Martina Zorc + Joe Apfelbaum Talk about evyAI.com

Yes, we are live. Let's go.

Amazing. Hi, Joe. Thank you so much for saying yes to this interview for Summer Sprint Society. I'm so thankful because, uh, you're the ultimate expert on LinkedIn, and I will never forget how, um, you treated everybody so well at the market on the Marketers Cruise, uh, certainly in a very memorable way. And, uh, so it's such an honor to be here and with you and your community. And then we are sharing this with, with our Online Experience attendees. So it's a big party.

Well, thank you so much for having me. And thank you for asking me to get interviewed about LinkedIn. You know, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional social network. There are 1.2 billion people on LinkedIn right now. Most people don't know how many people are on LinkedIn. They think, oh, LinkedIn, There's just a couple of job seekers on there, but the truth is there's 1.2 billion people on there. And if you're not properly leveraging LinkedIn, then you're really missing out on a massive opportunity to be able to do what you need to do in your business because LinkedIn is the easiest place for you to be able to pick up business.

So Joe, it's still a very hot opportunity, correct? It's not too saturated yet. It's, it still has The big appeal that it had before, and maybe now even more so.

Definitely more so in the world of AI. And I'll show you why. I'm going to share my screen with you just to kind of everyone can take a look. Do you see the way I have your profile pulled up here?

Yes.

So if I want to send you a connection request, I can press connect. I can press add a note. I can have artificial intelligence read your profile. profile and write a note that's customized between what I do and what you do and why you should connect with me. If I press send now, you get a direct connection request between me and you. If you go ahead on your profile and you accept it, you will automatically be following me and I'll be following you. That's extremely, extremely powerful. I want to speak to that for a moment. So go ahead and accept it if you want to, so we can show people how that looks.

Aren't we already connected? I, I was convinced. I need to get— I, my confession is I need to go back to LinkedIn. So that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this interview too.

So step number one, I, I, step number one is you have to connect with people. That's the first step. You have to connect with people. And if you don't connect with people, you're missing out on an opportunity to get more followers because every connection becomes a follower. So in the first minute, I just want to give a quick lesson to everybody. is that send out 20 connection requests every single day. Every day you got to send out 20 connection requests. That's number one, because every connection becomes a follower. Now on Facebook, you can only have 5,000 friends, but on LinkedIn, Martina, you can have 30,000 connections, and every connection becomes a follower. So think about the doctors you could be connected to. Think about the lawyers. Think about the bookkeepers. Think about the coaches, the consultants, the entrepreneurs. The sales professionals, the experts, the executives of Fortune 500 companies, the people that are there to do business with you and to refer business to you. LinkedIn is a 24/7 networking event.

Yes. And let me ask you this. Is it still true that like there is a limit on how many connection requests you can send, or have they lifted that?

You're able to send with a free account up to 100 connection requests every single week. That's 20 a day. That's fine. If you have a premium or a Sales Navigator account, they increase that limit to 800 a month or something like that. But either way, that's still more than you can handle in terms of people accepting. So if you accept my connection request, I can go to your profile.

I already have.

I can press refresh, and instead of it saying pending there, now it says message. So that's the other thing that I recommend people do is that they message people, message 10 people a day. So you want to send out 20 connection requests, but when We connect finally, what I can do is I can use AI. I can speak to it and say, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm so excited to be connected to you on LinkedIn finally. It was great to meet you at the Marketers Cruise. So now I just press the up arrow here and I just spoke into LinkedIn using my AI that you have access to called Evvy AI. So it sits on the side of your browser.

Yes.

And it helps you do things like send messages, send connection requests. And if I want, I can pull up your profile right over here on the side of Evvy AI. I can pull up your profile. You see, I'm pulling up your profile. It shows that you're in the Marketers Cruise. I can add your recent activity here and press save, which will automatically show me all of your recent activity by clicking on this link. And I see all of your recent posts. That's something that you can't really see.

Yeah.

And the last, and the last time you posted was a year ago. But hopefully—

Yes.

Hopefully you will go to my profile right now. You'll go to view profile on Joe, and when you go to view profile and you scroll down, you're going to see the video of us right now. We're live. So you can take this video as we speak right now, and you can press that reshare button, and that'll be on your profile. So go ahead and try to do that right now. Hit that reshare button. And if you guys are watching live, Go ahead and try it out. Hit that repost button and post it so your audience sees that we're online right now. Now the other thing is while you're doing that, I'm going to pull up my friend John's post over here and I'm going to go to the comments of John's post. I'm going to refresh his profile here so it actually loads. I'm going to go to the comments of John's post here. And as you can see, he just posted 4 minutes ago. You see that?

Mm-hmm.

And I'm going to go ahead and like it. And if I wanna leave a comment, all I have to do is tell the AI to write a comment. I say, write a comment, and then a comment gets written. You see that? I just said, write a comment.

Yeah.

And the comment gets written, and now I press comment and I'm done. You see, I just left a comment on John's post. So I would recommend leaving at least 5 comments every day. So whereas you connect with 20 people, you direct message 10 people, you leave at least 5 comments each day. And you can do that in less than 15 minutes. Now, if you want to see everybody's birthdays, I do recommend you go to the Learning Hub in Evy AI. You click on LinkedIn birthdays. You'll see everybody's LinkedIn birthdays that you're connected to. Then you can use something called templates. You can have as many templates as you want with Evvii AI, and you could use the templates as often as you like. So I have a template wishing people happy birthday. So I do this both on Facebook and I do this on LinkedIn because Evvii AI works on every website. So today is 9/4. So what I do is I open up this and I go ahead and I push the up arrow here on the side and the birthday message that's custom to this guy gets put in there. And as you can see, the workflow is really easy, and I can wish all these people a happy birthday, which helps me be able to stay in front of them. And it's just a nice thing to do, to wish people a happy birthday on their birthday. Don't you think so, Dr. Martina?

