NEW Udemy Course! ForthRight Business
work with us

work with us

Leveraging LinkedIn the Right Way to Grow Your Business with Gabe Lullo, Alleyoop: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Jan 13, 2026

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking the right way to leverage LinkedIn. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

  • Episode Summary & Player
  • Show Notes
  • Marketing Smarts Summary
  • Transcript

Strategic Counsel: Leveraging LinkedIn the Right Way to Grow Your Business with Gabe Lullo, Alleyoop

Are you making the most of LinkedIn? We’re all on it, but the vast majority of us are missing out on its true potential to qualify leads, build pipelines, and connect social data directly to revenue. Cold outreach on LinkedIn has many pitfalls, but if you’re smart about it, it can be an unbelievable way to grow your business. We wanted you to learn from the master of cold calling on LinkedIn, so we welcomed on Gabe Lullo. He’s the CEO of Alleyoop, a global leader in business development as a service. You’ll also love his Do Hard Things podcast. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • Building a Company-Wide LinkedIn Strategy
  • Following Career Transitions
  • The Personal Trainer Story: Fishing Where the Fish Are
  • The LinkedIn Methodology: Cold Calling Approach vs. Email Approach
  • Humanizing Your Brand: When You Know It’s Working

And as always, if you need Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

  • Leveraging LinkedIn the Right Way to Grow Your Business with Gabe Lullo, Alleyoop
    • [0:00] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
    • [1:56] Meet Gabe Lullo – From Wall Street to Building Alleyoop
    • [4:20] The Cold Calling Philosophy: Why It Works Better Than Email
    • [6:06] The LinkedIn Methodology: Cold Calling Approach vs. Email Approach
    • [8:25] Personalization at Scale: Video and Voice Notes on LinkedIn
    • [11:41] Building Trust: Making People Laugh and Being Genuine
    • [13:34] Intentional Targeting: Identifying Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
    • [15:01] The Content Engine: 40% of New Business From LinkedIn (Zero Ad Spend)
    • [16:52] Mobilizing Employees: Building a Company-Wide LinkedIn Strategy
    • [18:47] Employee Opt-In Model: Personal Branding Over Company Promotion
    • [22:22] Attribution and Tracking: Group Chats and DM Strategy
    • [24:45] The Cadence: When to Reach Out and How to Build Relationships
    • [28:09] Content Strategy: 80% Business, 20% Personal
    • [31:25] Following Career Transitions: Reaching New VPs and CROs (Chief Revenue Officers)
    • [35:05] Case Study: 20% vs. 80% Show-Up Rates – The Power of Content
    • [38:55] The Personal Trainer Story: Fishing Where the Fish Are
    • [42:44] Humanizing Your Brand: When You Know It’s Working
    • [45:24] Getting Started: Three Posts a Week and Guest Podcasting
    • [51:01] Just Do It: Starting Small and Building Consistency
    • [53:18] Key Takeaways: Personalization, Intentionality, Scale, and Consistency
    • Quick-Fire Questions
    • [54:14] Gabe’s favorite book: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
    • [54:43] Make Up in Numbers What You Lack in Skill
    • [55:12] Is This Buffalo’s Year?
    • [56:38] Final Advice: Play the Long Game

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01

Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast.  If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead  and operate in business,  you are in the right place.  In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking  to reveal a fresh perspective.  This unlocks opportunity for you, your team  and your business. Now let’s get to it.

 

00:29

Welcome to the Strategic Counsel podcast. I am Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to talk about how to really use LinkedIn to qualify leads, build pipelines, and connect social data directly to revenue. Many are now using LinkedIn for cold outreach with mixed results. The auto replies can be very tempting as an easy marketing vehicle, which April and I have cautioned before, but the templated approach, which lacks personalization,

 

00:58

tends to fall flat. mean, April, when is the last time you engaged in one of these cold LinkedIn outreaches? Well, you know how much I love them. So not very often.  And right before we got on today, I was complaining about another one to end. So there you go.  But not the point of this episode. Hope is not lost. LinkedIn can be extremely effective for generating business,  but it does involve leveraging the platform for what it was originally conceived as,  a thought leadership generator and connector.

 

01:27

We’re drawn to those who have something of value to offer and the platform rewards you for that. So  whether you’re a person, a business or a person within a business, this applies across the board. Yes. And we’re going to break this down  and show you how best to leverage this. And we have brought an expert who has successfully executed this in his business and others. And that’s Gabe Lullo and he is of Alleyoop.  Gabe, would you like to give your story? Tell us, say hi to everybody.

 

01:56

Absolutely, Anne and April, thanks so much. By the way, we’re huge fans of yours. So thanks so much for having us on the show. really proud.  you. appreciate that. Well, thank you. We’re excited to be here. ah Well, I’ll give you the quick story. I’ve been in sales development since a young lad, uh booking appointments  as an intern  on Wall Street, then moved into  my own business  and staffing and getting people to  take interviews with us.

 

02:24

And then we turned it into a sales training function. So I trained uh thousands of sellers on how to sell more effectively. And with my current company, Alieu, we are one of the largest sales development firms as a service in the world. We’re proud to say that. So we have hundreds of SDRs  or BDRs, depending on how you call them,  on our sales floor.  And they are fully branded and white labeled to our clients. And we make over a million cold calls per month.

 

02:53

And we do a lot of outbound on LinkedIn and email as well, all with the intention to  cut through the noise, like you mentioned earlier in the intro,  and have an authentic human centric conversation to  generate  interest and qualify those leads and pass them to our clients so they can drive business. So this is going to be a fantastic conversation because you can already sense the context for which Gabe has to orient his business.

 

03:23

And so Quill calling is his business, guys. So if you’re not going to anything that April and I have said over what, how many, how many years we’ve done this podcast, April five, six years. We’ve talked about LinkedIn and the right way and the wrong way to use LinkedIn. If you’re not going to listen to us,  listen to Gabe because  he knows what he’s doing. You’re going to be blown away by how he’s leveraging it. And so that many Quill calls. I mean, come on, this is, this is the expert.

 

03:52

Thank you, I appreciate that. I know you just kind of gave a little bit of what Alleyoop does, but I’d love for you to kind of share with  the listeners and with me and April here a little bit about the challenges of how  you have to go and operate within your business, especially since it is so cold calling focus. Speak to  the tensions and  what you need to really overcome and all the challenges. Speak to little bit about that, the context a bit.

 

04:20

Yeah, absolutely. Well, cold call is definitely our largest weapon in our arsenal. um And the reason why is it because it works for us. Listen, it’s a lot less expensive  to send out millions of emails than it is to make millions of cold calls, right? And but at the end of the day, why do we do that? Well, it’s because it works more effectively. Now, I’m not saying we don’t send out emails, we definitely do. But we’re not relying on email to be our best and most strategic weapon in our arsenal.

