Episode 209: Martijn Holtes – Unlocking Productivity: Personal Knowledge Management & Thought Leadership on LinkedIn

Martijn Holtes  00:02

For me, sales is a combination of having your network presenting your network, combining your network, letting them know each other, combining that with your knowledge with your perspective on the world, and to me, that’s what makes this whole industry so super exciting and interesting.

Intro  00:19

Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast featuring the Top Voices in Sales, Marketing, and Business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show!

Brynne Tillman  00:44

Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m Brynne Tillman, and I am excited to be here today with my guest, Martijn Holtes. He specializes in helping professionals and aspiring thought leaders in the B2B service industry and consultative selling fields to amplify their impact through the power of social and knowledge capital. I love that knowledge capital. That’s better than thought leadership. I think that’s awesome.

He teaches how to leverage your social capital for meaningful connections, strategic partnerships, and new business opportunities. Martijn also shares his expertise on developing your knowledge capital, teaching you how to turn your unique insights into compelling content that showcases your expertise and establishes you as a go-to authority, Martijne, Welcome to Making Sales Social. We’re excited to have you here today.

Martijn Holtes  01:44

Brynne, I’m so happy to have this podcast. I’ve been following your content for over 10 years now. So it’s such an honor to be on your podcast. And now after that, after that introduction, I am interested in what I’m going to say. Let’s thank you very much for that.

Brynne Tillman  01:59

Awesome. Well, I am excited at what you have to say as well. You are definitely one of the great thought leaders in the industry. And I can’t wait to ask you some deep questions on how to get more engagement and some other things around LinkedIn. But before I jump into that, I asked, as you know, all of our guests, What does Making Sales Social mean to you?

Martijn Holtes  02:24

What I would say, for me, it’s, as you already said in the introduction to me, it’s a combination of sharing your knowledge, which I call your information capital, or your knowledge capital, depending on how you want it, and your social capital. So for me, sales is not. I remember when I started in sales, it was already 20 years ago, a long time ago. And I was working as an account manager, going door to door to talk to people and to ask them if they wanted to buy me my goods for a company. 

And so much has changed, of course, which I don’t have to tell you or your listeners. Everybody knows that. So for me, it’s a combination of having your network presenting your network, combining your network, letting them know each other, combining that with your knowledge with your perspective on the world. And to me, that’s what makes this whole industry. So super exciting and interesting.

Brynne Tillman  03:20

Well, I love that. I think that’s awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about what is knowledge capital. Tell me first a little bit, like how do you define that? Let’s start there. 

Martijn Holtes  03:32

Yeah, Sure. Yeah. It was interesting, because just this weekend, I got an email from just a well. She’s a famous guy on LinkedIn, of course. And he was talking about how you can create boasts that were not really the point. But what stood out there for me is that he saw a boast around personal knowledge management, and he didn’t know what it was. And that’s interesting personal knowledge management. It’s sort of a new term, or in the industry, I would say, and it was made famous by Thiago forte, he has a course gold, a gold, building a second brain. And actually, personal knowledge management goes way back. 

But the whole premise of it is that we have a lot of information in his world. And in order for us to make sense of that information. We cannot store it in our brains anymore. You know, that’s what we all learned at school, like you have to read a book or you have to read some stuff. And then you have to talk about it or understand what it means. But with so much information going on right now, that doesn’t really work anymore, because it’s too much our brains can’t manage it. 

So knowledge management is actually how you can make sense of one year’s information. So first of all, collect the information stored in the information somewhere. So for example, ideas you have but also podcasts that you listen to books, and all those little snippets of information that are relevant for you, for example, on creating content on LinkedIn or shared with your clients or whatever it is for you. That’s actually what that whole system or that whole phrase means.

Brynne Tillman  05:07

I love that. We often similarly call that capturing your genius. So, yeah, right when you have an idea, write it down when you talk with a client and you answer a question, write it down. And nowadays go on to Zoom and then record those questions and answers to capture it. 

So I love that you’re focused on this. I think it’s huge. How do you teach to leverage that knowledge capital? What do you do for how do you teach your clients to now take this knowledge capital? And share that thought leadership on social and LinkedIn?

Martijn Holtes  05:53

Yeah, So to me, I’ve been talking about, for example, personal branding content networking for a long time, I think that those are the pillars of a good LinkedIn strategy amongst many, of course, but what I often call in my concentrating is you want to avoid at all cost the blinking cursor syndrome, which is like you go to “LinkedIn,” and then you click on “Both.” And then it says, “What do you want to talk about?” And so it’s like, “Yeah, That actually LinkedIn,” that’s a pretty good question. 

