2500 LinkedIn leads on Retention.com, When should you sell?, The end of Google?

0:00All right, so this one company got 2 ,500 leads just from LinkedIn. and this is the product I've been talking about quite a bit, retention.com. I'm looking at this here. Adam Robinson, he wrote a post. In the past 90 days, using LinkedIn, we generated 2 ,500 signups and booked 328 meetings with VP and C-level marketers for our new person-level ID, inbound-led, outbound playbook. That's what he's calling it. This guy owns retention.com. He's the CEO of retention.com, correct. I think they're doing 22 or 24 million a year right now, run rate. And so the first thing he says is this. So again, inbound lead, outbound playbook.

0:39That's interesting because that means he's basically enriching the traffic that's coming into his site. And then he's just reaching out to those people, trying to generate a conversation. So number one, he says, create the best content, full stop. Okay, well, yeah. So you need killer headlines. Each line has to be so good. They want to read the next. Okay, great. He said, it took me a year to crack and it's still a ton of work. And then number two, he says, DM me if you're interested in. So basically if you post on LinkedIn at the very end of it, it says DM me if you're interested in. So basically he has LinkedIn consultants that he hires and they're monitoring his inbox.

1:13So if he's getting DMs, they're trying to generate a conversation that way. So he says, my LinkedIn consultants also do inbox management because Santosh, I'm assuming that's his co-founder and I get hundreds of inbounds per month. Depending on what we're trying to accomplish, they either set calls or put them on a wait list. We have far more demand that we can handle. Right now, Santosh is taking five calls per day and Pete is taking eight. We're using these for discovery and relationship building. There's a couple more steps here. Three, spend way too much time in the comments. So that's trying to form relationships with people, trying to add them.

1:42That's how you build your platform, right? Share success. Number four, share successes and failures by working in public. He does that pretty well. He shares a lot of stories, makes a lot of videos. Number five, get other people posting. So he has other people on his team now posting. So there's like a compounding effect, right? More and more people are seeing retention. Number six, connect with your site visitors over LinkedIn and email. This is where he kind of plugs his product. So basically what he does was when someone, you know, they identify someone, someone looks like ICP fit, ideal client profile fit.

2:11They'll add them on LinkedIn. They'll send them a thoughtful email. Next day, 24 hours later, send a LinkedIn message. And the next day, send a second email 24 hours later. Final thing is use video. That's what it is. You want me to tell you the honest truth? The truth, you mean? Yeah, that's true. It is just the truth. Go ahead. What works for them won't work for most people. And the reason being is their software, if someone visits your website and they have that email in their database, they tell you that person's email address without them even giving it to you. Which I don't even know if it's legal in every country.

2:43I'm assuming there are certain countries where you can't use that software legally. Like we don't use it on our own websites. And they're pretty much getting people to be like, oh, wow, how'd you get my email? Oh, well, I got your email through the software that we own. Oh, cool. Cool. Either people are going to be creeped out and upset or they're going to be like, oh, cool. How do I do that? Here you go. Do you want to pay us? It's like, dude, those coaches going on social media and running ads being like, look how much money I make. I can coach you how to make money like I make from coaching people like you.

3:19That's pretty much their sales playbook. There's not really much of a difference. So what I'll say is to Neil's point, they have a novel offer and it's, stay novel forever, obviously. But once the novelty wears off. And there'll be legal issues eventually. There will be legal issues eventually. And so this is a nice time that they're capitalizing on, is what I think. And it's working well for them. Now, I do think there's elements from those steps that people can replicate. Like, yes, create great content and then engage with people. That type of stuff will go a long way. And then I think the meta thing everyone can take away here is, yes, have an amazing offer.

3:54And that will get people to continue to want to engage with you. Right. This is all marketing basics. What he's doing, no one else is going to generate the same amount of leads with the same similar amount of effort. Even if your content's that great because he's capturing leads without people knowing it and letting them know. And they'll be like, wow, how'd you know this is cool? Either I'm creeped out or yes, I want this for my business because it'll help me grow. The sales pitch that works for him won't work for most people. It's like those people who paid those coaches to get rich. And I've met some of them and I've spoken on stage at the same time with the panel on one of them.

4:36And the guy was talking about how well off he is. And I was scratching my head and I was like, how'd you make your money? And I didn't question too much. That's a big question. And he's like, I make my money by helping other people do well. I was like, okay, I was putting two and two together. I was like, so you made your money by telling people you'll teach them how to make money like you did by just telling people you'll help them to make money. And there's not necessarily a specific skill set. And they help with everything. Like, I'll help you get more fit. I'll help you do better in business.

5:08I'm like, what business experience do you have? And this goes back to what I talked about ages ago, and we had an episode about this on podcast. Yeah. Why I hate coaches. Yeah. Well, those coaches, yes, people should stay away from those coaches. There's different coaches. Yeah. But then we won't go back to that conversation. We can go back maybe in the future. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP digital. So Neil Patel digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well.

