Lisza Crisalle Interviews Joe Apfelbaum CEO of evyAI

networking, you're gonna get a taste of this. And when he is not mojo-vating the entrepreneurs at events and on LinkedIn, he enjoys spending time with his 5 kids. So Joe, I am so excited to bring you on board.

Oh, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm really excited about being here as well. A lot of people don't know this about me, but English is not my first language.

Oh, I did not know that.

You see, people don't know about it, but we'll keep them in suspense so that they could find out what my first language is. And it's not AI.

Okay. Well, you and my husband have something in Okay, awesome.

I love that.

Let's, let's jump in here because I know that you have so much to share today, and we want to start off with talking about the biggest mistakes that people make on LinkedIn.

The biggest mistakes that people make on LinkedIn is not having a strategy. People open up an account and they just are spraying and praying or hoping for the best, or worse, they're lurking. They're not doing anything, they're just watching. Because if you don't have a strategy, you're not going to take action. The famous saying is, if you fail to prepare, you may as well prepare to fail. But it's more than that. If you want to be able to properly leverage LinkedIn and the behemoth that it is, there's a billion people on LinkedIn and it's growing at a rate of 3 new members every second. If you want to be able to leverage that, you have to understand how to be able to create a strategy. And there's really just 3 Ps in a strategy. They say there's 2 Ps in a pod, but there's 3 Ps in a strategy. And so understanding what the 3 Ps are that go into a strategy will help you be able to actually write your strategy on the back of a napkin. You don't need this complicated, expensive thing to do. I tell people you need a plan. You need a business plan, marketing plan, and LinkedIn plan. Then what you need to do is you need people. There's 2 types of people. You need your centers of influence and you need your ideal clients. And then the 3rd thing you need is you need your promise, which means your messaging. If you can get those 3 Ps right, your plan, your people, and your promise, then you can have a foundation for having success on LinkedIn. And then you'll know what assets you need and what actions you need to take. So you need assets and actions. Those are the 2 As. So you need 3 Ps and 2 As. And if you can put that together and you take consistent action every day, or you have somebody help you take the action, or you get a combination of you doing some of it, some of it you get somebody else, some of it you're having technology do for you. Then you're going to start getting results. And the reason why people don't get results in business and in life is for one reason. It's not because they're not good enough. It's not because they're not lucky. It's only because they're not taking consistent strategic action. Action equals results. And reasons is basically just excuses.

Excuses.

And so you either have reasons or you have results. Which one do you want? Choose your R.

Absolutely. We want those results. We want those results. And I love this. This is, this is exactly in my wheelhouse here. So let's talk about how LinkedIn then is different than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. What, what's really different here?

So when you go to Facebook, what are you thinking about? You're thinking about your friends, you're thinking about your family, you're thinking about food because people put pictures of their lunch on Facebook. Same thing with Instagram, TikTok. You're thinking about all the fancy people dancing. They're doing fancy dances or they're talking about politics or they're talking about religion or whatever they're doing, but they're doing things that are more related to personal. However, on LinkedIn, it's more of a business platform. So the context on LinkedIn is revenue generation, job creation, economic activity, personal development. It's a different world than all the other platforms. That's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn. I don't know if you knew this, but Microsoft paid $26.2 billion for LinkedIn back in 2016. This is over a decade ago. They invested a significant amount of money, and that $26 billion in today's dollars, maybe $100 billion. And so think about how much money and effort and energy they invested, and the business generates $1 billion a year in profit for them. So it's a very profitable place where 38% of people are actually paying for a membership to LinkedIn. If you know that, you see the gold icon on their profiles. So I always say that people that pay, pay attention. Would you rather go where all the people are poor, or would you rather go where all the people are wealthy and successful and they're business-oriented? Would you rather spend your time where people are playing or praying, or would you like to spend time where people are profiting? So you want to be able to go to a place where people are connecting, building relationships. I'm an entrepreneur and I love to hang out with other entrepreneurs. I like to hang out with my— where my colleagues hang out, people in EO. People in Vistage, people in YPO, people in Tiger 21, people that are part of these businesses and these business networks and conferences, they go to LinkedIn, they're active on LinkedIn, and most companies, they might not let you use Facebook during work, but they require you to use LinkedIn. So think about where people are spending their time during business hours and where they're building relationships. And here's another thing about LinkedIn. And the reason I love LinkedIn and how I integrate it with artificial intelligence is that if I look at your Instagram or your YouTube or your Twitter or whatever, I see a screen name. I don't know much about you. But if I look at your LinkedIn, I see your first name, your last name, your company name, where you work, where you worked before, where you went to school, our mutual connections, your skills, your recommendations, your experiences, What languages you speak, your location, your website, your email, your cell phone number. Think about that. And often your birthday. So all that information leads to one thing, the opposite of cold calling. This is real relationship building because I have the fodder that I need to create the ultimate personalized relationship connection versus if I'm spraying and praying through email, I know nothing about you. And most people are now verifying their LinkedIn profile, mind you, for free, because on Meta, to get Meta verified, it's $15 a month. It's free on LinkedIn. You go to linkedin.com/verify and you can give them your government ID and you get a checkbox next to your name. That's powerful. And so people globally are verifying on LinkedIn and people that don't verify, they have their account at being risked of being taken away.