For many people, that’s hard. So you just told me, it was a strategy that came from you, like, get a Zoom recording, talk to it, and then take the transcript. I really, really love that one. But that’s, for example, one, what you always want is to have a system where you can capture the knowledge but also manage it. So not only capturing is like part number one. 

So if you have the capturing of your zoom transcripts, from the Zoom account that you just did, or whatever part of the content you have, how to manage it, how to find it back.And what I see in the market, when it comes to building a second brain, personal knowledge, mints, and all that kinds of stuff, people go crazy. Maybe you’ve heard of the notion, Evernote for example, is also a really famous notion. 

But for example, also obsidian, and depending on what you want, you can go super technical, super detailed with all kinds of texts. And well, I don’t even understand half of it. But you don’t have to do that, for example, we train, I train a lot of corporate guidelines, and they cannot use notions or Evernote or whatever kind of tool. So all those fancy things.

Brynne Tillman  07:31

Is your company blocking it?  Why can’t they use it?  

Martijn Holtes  07:35

Because yeah, Exactly, because the company blocks it. You know, and sometimes, all the tools that I always recommend are 100% safe, but of course, I’m not an IT person. So I understand that you have something with security and stuff like that, but almost everybody can use, for example, Microsoft OneNote, or even use the Notes application on your phone. 

So there’s always a way to, capture that information and to reshare it and that’s what I would say that’s the holy grill, this whole personal knowledge management to connect ideas together. That’s like the most important thing.

Brynne Tillman  08:11

So I use my notes, and I have an Apple computer and an iPhone, and my notes sync. So I can be out and about and I’ve got ideas, and then they’re immediately on my desktop or my laptop. And that’s Yeah, great. So I love that advice. I think that’s awesome. Um, and even on your notes, you can click the microphone and talk to him. So even sometimes when I’m driving, I actually just talk in my notes about some ideas that are going on, and it doesn’t affect anything that goes through my Bluetooth.

Martijn Holtes  08:51

Yeah. So it’s like it’s pretty me ask you, let me ask you a short question. Do you often use the finding option in notes? So for example, you have a word, social selling, or whatever it is to you? Do you ever use the option to find notes back?

Brynne Tillman  09:06

So I use the… Is a command F I think to find.

Martijn Holtes  09:10

Yeah. Ctrl F if your Windows computer? Yeah.

Brynne Tillman  09:15

Yeah. And I think, yeah, I think that’s really important. And I will often categorize like prospecting content, something that will come up. So I love that, that you may think that.

Martijn Holtes  09:28

That’s like a holy grail, because capturing your information. That’s number one. There are a lot of great tools out there. For example, we were talking about the podcast and you asked me if I listened to it. And of course, I listened to this podcast from other episodes, the program that I use or the app that I use and I think it’s also for Android right now. It’s definitely for iOS, it’s called Snipped, it’s like Snip and then with the D. 

And what you can do, especially when you have airports, you can just clip little notes of the year of the episode. So For example, I was listening to a podcast with one of you. And you were asked, you’re telling something and I was like, this is really interesting, but I was walking in the forest enjoying nature. So the only thing that I need to do is just click it two times, and it saves a little audio clip from 30 seconds and the transcript. 

So that’s for example, one of the things that you can do to find relevant information. Now what I do, then let’s not get too technical, but this might be interesting for you in your in your, and of course, the listeners. What to do then is that it’s automatically sent to my preferred notes. And there is also a transcript in there. Now, let’s say I am doing research for a client or I want to create new content. 

Instead of me going to Google, I go to my notion, or whatever to use, this word also works in OneNote. And I just type in what I want to talk about. And then it finds me, for example, the snippets where you talked about this, and this, and this in combination with a note that I’ve taken a year before and so on. So this is really interesting. If you look at it from a knowledge perspective from really managing and finding and organizing your knowledge.

Brynne Tillman  11:13

Oh, I love that, that organizational piece is really important because a lot of us capture and forget, we get it. And then it gets lost, and we never use it. So I love that tip. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. I’m going to side note this for a second and ask you about what I think is the elephant in the content room. Which is Chat GPT. Talk to me about your thoughts around this, how you would leverage it authentically or authentically. Now, tell me Yeah. A little bit about your thoughts around that.

Martijn Holtes  11:50

Yeah, So. Well, like many people, I was stung by Chat GPT. I remember using AI for like half a year. and a half year ago. And I was really like, this is nothing. And then I remembered November, I gave a content session. And I was talking about how I found this pretty nice. So it’s called something open AI. You have to create an account and go here near an errand and blah-blah-blah. 

