First Page Strategy, by RevenueZen

The open secret that underpins $11.61M in sales from companies I've founded: D E T A C H ↳ but also, CARE immensely Okay. But how? ❌ You can't let every mini-failure affect your sense of self-worth, or you'll give yourself a heart attack within 12 months. Failures happen all the time. In the big picture, they're actually more frequent than successes. ↳ More ideas, proposals, cold calls, etc fail than succeed. I could say, "get used to it." But that's not helpful. Instead, I'll say: Accept the fact that you're human and you will never be perfect at not taking things personally, but that you can grow more and more accustomed over time to recovering quickly after internalizing any kind of failure. Then, put in the work. Practice. Read "The Four Agreements", listen to everything Peter Crone has published, consume all of Ram Dass' wisdom. You don't need to go to an Ashram, but you do need to recognize: Your growth in this world... financially, as a brand, personally, etc... will come down to the degree to which you can remove the constraints that both society, and you personally, have placed upon yourself. 𝗔𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵𝘆, 𝗮 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝘆/𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵. When you believe the voice in your head telling yourself that, it saps your ability to care deeply about others. Remove the constraint. Allow yourself the freedom to tap into the love you have for the world around you. Suddenly, listening actively to your market and your customers (not to mention your wife, kids, friends, etc) becomes a whole lot easier. You slowly stop holding back as much. You take bigger swings. Some of those hit. You win faster. It's all about being able to detach, to therefore, paradoxically, allow yourself to give a damn. --- Pic is from last night's Block Party on my street. I was a little apprehensive about playing with some legit musicians being out of practice, but I - yknow - took a lil swing :) (ICYWW: I'm the one on the guitar, not the one dancing fervently)

Salesforce is now a $291B market cap company. Old school, cold email lead gen directly contributed to their success. They scaled lead gen by sending more cold emails with basic personalization. They created a role specifically to handle this function and specialized the closers into what we now know as AEs. Ridiculously effective. Nobody should dispute that the invention of the SDR was one of the most BRILLIANT maneuvers in B2B. In a startup environment, when you have a tactic that you can ethically exploit, you MUST do it. You’re pretty much obligated to. The real problem is: 👉 Not knowing when to move on. FIVE YEARS ago RZ began to see the writing on the wall and decided to call it quits on trying to scale mass outbound. Instead, we've generated millions upon millions of ARR for our B2B clients through SEO. We partner with marketing leaders to create a content strategy built and informed by a powerful strategic narrative. Seems like we went to something new but really SEO is the oldest digital marketing channel and content marketing is as old as time. Outbound always works. Content always works. Social always works. Paid always works. SEO always works. Carrier Pigeons always works. etc. The mastery of B2B includes knowing what tactics are currently the easiest to capitalize on, while never losing sight of the fundamentals. Anytime you're caught up in a cult-like devotion to a particular way of doing things, you're probably missing something. Walk the razor’s edge of optimizing and expanding channels while avoiding a "grass is always greener" approach.

🔥🔥 95.17% That's what social sellers who've taken my LinkedIn course on Apollo Academy have rated the course as, so far. We're getting a few folks rating it in the 52-88% range, which is not ideal, and the gist seems to be: They expected me to teach more advanced topics, instead of covering the fundamentals flawlessly. Fair. To those folks: please reach out. I do have more content I can share which is more advanced, if you're ready to progress your understanding of social selling. To everyone else: I'm so glad this was a valuable use of 35 minutes of your time, absolutely free. Thank you for watching it and I've loved connecting with hundreds of you who have gone through the material. -- The truth is: I think we're just getting started. LinkedIn is fine, but if you ask me: "social selling" is actually a gateway to an entirely new perspective, a better world. One where entrepreneurs, salespeople, and other high-achieving people are putting more of their own selves, their passion, and their powers of introspection to work in their careers, rather than hiding behind the cynical view that what they're doing is "just a job". In short: I envision a world where smart people grow more prosperous by sharing their wisdom freely, for the benefit of all. So, yes. We made a phenomenal course. It turned out even better than I expected, when I flew down to San Francisco a year ago to record it with the Apollo team. But it's just the beginning, my friends.