Of course. You can call me Martina.

Okay.

Um, this is, this is pretty amazing. So I, I want to go back just for a second, uh, to my question about the limit, because I, what I had in mind is actually the lifetime limit that once existed. I'm very, very happy if that was lifted.

There's no life— there's no—

so much more.

Yeah, there's no lifetime limit on connection requests. There's no lifetime limit there. There is a limit. There is a limit on how many you can have pending. So if you send, if you send out 3,000 that are pending, you want to remove the pending ones. And if you go into Evie AI and you scroll down to pending here, you see it says pending incoming connection requests. Pending sent connection requests. So if I click on pending sent, then you can see all the ones that I sent out and I could remove the ones that are really old. So for example, this guy Daniel, I see he hasn't accepted from 4 days ago, from 5 days ago, from a week ago. You see that? I can go back here and I could remove the people that are not relevant anymore. So this guy, vice president of blah, blah, blah, I can hit withdraw, withdraw, and now that's no longer pending.

So Joe, is, is that like, do you need to do it manually? Um, you could use automation.

Or can you select in, You could use automation. You can select all. You could use some automation tools. I don't recommend using automation tools simply because if you use automation tools, LinkedIn is not happy about that. LinkedIn doesn't want you to use automation tools, but you definitely can use automation tools. And if you use automation tools, it'll just make your life easier, but there are risks to it. And in our Skool community, there's one community called skool.com/AIautomation. We do teach how to do automations and all that stuff. And it's only $29 to be part of that community. So if people want to learn automation, they can go to skool.com, S-K-O-O-L.com/AIautomation, and they could learn how to do automations. But that's not something I typically recommend simply because it is risky to do that and it's against LinkedIn's terms. You are muted, so I can't hear you right now. But if you unmute yourself, I'll be able to hear everything that you say.

Yes. Wonderful. So, um, what, what I wanted to, to go back to as well is your recommendation to send 10 private messages a day. Uh, can you tell us a bit more about like how, 'cause you are also a strategist, right? Like how would you go strategically about, um, creating a system where, 'cause we can see that with, with Avi AI, it's very fast. what you can do, but like strategically, how do you make a decision on what to send to whom? Like, 'cause I imagine there's actually a method to the madness, so to speak, so that you can keep everything organized.

Yeah, 100%.

And you can, right?

100%. So the first thing that I would do is I would click on the networking tab and I would write a note about our relationship. Martina interviewed me for a podcast. She's an amazing person. I met her on the cruise. She's wonderful. Whatever. So those are the ideas. I would kind of take notes to train the AI on our relationship and who you are. Once I train the AI, what I can also do is I can have the artificial intelligence find your email address, your phone number, and all your contact information and kind of organize it for me inside Evvy AI to help me be able to really be able to go deeper and connect with you on a more meaningful basis. You know, like I wanna have a meaningful relationship with you and I wanna kind of get to know you. And in order for me to get to know you, I need to have AI kind of help me write everything up. You know, business intelligence, what you do, who you help, how you help them, conversation starters. And if for whatever reason this doesn't give me the information, what I could always do is I can rely on AI agents that we have available here, like Perplexity, like Grok, like Copilot, like Claude, like ChatGPT. And these agents can then scour the internet and find everything there is to know about you. So over here, it already found all this information very quickly. And it tells me that you have a PhD, international space law, blah, blah, blah. It shows me private consulting, how you help clients. It gives me your email address, your Instagram, your Facebook, your Clubhouse conversation starters. Tells me what to talk to you about. Tells me potential business opportunities, notable achievements. It basically gives me everything there is to know about you. within 1 second while the phone is ringing. And then of course I can click on the networking tab and then I can add a note with this information very quickly here. And this kind of saves me a lot of time. So now I have your email, I have your phone number, I have your quick link, I have your underwear size. I literally have everything that I need in order for me to really get to know you well. And now it's time for me to build that relationship. I also—

Joe, this is almost scary.

Uh, well, it just makes life easier. An assistant can do all this manually.

Yes.

But this just makes life a lot easier. So now I have you on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Twitter, X. I have you everywhere. And if I wanna comment on your posts, I can use Evie AI to comment on your posts right here as well. So the way that I would do that is I would go to the AI writer. I would select Facebook here.

Mm-hmm.

As a persona. Then I would select the content I wanna comment on. I would right-click and send it to Evie AI, hit generate, and now I'm able to generate a comment for Facebook specifically. And once the comment gets generated right over here, and I can do it in any language, I have many different language options here on the bottom. So once I have the comment, I say, wow, Martina, September indeed. I can't believe you're giving us a week of juicy summer goodness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I press send and I just left you a very, very nice long comment. Now, if I want, I can give you a much, a much smaller comment. I can decide to only give you, you know, just this or just this or just this, or maybe this or whatever. I have a lot of options. But this makes my life so much easier in terms of being able to communicate with you in a meaningful way and leaving you a meaningful comment that makes my life so much easier. And again, I have all these different languages I can choose from, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, whatever. And, you know, this, again, this is something that will save you a lot of time. And if instead I want to use templates, let's say for example, I want to send people happy birthday messages right here on LinkedIn. What I would— right here on Facebook, I would click on Facebook birthdays. It would show me everybody's birthdays on Facebook. And then I would go, let's say for example, to Julianne, which is her birthday today. I would click on message. And then I would inject this right into here. I have a template that I just injected with a birthday message to Julianne. I want to do it to George Soto. I do message, I do the up arrow, and I do send. So this saves me a lot of time, as you can see. to be able to send these people messages and connect with them and build a relationship and get to know them. And most people are not doing any of this. They're not even sending messages to people on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever. So this is how you build relationships and get to know people. And if you're not doing this right now, you're majorly missing out on an opportunity to connect with people.

