and those kinds of things. But they were always encouraging me to, yeah, chase the next thrill.

Eric M. (01:34.24)
Okay, and you're in Spain right now primarily for, well I know you're working as well, but the other hobby that you take an interest in is...

Hector Forwood (01:44.046)
Yeah, so I do a bit of windsurfing but also trying kitesurfing just to see how it is. So I'm in Tarefa at the moment which is extremely windy and yeah trying that out not very successfully but liking the challenge.

Eric M. (01:59.392)
All right. What's been the most dangerous sport that you've ever participated in or activity?

Hector Forwood (02:05.294)
probably, so I don't, I can ride horses, but I don't like riding them. And so my mom asked me to do something called bolting, which is when, if you've ever been to a circus and they do flips off horses. So from the age of about 12 or 13, I was made to stand on top of various sized horses and do some assaults and things off the back of them. Not, not now because I've drunk far too many beers and eating far too many pizzas, to, to do that anymore. but it's pretty terrifying.

jumping off that, trying to land on the ground when you're moving forward. And then you have a live animal that's very close proximity and you can easily get trampled. Yeah.

Eric M. (02:45.024)
Okay, hence the crazy enough to dare venture into like startups and creating your own company. I get it now. I get it now Okay, tell us a little bit about your background because I think you you got into sales first. Is that right?

Hector Forwood (02:50.126)
Yep.

Hector Forwood (02:58.222)
Yeah, sure. So I'm one of the very few people that I've ever spoken to who actually really liked sales from a very young age. So actually my first job was door to door selling. And I did that for six months and I was selling weed killer and fertilizer. And you, the best objection handling is if you knock on someone's door on a Saturday at 10 a on their day off and try and pitch them something, if you can deal with that, then you can conquer anything.

And, and then, and then from there, like worked in art galleries and self -sustained harrots and kind of more retail stuff. and then I was very lucky to join the tech scene in, or probably would win 2015 now. and then I got very lucky and joined a company called Cognizant and I was their first junior sales employee and then scaled with them to 15 million ARR, about 200 employees moved over to, the U S and I opened their U S office. and.

met some incredible mentors and people and was given a lot of different opportunities which I'm grateful I took advantage of now because it set me up for what I'm working on now.

Eric M. (04:05.92)
Okay, for somebody, let's say somebody's never done sales and you're trying to coach them, like what is like the principles or the basic things that they need to get right? Like the top two or three things.

Hector Forwood (04:16.654)
Just pick up the phone. Everyone is so scared of calling people. I do this for every rep, no matter what age. If they've had a bad conversation, they will go back down to just, I'm going to hide behind my keyboard. And you have to remind yourself that, if I send them an email and I don't know what they're doing with this contract or what they think about the price point, just pick up the phone and call them. And it's fine to call someone every day until you get a response. Being professionally persistent is a key asset that separates.

good salespeople from great salespeople. I think the other one is probably slightly controversial opinion, but there's basically a balance between being pushy, consultative and knowing when to ask the question. And a lot of people are, I don't know if it's a confidence thing, but being able to know when to push and say like, okay, I need an answer on this. Now we're going to talk about commercials and guide someone through the process rather than just offering all of your knowledge.

so that they eventually hope they'll say, yeah, let's sign a contract. And then I think the third one is the best salespeople I have had the opportunity to meet have a very meticulous and refined process from everything from setting aside blocks of time to just sending emails to social selling to calling. And they have the most immaculate and well thought through notes so that they've got every question understood and can answer.

any question about any deal to a PP of sales at any time and creating your own sales operating system. So I'd say that those three things are the ones that are really key to be successful when you're selling.

Eric M. (05:58.112)
Are you particular when it comes to like a sales operating system? Like, is there a certain platform out there that you prefer more than others?

Hector Forwood (06:06.19)
I mean, it depends what part of sales that you're, you're really looking at. but if you're, I think a lot of your audience, right. And maybe slightly earlier in the journey than, kind of these huge enterprise level companies, but you can, yeah, you can, you can basically just get started with like a hub spot and just upgrade there. You can get data from Apollo. and I just use notion and fathom .video for.

Eric M. (06:21.792)
Correct. Yeah.

Hector Forwood (06:35.182)
for pretty much everything else in core recording. Another key one is actually, especially in earlier days, you should record every conversation that you have with customers and prospects. It's a bit like, you know, NFL teams when they rewatch stuff back, you should watch yourself and say like, I could have asked that question then I should have leapt on this point. It's really important if you want to improve.

