🚀 Get 7 FREE Linkedin Content Templates 👉 https://bit.ly/7linkedintemplates
🤯 Join the LinkedIn Creator Community 👉https://www.brand30.io/linkedin-creator-course
🔗 Free LinkedIn Course 👉 https://www.brand30.io/free-training
Today we will dive into the mind of Michel Lieben, from Cold IQ. Join him as he shares his secrets to converting your LinkedIn profile into a lead-generating machine that helped his business to grow from $0 to $2.5 million in just two years!
📢 Stay Connected with Us:
Don't forget to subscribe for more inspiring interviews and startup stories.
- Follow me on X (Formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/andymewborn
- Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amewborn
- Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andy.mewborn
📩 Feedback & Contact:
We value your feedback and questions! Leave us a comment below or reach out at: andy@distribute.so
🎙️ About the Channel:
Our channel is dedicated to uncovering the stories of entrepreneurs who are changing the game. From tech innovators to wellness pioneers, we bring you the insights and behind-the-scenes looks at the journeys of today's top founders.
🔔 Hit the bell icon to stay updated with our latest content and dive into the world of entrepreneurship with us! 🔔
Andy:
To turn your LinkedIn into a lead generating machine, well, you're in for a treat that's sweeter than a French pastry, y'all. Today, we're diving into the mind of Michael from ColdIQ, and let me tell you, this guy's not just cold emailing. He's bringing the heat. His company went from zero to 2.5 million in just 19 months. That's gross so fast, it could get a speeding ticket. But the real kicker, they racked up over 4 million LinkedIn impressions in three months, leading to 356 inbound meetings. Yes, 356. Folks, if LinkedIn were a game, Michael would be the final boss. Stick around to learn how you can level up your LinkedIn game and watch your business soar faster than you can say connection request accepted. What's up, my man? How you doing?
Michel: Hey man, what's up? Can you hear me well?
Andy: Yeah, I can hear you. I can hear you well, man. I hear the French accent and everything, man. We're good to go, baby. We're good to go.
Michel: How is the camera quality?
Andy: It's good, dude. It's actually pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah? Dude, should we start it off with the little French that I know? What do you think? Which is, je m'appelle Andrew Comovatu. How's my accent, dude?
Michel: I don't want to be mean. Let's start the podcast positively. So let me not comment on that.
Andy: Basically, it sucks. All right, move on.
Michel: It's all right. Honestly, it's all right. It's just like the end, you were like, comment batout. We should say comment batout.
Andy: But for the rest, I got to add the tea, like the, like, I speak Spanish. So through, you know, through is like through instead of to, you know?
Michel: Yeah. Yeah. So you can use lots of the sonorities from Spanish. You can use them for French as well.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of things. I'm like, Oh, I could probably understand a little bit of that, but most of it now. So do where, where are you in France? Are you in Paris or where, or are you even in France right now?
Michel: Yeah, see, good question. I'm actually not in France. I'm in Spain. So I'm able to tell you that you can use some of these words. So I live in Barcelona, actually.
Andy: Oh, Barcelona. Yeah. Even their accent's weird to me, bro. Cause it's like the is like crazy.
Michel: Yeah. They don't even speak Spanish. They speak Catalan. So it's a whole new language. I mean, it's a whole mess to, to learn and to communicate with the locals here. So there are lots of expats in Barcelona, so you end up talking English, French, whatever language, but Spanish. And yeah, that's good. That's cool.
Andy: Yeah, it's fun. We went to Spain last year for my best friend's bachelor party. We surprised him. I don't know if it was a good surprise or not, but we took him to the running of the bulls in Pamplona and went around with the bulls. And, you know, my friends that were there were like, wait, don't you speak Spanish? Why can't you understand what they're, what they're saying? I'm like, that's not normal Spanish, man. I'm like, that's not no, that's Catalan or something else. Like, that's not normal Spanish. I don't know. I'm like, what am I going crazy? Why can't I understand what they're saying? And it's like, no, it's not Spanish. So it blew a lot of their minds because they had no idea that it was like, they thought Spain, Spanish, you know, which is just crazy. So yeah, man, cool. Well, you're in Barcelona. Well, dude, let's let's talk cold email. Let's talk go to market. Let's talk all the fun stuff, man. Typically, how we do this is, and you know, it's funny on the invite, one thing that came up, I had you as Alex on the invite, for whatever reason, I have no idea why I had you as Alex.
Michel: Yeah, I figured that because Alex is my business partner, and he's the COO at Cold IQ. Potentially, you talked to him at some point. I did. You put Alex.
