Megan walks you through your most pressing questions!

Hey guys, good morning. Sorry about that, uh, my Zoom crashed. And also, as you can tell, I feel like crap, um, so my brain is working slightly slower than usual. And by slightly, I'm sorry. I mean, a lot between cold medicine and life. So give me just one second to get started here. I will be right with you. In the meantime, why don't you guys start with positive power-up? Nathan, you go first.

Yeah, positive power-up. Got some appointments lined up. For the federal government for some weird job things. And also Megan and I had a great conversation last week. It was really good speaking with her. Just talked to her about her career path and yeah, it was nice. Shafiq, I'm going to pass it to you. Hi guys.

I think over the weekend I basically just spent my time at home completing my school requirements and stuff. So not much of a positive, I guess. It's just I guess I cleared my academic items, I guess. And yeah, I'm still hit by the flu, so I went to doctors and yeah, still the same thing. I think it's just the monsoon weather over here. I'll be passing on to Kai.

I'm in the same boat with Megan and Shafiqah. I'm actually sick as well, like I feel horrible. It's not corona, but I'm I'm sick, but I'm positive. It's like my last week of school for this semester, so I'm excited to get it out of the way, and it's— next semester will be my last one. So yeah.

Okay, my positive power-up is that I went to Epcot with my twins on Friday, and we had an excellent time. I'm pretty sure that's where I got this situation, but worth it. If you've never been to Epcot during the holiday season, it is incredible because around the world they have all the different holiday celebrations that each country has and different faiths. So like in Norway they have the Hall of the Gods and they talk about Yule and the barn Santa. And then in France they have Père Noël.

Père Noël.

I forget what they call him, but like Father Christmas, which is a very French thing. So all the different countries have really cool celebrations going on. We got to catch a lot of the like live shows showing what different faiths in different countries are doing this time of year. And one of my top priorities with my kids is to get them access to like all different kinds of backgrounds early so that they're never like judgmental or rude about it. So it's just really cool to have that in our backyard here. I can't imagine how much it would cost me to fly my kids around the world to witness different holiday celebrations. In Japan, they were doing like fire throwing and drumming. And they talked about like the, the new year being a different time of year for them. So it was just like really, really excellent fun time with them. And plus we got to go on some rides. They're big fans of that. I did come home with some type of upper respiratory infection. Oh well. Typically Mondays are prepping for outbound, but you guys have been through that. At least once each, probably more than once. So I'm going to skip over that and instead let it be open forum for you guys to tell me what's top of mind for you. What is like the number one thing you feel like you need help with right now?

For me, I'm having problem like, um, With like getting LinkedIn connections, like a lot of the leads, like I would email them, but like when I send like LinkedIn requests, like with a message, they don't like respond, like accept. So then—

Have you tried sending them blank?

Blank?

Yeah, just a blank LinkedIn connection, no message.

No.

Highly recommend that.

Okay.

So I accept every LinkedIn request I get because I'm a LinkedIn open networker, and if somebody wants to show their ass by pitch-slapping me, I will let them do it. It gives me lots of fuel for classes like this where I show people bad behavior. But when you send a LinkedIn request, with text, they know they're going to be pitched. No one does that except people who are intending to pitch you. The only time I send text in my LinkedIn connection request is if I have a specific reason for connecting with them, like we met at a conference, or I heard their talk on a specific subject, Or I saw a comment on another post and I really wanted to connect with them. Otherwise, adding context for why you are connecting with them is just letting them know that you are a salesperson. The other thing is there is a lot we can do with our profiles to get more connections. I'm going to take a look at yours, Kai, and we can go through it as a group. So graduate student is fine. That's not raising any red flags. It could probably be a stronger tagline, but that one isn't like, oh no, I don't want to connect with this person. Let's see what your about says.

Okay.

This is all fine. This is all fine. And it doesn't look like you have a lot of connections today. So you only have 70 connections. Are you trying to connect directly to decision makers?

Yeah, I send— like, I would send a message. I would like to connect and then like send a message, like, like with— like if it's like a small business, like usually the CEO or something like that.

Yeah. So I would say that on average, CEOs and other decision makers are going to be like, why does this graduate student want to connect with me?

Yeah, that's what I thought. I was like, oh, like, why does someone try to connect with me?

People are way more likely to connect if you already have connections in common. So I would try to build from the ground up instead of going directly to connect with the CEO or founder. Go connect with Someone in business development or the sales team, or someone else if they have people at their org that have also recently graduated. Right? So like, let's say I'm prospecting. Do do do do. What's like smallish? So this is one that I was prospecting the other day that I shared with Steph that she can no longer prospect. So this is open. So we'll follow them. All right. So we've got Michelle Bainbridge is the CEO and owner. And if we go here, they only have one employee. So this is a bad example. Just kidding. Let's just look for like IT consulting.

Okay.

