Kacy Maxwell, CMO at Provisions Group, Turning LinkedIn Connections into Relational Deposits

Kacy Maxwell is a veteran of marketing agencies and brand departments, having helped lead digital transformations at Dollar General, Ramsey Solutions, and CSS Industries. A series of viral LinkedIn posts of his “sketch notes” helped find his most recent appointment as CMO of Provisions Group, an IT staffing and consulting firm. His work combines savvy e-commerce strategy with story-driven customer marketing. 

Christian Banach sat down with Maxwell to discuss his new team at Provisions Group and his unique journey to finding his identity as a thought leader on social media and in the boardroom. 

Where to find Kacy Maxwell: LinkedIn

Where to find Christian Banach: LinkedIn

How LinkedIn Shaped Maxwell as a Thought Leader

Banach: 

Tell me more about your journey—any life experiences that have shaped you now?

Maxwell:

I’ve always been more on the creative side. Growing up, I was into acting and drawing. When I was young, it felt like finding something to do from 9 to 5 would have been torture. I pursued that for a while before I decided, you know, “I’d like to make money too.”

I was looking for a role to do that and still be creative, and I was drawn to marketing. I started on the agency side, and that’s where I found the groundwork for putting together strategies and how to make marketing work to grow businesses. 

Working closely with clients and seeing their operations made me more interested in working on the client side, which eventually led me to this role at Provisions, which is more hybrid. I’m both working with the traditional marketing funnel and spinning up a marketing tech consulting side of our business to provide to our customers who might need that expertise. 

Banach:

I originally came across you on LinkedIn, and you have a notable presence there. Can you share a little more about the role it played for you? 

Maxwell:

LinkedIn was an unexpected gem I found during the pandemic. I had been in the realm for a long time since beginning with agencies, and I don’t personally love Facebook or Instagram, so for me, LinkedIn was always a place just for looking for a job.

About two years ago, I started seeing people begin to use LinkedIn differently. They used it to build networks and have real conversations about my field. I wanted to do that for myself but find a unique voice beyond being a “marketing guru

One thing I had started enjoying again was art—I started drawing and creating these “sketch notes.” It was essentially visual notetaking, but in a more infographic-oriented way. They were a way for me to build a network of fans of those sketches.

Eventually, this meant the people I was meeting with already had a sense of “how I think,” through my LinkedIn posts. 

Relational Marketing Goals

Banach:

I’d love to hear a little more about Provisions Group. What are some of your objectives coming into the role?

Maxwell:

I’ve been brought in to establish marketing as more of a growth engine. One of my main objectives is to build brand awareness around Provisions Group.

One of the places we’re targeting is LinkedIn, so we just launched a strategy for how we’re approaching LinkedIn as a company. We’ve got everybody—not just the marketing function—on board with this. 

We are a highly relational company. Marketing so often goes the opposite direction—generic, annoying, beating you over the head with 700 emails. And we’re looking for ways to market in more intentional ways.

We’re working to get key people to start posting more and interacting more on LinkedIn. It’s not always revolving around the pitch, but rather creating relational deposits.

Banach:

That makes sense—proactively creating relationships starts even before you think about pitching to a prospect. What challenges are you seeing as you come into the role?

Maxwell: 

The same challenges as the customers who come to us—“We have too much to do and only limited resources to accomplish our goals.” So, I’m still working on building the team and simultaneously trying to create some quick wins.

Marketers often come in and begin with long-term plays. That is great, you want to start building for the long term, but if a company isn’t seeing any benefit in the short term, they aren’t going to stick with you. 

Balancing the resources to reach those short-term goals with that long-term strategy is exactly what I’m thinking about. Working with the right agencies is a big part of that. 

Maxwell’s Team and Agency Partners

Banach: 

That’s a pain point for a lot of clients. Tell us a little more about your team, though. Key areas you’re looking to grow in?

Maxwell:

Because we’re a technology company, we have a lot of those tech resources in-house already. We already have specialists for Salesforce and Pardot, so we already have operations and implementation for that tech stack. 

In the short term, I’m leaning towards performance marketing. We have a great UX person who can create pages that convert. Another of the roles I’m looking for is a copywriter. Marketers often take on that kind of work themselves, but people who are good at copywriting can change the performance of your marketing across your channels. 

Right now, I’m looking to outsource paid lead gen, SEO, and link building. Content strategy is also a big part of what we’re looking for. The amount of content you need for B2B these days is significant. Those are my main focuses, getting short-term wins and further investing in our marketing team. 

Banach: 

You mentioned potentially tapping agencies for SEO and paid lead gen, and you have experience on the agency side, too, so you have a broad perspective on this: what are you looking for in the partners you’re working with?

Maxwell:

The best thing you can get from an agency is trust. I know a lot of agencies function in a way where they don’t necessarily have all the people they need for the work they’ve won. I, like many others, have been burned by agencies that don’t necessarily have the ability to scale for what you want.

I don’t go for the huge agencies—I don’t want to be a small fish in a big pond, in the way you are sometimes with a bigger agency. The company I’m working with for paid now is less than a year old, but I know the leadership and have an immediate level of trust. I default to going with someone I know and trust over big names, or even relying on awards and longevity. 

Banach: 

Great insights—it all connects back to building trust and how you build it. LinkedIn is one way to nurture those relationships.

Maxwell:

If someone in an agency is listening to this, I would say this: One of the ways to bring leads in is sharing your expertise on LinkedIn. Not a sponsor! I’m not getting paid by them, but I do see it as a useful resource. 

I created a post recently about StoryBrand, which is one of the things I specialize in, and took a customer through how to use it. I asked if I could post that on LinkedIn as a sort of case study and got 4 leads from it. Maybe not a lot of leads, but it led to three proposals from that single post. Imagine if everyone at your company is doing something similar. That’s a great ROI for just one post. 

Banach and Maxwell discussed more about Maxwell’s creative background, how he approaches working with paid lead gen, and how he turned bedtime stories into his first children’s book. You can see more of the interview here.

Edited for brevity.