Andy: Yeah, I was like, Cold IQ. I'm like, Wait, this is Mike. Why did I put Alex? I'm like, Oh, yeah, because I spoke with Alex a couple weeks ago. But anyways, typically, what we talk about on the show here is, we talk about three things that are working for you right now. Like in terms of cold email, right, three things that are working for you and your clients, I would say, right, because you you cold IQ, basically, you're an agency that helps clients with cold email and just outbound in general, not cold email, but a mixture of different things. Right. And did I did I explain that correctly, by the way?
Michel: Pretty correctly, I would say. I mean, it's one of the things we do, you know, so my focus is not just on cold email because we have the agency, which is the main revenue maker in the company. Uh, let's say it's 60% of the revenue comes from the agency, but we launched an accelerator program and the whole idea is we teach essentially what we, what we do. So it's, I mean, exact same thing is we just teach from scratch to the end. all the ways we help our clients. And this is one of these products we have. And the last one is we are helping companies make sales technology decisions. So if you have been on the website, you will see we have those massive directories of sales tech platforms where the idea is that each sales leader that's wondering where should I find a tool to do X or Y would be able to go to code like you find enough information on this and then and then purchase. So this is kind of the vision for CodeLikeU. At the moment, you know, most of the revenue we generate comes from these other offers, the agency and the accelerator. But my shift, my biggest focus at the moment has shifted towards really building this G2 for sales company because I figure this is where we have the biggest potential upsides
Andy: Oh, interesting. Yeah, we can get into that G2 for sales because it's, um, I see, I see quite a few companies doing that, which is like, I think DEMO is one of them as a marketplace, right? DEMO, I think they're all like, they're not verticalized for like a sales specific. It's DEMO, D-I-M-M-O. And I think another one is like Pitchfire is another one that I've heard of, which is almost like, basically, you put your demo on the sites, and then you can go see the demo. And then I get an email when like, someone's viewed my demo or something like that. Right. So I don't know if that's something that's kind of similar to what you're you're thinking about there.
Michel: Yeah, I mean, it's, there are some similarities, because essentially, I guess the objective for all these platforms is to help buyers make decisions. But for example, you know, what you described with a case of demo, where they would help any kind of software discover some some tools. We wanted to focus on GTM because what we figured is most of these platforms, they just show you a little bit. So, you know, for example, you go on G2 and you're able to see some reviews, you know, what your peers think about some, some tools, maybe you see some video and then that's it. Now it's you and yourself, like you have to make a decision. I figured that with demos, demos is fine. The only issue is obviously demos will be extremely biased because it will be potentially a sales or a marketing person from a company showing how the tool works. And so what we want to do is we really want to show how you can use tools and we want to use experts to showcase how these tools can be used. So for example, Klee has Klee experts and these Klee experts actually help companies implement Klee. And what we want to do is we want to have experts for each individual tool, whether it's Instantly, LameList, Klee, whatever it is. And those people will make some tutorials where they will explain how they do any kind of outbound action using the tool. So the idea would be that if you discover a tool, not only you would be able to get some information on the tool, but also you would be able to see how it works and how experts are using it. And I guess this for me is the most important bit. And this is what most of these platforms are missing. And I don't think you would be able to build a platform like this if you are doing it in areas that you are not specialized in. So for example, I wouldn't be able to do that for finance or for operations, but I can do that for GTM. And so this is what we are building.
Andy: Yeah. And my, my first thought was that was like, well, is there a big enough amount of tools in there? And then you look at the, like, you know, the, the square image of all the tools and go to market nowadays. And there is, there's plenty of, um, it's actually hard for buyers to make a decision on these, um, because there is so many, um, of like different tools to choose from, right. Like 10 years ago or so, you know, you know, nine, eight, when I started at outreach, right. Early at outreach. we were like one of the only go-to-market tools for B2B SaaS teams, right? It was like us, Yesware, dude, I can't even remember, Boomerang, right? Very, it was like, that was it. And, and Sales Loft, right? Like that. And then of course, Salesforce and like, you know, but like in terms of that was most of your tool stack, right? And now there's all kinds of stuff that you can do, which is, which is pretty crazy. Like it overwhelms me and I have a, you know, I've built multiple, um, you know, companies for that space.
Michel: It's crazy. I mean, you're talking about outreach. And so I'm guessing it was really one of the first, first ones. And now if you just look at sales engagement platforms, surely you have at least 40, 50 different ones. And they only have their, I mean, I think it's even more than that. They only have their specific positioning. They will do one thing better than the other one. And so yeah, it's like everywhere. And I guess there is a lot of, of education work to do just because most of these platforms, they are pretty bad at showing how we can use their tools. So, yeah.