Yes. Absolutely. And so, um, because then I also want to go back into how you got started with, with this AI and your story on how you, you focused on LinkedIn. But before we go there, um, I want to, you know, just, just, um, focus for another moment on this, uh, on the, on the private messages to send every day to 10 people, because I love the fact that there is a system. There is a, like, you actually know what your, what your, like, your daily, let's say, task is. So how do you organize your, um, like, just, just what, who you're gonna speak to and what's gonna be that, that message? I just, I, I, I wanna understand, like, what, what system do you recommend? Because this is, this is an incredible tool, but then you need to also select the right, the right messages that go also beyond birthday wishes and comments, I guess. So are you creating campaigns within your business for your ideal potential clients, or how, how does that How does that happen? Like, what's your recommendation for, or best practices maybe that you've seen?

Well, step number 1 is if you want to know who to message, you need to have a strategy. That means you need to have a business plan, a marketing plan, and a LinkedIn plan. That's step number 1. Step number 2 is you need to know who the people are. Who is your ideal client and who's your target market and who's your center of influence? Number 3 is you need to know what your promise is. What are the pains, goals, dreams, and fears of the people to help you get to the plan? That's your strategy. Then you need to figure out what stories you're telling. What's your origin story? What are your case stories? What does your voice sound like? Your stories need to be clear. Then you need to have an offer because no one's going to buy anything from you unless you have an offer. And your offer needs to tie into your promise to the right people with the right plan and needs to be able to be through the lens of a story. But you need to have an offer. You need to be able to bring people through a ladder from a pro— from a lead magnet to a closed client. You need to have very, very clear and very simple focus. Because if you say it depends, I say it's a diaper. Depends is a diaper. So what you want to do is instead of doing that, you want to have a very clear offer. If you have a clear foundation, then you're going to be successful. You're going to know who to DM. But before you know who to DM, because you have the right people, the right promise, you need to have a library of templates for what to send. You see, I have a bunch of different templates here. I have hundreds and hundreds of templates. And in our library, we give you all the different scenarios and all the different templates. You need personas like the Facebook persona, the LinkedIn persona, the Twitter persona, the school persona, and so on. And you need to have one-sheets like business networking one-sheets. I'll show you mine in a second. Then you need to have an optimized profile. You need to have the right lists. If you don't have a dashboard, if you don't have a Dream 100, you don't have a list of allies, you're not going to be successful. You're not going to know who to DM. So I can show you what my dashboard looks like so that you can see exactly what's going on.

Cool.

But everybody needs to have a LinkedIn connections dashboard to help you make sense out of who you're going to be targeting and how you're going to be targeting them and what you're going to be saying to them and how you're going to be saying it to them. So for example, if I wanted to be able to pull up all the connections that I connected to in a certain year, I can take my LinkedIn connections dashboard, filter for a particular year. So I go in here, I filter, And then I say, for example, I wanna see all the people that I connected with in 2021. I hit go. And then who are the people that I know? Who are the people that are strategic for my business? Who are the people that I need to prioritize? Who are the people that are engaged? Who are the people that are responsive? And so I can filter this entire connection by that. I can filter by position, by company. I can filter by date connected. There's so many different filters I can use. And for all of our clients, we give them that dashboard with all of their connections. So I'll export all your connections and put it into a dashboard.

So can we just go a little deeper here? Because I think for a lot of our listeners, they don't really, they're not familiar about with this opportunity to export and create a document like that. Can you give us a little more details and like, and how Like that is obviously a very useful thing to do because you don't own LinkedIn, but if you export the data, then it's a different story, right? Like you have control over your documents.

Yeah, look, you have 1,627 people. What if I was able to take those 1,627 people and identify who are your ideal clients, who are your centers of influence, Who are your leads? Who are your current clients? Who are your friends? Who are the people that are just a waste of time? Figure all that out, segment all that, organize it, and help you create a system. And then use AI agents to research every single one to tell you every single thing about them. And then create messaging for each one that's individual and customized. That's—

Wow.

That's what we do and how— that's the stuff that we do. Now we do have a community. A community of 1,200 people that are learning together, and we have classes on how to do this. So if you go to the classroom, we have the 99 Hacks Crash Course. If you go to 99hacks.club, you can learn more about it. We have a library over here in the AVI library. We have special links with special tools. We have all the different template libraries, comments, direct messages, AI prompts, connection notes, snippets for posts. So here are all the different messages that you can use depending on the scenario that you have. When someone visits your profile, when it's somebody's birthday, when somebody has a promotion at work, when someone's celebrating an anniversary, when you're impressed by somebody's content, when you're connecting with someone you haven't spoken to in a while, when you're thanking a person. And we have all the specific templates that you can use right over here. So we make it really, really easy for people to start leveraging LinkedIn by giving them a strategy, but everybody's strategy is different. based on who you are. So in one page, we'll say, okay, let's create a business plan. Let's create a marketing plan. Let's create a LinkedIn plan with a checklist for what to do. Let's figure out who the right people are. Let's pull all the people from LinkedIn that you're already connected to and the people that you're not connected to. Let's make a list of people that you need to connect to, that you need to build a relationship with, that you need to comment on, that you need to DM. Then let's create messaging for those people. We call that the promise. Then from there, let's tell your stories. Then let's create your templates and your personas. And then let's take action every day. And if you don't have time to do it, we'll do it for you, but we'll give you AI. So it's just 15 minutes a day. You'll be able to get all the action, but come to our training sessions and we have training sessions every single day. There's one going on right now as we speak called the Lead Magnet Party, teaching you how to create an offer and a lead magnet. So we have trainings that happen every single day, several times a day. and we'll help you be able to take action and get results. And if anybody wants a demo of Evy AI, you just send the word demo to 973-841-8868. That's 973-841-8868. Send the word demo and you'll get a demo of Evy AI.

