EP 542 – LinkedIn: Building Connections And Starting Conversations With Marcus Murphy

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This is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closure Show. As always, Scott Carson, your host and I am extremely jacked up today because I am so excited to have our special guest on this afternoon. This guy, I've known him for a little while now and I consider him a friend because we run in a lot of the same circles, got a lot of same backgrounds with some of the people we know. But this guy, I believe is one of the hardest working and one of the most driven, let alone passionate people about helping entrepreneurs like you and I out there really master the sales process and really put some great tools behind what we're doing to help really impact our audiences and our clients in a much more deeper, emotional, I won't say physical level because that would be passing some lines depending on how physically you're getting, but really helping people overcome obstacles to close more, to really have a bigger impact out there. And the guy I'm talking about, man, this guy has got a great, great background. Currently he's the head of business development and partnerships at a little company called Digital Marketer here in Austin, Texas. And many of you have heard me do the episodes of where we do the biggest nuggets, taking away from traffic and conversion Center. Well, this is the company behind those big events. He's a speaker and educator. He's a instructor and author from LinkedIn. He's on the customer advisory board at LinkedIn. Just does an amazing job. And the guy I'm talking about, we got a little drum roll here. Gotta have some for the man, the myth, the marketing legend, Mr. Marcus Mercury.

Joining us today, man, thank you. Yeah, that intro is pretty special. And you know, the other part about it I think is funny is that also I wish I had, you know, they won't let me have sound effects, so I also have a podcast and some other stuff, but, like, no one let me have, like, have a soundboard because I'll ruin it. You did a good job. I would ruin everybody. Hell yeah. I would absolutely 100% destroy the show with sound effects.

Okay, I am bringing you some down here.

Next time I'm down, the nice one.

You might not use is the 16 ways to say the F word. Oh, that would probably ruin it, but yeah, I get plenty of positive comments on that.

Oh, that's great. I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for the intro.

Ain't no problem. Well, I know you guys have been busy there with the digital marketer TCS war room, and all the great entrepreneurs are going through that, and it's absolutely a phenomenal thing. But you have a big passion and I love your comments. I love some of the articles you shared, from why tomato juice is so special on air flights to getting rid of. Getting rid of your fake Rolexes out there.

Yeah.

Why such a passion for LinkedIn, Marcus?

Why such a passion, man? It's kind of crazy. It's like I see LinkedIn as a vehicle just like everybody else that has come across it. I've just early on figured out that it was way more than a place that my resume was going to be. And the reason why I realized that, I was like, man, there are millions of people on this platform. And then they gave us the ability to share content. So through articles or posts, that really was where I fell in love with it. Because I realized that I had a pretty captive audience. I had a lot of things to say. I didn't know that people were gonna take to them as much as they did, but I really fell in love with the platform that it gave me the ability to kind of be able to speak my mind and build an audience of people who were kind of getting that aha moment too and saying, me too. I feel that way. It's funn. That post about the airplane. I put a post together one time and I said, hey, it's really weird. I feel like there's a conspiracy theory going on. I'm a business traveler and all I do. I only ever drink ginger ale on airplanes. I won't keep it in my refrigerator at home. I would never order it anywhere. Why am I only drinking ginger ale on airplanes? And I just put it up as a post. I was like, who in the heck is going to relate with this? Well, literally 120,000 views later, in about 500 comments, people were just like, I thought I was the only one. What is going on here? This is a major conspiracy. I think that it was a really cool thing. But what I realized and the reason why I love LinkedIn, it gave me a place to start conversations. That's the biggest reason why I love it is that it has given me the ability to have thousands of conversations with people by literally building and finding my tribe of people who are going, oh, yeah, me too, me too, me too, me too. And so I'm literally, I have a huge network of people now on LinkedIn who are very similar, who are going through a lot of same things, who validate and who push back and challenge me. And so it's become a huge part of my professional life.

Yeah. I think looking at the demographics of the people that are spending time on LinkedIn, it's obviously a much more professional environment than Facebook or fake book, as some people like to joke about it.

Sure.

You can really drive into it. I don't want to say it's an upper echelon on entrepreneurs, but I really look at who's on there and the income and the education, what they're really focused on. I think it really helps you separate the people that you really do want to connect with and target and surround yourself with, versus a lot of the Shafe that we see on Facebook and all the different groups and stuff like that.

I don't want to put down Zuck or any of the stuff that they. But the interesting part is, it's true. It's like every platform has a purpose. And so my previous CEO a few jobs ago, started a company called Yelp, and I was there for enough time and I loved it and I had a really great experience. I grew a ton. But the one thing I remember him saying to me is you go on Facebook to what? To engage with family, friends, to be able to follow up with ex girlfriends and boyfriends. I don't know. You know, whatever you do on Facebook.

Now, date on there now. They have a Facebook dating app now. Not that they have always been a.

