Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence comm and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us. Right now it's Matt Cressman. Matt, you are the founder of Lead Storm. I your found on the web at Matt craftsman.com. We've got the spelling, the direct link to that to our friend that's listening.

Speaker 1 00:01:17 Just click around in your podcast app. You'll see exactly where you can click on and find Matt's website so you can follow along. Matt, it's great to have you.

Speaker 2 00:01:24 Hey Josh, it's a privilege, man. I love the energy so far. It's going to be a great conversation.

Speaker 1 00:01:28 Thank you so much. Tell me a bit about what you do, who you serve.

Speaker 3 00:01:33 yeah. So I'm, I'm.

Speaker 2 00:01:34 You know, a number of things. But first of all, I'm a LinkedIn marketing expert. So anything that touches LinkedIn and outbound marketing is where I kind of specialize in niche down within the wonderful world of digital marketing. Lead Storm AI is a platform that I built out last year and brought to market to solve a couple specific pain points, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. But, more than anything, I'm a connector. I'm a I'm a relationship guy. I, I'm also just, you know, strategist for, a number of different fast growing startups and B2B companies and also subject matter experts.

Speaker 2 00:02:03 So married, got a dog? Two cats. And life is good.

Speaker 1 00:02:07 Excellent. All right. well, go ahead and feel free to put a little meat on the bones in terms of, like, how you help your clients grow.

Speaker 2 00:02:15 Yeah, for sure, for sure. So I'll tell you a little bit of a backstory, because things are always better when you tell stories, right? So back in 2019, I kind of fell into LinkedIn. at the time I went, I just came out of a three year transition, from what I was doing, which was leading an international nonprofit. So I've lived in three different countries. I've helped, I've helped local leaders in all over Latin America and India. I started an orphanage in India in 2012, in memory of my daughter who passed away. So we can talk about hardships in life for sure and growing through those. And, and so I went through a heavy transition, 16, 17 and 18. And 2019 was a magical year. I fell into, LinkedIn fell into marketing and the agency world through a friend that hired me and, and gave me a hand up, not a handout.

Speaker 2 00:02:59 And in 2019, I felt compelled to do two things, one of which we're doing right now start a podcast. And number two, go all in on LinkedIn. And so I use LinkedIn as a platform to start conversations with people, to get them on my podcast, and also to see if there's an opportunity for us to add value to each other. And so when I started doing that, I man, LinkedIn became this doorway to incredible opportunities and relationships all over the world. so 2019, I started building out like a department within the agency that I was working for, and we started working with, we, we quickly grew to about 25 to 30 clients within a couple of months. And I started doing some things with professional sports teams fell into that, discovered pro sports teams really know nothing about LinkedIn, and all of their best deals are sitting there on LinkedIn, some pretty low hanging fruit. So I became the, the LinkedIn guy behind the scenes, helping their sales team implement the strategies. And then, you know, LinkedIn, it kind of eventually, like reached the end of the road, if you will, if you're playing outbound on LinkedIn and not focused on content.

Speaker 2 00:04:00 So that then led to cold email, which led to this amazing world of automation and personalization and just became really good at strategizing on, like, hyper personalized campaigns that start the right conversation with the right person in the right way. and then January 2020, I launched, Stormbreaker Digital, which is my marketing agency. Been doing that ever since. and then just, you know, life was good and helping clients and traveling the world. I've been around the globe three times because of LinkedIn and relationships that I've formed and deals that I've done, with, with other business professionals. But, 20 last year, I, I came to a realization that there was a gap in the marketplace for a platform that was not only like a best in class marketing automation CRM, but also, a, you know, kind of like an outbound platform to that would automate LinkedIn, cold email personalization, stuff like that. Because when I was running campaigns, Josh, and for your audience who may be running cold, email.