Wonderful. And so what about those that are not in the US? Because like for us, Europeans, sometimes the numbers don't really work. Like, I imagine we connect with you on LinkedIn, right?

You could just send—

I mean, I am—

Yeah, or you can send an email. You can send an email to hello@evai.com, or you can send a WhatsApp message. We have WhatsApp groups on my profile. There's a WhatsApp group. But, um, Evie AI does have a, a WhatsApp that you can WhatsApp from anywhere. So if you, if you wanna WhatsApp Evie AI, you can definitely WhatsApp Evie AI. Um, and you know, right on our website we have our WhatsApp, but you know, you can easily send a message to Evie AI and we'll be more than happy to help you out, um, and answer any questions that you have. Our number for WhatsApp is 908.

908.

242-2898, and you can easily send us a WhatsApp.

Excellent. Yeah, I'm very excited to dive in properly because I'm a client, but I haven't started yet. But this sounds like it, like you keep building and improving on, on Evy AI. It's like it's richer and richer every time I check.

100%.

Yeah.

And that's, And that's really the goal.

Yeah.

That's really the goal. The goal is for us to be able to help people make a difference for them. That's the idea. If we can make a difference for you, if we can change your life by simply giving you the tools, giving you the strategy, and giving you the community, it'll completely change your life. So my recommendation for you, Martina, is to just come to our daily office hours at noon. You just come to our office hours and just We'll give you all the guides to get started. We'll give you everything that you need and we'll support you. We have live Zoom sessions where you can come in and we'll walk you through everything every day.

Very cool. Very cool. So tell us, take us back to before Evvy AI was created. Like how did the idea come about? Like what's your, let's say, origin story with this particular business? I'm curious.

Um, there are— so, okay, so when I started, when I started off my career, my father wanted me to be a rabbi, and I became a rabbi, and I realized that's not what I want to do. So instead, I started doing computers and technology, and I started building websites for people. You know the famous saying, if you build it, they will come?

Yeah.

I built many websites. Nobody came. Nobody came. It was a very, very big problem.

Yeah.

So what I did was, is I decided to start learning how to get people to come to websites. And one of the things that I realized is that if you want people to come to a website, you need to do marketing. And so I got really good at marketing. I started a marketing agency and the marketing agency grew to be one of the fastest growing companies in America. I got really good at marketing and I got a really good team that does really good marketing. Then I realized that networking is how you get your best customers because I'm just cold calling people. I cold call a lot of people that are very angry and I get really good customers from networking that are not angry, that are happy. 'Cause you gotta be happy to network. You can't be angry and network. It's not gonna work. So I started finding a lot of happy customers from networking and that are paying 10 times more than the people that I would get from cold calling. So I said, I gotta get really good at networking. So I had to do a lot of personal development to get really good at networking. You can't just be good at networking 'cause you gotta like yourself and you gotta like other people and you gotta be likable and you gotta be interesting and you gotta know how to talk and you gotta blah, blah, blah. So I became really good at networking and then I realized I don't have the time to go to all these events. and to travel to all these places. So I gotta get really good at LinkedIn because that's where people do networking online. So I got, became an expert at LinkedIn and I started getting 7-figure clients for my agency. And then people started asking me, Joe, can you do LinkedIn? Can you teach me LinkedIn? So I started teaching people LinkedIn, then I turned it into a course and I started a company that teaches LinkedIn and blah, blah, blah. And then people was like, you taught me how to use LinkedIn, but I don't have the time to do it all. And AI came out and I was like, okay, let me have AI do it for you. And that's kind of like how I started a company that has clients in 40 countries around the world, and we have 23,000 users. And that's kind of like what we're doing. And every penny we get from a client, we take it back and put it into the business to make it better.

Incredible. Such a wonderful story. And it makes sense because like you're solving problems along the way.

Yeah.

And that's what makes it powerful. So Let me ask you this. Where do you see the future of LinkedIn going? Because you're so, so, so much of an expert at this point on LinkedIn that I'm sure you can predict some trends and have a feeling of how everything is going to evolve. What are, what are the biggest opportunities? Let's say right now, because I. For example, I would love your comment on short video formats, right? On LinkedIn, for example. But then also like, where do you see LinkedIn going in the next months? Let's say in the next 12 to 18 months.

