Martin Martinez considers himself an accidental entrepreneur. The LinkedIn solution he created now serves 104,000 users in 89 countries.

As the CEO of Meet Alfred, he has the data to prove that using a multi channel sales approach leaves your competition in the dust.

Martin shares 5 takeaways on this episode of the Close The Deal. Com Podcast: 

1. Best restaurant to close the deal in Sydney, Australia
2. How he accidentally started this company giving his service away
3. The right way to set up your LinkedIn automation - he shares how most people screw this up
4. Why being omnipresent matters using a multi channel approach
5. What to expect next from Meet Alfred that will up your game

Connect with Martin:

https://meetalfred.com/

Email

martin@meetalfred.com

Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/company/meetalfredofficial/

Products we ❤️  for our health:

• Athletic Greens - AGI
• Whoop - get a free Whoop and one free month

Show Notes with Martin Martinez

Martin: Within LinkedIn as a channel, there is so much available. So, you hit the nail in the head as far as social, it is the future of. Selling it is the future of, in particular remote selling. And you've gotta be wherever they are. And unfortunately, people really focus some, sometimes only on one channel.

Ewell: That is Martin Martinez. He's the CEO and founder of Meet Alfred. What he is talking about is the data that he has to support to show that salespeople who are using automation, using a multi-channel approach to automation, not just LinkedIn, have a 44% lift over everybody else. That explains why they have meet Alfred has over 104,000 users, 5,000 customers with over 104,000 users in 89 countries.

Now you're listening to the Close The Deal.Com podcast. I'm your host, Ewell Smith and Martin is the OG of LinkedIn Automation going back to 2017. Now on this episode, he's gonna share some tips with you if you're considering using automation. There's three ways to set it up properly that he goes over and he sees it done wrong over and over. So, he is gonna give you insights.

He's also gonna share with you the five channels available to you to leverage on LinkedIn, and then he's gonna talk about the multi-channel approach that they use in the top three that makes sense at this moment. And they're adding more channels right now. If you've ever considered using automation, this episode is for you.

Now let's get started with the show.

Ewell: Martin, I wanna welcome you to the Close The Deal.com podcast. Where are you based out of? 

Making a BIG move

Martin: I'm currently based in Sydney, Australia. But in a couple of weeks, I'll be out of Dubai, the UAE.

Ewell: Why the move?

Martin: Business related obviously. Australia is a very highly taxed country, and running a software company from here is not very tax advantageous or efficient. So, part of the idea is to launch a new company in Dubai as a group portfolio of investments. That I'm looking to make in other software companies, including the one that I currently run.

Ewell: Fantastic. And I like, I just started asking this question, and even though you're in Sydney, we'll go with Sydney right now. Where do you take a client? If you're trying to smooth a client to come on board or partner with you, where do you take them to dinner?

Martin: Look Sydney and Australian General, they've got really good food and amazing restaurants. We rate highly in not only the quality of produce, but the quality of. The chefs. My list is pretty long 

 The number one there is an Asian Chinese restaurant called Mr.

Wong, amazing restaurant.

Ewell: There you go. And there's one other question I'd like to ask is, what are you grateful for? That helped you get you where you are? Who or what are you grateful for? It helped you get where you are today.

Martin: Look, as a non-technical founder, I have to be, I'm very grateful for my technical team. It has evolved over time, but I've built a very good rapport and relationship and they're taking care of my baby. To be able to, not only entrust but also to empower your technical team when you're running a software company is quite important in my opinion.

Ewell: There's no doubt about that. So, what was the problem that you identified in the marketplace? And you clearly saw a window of opportunity. What was the problem that you went after? And you had just alluded to it to some degree of how you had to overcome probably a big hurdle to develop the solution to your problem.

What was the problem you solved?

The accidental entrepreneur...