Eric M. (06:56.608)
Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think a lot of people get stuck inside their head and they tend to analyze too much, like a conversation, or like you said, they're afraid to pick up the phone because they think, I sent them the emails. So they've got it in their inbox and now it's their turn. The balls in their court. When the reality is the person may have just forgot and they get overwhelmed. They get so many different emails and they just may, you know, may have forgot to reply. And so I totally agree with you about picking up the phone. And I think it's even more difficult with the younger generation.

because they're not used to calling people. They're used to texting and emailing. And so picking up the phone is something that's like so, it's just, it's just so distant from them that they don't even think about that option. But I think if you're going to be great in sales, obviously going door to door, speaking of door to door, Hector, did you ever like get the door slammed in your face? Or do you remember anybody like telling you, you know, like something crazy and just like, you know, what the F are you doing here?

Hector Forwood (07:29.326)
Yeah.

Hector Forwood (07:52.046)
I have a few stories. I'm not sure how PG some of them are, but, so I, so one example is like, I knocked on a guy's door and, this was also a Saturday 10 AM guy. And he said he was going to dig up my grandmother's corpse and defile me with it. That was a fun one. Or another person who, I could set their dogs on me. another.

Not like a bad one, but I used to work in a suit and so I was walking around quite a nice neighborhood and I knocked on the door and the guy said, you're late, you're late. So he rushed me in and I sat through a 45 minute wedding of someone I'd never met before because I was like, I didn't really have an opportunity to open my mouth. And at the end of it, he said, I like, so how do you know the brand? He said, I'll be honest, I was just here to sell you like fertilizer. I was like, get out of my house right now.

Yeah, yeah, they had a really nice, I was, you know, I just got excited. It looked like a good lead. There's lots of grass that need to fertilise us, so yeah.

Eric M. (08:47.04)
What was the wedding in the backyard?

Eric M. (08:59.104)
my god, that is crazy. You just said get the hell out? okay.

Hector Forwood (09:01.774)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was one of the more uncomfortable ones. It's almost easier when they're really rude.

Eric M. (09:10.848)
Ha!

Okay, that's gotta be the craziest cell story I've ever heard.

Hector Forwood (09:18.254)
I've got a few others, but maybe not for daytime podcasts.

Eric M. (09:23.264)
OK. OK. Next time we're having a beer, I'm going to ask you about this. OK. All right. Let's talk about Fluencer. This platform, you and I connected on LinkedIn a few months ago. And I saw this, and this is fantastic. This is a really great way for SaaS companies or B2B companies to go and find reputable B2B influencers that they may want to work with. And so where did you get the original idea for this? And where you add in the like,

Hector Forwood (09:28.782)
I can't put it.

Eric M. (09:52.992)
Like in terms of like getting it off, is it entirely bootstrap or did you get financing? Like how did that work?

Hector Forwood (09:59.246)
Sure. So the idea stemmed from, I love building stuff. So I built lots of small AI products and tools that charge maybe like two to $5 a month for, and it's much more of a volume play and kind of user acquisition on that piece. And I thought, well, I can't cold call 5 ,000 people. I could email that many, but I thought why not.

something a bit different. So I went on TikTok and I was like, I wonder if I can find productivity influences specifically to talk about this. And I went on the creator marketplace and I realized that they bucket everything just as like business influences. And it's very hard to drill down because if you had like a sales influencer, there are loads of specializations just like in marketing, there's, you know, ABN, PLG, content, SEO, so on and so forth.

and then I thought, well, the only way to find those kinds of individuals is actually through LinkedIn. And then I started doing research and I was realized there's no influencer LinkedIn marketplace. And, and that was basically in the inception of it. and I started a couple of companies before and fundraisers for them. And so I had the frameworks to be able to validate the idea. So I spoke to, you know, 50 VPs of marketing and CMOs, then.

spoke to the influencers as well and learn about their process. And a lot of them signed up and said, yeah, like I wouldn't mind. I want to earn extra money. Why wouldn't I? And there are a few nuanced conversations within that, but that was the inception. And from December till basically now we've got about 200 plus influencers on the platform. We've worked with nearly 20 brands and just getting a huge amount of interest, but.

Me personally, I've worked on a lot of different companies and it's a really nice feeling when you, you know, I'm sure someone works with you, right, Eric, and all your podcasts come together and you get results for the people that are sponsoring all these podcasts. We've had such good results from the campaigns that we've been running it. Like it's having a real founder moment, just being like, this is amazing. But both sides of the marketplace are happy. Everyone's collaborating well. And it's been super awesome to see, to be honest.

Hector Forwood (12:18.158)
In terms of the kind of funding amounts, we, cause, cause of revenue syndicate speak to loads of founders and see loads of pitch decks and stuff. And one of the things is you should always be trying to build your product for as scrappily and leanly as possible. And we were able to secure some revenue, basically just using a combination of spreadsheets and some, like automations that we made, no code. I can't code. I'm just a.

salesperson, but I have some level of operations. And yet been able to get to profitability in two, three months. And then it's just about, you know, making it better and actually starting to build the technology behind it too.