Andy: Yeah. It's, um, it's pretty crazy. I will say in the other problem is that the G2 crowd, like When you go look at the reviews, they're all people who were paid to do a review, right? So like, you can't trust the reviews. And it's like, whoever has the most reviews is typically the person who's paid the most people. Yeah, you know, that's like who's bribed the most, right? And like, don't get me wrong, that's part of the game. You know, and it for some people, it works like for some buyers are Oh, lots of G2 crowd reviews. But I think a lot of people now are sniffing that out. Right. And, you know, you, for example, I was looking for a vendor the other day for something specific. I don't want to call them out. But like, I know that one vendor because I know both founders is one way better than the other because I've used one of the tools I've used the other. But the one that's not as good had more reviews on G2Cut. And it looked like it was a better platform. But someone who's a builder and uses these things all the time, I'm like, no. There's no way. So it's marketing, right? It's marketing. But you don't know what to trust. Yeah.
Michel: Yeah, I mean, for G2, it's it makes sense because if you think of the business model, it's like 80% of the revenue comes from the reselling of intent data somehow. So you know how they sell those 40k euro packages. And essentially, as a SaaS platform, they will tell you, Hey Andy, there is this guy on distribute page. Then there was this guy on distribute versus your competitor. And then this guy was also on distribute alternatives. So now you have the information and you have to act on this information. And so they are selling those big packages. And obviously the bigger you are, the more you will be able to pay. But also then that means that they will try to have more people visiting your page because they will just be able to provide more information to you. So if you think of the fact that if you want to work with them, it starts pretty high, then there will obviously be a bias for the bigger companies. But what we are seeing just being in GTM is that the smaller companies are the one innovating the fastest. just with AI and all those new technologies and so on. And so where G2 is focused on, if you look at the best software companies or CRM, whatever it is, you will see Salesforce, HubSpot, all these kinds of guys. You will see outreach, sales labs, just because they're the ones that have been here the longest time. But if I compare a sales engagement platform for features against, for example, Outreach versus a newer one, which is already pretty established, like Lemlist, then you can look at each individual platform and Lemlist is beating them almost everywhere. But the thing is, because Outreach is this $4 billion company, and they're able to pay a lot to G2 for the intent data or whatever G2 has, they will be shown the most. And so this is kind of what we're trying to do better than they do.
Andy: Yeah, it sadly, you know, it comes down to who has the most money to win, right? Like, you know, I think someone like Hermosi said that like, it's really a numbers game, like whoever's gonna have the most money to spend is going to be able to get the most market share, right, which is like kind of common sense. So, um, yeah. And I guess that's why you raise the big VC money and do all that, you know, fun stuff there, you know, which is crazy. The other thing too is, um, yeah, I think there's some other factors on that. Like the outreach is also like a us based company. Right. So I think for, for us based businesses that spend a lot of money, they like the fact that like it's a us based thing. Right. But I think, you know, what would be a good opportunity is for new platforms, I think there's some VC firms that do this, but like, they basically take platforms that are blowing up, like in the US, and then they'll go build them for like the European market, right? And like, or the Latin American market or something like that, which is actually a genius idea. Right? Once you say like, Oh, that thing over there is getting some traction in this market, let's build it for another market. you know, another business market, which is pretty genius.
Michel: Yeah, it's a good idea. And I see that with Klee, for example, so you know, they have been exploding. And in Spain, I was hearing some conversation. And some guys were talking in Spanish about a platform called Induced, something like this. I was like, what? What the hell is Induced? You know, they are talking about MySpace. I've seen all of these tools. And as I look at the platform, I see it's basically a Klee copycat, but for a Spanish market. But in Spain, it's like a revolution. Here in the U.S., you would think, you would say, why would I use that? It's just way better than this platform. So it's a great idea.
Andy: Yeah, it is a great idea. I might as well do it. Right. And like, you know, the platforms in their language, you know, like the Spanish language, all that fun stuff, which is kind of crazy. And, you know, Latin America is a huge market. that most people don't realize, right? It's just like, it's massive. I mean, think it's like Mexico all the way down, right? So tons and tons of people. So it's just, it's crazy, man. And Europe as well, right? Huge. But man, let's get into some go-to-market stuff, like some tactical stuff. So Michael, typically what we'll do is we'll start with like three things, three go-to-market, like things that you see really working well right now. Um, three things you're experienced. So three, three, three, right. Three things you're experimenting with. And then three things that you've tried that were a total flop. Right. And, and typically we don't get through all three. We'll maybe get through like, you know, the first section of three or whatever, but, uh, typically we'll try and run through all those. So, man, I would love to hear, uh, from you some tactical stuff that you are doing maybe for your own business or for some of the clients you're working with. Right. Like, What are our three things that are working right now from like, whether it's cold email or ads or anything like that from a go to market perspective?