I see LinkedIn growing. It's growing right now at a rate of 3 new members every second. So LinkedIn is definitely growing very, very quickly. Um, if you're not using LinkedIn right now, you're really missing out. More people are starting to have access to the internet. More people are getting fired from jobs. And what do you think they're doing when they're getting fired from a job? They're becoming entrepreneurs. They're starting to become consultants. They're starting to become coaches. They're starting to support other people. And so what are they going to do? They're going to want to network and build relationships. And where are they going to go? They're going to go to LinkedIn. And so most people don't know how to use LinkedIn. They don't. So you learning how to use LinkedIn is a competitive advantage, not because you're going to teach someone how to use it, but because you're going to leverage it. LinkedIn has a lot of attention, but few people are posting. I mean, you haven't posted in a year. Most people are not posting, but you have 1,000 followers. You have 1,700 people that are subscribed to your content, but you're not even sending them anything. What? Why? You have a tool that writes the content in 2 seconds with a hook, main points, call to action, and hashtags. Just do it. Just push a button. The tool will give you the idea, write the content, then you publish it and you're done. And then we have a community of 1,200 people that will comment on your content. So the real question is, you're not doing it because you're not showing up to our events. Because if you came to any of our events, you would be motivated to do it. So you need accountability. So where's it going? It's going to a place that's going to keep growing and And it's gonna keep getting better and it's gonna be more relationships and more connections. And some people, they would rather go to Substack, they would rather go to school, they would rather go somewhere else. But I think LinkedIn has the most information on people than any other platform. So if I'm gonna use something to connect with someone to get to know them, I'm gonna leverage LinkedIn. That's what I'm gonna do.

Hmm, yes. And, you know, in my case, really, like, I think my— that initial hurdle is just to update my profile, and then I can start using it properly. I mean, I would just—

most people don't even read your profile. Just start posting. Start posting even once a week.

That's true.

Start posting even once a week. Come to our sessions. Join us. Join us in our sessions. We have daily sessions every single day. Join us. Maybe pick one day a week where you come. Find the next class, watch the replay, get involved. And if you become friends with people on LinkedIn, you might not have a lot of friends on LinkedIn, but if your friends were on LinkedIn, you would go there. You go where your friends are, right? So in our community, you can book meetings with over 100 people. They put their calendar links at the last event, 100 calendar links. You could book yourself solid for the next 3 months and they're all interested in talking to you. I mean, even on the cruise, I walked into the cruise, I didn't know anybody at the cruise. I walked out with 25 clients, including you.

Yeah.

Because I became friends with them. And many of those people are on LinkedIn and I meet them every Friday and we comment on each other's content. We have a whole posting party going on every Friday with people from the cruise. So join that. These are your friends.

Very cool. Yes. So since you mentioned the cruise, would you share with us a little bit the strategy that you implemented on the cruise to connect with people, to serve, to, to give value, to get clients, right? Because like, I've never seen anybody execute at this level so systematically and so efficiently. And I would love for all of us to learn from you because this was really masterful.

There's 450 people out of 4,000 people on the cruise that were part of the Marketer's I did one simple thing. I said, I'm going to tap into the 20%. I'm not interested in everybody. I can't talk to everyone. So if I walk over to you and your energy doesn't vibrate with me, I move on. I don't judge you. I don't bother you. I just stay— I'm just not attracted to it. I'll leave it alone. I try to shake every tree, but most trees that I try to shake, 80% of the trees don't want to be shaken, and I leave it alone. I move on very fast. But then I shake a tree and it tickles and it laughs. And I'm like, ooh, I'm gonna shake this more. And then I start shaking, shaking, shaking. And I give all my attention to that tree because that was in the 20%. And I found my 20% very quickly. I took 100 selfies. That's my 20%. Out of the 450, I found my 100, my 90, whatever it was. Those were my people. And so I invited those people to meet me at a certain place at a certain time every single day. I decided to create events. I said, what type of event? One person said they wanted a networking event. I said, okay, I'm doing a high-speed networking event at this and this time. Bring at least 5 people that vibrate with you.

That was really cool, by the way.

60 people showed up to that event. 60 people showed up to that event. And someone at an event next door was like, I had a scheduled event and nobody came because they all came to you. I was like, no, there's 450 people here. I got 60 to come to me. You can find 60 of the 450 to come to you. You're just not willing to do the work that I did, which is set up a one-on-one every 10 minutes. I had one-on-ones every 10 minutes during lunch, during breakfast. I would move from table to table connecting with people. I had the confidence to walk over to people and say hello, and I got rejected a lot. I don't know if you know this, but I experienced a lot of rejection on the cruise. Most people were not interested in talking to me. Really? Most people were not interested in talking to me, but the people that were interested in talking to me, I went deep. I'll say this again.

Wow.

Most people rejected me. If you're not willing to get rejected, you're not going to be successful. So I walked over to people and I got rejected and I moved on. They were not interested in talking to me and I was okay with it. I'm not for everybody. Some people get vomit when they see me, but I want, I want to just show up in a beautiful state where means that anybody that's negative is going to vomit from seeing me. That just happens.

So like, what was your like opening, you know, your hello, or like, were you even mentioning LinkedIn? Because it's hard to imagine that somebody would not be interested because this is such a business topic.

I don't talk about mental disorder awareness. I don't talk about what I do. I don't talk about what I do.

Okay, great.

So tell us, how do you approach people? I want to learn who you are. Who are you?

Yes.

I connect and I get to know you personally. I learn about you. I'm like, oh, so what's up with you? Who are you? And then we build a relationship and they're like, and then they might ask, what do you do? And then I'll be like, I help people be able to make more money. And then we talk about it and they're like, how? And I was like, do you use LinkedIn? And they're like, oh my God, I wish. And then we talk about it. I also created my own WhatsApp group.

That was a big part of it.

And the 100 people that resonated with my frequency joined my WhatsApp group. And so now I have this back channel of people that I'm talking to from day one. I have a WhatsApp group and a back channel of people that are my relationships. And every time I want to do anything, I just say, hey guys, I'm going to be here at this time. If you want to come, come. I built my own little marketing system within the group. And then they brought people that were not in the marketing system. And I said, I taught, I trained the people in the group how to get more people into the group. Now, some people got upset and they're like, oh, you have to use the official marketing channel called the Facebook group. And I was like, you can use that channel. And I'm using that channel. I use that channel a lot, but I built my own channel. I built my own channel quicker.