 

04:47

We’re relying on cold calls to be the one that actually gets the rubber meeting the road. I mean, if think about it right now, you and I are on a phone call, right? We’re just talking via video, but this is no different. It’s a live conversation. So  what problems right now with LinkedIn versus what people are doing with cold calling or email is that a lot of people are so used to email automation and I’m old school. I got a lot of gray hair. So I remember when cold calling was the only way to do prospecting.

 

05:13

And so then everyone moved into email automation and email marketing when Marketo and Pardot came out about 15 years ago. And everyone started firing their sales teams and saying marketing is, you know, everyone’s going to get emails and everyone’s going to sign up for your stuff. Everyone’s going to buy your stuff if you just get an email. And interestingly, two years later, everyone started rehiring SDR teams because it wasn’t working. Well, what happened now is that everyone is just duplicating what  is really challenging to do already on email into LinkedIn.

 

05:43

And the way we do it differently is we bring the cold calling methodology into our outreach on LinkedIn versus our email methodology into our outreach on LinkedIn. And I can talk a lot more about that if you like, but that’s our philosophy, if you will. Yeah, I mean, before we get too much further, I would love, because now I’m on the hook here listening, but  if you could take us a little bit further down that, because I think.

 

06:06

Instinctively, I know where you’re going with that, but would love for you to just spell it out so that as we get further into this, everybody’s very clear on the difference. Yeah. So there’s three things we like to do. First and foremost,  my daughter’s 12 years old and I don’t know if you can relate to anyone  about this, but she doesn’t capitalize any of her words on her text messaging. Now my  mother, her grandmother is a retired English professor.

 

06:33

I was raised by an English professor,  okay, and teacher who literally slapped me on the back of the head on the dinner table if I said the wrong grammatically correct word. And so if I told my mom that I did this, she would be very upset. But here’s the reality.  I don’t capitalize any of the words anymore in my sentences when I message people on LinkedIn.  I on purpose. I don’t capitalize names of people. don’t capitalize the words. And here’s why.

 

07:02

because everyone’s getting hit with AI right now. And I want to sound the opposite of what AI is sending. And I want to look like a human. I want to text people as if they’re assuming I’m texting them on my iMessage or my, or on my Android phone. I want to look like I’m texting somebody because that’s truly what it should look like. Right. It’s a social media platform. It’s not an email platform. So that’s number one. Number two, voice and video notes.  I

 

07:27

love sending voice and video notes. Now, just like a cold call, it’s like a voicemail. It’s like, know, you and I are talking, you’re hearing my tone, you’re hearing my passion, you’re hearing how I’m enunciating things. You’re hearing my enthusiasm. A voice note can do that and you could do it through LinkedIn and video just changes the whole entire game. I’m posting twice a day every day. We’re graduating to three times a day every day on LinkedIn, just my own account. Everyone recognizes my face. So when I send a video note to their DM and I take the time to do that, they’re like, oh my God.

 

07:56

thank you so much for sending the note to me. They’re actually thanking me for prospecting them. If I sent just some AI scripted 14 page email template on DM, they’re just gonna ignore it. So we’ve tracked this. We see a one  to actually seven. So it’s a seven X response rate  when you’re doing voice and video notes, then text based format. And that’s how we approach our LinkedIn DMs. Wow, that’s,  it seriously blows my mind. So let me ask you a question related to that.

 

08:25

Are these personalized for the actual person you’re reaching out to or is these still like more general  video and  voice notes that go out to multiple people? No, we do everything organically. All of everyone in my so four years ago, we had a very little LinkedIn presence. We aggregated everyone’s profile in our entire company. had 25,000 followers across every employee’s profile. Pretty crazy. I am more than that myself right now.

 

08:55

Everyone in our company adds 30 people a day to the LinkedIn network. Like breathing, everyone in the company does 30 a day. Because LinkedIn limits you to do any more than 150 a week. So 30 a day, five days a week, corporate business hours to 150, right? You max out on Friday and you are with all the guidelines and rules of LinkedIn. We’re adding as a company 40,000 new followers within all of our employees network a month right now.

 

09:24

We went from 25,000 followers across all of our employees to right now, actually a few months ago, we hit over a million followers on LinkedIn on just our employees profiles collectively. So we’re just, that’s how we just build the network every single day. So we’re constantly building the network. And then when we go into the DMs, it’s hyper personalized, just like a phone call would be. Again, we take that methodology of cold calling into the DMs.

 

09:50

And I would send you a voice note and I would say, Anne, look at it. I just noticed this and I mentioned where you located. I noticed your profile. I mentioned where you’re working. I noticed this post that you actually sent yesterday and I really liked that. I’m reaching out with intention  and here’s my ask. And by the way, you only have a minute to do it. They literally time you. You have less than 59 seconds.  So you keep it short, you keep it sweet, you keep it personal. And I guarantee you, have a seven times more chance of getting you to respond to me.

 

10:18

than if I sent you any type of template on text. I’m sitting here thinking about this, right? From the AI generated to the personal side of things.  Because and back to your point about, you know, let’s make the  when I asked to make the definitions, right? Because  I’ve been duped when Anne and I get people asking to be on the podcast, right? And I’m in branding and marketing. And the first few times they would come through,  you know, I’d be like, oh, I saw this episode and I, you know, whatever.

 

10:46

And then I’m like, oh, how exciting. And then you get, you know, seven or eight of those same things and you’re like, oh no, they’re totally just AI generating these emails to me, right? So I would love if you could talk about not just how you know it’s successful, but like what kind of reactions are you getting? Like you mentioned people saying thank you,  but how does that more quickly build the relationship with people or does it shorten the sale or I don’t know what happens, but.

 

11:13

Just when you add in that humanity, what does that do  for the business overall? Yeah, you have to be genuine, right? You have to be genuine with what they’re literally doing. You know, I do get those messages too, where they’re AI focused and they’re like, oh, I really like that you and I can tell because it’s just what my headline says. I know.  And it’s just regurgitating that back to me.  So you have to be genuine. I just love laughter. I love making people laugh.

 

11:41

Right. So I would say if I’m noticing where you live in the world, I would make a joke about where I live. I live in Buffalo. It’s a  freezing tundra over here right now.  I would drop something that would be relevant to your world. I literally say it in the first sentences. Sometimes I’m not AI. Hey, I just wanted to shoot you a quick voice note. Don’t know if you love them, but it’s one of the proofs. You’re not an AI bot here. It’s really me reaching out. And here’s why I wanted to reach out. And I would say that because again, the thing with AI right now is that it’s just not trustworthy yet.