Speaker 2 00:05:03 They're probably dabbling with duck soup or some kind of automation tool. if you know, if they're into that kind of thing. But usually when I was running campaigns, I was juggling like 4 to 5 different tools my data, my LinkedIn, my cold email, my personalization tools. And it was just a lot. I'm like, this is silly. Why? Why hasn't somebody kind of rolled all this up into one and make it easy for people? And so I did it. I packaged everything into one, called it Lead Storm AI. And so you've got, you know, 700 million contacts. You've got the ability to, to, to build funnels, landing pages, manage your contacts or pipeline and then also full like LinkedIn, outbound automation, email, text, LinkedIn DMs and stuff like that. So it's a it's a great platform. but really it's, you know, we're in this interesting era of like data commoditization and I would say almost like platform commoditization. AI has accelerated the, you know, the ability to go to market with a new tool faster than ever.

Speaker 2 00:06:07 you know, writing code with Claude or chatting. Right? Right. So. So it's not about the tool, and it's not so much about the data anymore. It's really about the strategy. And how are you integrating your, you know, these outbound campaigns and tools into a bigger marketing campaign and a bigger. Yeah.

Speaker 1 00:06:24 So so share with me what is working and outbound lead generation and what is no longer working in outbound lead generation.

Speaker 2 00:06:34 Yeah. Great question. 2019 to 2022 was probably, you make a case for maybe, you know, a couple of years earlier, but I feel like really 2022 was where the golden era of outbound, like, started to taper off. and now there's some great tools out there that can help you, you know, put together campaigns that are just, like, unbelievably personalized and still feel natural. Claycomb is a great tool, you know, for your listeners or you like. clay.com as great plugs in your data hyper personalizes the messaging and can. Some people are using it to replace sales teams like it's nuts what people are doing with clay.

Speaker 2 00:07:13 but at the end of the day, I think the buyer behavior and interests have changed so much to where if you don't have if you don't have a brand and you're not creating meaningful content, it's really going to hurt your outbound. So that led to the framework that I came up with called BCT. And it's not it's not unique. It's not revolutionary. We're talking about fundamentals of marketing that you have to pay attention to and you can't ignore. If you're going to win brand. Who are you? Who are you? Not right content. Are you creating content that people actually want? They're interested in and educates the buyer, inspires them, makes them laugh. And if you take those two things and turn that on into your outbound, that's where you're going to win. So there's some, you know, there's some industry leaders and, you know, voices that are saying things like inbound, lead, outbound. I've seen content lead outbound. And it's really just the fundamentals of are you showing up to help people and giving things away of value, or are you just trying to be transactional and get a meeting right? That stuff doesn't work as much anymore.

Speaker 2 00:08:13 You have to.

Speaker 1 00:08:14 No, indeed it doesn't.

Speaker 2 00:08:16 No, no. So do everybody a favor. And just like, you know, take a step back, see the bigger picture and ask yourself the question, what can I create that's extremely valuable and helpful for my ideal customer that I can just give away to them? If you put that in an outbound sequence, you'll see some traction and some wins because you're you're giving first. It's a different way of thinking and approaching outbound.

Speaker 1 00:08:36 What are some examples of maybe because look, I mean, I get a lot of DMs. They never get to me. I've got a team to kind of manage all of that because I'm just too busy to be bombarded with solicitations. you know, I'm running a company. I've got a lot of responsibilities. So I don't, you know, again, I've got multiple email accounts, emails not going to work for me because again, I just don't have time to be sold out. So what breaks through the noise, Matthew?

Speaker 2 00:09:03 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 00:09:05 so here, here's what breaks through. Noise number one. You know, if you're not hyper personalizing your messaging, you can almost forget about it. That template style, like, you know, you feel I feel I hate it, I hate it. I can tell right away I'm like no archive delete spam. Sorry. Ignore. so you have to be hyper personalizing your messaging and using much more sophisticated tools like a Claycomb or a video personalization tool. Send spark or Lead Storm. You got a hyper personalized number to your strategy around data. It matters more now than ever. And so here's a very practical, you know, tactic, if you will, that I've used for years. It still works today, with a fairly good level of, of of success. So if you go to and really what we're talking about is, is, you know, intent, right. If you can get some intent data and understand what's going on in here and what's their world like on the other side, are they experiencing a pain or a problem? Is there a signal that maybe you could look for that would indicate, you know, some kind of pain or, struggle or challenge, then that's what's going to help you win.