Michel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so the first thing, because I think you talked with Adam Robinson, but essentially, we're implementing some sort of this inbound lead, outbound, this outbound motion, which has been booking tons of meetings for us. So essentially, you know, it's the LinkedIn content that we've been doing has historically booked a lot of meetings for us. And so I think over the last year, we've had the whole CodeLikeU team And so if you look at your LinkedIn feed and you kind of check for our teammates, you probably see at least eight, nine different people posting a lot on LinkedIn. And so the amazing thing with this is because of that, We have, I think, combined probably over 100K followers with the team. So, you know, we have Alex who's at 20K, I'm at somewhere around 21K. We have Monica who's at nine, Fivos who's around eight. And so we have lots of people posting. And so this, you know, in itself is actually a great strategy because this has been booking us over 15 meetings consistently over the past month, every month.
Andy: Wow, really? Okay.
Michel: Yeah. And so that said, now what we started doing is we just realized that we had been building up this audience for so long without ever reaching out to people, which is odd because we are an outbound agency, but we were just posting content on LinkedIn and there was all this low hanging fruits. which would be our followers, people who engage with the post, people who view our profile, and then even our website visitors, all of these people, we never reached out to them. And so this is something we started doing. And so because we built this massive audiences on LinkedIn, when I'm saying audience, I'm not talking about our follower count, but I'm talking about the number of people who viewed our profile over the last 90 days, other people who visited the website, people who signed up to the newsletter, then we actually had a lot of leads, people who fit our ICP, as we could reach out to with context. And so essentially this is what we're currently doing that is helping us book even more meetings than what we're booking with just the content. And so now every month we are booking over a hundred meetings pretty, pretty easily. Even in August where it's not the busiest period of the year, especially in Europe, because we sell mostly to the US, but you know, we also sell to Europe and most people are asleep. That's sad. I mean, people in Europe, they like to take those long vacations. So, you know, the out of office is, I mean, it's getting crazy in Europe way, way more than, than, um, Yeah, than the US. We are using this, this, this, this motion. And so we are kind of reinvesting even more on this, just because it has this perfect match, you know, between us posting and then it's, you don't, we don't, you don't have to build a whole new motion, it just just builds up on top of a proven motion you have. So it's a no brainer to just reach out to people over your profile, and didn't take action and just say, Hey, what's up? So essentially, this is kind of the number one way we book our meetings for the for the company.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, interesting. And so let's walk. So step one is you post a piece of content. Step two in the content, are you linking to your homepage of your website? to say like, No, or are these people, these people are coming inbound and messaging you and saying, Hey, I need help? Right? Like, what are it? What? Yeah, like, how are the what's facilitating the meetings there?
Michel: Yeah, it really depends, right? Because my whole thesis around LinkedIn is obviously LinkedIn doesn't want you or doesn't want you to, to get people out of the platform. Yeah, there's always this fine balance between How much do I promote myself, whether it's a YouTube video or it's a page on my website versus how much do I try to maximize the number of impressions I'll get from the platform so that I can grow my audience? And so I'm not calculating this that much, but maybe, you know, one time out of seven or eight, I will try to put a link. But for the most part, I'm expecting, I'm assuming that people will view the profile. As they view the profile, there are several links. So essentially on the featured section, I put the VSL for our accelerator program, and I put the VSL for the agency. And then the last one is a post where I'm showing all of the platforms we use and I'm linking to our page of tools. And so on the featured section, you will be able to read a post that then gets you out on the, on the website. And then I have the feature, the featured page.
Andy: Nice. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. Um, wow. Okay. Yeah. So the fee, cause what I always teach is like, is on the, you want to have like one call to action on your LinkedIn profiles. What I tell people in that call to action needs to be your featured section and your banner needs to push to your featured section to say, Hey, you know, I tell people a couple of things. The first thing is like one, your headline needs to say exactly what you do, right? Like, don't make it fancy. You know, a lot of people will, they'll do is they'll put like skydiver, you know, like a pilot, you know, a author, you know, scuba diver, whatever. And you're like, what is it that you do, dude? Or gal? What is it that you're doing, actually? And so I think with that is less is more. And I think you got it right. And I looked at your profile, which is you amplify the headline with your banner image, because it's a huge piece of real estate. And so what I tell people is, dude, put a piece of social proof up there, like a literally a testimonial from a customer that maybe is known as well known as possible. And say, hey, cold IQ is the best frickin agency to work with, or whatever. And then like book call, like with a little arrow in the featured section, and then in that featured section, is basically a way to book. And it's keeping it very simple. And like, getting people exactly what you want them to do. Because sometimes what happens is people will put like in their feature, like, Oh, here's like my top view posts, and here's 30 of them. And you're like, what is it? Cool. You've got a lot of likes, like no one cares, you know? Like, what is it that you want me to do? And I think a lot of people lose a ton of like potential business in that way. And it's almost like a lead magnet, right? Yeah.
