Dan Martell, CMO of Alignable, explains how the platform targets Main Street business owners instead of corporate employees. He ditched his 55,000 LinkedIn connections for 700 curated Alignable contacts, which led to a $25,000 project in three weeks and access to over 20,000 potential customers through the network-within-a-network.
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All right. So, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have an incredible thought leader and marketing expert, Dan Martelli. Don, can you tell us a little bit about yourself briefly before we get the interview started? You are the Chief Marketing Officer of Alignable.
That's right.
one of the world's largest professional social networks. Can you tell us a little bit more?
Yeah, I am with— yeah, yeah. So former journalist for the Boston Globe, spent 25 years now in marketing communications, mostly on the storytelling kind of content development side. I'm currently in a VP role with Alignable. I am not a product developer, and why I'm there is because as somebody who's worked with and sold small businesses for 20+ years, I know what the platform can do for a small business owner. So my role with Alignable is really to work with the product development team, our chief revenue officer, and others to really make sure the experience for small business owners allows them to get in, get value, and get on with their very, very busy days, as you know.
So as the person in charge of like marketing for Alignable, how would you describe how Alignable is different than LinkedIn? A lot of people ask me that question and I—
Sure.
And it's hard for me to, to explain it other than saying that on LinkedIn you have a profile and a company page, and on Alignable you only have a company page and everybody's a company because you guys are more focused on business owners versus just employees. But can you, can you describe it a little bit more, like, in, in a way that you want, like, representing Alignable? Like, what, what is it that, that Alignable says of how they're different than LinkedIn?
Yeah, great question. Um, there's a couple ways I answer that, um, and all the product marketers and folks that work for the platform, we discuss this all the time because we obviously, uh, LinkedIn is sort of the Goliath in this space. They're both designed to help individuals network with other people, right? The difference between LinkedIn and us is think I have about 5,000 people that follow me on LinkedIn. I have another 49,000, 55,000 connections. I probably know a 16th of those people. On Alignable, I have about 700 connections and I've carefully curated that network over time, right? So the difference between the two of them from a networking perspective, it's not about volume, but it's rather about the quality of those connections. On the Alignable side, the networking you do one-to-one with either your direct customers or your referral partners— LinkedIn has grown so much that it's become a bit of a lead generation tool for large-scale businesses and a fantastic, honestly, thought leadership platform. If you want to be known in particular circles on particular topics in business, most people are doing that on Alignable outside their own podcast and their website. So when you think about Alignable, No, it's really for Main Street, not Wall Street. It's for the general contractor who lives just outside of Boston looking to meet electricians. It's for the woman that owns an art gallery in Idaho looking to sell her art to homeowners or real estate agents in LA. It's not for the Fortune 500 company that is looking to add another 500 employees to their 10,000 employees globally. Big difference. You know, big pond, small pond. That's the difference. And outside of the experience, our platform is about the individual and their profile. Their profile literally is the algorithm. It's how it's set up and those ideal customer tags, ideal referral partner tags, everything on your profile feeds the system, which basically tells you, hi, my name is Don Martelli. I work in marketing. I want to meet nonprofits. Tell me who in my network knows nonprofits and they are an introduction away by one click. I love that.
I love the whole concept of like you're dealing directly with Main Street business owners versus with just a bunch of employees. There's, there's 1.2 billion people on LinkedIn. Alignable has 10 million people only in the US. that are just business owners, and there's only 32 million businesses in the United States. So you're talking about 10 million people that are interested in networking and relationship building that are business owners. So if you're looking to do business with business owners, just go to Alignable and build connections with people. I'm personally a client of Alignable for several years now, and I can tell you I've built some pretty incredible relationships. Can you speak to the revenue generation that you've generated just in the past year alone on Alignable?
Yeah, yeah, I have a great example of this. So prior to joining the company, I've been on the platform for probably a decade on and off, on and off. And I was, for my company, which is the PR Bunker, I was prospecting for nonprofits in Maine, a very specific type of executive director in that area. Reached out to a gentleman who said, hey, look, I have a PR guy, but I'd love to send you referrals on Alignable. I'm like, oh man, I think I have an Alignable account. You know, he sent me the link, logged back in. I was like, oh geez, I remember this thing. So I started to play with it. And then within a day or two, reconnected with a gentleman that I haven't talked to in about a decade. We started talking, do a one-on-one. 3 weeks later, he's sending me a project for $25 grand for 3 weeks worth of work.
Wow.
5 figures, 3 weeks. And I said to myself, who else is here? Former clients, former colleagues. I'm like, man. So I— and Eric Groves, who's our CEO, and him and Venkat, the 2 guys that founded this thing. Eric has a great analogy. Everybody has a stack of business cards somewhere in their office, and they're just sitting there either collecting dust or leveling off the table in your business. Right now, imagine if you knew who those people were connected to and how to untap that network pretty quickly. And that's what Alignable has done. That's what Eric and Venkat have done. They have been able for you to see into your network's network. And so just within a 2 or 3 week situation where I re-engaged the platform, reconnected with my contact, signed that project, and from there it was just a catalyst. I literally stopped paying for LinkedIn, put the credit card down for Alignable, bought a premium subscription for the year, and it's been gold ever since. And ironically enough, it was my network That got me to Alignable. Somebody who I know, who knows somebody, who knows somebody, our Chief Revenue Officer, had a couple conversations and here I am down the line. And one of the things they identified quickly and early on was we need folks that are using the platform, that know how to use it, that can educate other users to do it. So in terms of our revenue number, in terms of the quality of my network, it was instrumental. The fact that I can meet literally between the 700 connections I currently have now on the platform, there are over 20,000 potential customers and/or referral partners that are a single introduction away. In the 9 minutes you and I have been talking, I could have asked for 40 referrals. It's that easy.
It's crazy. Yeah. So I just go to my network. I click on connections. I click on the submenu under Alignable 360 called referral partners. And I have 15,000 referral partners right now. You guys are watching this live. You can actually see me scrolling through my referral partners. And then I just can click on a button and make a request to be connected to that person. And that's kind of like how it's designed. It's such a powerful tool. A lot of people don't realize how powerful this tool is if You learn how to use it right. Want to make networking easier and more effective? Try Evvy AI, your AI-powered sidekick that helps you connect, engage, and grow your network faster than ever. Click the link and start building smarter relationships today.
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