Speaker 2 00:10:09 So really simple one go to LinkedIn thinking think. Put your, you know, put your hat on the mind of the buyer and say what event would they attend. And then put that word or those, you know, couple words or that phrase in the search in LinkedIn and then go and filter by events, and then it's going to surface all of these events that your ideal client is going to to attend because they're experiencing a pain or a problem. Magic. Right. And so now what you can do with that event is you can actually scrape the attendees of all these events. You can plug in the search URL for that event into Lead Storm if you want, and it'll automatically extract all the attendees. And now you have I kind of have a hypothesis which every good marketer is a scientist. I have a hypothesis about where they are in their buyer's journey. If they're attending an event on sales, well, they probably want to level up their sales or they're struggling with sales. And so I have intent.

Speaker 2 00:11:01 I also have something in common with prospects. And when you're doing outbound. I've been teaching for years. Always try to find commonality between you and them because commonality breeds trust. And so if you have something in common with the event, hey, we're going to the same conference, right? You kind of have that feel. and then the third thing is people that are attending a LinkedIn event are also active on LinkedIn, which that's the, you know, that's a that's a big hurdle if you're sending messages to people that aren't even active on the platform, you're not even getting that you don't get. Not that you got to get that bat. And so those are the three things that help you win with a LinkedIn event hacking strategy. I would say that still works. The flip side to that is if I'm, you know, connecting with and sending messages to other people's events and their attendees, I can start my own event and then invite them to mine. And now you have that nice, like, content domino, like what we're doing right now.

Speaker 2 00:11:55 Host an event, invite people to it. I'm not selling you anything. Come to the event. I'm going to give a ton of value away. If that turns you off from my connection requests, then okay. No harm, no foul. That's fine. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm just trying to educate you and give you an opportunity to learn and maybe level up so you can invite them to the event. Jump on, bring a collaborator who owns your audience. Right. And then now they're bringing their audience and you just kind of rinse and repeat every month.

Speaker 1 00:12:21 Your website Matt, is Matt craftsman.com. Can you share maybe a little bit about what like when you're working with your clients, like what that looks like or do you just provide education.

Speaker 2 00:12:31 Yeah, three specific ways. One if you get a license to lead storm I we have a great support team. We've got ten full time team members. we'll jump jump in with you, give you two onboarding calls that help you think through strategy, get a campaign up and running, ten day free trial.

Speaker 2 00:12:45 You don't even spend a dime, and you've already got stuff that's like moving and tons of value. That's the lowest cost to work with me. the second tier is, as as a consultant, I have a program that's called the Expert Positioning Accelerator, and that is like a full three month program, you know, accelerated by AI. I'm not like, I use ChatGPT. I'm an AI expert. No, I mean, like real AI tools and processes. And in three months, you come out positioned as an expert with an authority brand. And that's, you know, Josh, I feel like that's been the word of the year for me is positioning is so important, especially for subject matter experts. So that middle one is the three month program. It's, you know, fairly cost effective for people to work with me. And then, of course, you have the, the boutique, you know, white glove done for you at the agency level, which ranges from like 2500 to 6500 a month, usually somewhere in there.

Speaker 1 00:13:38 Yeah, yeah. and, Matthew, I know that, as we were talking earlier, that, I mean, like, if we were to give someone, you know, some next steps from here, like, if they're interested in learning more about the strategy, you know, and again, you know, in full transparency, I'm very, very sensitive to not treating humans like leads. I'm very sensitive to, you know, not wanting to be a spammer. And I suspect that there are a lot of folks who listen to this show probably resonate with that. So again, you know, making sure that any activity is in alignment with our values is going to be pretty critical. So, and again, I'm, I'm kind of projecting a little bit there, but what would you recommend kind of these next steps in this learning journey be?