Michel: Yeah, but this one is tricky, though, because, you know, when you look at the gurus, the content gurus recommendation, a lot of them will tell you to put a link, you know, that would be, for example, straight to a lead magnet. And this is where I'm not sure if it's what you should do. Because what I what I like to do is, I like to think about it in just a longer term perspective. So what I'm thinking is, If you land on my page, I want you to have some context as to which page you're landing on. And so I feel that having a featured post that's actually promoting the page is a great way, you know, for people to not be just seeing your profile and then clicking on some lead magnet link and having to download it straight to your page without any context. And so I like the idea of having the VSL sit there because I'm thinking this VSL that I have, for example, for my agency, that's what they would see on the homepage of the agency. So I'm like, this is what I want them to do. Because I want them to see this, because this is ultimately what will make them take a decision of booking a meeting with us. So I'm putting this here context and having them land on the page. And I have no idea if that's that good, to be honest. But we do book a lot of meetings. So I'm not gonna be changing that. Yeah.
Andy: Well, there you just the last part you said is, you know, it's working. So If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Right. It's kind of the saying here, at least in the US, maybe in like France, there's a similar saying, like, you know, if it's not fixed, you know, I'm going to make it shit up. As you can see, my French is like four words, man. Yeah, yeah.
Michel: I always say.
Andy: Yeah, I know I need to get chat GBT out of my phone and like have it translate everything I say automatically or whatever. But yeah, so I think with that, something interesting that you mentioned it, here's the thing, it can be different items, but I think it should, you should test and experiment with what's going to work best. I think the different you mentioned, right, the different options, some people will say do a lead magnet. Some people will say go straight to like your homepage. the thing that works about your homepage that most people don't have is what I would say is a VSL, right? Which the VSL is probably the one doing the real selling. Your VSL is really good. I was checking it out before. And you're the one in the VSL, right? So like for you, it's probably, Oh yeah, there he is. I saw his content. Cause they're coming to your profile already, most likely from your content. So for me, I, you know, that's why I also say is like, they've already come to your profile because they've thought you were like, had some credibility or authoritative for whatever reason, because of a post that you did, right? That's what made them go to your profile. So with that, how do you amplify that credibility against like the problem that you're solving, right? And so I think for your VSL does that beautifully. Because it's like, here's how what we do, here's how we do it, you know, build a strategy called pretty seamless, pretty easy on that front. Now, are you guys running that same strategy on every profile in your company?
Michel: I mean, mostly. So what we want to do is we want each of our employees to be free in terms of what they end up putting in their profile saying you own it. But we do like the idea of having some kind of, you know, streamlined branding. And so what happens is even though everybody is free to put whatever they want, we have a designer that helps us with the creative, with the banner and so on. And so they all end up putting these because it just looks way way better. And what happens is, you know, because we have started to post, you know, in the beginning I was the first one to post and then Alex came on LinkedIn, he started to post and then we had Dan that joined and then a few other joins. And so now it has this effect of if you announce that you are new to CodeLikeU, people almost know in advance that you will be posting some stuff. And so this is something that our new teammates described. They said, as soon as I announced, I had never seen that. I had a hundred of new followers just, you know, sending me connection requests or inviting me just saying, Oh, you are joining CodeLikeU. And they were just already sending messages. And so because of this, you know, one thing that I guess realized is we have a way of making content that works both in terms of gaining followers and in terms of booking meetings. And so if you consider yourself just you as an employee joining the company, and let's say you are thinking extremely selfishly, What you know is by adopting the same code that we do, you will also benefit from the growth that's happening to us as a whole. So what we're seeing is that most of the people in the company are growing pretty fast on LinkedIn. And so this is, you know, a super great win-win situation because it's essentially saying, as you work with code like you, you have the opportunity to go say from 2, 3k followers to 10k followers by the time you are done. If one day you decide you're done. while you're here, you're helping us making lots of promotion. But ultimately, you're promoting yourselves because you're establishing yourself as an authority on the market. And this is kind of what we've had in mind for this whole LinkedIn content motion, is we're trying to help everybody grow on the platform. And the whole idea is because everybody grows on the platform, we do get a lot of inbound, but at the same time, they are self motivated because they see the numbers and the impressions and so on. And so when it comes to employee engagement, it's you know, LinkedIn is extremely addictive. I mean, I saw your LinkedIn, you must be struggling to not look at the notifications too often. And one thing I noticed with employees is that they are not expected to be working too late or too early, but I would see them responding to comments pretty late at night, or, you know, like, pretty early. It has this kind of effect where just because of the nature of social media, it makes them addictive. So it's like, as if they're even more engaged than a typical employee that wouldn't post on the platform. Yeah.