Facebook, which is fine. And that proves. Almost just solidifies my point is that really what we were trying to say when a Yelp is like, people go to Yelp to make purchasing decisions, right? They're going there to read reviews, to patronize, to get directions, to find out whether they should be patronizing or going to a business or using them or et cetera. Whereas, like, a Facebook, like, you're not going to Facebook to buy something, but the ads work because there's a billion people on there. And I think that's the important part is like, yeah, you can't get rid of the audience, but every platform has a purpose. So LinkedIn, to me, is a place where people. It has a professional Persona attached to it. Like, you're not gonna find a bunch of cat videos on there. You're not gonna see a bunch of that stuff, because people, it's in a Box. It has a framework, it says, hey, come here, you're a professional, people wanna know what you do, they wanna hear your thoughts, but they want to hear your professional thoughts and they want to hear what you think about things that are relevant to them. And what's relevant on LinkedIn is professional. And so I think that, yeah, it's just the purpose, that's why some of those other things don't work or translate well from other social platforms, is because it has a very specific framework and it's professional.

Yeah, it's definitely that way out there and it's going through its changes. It's nice seeing some of the different things that have evolved there on Ally over the last quarter. I mean the thing I always joke about was the Thanksgiving Day massacre when they took away the ability to export emails when you did it export last Thanksgiving. But I understand why they did it. They've really still make it a lot available with the articles and I think the inception now the LinkedIn video, when those get, when that gets approved across the board.

Yeah, yeah. LinkedIn Live is going to be an interesting thing. I'll tell you. It's a double edged sword when just so everybody knows on here they're video is powerful. So probably a little over a year ago they launched native video, which means you can upload a video that is not actually just like platform specific or like on YouTube you can upload a native video and be able to share. And that was huge because just so you know, the people that are winning at LinkedIn right now are content creators. They're the people that are sharing really good content and not just any content, but content that is really getting a lot of engagement. So people are having conversations online, they're commenting, those comments are turning into conversations. It's really great. And what they're realizing and what's really crazy is there are 9 billion content impressions per week in LinkedIn feed. So 9 billion content impressions, 468 billion a year if you're a mathematician. And then those are actually being driven by 1% of the entire population on LinkedIn, which is 645 million people, Scott. So if 1% of those people are driving all of it, that's called viral. That's called that. If you get enough people to comment on your, your specific piece of content, it means that it's showing in their community and their following and their connections which you're not even connected to. So those are your second and third connections. So all of a sudden it shows that Susie Q wrote on your post to her entire community. It might be 20,000 connections she has. And then those people are engaging with it, and then those people's people are engaging with it. And then it goes so far that all of a sudden these 9 billion impressions are being driven by like a really small sliver of the population on there, which is a huge opportunity. That's the reason why video is massive. This is the reason why LinkedIn Live is going to be huge. It's because it's a content based platform now that is literally being dominated by such a small group of people on the platform that everything is just getting circulated like crazy. It's like Facebook six years ago, right? It is wild the way that. So if you tap into the ridiculousness of this thing and you have good content that starts these conversations where you get this type of engagement, you're going to amass a massive following very quickly because of the way that this thing can go for you. Do you know the company Drift? You ever heard of them before?

Yes.

So Drift. Their previous vice president of marketing is a good friend of mine. His name is David Gerhardt. And David has built probably one of the fastest. I've never seen anybody build it this fast, but content, I mean, he is literally a content house. And he's like, at 35,000 followers right now, probably amassed those within six to nine months. I mean, it was really crazy. And then we had a conversation probably a year ago and I was like, you really need to get on this LinkedIn thing and here's what you need to do. And it's content. I gave him the same spiel about the impressions on the site and he just really took advantage of it, man. That was the huge part. So, yeah, video's huge. Native video was big. I think LinkedIn Live is gonna bite people in the butt a little bit because LinkedIn hasn't really dialed in how to notify people that you're live without being annoying. Like, I started using it and trying it and I was losing followers because people were. It's just like, Marcus is live, Marcus is live, Marcus is live. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, this is an ig. Like, this is. This is me. Like, I'm trying to read content, be professional and be on this thing and all I see is this dude just popping up, popping up over and over again. And the content has to be good. I mean, that doesn't change. So you can do LinkedIn live, which I think is going to roll out to everybody. I was in the second beta group, which is really exciting for me. So I've had it for almost a year. So. Yeah, man. I'm thinking that I answered way more of your question in the video, but I do think that I hope people walked away with like, content is king on the site. Whether it's video or not. It's huge.

I agree with you. And who'd I have to kill? I've been waiting for at least six months to get approval. I know they're rolling it out, but it's a different conversation.

It is one, but we'll see what I can do. We'll see what I can do.

Well, that's the thing. So LinkedIn, a lot of people, I think it's the struggle with the unfinished bridge scenario. They start a lot of things. They start a lot of things. They start their LinkedIn profile. What I've always told people is LinkedIn is a great way of helping you guide you through to get a completed profile, because that's where you get the most out of it. Where are, I would say, maybe the biggest gaps that people aren't utilizing with their profiles? Just the basic profile stuff before we get into kind of some of the content you see working.