But then you had the AI playground, which was like, I think, yeah, it was just before Chat GPT. So when it comes to Chat GPT I think it’s an incredible tool. I use it all the time. Let’s say that first. But what I think is happening in the world right now is that the perspective that you have on the information is getting more and more important because what happens is the barrier of creating great content, it’s almost well down to zero. 

You know, if you know a little bit of prompting on Chat GPT you can create great content, but when it can not do well, at least yet. It reads your mind. So what I would do when it comes to getting up to you know, play around, do your thing, create content, whatever it is, but always look at it from the perspective that you have, because you are in that case, of course, unique with your experience, your point of view, the combination. 

That’s why I save all those notes, the combination of different insights. And that’s really hard for now to get out of Chat GPT. And of course, we don’t know what the future brings. But yeah, that’s one that I would definitely recommend to everybody to find out how you can be more clear on the perspective you have on your industry or the business or whatever it is for you.

Brynne Tillman  13:35

I love that. How do you feel about people taking all these notes that they’re taking in OneNote or notion or notes as I take them, sticking them in Chat GPT and saying “Hey, Write a 2000-character blog post based on these notes.”

Martijn Holtes  13:53

Yep, I was just this weekend. Finally, I’m from the Netherlands. Some of you might have already heard my accent. But finally we have some just a little bit yeah. But we finally had some great weather so I was sitting in the sun and I was just and I was joking with it and thinking about letting me do some prompting on Chat GPT. So I can definitely afford to capture your notes and capture your ideas. 

When you’re in the car, please keep your eyes on the road when captured with your voice notes. Then put it into Chat GPT leather, Right? Do all that kind of stuff, but then go through it and say like, Hey, is this actually what I really want to say? And what I see happening is that many people just copy-paste boom and wait for a great blog post. But I would say well spend some more time and see, “Is this really what I want to say?” “Is this really how I can be serving my audience and my clients with my knowledge the best way?”

Brynne Tillman  14:50

Yeah, so that’s interesting so that when you do that, you’re sharing your voice not Chat GPT voice, but more. So I love that idea. The other thing that comes to mind is, if you really want to be that thought leader out there, you have to say something that they haven’t heard before. And if it’s coming from Chat GPT, it’s out there. Yeah. So your perspective needs to be a new one. So I love that I, you know, based on what you said, That makes so much sense. So I absolutely love this. So. So now we’ve got all this content out there. Why are people not sharing it and engaging?

Martijn Holtes  15:35

People always get stumped when I say this, but actually, it’s really dangerous to put content out there and to comment on posts. And what I mean by that is that when you share content, you could get rejection, of course, depending on what you share, let’s keep it professional. But, you know, depending on what you do and for old brains, Rejection equals death. And many people don’t realize that, like, it’s our instinct that whenever somebody rejects you, your brain detects this as this is life-threatening. 

And of course, I’m exaggerating a bit, because if somebody on the street doesn’t like you, well, that’s way less important than when, for example, your boss or your colleagues or your partner doesn’t like you, there’s a radically different situation. But that’s number one. So I would say to you, you have to work a bit more, if that’s the case, work a bit more on your resilience. Because if you share real thought leadership, you also have to take a stand, you have to stand for your opinion.

And that means that sometimes you can, of course, in a professional way but offend people, and I’m not talking about offending people, because you want to offend them. But if you have a different opinion, well, somebody could say something like, “Well, maybe I don’t agree with you, great, man, let’s have a discussion about it.” Because we can learn from each other. But that’s number one. And number two, I think when you overcome that, it’s really hard to keep those ideas flowing, and to consistently come up with new angles, new topics. 

And I say to myself, as well, you know, I talk about this stuff, my library is full of great content, ideas. And still, it’s hard to create that content. So many, I think there are many different things. But those two will stand out, like the one that nobody is focused on. Nobody notices, because, of course, nobody thinks like, “Hey, you don’t like my post, and you tell me like eight more things. I really don’t like your posts or I disagree.” Nobody. You won’t die from that, of course. But it’s really interesting to see how your mental brain detects, “Oh, people don’t like me, Oh, I’m in danger.”

Brynne Tillman  17:38

Yeah, it’s great. I Yeah. So when it comes to engaging, I think if they do engage, we get a lot of great post good insights. What would you say is a good engagement? What is a good engagement strategy?

