Full Throttle Falato Leads Roundtable/Mastermind on May 1st 2024

Hello, hello, hello. Hi, how you doing? Good, Michael, how you doing? One here real quick. We're gonna get started about 11:05 Eastern because, uh, people are getting all these note takers out. Nice. Such a pain. You see, it's way bigger crowd, Victor, when we do it once a month. I know, I remember. See, people are still coming in. You find the note takers to take out? Yeah. All right, we're going to get started here. It's really a collaborative type of group of people where we all share ideas, tips and tricks, you know, what's working, what's not. Like, each person is going to be able to kind of introduce themselves and get those out of the way. I'm going to give some tips and tricks around top of funnel. We're going to be looking to have people give their tips and tricks more— not a big presentation before each, each one, but we're trying to have a little bit of an educational part and then go into the whole networking thing that we always do. Again, this is once a month now, not every, every week like we were doing it before. I might sprinkle in some other ones, but, uh, once a week was just a little too much. So when we do these intros, it's going to be who you are, what you do, um, maybe a tip and trick you want to share that you found that works really well for generating revenue, um, whether it's ChatGPT or some tech stack or some way that you like to work with that you want to kind of converse with everybody and kind of share that. So if that's something you want to share, or the other thing I was thinking was you're working on something, you want to bounce this off the group to try to solve it. So those are the two things I'd really love answered. But make sure in the chat you put your information in there. And depending on how many people we have in here that's actually not bots, we might split into Zoom rooms because there might be too many people to do intros if we do it the old-fashioned way. So I'm going to put my information in here so you guys can see it. But I would suggest putting more than just your name and email. Put some links in there so people can interact with you. So like this, John, a little more information. So yeah, we're going to get started here in about a minute. I'm going to go through some tips and tricks. It's usually like a one-page slide. Not selling what, like, what your company, but more selling like, how do you help people? Some tips and tricks. So if we're going to open this up to other companies to do this, I'm going to be helping ones that, that kind of help grow the group. So if you and if you can show me you invited like 5, if some people showed up like 5 people that you kind of help bring into this group, then you'll be rewarded to kind of do what I'm going to do here in a couple minutes, which is a little bit of a highlight of who you are. Okay, then I'm going to walk out.

Um, so that's another one that, um, that, uh, you're, you're on.

One sec, hold on one sec.

Let me just see.

Let's see, where is she? She mute? Okay. Yeah, I'm on mute.

I was on mute.

Is that— that's the rules, correct? No, it's just you were talking to someone else and we were talking, so all good. Just if you're— if you're gonna have other conversations, please put yourself on mute. All good. Um, but yeah, please put your information in the chat on the right, and we're gonna get it started here in a sec.

Yeah, I don't mind.

Let me bring up slide I want to show. Okay, so my name is Michael Filato. Um, I am the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Full Auto Leads. It's a lead gen automation company, so we do email, um, automation, about 20,000 to 30,000 emails a month, about 5,000 activities on LinkedIn per month per profile. And we do these roundtables for our customers so we can basically get people to get educated, network, and then you really bring in your own attendees that you want to sell to. Because doing this or doing podcasts is a great way to kind of get more business because you're kind of controlling your own events. So can everybody see the screen? Okay, so I'm gonna give you a couple tips here, um, and then this is what I'd want from a company going forward that can help, help get some audience. But there's a lot of people that spend a lot of time, um, hunting. That's what I do for people. But what I see is there's executives or VPs or even account executives spending a lot of time on hunting, not closing, because they have to kind of keep their, their pipe from doing this every month. So I would definitely, whether it's using someone like myself and Victor or finding someone that's an SDR to basically do the— get the leads, get the automation going. The only problem with kind of doing that is that you might break your LinkedIn domain or might break your email domain. It's very easy to break stuff. So be careful when you're doing that. If you can definitely give someone junior to kind of help them with their other than top 30 accounts, that's what we call account-based marketing and software sales, ABM. That will help you focus in as an AE or salesperson or VP on your top 30 accounts and leave the rest to either an SDR or an automation or outside company. The only problem with, you know, having the SDR approach is that they're usually kids, they're usually the first job out of school, and it's a big turnover situation with time, and/or they want to be something more than a lead gen person their whole life. Any question? Victor, are you letting people in? Because it keeps on popping on my thing. Yeah, I'm doing it right now. Cool. Thank you. Any questions on that whole, like, closing versus hunting approach and what you, what you think you should be doing or not doing?

No one?

Okay.

So the other thing that I'd give you guys tips on is that people use HubSpot, they use email engines, and they hook it into Office 365. Or Gmail. And why you start sending emails from Outreach or HubSpot or any other email platform, you got to have a separate domain, you got to have clean the emails, you got to make sure that you're using a separate email engine like, um, SMTP server like a SendGrid, you know, Constant Contact and those things are not good for this stuff. And sending emails through Yesware and other software programs, it's an easy way to kind of ruin your deliverability. On sending out emails. So that's important. Don't, don't use the tools that are made for more drip marketing like HubSpot for cold outreach. LinkedIn automation. There's a lot of LinkedIn automation tools. This is one of the things I do, but a lot of people do it on their own and they start seeing themselves in basically LinkedIn jail. And that's when they start seeing automation tools, especially I would be very careful of Chrome instances. Like Octopus CRM or Copilot, those things kind of get, got to get caught by LinkedIn. So you want, you want to make sure you don't use those types of tools that are actually easy to spot because LinkedIn will lock you out of your, your profile and then you're really kind of messed up. So any questions on the, the LinkedIn side of things and how to use that for automation?

Yeah, I just had a quick How do— is there like, because with LinkedIn, you know, you get put in jail, like they don't tell you why, like you used X program and they just say, you know, you violated terms and like you can never find out really what you did necessarily.

Well, most of the time you're using an automation tool or you are, you're, you're having some person in another country as a virtual assistant doing that for you and that you can see the IP. Address, and that's what gets you into jail, right?