5:41They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. So Alexander Volodarsky, so Volodark on Twitter or X. So he has this great post over here. Let me just read you a couple of lines. So Facebook, famously Facebook turned down Yahoo's 1 billion acquisition offer in 2006, and now it's worth 1.28 trillion.

6:27It's probably more than that now. For many, it does not turn out well. So Groupon declined a$6 billion offer from Google in 2010. Since then, its valuation has dropped to$600 million. Moz declined a$25 million M &A deal from HubSpot in cash and HubSpot stock. In 2014, HubSpot had one of the most successful IPOs of any SaaS company. Path, I don't know if you remember Path. You remember Path? So Path was like the social app where you can only add 150 people max. It was super well designed. That's it? Yeah. Actually, around the same time I met you, we started talking, I was using this thing, Path.

6:57Because the whole idea is like Dunbar's number. You don't want to go above 150. Path rejected a$100 million buyout from Google. It was eventually sold for pennies, if even pennies. I'll just zero it out. And then finally, I'll give one more here. Yahoo turned down a$44.6 billion offer from Microsoft in 2008. It later sold to Verizon for just$4.8 billion in 2017 after years of declining ad revenue and strategic missteps. So what I titled here was, really the question is, when should you sell? right and then here I'll give you my take first my take on this is like you should sell if this will get you your first nut meaning like it will make you set other than that if you want to let it ride you have your nut already that's your decision when you look at a lot of these acquisition offers Yahoo almost bought Google as well right they tried to they couldn't work out no no Google tried to sell but Yahoo didn't want to buy it they didn't want to pay enough or they asked for It wasn't even that much money.

7:57I think back, it was like a million dollars. It was like nothing much. Here, I'll search it up. You keep going. Here's my big takeaway with a lot of these acquisition deals. Yes, if the money's enough and you're set and you're happy in life and you're content, take it. You could have had more, but there's always scenarios where you don't have as much and you're grinding out instead of taking something. the other big thing that i think about with a lot of these deals is a lot of entrepreneurs believe their shit doesn't stink in other words like their company is the best thing since sliced bread and i'll give you a prime example of everybody does clubhouse remember clubhouse yeah everyone was on it you know who wasn't on and who hated it you did yes and i was vocal i kept trying to convince neil neil's like no i don't see it and then he turned out to be right because the whole concept was for me to get value from this platform, I had to be on it.

8:53The moment I left, there was no more value. I'm like, this is stupid. And then a lot of people and entrepreneurs were like, I spent four hours a day on Clubhouse. I spent eight hours a day. Look what I did. Like, what did you do? I'm like, I focused on making money in my business. I was not on Clubhouse for even a minute that day. Like, oh, okay. They're like, but you're missing out on these followers. I'm like, who cares? Followers don't necessarily equate to more revenue, but they should have taken the offer. Didn't LinkedIn try to buy them for a nice... I think there was an offer for$2 billion or something from just Twitter back in the day.

9:24There were talks about Twitter potentially offering$2 billion. And Twitter just went and built their own. Yeah, and then everyone who built their own Clubhouse feature, none of them took off. They shut them all down. Facebook tried to do one. I think Spotify did one as well. Everyone did one and it didn't work. By the way, the headline here is, remember when Yahoo turned down$1 million to buy Google? So Google was trying to sell to Yahoo for a million dollars. I thought Yahoo also made an offer to buy Google. Yahoo offers a billion to buy Google. Where was it? Yeah, in 2002, Yahoo had a chance to buy Google for a billion dollars.

10:01But executives dragged their feet. By the time they decided to pursue the offer, Google's price soared to$3 billion. They should have just paid the$3 billion. And then fast forward to 2002, Google offered itself to Yahoo once again, this time for$5 billion. It was just too much. Yeah, yeah. They should have taken that for sure. and they should have just offered Facebook an extra billion dollars and had the investors try to force the hand. I mean, they probably would have just tanked a deal. Like they would have tanked the company, I should say. Yeah, that's true. The companies may not have been the same.

10:28If you look at Tumblr, Tumblr was soaring pre-Yahoo, post-Yahoo, and then got acquired by WordPress. Yeah. And no one talks about Tumblr. Do you know how much Dig was offered for? 200 and something? Yes. Yes, so Dig declined a$200 million offer from Google in 2018. It struggled and eventually was sold in parts for about$500K in 2020. I don't think that was a true story. From my understanding, Google looked at Dig and Dig was open to selling, but then they found a lot of it was manual and not automated. And they didn't like that. So by the way, I have this one over here on the end of Google. So this tweet is from Othman.

11:08I should stop saying tweet posts. So O-T-H-M-A-N. So here's what he says. you're the one that's like, Google's not going to go anywhere. This guy was a Google engineer. So here's what he says. Gen AI poses a much deeper pickle for Google than I initially assumed. The last few weeks completely echoed the time I was at Google in the early 2000s when we were up against Microsoft. Except this time, Google is on the receiving end. So keep in mind, everyone, Microsoft used to be the big behemoth. Everyone looked up to them and they have all these antitrust issues. And then Microsoft did slow down and Google became the young upstart, right?