Martin: It's a typical accidental entrepreneur’s situation here. I don't have a technical background, so I was actually running a consulting firm and we were using LinkedIn to actually do a lot of outreach and we had a large team about 17 consultants. And we were using LinkedIn but they didn't have the time to do it themselves.

So, we hired a lot of VAs to run campaigns and do it for them. And it came to a point that it wasn't scalable. So, we thought is there a different way? And we looked into automation when I went and looked at the market. And what was there, there were a couple of Chrome extensions products.

You may have heard of like Duck Soup and things like that. Great people behind those companies, but they, just didn't fit me as a non-technical person. I like something that's easy to use and friendly and I just couldn't find it. So, I decided to see if I could get somebody to build me something.

I felt it was a very repetitive and tedious task that could be automated and I fell upon it and that's how it all started.

Ewell: So, what does your product do? How does it help a salesperson or somebody in a marketing field and does it serve both? 

Martin: Yeah, apologies. I should have answered that question. So,  this product that we've created is a LinkedIn automation tool. Primarily that's what we're very well known for, because that's our, we've a sales automation platform where it's essentially multichannel. You can start conversations on LinkedIn, take them to Twitter or email and vice versa, and go back and forth.

 So, what we essentially do is help sales professionals, entrepreneurs, company founders, CEOs, use and automate you LinkedIn for outreach purpose. Trying to obviously connect with people trying to. Schedule a meeting, have a conversation so you can actually potentially sell 'em your products or services.

 That's what it does.

Ewell: And. You said you did not have a technical background, so was that difficult to find the right technical people to help build a solution like that? 

Martin: I've been a little bit fortunate. The people that I've hired have done a tremendous job in building what I wanted, but also we built a good relationship and rapport, so they've stayed on for a very long time. As a non-technical founder hiring technical people it's difficult in some parts, but the thing that I have I don't know, a skilling is the eq side of things.

So, I can sense when people are pulling wool over my eyes or they're not telling me the right thing or they're really genuine and stuff. My hiring skills in a way have helped in the selection process of finding the right people, but there has been a bit of fortune as well, so I don't wanna take all the credit.

Ewell: And what's the name of your product?

Martin: The website is MeetAlfred.com. It's predicated on this persona Alfred who becomes your best employee. He doesn't take breaks. He very cheap. 

Ewell: You were early to this space. What year?

Martin: Yeah, I was one of the that's considered an OG now. We started 2017

 And we've evolved significantly primarily through acquisitions. So, we started and built a Chrome extension about 2018, 2019. We bought a company that had a desktop app and we converted that. And now we're a hundred percent cloud after an acquisition about 18 months ago.

 Yeah, so it's one of those things that people buy it because they wanna save time and also save them money. Cause you don't have to build as big of a portfolio of sales professionals in your team, or you can start it yourself and essentially your doubling your time because the software's doing the work.

So yeah, that's that's how it all started.

Ewell: Are there any unique features that separate you from the current offerings from other companies?

The first out the gate in many ways...

Martin: Look, we as being one of the first, we were the first in many things. So we, we were the first to offer InMail automation. We were the first ones to do group and automation like group and LinkedIn event automation. We are the first and probably the only, Few, if any, that does multichannel.

 We, created the first LinkedIn CRM because LinkedIn doesn't give you access to your data. We do social media scheduling right inside of the platform. So we have been the first of lot of things. Differentiation right now in software in general is very hard when it comes to feature base.

So, we launch something within three months, it's copied, we launch something else within three months, it's copied. So, we've played this game for a long time. We've hit a maturity in what can be done within LinkedIn. There are some interesting things that the LinkedIn is releasing voicemail and all sorts of things we're playing around with.

But right now, the key differentiator is our brand. It's reputation it's status in the market. And we've, we have created the most comprehensive set of tools for the most affordable price. So, part of our ethos in the company has been offered more for less. And so, if you compare us with anybody else, we know we are as a set of tools.

We are the cheapest in the market.