I mean, I've never, uh, I mean, I've been like, had my, my account turned off for like 24 hours or something, uh, but I never knew what I had, like what extension, you know. So I just stopped using what I was using, all of them, for a while, and then let them back. Like, I, I didn't know what—

you got to look at— I use software that makes— moves the mouse around on a virtual desktop. So that it looks like a human is actually on LinkedIn. So those Chrome Insisters, they just cut and paste, cut and paste, and a lot of them don't have a think engine to mimic human behavior. So the one I do does, and that's what I like about it. It doesn't get caught by the LinkedIn police, but you also got to limit to 150 activities a day.

Yeah.

And if you sometimes when people go, you can't send any more invites out. It's either A, they might have, they might have got too many refusals, or B, it could be that you ran out of your invites for the week. So sometimes you just don't know why you're being kind of limited, but that's kind of how it works. Any other questions?

Yeah, Michael, I'm wondering, my name is Martin Ricketts, by the way. What is better given the restrictions that LinkedIn is putting on, and sending messages. What is better to do, email messaging or LinkedIn messaging?

Well, LinkedIn's stronger because it's one-to-one and it's a human-based interaction of profile to profile versus a very cold email. So I think LinkedIn's better, but you can't, you can't automate as high the numbers.

Yeah. Is LinkedIn still getting open rates that are good? Because, you know, so much of this—

well, we get great open rates on LinkedIn, but then again, it depends on your profile. You know, even the females get better acceptance rates on their, on their LinkedIn than men.

I wonder why that is.

Yeah, I mean, it's just— I mean, you obviously got to get— you have to have a good background stuff, and if you have SDR on your, on your profile, it's not a good look.

What's SDR?

Sales Development Rep. You don't— I mean, no one wants to be pitched by, you know, a kid. So you want to make sure if you have SDRs, you don't call them SDRs, right? You know, you just say, you know, Mark. I put Marketing Manager on some ones that are low level just because I don't want someone look like they're bugging someone to sell them something. No one wants to be sold anything anymore.

Yeah.

Any other questions? All right. The other things you should think about is signal data, relationship data. If people are on a group in LinkedIn and they're interested in that particular subject that your product sells for, you should be joining every single group so you know who's interested in those things because they're actually seeking information. So I call that signal data. A relationship pattern. So groups on LinkedIn are very important. Events on LinkedIn, scraping those live events, scraping, scraping the attendees and the exhibitors and say, hey, I'm going to be at 2.0 in Dallas and wanted to meet with you while I'm there, whether you're going or not. Great way to kind of use that as an anchor to get meetings because if they are going to come, you basically say, okay, let's sit down. If they're not or you're not, say, hey, I couldn't make it last minute. Let's have a virtual cup of coffee over Zoom. They will still meet with you if it was a good lead. So anchor data and signal data is very important when I do these things because it, it shows that you are invested in who they are and what they've done. There's things like new hires as well, or if they're hiring a VP of marketing, you might say, you know what, I sell marketing solutions. Maybe it's a good time for me to also introduce my types of things for that. So That signal data, relationship data, intent data is on, on, on my platforms as well. People, um, connections of your competitors and your friends. That's also kind of a way to look at LinkedIn. There's ways that we do relationship, uh, outreach. Again, for me, I out, I automate all that outreach. And what I'm suggesting here is, hey, you don't have to automate it, but you still wanna work on, uh, closing versus hunting all day. So. There's ways to kind of do it better, faster, cheaper. Looking at analytics, A/B testing, kind of the whole Moneyball approach, like what's working, what's not. The data is going to tell us. Don't let some salesperson or client service person say this is going to work or not work for sure. No, you don't know what you don't know yet. But here's some suggestions based on past, past clients. So those are the things you want to look at. Subject lines, you want to use snippets, they're called, where you can kind of say, hey, I hope you're enjoying your Wednesday morning. You know, my name's Martin and I'm calling from A, B, and C. So that's kind of the things that you could do to kind of make it a little more less robotic looking. And then you definitely want to use ChatGPT, Bard, which is now called Genesis, I think Gemini, Gemini, and using these different AI tools to kind of write the content, but never take the content that you ask these tools and put it into a messaging system. Make it yours, make it about them. Whenever you write these messages, who cares, so what, why are you telling me this, how's this going to help my business, what's the fear of missing out? If you can't think like that when you're writing a LinkedIn or email message, then it's, it's not a good look because you're, then you're selling too much. These round tables I actually use in my pitch, um, to get people to come because I know that if I help people, you know, it will all come around, right? So I say, hey, you want to be a featured guest you know, in my, in my roundtable, I do this every first Wednesday. You— some of you guys got an email like this, and I say, hey, by the way, I'm going to introduce myself. I do lead gen automation. Here's my account if you want to have a one-on-one. So if it's more about them, give them something. Having a forum, by the way, they'll get to know you. And if your product and services work for people, then it will kind of pay it forward. So I always look at, especially on LinkedIn, is be a little more consultative and less marketing-driven on this messaging, because you're not going to get anywhere with marketing messages anymore. It's too much information. No one cares about your company or you. That's, that's what you do when I open the door, someone opens the door for you, it's like, okay, now let me get to know this person. So any questions before I kind of, uh, kind of start doing intros for the team? Any questions? No. All right, so this— we have how many people, Victor?

31.

About 30.

So I think we can get through this if we— no, if we had 30, that means we have to cut it to about a minute, right?

Yeah.

All right, so you got a minute to introduce yourself, tell us what you do, and, um, please be cognizant of the time just because so, so everybody can get their their spiel, but who you are, what you do, where you live, and then either a quick tip and trick that you can put a link into, into the chat, or, hey, I need help with this. I'm bouncing this off the room. Could someone reach out to me one-on-one and see if they can help me solve it? So I'm going to start with John Costa.

Thanks.