 

12:11

And the trust factor is the problem. And so if you could just get around that and let them know, hey, guess I’m not AI. I’m a real person actually asking you a real question. Do you mind if I can take a moment to tell you that and talking like that, not pitching anything, no pitch lab, just asking them a couple of questions. I lead in with what they want to do. Now my target market is sales and guess what salespeople love to talk. I know if you can tell by now. they do. We know.

 

12:38

My great question to ask someone in sales is, hey, what does your company do? What are you guys all about?  I haven’t heard of them yet. Now, obviously you have to not hear from them or what do you guys do? And then they love to tell you. And from that message, then you can describe, you know, prescribe what makes more sense  to move forward in the next conversation. I’m just going to like continue to note the specific bullets that are just like brilliant here so people can take these away. So already we’ve gotten to.

 

13:07

The fact that there’s personalization, right? That’s extremely important.  And I would guess that you’re also personalizing it to specific targets that you already have identified. You’re not just randomly reaching out to people  that would, you know, randomly reach out to my list or however the automation works, but you have specifically targeting people that you want to prospect, right?

 

13:34

Yeah, we always look at your ICP, right? So ICP, the persona of what we’re looking at. We want to look for companies that are hiring sales development reps. We want to look for companies that are actually in startup mode that are relatively new, less than five years old. We want to look for VPs of sales. We want to look for CROs. We want to look for CEOs, founders. That’s our sweet spot. So with those 30, 40,000 new followers we’re collecting every month as a company, we’re doing that intentionally to those

 

14:03

actual titles  and to those types of companies. And so we’re wanting to target those individuals. And we play the long game. We don’t reach out to them the minute they uh connect with us other than a quick, hey, thanks so much for connecting. Hope you like my content. That’s all I say. em then two, three weeks later, when they got hit by 14, 15, 30 posts of mine, then I’ll ping them and start a conversation. At that point, they should have at least recognized some content across their feed.

 

14:33

I love that. OK, so we have personalization. have intentionality. And then the third one, which I’m sure people now are kind of peeking to, which I love to go into, is this whole idea of scale. The way that you’re using your employees to generate scale and this massive, like basically marketing engine, which if you could correct me if I’m wrong, but I recall right from the conversation you say that 40 % of your business is coming through LinkedIn and through this process that you’re doing. Yes, that right.

 

15:01

40 % of our new business comes from our LinkedIn content and we don’t spend $1 on LinkedIn ads. Okay, wow. So everybody’s probably be like, okay, tell us.  So tell us how you did that. How is this engine  constructed? If you’re open to sharing. Yeah, and ready for this one, which is even more exciting because we’re in the people business, right? So companies come to us to build out their SDR function, but we need SDRs to do that. So here’s an even more unique  data point.

 

15:31

We used to thousands of dollars a month in zip recruiter, career builder, indeed ads to get applicants to apply to work here so we can support our clients. Last year we had 4,200 SDRs apply to our SDR job. We hired 80 of them. So it’s less than 3%. It’s harder to get into Harvard than it is to work at Alleyoop right now.

 

15:59

Statistically speaking, I should say. But here’s what’s crazy. We spent $0 on job boards last year. Zero. So not only are we attracting new business, which is exciting, we’re attracting the SDRs we need to hire to support our new business also in a free model. So that’s been all through content, of course. So that’s been exciting. What was your question?

 

16:23

I know people are going to be like, okay, what kind of content, how do you do it? How do you mobilize your employees? Because I know you have a very  interesting approach  and you have it all matrices together in order for it all to work very harmoniously. And so I’d love for you to share if you’re willing to share. Yeah. So we hired a videographer. So we have a videographer on staff full time producing 20 to 30 videos for us on a weekly basis. We have a copywriter.

 

16:52

who writes for 10 influencers  that work here. And by the way, they’re full-time employees. They don’t get paid to be influencers. However, the more content they produce, the more new business comes to them. So our recruiters are creating content, our sales team is creating content, or some of our operators and client success team is creating content. And any new business that comes through their profiles, they get compensated for. So that’s our way of incentivizing them to be excited to do content.

 

17:21

but it’s completely voluntary. We have people that are in the same departments that have zero interest in doing content. And then we have others that are, oh yeah, I’d love to do this.  So they do it and we don’t force it. We just work with the ones that want to do it, but we enable them in big ways because they have a full-time job and it’s absolutely not to create content. So the videographers are making their videos, the copywriters are writing their templates, and then they are going in and approving them, tweaking them and personalizing it to their need and then posting them.

 

17:49

So we are producing 250 organic posts per month across those 10 people plus me. And so that’s the enablement engine that we have full time working for ourselves in our marketing department to produce that organic content. Now from an employee perspective, our employees are doing these 30 a day reach outs, also doing  promotions  about getting compensated for new business. So if they acquire

 

18:19

a lead through their content or resharing  or there’s DMs that we talked about through voice notes or video notes. They’re also getting paid like an account executive would on those deals that are closed  or a referral bonus if they’re uh somebody’s hired from one of their recommended uh contacts through LinkedIn. So that’s how we’ve been able to build it. So I am not going to be surprised that I’m going to ask this about the employee side of things. But  so we.

 

18:47

have clients, right? And we talked about how we’ve talked about LinkedIn on this podcast before,  but where employees  do not want  to promote their company, right? Like they want their brand to live separately.  So you said you let people opt in and opt out, which I totally appreciate that side.  But how do you  get over that hump? How do you find the right people? How do you convince them? Like what kind of person are you looking for?

 

19:17

that is interested and willing to do this because I think it is amazing when you can tap into people that have passion for what they do and then are willing to leverage that on behalf of the company. When you interview someone, do you look at their Instagram and their TikTok before you interview them? Because I do. Yeah, of course. Are they passionate, excited about promoting on their personal social media platforms such as those? Those are things that we find out, we ask.

 

19:43

Secondarily though, we’re not asking them or even if you notice our reps, they’re not promoting Alieu, there’s not Alieu intros, there’s not Alieu outros, it’s their brand. Every one of those 10 influencers has their own personal color, they have their own personal tagline that they came up with. It’s all about them, we’re literally promoting them as the influencer, it’s their brand. And it just so happens the topic of conversation is sales and sales development.

 

20:09

Now, if they decide to throw out shout outs to Elioop and they want to mention Elioop in ways that  that’s exciting for them to do or  culture, you know, hey, I love working from home or working remotely. I’m on a trip on on a boat with, you know, my family and I’m still able to make money like they’ll go and they’ll tag Elioop in it. But I actually encourage them not to tag Elioop in it because I don’t want them to sound like infomercials for our company. I actually would rather not have them promote our company and just promote themselves.

