Josh Elledge is a renowned entrepreneur, media expert, and advocate for financial empowerment. With a passion for helping people save money and maximize their potential, he is best known as the founder of SavingsAngel.com, a platform dedicated to assisting individuals in achieving significant savings through practical strategies and couponing.
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Introduction to the episode
(00:00-02:26)
Josh Elledge: Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Experience-Focused Leaders Podcast! I am not your host, but I get the privilege of introducing and interviewing the regular host of this show, Alex Shevelenko, the founder and CEO of RELAYTO. Congratulations on the new podcast!
Alex Shevelenko: Thank you, I'm excited!
JE: Well, I’m excited about this show because we are going to feature experts and leaders in ways that should inspire a lot of great ideas and activities.
AS: Yeah, absolutely! I think both at RELAYTO and at the podcast, what we are fundamentally excited about is bringing the most important ideas of our time to life. The podcast is going to be one of the mediums.
Fundamentally, we see that some of the best, most valuable, and most important ideas are typically communicated in the worst possible ways. And some of the junkie ideas are communicated in the most sophisticated ways.
So, you want to balance out for the benefit of our organizations, careers, and frankly, our society and our audience. We want to balance that out, want to make the valuable content easy to digest, and experience it in a way that moves you forward in making decisions.
I think the purpose of this podcast is to bring people who put this into practice, people who are thought leaders, and people who are doing research in interesting areas around this. We have many ideas and experiences to help achieve this underlying mission of bringing the most important ideas of our time to life.
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What does "experience-focused leaders" mean
(02:26-06:25)
JE: Well, with RELAYTO, you have an amazing network of folks that you get to work with, and obviously, one of the types of leaders that you work with frequently. Then again, what the term “experience-focused leaders” means?
AS: I think, historically, when people think “experiences”, they think something in marketing only, sort of experiences around events. But what we really are focusing on is people who create, whether they are digital or physical experiences. Those “leaders” could be leaders of an organization that’s focused on motivating and engaging their employee base. It could be a leader of the communication function in that same organization that needs to get internal strategy rolled out. Or for example, to publish ESG reports and investor communication in a compelling way.
And, of course, the bread in the butter of innovation in this area has been marketing and sales, where there is so much at stake. We do see chief executives focused on those functions and CMOs and CROs who are looking to stand out in a busy marketplace. Those people are focused on what they can do through experience versus spamming versus brute force. I think creating something that stands out, connects, and is memorable is the answer to bypassing this cacophony of noise that we are bombarded with on a daily basis.
JE: I think Experience-Focused Leaders are going to be very cognizant of consumer behavior. When I say consumers, I speak generally. Basically, who are you looking to engage with, if you are behind in terms of where consumers’ brains are, then you are at a major disadvantage. Your sales seem to be working twice as hard, probably closing way fewer deals.
I’m just thinking about the sales and marketing side of this, focused on growth like you got to get this stuff dialed in and understand that people don't buy the same way they bought even five years ago.
AS: Exactly! In RELAYTO, we look at what is going on in the B2B communication space. The default factor of the standard of content was the stakeholder PDF. So, what we asked was, “What if we take those tools we know how to use and create those experiences with them?” That was the genesis of how we started talking to the clients and creating experiences that bring value to the end users.
They start with the consumer, the buyer, and the audience, and how do you get them to do the things that they want to do? You can’t force people to buy, they can just choose to buy. That’s one of the fundamental premises. We are very fortunate to work with companies in the B2B world that have consumerized B2B, and we learn from them. We love taking what we learned from great brands and great thought leaders in this space and applying it in ways that help people to succeed. This podcast is all about that same philosophy.
An idealized guest for the podcast
(06:25-11:17)
JE: So, I suspect that there are folks listening to our conversation right now who probably know someone who is innovating. Not just innovating, but they have taken action, and they have stories from the trenches of running experiments, and because their values are focused on that experience, and truly try to be not just empathic but mindful of everything, like they’ve got their customer persona dialed in, they know the pain points and they anticipate where the journey in the buyer’s case is gonna be.
Again, I seem to be focusing on sales and marketing. I know that RELAYTO offers solutions just beyond sales and marketing, but when it comes to my question here is that someone listening right now probably knows someone that deserves to be celebrated and recognized on this podcast. Would you mind talking about the character traits, personality, leadership style, or some of the things you know our friend might know? How would you describe that perfect guest for you?
AS: We love marketers who really care about the impact of their creativity. In terms of revenue, for example, the types of marketers measure themselves not against site visits only but leads and pipelines that are successful and are actually becoming successful customers. It’s a type of customers and creatives who really care about outcomes versus just the output.
And if you think, historically, most of the content creation has been about outputs and hoping the outcome is great. We are very much reversing that equation with data-driven designs. So, people who can combine creativity and content with the impact of that, that’s one broad topic.