You would start at the very top. I, I, my name's John Costa, CEO of a company called Repubbit, helping our customers optimize their workflow. It's a republishing platform. It's a SaaS offering to allow people to ingest training, education, employee support tools. Now we collected tremendous amount of analytics, which is now fitting in perfectly with all of the movement towards data analysis. We connect up to all the CRM systems out there.

So, uh, what, um, what trick do you have, or what tip do you have to help people grow their revenue? Or what's something that you're trying to work on right now? And then people answer him, um, either in the chat, just because we're gonna run out of time if we do this on voice.

Okay. Uh, I guess a tip would be to leverage the tools that are out there that are being developed to integrate things together. Don't look for the ultimate Uber solution for something, but tie things together. Let's use the tools that do things best. That's, well, it's been my mantra.

Did you put your information in the chat, John?

I know I was about to.

Okay.

So, all right, Michelle.

Hello everybody. Great to be here. Michelle Ricketts, Cohesion Services and Digital Samurai, and guiding entrepreneurs and business owners to lean into their teams, to delegate, to get, and to get efficiencies in their business through scheduling. And the tip I will give you is voice typing. The efficiencies you can utilize with voice typing, uh, are immense. A lot of people are doing it maybe just on their phone, but you can literally— there's tools we use with Digital Samurai to be able to lean into voice typing in almost every element that you use anywhere that you're typing. So reach out to me, love to give you some tricks on getting some time back so you can make more money in your business.

Awesome.

Thank you, Michelle. Michelle, did you put your stuff in the chat?

Yes, my Linktree is there. You can get everything from my Linktree.

Cool. I might go to Martin, her lovely brother, because keep the messaging together.

I'm the good-looking one. My twin sister Michelle talked about efficiencies. I'm a tech nerd. And so my company, Digital Samurai, we solve a problem that most people don't know they have. We call it technology chaos. That's any friction between you and your data, you and your team. I can't find the file. The link didn't work. I didn't get the attachment. That's technology chaos. And we have processes and to put in place to help you streamline that. We are obsessed about taking the friction out of the process between you and your, your people. And so that's where we start by solving that. Once you solve that, you have effortless back and forth with your team and with collaborators, and you, you save time from then on. And so we use a targeted learning method. We have micro lessons, and the micro lesson I have today for you guys is using clipboards. So we have certain apps that we use, but then we tell you how to use it because tactics, how you use the tools, matters infinitely more than which tool you use. And so we have a micro lesson to teach you how to use clipboards effectively. And along with the voice typing that Michelle talked about. Those two things will boost your efficiency more than anything else, using voice typing and clipboards.

Great. Thanks, Martin. If you have any questions for Martin, please reach out to him on the chat, either one-to-one or as a group. If you look at the chat bubble thing, there is a button that should have three buttons so you can save the messaging. Yeah, so if you go by your name and by how to make it full screen, there's like a three dots and you can say save chat and so you can get everybody's information. Let's go with Matt Rolnick.

Great, so Matthew Rolnick, I'm Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Yamaker. We're best known for doing team building events, especially creative experiences. We do them in person, virtually, or hybrid. We also like to connect DEI, mental health speakers, Actually, the last speaker I brought in was, Mike Tyson. I got to interview. So that was kind of exciting. I've got 2 quick LinkedIn tips. One is I use that LinkedIn voice message a lot after I connect with somebody.

Yeah.

And hardly anybody does it. I even once left a message for someone at LinkedIn, said they didn't know, even know about it. The other thing that's worked very well for me, I probably generated 50, 60 clients just from my LinkedIn content. A lot of times after an event like this, I will do a recap or summary of the moderator and some people I've met, especially like, I went one, did one recent with Adobe or Hunt Club, and I, I highlighted my takeaways and tagged people, and then I noticed that dozens of people from that company will look at it or comment, and it just strengthens my relationship. I even once had a moderator of this company, Hunt Club, that reshared my exact post to his whole network, and like 70 people from that company Follow me. So I do a lot of that. You know, I try to be different ways of engaging with my content.

Yeah, definitely. I spoke at a conference called Synapse in Tampa. There's like 60 people in the room and 10 people wait in line to talk. I mean, if you can be seen as an expert or teacher, kind of a challenger sales approach, that's going to get you a lot more leads than just getting a booth at a show or scrape. Another tip would be scraping the list of that show. And having those meetings set up before you even go to the conference. That's what I do. So most of the time I don't even need a booth. Charles Dentz.

Yes, so I work with small to medium enterprises that overlook strategies that could increase their growth, double their growth in over a year. So I am Charles Dentz. Business advisor and strategist. And my whole idea about helping businesses is, is about helping them scale and become more efficient from their strategic planning, their operational efficiencies, as well as leadership development.

What tip, what special tip that you've learned through life that you can help, or what's something we can maybe try to help you? Help you out with?

Yeah, so the, the, no, not so much a tip. Well, maybe it is a tip. What I've done, I leverage AI to accelerate results for my clients. And so using all the traditional things I've always done, but now I'm able to accelerate that by using AI, creating GPTs to help them help them, help them help themselves, basically.

Put your, put your stuff in the link here on the side, and we'll go to Nicole.

Hi everyone, uh, my name is Nicole Haslip. I am the global Marcom and events manager at SAFT. Um, I'm here because I want to learn, uh, different ways of, um, of doing marketing beyond events. I mean, what we do mostly and what I'm in charge of is a lot of events and it's a lot of work, a lot of coordination, and it's a lot of money and it's the sole focus of my job. However, I think we could be doing a lot more. I don't really think events are the best use of our resources. And so I'm attending really to just learn what else is there, what else is out there, how we can use AI, how can we, how can we use LinkedIn, how can I help our sales team? To realize other ways of getting leads other than industry events. How can we bring our company into modern times? It's very old school. I was not prepared with a tip. I wasn't, I wasn't expecting this. However, I guess I would say just to don't discount an in-person event. There's always a good connection to make and get out there. It's, it's definitely part of the marketing mix. But there again, there's other things that we can be doing with technology, especially AI. So I'm here to discover some of those things and listen to everyone else's tips.