Follower count has always been pretty irrelevant on LinkedIn. Might sound like a hot take. But here's my evidence 👇 My revenue sourced from LinkedIn has been consistent at ~$71k/mo on avg. (Regardless of having 5k or 20k followers!) What DOES matter has always been the: → clarity of my words → quality of my content → focus of my insights So my claim is not just based on the algorithm (i.e. posts aren't shown primarily to your followers). It's been this way for years and years. Alright, then what DOES matter? In my experience what has a huge effect on my performance here is: 1. Am I talking about one thing, or multiple things? This is difficult as I've had several business interests over the years: → Growing RevenueZen → Growing Aware → Acquiring companies → Selling companies → Helping clients hire → Helping friends get hired But if I had had the guts and discipline to stick to ONE thing at a time, I would have done even better than I already have. 2. Do I feel comfortable talking about what I 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 to talk about? Ooh, this is tough. I've gone through stretches where what I was most focused on, particular with respect to M&A or big partnerships or feature development, was either under NDA or just not something I believed was smart to talk about publicly yet. When I can't talk about my greatest focus, my LinkedIn performance suffers at all levels: → Engagement → Pipeline & Revenue → Community feedback So really, this is not an exercise in LinkedIn copywriting. It's a game of structuring my life and work in such a way that I'm free to speak about what I'm working on, most of the time, and to not get sucked too hard into things I don't think I'm ready to speak publicly about. 3. Is what I'm talking about actually interesting to others? With all of the mental effort I've spent detaching myself from outcomes (the work is not done) and not spending too much time on social media (hasn't actually ever been too much of an issue because I have always had a good amount on my plate): → LinkedIn is still going to go a lot better for me if I'm doing something that people care about, and can get behind. Transparently, I spent quite a while talking about SEO, one of my business interests and something that RevenueZen, the agency I founded, is really really good at. RZ has driven tens of millions in revenue via organic search - but those posts on average did not do as well as my posts about LinkedIn, about entrepreneurship, and about some of the major life decisions I had made over time. It's not that SEO as a topic isn't as popular (it very much is), it's that the community I've built up here is more oriented toward entrepreneurs, sales leaders, CMOs, and founders vs marketing practitioners. That's led to less engagement on my hardcore SEO-related content. -- To bring it full circle: ❌ Don't sweat your follower count. ✅ Focus on building something great, and maybe documenting that on LinkedIn. (Rather than the other way around!)

Alex Boyd grew his marketing agency to $5M+ in revenue. When I'd hit him up to ask him how he did it, his answer always blew me away. "LinkedIn, dude!" He drove an astonishing amount of business from every single LinkedIn post. Now, I know hard it is to grow a small business. I've been there. Alex was on to something that I thought could help a lot of people. So once I got to Apollo, I wanted to make sure we made a Master Class with him on EXACTLY what to do on LinkedIn to grow his business. That master class is now available, 100% for free, on Apollo Academy. If you comment "LinkedIn" on this post I will send you the link to it... ...it might just make you a few million bucks :)

How to slide into someone’s DMs without being cringe. ⬇️ Professionally speaking, of course. 😌 First, take a lesson out of Alex Boyd’s playbook: Build trust and give value first. Even the smallest acts, like leaving insightful comments that can turn into DMs, can help turn friendly conversations into meeting requests. Because social selling is an art form. 💡 And when done right, you can see truly insane results that level up your business (and income 🤑). We asked Boyd to break down the exact playbook that led to him earning 13k every time he posts on LinkedIn… and no, that’s not a typo. 🔥 Ready to get strategic on social? Social Selling for a Seven-Figure Income is now live. We’ll drop the link in the comments to watch inside Apollo Academy. 🚀 #SocialSelling #ApolloProducts

Pumped to announce our investment into The Deal Lab, Kellen's GTM R&D company! I'd been looking to get more involved with Kellen for a long time. Here's why we did it: 1. STRATEGY RevenueZen (and thus Onfolio) coinvested alongside me, which is highly strategic for the agency. While I haven't managed the day to day operations of RZ in quite some time now, we *did* get our start as a sales dev consultancy back in 2017 (remember?!). We still have deep brand equity in the outbound sales function, locked away in the minds of everyone who saw us crush outbound back in 2017-2020. So it makes sense to start unlocking this by deeply partnering with one of the best in the business: Kellen Casebeer. We can introduce Kellen to our clients and vice versa, tying together the inbound, SEO, content, LinkedIn, and now outbound channels more tightly. 2. CAPITAL I and RZ injected capital directly into The Deal Lab and became shareholders. Our income from the investment rises and falls with the business performance overall. And yet I know how much harder and slower it is to build an agency when it's always a choice between take home income for the owners, and reinvesting in beneficial growth, infrastructure, and things that we pretty much know for sure are going to be fantastic investments in the medium term. A capital injection helps. 3. MENTORSHIP Time is our most precious asset. Kellen is someone I'm overjoyed to spend time with. His dedication, intelligence, and integrity are maxed out. I believe that not only I but also other RevenueZen leaders can help be a guide to The Deal Lab at critical points in their growth. Kellen's brilliance is all the more reason why mentorship from us is an accelerant, not a necessity, but what a beautiful acceleration it is toward a full vision of modernizing GTM, in a time of tumult in the world of outbound and sales dev. 4. PORTFOLIO I'm on the cap table in 3 B2B growth agencies, soon to be 4. And I've previously invested in multiple small, cash flowing private companies. The performance of these companies beats the sh!t out of the stock market, and I can positively influence the growth, profitability, and happiness levels of the companies as a whole including their owners. I'm not a day to day agency operator myself, which is good in that I can spend time reflecting on all that I learned, while still being an active advisor to RevenueZen, The Deal Lab, and a few others yet to be named. More people should invest in agencies and service providers in industries they're intimately familiar with. If I may ask something of you... Are you looking for help building, restructuring, or improving your outbound GTM ops? 🚀 Shoot me or Kellen a DM. We'll bring you up to speed for what's working TODAY, in H2 2024. Onwards and upwards.