Of course.

I also built an AI that looked through the whole directory and tell me who to prioritize. I knew who my top 30 people were from the 450. Who are my 5% people? Who are the 5 percenters? And I booked meetings with all those 5 percenters during the cruise. I went, I seeked them out. I had a list of people that I had to go after. Most people didn't do that.

So let's unpack a bit. First of all, it's hard to imagine how you even could have been rejected when you just Started like a normal human conversation. Is it like that they were in a bad mood, or like yeah, yeah, like they weren't a bad mood?

I mean, if you if you if you really want to know, you can ask around. I don't gossip or talk about anybody, but if you want to know, you could ask around. You could say who was angry at the cruise, and there were some people that were just angry. Something happened; they were sick. They were they they you know you're on a cruise; you never know what happens. They got into an argument with their spouse, and they let it out on you. Whatever things happen. You know, like, there were people that got really angry if I just approached them and say hello. Like, why are you bothering me? And I was like, okay, right, I got you, I got you. But most of the people, most of the people were cordial, but I didn't, I didn't vibe with them. You know, I sit down, I talk to somebody, I'm not vibing with you, we're moving on. You know what I mean? I try to have a conversation with you and you're not wanting to talk to me, I get it, I understand. Enjoy your salami, I'm moving on.

Right.

And so I, I move on to the next person very quickly. I'm— and I just kind of feel your energy. And if I feel your energy is not on my vibrational level, I don't judge you. I just don't invest time paying attention to that. I go where the excitement is. So where's the fire for you? Where's the excitement for you?

Yeah.

I'd rather have 5 fires that I'm dancing with than a bunch of dead poles. You know what I mean? So I'm dancing. I'll go onto the cruise and I'll just start dancing, and I'll see who wants to dance with me. And all of a sudden, a bunch of people start dancing around me. These are my people. You get what I'm saying? But if you're too afraid to dance, if you're too afraid to dance, no one's gonna dance with you. You get what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So you see me, you see me with my camera running around taking videos, dancing, taking pictures, making noise, doing stuff, having fun, and you're like, who's this guy? Most people are afraid of that, so they won't touch me with a 10-foot pole.

Really interesting. So like, you know, that leads me to the next question, and that is like, how do you manage energetically and time-wise? Like, I imagine that you prioritize your own basically plan on connection. Celtic sea salt.

You got to get hydrated.

You'll tell us more.

You got it. You got to get hydrated.

Yes.

By the way, I took a jar of salt with me. And every single day—

Oh.

I had my sheer of healthy salt. I had apple cider vinegar. I had a bottle of apple cider vinegar. Every day I did my shots of apple cider vinegar. I bought a case of water in my room. I would get really, really hydrated every single day. And most of the day, I would just eat healthy. And I would run every day, and I would go to the gym every day. And most people were not doing any of that. So I was being very, very healthy the entire time, not drinking alcohol. A lot of people were getting drunk. The only time I had alcohol was during the events where they had they served a couple alcohols. Maybe I had one or two drinks, but I literally had like five drinks for under eight days. Or if somebody wanted to buy me a drink, you know, a lot of people bought me drinks. I didn't. I most of the time I said give me a virgin drink. But if somebody bought me a drink and they already got me a drink, I'll taste the drink. I might not drink the whole thing, but I'll taste the drink just to be nice, and I'll say לחיים. You know, I'll say cheers. Yeah, but that's the idea.

But so do you— you didn't attend the official meetings then, other than the most of the parties?

Most of the official meetings I did not attend because, because I was busy talking to people. What do I want to do? I want to sit there and listen to somebody spew at me, or do I want to walk around and build relationships with people? So if I see someone and they see me, I'm like, you want to get out of here? We get out of there. We go for a pizza. We go, we go chill. We have a grapefruit together. We walk around because we like each other's energy. You know what I mean? So if there's 100 people in the room that like your energy and you vibe with them and you keep seeing them around, you'll meet who you need to meet. You know, the universe will collide with you. I went running. There was a woman I wanted to meet. She was a coach. She was a masseuse. I wanted to meet with her, but I never saw her anywhere. I went to the running track, there she was, and said, would you like to run with me? And I said, yes, let's run. And we ran together, and then she ended up becoming my masseuse. I got a massage every day. I still miss those massages. Every day I paid her to give me a massage. That's very cool. And it was half the price of what it would cost to get a massage at the cruise. And I sent her a bunch of customers too. So she ended up being busy for 4 hours a day because the massage was so good.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I guess this is just— it's a different approach to experiencing this cruise because it's like, literally, it's whatever you make it. And so if you come with the clarity of what you'd like to accomplish and experience and who you'd like to connect with, and how deep and where are you leading the, the connection, right? Then it's like, it's a completely different cruise.

How many people took the directory and used artificial intelligence to educate them on who in the directory they need to meet? How many people did that? Me. I did that. How many people took the directory and identified everybody's LinkedIn profile and then looked at how many followers each LinkedIn profile had and organized the top 30 with the people with the most followers, and then organized the people that were actually active and made a list of those people and built a relationship with those people? How many people did that? How many people took a strategic approach to building relationships after the cruise and set up meetings with people and had groups? I set up a whole series of group meetings after the event and networking meetings after the event that are still going on and people are still talking about. because of the value that I've been able to add to people, because I know people want that.

Yes.

So I, I just, I just figure out, okay, what do you want? How can I add value? And I make a difference for people. Somebody from the cruise texted me yesterday and she said, Joe, thank you. The client that you referred to me last week just signed. You know where I found that potential client? On the cruise. You know where I found this person? On the cruise. I connected 2 people from the cruise And they became clients for each other. I'm a conduit of blessing. I'm a conduit of blessing. I connect people together and I make money happen from the people that I connect together. So I have a question for you, Martina. Do you want to be a conduit of blessing or do you want to be a taker?