Yeah, I would— one tip for you for the event side is getting the app. And a lot of times the app has a web version, but it has just the name and the company. So you can actually grab that with a Chrome extension, scrape that list list, ingest it into an email platform, enrich their emails, and then send them emails on LinkedIn. When I do that, I get like 20 meetings, uh, before I even get to there, not worrying about who's going to walk past my booth. Yeah, I set definitive times and meetings either at the booth or, or off on the side. And sometimes you get way more meetings because you don't know who's going to stop by and say hi. And then you go, what do you do? And then they tell you what they do, and it's 20 minutes later, it's like, this was not a good use of my time to even talk to this person.

Of course.

Yeah. Now, well, I just want to get our salespeople off their phones too, and actually engaging in the show. So that's another challenge.

But yeah, I always say get off the booth and walk around. There's no one in here. Go talk to someone by the coffee table. That's what I do. But I think we should talk because I have some— I'm an event guy.

So, okay.

Yeah. Um, John, forgot how to pronounce it.

Yeah, Flay Hive. Um, for events, I like to try to scrape the, uh, the content in advance as well, drop it into an Excel sheet or Google Sheet. And if I'm going to be walking the floor, I sort it by category, then by booth or row, so I'm not walking from side to side if I'm trying to, you know, tackle the whole floor in 2 or 3 days.

Yeah, I try to go from left to right, otherwise I'll forget where I left off.

Right, right. So I know if I'm in the 700s, 1000s, and, uh, in that way, if I don't— if I am going to schedule meetings, I also try to do it accordingly as well. I'll try to hit the 7s, 8s, 9s if I'm going to meet at someone's booth. If I have a meeting room, then it's different. Uh, for lead sharing, also similar to scraping, it's expensive to try to join everybody's lead share products, um, like Crossbeam or Reveal. And, and you may be using Reveal and somebody else using Crossbeam, or not at all, anything at all. But if you can get that into an Excel sheet, um, the partner you're trying to work with, and upload it into a Google Sheet, you can align that with your Reveal, um, your leads as well. So it's— you're not fully dead in the water and trying to do everything off an Excel sheet. You can still use that and import into Reveal from a Google Sheet where you cannot with an Excel sheet, if that makes sense.

Yeah, you're better off taking that list and ingest it into— I guess Reveal would be something like a Zoom info, I guess. But you got to make sure that data doesn't bounce, otherwise you're going to break your domain, right? Yeah.

When you're pulling it out of Crossbeam or Reveal, you're getting that other partner's agreeing to give you the client name, their account representative that owns that account for that partnered company, and email address. So you're getting good data on how you can work with a partner to reach out to that customer that they already own so that you can engage with that customer.

Awesome. All right. Get your information in there.

Kathy.

Yep.

Hi, everyone. My name is Kathy Houlihan. The name of my company is Dreamed Career. We're looking to create synergies between workforce and education. For those of you who do offer educational courses or programs, a couple of people seem to be in that space. A great idea is to let your clients know if you work with businesses, there are huge tax incentives, tax breaks for offering educational— they can basically get a lot of services for free as long as they're not required. You know, so if you— if they have an educational reimbursement program, which many companies do, unfortunately only 7% of employees take advantage of it. But if you can set up a situation, if you look up the 127 tax credit, there's, there's an opportunity for businesses to start to look at using education. So if you can package your services in such a way that it's educational, there might be opportunities to, to get people in for that. So that would be my tip. $8.8 trillion was last, according to lost last year according to our, the 2023 Gallup poll, uh, due to disengagement at work. So when you're talking about motivating people, motivating salespeople, um, they have to love what they do. They've got to have a passion for it, and education can be used to, to do that. So thanks, Kathy.

Let's, let's, let's try to keep to 30 to 45 seconds just because of, uh, making sure we get to the chat. Um, Nava? Is that how you pronounce it? Exactly.

I think Java, but with an N at the beginning and H at the end. You got it perfectly. Hey everybody, first time here. Nava Hopkins. I'm the evangelist over at Optimizer. I do a lot of work in the PPC space, international speaker, blogger, do stuff like that. I was going through a number of different tips and I landed on Something that I think will be more helpful for sales than marketing, but if you have any questions about PPC, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, feel free to hit me up. The tip is actually to create polarizing content on LinkedIn that will invite debate because the way the algorithm works, they love comments. And so, so long as you're okay having a conversation, a respectful debate-oriented conversation, that can be super, super helpful and help raise your clout because if you start getting really meaningful thought leaders engaging with your content, that can be super helpful. And then a bonus tip is not to put links in your LinkedIn posts. It actually hurts your post in the algorithm. You want to put the link in the comments and call that out. The verdict's out on whether images are better or not, but just something to think about from a sales standpoint. If you're trying to build that clout and get that organic reach and organic engagement, make interesting statements that you can back up with data.

Awesome. Please put your info in the chat thing.

I did it.

I did it at the top. Cool. Kashana, is that close?

That's great, Michael. Kashana Evans here, founder of Kissing Lions Public Relations. We are coined fierce yet lovable media strategy for niche brands. that are purpose-driven most often. Uh, so made a couple of notes so I wouldn't take ramble for my minute. Um, I am the founder of Kissing Lions Public Relations, and I'm also something called a resilient communities consultant coming hot off the tail of some nonprofit work. Um, we are ideally here focused on small, medium enterprises and lifestyle brands. Our differentiators include corporate positioning, community building through communications, and the focus on 3 silos, which are branding, marketing communications, and public relations, sometimes individually and sometimes combined. Uh, our services are tailored. I'm New York-based for now, but now that it's spring, I really am craving to get out in that wonderful world. And let's get to the good stuff. Let's get to the tips. So what I've noticed working with a nonprofit that I just wrapped up with, worked with them for a year, it was powerful work educating on trauma-informed awareness and resilience building, is that rather than just continuing to focus on cycling to people that already follow you, I really found, we, you know, we found some powerful results with making sure that when we were rolling out a monthly campaign, we launched the LinkedIn version, which is an abridged version. So things that are membership focused stayed internal to our newsletter distribution list via email, but the LinkedIn version was a chance to have a couple little promo areas, really amplify different programs we, we had. Also, that's really powerful because there's analytics. So if you're in teams that are just struggling to get organized, you can now go, hey, we did this in January and now it's March.