But yeah, they're not optimizing their profile for conversations. And let me say it this way. Everybody is. Literally everybody's got a photo now, right? Everybody's got a photo. Everybody's got their basic information. They might even have like a few different skills on there that people have said, yeah, you're good at this and this and this. So you can go on Google, like, Google everything. Like, you'll find a template. I've got a bunch of them out there about how to build an all star profile. Congratulations, you got one. What people aren't doing is they're not utilizing the real estate. Like, there are actual character limits on all the things in your profile. The biggest one that people miss is there's a headline section. The headline section. Right now most people are using it just saying, like their title, they put their title on there. Well, guess what? Your title is going to be inside of your profile. And what people were, when they're scrolling through and they see your little snippet there, they see just that kind of like mini version of your photo, your name, your headline. And then whether somebody wants to connect with you or not, that actually is the first and only opportunity that you can get someone to want to click on your profile and go a little bit deeper. So the headline is super great. My teams are personalizing and I tell them I'm like you've got 300 characters, so you should go through there and not 300 characters. It's actually a little less than that now. But whatever the character limit is, you should use that real estate to start a conversation. Like, you should say to people, hey, we're on a mission to double the size of 10,000. Ask me how I can help your business. Do X is a really great one that you can put there. So now people know what you can do to help them. They know what you're good at, they know where you are, what kind of conversation they can have with you when they see your name and your picture show up. The other big missed one, Scott, is the summary section. The summary section is 2000 characters. It's 2000 characters, but everyone uses it like a resume. So it's just bullet points of superlatives or things that you've done. And I'll tell you what has been working for me. I write in a narrative format. I tell people this is my mission. I answer some personality, tell a joke because I'm typically pretty lighthearted when it comes to most of my life. And then I will say, hey, sometimes, yeah, sometimes I should be a stand up comedian for real. So I put something in that so that by the end of it, I get to a call to action where people really feel like they know what I'm all about. They know what my mission is, they know why I'm on that mission. They've got a little bit more personal information about me than maybe what would be on my resume normally. And at the end, I usually always have a call to action, which is like, hey, who wants to join me? And I'll tell you every single week without fail, for the last two years, once a week, if not way more than that. When I go on the road and I speak is I'll just get people being like, I love your summary, man, I love your mission. Like, how do I. How do we get involved? When can we talk about. And that shows me it's a proved point that people are, if LinkedIn is giving you the real estate, you have to use it, okay? Not just for SEO, not just to put a bunch of words in there so that it shows up in a different way, but to truly start conversations. And I think that's where people miss the big profile piece of it is they're not using the real estate in a thoughtful way to start conversations with the right type of people. Not just everybody, but you really narrow down if your content's good and if you're Writing in the right way or your headlines the right way. You can actually qualify the types of conversations that you're having because you're getting rid of people who might not really resonate or it's not relevant to them about the things that you're talking about that you care about. So the people that are really reaching out to me, those are the right types of conversations that I want to have because they passed kind of that litmus test which is like, was that relevant? Did you like what I'm saying? Are you on board with this? And if they usually write to me, they totally are. And we can jump right into a super thoughtful conversation.

That's really two valuable points there. I agree to that. Yeah. And I heard you talk about that, I think at Traffic Conversion.

Yeah.

February in San Diego. And those were two of the biggest points. I was like, oh, yes, let's maximize that character. Let's maximize it versus just being bullet points. And five, here's what I'm good at. You know, good at PowerPoint.

Yeah. It's like proficient at Microsoft Excel is not going to. Not going to be something I care about. So.

And I like the fact that the availability to be able to upload slides or videos, other things that can add. Show people your personality because I think you said a very powerful thing. It's all about getting to that conversation side. And while we love to use social media video to the masses, it's all about having it narrowed down. I hate to say funnel, but getting down to the people that you really need to have those one on one conversations with. And it's hard to replace that. Even though a lot of people like to try to systemize that with bots and things like that. Still getting that one on one conversation with the right client is so valuable.

Yeah. I mean, it's the same thing that people been doing in marketing and sales for a really long time. It's what a lead magnet is for. Like lead magnets aren't just a really cool way to get more leads. It's actually a way for somebody to go that's relevant to me right now in this moment. And I want it. So I'm going to raise my hand and fill out something or take a next step to get that thing. So I know when I reach out to that person, knowing that they downloaded the thing, I know what they want to talk about. I know that they are motivated, I know it's relevant to them and I know the type of conversation I should have with them because of what they've downloaded. So it's super important to understand that if someone's engaging you off of a summary section that you wrote, that summary section should give you enough information to understand, like, this is the type of conversation I'm going to have with this person. This is what they care about. This is because they've engaged with this piece of content. I've intentionally put that out there almost as a way to, like you said, narrow down the audience to make sure that I have a very captive audience that is well qualified for the type of conversation I want to have.

So with you speaking and traveling more, traveled quite a bit for the last few years, doing a variety of different things, do you recommend somebody goes in there, maybe puts a booking link in there for somebody to engage off their profile as a possibility?