Andy: Yeah, man, there's a lot to unpack here, which is like, the question I was going to ask you is how do you get your employees to post on LinkedIn? Right? Because like, we know it's, we know it's valuable. Like that, like, let's just get that out of here. Because most, you know, some people are like, what's the point? You know, but okay, just all right. If you think you don't know the point of it posting on LinkedIn yet, stop listening now. Right? Yeah. But we know it's valuable. And you mentioned like getting your employees to post, I think you made a good point, which is It kind of has to be in the DNA of your company to do it right from the top down. Because I get this question a lot. They were like, Hey, like a bunch of people at outreach when you were there, we're posting and If you look at Gong, a lot of people there post. And why is that? It's because they kind of have a culture of that, of people posting, and that's part of their culture. So I don't think it's something you could just flip the switch on. I think it kind of has to be there from the get-go, which is, yeah, it's hard to like, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Again, I'm sure in France you have a similar saying. I don't know. Do you have a saying like that, or is it the same one? I won't even try and French again, my man. I'll just say you're my pal, dude.
Michel: We have the same idea, but I agree with the idea.
Andy: Yeah, right, right. It's like, yeah, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. And so I even had the idea, like once, you know, we're starting to grow now at Distribute. And with Distribute, I'm like, for everyone we hire that's like on the go-to-market team, not engineering, but like more go-to-market, we're eventually going to hire like a ghostwriter to basically write for every employee, right? Because the big thing too is like, I don't know what to write. If you want to do it, it is hard. And going, this is the second point that you mentioned is like, You want to check the notifications. You want to see what people are saying. Like you go through that phase of like, what do people, you're still worried about what people think. And like, are they going to like what I say? And like, it is draining, man. It's almost like a full-time thing to like figure it out initially. Right? Like you're spending a lot of time on it.
Michel: And so this is why I completely agree with what you are saying it has to be to come from the top, because there are lots of stuff that needs to happen. You know, essentially, for example, you start posting content, you have no idea of what for us. And so one thing we do is we say, Okay, guys, this is what has worked for us. Obviously you will be posting about the same topic. And so I'm saying to my team members, I'm saying, don't hesitate to even steal my ideas. You know, just look at all my posts, take the ones that have performed the best and then just rewrite it at you. You know, it's like, even if you have to almost copy paste this, just start with this proven topics as you write. And as you rewrite this post, you will start getting inspiration for your own kind of post. So I guess this is one thing. Another thing is, you know, for us, what works super well is adding visuals to all of these publications. So essentially, I'm making the exact same post, I'm adding a nice infographic, I'm adding a nice schema, whatever it is, I know it will have potentially 40-50% more reach, just the post itself. But the thing is, this takes lots of time. On LinkedIn, you see a lot of people trying to do their carousels themselves, using some templates in Canvine and you see the results like, you just know that these people are designers. And so this is what we did is we just said, Hey, like we've got this designer. She's great. She, she does amazing. Like don't even try to do your own design. Just ask her to do whatever you need done and then she'll take care of these. And so, you know, there are a few things you already have some kind of proven content plus you have the visuals. On top of this, you know that I will engage because I engage with the posts of each person, knowing that the more I engage with them, the more I get exposed to my own network. And so there are lots of these synergies happening, where the more people post, the more you have people that engage with your post, the more content ideas you have, because it's in the same field, you can kind of reuse some of the visuals. And And in the end, this is one side of it, so making it as easy as possible and being here to help improve the content. And so one of the things that I will be doing now, because I think it's one of our greatest opportunities, is I will be pushing for the team to be posting even better content So we'll start organizing some monthly meetings where we'll just go through all of the best practices, what has worked, what has not worked. Potentially we'll get some LinkedIn coach to come and coach the team. Because my idea is I want to have at least eight people above 10k followers before the end of the year. So this is kind of the first objective. And then the second thing also is we are making this work for a while. So I guess one of the other reasons why you would be posting content is because you know of the benefits of content. And so one of the benefits, obviously, is you are building a personal brand. So this is something I'm saying to every one of my employees. I'm telling them, Hey guys, you know, when I was working at my previous companies, one thing I regret is not, not posting on LinkedIn. Because if I had started my business, we'd say the number of followers I have now, which I could have had if I had posted at my previous jobs, then everything would have been just so much easier. So obviously I had to rebuild the Merkle, but I want to tell them, It's not about code like you even. It's about your own career. If you grow your brand, your personal brand to a point, you don't even need to be an entrepreneur. You get lots of these requests for working for you. Monika, she has 9k followers on LinkedIn. I think every week she gets, I don't know, 5 to 10 people requesting, asking her if she can work for them. And so she's now in this stage where whatever happens, almost, she knows she's going to be able to find a job pretty easily. And the reason for that is she I think she had she had 600,000 impressions in the past three months. So if you have like 600,000 times your post being viewed, there will be people that will take notice and we want to offer some some stuff to you. Yeah. The thing is the opportunities you get. And the last thing we've done is We incentivize them with money, even. We just kind of build this small competition.