We gotta cut it off.

Thank you. Perfect. Thank you so much.

I think you put your information in there. Yeah. Let's see. Mike Horstrom. How are you, Michael?

Good.

Good to see you. I met Michael a few weeks ago virtually, then we get Got to see each other face to face actually, in Florida. But Mike Hruschka, I'm the founder and CEO of Problem Solutions. I'm a former researcher from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and left there. And for the last 20 years, I've helped companies build impossible technology. I've been doing a lot in the AI machine learning space through DOD and NSF funded research and help companies, medium and large, transform into what we call augmented enterprises. Work with large consulting firms and manufacturers and other things. We've been a a services company but have built a product. It's not email automation, it's not marketing automation, it's extreme sales intelligence. So if someone's in the field— and I threw the URL in there— but if someone is in the field of hunting whales and you only hunt so many a year and you have to have extreme amount of intelligence about them, their market, their positioning, and we just launched this. And so I'm also, I'm looking for some advice on best way for email marketing automation and LinkedIn stuff. So everything I'm hearing is glorious because we're a services company that people refer to us and our, our people find us. We don't, or we find them that need our help, kind of like the A-Team. And so this is extremely awesome for me because I'm trying to learn about this marketing automation space a lot more.

Yeah, just for obviously for, for the marketing and LinkedIn, I can help you there.

Email.

So anyways, put your information in there, but yeah, you and I should talk again. Absolutely. Let's see, John, you're How do you pronounce it?

Jaworski. Hi everybody, I'm John Jaworski. I own Nibble Digital Media. I'm an Emmy-winning producer-director based in Chicagoland. I work on documentary-style productions and documentaries, but I also do a lot of things for major corporations, higher ed. I did a bunch of course— I created a bunch of the media strategy, a bunch of courses for Georgetown, Johns Hopkins. Northwestern University is right down the street from me here. I do a fair amount of work for them, so I'm into social impact projects first and foremost, but I'm open for suggestions and opportunities. 90% of my work is referral-based or bouncing around within. Sometimes I don't even find out how people find me, which is aggravating because I'd like to do more of that. That's why I'm here to try to be a little more strategic in my outreach and not be a willow in the wind just in whatever comes across my transom. John Jaworski, Nimble Digital Media in Chicagoland.

Thanks, John. Michael Kennedy. Let's keep to 30 or 45 seconds.

Good morning, everybody. Michael Kennedy. I have a company called MK7. We're an IT solutions company based in Chandler, Arizona. Small company. I'm in the process of trying to refine and improve cold email outreach. Page. Um, a number of things, uh, Michael, on your initial tips and questions. How are you protecting your email domain? Um, I do have a separate domain, but you got to warm up the domain is what I learned. And in warming up the domain, there are some services that can do it for you, and they'll charge anywhere from $75 to $100 a month. I found an email platform called woodpecker.co that is very inexpensive compared to things like MailChimp or what have you, but they'll do email domain warmup for free. As long as you're, as long as you're paying their $39 per month subscription for like an entry-level thing, they'll do the—

you still need your DKIM, your DMARC, your SPF.

All of that has to be set up and they'll help you set that up. Absolutely. Anyway, that's one tip. Woodpecker.co, I highly recommend you check that out. As far as intent data, signal data, and things like that, ZoomInfo is very expensive. I used to use it. There's another one out there called Apollo.io, and instead of $10,000 to $12,000 a year, Apollo is about $50 per month for small businesses, and they have Bombora intent. They've got all of the other firmographics that, that you look for. So anyway, those are my two tips.

Awesome.

Ira.

Hey there. So my name is Ira Ozer. I'm an engagement consultant and an innovation coach. And so I basically help companies motivate and engage people. And I also work as an embedded consultant within a media company, sales and marketing management, and its sister branch training magazine. So I use that as a personal way to get my thought leadership out there and to also work with sponsors and all that. And I want to work with Michael to develop our— to improve our subscriber list of sales VPs and CSOs. My one tip for everyone is I can help you publish content for free on either of these two publications. So please feel free to reach out to me. My, my information is in the chat, IraOzer@EngagementPartners.com. But we also have opportunities for webinars that people could present. And all kinds of things like that.

Awesome. Thanks, Igor. Hi, my name is Igor Krasnik. I'm a founder and CEO of Tekken Web. We help businesses reduce operational overhead through technology and automation. I am based in Austin, Texas, and the bonus tip For today would be don't afraid to ask your customers for a referral upon completion of the project. I always ask for 3 referrals, at least get one, and that's been very helpful for me. Thanks, Igor. Brian Hines. Hi, Brian Hines, Nashville, Tennessee. Currently a free agent, but got about 25 years worth of experience in Marketing, sales, and account management. And my tip is you need to keep coming to these meetings. I'm learning something every time I'm on. I've known Brian for about 25 years. We were in sports marketing together, so we were working with NASCAR and Major League Baseball and all these different events. That was fun. Let's see who hasn't gone yet. Catherine.

Hi everyone. I am a brand visibility coach and a communications consultant. And what I do is I mentor entrepreneurs to help build and tailor brands— excuse me— and help them communicate effectively, just like I'm not able to do right now. And I also build strategy that increases their visibility and their impact. And my company is OP Creative Communications, as you can see. And one tip that I have for especially LinkedIn is where I'm very active, is the, the platform wants you to engage and do different things such as posting video. They want you to post photos, polls, do a variety of things to try and engage. And like somebody said before, to be able to keep them on the platform and post constantly.