I mean, honestly, just one. It's not going to be an active hyperlink, so, no. But the one thing is with booking links, okay, it's really funny. We experiment with a lot of things at digital market. Everybody knows we are basically trying to break everything. What I'm realizing is that we have. If you send out a calendar link, you're probably going to get people who click on it if it's relevant to them. What I think a lot of people have done and what I'm really going to lean heavily on, and probably a lot of salespeople are going to hate this, but I think rapport is bs. I think that we have focused so much on building these relationships that we don't understand that the only relevant always precedes rapport. And so when you're sitting around thinking about like, okay, well, I'm going to put my meeting link in there. Cool, put the meeting link in there. If it's relevant to the person, then, yes, they're going to go ahead and click on it or they're going to want to take it further. My challenge to everybody is have things in there that people want to take an additional step to have a conversation there, not a conversation that you want to get them to. It's like, hey, I'm on this platform. Let's go somewhere else. It's like going into a bar, having a really great conversation with somebody and then being like, you know what we should do? We should leave. It's like, no, stay in the environment. Stay right there. Continue that conversation. People are making a huge mistake by not understanding that conversation. People that are really great at conversations are omnichannel with it. Like, they will go have a conversation wherever that person wants to have it. So telling somebody like, hey, if you're on LinkedIn, have the conversation there is my point, Scott. If you're trying to take somebody to a meeting, you've skipped a bunch of steps because you haven't had enough of a conversation there to ask for an additional meeting where somebody would even want to go over and go somewhere else with you. So to answer that, that's a very long winded way, but I need to unpack it so that people understand because it seems like a really quick, like, of course, why not just throw your link in there? Why wouldn't you want to do that? I just think you're five steps ahead and haven't had enough of a conversation on the platform that you're currently on having the conversation in order to take it off of one or escalate it to a place where you're going to have a more captivated meeting.

That's totally makes sense because it gives an opportunity to see what else is on there, comment on other things and articles or other things that you're sharing there on a regular basis. So what are some of the things that drive you bonkers about?

I literally should have a show about just the types. Okay, so most conversations, I say conversations are big. The fact of the matter is most of us are trash at it. We are the worst conversationalists. In fact, we don't want to have conversations. We are a huge population of people that have been conditioned to a place where I believe we like to do antisocial things. Socially is kind of what we. We love going to read a book at a crowded coffee shop, but we don't want to talk to anybody. What are we doing there? Right. We enjoy being in proximity, but never like in conversation. And the reason why, I believe Scott is because we don't know how to have one. The frameworks for most conversations don't exist. Most of the people that you. My biggest pet peeve on the platform is the way people reach out and connect and the way the type of messaging that is going on on the platform is outrageous. It is literally like showing up and being like, hi, my name is Marcus Murphy, let's go back to my place and have a pizza. And you know what? Because that is what. I've skipped every step in the relational guidebook there with that question, thinking that I'm just going to walk up and be like, sex sound good?

Great.

Like, let's go do that. And it's not. Because if you've ever been in any type of romantic relationship, you understand that there's a dating sequence, there are Real scientific steps that come with creating intimacy, right? And there's a book by Desmond Morris which no one in here is ever going to read. But essentially there's 12 stages of intimacy. He's a zoologist. And I first heard this from Ryan Deiss, and it blew my mind as a salesperson, but it blew my mind to start thinking that, man, we don't have a framework for how to have an effective conversation online. We don't know how to take human traits and kind of like normal things that we would do and bring that to an online environment. Because right now, if we took some of these messages from LinkedIn and we brought them into real life, it would basically, like, be what we do now. Imagine someone looking at your profile, okay? Cause this is what happens on LinkedIn. You can see people who've looked at your profile, right? You've seen that, Scott. And basically at that point, you know what? No one does? No one writes to those people and said, hey, saw you looked at my profile. Is there anything I can do to help you? Because in real life, it would be us doing this and then not doing anything and walking away like this, and.

Then doing this left or swipe right Tinder relationship.