Eric M. (13:00.768)
Yeah, no, exactly what you mean. sort of like with the MVP, I just put a page on my podcast website and had like a Google form. So anybody who was interested would just fill out the Google form and now it's got its own website and it looks a little bit nicer. And I'm starting to look into a proper CRM, because obviously you've got, you know, podcasters that are in my community and then you've got leads and customers and just, you know, Excel is great or Google sheets is great, but you know, if you're trying to grow,

Hector Forwood (13:18.638)
Mm.

Eric M. (13:29.344)
business that's been validated, then you need to start thinking about the processes and tools that you're going to use. So you use a metric that I thought was really fascinating on a LinkedIn post earlier, because I always think, and you always see a lot of posts where people talk about, we generated X new revenue for this company through this campaign, but you use the metric. And I think it was something along the lines of we reawakened dormant,

Hector Forwood (13:45.934)
Thank you.

Eric M. (13:54.88)
You know, leads or dormant customers who weren't really active or spending money with the client. Do you remember what that metric was called or.

Hector Forwood (14:03.886)
Yeah, so I mean, it hasn't necessarily been given a time in terms of like, when you find those opportunities, any closed deal, so any opportunity where they've said now is not the right time using a competitor, the pricing is too much, whatever it may be in the objection that they had that they end up not signing with the solution that you're selling. And so a lot of companies will have

They just call them closed loss campaigns where they get the salespeople after three to six months to call through all of those things and say, is now about a time we've released this new feature. Are you still struggling with this pain point with the idea that they'll revive that opportunity? And so what we look at in when we speak to brands is are there any opportunities that have either stalled? So they just haven't got back to the salesperson.

an extended period of time, they're bad on communication. Any closed last ones that have come back around and are like, actually this person who I respect is posting about the solution, maybe I should take it a second look and come back and revive that opportunity. So as well as, you know, can I bring in net new revenue is can I bring stuff back from the dead? And so that's also something that we're trying to track at the same time.

Eric M. (15:29.344)
Yeah, yeah. OK, so what phase are you in right now? I think you said that you're you're building the technology behind it. What is that going to look like from a user perspective? If you're a brand.

Hector Forwood (15:40.11)
Sure. So if you're a brand, the beginning to end flow is that you'd be able to come on the platform, create a campaign, which is, these are the objectives I want to get out of it. This is the kind of copy and content and, pieces of information that I want to distribute. this is the, how I want to incentivize the people I'm working with. Then matching through the ICP, the audience data, being able to filter and say, okay, these are the top.

10 to 15 influencers, approach those individuals, pay them to post and then get the results of them posting and coordinate the whole campaign process from beginning to end. That's the MVP vision. As of yesterday, I had this really crazy idea, which is very technically difficult to do, but we found a way to do it where one of the things that

you're ultimately paying for is someone's audience. And the way that people's audiences are broken down on LinkedIn is like, let's call them, they're, they're bucketed and the buckets are quite good, but they're not amazing. And we can essentially track, the last three months of every person that's liked and commented, as an influencer's profile, build a data set and then say, okay, this person has liked and commented on every single post for the last.

three months and so they're a hyper engaged audience member of this influencer. Now I can take that data and give it to the influencer and say here is a snapshot of your community but more importantly for the brand side I can take all of your opportunities every stakeholder who's a decision maker cross -reference that data and say okay here you should hire these three influencers because your active deals at the moment.

will map with their audience and so they're definitely going to see it and they'll probably engage and it should either create a deal or move the move the deal down the pipeline.

Eric M. (17:41.44)
Yeah. Yeah. I wish we had that kind of data available for podcasters, podcast listeners. This is amazing. This is really, really amazing in terms of like the, the results and the engagement and the number of likes, like, are you going to bring that information back into the Fluencer platform for brands to see as well?

Hector Forwood (17:46.03)
Yeah.

Hector Forwood (18:00.366)
So there's definitely a big data play in terms of using all of the campaign data, both of the influences about what kind of content they should create in terms of like, should I do video? Should I do graphics? Should I write posts? And what kind of push should I write? But then you're right in terms of the brands, they can track impressions, engagements, engagement rates. And in future we'll do CRM integrations and affiliate links and stuff so you can more accurately track it. But at the moment we just say like,

either ask them on a demo or have your own affiliate link software and everything else. But we can provide the, let's say like vanity metrics of impressions on top of funnel. But the bit that's exciting is using machine learning to optimize the campaigns that they're running for what time of day should they get the influences to post, what kind of content they should write. And that's where it gets really interesting in my opinion. Can you do the same thing with podcast data?