Yeah, I'll add to that since I'm a LinkedIn guy. Posting on LinkedIn is kind of a hope-you-see-it type of approach. If you really want to get somewhere in lead gen or revenue, you have to reach out to people. So that'd be in-mails, be invites, they'll be inviting them to your event. Control your destiny by doing your event. Um, but posting on LinkedIn is like saying, oh, I posted something on Facebook too and they saw my picture. So it's good But it's most— if you're not, you're going to get more response one-to-one when you do one-to-one. But I would— there's not either or, I would do both. Um, who— let's see, who isn't— Edie, we got— is that—

though, I'm on.

Who else, who else has not gone besides Edie? Is that it?

And Nick Gupta, and we have, uh, Kurt. And Ignacio and Akila.

Akila, if you guys could turn your camera on, otherwise I don't see you. But let's go with Ignacio and then Anith after Edie. We got about 15 minutes left, so I think we can get through this, but let's stick to 60 to 90 seconds.

Awesome. Yeah. So, hello everyone. My name is Ignacio. I have an AI agency called Dynamo Labs.

Actually, Edie was going to go, Ignacio, didn't you?

Yeah, sorry. I'll wait. Sorry.

He can go on.

I'm—

Oh, ladies first.

Okay. I'm Edie Rether, and I'm in the business of thinking bigger, better. And I basically inspire awe and action to make change happen. I'm an international keynote speaker, thousands of events on 5 continents, TEDx, all of that. And so my tip though is really from Terry Brock. I was just on a program with him. AI genius, but he was just saying yesterday how, and I'm just looking where the heck it is, but Opus Clip Perplexity Cast Magic is much better than ChatGPT. So anyway, Terry Brock, genius in AI, and those are the tips that we were talking about yesterday. They were also talking about LinkedIn newsletters are just the way to go because they get through directly to the people. Anyway, that's my tip.

Thanks, Ignacio. Then, Anit. Awesome.

Thanks. Yeah, so I'm Ignacio. I'm the founder of Dynamo Labs, an AI agency. We develop solutions for different industries. We have been working more with sales and doing some automations on LinkedIn for internal usage. And yeah, one tip for LinkedIn would be use any type of automation for cleaning your leads. We have Clay and we have other tools also, but I think that will be one automation that I would recommend.

Yeah, just be careful. I've used all of them and you gotta look at what looks like human behavior. There's only a few of them that actually mimic that. Otherwise you're gonna get your LinkedIn and Google LinkedIn jail, and that's not good.

Yeah.

Um, all right, so can you turn your camera and, and, and, uh, microphone on, honey? Yeah, I'm that bitch. Um, and, uh, I don't hear anybody. Um, okay, Kurt. Do you guys hear me? I can hear you, Curt.

Go ahead.

Okay.

Yeah, I hear somebody talking and very—

I thought I heard that too.

Yeah.

Let's see who is that.

I was just muted. I wasn't on mute. That's another window. Sorry about that. Thanks for calling that out.

You're grounded.

Yeah.

So what's the format here introducing? Myself and the company.

And yeah, yourself and the company, and then free 1-year service subscriptions for everybody on here. I think that was the format.

Oh, for my, for my company? Sure.

Yeah, no problem. Everybody gets it. And our friends.

That's only like, uh, yeah, no big deal. Sure. Um, I'm, I'm Curt Wallace, and, uh, uh, I'm a founder with Lerny. Lerny is a community microlearning platform. It's a mobile app in the app stores and web-based as well, and it allows companies to capture and leverage the knowledge within the organizations. So everybody can create kind of TikTok style or Instagram style— TikTok is offensive these days, the environment that they're having— but, you know, they can post short micro lessons about what they're doing in their job.

Where are you based?

Peer-to-peer training. I'm actually in North Georgia, but we're all over the place, so we're completely decentralized. Our entire company is— we don't have a brick-and-mortar office. We all work remotely.

One suggestion for everybody is you look at Kurt's name or my name or Victor's or Igor, have something— or Kathy, have something. You can have your last name or not, but put down what you do when you do these Zoom calls. Maybe for this even more so, but if you do like anything that's a networking approach, even like John's, you know John works for Nimble based on his title on this thing, which is like I have. That's important just to have more than your name when you have this hour of exposure for yourself. Um, So let's see, who we, who we missing? I call him, uh, if you guys want to be on, please turn on your camera.

I went already, I already, already went.

All right, see, Akila, Elion. All right, well, Victor, why don't you go, and if there's anyone else that has gone, raise your hand, but Victor is my right-hand guy and you'll know him very well, just like the Ricketts, if you work with us.

Awesome.

My name is Victor Miranda. I'm with Full Throttle Flyer Leads. Basically, I help assist our clients to make sure that every and anything regarding their email campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns are launched accordingly. I basically take your subject matter and put it together and make it deliverable. My background background, uh, for many years, for over close to 20 years now, is as a business broker. I've been a business broker here in the state of Florida, uh, working for different industries. So trying to understand your businesses is my business, really. So, uh, if you have any, ever any questions regarding, uh, the LinkedIn or email automation that we have, you're welcome to reach out to me, pick my brain, uh, and also if you need some help with your business as well, I could probably help you with some of that as well.

All right, so we have 10 minutes left. Does anyone want to go that hasn't gone? And does anyone have a question that was a little deep, they might go a little bit deeper since we have some time, um, and ask that if you think it's a good question for the group to, uh, learn about the answer. Otherwise, I'll give you back 10 minutes.

I have a question.

Sure.

So we get bombarded with email constantly, and I'm just curious about not only is it easy to get through to people using email, but then also, is it just like what's considered to be too much? And what's considered effective?

I would say if you, if you go after someone's server, like say you send out 200 emails to Cisco, their, their server is going to see that you're bombarding their, their base, basically spraying and praying. So that's something that'll get you in it blocked completely. I would go probably 5 deep at a company. So VP, director, manager, coach, and then C-level, because you never know who's going to refer business back to each other. So you handle this, you handle this, or do you see what Michael said? So email's effective if you do, I'd say probably 3 to 4 emails over a course of 3 weeks. But to have an email, LinkedIn, and roundtables together is the whole 3-pronged approach. But if you don't send enough emails out, some people send 50 a day because they don't want to break their domain. It's because they're using Apollo with their Gmail or Office 365.