 

20:39

and talk about why they love what they do. And it attracts a lot of great people and it’s hyper personalized to them. Now here’s what you’ll find. CEOs will think I’m nuts for doing this. Look, we’re just going to get poached. Your reps are going to get poached and leave and you’re going to, they’re going to build a network. And yeah, that’s going to happen regardless of them working for you or not.  If they, the way,  are treated well and they like working here and they do a good job and they’re paid very well, they’re not going to leave. And that’s okay. And by the way, part of our business model to our clients is

 

21:09

They can actually hire our reps as full-time  account executives  if they prove themselves as SDRs when working with us. So we’re okay with our team leaving  and that’s fine. know, heads of sales development, VP, senior vice presidents of huge billion dollar SDR teams used to work here as an SDR. And so it, and by the way, they’re now our new clients. They come back to us and they say, Hey, I…

 

21:33

I used like, literally, I have five clients right now that all used to be SDRs on our sales for years ago. Amazing. So it’s just, it all comes back to you, right? If you treat them right. Marketing teams also think we’re nuts, right? Oh my God, how do you control what they say? That’s what I was going to say next.  Like marketing teams hate when their employees post, but it’s because they let them do it without any encouragement or training or enablement or help or support.

 

21:58

If you enable them and support them and help them grow their network and feel excited about that, they’re going to come ask you for, okay, how do you do this? How do you do that? How do do it better? And that’s what you want.  Okay. So we have like now,  that’s the three main pieces  of the  marketing engine here, which we have the employees, we have the LAU content, and we have the influencers, right?

 

22:22

So I know a big question people are gonna have because I mean, coming from the PR world, I love using influencers. I use them wherever I can.  Is the tough thing is the attribution then back to LA Upe, right? Or to wherever the business is. So a lot of people shy away from that because you have to give the influencer some latitude for being able to work within their own brand. That’s the reason why you hire them. But then trying to figure out the attribution back to you so you get credit for  the investment you’re putting into them, right?

 

22:50

So how do you get around that? Because you said like, I tell them not to actually tag us. So  how do you get it? How are you getting value from the influencers in this context? Well, the DMs do the work, right? The DMs are going to be the one that’s going to track whether or not it’s linked back to them. Our account executives are very fanatical about who and where these prospects are coming from. Everything is sourced correctly. very specific about, where did this lead come from?

 

23:20

You know, we’re doing group chats.  Again, people don’t do group chats on LinkedIn. We love group chats, right? So we go ahead and DM somebody, but we’ll DM them in a group chat with the account executive in the group chat. So when questions are coming back to us, the account executive can go in there, answer the question and say, hey, I actually am the one that’s going to be taking this call. You know, so let’s go ahead and chat a little bit more about this. These are great questions. And then boom, demo and the  SDR gets the credit because they’re actually the one that created

 

23:49

the group chat. Also, you just scroll down three inches and their title of the position that they’re at within the company that they’re at is right there. So they know they work at LEU. It’s in their headline. Everyone knows about it. We’re just not putting it out there in the post and in the feed because that just sounds again like a sales pitch. And so how do you, you started to say this and this is kind of one of those double clicks, right? But you said in my head, I’m like, how do you build the relationship to the point to get to that sales call?

 

24:19

And what does that take and how does that look different? Because  that’s the other piece of this, right? Is I think people jump the gun way too quickly and then it becomes transactional versus like what is kind of the  cadence, the when do you introduce the group chat? When is it time for that phone call?  What does it kind of take to get there? Because that’s just a place that I think is a  massive mess. Again, we connect with the person intentionally.

 

24:45

We are posting, we’re posting, we’re posting, we’re posting. We’ll say one sentence, hey, thanks so much for following my content. I post every day. I hope you enjoy my content. That’s all I would say in the first connection. do say that to at least plant to see that I’m a real person. And then weeks later, you know, we’ll send a note and say, Hey, listen, I noticed this. it’s typically they are hiring or they just went ahead and they, you know, announced a new product or a new service. And I say, I just.

 

25:13

I just heard that you launched  AI software in addition to what you’re currently doing. That’s amazing.  Not sure if it’s relevant, but we have a lot of AI startups working with our team right now. Would it be crazy to think that you guys would be open to doing some growth initiatives in 2026? And just say that. And then it is wait to see what they say. So actually, yeah, we’re looking to grow. Okay. But we enabled growth teams like companies like Peloton and Zoom Info and Aurum and Adobe and

 

25:42

and countless others come invite us in to do growth initiatives for them.  If you’d be open to explore a conversation, I can create a group chat with one of our experts. Are you open to that? And again, I’m not even asking for a demo. I’m just asking for a group chat.  Is it crazy to think that you’d be looking to add some appointments to your calendar? And I name drop, name drop, name drop. So, and especially companies that are in their space, so they feel like it’s super relevant. But I intentionally reach out to them because I saw something they posted.

 

26:11

And so that’s, that’s it. Now we gave everyone in our entire company, we block out an hour of LinkedIn time at the exact same time. So the whole company is doing one hour of power, our LinkedIn prospecting  at the exact same time. And when we get wins, we put it in a group on Slack and we’re all high-fiving each other when you get a win. And when you get one that’s on the fence, right. Experts jump in and I would go and jump in there and say this, say that, or say this or say that. And we all help each other get the oh ball in the basket.

 

26:41

Thank you for doing that because I,  there’s nuances in what you just said that I think are some of the misses paired with the fact that  you’ve built this engine behind the scenes where people get support and credit simultaneously for what they’re doing without unhealthy competition,  which I think is also really important versus having  your team members just, you know, getting 40 new contacts or whatever it is, 30 a day, I think you said, but  those types of things where you can really work together. And I think that

 

27:10

putting the work in in the right way with the intentionality that I know you’re gonna come back to, Ann,  is so important versus just kind of what I would call phoning it in or putting people on an island and not helping them learn the right way to do it in order to build the effective relationship in the long run. Yeah, so with cold calling,  we actually are all in a video room when we’re making calls. So we do call blocks and we do LinkedIn blocks. By the way, all of our emails that we send out, millions of emails,

 

27:40

All of that is done through AI and automation.  None of our reps send out emails, period. We stopped that two years ago. So they’re focusing on two things, phone calls and LinkedIn outreach. And it’s highly structured throughout the day, not to be Mr. Micro-Manager, but so that they are literally playing a game on a court with a team and a team captain and a coach. And our goal is to get as many baskets in the  basket as possible. We take Alleyoop’s  name to a whole nother level internally, right?

 

28:09

but it’s all sports driven, right? So like our managers, our  team captains, our directors, our coaches, right? So at the end of the day, they’re all working together at the exact same time with the same intensity to get that. There’s over 2 million SDRs in the world, in just the United States right now on LinkedIn, 2 million. Our goal is just to help companies bring that SDR work to us.  And  we’ve done it 1,600 times successfully over the last 10 years.