Another one is obviously people who see and care about their brand. If they are in a noisy market, and their brand is really important, they have a large impact and house for that, and they are showing up with a 30-year-old format. If they look beyond, in general, for fresh ideas, those people can help our audience. We take their ideas and experiences and apply them to their work.
Then, I would say intellectually curious people because we are multidisciplinary in our approach. On this podcast, we are not just talking about the very niche marketing, the main generation tactics, we are talking about broader themes, about how to create a holistic experience for your key stakeholders. Be it your company, partner, customer, or future customer. That is a holistic mindset for people who like to connect the dots.
And obviously, digital innovators. People who have compelling digital strategies, and ambitions, and trying to create digital transformation for their organizations but are finding they are not congruent all the time and are looking for better ways to be more innovative in that space. Those are people who feel motivated to bring their A-game in creating experiences, whether they are hybrid or digital-first, and we tend to speak the same language with these people.
RELAYTO Podcast Contact Information
(11:17-12:00)
JE: So, to our friend who’s listening, here’s what you do: just send the link to, Alex, your company website, that’s podcast.relayto.com. You can apply and schedule right on that page. If you want to do a formal introduction, you are welcome to. Otherwise, you can just send it directly to RELAYTO. And Alex, speaking on this, we kind of touched on it, what is RELAYTO?
Knowing more about RELAYTO
(12:00-13:22)
AS: RELAYTO is a web application that takes your static content like PDFs, presentations, and videos and turns it into interactive microsites. In a few clicks, you go with a more engaging, web-friendly, mobile-friendly experience that’s measurable.
Fundamentally, take our content output, and turn that into a business outcome, depending on your organization, could be things that drive the pipeline and win the race, or it could be things that, if you are really engaging the audience, you have to share and show how persuaded they are with your communications. It is sort of the super weapon for everybody, we are trying to market interactive content the same way tools like Canva do graphic design or Figma do product design. We are trying to do the same with B2B and the content that people share.
Why the connection would be valuable
(13:22-16:00)
JE: So, Alex Shevelenko, in addition to being the host of the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast and founder and CEO of RELAYTO, you are a good person to know. RELAYTO has some high-authority client users, and you have a lot of advocates out there in the world. I guess I could give you 30-45 seconds to talk about why you’d be of valuable connection to folks and why they should kind of plug in with you. I’m giving you this space to brag about yourself just a little bit.
AS: I will brag that we happen to be working with amazing customers. We can’t say all the names but think of the flagship of clients in industries with lots of content: B2B technology, enterprise technology, professional services, financial insurance services, and so on. We’ve learned from them, we built the products with them, and we are applying the best practices from them.
The second thing is these customers are all about content marketing awards, digital awards, and that’s really interesting that they are succeeding not just in outcomes but also in their careers. We at RELAYTO have also been very fortunate. We have been recognized as a leader in multiple categories of products, and I think that’s part of the holistic vision where we are transforming all content from the content that designers work on to marketers to sellers.
For example, G2 combines a lot of reviews of actual users. We are leading at any point 9-10 product categories for this content value chain. So, for people who are deep in the content, we are as deep as it gets.
Personally, I have looked at more PDFs and presentations than probably any human being on Earth. So you try to think of how you can transform them. If this is something where you have important high-stakes communication, we can apply our expertise, and that of our customer, what we’ve learned from the industry and leaders as well, and we’d share that with you.
About subscription
(16:00-16:55)
JE: To our friends who have been listening to our conversation, here are your next steps. If you know of anyone who deserves to be celebrated or recognized on this podcast, just send them to relayto.com.
Also, you are listening to this likely on the podcast player, so hit the subscribe button now, and the reason why is you are going to learn from the best of the best. They know about what engagement means and how to truly engage. They’ve got the right tools and right technology in place as well.
So, subscribe, and listen to every episode, and the transformation after you’ve been through many episodes is going to be pre-significant to getting actual advice for your own business as well. Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Congratulations on this episode. I’m so excited to hear about the actual interviews and conversations with your guests.
Outro
(16:57-17:08)
AS: Welcome back! Alex Shevelenko here! Thank you so much for listening to the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast! You can learn more about us at podcast.relayto.com.
Obviously, we would love you to send this to people who you know would be great speakers or just share the nuggets that you took away from this episode with your community on social media, and you can learn more about what we are up to at relayto.com.
Certainly, connect with me on LinkedIn, where it’s just very easy to spell my name, you don’t have to have a Masters in Ukrainian. We’d love to connect so that we can move together the way the world communicates about its most important ideas. Thank you for listening. We hope to see you next time!
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Author
The fastest way to build digital experiences. We empower businesses to convert PDFs, presentations, and other content into interactive experiences & webpages with instant branding, analytics & more