It's because we have been online is amazing. Social platforms are amazing. They have done something to open up our world. It is amazing what you can do and the people you're connected to. You can go all over the world now and just know people everywhere, like, anywhere, right? It is amazing the type of reach, but it's also the dangerous thing that has conditioned us to be antisocial. The social thing that we have created has taught us how to be antisocial. We don't know how to engage in a real conversation or when it's appropriate. So we get these messages. We get these messages on LinkedIn from all these different people out there who literally show up and just say, here's my stuff, do you want to buy it? Here's my stuff. Do you want to buy it? Here's my stuff. Do you want to buy it? And they've added no value. They actually haven't even seen if something is relevant to you, they've done no. Kind of like, I'm going to put a feel out there and figure it out. It's just thoughtless. Outreach is one way where I used to just totally rage about that. And over the last several years, in my old age, Scott, I've actually stopped and started to educate. It's the main thing I talk about on LinkedIn. It's the tactics I put out in the world. It's the things I teach about. It's the number one thing to, like, how do you insert a relevant conversation that creates the opportunity for rapport and that you've added enough value where someone would ever want to actually, like, do anything with you, right? Where they would want to have a real connection or find out if there's something that maybe we can align on, or if they want to buy from you or they don't, or you want a partnership, all of those professional relationships, everybody's trying to expedite it, and the only thing you can't expedite is intimacy. Like, you just can't. There's no way to speed that up. We know people in our personal friend groups, right, that, you know, they need one night, but they still had to go through the steps. They had to go through the steps of building that. And there's intentional steps there just like that. So if you want to know, I mean, I'm on a soapbox so high right now, Scott. But it is. It's the one thing that I just hate is like, there's too much information out there, too many different ways that you can connect with people in an intentional way. There's too much out there to be thoughtless. And so, yeah, I hate it because the platform is literally built to be the antithesis of that. It's built so that all of that is at your fingertips that you'll know so much about the person, what they like, what they share, what they've done, what they care about, what groups they're in. I mean, there's so much information there that it's just really bad when all you do is you walk up and you say, here's this thing. Aren't I great? It's like, no, man. You literally have to start talking about them. If the conversation is not about them, you lose. You don't have permission to move the conversation forward because they haven't given it to you. And so I think that's the reason why a lot of these people are not getting a good return rate on this platform. 645 million people and probably 1% of them are doing it right. So, yeah, I get fired up, man, because I think we can be better. I just do. And that's why I'm, like, out here creating all this content is because I'm really trying to kind of regulate that stigma of thoughtlessness on the platform. But not just on the platform like in real life. How do you make the. How do you bring humanity Online and make it real. And that's like, that's a huge challenge.

I would agree. I think everybody is moving, trying to move. Not everybody. A lot of people trying to move that relational off too fast or is raping the relationship versus taking the time to be intimate with it. Hey, here I ready to connect with you. Buy my stuff. Even though what I do doesn't match anything, what you're trying to sell me.

It doesn't even matter yet. Like, yeah, you haven't even built enough value or gotten anybody excited. Something that people should totally check out is the customer value journey that Ryan created for Digital marketer. And it has very specific stages. Like, hey, here's an awareness phase and there's an excite phase that comes next. And if you don't get people excited enough, they got to go back to awareness because they can't move on to any additional phases because whatever you're doing or talking about wasn't relevant. Didn't get them excited enough to make an additional, like, advance them through the journey. And I think that's the thing is, like, we try to advance everybody through the journey. We try to skip steps, and unfortunately, you just can't do that. But, you know, if I was someone's defense attorney, though, Scott, is that I realized that people just don't know the steps. And I honestly, that's what I've been kind of sitting here going, I can get angry or I can educate. And a lot of times what I've found now in the last three years of my life being a digital marketer, is that I'm a damn good educator and I have a little bit more patience than I think I do. And so all I want to do now is teach people the real steps that it takes in order to create that and be intentional online and create these really meaningful relationships. So, yeah, that's big. Yeah.

That brings me to the next thing, because I know you said something today in between you posting your high school freshman photograph or something about you've got a new kind of LinkedIn training, you're kind of. You've got you rolling out or a part of.

Yes, I've got two things. So one, the post you're talking about is actually really funny. It is. I got invited back to my president of our. Of our upper school. My high school reached out to me and asked me to come back and do a full school assembly and, like, talk about success. And I laughed really hard because I barely graduated from high school. If anybody knows my story, I had like a 1.7 a GPA and they called that dumb in real life. But I wasn't dumb. I'm not dumb. I just, I really man, academia, just the way that it was structured and I was just too social, didn't do homework, didn't have good habits. It was all those things. But I sat there and I was like, okay, cool, I'm going to do this. But I realized that I would have been the kid in the auditorium that just hated being there. Right? Like, it's like, okay, man, you don't really get me. What are you going to like rip a phone book? Like, I'm supposed to feel inspired. I literally want to build that talk and say, what is the advice that I would have given myself, my high school self? That's why I put that picture up of me, that frail, skinny picture of Marcus Murphy when he was 15 years old. I put that up because I was like, man, what would be the advice that I could give that guy? 20 years. In retrospect, what is the thing that I should tell you? And I just listed them out. I was like, yeah, here are some of the things. Eat more vegetables, hug your mom and invest in Apple. That's a joke. I actually put, you should surround yourself with better people and you should do these things. So I'm going to go back to this high school and I'm going to share the successful things I would want my younger self to know and hopefully that resonates with some of these young kids. Now the thing that you're talking about, the other thing that I'm excited about is LinkedIn learning. I've got, I'm an author on there. So there's 400 plus, maybe 420. I think there's like 415 authors on LinkedIn Learning. It's 22 million students, which is really cool. LinkedIn Learning bought Lynda so people are more familiar with Lynda. That kind of is what turned into. Now the cool part about being an author on there is like, yeah, you get to go. They have a Santa Barbara location, you film everything. It's like months and months of preparation. So I have one course on there called marketing on LinkedIn. That was my first one. Walked in, eyes wide open, had no idea what that was going. My next course was aligning sales and marketing. That's the one that just came out and I'm so proud of that body of work. It's only 35 minute course. It is the most packed, real, sometimes funny, but super relevant. If you have a sales and marketing team in Your organization. It is everything that I've learned, the good and the bad, the hard stuff, the things that we do here that really bridge the gap between sales and marketing and really not only bridge the gap, but talks a lot about cohabitation. What are the real things now that your teams are vibing? What are the metrics? How do you measure it? How do you report on it? What are the positions? What are the titles? What are their job responsibilities? I took a super deep dive into everything we've learned at Digital Marketer by how we get our teams, both the sales and marketing team, which is traditionally pretty bad. There's a lot of conflict and friction. There's. But, you know, enough friction can start a fire in a good way, too. And so when you put those two together, I got to do this in this awesome course, and it just came out, and it's getting a lot of really positive feedback, which I'm excited about.