 

28:38

So the reality is, that there’s more than enough  to go around and there’s never a cutthroatness in competition. Going to take this again  to the different points because I want people to really like hear this and reinforce the right way of being able to leverage LinkedIn. So we talked about personalization, we talked about intentionality to the targeting, we talked about the organized scale by which you actually execute. And we talked about content generation.

 

29:06

But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you what kind of content are you generating? Like how you decide what is going to be good content for the business? Cause I’m sure if people are still hanging in, they’re like, I don’t even know if I got all that. I wouldn’t even know what to go and produce. What do I even make? Yeah. 80 20 to 80 % about work, career, success, business, what we do under the, under the hood, uh, showing you literally everything that we do.

 

29:36

If you just want, have 4,000, I think videos,  two minute like TikTok videos, talking head videos on my LinkedIn profile personally. If you watched all of them, you would be able to do what we do without  the 100%. We share no,  we don’t hide anything. If you’re crazy enough to do what we do, I say go get them, right? But the reality is, is 80 % is very focused on sales development, appointment setting, what tools to use, what’s the best,  you know, software right now.

 

30:04

How do you score leads like everything that’s very in the nitty gritty of what we do and then the other 20 % is completely personal just think Instagram frankly, right? I’m posting things of my daughter I’m posting things with me and my wife when we go on a trip and we’re you know, we’re very encouraging You know, we’re in the center the sales business So it’s like we’re very encouraging about pushing through and going through the nose and doing the hard things like I have a podcast called do hard things

 

30:31

because what we do is very hard. Sales is hard. You’re get punched in the face seven times out of 10. And so it’s very personal. It’s about me and my brand. It’s about my family. It’s about my life. I want them know I’m real and I want them to know they can trust me. And that’s what I do. So it’s 20 % personal, 80 % very strategic business about what we do and how we do it. And then when it comes to what you’re posting to continue that thread,

 

31:00

I know I had you go through like, when do you know when to reach out and all of that. I have to imagine you’re looking for certain types of interactions as well on the other side from folks  to then continue conversation, that sort of thing. is there, I know you said if we watched all of your videos, we could do it ourselves.  That’s not the intent, right? But as far as your strategy goes from a content pillar strategy or whatever.

 

31:25

Give us a little peek behind the curtain of, we know when we post this type of thing, when this person’s at this point in their journey, they come to us or they respond. you know,  give us some of that too from the social side outside in of LinkedIn. We really like following  heads of sales and heads of marketing’s career.  You’ll notice that you’ll see a company we just brought back. Actually, this week we have a new client that signed up with us. This is his third time he’s been a client.

 

31:54

Oh my gosh. And it’s because he’s been a VP of sales at three different companies in the last six years. So it used us for two years at his last company. He moved on and then brought us into his next company. And we have that a lot. So with that intention, we tried to reach out to heads of sales or CROs that are new to a company because they want to make an impact and they want to do the right thing. And it’s usually they’re thinking about, okay,

 

32:21

How can I improve? How can I impress? How can I drive business? What can I do differently than the company’s been doing? So we’d like to be in those conversations when they’re making those new  transitions into their role. So we’ll congratulate them. We had this one campaign, which is really cool. We actually were probably gonna bring it back. We sent every new VP of sales socks, physical socks with Al Upe logos on it and says, congratulations on your new job. Here’s a pair of Al Upe socks.

 

32:50

If you’d like to take a demo with us, we’ll send you a free pair of all bird sneakers. Okay. To match your socks. And it was wildly successful. And I mean, literally they’re a hundred dollars sneakers. You know how many times people are saying, you’re the a hundred dollar gift card to take a demo. mean, that’s no intention and really. Right. But doing it that way, they have a free pair of socks. They take a demo. We’ve sent them a pair of sneakers.

 

33:15

and we get business off of it. But it was all because of a gift congratulating them for their new role. So reaching out to people at that time within their career is a perfect time to bring us in and we like to take advantage of that. I love that. So smart. I love that too. That adds an extra element of timeliness, And relevancy and being relevant um in that moment in time. And again, that goes back to the human  factor and what you’re trying to cultivate in terms of

 

33:42

the relationship, is what sales is basically based on. Right. So if we’re going to like just kind of distill all of this down, because I know people are like, I’m not going to go through all that. Like that seems like a lot for, you know, just LinkedIn. But at the end of the day, it is a sales strategy. Right. It’s you could do this. You could do the email outreach. You could do going to expos. You could do there’s a whole bunch of different things you can do. The choice one is comes in. What?

 

34:10

is going to be the best sell strategy for your business. And just keep in mind again, I’m going to go back and say, you’re generating 40 % of their new business from this strategy, right? So again, not one size fits all, but definitely something to reconsider because people generally half ass this. Let’s just be totally honest.  They’ll do a couple of videos, they’ll put it out, they’ll ask everybody to share, and then they wonder why it doesn’t do anything, right? So there’s a consistency element, there’s an intentionality and all those things we’ve talked about.

 

34:38

So I also know you’ve taken this and you’ve helped your clients do something similar where it makes sense too. So maybe you can talk about, okay, if you’re brand new and you don’t really have this established,  how do you help your clients establish this practice as part of their overall sales strategy?  Absolutely. Because you think about it, sales development and cold calling is only one piece of it.

 

35:05

But if you had credibility and relevancy and a third party validation and a great brand and some good talking points that you can use in those outbound conversations, it just makes it 10 times better. Here’s how we looked at it. We had two companies that were direct competitors of themselves. So exact competitors, they’re both clients of ours at the exact same time. And it was kind of interesting how this all played out. So we’re doing

 

35:33

20 booked meetings on one company and 20 booked meetings on the other. So we’re given the same effort intensity. They both had two reps. Each rep was getting 10 confirmed meetings every single month. We had the exact same output. It was perfect. Here’s the interesting part. 20 % of those meetings that were booked actually showed up. So the prospect actually showed only 20 % of the meetings that we booked for the one client. The other client had an 80 % show up rate.

 

36:03

So what was the difference? The difference was content. Though there was a couple other pieces of difference too. Their sales team didn’t take the lead very seriously, which is a whole nother topic. They didn’t send a nice personalized note on LinkedIn  when they got the lead to get ready for the demo. Sometimes they showed up like super late or blew off demos.  They just didn’t take the lead seriously. But that’s really besides the point. They still only had a 20 % show up rate. So 80 % on the other side and why is because content, content.

 

36:32

content. We are working with that company. We are helping the CEO create a brand. He was posting consistently three times a week. He was taking we were taking those videos in your post and we are sending them into our emails into our DMS onto our conversations on the phone. And that’s really where it changed the game for them. So when you add that piece to it, it helps our core business of outbound prospecting be so much sweeter. And that’s why we added it to our team. Well, and of course, we love

 

37:02

you we would call that branding, right? Making sure you have an actual brand because that allows you to build that relationship we’ve been talking about the whole time from a true emotional trust-based start instead of making it more and appreciate it on the side of, okay, they weren’t taking it seriously, whatever. But even besides that point, you can see the 80 versus the 20 % right there.