Martijn Holtes  17:58

Well, that’s a good one. First of all, also, like, really, really strange dip, but I would not go to your home feed. 

Brynne Tillman  18:08

Me either.

Martijn Holtes  18:09

All right, great friends. So we know, don’t go, don’t feed people. Feel free to scroll around. But if you want to leverage LinkedIn, please don’t. So I have, and you of course have as well. I follow hashtags. I have bookmarks on specific topics I want to follow. I have those lists with people that I want to follow in Sales Navigator, where I have a specific home feed with only news from leads and so on with so many different options. And I completely forgot about your question.

Brynne Tillman  18:40

No, no, no. And I’m not sure I remember either. But you know, I guess it’s around the engagement strategy, like ringing the bell of people. And then when you see their content show up, like that kind of if you were to say, you’re sharing with our listeners, maybe the three to five steps of a good content engagement strategy.

Martijn Holtes  19:07

Yeah. So first of all, thank you. And I remember the question. First of all, I would take two, or three topics, Max, most of the time we are overcomplicated. Like we want to be known on 15 different topics because then we have a lot of internet, we get a lot of posts and often it’s way too much show to decide on. Well, for those of you that cannot choose, let’s take five Max, but I would prefer you to go for two or three topics that you want to be known for. 

Go search for those topics on LinkedIn, just with the search option. See if there are hashtags about it. Maybe you have a specific topic in mind, maybe Chat GPT. Like, “Hey, related to this topic, are there other topics that I could search for?” So find the topics that are interesting for you, then I would say another important one is building your routines. So start engaging with them. it on a specific time, if that works for you. So one of the things that it’s hard for many people to stay consistent on LinkedIn, actually, that’s also something I’m always struggling with. 

But staying consistent on LinkedIn, you can do it in two ways. Or it’s already in your system. So you do it like you don’t have to think about it. But if not, I always say schedule like five to 10 minutes a day, if you start with this, start with five to 10 minutes a day, block your calendar. So say, I don’t know after lunch, I’m going to spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn, interacting with interesting posts, until it’s in your system until you don’t just think about it anymore becomes a habit. 

Brynne Tillman  20:38

It has become a habit.

Martijn Holtes  20:40

Yeah, it becomes a habit, and why 10 minutes? Because there’s no excuse not to do it, we all have 10 minutes in a day, if you make a content strategy, which would take you for example, 30 minutes a day, or an hour a day, definitely 100% It will bring you lots of results. But you have to do it consistently. And you have to do it over a long period of time. And then it becomes really hard if you have to take an hour out of your day. So if you start with 10 minutes, and then maybe go to 20 and 30, and so on.

Brynne Tillman  21:10

Even split it up. 10 minutes in line, 10 minutes after lunch, 10 minutes before you leave. 30 minutes. Yeah, I love that. I think yeah, we’ll look at that. I believe we waste 10 minutes, all day long. Yeah, I don’t know how many times I get up to get a cup of coffee. If I like every time I get a cup of coffee, I have to pretend for minutes and on LinkedIn.

Martijn Holtes  21:35

Coffee is important, Brynne. Coffee is very important.

Brynne Tillman  21:39

I love that, I agree with you. The free LinkedIn homepage is a black hole of time sucker. So from what you’re talking about when you go in topics, but also people who are your prospects who’s in the industry, and I’m a big fan now of ringing the bell of company pages, you follow them and ring the bell, and of people. 

So now when you’re going to ice, tell our clients to spend a lot of time in Notifications. You’ve rung enough bells, you’re getting the content to engage in there. And it’s very specific, similar to Sales Navigator, we’re all you’re getting our leads and counts that you’ve saved. You can do this a little bit now in the free LinkedIn in a way that you couldn’t a few months back. 

Martijn Holtes  22:29

Yeah, that’s a really interesting one that I always recommend people to use, you know, and for those of you that like to spend time at your home feet, by all means, do your thing, but try to for example, sometimes at times have you both like I know that’s not interesting for me, I just muted but don’t count on the homepage to serve you with really great posts, use tactics that you told me that you talked about, of course, you silicification use bookmarks, whatever is relevant for you.

Brynne Tillman  23:00

One of the other things now, and I think you mentioned this, but I’m just going to, from a tactical perspective for the folks listening, is you can search those hashtags and posts of your first-degree connection. So you can really drill down into free LinkedIn, you can really drill down to find the right content to engage on. I know we’re going a little long, but I’m loving this conversation. So I’m just going to quickly ask you, how would you use or recommend using Chat GPT with commenting.