DMP Technology looks. They're not too hard. Okay, so this is a 12-employee company, right? Now I could go directly for connecting with this managing director who is going to be the decision maker or the chief operating officer. But let's scroll down and look at some people more likely to connect with you. This person who's just a manager, this administrator. Now they're showing up as just LinkedIn members for me because I'm actually already connected to the CEO. It's very different for me because I also have that CEO like tag and I've been in the space for a long time. So I get really high acceptance rates because my profile very obviously shows that I'm substantiated in the industry. And they're not immediately thinking to themselves, this girl is going to pitch me, or why does she want to talk to me? They're like, oh, another CEO, let's network. So for you, you want to network peer-to-peer. Find the people who are recent graduates. Like this person is great for you to connect with, right? They're just an associate. Looks like they're relatively new to their career. They're also overseas. They're probably likely to connect with you. That would be my suggestion with those people. If you want to send a message along with your connection, and I highly recommend A/B testing and looking at do people accept more when you don't send any message, or if you're going peer-to-peer, send something like, hey, I recently graduated and I'm looking to connect. with other professionals just so I can kind of follow their career journeys. Would that be okay? But go for something low-level like that, and then once you've built your network, you can start reaching out to those higher-level decision-makers. But they're probably not going to connect with you because your profile to them is going to look like, what is she doing? What does she want?

Yeah, that makes sense.

All right, anybody else? Anything top of mind at the moment?

I think for me, it's not really on the copywriting, it's just finding companies. So for example, I'm trying to target those DPC health and wellness companies, like vitamins and whatnot, but a majority of them are, I would say, under umbrella corporation. Like, I think that's Church and Dwight Company, if I'm not wrong. So it's a bit tough in finding Who are in charge of what brands? Yeah, I think this is a major, I would say, the major—

Google's your best friend. And that is really what it comes down to with those things. So my process for this, full transparency, I have ADHD, I'm totally, totally likely to get sucked down the rabbit hole. So first things first, I set a timer, whatever event that may be, right? 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever. And I say, I'm going to spend the next amount of time researching B2C health and wellness companies. So I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to look at health and wellness companies, right? And I always just click on the first link, see what's going on. This seems good. Okay, Wellable, who are these guys?

Cool, cool.

Pull up SimilarWeb. All right. More insights. Oh, SimilarWeb's got an outage, guys. Do you have DataNize or Intricately or anything like that? Okay. I don't either at the moment. But let's see what else there is that's Free parent company. That's cool. Penny buttons. Okay, none of those are really what I want. I like the datanized. Plugin, but it's pricey. The Intricately plugin is a little bit cheaper. But there are a lot of those plugins. Without the plugin, you're going to have to go search Wellable parent company and see what comes up. Crunchbase is my go-to. So it doesn't actually look like they have a parent. These guys look like They are standalone. Nick Patel is the CEO. And it looks like they took quite a bit of debt financing. So these are alumni-funded. It is also good to look at where their funding comes from because that is going to give you an idea of who they have to respond to. So I would say these guys are a great contact. If they don't have a parent, you could just prospect them. So that's good for you, right? Now we scroll down. All right, we've got Bonusly. Take a look at these guys. Always, I always check SimilarWeb. Because that gives me an idea too of like where their users are. Because you guys are just the US right now, right, Shafiq? Harmonize just captures US. Right, so anybody where this map is lighting up blue all over the place, not going to be worth your time. But mostly US is. Taking a look at their traffic. Cool. So then we can go over here and look at Bonusly parent company. Interesting. Go back.

What's this?

So she is the owner. They don't have a parent company. So this is— that's how I do it, right? It doesn't take that much time. And what I would do is open a Google Sheet in another window. Do you use 2 screens when you work? Yeah.

Yes, I do.

Okay. So one screen has the Google spreadsheet. The other screen has your search. And as you're going, You're going to want to just keep track of what you found out, right? So, Wellable and Bonusly, put in whatever you know, right? So I would probably do it like this, company, parent website, Target. And just roll like that. And you can fill it out with more data as you are researching, however you want to do that. I have a couple of research templates that I use I can shoot over to you. But the big thing, when you are researching, I like to move quickly and not get bogged down in my outreach during that time block. So if you set 30 minutes to research companies, be doing the research and filling out the spreadsheet, not the outreach. Especially since you guys use Poseidon and you can automate the outreach quite simply later. Then you can be putting these people in. For your uses, Shafiq, since Poseidon is LinkedIn primary, I would just drop the LinkedIn profile like right there so you can just click to it later. And like that is how I would do it and just do it per, Person. Let me send you my market research template too. So I'm thinking about it. I'll drop it into chat. Did that help?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Thank you.

Okay, awesome. So this really quickly. This is my account research template. It goes company overview, business units, historical contacts, links, financial insights, industry insights and trends, current state, their tech stack and partners, so anybody they are working with that is relevant to you. And then this is other information like you've got your compelling events, The contacts. You can duplicate this, like just duplicate it as many times as you need. But I also use this template here. Don't use mine, make a copy. But sharing that with you all now in the chat. This is great for ongoing research, especially for your key targets. I wouldn't say you want to fill all this information out for every company that you want to talk to. But the key targets that you are really dead set on getting into, you want to keep track of all this information. Especially, it's very, very important to track their compelling events so that you are working up to something that is happening for them. And you can continue to mention that in your copy to be like, this is what is happening. Can you— like you need to take action. You are driving that. What's the word I'm looking for? It's an emergency. I'm on cold medicine today, guys. Ignore my complete inability to form functional thought. Anybody else got anything top of mind they need help with? Nathan, we haven't heard from you today.