11:44But now it's like, oh crap. So anyway, OpenAI might be the upstart. I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but let me give you some more context. Looking back, we beat Microsoft not because we had better tech, but because we forced them to play on our terms and at our clock speed, quote unquote. Many, myself included, were viewing Google's LLM problem as one of the catching up with the technology, specifically OpenAI. It stands to reason that with all its incredible talent, infrastructure, users, and data, Google can and will catch up to OpenAI and likely be able to build better technology.

12:17But I'm realizing that's likely to be wrong. The debacle last week, and even more Google's response, we're talking about woke Gemini, puts a point on the real and somewhat unsolvable problem Google faces now. Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI tomorrow. It lost to it over the last 10 years. We'll just leave it at that right now. And Marissa Meyer did respond to this one as well. What did she say? She's like, I agree with many of the points here. Some I disagree with, but mostly right. I do see OpenAI taking a portion of Google's lunch. I don't see GenAI taking away search fully. I still believe there's a purpose for search and people will use it.

12:58If you're looking to buy new sneakers, I know you started leveling up your sneaker game, right? After you met the Thriller CEO. Thriller. Thriller. Did I say it right? No, you said Thriller. That's a Michael Jackson song. Thriller. Say drill. Thriller. Okay, so the Thriller CEO helped level up your sneaker game. If you're trying to buy some new fresh sneakers, do you see yourself using OpenAI or ChadGPT or do you just see yourself using For now, Google. Now 10 blue links for now. On the flip side, if you're just doing some quick research, would you rather do a Google search or just put in a query into chat GPT or Gemini?

13:42A quick search. You know what? It's actually changed a little bit for me now. I do use OpenAI quite a bit and I do use perplexity quite a bit. So I would have said the same thing. If it's research, like asking questions and stuff, a lot of times I just type it into chat GPT or Gemini or anything because you're just going to get the answer right then and there instead of going through the blue links. I do see a use case for both. I do see this affecting SEO. I do see this not necessarily killing off Google. Will it change Google? Yes. Will there still be search? Yes. But what will the search be like?

14:17I don't know. Will it be 10 blue links? There hasn't been 10 blue links for a long time. A lot of times it's videos and local results and other things integrated. They've been taking away traffic from marketers for a while by integrating other stuff. But what I'm getting at is for a lot of money-making keywords, like transactional keywords, I still do see people using Google search. It's like saying, Hey, if you're looking for toothpaste, why would you ever just use Google? You would just search Amazon, but yet people still do search Google for toothpaste because you can see tons of different results.

14:48You also can search on Amazon. You may search in both places. I don't see a world where there's no Google search. I don't see a world where open AI controls everything, I see a mixture of both in which there's a purpose for open AI and there's a purpose of Google. Google is going to have to make adjustments, but open AI won't get 100 % of the market share or maybe not even the largest chunk of market share for search. So I'm going to simplify it for everyone here. The way I see it is similar. It's basically, I think Google's going to lose some market share here. I don't think they're going to go away.

15:24I mean, it's It's still one of the best money printers in the world. It's a great business model for them. I think this stuff takes time. Things don't die. Microsoft never, they slowed down for quite a bit, and then now they're back, right? And so here's the big thing over here. The real problem, this guy Othman says, the real problem for Google is one of clock speeds. It goes back to that keyword, clock speed. Google all of a sudden has its ass on fire and is trying to innovate into the future. But that innovation now has to happen at the heart of its business. OpenAI doesn't care about messing up on an ads business model.

15:58They can just iterate with a product slash quality purity that is impossible for Google to get. Now, all that to say is, yes, Google is going to lose some share. They're not going to die. And search is probably going to be around for a while. Yeah, and the big money-making revenue for them is ads, but it's from these transactional keywords. It's not from people Googling a specific question like, how tall is the pyramids? You know, like, you know, what's the average height of a pyramid in Egypt? That's not where they're making money. And if people start using open AI and things like that for those queries, you know, it's not bad.

16:33Does it mean that people won't be using open AI for some money making queries? They will, you know, for doing research or picking a consulting firm, you know, sure, it'll eat at some of Google's market share. But I still believe there's a world like you're saying for both. Yeah. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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19:19So we'll see what happens. I don't think it's going to take over like the ad model completely, but I think we're going to see affiliate marketing tick up. I think it's going to become more popular over time. So here are the last two paragraphs and then we can move on from this. So, excuse me. So Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI in the coming few years. It has lost over the past decade when it could have evolved, iterated AI into its model at its success encumbered clock speed. Now that game is on, but on a startup clock speed, there's no chance for Google to catch up and even less win this next cycle.

19:53The problem compounds over time. This problem compounds over time because every single day that goes by, we are all feeding OpenAI our usage patterns, feedback, custom GPTs, integrations, etc. At this stage, there's no way for Google to shift its clock speed unless it's willing to give the middle finger to the market and its customers for a while and say, sorry, the future beckons. Feel free to opt out and invest your money elsewhere. That's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, rate, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And if you want to hang out with Neil and I to help you grow your agency, marketingschool.io slash agency.

20:27We'll see you over there. And we'll also see you tomorrow.