 

37:27

that on the one side there was a brand that knew who they were, that knew what they offered, that knew who they were going after, I imagine. And then you’re able to help build that engine alongside them or, you know,  to make sure that LinkedIn is the right approach and how to use it versus the other side where I assume it was more of a transaction-based, we have quality, we deliver service, whatever it is, things that are not differentiated and that just gets sucked into the noise and nobody pays attention.

 

37:54

Yeah, I’ll give you another story. There’s a gentleman. He’s very successful personal trainer. He’s a huge brand. Has, you know, I think 100,000 followers on Instagram. He has a great presence, a great brand to your point. But his entire pitch is pitching wellness and personal training to high level executives. Every one of his, but you have to make 150K a year in order to be a client of mine. Like that’s his pitch. I don’t judge that. That’s just what he pitches. But all he was doing was LinkedIn. I’m sorry, or was Instagram.

 

38:24

I looked at his LinkedIn profile, right? And he had 2000 followers on LinkedIn. I’m like, what is this guy doing? So I reached out to, I literally reached out to him on Instagram because I knew he wasn’t on LinkedIn very much. And I said, Hey man, listen, you got a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and all you’re promoting is you work with executives and you have to make a minimum of 150 K a year to even be your, your client. Why are you not on LinkedIn? Like, why are you sleeping on LinkedIn? And he was clueless to that thought process.

 

38:55

Now he’s working with us and he’s doubling down on LinkedIn with us and his  business has changed forever because that’s where his clients actually live. So it’s just interesting on how many people are not realizing it still to this day. mean, that happened months ago.  So it’s pretty interesting for sure. But the ones who are doing what we’re talking about right now are seeing a significant difference. And I think the best is still yet to come. mean, LinkedIn has changed their algorithm in many ways.

 

39:22

They’ve doubled down and reformatted their tools and technology to drive video engagement. So they’re doing a lot of things right now that this B2C world of the Instagrams and the TikToks are now blending into LinkedIn. And that’s where the B2B world is starting to play. So  you have to do it. Yeah, it’s really interesting too, because I mean,  at the hub and at the core, LinkedIn is all about thought leadership. So traditionally you wouldn’t post anything personal on LinkedIn.

 

39:51

you would post things that are going to build your thought leadership.  that 80-20 is,  I think,  based on what best practices has been is a little bit new. And it’s still a little startling. I think when I see personal posts on LinkedIn, I’m like, what are they? What are they doing? But it does add an additional dimension of the person as a whole. Again,  it really starts to amplify the personal brand  of the individual,  which also magnifies the thought leadership. So one day ago,

 

40:20

I posted a video of me and a gentleman who was on my podcast. He has a  Hulu documentary. This guy’s a big deal. He’s a huge following. He’s a worldwide trainer. And I did a video of him. I got 22 likes and a thousand impressions. That was yesterday. Okay. And we talked about business. I posted a picture  seven hours ago of me, my wife and my daughter at a sign that is named after my family. My grandfather had a street named after him.

 

40:50

What’s interesting is that has done 6,000 impressions and 70 likes and comments so far just in the last seven hours.  it was a personal picture of my family. Now, my message in the text was very business focused, right? And very  intentional about our career and what we do, but very grateful and thankful for things like that. But it sends so much better. And so what’s interesting is that happens. I’m not saying

 

41:20

do Instagram posts nine times out of 10. But I am saying is humanize yourself as a person on LinkedIn versus just again, being a billboard about your company. That’s my point. Yeah, and I love that context because it is like,  it’s still a  hub, it is still people. Like LinkedIn is still about your personal brand and who you are as a person. And so  when you lose that, and we have a conversation all the time with a lot of the people we coach, April specifically.

 

41:49

is a lot of their LinkedIn is just regurgitating the company  posts or being like,  you know, I’m so proud to be recognized for this award or like so moment in time, which I’m not saying you shouldn’t post that you should be recognized for award, but it’s all curated based on the specific business moments  versus  adding your own additional perspective or

 

42:14

thought leadership or point of view that really starts to amplify your credibility as a person or your credibility as whatever your role is. that still does that still play? Is that still a thing that’s really important? I totally think that you know, you’re personalizing yourself as much as humanly possible again, don’t go overboard.  Don’t overshare. Yeah, don’t overshare. Don’t go overboard and don’t do it all of it on just selfie posts or something like that.

 

42:44

Nothing against them, but I do want to be  mindful that that is not what I’m trying to say. But people should know that when they get on a demo with me, they know I have a daughter. They know that she’s a swimmer and they know that I was in Puerto Rico last week. Those are things they can easily know about me when I’m on a demo with them today. But they also know I have a podcast. They also know I have 150 SDRs on my sales floor. They also know we have 1600 clients.  They also know those things too, but it’s just they have

 

43:14

trust right away and what you’ll find, here’s when you know it’s working. A lot of people say, how do you know it’s working? Cause it’s hard to track. Here’s how I knew it was working is that I was just recognized. I got on a demo and then my sales team who started doing it, cause we do the same thing for them. They are, everyone on my team who gets on demos these days, we’re not trying to sell who we are and if we can help them. We’re talking about immediately how we can help them, not if we can help them.

 

43:43

They’re coming to the conversation knowing that we’re a company that can absolutely help them. The question now is how? And that first 10 minutes of the demo that used to be here’s who we are, here’s what we’ve done, here’s our lineage and our comp, all of that, we’ve literally cut out all those slides. Our demo is half the size as it used to be three years ago because we don’t have to sell people on who we are. We just have to tell them what we do in.

 

44:11

and how we can help them specifically. And it’s so much better. So as soon as you start realizing that, that’s when you’ll know it’s working and it’s exciting. Which is amazing because at that point, what you’re saying is they already know you. And to this conversation, not just know your company and what you do, but know something about you, which I think  that also helps the relationship build faster because they’ve already opted into wanting you. It’s just how.

 

44:34

political side, opinions aside to these people. But if you look at Bill Gates, if you look at Elon, and if you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, and if you look at their personal following count on all their social media accounts, and then if you look at their company’s following account on their social media accounts, they’re  10X.  And the reason why is because they’re the person, right? And so it’s all about doing that. It’s about your personal brand. And it goes back to branding. But in B2B, it’s so much  new and it’s weird and it’s different.