Wow. Okay. Total gold in all of that you just said. And I didn't even know you could verify in LinkedIn. So that was— that I cannot wait to go in and get that done right away, right away. So, and I also love what you, you talked about, um, again, about the— they're investing over there, right? They're investing in LinkedIn, which means they've got dollars into it. And again, every dollar is a reason to be in there and to be connected. Yeah, you're— that's— I've never even heard it Presented that way. So what do you need to do daily on LinkedIn to actually get results? What, what, what do you—

Once you have a strategy and once you have your assets in place, then you need an action plan. There are 3 results you want from LinkedIn. You want people to know you, like you, and trust you, cuz people do business with other people that they know, they like, and they trust. And so how do you get people to know you? You need exposure. What equals exposure? Well, there are 10 different ways to get exposure on LinkedIn. And they all revolve around posting. You can post an article, you can post a newsletter, you can go on LinkedIn Live, you can do a photo, you can do posts, you can post photos, you can do animated GIFs, you can do carousels, PDFs, you can do polls. There's so many different ways to gain exposure and knowing how the algorithm works will allow you to get the maximum amount of exposure. So that's number one is you want people to know you and you want people to remember you. That's exposure. The second thing is, without trust, there is no business. There is no referrals, and there's none of that stuff. So if you want trust, you need to learn the art of commenting. Commenting allows me to build trust with people that I don't know and that they don't know me because they see that I'm real. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Zig Ziglar said that, and I believe in that. And people will know that I care about them when I leave a comment on their posts and I invest my own connections to be able to see the comment that I left. You're basically borrowing my influence by me leaving a comment on your post. So that's a powerful thing that few people know how to do right because few people are actually building trust in the right way and then they're wondering why are they not getting comments. If you want to get comments on your posts, how about leave 5 times more comments on other people's posts than you get on your own. And watch what will happen to your own posts. Suddenly, the people that you've left comments on will be like, wow, I want to be reciprocal, and I will then comment on other people's posts. And I say the same thing about networking. If you want inbound referrals, make 10 times more outbound referrals than you get inbound, and you're going to get a lot of new business through referral. And then the third thing that you need to do, besides getting exposure and building trust and getting credibility, the third thing you need to do is you need to actually get on the phone with people. And how do you actually get on the phone with people? You might say, hang on, but that defeats the whole purpose of LinkedIn. Wrong. LinkedIn is a means to an end. It's not the point. It's the journey to get on a phone call with someone. Because the real way that we build emotional trust and connection, and the way you'll get to like me, is when you hear my beautiful voice. Because we are all a vibration.

Yeah.

Do you agree with that? That we're all a vibration? That's why there's a concept called vibe coding or vibe marketing. You need a vibration. They say when a child hears their mother's voice, they get oxytocin.

Mm-hmm.

It's powerful. Even if it's over the phone, even if the mother checks in over the phone, the child gets oxytocin. It gets the trust hormone. And so if you want people to like you, you need to share your voice and you need to do it in a powerful way. And you do that by being on the phone with people, getting to know people, and building real relationships. Now, you could also do webinars, seminars, podcasts like this one. You can do LinkedIn Live. There's many ways to share your voice, but there's nothing better than getting on a phone call with someone who can spend $10,000 to $100,000 a year with you, or who can refer you to somebody that could spend $10,000 to $100,000 a year with you. And so making sure that you're measuring how many phone calls you're having each day is a key performance indicator that you need to really think about. So the 3 activities that will help you be able to get more People on the phone with you is number one is you need to be messaging and not spamming. Everybody hates spam. If you're watching this, write, I hate spam in the chat if you hate spam.