The first, for sure.

So then all you have to do is figure out what does this person need? And connect them with what they need. Sometimes they need a hug. Sometimes they need a kiss. Sometimes they need a massage. Sometimes they need a client. Sometimes they need a word of encouragement. Sometimes they need a burrito. What? Tell me what you need.

Yeah, you make wishes come true. Basically, that's really cool. So I love how you you didn't stop at the cruise, but like you organized those follow-up events. So can you speak? speak a little bit about like what was the invitation was about, like connecting, going deeper, like learning more about each other, or like how did you position that dose?

For one-on-ones after the cruise, like after the cruise or what?

Well, sure, that one too, but also the group calls that you did after.

What I did was I put out an invitation for the group calls. I said, guys, we had some really good events. We got together on the cruise. We wanted to get to know each other. If you wanna meet other cruise members on this and this date and this and this time, I'm doing a Zoom. If you wanna join, please let me know that you wanna join. Here's the link. And then 30 people showed up, 50 people showed up. And that's basically what I said. I just connected them with each other. That's, I'm just here to serve.

Yeah.

I'm just here to connect you with people. For my clients, I actually gave them a whole list of all the people that were there and put it into their dashboard. So just like I showed you my dashboard, I made a cruise dashboard and I gave it to my clients. So you, in your connections dashboard, you have a tab called the cruise, the marketers cruise, and you have everyone's information there all organized for you.

Nice. Nice. So for example, since you already mentioned this, so how would I now, like, strategically start warming up those relationships before the next cruise? I would give value and kind of since I haven't been active on LinkedIn, Right.

The way that I would do it is I would— are you going on the next cruise?

Yes.

Yeah, I would make a list. I would find out who's going. If you go to the Facebook group, you're going to see who's going to the next cruise. I would make a list of the people that I know that are going. Let's say 20 people, 30 people you know are going, and you would book a meeting with them in the next 3 months. You book at least 1 or 2 meetings with them to just get to know them a little bit more. So by the time you're at the cruise, you're already friends. And simple as that. I saw that you're going to the cruise. I'm also going to the cruise. Would you like to book a 15-minute meeting so we can get to know each other more? Do that to 10 people. Do that to 20 people and see what happens. And then you can say, by the way, I'm doing a group session and 5 of us are getting together to learn more about each other for an hour next week. Do you want to join us? Do that. Be the organizer. Do that once a month.

Yes. I love that. Yeah. I love that. Because like, I naturally, I'm, I'm a connector. It's just that I've been I've been working so much on building infrastructure and like, you know, on things behind the scenes. I just haven't, haven't taken enough time to actually dedicate to people.

Set up an informal Zoom call, set up a time, invite people to the calendar, and then just see what happens. See who shows up. If 3 people show up, that's good. If 5 people show up, that's great. If 10 people show up, that's awesome. If nobody shows up and it's just you, then whatever, it's fine. But if you invite me to something and I say I'm coming, I'll come.

Sure. Yeah.

You invite me to this.

Sounds good.

I came. I'm here.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that because it's really like, I love how, you know, this is like what we're talking about here and what you embody so well. It's kind of the intersection of the best of AI the best of like caring about what people actually want and like genuinely connecting with them, and then doing it in a strategic way so that it's sustainable, so that you don't burn out, but you have a system that you actually can implement day in, day out. Which is like, it's very rare that somebody, you know, brings together all 3 of these aspects successfully for a long period of time. Because like most of the time, like we can sustain it for, you know, sprints, but not necessarily all the time consistently. So, so I think that you're a really great role model in that sense. And, and it's because you know how to, you know how to use every AI properly. And you're a strategist and, You, you care about people and you learned how to connect effectively. And so these are all skills that are so valuable in like when we put them together, right? Like it's everything can shift in, in, in the business, as you said, like you, you got 25 clients just from the cruise. Um, and then that, I'm sure, you know, had a multiplied effect later. So. So it's a, it's a great example. And here's, uh, very inspirational.

And here's another thing, you know, most people don't realize this, but if you're not taking the time to build relationships with people, like for example, I have a list of all the people that are on the cruise. Um, I have a list of all the people that are on the cruise. And what I do is I go through and identify if they recently posted on LinkedIn or Facebook. And then I leave a comment on their post. So for example, remember Claire, the one with the red hair, one with the pink hair from England? Remember her? Are you with me?

Uh, yes, I am trying to, to see the picture, but it's small. Uh, right now, no, I must say that right now I don't, I don't.

But anyway, she's on, she's on my list over here. You see, she's on my list.

Wonderful.

So she's on a list that I have called Marketers Cruise Active. So I have all the people that are active in the Marketers Cruise and I have all their information. And so I just pull up to see, okay, did they post? Alexander Ford, he's active, he's in the Marketers Cruise. I want to see his recent posts. I click on a button and now I see Alexander's post, Alexander Ford's recent post from 21 hours ago. I can be the only one that comments on his post. You see, I click on this right over here. Yeah. I click on these 3 dots on the side and the AI reads the post and leaves a comment.

You see, this is golden. Yeah.

And so I'm staying top of mind with these amazing people. Steve Green, he's a client. He was on the cruise. Awesome guy. He's very active. He's hosting events in our community. You should definitely get to know him. He's totally an awesome dude. I'm gonna close some things cuz LinkedIn's having a heart attack right now. Um, but you know, the idea is I, I build relationships with people and get to know them by leaving comments on their posts. So Martina, if you're not doing that right now, that's a huge opportunity. Even if you don't have your infrastructure in place, even if you don't have anything in place, if you start leaving comments on people's posts, that is a very nice thing to do. And you can see nobody else on the—

I didn't see that.