Speaker 2 00:14:24 I have I have a phenomenal case study, of what this looks like when you do it right. And there's a right way to do it. I believe the same thing about, you know, every type, type of marketing or sales tactic cold calling, door knocking, mailers, outbound ads, like it's a channel.

Speaker 2 00:14:40 The channel is not the problem. It's how are you using the channel? Are you abusing the tool or are you using it the right way? Right? When you use it the right way, you get results. So Christy Hoffman, you can look her up on LinkedIn. phenomenal case study of where she, she came in and I think she had maybe 2000 followers on LinkedIn. She was working at another company, and she had been their podcast host for the, you know, the brand's podcast for 18 months, she was giving away a ton of value. She knew her audience extremely well. She had her own flavor on the podcast and the brand. She was funny, she was relatable, but she was an expert. She was brilliant and people loved her. But they came to me and she's like, I feel like we're not growing as fast as we could be. We just want more people to find and hear our content. And I said, oh, have you ever done outbound? And she's like, no, never touched it.

Speaker 2 00:15:32 Never done. You know, any kind of LinkedIn automation or outbound stuff like that. I'm like, wow, okay, so you have 18 months of content and insights into what people actually care about. I was like, okay, we're going to take a step back and put a whole like strategy together around the outbound. To make a long story short. We did two things and it worked so well. She now has over 8000 followers on LinkedIn. We went to the data on her podcast episodes and we looked at which ones get the best listenership. Those then became LinkedIn lives. We would schedule those as a LinkedIn event, and she would go live to talk about those things that we know people want to hear about, and it's a pain point for them. And so we would set that up as an event, and then we would do outbound to people that were within her ICP, just inviting them into her network and to come and listen to the content. Her inbox blew up with so many conversations.

Speaker 2 00:16:26 They had to hire somebody to manage their inbox. She was spending a couple hours a day responding to messages, having deep conversations with people, and we created a group. Hundreds of people jumped in there very quick. And if you look at her LinkedIn, she's booked, I think her top performing organic post. And this is where they work in tandem, her top performing, I think organic posts got like 72 meetings off of one post. And now everything she drops out there, people are just eating it up. Why? Because she had a traffic problem. She didn't have a brand or a content problem. She had a traffic problem. We just had to push her stuff in front of the right people and it just took off.

Speaker 1 00:17:06 Yeah. so again, your website. Matt. and then for the, you know, what you were talking about, kind of the next step.

Speaker 2 00:17:15 Yeah. website, if you want to go to Matt craftsman.com, that's where you'll find out, you know, a little bit more about me.

Speaker 2 00:17:20 I would encourage people, if you want to, you know, dip your toe in the water and kind of, you know, explore a little bit. Go to LinkedIn Power score.com. I'm just launching a book. It's called the LinkedIn Advantage Book, co-authored with a good friend of mine who's written 100 books. I'm trying to catch up. and so the LinkedIn power score, take the assessment. It's free. It'll give you some insights on where you are, what you need to change, and how you can do a little bit better.

Speaker 1 00:17:45 Nice. Again, that website, LinkedIn power score.com, you can click it. There's a button that says start my free assessment right there. and again it'll be a looks like a short quiz. that will help you understand what you may be missing out on, on LinkedIn. Matt Cressman. again, you are the, the founder Tour of of lead storm I. Your website once again is linked in power score. Com and Matt craftsman. Com all those links we have in your podcast player right now just click around.

Speaker 1 00:18:20 Matt thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2 00:18:22 Yeah thank you Josh it's a pleasure.

Speaker 1 00:18:29 Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

Speaker 1 00:19:34 Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right, seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.