Ewell: Let's take a break right here and we'll come right back and I wanna understand a little bit about your why, how you ended up in this space.

Because it's fascinating to me that you came from a non-technical platform, and I want you to tell us a little bit about the growth, if you don't mind. We'll get some more questions answered. 

People will ask me from time to time, what type of watch do I have on my wrist? Then they realize it's not a watch, and I'll tell 'em it's a whoop. And what is a whoop? The whoop monitors my sleep behaviors, monitors my recovery from working out. It helps get me in a state of mind to track my health and wellness every single day, make sure I get enough sleep so I have the energy to go forward the next day and improve incrementally day over day.

And that mindset, that mentality, that methodology that embodies this entire podcast on improving. In this case, we're talking about our health and our wellness now, if that's important to you, check out the whoop and you can find it on closethedeal.com and visit the show notes page for Martin closethedeal.com.

Now let's get back to the show. 

Martin, welcome back to the Close The Deal.com Podcast. You started non-technical and what's the growth look like of your company from a non-technical founder? Starting a tech company, where are you today, where you were started, and how many users are on the platform? And if you share your revenue, I don't know if you can do that or not, but if you're willing to, we'd love to know.

Martin: So, the history, we just passed five years in operation. So, we are one of the early companies in this space. We have grown tremendously, primarily through prior to Covid we were growing steadily, but Covid kind of accelerated that, that growth we're currently growing at about 5% per month.

Just mostly organically, word of mouth. And other platforms like affiliate marketing and stuff like that. We don't publicly share too much of the data of the company cause for we don't have investors. It's just mostly me. But we are, we're above eight figures in revenues.

 So, it's a very healthy business. We've got a team of 15 in the technical side, about 12 to 13 in the support side, and between marketing and all the others we probably have another five to 10 people. So, we're a healthy company a hundred percent remote. I'm based in Incident Australia, but everybody is from everywhere else.

Although we have a, we used to have an office in the Philippines where a lot of the support comes from now they're fully remote. So that's where the companies roughly at the moment growing quite healthily. And where are we at as a company? We are privately held, very profitable and looking to obviously continue to grow.

We have underserviced, a particular market. Which we're looking to do now, which is the agency market for companies that provide a LinkedIn or sales outreach service. Who would like to use our product as a label. So that's future.

Ewell: Was this a quick growth for you all because you were early into the game?

How the accidental entrepreneur thing happened...then word of mouth took off

Did people recognize what it could do and they, yeah, as I mentioned we've fallen into this I didn't start out to build a software company. What essentially happened was that I was scratching my own niche and I went to the market. I didn't quite find what I wanted, so I took the ride off getting something built for my own use.

Martin: We were so successful with our own use that our customers, our consulting company customers, We're saying, do you mind if I use it for my…

Ewell: Oh wow. 

Martin: What we did is, yeah, we just said, of course. Yeah. Downloaded it in the Chrome store. We had to upload it to the Chrome Store so they could use it.

And all behold six months go by and we have over 5,000 free users just using the platform because the people just talking started talking about it and sharing and sharing. It's one of those things that we were fortunate being early in the game.

We also have built a such an easy to use product that our customers loved it. So, they told somebody else and somebody else told somebody else, and so on and so forth. So that word of mouth, which is the best of marketing, really worked. So around February 20 2017, we turned on payments. And out of this 5,000, so five, 6,000 users, we probably had about four and 5,000 active users, and then we converted a large percentage of them into paying customers.

 And that's the business started from there. Not knowing anything about SaaS and software and subscriptions and whatever, the learning curve was very steep. But as a typical entrepreneur, we problem solvers. So, every challenge that we faced we kind. Figured it out and we evolved significantly as a platform.

We added features that people wanted again with a user-friendly point of view. And then we grew again by transitioning our platform into different, because Chrome extension, it's a little limited on what you can do. Then we moved into becoming a desktop app through acquiring a company and now hundred percent cloud, which kinda unleashes.