Nobody else on the cruise left this guy a comment except for me. I'm the only one that left from the cruise. I'm the only one that did it. So because I'm the only one that did it, I'm the one that stands out. But it's not because I'm so smart. It's not because I'm such a smart guy. It's because I have a system. You have your systems and processes in order to properly take action. And you're going to take action and you're going to get results. That's the idea. You see Sherry, she posted a week ago. Sherry's another client of mine from the cruise. So I'm able to connect with her, leave a thoughtful comment on her post. And now she remembers that I exist and I'm the only one that did it. Lori.

Yeah.

Lori over here. Lori's a cruise client. So I can write cruise clients. You see, remember Lori, the person who makes websites?

Yes.

So she's a client of mine. So if I want, I can go in here and check if she posted anything recently on LinkedIn. If she did post on LinkedIn, I go ahead and I leave a comment on her post just like this. You see?

Mm-hmm.

Wow, Lori, it's so true. Like, self-doubt is such a sneaky little thing, huh? But seriously, just start, even if it's a tiny step. I'm literally the only person that commented on her post. The only person. That's extremely powerful.

It is because it's so easy to stand out when we think about it because nobody's doing it. And so when you know how to use AI like this, it becomes a superpower because it's like doing it manually, it's just not realistic.

Not realistic, yeah.

Or we could do a couple, a couple a day, but like, it's, it's just not time efficient enough. But this, this sounds just what you're demonstrating here. Like, it sounds so simple once you know where to click and what to do. It's, um, it's fun.

Yeah.

And you can, you can, I, I mean, I'm sure when I start doing it, like, I'm gonna feel so good knowing that this person will feel, feel seen. And appreciate it, right?

Um, I, I feel like it's a form of giving. It's definitely a form of giving. Yes, it's definitely a form of giving. So this really makes a very, very big difference in people's lives to be able to do this, to be able to leave a comment on their post. It really makes a difference in their life, and most people are not doing it. And if you can do it, oh, so helpful, so helpful. Look at Tammy. You know Tammy Demise?

Of course, we are friends, and I was just talking to her before we jumped on on a call. She was also in Summer Sprint Society as a guest expert. I love Tammy; she's incredible. And what what I wanted to say is that I wanted to ask you, so can we can we use this commenting feature on? Profiles that are we are not connected with, like yes. Will it work?

100%. It 100% works on every profile whether you're connected or not connected. It doesn't matter if you're connected.

That's powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. It's even more powerful when you're not connected.

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because then we we start getting noticed and and then when we do connect, it's more likely that they will recognize our name and. actually accept connection requests.

Exactly.

Yes.

And you can pick any persona you want. So I can make a persona specifically for the Marketers Cruise, and like, or I can pick a contrarian comment. I could be funny, I could be motivational, I can encourage action, I can offer tips. You see that?

Yeah. So, so, but like, let's say you want to be, you want to represent your brand, right?

Yeah.

Like, how would you, how would you set up the, like, tell, tell us about the op— the opportunities of, of these different, um, choices of personas and, and tonalities and, and all of that.

Every, every comment needs a goal. Every comment needs a tone and every comment needs a persona. The persona is the training that you give it to tell it what the context is and how it should speak and what it should do. And so you can sound very, very unique by changing the goal, the tone, and the persona. And that's how I sound very, very unique with everything that I do.

And that is key because if this was just generic AI, The same for everybody.

Nobody would—

then it just wouldn't work.

It would not work at all. Yeah, it wouldn't work at all.

Yeah. So Joe, what else would you like to share with us, uh, either from your AI or from strategies to get clients on LinkedIn? What do you feel, um, all of us need to pay attention to besides what we already covered? But what are some of the other like special secrets that you can reveal today?

It's just 3 things. Number one is you need to have a very clear foundation for what you're doing, a very clear strategy. You need to plan the people, the promise. You need to have assets. Like, you need to tell your story, have your presence, have your automation. And then you need to get exposure, credibility, and you need to have conversations with people. The number one reason that I close clients Is because I have conversations with people. So if you're not having five conversations a day, you're probably not going to close clients. That's the truth. And conversations are not just like DM, you know, like DM somebody. Conversations are actually getting on the phone with people. That's the idea. So if you're not getting on the phone with people, like this guy says, you were going to send me a video of your Hermosi takedown. You see, I'm gonna go here, click on Article Promo, and then I have, I have all my different articles and all my different things here, right? So if I want the Hormozi article, I just press up and that's the video. You see that? But do you see how quickly I'm able to send him that video when he requested it? Whereas most people would have to like take 2 hours to do it. I just clicked a button and it was done. That saves me so much time. Yeah, but you—

You created it ahead of time.

Yeah, I definitely created it ahead of time. Um, I do have somebody waiting to speak to me, so I have to go.

Yes. So one wonderful thank you. Uh, I wanted to ask you about your lead magnet so that everybody can actually go deeper. My lead magnet interview—

my lead magnet is a webinar replay. If you go to eviai.com/leadmagnet, And you can put the link in, evviai.com/webinar-replay. It's an hour training you can take. There's no cost. Enjoy. And I'll see you guys there.

Amazing. Wonderful. We'll post a link to the Summer Sprint Society community. Come join us, everyone, to summersprintsociety.com. And thank you, Joe, for these illuminating insights into LinkedIn and how to get more clients with it. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Martina. Thank you for having me. I'll see you on the cruise.