I can't see.

You can't see it. You gotta, you gotta ask. You have to ask for access.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Like ask and I'll approve it.

I guess my question would be, how do you make the quick delineation when you go to a company's website, when you're researching them to be like, this is the product I wanna sell them, a website, like redoing their website or doing marketing for them. How do you make that call in that 10-minute frame?

Okay, so 2 major points of information I look at when I'm prospecting. Their website, well, 3 really, but 2 of them live in the same place, right? So one is their website and the other is LinkedIn. And I'm going to look at the business LinkedIn and their key stakeholders LinkedIn. And that tells me everything I need to know to make a quick decision. So let's say, um, name a company that you're trying to prospect.

Uh, think of like Normal, the marijuana company. It's obviously the website that needs to be redone, but I'm curious, how do you, how do you delineate like the key, the key partner holders?

Yep. So cannabis is weird because not everybody publicizes that they are working in cannabis. But it's usually by their title. So like this is the National Normal webpage. And like in this one, yes, you are right. It's quite obvious their website could use some help. Their social presence is actually pretty good, although their LinkedIn is not the best of their social. So as we are looking at their LinkedIn, We've got 123 employees. And I'm obviously going to send them all connection requests because that's who I am as a person. Now most of these people have multiple titles. And this is extremely common in the cannabis industry. Almost nobody is working just one place. They've got multiple stakes in multiple companies. If we go look at the website, there should be an About page typically. Okay, if we look at Chapters here, it's going to have all their different locations. Now I've worked with NORML in the past as a volunteer, so I know a little bit about their internals. Business, which is that like all of these chapters function somewhat independently from National Normal. I didn't blow out your microphones. You're welcome. So you're going to want to contact them independently. Now this would be a great example of one that is very much worth calling into. And for something like this, I would probably try to get in by offering them some free work up front, like some free graphics for social media or whatever. And I would take a look at their individual pages. Like I would go look at Alabama's Normal. I would be like, okay, these guys, the last time they posted was December 2nd. They are posting semi-regularly. I would offer to help them with social probably, the Alabama one, because their social presence isn't fantastic. This is one that you have to go like Step by step. It's also really important to remember that NORML is a nonprofit cannabis company, meaning they do not have the money some of these other cannabis companies do. And they also have to report to a board how they spend their money. I spent 2 years trying to move into the nonprofit marketing space exclusively and couldn't because one, they don't always have the funds. And 2, even if they do, they have to explain every single cost that comes across in the spreadsheet to not just their board, but also Charity Navigator. So they are highly accountable for how they spend their money. What can help instead of looking at, say, normal, is looking at some of their partner companies that they are working with in individual areas to find the companies that are for-profit, and work for them. What we could also do for NORML is reach out and offer to do some free stuff for them in exchange for introductions to their partners that are for-profit in certain areas. There are a lot of dispensaries partnered with NORML that we would love to work with. So we would be better off kind of like offering to do free work for NORML in exchange for some introductions and some maybe like they if they have ads on their website. So, you know, offering to do free work in exchange for an advertising slot. Because it does look like they're getting a decent amount of traffic. When you're looking at a company that's for-profit, it's going to have a lot more of the stereotypical titles in the jobs like CEO, COO, owner, founder that you're going to know immediately. Like, oh, that's who I need to talk to. With NORML, most of these titles, like, so Christopher Cano, I actually do know this guy. He is the Executive Director, which is the top title you can have in a nonprofit organization, for Suncoast NORML. So he would be a target, but he is only going to have decision-making power over the Suncoast NORML, which is The other, the Tampa side of Florida.

How do you decide when to give free work? Is it like case by case, or do you usually do it for nonprofits? Non-for-profit?

I always do free work for nonprofits. As long as it's a nonprofit that's not doing something fucked up, because sometimes nonprofits exist for terrible reasons, like the ones that exist solely to try to torture homosexuals out of being homosexual. We do not give them free work. Any cannabis LGBTQIA liberty-related organization that is a nonprofit, we will do work for free. Not unlimited work, but we'll do a couple of things for them for free. Especially if we can exchange it for use of their logo, or an advertising slot on their website. When it comes to businesses, I almost always do one piece of work for free as kind of a gesture of goodwill to get them to talk to us. It's always something simple. So we do something like create a custom graphic for them. We don't do crazy amounts of work. But it's very much case by case as to how much work we will do. But I'm always willing to do a graphic if we think someone will respond to us if we do it. But always, so the big ones are like nonprofits and cannabis companies and also B2B technology companies that we want their logo. So like if it's a CDN or any other like networking telecom company, we've got a lot of free work for Harmonize. Anybody else got anything top of mind? No. All right, I'm gonna shut down because half of us feel like crap. Unless anybody has anything else top of mind for them. All right, adios, guys. Talk to you later.