Okay.

You know, you don't just use your email, get one of these platforms like someone suggested earlier, unless you really have the time to learn it. And if you're learning that stuff to save money, but it's cutting off your time, you're basically washing it, right? So as a strategic person on this call, not, not to sell what I do, but automate whatever you can do, whether it's with me or someone else. Worry about strategic, consultative, prescriptive type of a role for what you do in life, because no one can mimic that. But if you— I mean, the whole SDR approach of hiring a bunch of people to do lead gen for you, it's going out the window because it needs to be about, hey, what do you do for me? Hey, don't bug me with phone calls. And I want to If I'm interested, I will fill out a meeting, and I get that all day long. Just have some sort of back question, you know, in that county, like, what's, what's bringing it to the table? What's— is this something that's budgeted for 2024? I get one answer that they have to answer. I always get their phone number in those invites too, because there's a lot of optional. I'd make— I make them all— I make them pretty much all required. So long as it's not form fill hell. So email deliverability is very tricky. And that's why I have an email engineer. And Victor and I don't even attempt to understand how to fill this out for this company, that out for this company, for their DNS, their DKIM, their DMARC, their MX records, the DMARC records. It's a whole bunch of things. You just don't know unless you're an expert at that stuff. And I have an expert. So great.

Thank you.

Michael, I wanted to mention my experience. I will say, first of all, I run a technology company, so I'm very techie. But the expert that Michael brought on is more— he's one of the few people I've been on a call with that knew more than I do about this stuff. And so he's absolutely right. Like, you don't want to do this stuff yourself. You want to focus on your core message. And that's what we tell people, you know, that's what we do, end-to-end systems and integration of that stuff. So, and then we rely on partners like Michael to do the high-end stuff that, you know, again, it's super complicated. I'm good at this stuff and I'm not doing it because they're better. You know, we've used 3 different companies for doing this lead stuff. And, you know, the first one, they did good stuff. It was on LinkedIn. But once we did the first part, they didn't follow up. The next one was like Michael talked about, they hired people to do calls and stuff. That was a catastrophe. And then we hired Michael and their attention to detail, the experts that they have, the stuff that they're doing. Again, I've never found anyone that does it better. Certainly the 3 we worked with didn't. And when they know more than I do now, that's when I know that the company's good. So shout out to Michael about that.

Thank you, Martin. Okay. I'm gonna have to give a discount for that one. Um, Kishana, Kishana, Kishana. I'm losing my— I, I am not—

Don't you worry. I, so, so long as you have a good intention, don't you worry about the tongue twisters. Uh, I'm here to level up and network and I'm super grateful to be here. Thank you, Michael, for that. It's Kishana, but you can also call me K like the letter K. No problem at all.

I said it right earlier. I just, I, I, I'm—

You sure did. Uh, so my question is, uh, I, it was a little bit late today. This is my first time here. So for an organization, um, as, uh, that has as much experience as your organization, clearly you're, there's a whole ecosystem here. My question is, you know, how would folks just joining in on an event today like myself, what are you looking for in terms of like when people just had a great time? Do you like the thank you on Twitter? Do you like the shout out on LinkedIn? It's always great to know for newbies. You never know when that comes in handy. So that's my question.

If you say it was great meeting with this company today or something like that, I mean, yeah, like, yes, like what's your vibe with that?

Is it yucky?

Is it weird? Is it welcome?

I always say ask for forgiveness than permission.

It's for real.

Cause I used to work in sports marketing with Brian and I would say, hey, I'm so excited to be working with Sprint and Nextel and doing this, or Or I just signed the, um, who did I work with? Oh, Miami Dolphins. So I was doing texting for the NFL. So I basically put in the contract, um, we could do a mutual agreeable PR statement. So instead of asking them after the contract, ask for things that you need while you're doing the contract. You know, when we're doing sports marketing, not many people do what we did, and I'm not charging that much. So, you know, you just want to do things called— they're called levers. If I do this, then I'll give you this. Don't just reduce your price or take something in and put something out as far as cost or, or duties unless there's a yin for the yang. So I learned that because I'd be like, you know what, yeah, I'll cut it down for you. You just cheapen your brand. So yeah, I'll cut it down for you, but I'm going to charge you 10% on every sale you do, or $500 a meeting.

Love it.

We could do it either way. Give them an option so they choose what they wanna buy, not what you wanna sell.

Absolutely love that. And then really just to kind of reposition the question, how do we say thank you to you on those social channels? Is that welcome? Is that fun for you and your organization?

Yeah, that'd be awesome. And then obviously using the link for, for, um, the roundtable for, for people to join in your network is good. You know, so, but yeah, if you, if you post something about what Michael's doing, that's, that always helps me. That'd be great. And then I give referrals, and hopefully I— this is one of the reasons why we do this, is, um, I give 10% on gross for the first year. So normally it's like $5K a month of what I charge, $60,000. That's $6,000 for passing the name, not selling it. So Um, I would suggest everybody here, that's why you put your information in chat and then press the download button with the 3 buttons, because you guys could be helping each other. I mean, I was doing this in person last week, um, in, in Orlando, and I did a 6-man and woman, uh, square table instead of round table, and it was the same thing except in person. So it's like, and they're like, well, do you do this?

Yeah.

Well, we should talk. So that's half of the things that me doing this is you guys getting business for yourself from me as referrals for each other. I mean, it helps me. I get business because I'm someone that's bringing people together and connected. But this is also a highlight of what I do for like Martin and Michelle in the next month. We're going to be doing one for them, not about me, not about Legion. It's going to be more about process automation and, and how to best think about it.