Pretty much anything you can imagine. From a marketing perspective, we've never done any marketing aside from starting July to January one this year. So we've, to this point purely on referrals and.

Ewell: That's unreal.

Martin: Yeah, it's a typical story of a product led kind of product led growth. I just want I'm not technical, I just want the best product for me, and it happened to be the product for a lot of people, and that still stands today. I really want. The leader in offering the easiest to use product the friendliest, the best support.

We offer 24 7 support. Nobody else does. So those types of things I think make a user comfortable and they're happy to use the platform.

Ewell: About how many users do you have today? Can you share that?

Martin: So, we I can give you a measuring customers, not users, because each customer might have multiples. We've already, we've exceeded over 5,000 customers. And each customer has multiple users on average.

Ewell: Yeah. And then now you're going to the agency side, which is gonna start multiplying you dramatically. Wow.

Martin: Yeah the typical agency partner that has approached us on the low end, that would have about a dozen clients and then upwards of hundred on average. We estimate that it'll be somewhere around 30 mark. And when you get a lot of those you really accelerate your growth.

Ewell: Yeah, no doubt. So, for somebody listening to this who's not, has not used automation, what's the natural progression or the most used tool in your toolbox?

How to get started the right way with LinkedIn automation per the OG of LI automation

Martin: Look I think what your audience needs to be very clear about. And let's focus on LinkedIn in particular because that's what the majority of our customers use it for. What people need to appreciate is that LinkedIn is not for everyone. That's the first thing. It's really focused on b2b.

If you want to be successful, B2C just doesn't work. On LinkedIn, you're not gonna sell, I don't know, lollipops.

Ewell: Sure.

Martin: On LinkedIn, you sell widgets and machinery and software and all sorts of other things. If you're ever gonna use Link LinkedIn, you've gotta know that your audience is there. And not only that, are they active.

So, for example, Teachers they may have a LinkedIn profile, but they're not really active on LinkedIn. So, you gotta do a little bit of research using tools like Sales Navigator or other LinkedIn searches. The second thing that I say is that automation Is something to do about scale. It's not about the approach.

So, when I talk approach, I say, first of all, make sure that your profile, you treat your profile as a landing page. When people look at you, or people see you, when people read about you, it screams what you, what problem you solve, or what you do in an easy way. And you've gotta put yourself there out there and be approachable.

Then it's to me all about testing your market and saying, okay, I'm gonna search for them. Our targeting is right. They're active. I can see that they're there. Let me start doing a few things manually to see how it goes. And then once you've found a sequence of messages or a sequence of lang or a particular language you use in order to approach these people, then it's when you put automation.

But a lot of people, what they do is they start backwards. They're saying, Hey, I wanna do LinkedIn. Let me get automation so I'm not wasting time. And they're not doing the prep work as I call it. And the prep comes into depositioning. And that's you on your profile. The targeting, who you're looking for and the messaging.

And if you don't get that foundation right, the automation's not gonna work because you just putting bad stuff in, you're gonna get bad stuff out. And that's the baseline that people need to understand. Make sure that you do these three things first before you actually use automation in any way. Now once you use automation, oh it's endless the amount of stuff that you can do.

Obviously people can connect with one another in a personalized fashion. You can send them follow up, excuse me, you can send follow up messages and, Try to build a rapport and do it completely remotely. If they're not responsive on LinkedIn, you can switch to email and it does it automatically.

And maybe they're active on LinkedIn if, or an email. If that doesn't work, you hit them up on Twitter, and if that doesn't work, you go back to LinkedIn. And it could be just messaging or liking their content or commenting. There's so much you can do. There is no typical campaign that I can share.

 This is what works very well.

Ewell: I, and I heard a really great statistic the other day, and I've gotta dig it up, and it was talking about, The salespeople that are the most successful right now are the ones that are incorporating the social, and you just nailed it too. You didn't just you're not obviously your product is really, is lasered in on LinkedIn, but you also mentioned the other platforms as well.