 

45:02

in the all the other, you know, Twitter spheres and, you know, X and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. Like in the B2C world, it’s  commonplace, but in B2B, it usually catch up second. And so that’s where it’s still relatively new. So if you double down now, it’s going to work in a big way. I love that. uh

 

45:24

I’m going to ask you in a second  to give people some strategies for how to get started on this, but I’m going to get on my Tidebox for just a second because I’m sure people are listening to this and the first thing that they’re like constantly coming back to is the money, the investment, right? So I’m just going to get my Tidebox for a second and say, you guys, for all those people who are sitting there going, oh, this is too expensive. I’m like, I’m not going to hire all these people. I’m going to outsource this or I’m just going to,  you know, get a social media manager like

 

45:53

How much money are you wasting doing  frivolous, ridiculous marketing that is not doing anything? I mean,  just tally that all up  and see what that amount is. And I can guarantee you  that what you have  done, Gabe, and what you’ve built, sure, it’s an investment in people. It’s investment in some level of technology and to  the influencers. mean, there is investment there. I’m not gonna downplay that, but…

 

46:22

It is investment that can be reallocated from other things that aren’t working in  just the context of thinking, oh, it’s just easy for me to send out emails, automated emails. You still have to create the email. You still have to monitor the responses.  There’s time and effort still to be done there. So  just put aside for a second that you can’t afford it, that is too much effort.

 

46:47

And that it’s like,  it’s going to be like a distraction, whatever the like that little mindset, little niggle is in your head. And just like listen  as Gabe is going to take you through. if I wanted to do this, if I am like really solid, seriously thinking about, OK, I want to give this an honest effort.  What can they do tomorrow or even today  in order to like get going in the right direction? I’ll tell you what I did four years ago because I was in the exact same boat. Right.

 

47:16

I’m a sales guy, still putting me in front of a camera. I’m like, oh, okay. What do I do now? Or, you know, I don’t know how to start. Yeah. don’t know how to start a podcast. I don’t even know how to upload a video on the iTunes. Like how does that even work? So here’s what I did day one. I, to your point, I scheduled everything. I’m fanatical about my calendar. So I just scheduled, okay. One hour a day, write three posts for the week, right? Three posts for the week.

 

47:46

one hour a week, excuse me. So every Monday I would write three posts for the next week and I would schedule them out. Cause you can schedule posts on LinkedIn organically, right? So I would schedule out three posts a week. I would spend one hour doing that every single week. And that was my post for the week. And I was only three times a week, by the way, now I do two to three times a day, right? So, and by the way, I a whole team doing that for me, but they won. didn’t they won. had one hour of cave time and I wrote three a week. Number two,

 

48:15

I didn’t know how to start a podcast, but I knew how to talk and I knew how to be interviewed and I knew to ask questions. So I said, maybe I should be a guest like this on other people’s podcasts. Yep. I reached out to a friend of mine. name’s Tom Hunt. Okay. He’s a good dude. He owns a company called fame and he is a podcast booker. So he books people on the podcasts.

 

48:39

and a lot less expensive than it would me to run a podcast, I paid him to say, dude, get me on two to five podcasts a month. And he did that. So I just showed up, got questions like this and did that. Over the last four years, I’ve done 400 guest podcasts. Okay. But I did, I didn’t know how to start one. Now I have one. in season five already. So day one, week one, right? Three posts a week. Don’t ask anyone help to help you just do it. And.

 

49:09

try to get on  to be a guest onto a podcast and see if that’s a place that you can get comfortable with. And then I think everything will start to fall into place from there. So good. And I love we do the same thing when we coach, right? It’s getting over the hump of starting. Yeah. And trying things out. And for me, it’s always don’t take yourself too seriously, right?  But I mean, Anne and I have said, like, if you go back to our very first podcast episodes in year one, I can easily.

 

49:36

listen to those and pick out and be like, oh, that could be better. That could be better. That could be better. Right. But had we not started and done something about it back then, we’d be sitting here now with no podcast.  And I think that the other piece about it is things that are really manageable for people. Like you said, it was three posts. Appreciate that you made yourself do it so you knew enough about how to do it if you had to.  And it was just one hour of scheduled time and it was batched then it was done for the week until the following Monday.  And so I think that.

 

50:04

Like I said, with our coaching clients too, a lot of it is spent with what can I do that doesn’t feel so intimidating, but that gets me started somewhere. And then from there I can build into it versus saying, I want a podcast and trying to think how to go and do that right now when I have no experience or no business at all, because I have no idea what I’m doing. Right. And go be a guest and you’ll learn so much as a guest, just as much as they learn from you, you’ll learn from them. I mean, the first thing I learned is the guy who was on the show is like,

 

50:32

What kind of webcam do you have? I’m like, don’t know, a $30 Amazon webcam is like, no, you got to up your skills, man. If you’re going to be on a show, you got to be. Now I have a $3,000 Canon 8K camera looking at me. I had, by the way, no idea how to do that. My videographer told me to get that. But I didn’t even have a videographer when I first did my thing. So it’s like all of those things, you just have to kind of just crawl before you walk. But the point you said is you just have to go through, you just have to do it. Just do it. Don’t hire anyone to do it. Just do it.

 

51:01

It won’t be as lavish. It won’t be as attractive. It won’t be as, you know, I should say about high volume or scalable. Just do it and then you’ll get the hang of it you’ll know what to look for next once you realize how to do it. Well, it’s such a great advice. It’s how April and I started to if I was just going to take the podcast for a second. mean, I was on some other people’s podcasts and we’re like, hey, this might be a good thing for us, especially right around when COVID hit and we were looking for a way to stay.

 

51:30

connected and build our own credibility reputation as a new business at that time. I mean, we actually literally would script out our podcast episodes and practice them. Yep. Before we actually even get into the studio. And by the way, we didn’t feel comfortable even though we had Tim Ferriss’s how to set up a podcast like, you know, episode on repeat. We didn’t feel comfortable doing it ourselves. So we went to a studio.

 

51:54

and we had a studio do it for us. Is it more expensive? Yes. But did it take away some of the fear of all the things that could go wrong and have, and then also having that guidance, that professional guidance, it was extremely beneficial to get to start with after a year and a half, two years, me and April, like, I don’t think we can get the studio anymore. And we have somebody who is our producer, who takes our content and makes it phenomenal, right? But we also make certain choices like,

 

52:21

We’re not gonna do video because we’re just not going to have to invest in that, right? So. Not yet. Not yet. Maybe someday. Maybe someday, right? But we’re five years, six years in. We keep talking about doing video. I haven’t done it yet, but like it  is a process. You kind of start to get into the process and you learn things and then you kind of evolve your process, but you have to start somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. Just do it. Just do it. mean,  Do the hard things.