Andy: Tell us about that. Tell us how you've incentivized. Yeah. Like, okay. Yeah. What's the incentive? What's the incentive? I want to hear this. Yeah.
Michel: So, so essentially, I, I analyzed the results from Q2. And as I analyze the results, I noticed that we had 4 million impressions for the whole quarter, the whole team combined. I think I was at 1,000,004 personally. And then, and so we've got, you know, more and more or less, depending on the team member. And when I run the calculation, I noticed that those 4 million impressions were actually responsible for potentially 250 meetings, something like this. And those meetings added 80,000 euros in monthly recurring revenue. In monthly, I'm saying. So not just 80k, it's 80k monthly added content. And so the first thing we had done is we said, the person who posts the most, so the person who published the most publications, with at least 20 likes, we'll get, and I think we said 1,500 euros. I think it was something like this. And so after I ran the numbers, I realized that so Monica, she won the challenge. And so she won. I mean, I won the challenge. Don't tell her, but she won the challenge.
Andy: And
Michel: And I was thinking, wow, so thanks to this challenge, where we only had to pay 1.5k for the winner, we added 80k in monthly revenue. So now we have to, we have to double it, triple it, whatever it is. And so now like the new prize is the first person gets 2.5k, the second gets 1.5 and the third gets one. And every team member that has posted at least 20 times within the last three months will get 500 bucks. Because we just figured that if you see that you are losing, then you want to kind of stop. We want you to be thinking, it's still worth it. You can still get 500 bucks from this. So just do it as you grow your personal brand. This is what we are experimenting with at the moment.
Andy: Yeah, this is smart. Yeah, I tried to do this with something on the sales team at Outreach, right? Which is like, you know, it's There's commission in sales, right? Why isn't there commission for posting? Because it's leading to revenue. It's the same thing. Even if it's not you closing the deal or whatever, it's you bringing in pipeline. And I think more companies are going to start to adopt this, right? But I like how you quantified it, which is whoever has the most posts at the end of the quarter with more than 20 likes wins, right? And then that's good, because 20 likes is, it's hard if you're just getting started out, but it's not impossible, right? Especially if you're tied to someone bigger brands on LinkedIn, right? It could be more simple. It's not going to be always simple.
Michel: Yeah. Because also it's the rest of the team we like. So what we want to avoid is we want to avoid you just posting two letters just so that you have one more post. So we're just saying you need to have at least 20 likes. Yeah, you have to try to make it good. Yeah, exactly. With the team, you already have at least 10 likes, because even if some people forget to comment, you have 10 likes coming in. So it's really not that big of a deal, but it's really incentivizing quantity of quality with these likes.