Would you like a 44% uplift in performance?

So these they're just becoming omnipresent to their customer, which makes the sale a whole lot easier when they finally get to talk to the person.

Martin: I can give you very interesting stat and we do a lot of analysis on our campaigns, but I can tell you that a lot of people come to us because of LinkedIn and that's a history. But when they realize that we are multi-channel, they really embrace our platform, and I can get, I can tell you that you can easily get an uplift of 44% on average if you use multichannel over LinkedIn only.

Ewell: That's huge. That is really...

Martin: That's just a baseline minimum that you can expect. The thing is a lot of people have a LinkedIn account, but I'm not on LinkedIn every day, but I'm on my email, on my phone every day. So, you hit me up that way and sometimes I'm on Twitter, so yeah.

Ewell: what are the channels,  go through the channels so everybody, make sure we understand all the channels that you all touch.

Martin: Yeah, so you have LinkedIn as a channel. You have email as a channel. You have Twitter as a channel. At the moment, we're adding sms, we're adding WhatsApp and other channels. So, you'll have even more things to hit them up because as I said, they may not be as active on one platform or over another.

 Within LinkedIn you also have multiple channels. You have. You have messaging, you have emails, which is the LinkedIn's version of email. Within Sales navigator, you have LinkedIn groups, you have LinkedIn posts, LinkedIn events and all. You can communicate with people that are attending online events that are liking content.

So there is, within LinkedIn as a channel, there is so much available. So you hit the nail in the head as far as social, it is the future of. Selling it is the future of, in particular remote selling. And you've gotta be wherever they are. And unfortunately, people really focus some, sometimes only on one channel.

Some maybe they came from email switch and you don't have to switch.

Ewell: Okay, so I, and I know we're talking business to business, is there a play with Facebook is more social, Instagram is more, is there a play there too, or is that not the focus at all?

Martin: For b2b, our experience and our, as statistics say that LinkedIn is the only platform in the order of things will be as, as we see them now, LinkedIn, email, and Twitter in that order. As we introduce SMS, we'll see whether that kind of supersedes another SMS and WhatsApp's.

Not really social, it's more direct. But it is, it's when you've built a report with someone online, if you send them a text it's not unwelcome.

Ewell: That's very true. What's your favorite tool to use? Out of all the.

Martin: Look I use my own platform. I do use LinkedIn. I'm building a tremendous network in Dubai at the moment, ahead of my arrival. I personally, when I receive personalized messaging I do prefer that it comes through email cause I'm not always on LinkedIn. Email I'm most, like 80% of my time is on email every day.

So, I'm more receptive to that. But different people behave differently. It's where you're most active.

Ewell: Now, as you add these other tools are you in process of, are, is that gonna be built internally or is that going to absorb another company to bring 'em in?

Martin: No, we are now a hundred percent building everything internally. So we very, we got a great team. A lot of these things from a technical point of view, although I don't build it, I they're not as complicated as they used to be. Integrations with tools like Twilio and things like that, which make it super simple with their APIs to be able to offer SMS, ac you have to buy the credits, but it's easy to do.

It's just a matter of what is the right channels to add to the platform. Are they in demand? Will people use them? And that's the key decision that we need to make.

What's next for Meet Alfred?

Ewell: One more question then we'll wrap it up. What is, what do you see as the next big step for your company or where do you see the technology going? Wait. What's the trend you

Martin: Yeah, in our case, there is a, there's a company direction and then there's the Meet Alfred software direction. When it comes to Alfred itself, the direction we're taking it is that we are going to serve a market that has been screaming at us. To help them. And that's the agency market. A lot of companies want to use our product because we one of, if not the only, who has great LinkedIn and then multichannel.