Yeah.

But the people hate spam. So instead of spamming, instead be greeting, feeding, and meeting. And in our program, the Evergreen Networking System, we teach you the exact process to be going from cold connection to warm client. And we teach you how to go from a lurker to a influencer in just 15 minutes a day. So we take you through a journey of greeting, feeding, and meeting, and in being very normal and natural and real, you build a relationship and get people on the phone. And the second thing that you need to do is you need to send more connection requests. So every single day, you need to be sending a minimum of 20 connection requests to people that you're not connected to that fit into your people strategy. What is your people strategy? We said it earlier. It's either your centers of influence, the people that are in the position to refer business to you, Mm-hmm. Or the people that are ideal clients, the people that are in the position to do business with you. Maybe the timing is not right now, but you need to be able to connect with them. And most people are grossly unconnected. They're not connected to enough people. Did you know the limit on LinkedIn? What's the connection limit on Facebook? It's 5,000. But on LinkedIn, the connection limit is actually 30,000. And every connection also becomes a follower. So if you're not doing that, you're not going to be successful on LinkedIn. If you're not messaging using the greeting, feeding, and meeting system, and then you're not connecting with new people, you're also missing out. The 3rd component to getting people on the phone is using LinkedIn's InMail system, which very few people know how to use, especially because they don't pay for LinkedIn. But if you do pay for LinkedIn, you have the opportunity to message what I call 2nd-degree connections. Which are your connections' connections. And you can borrow their trust either implicitly by asking permission from your connections to reach out to them and asking if you can use their name, or by using it in a creative way by mentioning people's names. That can backfire if the person doesn't really know those people. So you should only do that if they have very few connections. That'll show that those connections are usually meaningful. So if somebody has only 384 connections and you see 3 of them are mutual, You can assume that those 3 mutual are people that they know. But if somebody has 30,000 connections and they have 800 mutual, don't randomly pick a name unless you know they know them well. So I would reach out to my connection first and say, hey, how well do you know this person? If they're like, I don't even know the person, you would not use their name. But if they say brother from another mother, then you say, hey, can I mention your name when I'm reaching out? They're a great prospect for me. And if they say yes, now you have your way to get in the door. So those are the 3 ways that you can get people on the phone on LinkedIn. And if you use those 3 methods, You're going to get at least 5 conversations a day. And that's my goal, to get on the phone with 5 people a day, 20 a week, 80 a month, 1,000 a year. If I can't get— if you can't make $100,000 in profit in your business, in new profit on top of whatever you're already making by getting on 1,000 conversations a year, you probably have the wrong offer.

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

Wow.

I am taking so many notes here. This is fantastic. So tell us a little bit. I know you kind of touched on a little bit, but how many people are actually using LinkedIn and then what are they using it for? Because I know a lot of times again, and it's because they don't understand your system, but I know a lot of times people say, well, you know, I don't really know who's there and how do I connect with them? Right? They're, they're not building the relationship. So I'd love to hear your insight on this.

There's a billion people on LinkedIn right now, just in the United States alone. There's 200 million people using LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is a true global platform. We have 20,000 users in 37 countries around the world just because of LinkedIn using Evvy AI, our technology. So the question I have for people is, are you afraid of networking or are you a networker? And most people, they won't even admit that they're afraid, but 94— 90% of people would rather be in the casket than giving a eulogy at a funeral. That was Larry, um, was it Seinfeld? What's his name?

Jerry.