Yeah, check it out, guys and gals out there listening. We'll put the link in the show notes as well for you, as well in the YouTube description as well for you. So you'll be able to take a look at that and watch it. 35 very valuable minutes for you to take a lot of notes on. But you do. You do feel it. Full of great stuff and passion is coming out of your pores, buddy.

Thanks, man. A lot of sweat, too. You know, that's what I call sweat. I call it passion. You know, I'm not just a little overweight, Scott. I just am very passionate.

Very bad. I like that. I might have to use that nugget. That's a money shot there. But anyway, that's great stuff. Now, you talked briefly about how you've got a goal to help 10,000 businesses double the size in the next 10 years. Remember correctly. I know I'm butchering.

No, it's. It was actual.

Yeah.

The mission statement Digital Marketer was to double 10,000 businesses by 2020. So I guess that means, say, next month. We are pacing toward our goal. We've had a lot of iterations of our business, but that has always been what drove us. Whether we hit the goal or not is irrelevant. I've always thought that I'm like, you know what? I want to hit the goal. We put goals and missions out in the universe to drive us, but ultimately what it does is it steers our ship and the decisions we make on a daily basis, who we serve, how we do it, how we set up our conversations, how we set up our office, everything right now. Is can I work from home? And four day work weeks and all that stuff is great. But if it doesn't serve your customer, our global customer base, then it doesn't work. If we're not set up for it, if a four day workweek doesn't get our customers where they need to be in their lives, then it doesn't mean we're not doing it for our convenience, we're doing it for theirs. And so I think that, yeah, the mission, man, we've been driven by that mission for, I guess it's like the last five years that it's been around. It has really informed so much of our decisions. The businesses we buy, the acquisitions, the partnerships. It's an unbelievable litmus test for all of it. So yeah, man, I was. Yeah, we're really proud of that.

You should be. And that's a very valuable thing. You guys have always. I know I always get a lot of stuff from Diem Lab and some of the other things that we go to. Traffic Conversion Summit's always the first thing we have on our schedule.

And this is the year, like if anybody's coming out to Traffic and Conversion Summit, it is the biggest marketing conference in North America. And this year we're tipping 10,000 people, Scott, which is pretty crazy. We're at the convention center in San Diego. Yours truly is going to host the whole thing. So I'm probably going to fall down dead at the end. And I'll tell you, yeah, the main room, we've got some huge celebrity speakers, as always. We've got 130 something sessions of over four days parties. We've rented out the entire Gas Lamp district. So all the bars on both sides of that street down the Gas Lamp are all different companies. And we've done, I mean, we're blowing this thing out. And we'll have a musical guest which no one ever wants. What I want, Scott, I've always wanted Boys to Men. I've always wanted boys to Men. And I think they'd bring the house down. I think they'd be like $20,000 in first class flights. Right? But like, I know I could just hear Motown, Philly, I can hear all that stuff and get super emotional, but no one ever wants it. So last year, I think before it was, yeah, Humpty Dance, that crew, whatever it was. Yeah, there's always stuff. This is the year. This is. I'm so happy that you kick off your year with that because it's just such a good way to get excited about 2020.

Yeah, I mean Literally, we pay for the cost of everything within usually the first 10 minutes of just walking the vendor room before we even set into a session. It's crazy. So I want to bring as we kind of the year rolling into 2020, if there was a nugget that somebody's not doing with LinkedIn or something that they're not doing in their business to help them boost their marketing sales. I know, no magic pill, but if there was something that you just absolutely adore and I've seen it work with your guys, these companies you've worked with from Drift and everybody else, I'll tell.

You the one thing that people are doing that on both sides, sales and marketing. So I can only speak to what I know. And by the way, I'm like a proximity marketer, right? I'm a sales guy through and through for like last 15 years. But being around some of the best marketers in the world, like, you can't help but be a marketer or think that way. But here's what's working. People are sending the first piece of contact that they have. So imagine everybody on here has probably got list of people or a captive audience or something, right? And a lot of what people are doing is they're using that. I think that they're actually sending and communicating with people ineffectively. It's the same thing that I hate on LinkedIn. It's the same thing with like thoughtless outreach, et cetera. But what I realized is if people started using emails, if they started using ways of their initial outreach just to start a conversation like, Ryan, what we've done at digital marketers, we have a nine word email. We have a nine word email. We give that to our certified partners in our agency program as well. They send it out. The nine word email is essentially something like this. And it'll be a paraphrase because obviously there's a real nine word email that people use, but it's essentially asking, hey, how can I make X business go faster? A really relevant, simple conversation that is relevant in terms of the people that you want to respond, like, hey, how can I help your team do X? Well, one, that person's got to have a team. And so whoever's responding to you, whether it's a yes or no or hey, what, what is this? Or I'm interested or I'm not interested or like, hey, actually I need help doing this, or hey, like, are you hiring for really important positions or have you, do you need help with this thing? Right? I think people aren't really Utilizing the simplicity of email. Like I get. I don't know how many. Scott, how many emails you get a day?