So a lot of these agencies that provide outreach services for their clients, they want use Alfred as a white label service. Now we have not done white label because we focused on multichannel and our competitors are focused on white label. So now that we've completed that and we're leading in that space, adding white label is not that difficult.

And once we do it, a lot of those companies are gonna come to us. And switch over from whatever platforms they want. They want our product over theirs. So that's kinda where the direction is as far as software concerned. Beyond that, it's all about adding more channels.

And adding things that will add value to the customer as far as the company's concerned. I'm trying to close the deal on some acquisitions. Pardon the pun.

Ewell: Okay.

Martin: and then we're trying to target different current customer segments. We're building a platform for the high end sales professional, the really high large sales teams in competition with tools like Outreach and SalesLoft. So that's a space that I'm moving into as well, using the bread and butter of LinkedIn as its main ingredients.

Ewell: You're building a machine that's gonna be, I love it. I love what you're doing. Any final tips for a new user coming into your platform? 

Martin: Yeah, the first thing that, as I said, mentioned before, I think it's important that you do a little bit of groundwork in preparation for using automation. Don't start with that. Start with can you find the customers you're looking for on LinkedIn? Are they active? Are they responsive? Using my profile, re resonating with them.

Just do that foundational, I call it foundational work, and it can take a few weeks to nail. And then once you insert automation, be pace yourself. And what people want is they want immediate results. And with LinkedIn what, because you can build multi messaging campaigns you wanna ramp up your outreach over time.

So gimme, let me give you a quick example. A lot of people go with especially in North America, they go with a very aggressive introduction to connect.

That's, that might work in the us. It doesn't work all over the world in Australia. They'll tell you to get lost straight away. People don't like to be sold. S, I, we found that the cadences that work best have at least seven or eight steps in the sequence as messages over a three months period.

Ewell: Wow.

Martin: you are dripping these messages in trying to get response rates. Getting people to reply, getting people to be intrigued. Within that period, what you can supplement it is with content or with commentary on post or posting yourself. So, you build that kind of credibility with these people.

So, if you can do a combination of the two by the second or third month your calendar's gonna get fuller and fuller. Whereas a lot of people start straight away trying to sell, and it's, think of it as going to a networking event. You go to a networking event, you meet a bunch of people, you, handshake, exchange business cards.

You get back to them, oh, I'm busy. Can we have coffee another day? Blah, blah, blah. Like it, there is a process, right? You can fully automate that online on LinkedIn and using multichannel as well. And that in itself, I think is golden for people to appreciate it as you build volume, it just takes longer to get there.

Ewell: Regarding LinkedIn.

I just see more and more people get engaged, but it is a process to learn how to get in there. Where can people find you or your platform, Martin?

Martin: The website is meet alfred.com. You can contact me directly at meet martin@meetalfred.com. We've got 24 7 support.

So, depending on where I might be, you can hit the team and ask for me, and I'm sure I can come online to, to have a chat or schedule a call. So that's the easiest way.

 I'm on email first. You can obviously find me on LinkedIn. That's not a problem. But if you want my attention, you can quickly get it on email.

Ewell: Fantastic. Martin, I appreciate the insights. I appreciate you sharing the story of the background of your company. And I just see, just continued growth cuz LinkedIn is starting to really take off and that's how we even met through this entire process. So, I wish you continued success.

Martin: Awesome. No problem. Thanks for having me.

Ewell: And that is a wrap with Martin Martinez. Now, I'd be curious to know if you are gonna try out LinkedIn Automation if you're not already doing it. And that suggests check out, meet Alfred. The fact that Martin and his team are across 89 countries, clearly they're doing something extraordinarily well.

Not to mention much of that's been driven by word of mouth. And podcasts like this. So we appreciate having Martin on the show. And one favor for you. One favor for me. First, I love you. To whatever podcast player you're listening to this on is to like it. And then also share it with your friends so we can grow this community.

And my favor for you is to make sure you're intentional about making this day a great day. Take care. See you at the next episode.