Martijn Holtes  23:31

I tried to do it, there was a little plugin that generated a comment, I didn’t like it. What I sometimes do though, is I take two posts, so I just copy the whole post, drop it into Chat GPT create a prompt for it like a Chat GPT come up with two great angles on me to comment on blah blah-blah-blah, what it comes up with is like 80% Correct.

Which most of the time is but it gives an idea of Yeah, that’s the angle that I want to take. And then I just go to the comment section. And just type it aloud. So I don’t copy from Chat GPT. But I used to have Chat GPT to help me come up with different angles. Or for example, I’m talking about, like, “Hey, I want to take the angle of what we talked about,” for example, knowledge management, this is what I mean by knowledge management.

Please come up with five ideas or three ideas to comment on this post. But especially with the government strategy, it has to be authentic. You know, there’s a save a little bit you’d like to LinkedIn bots, great posts, great posts. Love it, Love it, Love it. So, yeah, when it comes to the content, the common strategy, is always to go for the authentic one, be honest, and share your opinion.

 Brynne Tillman  24:44

Yeah. I appreciate that. All right, as we’re kind of coming in for a landing. My last question is there a question I forgot to ask you that you’d like to answer? 

Martijn Holtes  24:56

Oh, well, there are tons of apps that I have to share. But I think we’ve covered a lot already, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  25:05

Yeah. All right. Thanks for your top three apps that you haven’t mentioned yet.

Martijn Holtes  25:09

Hmm. That’s an interesting one. Um, that’s a hard one. I would go for let me see, I would go for Read Wise notion, and one that we didn’t talk about yet than it was read rise read reader. Alright. So let me explain. For those of you that are wondering, like, what is he talking about? One of the things that you can do is use an app, it’s called Read Wise. And they have two different sorts of plants, read wise is known for drawing in content from different places. So for example, the podcast app just talked about snippets, but also, for example, my Amazon Kindle, when I highlight a text in an ebook, it automatically sends it to Notion. 

So this is what read-wise can do. So it integrates like different kinds of EPs, and sends it all to one central place. For me, that’s the notion. Again, this could be any different tool that you want. So that’s, yeah, so that’s step number one. So Read Wise, then notion, of course, notion is just a website or an app. I think I have almost everything in it. I use it for content creation, I use it for projects, I use it for, well, my knowledge base.

I have everything that I read and save comes into Notion. And then what we were talking about before I use the Finder option, so I’m not really worried about what’s the structure, I have some structure in there, but I really trust on finding interesting information whenever I need to. And then the last one, read wise now has read wise reader. So it’s from the same company, but it’s a different project product. And what that is, it’s like a combination of an RSS reader. It’s a little bit

Brynne Tillman  27:00

Curating. It’s Curating.  

Martijn Holtes  27:03

Yeah. So an RSS feed. Feedly isn’t important, or a famous one Google Reader used to be one now. So they have one. But what they do is they also included a bookmarking tool, what they also included this AI. So whenever I say for example, this is really great. Whenever I save an article, it already makes a summary out of it. And I can just click on it and say, “What’s in this article?” 

Brynne Tillman  27:31

Is that reader?

Martijn Holtes  27:32

Yes. Read Wise Reader. Yeah. So those would be the top three that I would say, maybe a bit technical, but if you spend a little time on it, it’s pretty straightforward. Pretty easy to find out how it works.

Brynne Tillman  27:50

I love this. So tell our listeners, how can they get a hold of you?

Martijn Holtes  27:56

LinkedIn is like the best place LinkedIn.com Of course, Martijn Holtes is what a j so little bit. Many people are like, is that like the Dutch version of Martin? So yeah, so Martijn Holtes. So LinkedIn is the best place I have a website Morton holders.com. But for now, I’m working on the translation. But for now, it’s all still in Dutch. So LinkedIn would be the place where all my content is in English. My role is of course in English. So that will be the most relevant place for people to find me and we’ll follow my content. I would say.

Brynne Tillman  28:33

This was great. I’m so glad I got to meet you. We met I think because you shared content that I was intrigued by. And so I’m excited about how that works. Or you may I That’s how you came into my world. From my perspective, what you brought here today was really wonderful. So I thank you so everyone, go follow and connect with Martijn and watch and engage on his content. And so you know, as we close this out, I just want to say that everyone out there when you are out and about don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro  29:16

Thanks for listening and joining us again. For more special guest instructors bringing you marketing, sales, training, and social selling strategies that will set you will park don’t forget to subscribe to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social Podcasts, Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.