Over a hundred a day. But it's. I want to clarify something because that nine word email is one of the most valuable emails that we send out every six months at least. I've done a recorder, but it's a very plain.

No logo. None of that, no way.

Hey, how can I help you? Close more business, close more deals or raise more capital or find more notes or.

The most, the most important email I sent when I was way back, I used to be 90 call a day sales guy a long time ago. Wasn't that long ago, but still one of the things, the best email that I got. So I started working a little bit smarter than harder. And what I did was I sent an email. The subject line was meeting confirmation. That was my subject line. And in the email all it said was, I'm really excited to connect with you. I don't know exactly what works for your schedule, but here's my calendar link. And I sent that email out to a thousand people that were in my pipeline that I hadn't really connected with yet. And I'm telling you, I'm not kidding. This is like the scariest thing. I need to share like a screenshot of this somewhere someday. I know I kept them, but there were 63 meetings that were booked out of that. I was full for three, almost three weeks. I had a problem with getting people to show up because they're booking out so far in advance. But that's a really amazing problem to have. And it was just because it was simple, it was conversational and it got. And it was plain. And I think that if we can get back to understanding that, hey, the point isn't to sell people online. The point of it is to get a conversation started. And if we can start like getting simple and having really good, like one line, not complicated emails that start conversations. And we get really good about monetizing that conversation and taking that conversation different places and making sure that we're not overcomplicating it, I think that's the biggest nugget that we can give people. That's the best gift that ever happened to us. And our sales teams is like they literally walk in with book meetings. They walk in with a bunch of conversations started in their inbox. Because the majority of the marketing that's done is to create simplistic messaging that starts conversations. So the true thing that I can tell you the gift that keeps giving is get really good at starting conversations and get really good at having them. Those are the two big things that. On both sides, sales and marketing. Then it's. The reason why sales and marketing get along so well is because one, marketers are really, really good at starting conversations. They are amazing at it. They really are. If you've got a really good marketing team, they're really great about that. And your sales team should be really good at having them with real people, because marketers, I think, are just antisocial or introverted salespeople. Okay, you talked to Ryan Dice of the world, Ryan. Ryan is probably. It's so funny because Ryan. I've never thought Ryan was an introvert. Ryan is an introvert. It surprises the hell out of people because he's such a. All over the place and he's such a. He gets behind a camera to do that work. He sends emails. He's an incredible writer because he just doesn't really love all of the people for a really long period of time where it's like, me, I'm like 99% extrovert. So it's like, people give me energy. And so I think it's really cool to understand that there's a really cool balance. But the people who are going to win, the people that are going to really do well this year are really good at starting conversations and really good at having. And those are. And the simplicity in it is the key. So it's going to be super cool. I hope that's helpful, Scott.

That's extremely helpful. And I will vouch that Ryan is an introvert. I ran into him last year at the Nutcracker here in town when he was here with his wife.

Yeah, what's up, Ryan?

He's like, hey, what's going on? And he's like, I gotta get out of here. I'm scared. People didn't.

A lot of the great ones really are like that. And I think it's funny. Yeah, Ryan. Ryan, at the end of the day is. Is a husband to his wife and he's a dad to his four kids. And it's really amazing to see that that's the most important thing. Not necessarily wowing the audience or being famous and important. Those things happen. I'm gonna leave you one with one last thing, Scott, because I think this has been a huge realization. I've been around a lot of famous people over the last three years, speaking on stages, interviewing them, whatever it is, right, Everybody, from Richard Branson to. Have you seen the movie Free Solo with Alex? Yeah, you're like sweating, just sitting there watching. Even though you know he made it, my feet were sweating. I don't know how. I was just so intense into this passion.

Passion, baby.

So he was at Passion in the Feet. So anyway, he was speaking at Hyper Growth this year in Boston and Ryan was speaking. So I was just backstage. All those guys are friends and so I'm just back there. I'm also speaking at Inbounds. We're there and Alex is speaking and I'm fascinated. I just watched it. He's backstage, he's very quiet, very whatever. And then he goes out on stage and he's funny and animated and he talks about doing pull ups with just his fingertips and making me feel super emasculated. And one of the things that he came back and I was like, gosh, man, you're the most humble dude. You're not talking about yourself. You're. You're just kind of enjoying. You're asking me a ton of questions about me. You're going to go probably get on a bus with your backpack and go back. He lives in Vegas. Not because it's the Strip, because he hates it. He lives there because it's good climbing. And I'm sitting there going, man, there are two types of people I've met. There are two types of celebrities. There's people that have their whole life have pushed to be a celebrity. And then there are people that are so good at what they do, they become one. And I continue to surround myself with people like that because one, for a guy that has a propensity to want to push to be a celebrity, it's really important to realize you got to be good at your craft first. Ryan Deiss is that guy. Ryan became famous because he is the guy. He's one of the best marketers on the planet and he got that notoriety, the fame and everything else, but he didn't pursue it and want it. It's cool to be around guys like that every day because it really, it feeds my soul. It helps me stay humble. When you're surrounded by people who aren't impressed with you. So I think that it was really cool. And I don't know that this felt right because I think it's good to understand who Ryan is. At the end of the day, Ryan doesn't feel like he has fans. He feels like he has students. That's the coolest thing that we can kind of, kind of do in this world. So yeah, man, that's. I don't know where that went, but that was fun to Say no, I would totally agree.