Not—

and I suggest don't do a sales pitch, right? You want to educate and make people network. If you're going to— if you're going to have people talk about you, should— I mean, not that I asked Martin to do that, but that's— I could— we can make fireside chat with Martin and Michelle about how they grew their company. And, you know, that's— or so that'd be them talking about me, right? But if they can get a client talking about them, that's going to be always a better look. Than you talking about what you do. It's like, fireside chat with Exxon and how they reduced their process automation. So he's going to talk about everything and probably mention that they worked with Martin and Rochelle too. So someone talking about you is way better than you trying to get, hey, look at me, look at me, you know, which is what this economy and culture is going to, you know, mean.

Michael, thanks for saying that. I'm going to expand on that. We just started with Michael. Couple weeks ago. We're already off to the races and doing stuff. I came to this event to, to see what we're— how he does it, because we are going to do one. And that's what I want to mention. You know, we get a lot of stuff in our inbox on LinkedIn, and mostly we ignore it. Um, but the message I got from him, actually from his son, talked about this event. We want to bring you on as a, as a, you know, speaker and expert and talk. And that was very compelling. I thought, well, yeah, yeah, Right. One, you know, kind of boost your ego. Yeah. But also because, you know, they're talking about collaborative and like finding out stuff and, you know, now I'm here and seeing this format. It's great. You know, as Michael says, once you can see somebody, now you're more likely to do business with them. So my point is using this strategy of roundtable was what me, what got, you know, a sale for him from us. And it's definitely a strategy I would recommend because it caught my attention because again, instead of selling You're ingratiating yourself to this person and giving them, you know, an opportunity to talk and share with themselves. And I think that's what the value I got out of it was.

Yeah.

People always— I always— I learned other two tips. This is what— is this what you're saying? Is what I heard you saying, Martin, was this? People, if you can confirm what people are saying and ask them back what they said, that you heard it. People like to be known that they're heard. One of the best things I learned too was saying, So, Mark, you booked a time with me. What brought you to the table? What sparked your interest? And he told me that, right? So it's, then he'll say, well, the reason, reason why is also this. So you get people to talk about their pains without, without hammering them with questions, which is probably how I did it when I was 20-something. It's like I was just not very tactful. And I could always be more smooth in today's world as well, but just be more authentic is what I look at. I don't look at the New York smooth sales guy approach back in the '80s. Is, you know, no more Gordon Gekko and, and those types of folks. You got to just be, hey, this is where I think I can help. This is where I think we can't. You know, you should work for Ira for this and Michelle for that. But I really just focus in on top of funnel, so I do this. So that's the whole thing is just being sincere and honest and You know, my whole thing is my Midwest approach is this is who I am. I don't, I don't want to tell people I could do something I can't. It's another thing is we probably stay in your lane too, because I think I can get pushed into a million different things that don't really what I sell, but they want me to help them. So you got to be careful. Like, just don't do the scope creep where you're going, okay, I'm getting the most stress and the least amount of money because this company is so small and they're leaning on me so much. I've had like solopreneurs because I'm kind of that, right? But, um, you don't want to have to be on top of people or they don't have to be on top of you. There's a fair amount of give and take in life and communication. So just make sure you think about what would you like and what would you like done back. Because I've had people call me 6 times in a row, I'm like, This reminds me when I was 25, I did stupid stuff like that. But let's try to be smarter and not irritate people because then people want to work with you because they like you too, you know. So I somehow convinced Martin and Michelle to believe me. But you got— you guys gotta— you guys gotta prove it.

You're doing great work.

I dare you. Tell John Costa, he, he, yeah, don't do this stuff yourself, you guys.

The first company my brother talked about, it was actually me working with them trying to get us to do the things that Michael is doing, but they didn't tell us that up front. It wasn't until we paid the money and then the back end, and like, you got to do this and do this and warm up and all that. So I know the stuff that Michael's doing because they had to do it. I don't want to do it. You want to focus on your core That's your core talent for your business. What do you do best? It's not what Michael does. Let him do that.

I got a great commercial. This is not usually how it goes, to be honest with you. And I want you guys to think that I asked Michelle Martin to talk, because it's always nice. It's almost too humbling for me, but I don't know. I would love to help you. I'd love to even show you how to do it manually if you want. Like we're saying, like, yeah, if you are, it's not a good use of your time, but Again, you can use LinkedIn, you can go on groups, you could send free messages. So just that's the one biggest tip I learned is like go to groups, look at the members, pick them out, and then a lot of them are open profile. There's a way to also look at every open profile on LinkedIn, take out the ones that are not, and then send them free emails. Again, stuff that Victor figured out because he's the brains, I'm just the looks. I mean, I don't have the looks. I mean, he's the looks and the brains. But, uh, we'll, we'll let you— now we're 4 minutes over. And, uh, please give each other, um, messages, help people out. Um, there's a great automation tool if you're looking for a job that I told Brian about called Lazy Apply. Lazy Apply is an automation tool. They make it in India, but it works pretty decent. It's about $100 80, $200 lifetime, and you could post up there. I actually do this to look for work too. So if they're looking to hire salespeople, they might hire me. But it applies to LinkedIn, Indeed, all these other different job boards. And if you ever try to get work for yourself as a solopreneur or fractional person, that's a good way to go too. But if you're actually looking for a job, you know, it's not the best way to do it. But I always like— I am not spending 25 minutes filling out an application on LinkedIn. For a job. Like, I'll do the spray and pray, and if they like me for that, I'll make sure I don't take out my time list as a job I want. But now, obviously, I'm not looking for a job, so I don't— but it's a great way to find leads. You're trying to hire someone that does sales, you probably need sales. So if you look at all these roles in life, look like who you replace as a fractional person as well. If you're a solopreneur or entrepreneur, And if they're hiring like a VP of IT or they're looking for a help desk manager, why wouldn't, you know, maybe John's company reach out and say, what else do you need technically that we can help you with instead of buying a full-time employee, you know? So anyways, thanks guys. We'll see you, uh, every first Wednesday of every month. Take care. God bless.

Bye guys.

Thanks, Michael.