Eric M. (18:59.2)
Not really, because every podcast is on a different platform and there's so many different platforms. I mean, you've got Anchor, Spotify, you got Buzzsprout. I mean, I think within my network, there's no one platform that represents five or more podcasters. That's how widespread it is. And so it's really hard to get data unless people are sharing their API or screenshots of whatever data. And the other thing too is that downloads...

Like Spotify reports like listens, I think, or plays. And plays is a combination of downloads and listens. But other platforms don't even report listens. So it's just very, very scattered in the number of metrics that are out there. And I think downloads is the only one that's kind of consistent. But when we were talking about Fluencer, so you said you had about 20 plus brands that you worked with. How did you initially get those 20 brands? Were you code calling them? Did you pick up the phone?

Hector Forwood (19:53.07)
Actually word of mouth, I haven't had to make any call calls, which is the irony of it. But that also means that you know you're working on something people want, right? It's that they come to you because it's a pain point or a channel they want to try and then also the results. So most brands that we've worked with after the first, actually after the first month, they get a lot of MQLs. Like one campaign we did within a 12 hour period had

68 people registered for a demo and it was the most meetings they've ever had historically on a single day ever. And the founder actually said almost across an entire year and that was having a sales team of two SDRs and we did it in 12 hours. And so they told all of their friends about it and were like, you need to go work with this company, which has been great for us. Right. But there will come a point where we'll be, I'll have to be more proactive. I, as I said, I actually don't mind picking up the phone.

and then doing sales, but I enjoy it.

Eric M. (20:56.16)
What platforms are the influencers on your influencer, you know, primarily representing?

Hector Forwood (21:01.902)
I'm primarily linked in, but the, you know, a bit like how we got started actually, and talking about kind of podcast sponsorships, a lot of the bigger creators will have a newsletter or a podcast, a some sort of coaching course, maybe, and then consolidating all of like creating their own media company. And then that's eventually what we'll be able to support is

between media spend as a whole.

Eric M. (21:33.92)
Yeah. Okay. One more question about the platform. What are you excited about in the next 12 months? Hector.

Hector Forwood (21:37.678)
You

Hector Forwood (21:42.158)
Ooh, so I am most excited about seeing the engaged audiences and seeing how it works because if my hypothesis is right, like as you know with testing any business, you make three strategic big bets a year and those should be the only three things that you focus on. And engaged audiences is one of our bets. And so with...

talking with a few CMOs about how to pilot this with them. And I just really want to see it work because if we can, we will be the only company ever to have done it. And if it works, I mean, obviously that's great because more revenue. But I also think that it's such a challenging task that, yeah, I don't think it will eventually get a competitor. Like I'd be naive to think that someone won't come along, but that specifically will be.

very hard to do.

Eric M. (22:39.52)
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Great. Great. Now it's rapid fire time. Are you ready? Okay. First one. Okay. Fill in the blank on this one. Blank gives you motivation.

Hector Forwood (22:44.142)
Sure, I'm ready.

Hector Forwood (22:54.574)
free time gives you motivation. So like being able to afford free time, I guess.

Eric M. (23:04.48)
Yeah, no, I love that too. I love looking at my calendar and I see a day like, my God, I only have one call that day. It's fantastic. Okay. Blank is the title of your PowerPoint presentation that's going to get you an additional hundred million dollar investment.

Hector Forwood (23:10.542)
Yeah.

Hector Forwood (23:24.046)
Blank is the title that's going to get you an additional $100 million investment. How to be resilient.

Eric M. (23:33.568)
Okay, okay. What is the most death -defying act you've ever done?

Hector Forwood (23:41.078)
I jumped off a cliff in Morocco and the margin for error because it was down a chasm was maybe two inches each side. It was terrifying. And then so yeah, you drop through it and then go into a river and that kind of thing. But if it was also maybe five or six meters. So if you miss you would definitely break something and it wouldn't be good.

And to be honest, I love skiing, so I've skied off a lot of cliffs before. That's pretty scary sometimes.

Eric M. (24:18.72)
Okay Hector, all right, last one for you. In the new Disney original, Hector is struggling with blank for the first time.

Hector Forwood (24:30.766)
Hector is struggling with relationships to be honest. It's more about like being able to allocate time to invest in them or like find one.

Eric M. (24:43.584)
Okay, there you have it folks. We have Hector Forwood here from Fluencer. I will put links to Hector's LinkedIn profile and the website in the show notes. Hector, thanks so much for coming on Innovators Can Laugh.

Hector Forwood (24:57.614)
Eric, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Cheers for having me.

Eric M. (25:00.672)
Yeah, pleasure having you. All right. Thanks everyone.

Hector Forwood (25:02.478)
and that is it.