But that's the thing, is you have to know your craft. And everybody, especially in social media, wants to be, hey, it's all about me. It's all about me. And you need to reverse the conversation. How can I make the conversation best about you as a client on a one on one basis versus look at me, really have those conversations. And I would agree. I mean, you know, Asprey and Vaynerchuk and Damon Johns and some of the people out there have had a chance to meet and other people as well have all been just completely humble.

It's crazy.

They know their craft, literally.

Gary has been talking about the same thing for 10 years, like, the same five things, and somehow he's still famous. I just. We just spent some time. We were in New York City together and backstage, and I don't always get the opportunity to introduce people that I know and I respect and care about. So when I interview or, like, when I introduce Ryan or want to do something, I want to do. So I'm introducing Gary, and I got up there and I was like, God, what do I say about this guy? So I started talking about all the things I could talk about. And at the end of the day, Gary doesn't identify. He has done so much. It's like a fairytale. But at the end of the day, he identifies as an agency owner dude. That's literally how his mind. He's like, I identify as an operator. I'm a CEO. I don't have a CEO because I operate the company. I have to make payroll. I know the things I have to do. I'm a really good operator. And that's probably the reason why he's so famous. It's probably the reason why he has such an impact. One, he's passionate and he cares a lot about it, but he's also just an incredible operator, and his identity is not wrapped up in being a celebrity. But you're right, man. If you've met Damon and you've met Gary and all those people, like, one, you're a super blessed dude. And the second thing is, you're right. Those people are just. They understand their celebrity, they understand their platform. You know, they're not a Kardashian or anything like that, so.

But they know it, they run it, and that's what makes them experts. And you're an amazing expert. We talked about not only in sales and helping people fan their business, but Also on the LinkedIn platform and stuff like that. So that's why I was so Excited to have you on here.

Thanks, guys.

I think it's such a valuable tool. I know it's been made a huge difference in what we do with our niche in real estate and how we contact asset managers and how we connect with investors and other types of real estate professionals to grow our audience and build our business. And we built on the backbone of LinkedIn is a big thing, but I know that so many people, when you see people wanting to do big things, they're not willing or not just don't do the simple things of getting on and sharing content or sharing what's going on in their business on a day in, day out basis.

Totally. Right, yeah. And just share all the time. I mean, honestly, you're winning on LinkedIn when you're creating a ton of content, you're winning in that game, but it's relevant and it starts really meaningful conversations, like, period. But yeah, you got to get in the content game. That is the winner.

Exactly. A big goal. You have a big goal. Big thing you're working towards for yourself, personally. Anything here in the new year, big, big goal you set aside for yourself.

You know, every year I always want to lose some LBs. That's always my thing. But then my wife's a photographer and has Photoshop, so I just kind of go, I'm going to eat everything. I want to be a better dad. I'm on the road a ton and I love my girls. I've got two girls, four and two. They are the world to me. And my family doesn't get enough of me all the time when we're building big stuff like this. So my goal this year is honestly to be not about the amount of time I'm home, but just the quality of time when I'm there. And I think that that's a big one, is just being relevant, being present, I mean, and being super present with my family when I'm around. And also I'm taking my daughter for the first time on a business trip this year with me. So she's going to go with me to the meeting, she's going to go with me when I speak and kind of get on the plane and do the thing with me. So I'm super excited about that. So, yeah, those two things, man. Yeah, better husband, better father. I think that I'll wrap up 2020 and feel pretty darn good about it.

Cool. And how many times have you seen.

Frozen so far, man? My daughter had the dress the day we. I mean, it was happening. You should see this frozen dress. She has that my mom bought her. It was, it's pretty intense. So yeah, I could sing some of the songs. Not going to Scott, but I won't.

Make you do that buddy. But. Hey Marcus, I know you're busy. I got, you got a busy couple hours maybe with a war. I know it doesn't, it may have wrapped up but it hasn't finished at 5:00'.

Clock. No, no, there's still a happy hour. So yeah, I'm going to get out here and get it super happy.

Hey man, thanks for taking time. Your business schedule out there guys. Check them out on LinkedIn. Marcus Murphy, just an amazing. Check out that 35 minute course and as I said, always say guys, take some action, put some things in place, start taking action and we'll see you at the top.

So thanks Scott. Take care. Sam.