Andy: Yeah, I started posting seriously, probably like 2020, I think, 2019. And people are like, oh, you have a lot of followers, LinkedIn, Top Voice, da, da, da, da. And they're like, oh, man, what do you do? And I'm like, I post every weekday for five years. That's what I do. Yeah. They're like, what do I do? I'm like, post every weekday for a long time. That's what you do. Yeah. Simple, but not easy, right? It's simple, but not easy. It's like, yeah, that's the thing. And they're like, what should I do to get started? I'm like, don't start unless you know you can post every day for five years. Right. Or at least a year. Because once you do it for a year, you kind of you kind of do that. But going back to your thing. Yeah. Like, you know, what's funny is I'm so numb for notifications and likes and all that at this point. Like my team runs my LinkedIn. To be honest, I try and not log in. Yeah. Like I still write all the content. So everything you see that's written, I've written. So I spend, you know, like this weekend, I spent three hours just writing new stuff. Um, you know, like that, so that we're going to like test and, you know, film videos and do all that. But like when it comes to the dynamics of posting it and doing, you know, managing comments and stuff, um, it's my team. Right. And so, and why that is, is because I'm like, because this is how serious it is. Right. Like I can't, it's a, it takes a lot of energy and work and I need it to do other stuff. Right. So, you know, a lot of people will try and, um, I think going back to this is they'll try and do like 10 platforms at a time, you know, I'm gonna do TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, you know, you know, whatever, OnlyFans, I'm gonna do all of them. And then you're like, wait, dude, let me just tell you something. I have like, two people just helping me on one platform. And that's me still writing everything, right? So like, And I still haven't moved platforms. Really, right? Like I've done, yeah, my newsletter and stuff, but like newsletter, then we're starting some Instagram stuff now, but barely just starting to do some Instagram stuff. 100 and almost 200,000 followers. So I tell people, I'm like, Oh, shit. And I'm like, just focus on one. right? Like, just do one and do it freaking well. And that's the other mistake I think some business owner makes is like, we're going to post everything. If you're doing video, might as well just kind of like post everything. But like, your focus on growing one should just you feel like it should be just on growing one of them, like seriously, and figuring that all out. And I think a lot of my friends that are like, you know, million followers, Chris Donnelly, and, you know, Cody Sanchez, and, um, bunch of these people, you know, my friends, like, yeah, they just tackle one at a time, even them, right? They're not saying we're doing everything. They're like, no, we're in. And, you know, now, you know, Cody Sanchez has like, she's good on big on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter now and stuff, but like, she has a team of like, I don't know how many exactly, but like eight to 10 people. Yeah. Right. Like, so you got to, yeah, it's crazy, man. It's crazy. So yeah, it's, it's hard for sure. You know? Yeah. Um, So I think you're doing it the right way. How do you incentivize people to do LinkedIn, which is where your ideal buyers are, without forcing them to do it, but incentivizing them in a way that makes them just automatically want to learn and figure it out? which is super smart, bro.
Michel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks. Yeah. And I guess the second thing is because one thing is you do something, it works. And then you think about how to amplify it. And then as you want to as you add more channels, you know, my, I'm always thinking, how can I compliment what's already happening. So, you know, this is why I'm saying that what's great about this whole inbound-led, outbound motion is the fact that it plugs directly on top of the efforts you are doing. But if you are doing LinkedIn content and you're looking at who views your profile and you reach out to them, it's just a logical evolution of this. And so, because it has a question about the things we are experimenting with. And so obviously like we have do we, we have started doing that. And then, so the other thing I'm thinking is, let's say I want to start running ads and I'd rather run ads where I am organically just because I know that it's complementing something that's already working. So for example, we are experimenting with LinkedIn ads. And the reason why I picked LinkedIn is with their thought leadership ads, I'm thinking some of my posts, I know that the exact post put in front of a very specific audience has worked to book meetings. So if I have this post exposed to more of these similar people, then this should work. So this is kind of how I think about new channels and so on. Lots of people are trying to do this whole repurposing strategy. You make one piece of content and then you go in 15 different channels at the same time. As you said, I don't think it works that well. It's like the one channel you would be able to make it work. will bring you 1000 times the results of these 15 channels combined. So just focus on one and then if it doesn't work, then you just switch at that point.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, you're spot on on that, man. And it comes down to, I think the strategy now is like, find out what works organically, and then pour the gas on, right? Like, so organic, organic should kind of be like your test bed, right? In like, I think more you're going to see more brands actually go towards testing a lot of organic stuff, right to see like what's going to work organically, because I think it actually saves you money as well. Because you're not having to spend money to test something. Right? And if something works naturally, right? Oh, okay. Well, this book me meetings, right? Just freaking off this post, then what we should do is scale that thing. Right. And I haven't actually experimented with thought leader ads on LinkedIn yet. So it sounds like you're starting to experiment with those right now. What's the CPM cost? I know it's more expensive than like meta, right? So for you, what's kind of the cost that you're seeing when testing these thought leader ads right now?
Michel: Yeah, so we are seeing somewhere around $15 CPM cost. I don't think it's that high. I mean, We have started literally, I think, three weeks ago. But we're already seeing a massive impact in the meetings.
Andy: Really? And you just took one post that booked you meetings and you're literally just running money to it?
Michel: This is basically the strategy. So we have Ivan, he's our growth lead. And what we did is he went and looked at all of Alex's posts, just looked at the best performing ones.