Jerry Seinfeld. I called him Larry Seinfeld, but Jerry Seinfeld, he said that people would— people are just afraid. People are afraid of— forget about stand-up comedy. People are afraid of doing an elevator pitch. People are afraid of meeting strangers because we've been told when we were young, don't meet strangers. But your mother was once a stranger. Your father's probably still a stranger. So the idea is to get yourself used to and learn how to build those relationships. And then you will be the owner, the captain of your sea, of your ship. And so you want to be the captain, you need to be able to be the host. I always tell people, when you go to a networking event, if you're shy, become the host, act like the host, act as if it's your event. And when somebody walks in, say, welcome, so glad that you made it. What brings you here today? And they're like, are you the host? No, I'm just a guest, but I act like the host and that makes me feel more confident. Who do you want to meet here? Tell me. And they'll be like, well, I want to meet rock stars. It'd be like, oop, I got a rock star for you. And then you make an intro internally and you end up being the host. You become the host because if you can believe it and conceive it, you can achieve it. So I truly believe in the concept of Think and Grow Rich. But when it comes to LinkedIn, most people are not networking savvy. But if you are networking savvy, you'll be the connector in your circle. Most people are not leaders, but you can be the leader. Instead of being the consumer, be the creator, be the connector, but you have to commit to it. And there's an art to it and you got to get training on it and you got to practice. And if you practice, you're going to get really, really good consistent practice on getting on the phone with people, building relationships, learning how to get to referrals, learning how to make meaningful relationships with people and going deep. That is an art. And that is also a skill that you can learn.

All right.

Wow.

Okay. So I love this. This is really helping people, one, stepping outside their comfort zone. But 2, there's this beautiful— like, when you're— one, you're welcoming people, which makes them feel seen, right, and heard. But then the act of connecting them or introducing them to somebody else, I just think that is so lovely because now there's this mutual— all 3 parties then benefit from that, right? All 3 parties benefit. So let's get into some— I'm, I'm super excited to— for this topic. So let's talk about how you do AI research with LinkedIn differently than any other platforms. And you guys, I really want you to pay close attention here because this is about, again, the whole concept of this summit is simplify to scale, right? It's— I love what you've shared here. It's, it's incredibly valuable. And Joe's gonna go into more about how we can simplify all of this down.

So when you get somebody on LinkedIn and you see their profile, what do you do with their profile? Maybe you hit the connect button, but if you're not saving them, if you're not saving them into a list in an organized way, there's no way for you to really stay top of mind with them. There's no way for you to do that. And so what I recommend people do is get a piece of technology. I have one called Evvy AI. There are many other technologies out there, but this one's seamless and easy to use, and it sits on the side of your browser. And you can create a list, say people in EO or my friends in Vistage or people in the Speakeasy Mastermind, and you can simply save them to a list. Once you save them into a list, you have the ability to deploy an agent that will research the internet on your behalf and scour every website that's out there to look for everything that's available on them. Telling you the pertinent information of what the business opportunities are between you and them, who their target market is, what is their message, what is their offer, what is their contact information, what are some conversation starters, what are some unique fun facts about them, and what are some ways that you guys can collaborate together to do business together. And that happens instantly. Instead of while the phone is ringing and you're about to call somebody, that's already in front of you. And then you can further query The agent to go out and do even more research. Say, I wanna see if they raised any money recently. I want you to research to identify if they're married or they're single. I want you to look into find out what location they're from, where they're based, what's their original language that they have. And it will go look through YouTube videos and it'll look through their tweets and their Instagram. And it'll kind of just go out and scour the web and find you everything that you would have to spend hours being a creep doing Google searches. Instead, you have the AI just researching it for you and bringing it to you on a silver platter. And Evie AI doesn't have just one agent. It has 5 separate agents that you can find different information because every agent has access to different databases. So you have Copilot, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Findy, You.com, and each one of them has access to different, 8 different sections of the internet and different databases. And then you have LinkedIn itself where Evie AI can go into the depth of someone's profile and find out when they were born and find out where they're from and find out what the degrees they have on their profile and organize it all in a way where it just lays it out for you in 2 seconds, it's in front of you and it gets saved into their account. You could also take notes. There's a little microphone on each person's profile where you can leave notes about them. So you don't even have to type anything. You just push the microphone button, you talk into it, and AI types everything up and organizes it. If you want to send them a message, you push one button, AI will write the message for you, and then you could decide if you like it. If not, tell AI what you don't like about it, either with your voice. Or you type it up, you hit send, it rewrites the message, and then you push another button, it goes into their LinkedIn and sends it. So this is a very, very powerful way for you to connect with people. Same thing with commenting. Once you save somebody, your, someone's profile to a list, you could push a button, all their posts load. You find one post that you like, you push another button, it drafts a comment in your voice. You're done.

Okay. Wait, wait, wait. So this is so exciting. Can, can we get a sneak peek while we're, you're—

Of course.