 

52:49

Do the hard thing. Exactly. Exactly. And it does feel hard. So I’m going to recognize the fact that it does feel hard. For sure. Couldn’t agree with any more. All right. So before we  wrap this up, because we went through a whole lot of really just fabulous, tactical, tangible, contextual, strategic positioning,  everything related to LinkedIn. I’m just going to go back to the little points that I picked out so people can hear them again about personalization.

 

53:18

Intentional targeting, the scale, like getting that matrix and organizational scale associated with really being able to do this at mass. Content generation,  timeliness and relevancy, consistency. And then the one that I thought was extremely  really well, like intentionally  articulated in your story about the trainer was follow the lead.  So make sure you’re fishing where the fish are.

 

53:46

and continuing to follow those leads. Once you get them, don’t let them fall off. Continue to nurture those. So fantastic, Gabe. mean, in all different aspects. Before  we wrap this up, are you open to some rapid fires? Let’s do it. All right. One of the, we always start with, what are you reading and listening to right now with regards to  your learning? So whether you’re reading it or listening to it. I’m reading a book called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy.

 

54:14

Big fan of his. Darren Hardy. Yeah. Yeah. And so he’s also was mentored by an old gentleman named Jim Rohn, passed away in 2009, who’s a great philosopher. He’s also Tony Robbins mentor. So I listened to a lot of his stuff on audio. It’s hard to find his stuff, but Darren’s a great example of Jim’s work. So I’m reading that book. Love it. Best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

 

54:43

Make up in numbers what you lack in skill. Work ethic will get you everything you need to know when it comes to training. If you’re a brand new sales rep and you’re on the sales floor and your goal is to make 100 calls and everyone next to you is make 100 calls, make 200 calls. Because the numbers will work in your favor and it will get you better, faster, and then you don’t have to make 200 calls. You can make 50 and get as much results as if you were making 200 as you become more skilled. So that’s what I always say is make up in numbers.

 

55:12

what you lack in skill and by the way, will say that as a Jim Rohn quote, so I will have to give him credit for that. I love that. All right, my last one is this going to be Buffalo’s year? I really, really hope so. Yeah, obviously the game. So it was great against, you know, first off, what a game that was amazingly awesome. But the week before a friend of mine who I met on LinkedIn, by the way, named Scott Lees.

 

55:39

He’s a big influencer on LinkedIn. He flew to Buffalo. We spent a lot of time together.  We’ve been working together for two years, but we never physically met. It’s all through Zoom and we met, we hung out, his kids came, my kid, my daughter was there. But the fun part about it, it was all through LinkedIn is how we met each other. So it’s a great way to build lasting relationships as well and  go Bills.  I’m really hoping, I really like to see Josh Allen pull it off. I mean, it’s just…

 

56:08

It’s heart wrenching and just high. The highs are really high. The lows are really, really low. So hoping they can string it together. We gotta break the curse. We gotta break the curse. I remember when I was 10 years old, you know, obviously the the four Superbowls straight losing them. That was my childhood. So we’re still trying to to win it. But with the new stadium next year and with the intention of, you know, being in the last year of this stadium, I think there’s just this fire that we’ve never seen before. We’re excited. So.

 

56:38

I hope it gets funneled. I hope it does. Alright, so Gabe, anything else you want to leave us with? Anything that we missed or a bow you want to put on this and then definitely tell everybody how to find you. Because I’m sure they’re going be very interested and I know it’s going to be through LinkedIn, but I’m going to ask the question anyway. Yeah, I mean it is through LinkedIn. I mean send me a note. You know, give me.

 

56:59

a reason to connect. You know, I always like to say be intentional about that. I’d love to answer it all on every question.  The big thing I think just to  recap is just do it, you know, literally, you know, eat the frog or eat the toad I think it is right, just make it happen.  And,  and start off small. think, you know, entrepreneurs, especially they have really big goals, big brains, they very look at things in a macro level. So they look at like, oh, if I can’t post three times a day, every day with a full time videographer, I’m just not going to do it like no.

 

57:29

That that’s two years from now. Look at just doing it a couple of times a week, but being consistent about it and it will start to grow from there. And don’t look at the tracks or the numbers or where that looks like. Just start doing it because that’ll start freaking you out and saying it’s not working, but it actually is. I love that. And you’re totally right on that. Me and April get obsessed about that too. And we’re like, hold on, let’s do the next thing. You just never know who’s looking and who and I’ll just give you an example.

 

57:58

This happened yesterday. This literally happened yesterday. So I met someone through a LinkedIn post, some sort of content a year ago. Okay. And Holly was one of our account executives sent me a note and she’s like, this person just booked time on my calendar. Can you give me some context? And she sent me an email about the context. And I said, Holly, look at the date of that email. And she looked at the date and it was 2024, January of 2024.

 

58:26

And I said, Holly, this was from a year ago. And now he’s booking time in your calendar. like  that you got to play the long game, right? And it’s all about timing in their business, not in your business.  And so that lead just came back to us after a year of just waiting.  you know, timing is everything in business. So you have to think about it like that. Yes. And just a quick story on that one, too, that that’s something just recently happened with us as well is that

 

58:52

Um, one of my, uh, brand folks that I was really close with at Tide, kind of are still connected on LinkedIn and kind of were seeing each other’s stuff, but not really engaging. And then she just kept seeing our podcast episodes that we were, uh, putting out there. So when she was back in Cincinnati, she asked to meet and now she’s working with another company, um, that we’ve just partnered with called Thaudium. And we’re doing some really fantastic things together. But if it wasn’t for me posting our podcast episodes on LinkedIn,

 

59:22

And her being like, oh, this is interesting. I wonder what she’s up to. And then wanting to have a meeting and discussing it all. I mean, we never would have had that connection. So you just never know who’s looking, who’s watching. Yeah, exactly. When you look at those impressions, when you look at your follower count, like you may seem like, oh, no, it’s not a lot of people. But if you start actually physically thinking about how many people are in a room when you start doing that,  it starts becoming kind of crazy. Right. So, you know, I have 25,000 followers.  They can’t fit in the Sabres arena.

 

59:51

So when I look at them, like, okay, the Sabres, Buffalo Sabres hockey team, right? When you go into that event, it’s a massive stadium. It’s unbelievably, and that there’s more people following my LinkedIn content than in that room. That’s crazy, right? So it’s like, so if you think about that and just put it into real context about how big that audience really is, it starts to get pretty exciting if you think about it. Exactly. And in order to get that kind of audience, you just have to start.  Just do it, right? Right.

 

01:00:20

And thank you so much, Gabe. This was like fabulous.  Again,  just really great tactical, tangible, but also strategic guidance.  And with that, we’re going to encourage all of our listeners to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put into practice so much today. Just start, take the simple  avenue of the three posts a week, go onto people’s podcasts, just experiment and remember strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action.

 

01:00:50

Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further?  Reach out to us through our website, forthright-people.com.  We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business  and make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform.