Episode #92 Is LinkedIn Dead? Nope. You’re Just Posting Wrong ft. Darren McKee

This episode of Bridge the Gap features the legendary Darren McKee—LinkedIn whisperer, social selling coach, and former pizza-slinger turned revenue disruptor. Darren’s coached over 900 leaders on how to stop being sales robots and start building authentic relationships that actually close.

We dive into:
•Why most go-to-market strategies are broken by design
•How Darren hit 147% of quota by ignoring the “playbook”
•The truth about LinkedIn’s algorithm (spoiler: nobody knows)
•Why promoted posts are a death sentence
•The future of B2B is DTC (yeah, really)

If you’re a founder, revenue leader, or rep trying to unlearn bad sales religion and grow real pipeline, this one’s for you.

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🎙️ Guest: Darren McKee – https://darrenmckee.co

Follow Darren - https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenmckeesales/

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Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode, we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful for you choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. Let's get to it. 

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. I am beyond excited to have someone I've been trying to get on the show. I feel like for the better part of a damn year, and he's so damn busy with what he's doing, and I'm so grateful you made the time. We have Darren McKee here, who is a dad, husband, founder of Darren McKee Co., where he's coached over 900 leaders, individual contributors, all sorts of folks, some that I've even placed in those courses, on how to master LinkedIn and social selling. Before that, I did not know this. 

He was a pizza chef, a mail room guy, a recruiter, ultimately finding into his way to this like sexy world of fast sales, where he found his footing, realized it wasn't so sexy, worked with some of the top names in the industry, and is now out here doing his own thing and making a difference. Welcome to the show, man. Feel free to steal that intro and like replay it. 

I know, it's super great. It was awesome. I'm excited to be here. I know we've been trying to do this for the last, you know, better part of year, and I think this is the first time me and Dale have ever even like, been on a call together. 

Yeah, I try to keep everyone away from him, man. Yeah, yeah. I'm never talking to you again. 

He knows like I'm going to steal everything from him, so it's okay. I saw that. Darren's awesome to connect with you in person, or virtually in person. And Amsa had a lot of great things, especially with all the LinkedIn stuff that you guys are doing, which is super interesting. We'll get into a little bit, but you've gone across like, listen to that intro, you've gone across a bunch of different things. One of the things we talk a lot about is challenges with the go-to-market strategy. So bring us back to a moment where you felt like that go-to-market strategy, you were trying to like build or manipulate or change or like totally out of control. Could have been like your sales team was terrible, or you had no process, or... 

I just had this conversation two weeks ago with my old president of field sales and one of the companies I used to work with. And I think the interesting part when I joined a couple of these organizations, it was like, hey, we're going to put everybody in sequences, we're going to put everybody in cadences, we're going to make sure we get a certain amount of dials. You've got a multi-thread between seven and 14 people in every single deal. Sales cycles take six to 12 months. And I was like, this sounds awful. 

Why are you telling a new hire that they're going to do all these things and they're going to take a really long time to close a deal and they're going to have to do all of these things that seem daunting? And so at that point, I just looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, I'm not going to do any of that stuff. 

Right? How can I ask somebody to do it if I'm not going to do it? 

Yeah, right. And so I got in trouble a little bit and then all of a sudden I was 147% of ramp in my first six months and my cold calls were the lowest, my outbound emails were the lowest, everything was the lowest but I was still closing revenue. And so that was kind of the time where I was like, all right, let's blow this thing up and do it in the way that we're supposed to do and build relationships and try to find intent and go after it pretty quickly. So I think it was at that moment where I realized the industry was just broken and kind of needed to be shaken up. And fortunately, three years later, I was able to jump into a spot where I could figure that out. Even in last roll at Sky, I was able to come in and not do things different and get us to a pretty good revenue clip. 

So what year was that? Was that 22? 

That you were like, Vicky Ness? Yeah, end of 2020, all of 21. Okay. 

So there's another founder out there that we talk about a lot. Darren, I don't know if you've met the CEO of Attention, but you guys would totally hit it off because his whole premise is do shit that's unscalable, not what everyone tells you to go out and do. And that's how you're going to grow. 

And he's built an amazing multi-million dollar company that likely is going to be, in my opinion, like the new Gong, and I used to be the biggest Gong fanboy. Because going out there and sending hundreds of scripted, cold emails, it just doesn't work, right? You talk about this all the time. 

It doesn't work. When you look back, and you look back at whether it was Sky or whether it was, I think it was better up before that if I'm not mistaken, how long until you realize what the real gap was? Was it right away that you're like, fuck, you people are crazy? Was it a couple months in that you were like, maybe we should do this differently? 

No, I mean, there was a lot of that. Everybody was, that company changed my entire life, right? And I learned everything I know about sales because of that organization. I think one of the things that I started to realize quickly was like, we were trying to build everyone into the same human. And for me, it was like, this person is really good in person with financial businesses. This person is really good running conferences. 

This person is really good in LinkedIn, DMs, and videos. Like let them do the thing that they were like built out and set out to do. And so we talk about like string space approaches and coaching. It's like, okay, well, let's cater to those things and let them do that. And so I think something that obviously, there's a coach, a lot of sales leaders in the 80s now, and I'm like, hey, like, I'm trying to not have you be a cog in the wheel. Like I'm trying to have you be the unique human that you are going to be. As long as you are closing deals, like let's do that thing. And now, listen, not everybody's going to work out in that category because some people need structure and some people need some guidance, but like we have that for those people too. Right? 

There is, there's still structure and guidance in what you do. And I think, you know, you're not telling people to go be the wild, wild West and just go out there and do whatever. I think there's still structure and guidance. 

But how do you now, and sorry, Dale, but how do you now, especially with coaching people from the outside, get people to convince their CEOs and their CROs that like, I don't have to be the cog in the wheel that follows this exact playbook and says, hi, Darren, my name is Adam. It's okay if I'm going to do LinkedIn. It's okay if I'm going to hop on, I mean, hopping on airplanes a bit different because there's a big cost there. But yeah, and I do think in person works, but it's okay if I don't send the script that you want. Let me try it this way. How do you convince senior leaders that that's okay? 

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's super hard. The only, one of the only ways that you do that is to connect that senior leader with another senior leader that has already seen success doing this. And so, and then the only other thing is like, I tell people, if you're going to go try to do this and you're coming, you're going to have to have a quick win. 

If you don't have a win in the first 90 days of doing this, like you're probably gone. And they're going to be like, hey, do what's been working for us for a really long time. But like, I have always done it this way. I'm just, I have such a playbook that like, if you run that playbook, it's going to work, right? Like my biggest thing that I love when I go into organizations and they're like, yeah, our average, you know, our average sales cycle is nine months. And then I come in and I'm like, why? Right. 

What are we, what are we doing? And it should be 45 days, right? We took guys average sales cycle in the first year that I was there was like six to nine months to the last year. It was like 45 days. And that's just because we stopped talking about it. 

Yeah, so that's, so it's interesting. Let's talk through that a little bit because I think those there's, there's three levers we always talk about. It's like, what's the time to close so your deal velocity, the average deal size that you're, you're portraying on and then like to close rates. Like if you, if you're starting to pull those levers, you're starting to, starting to scale and get repeatability. What did you do to bring it down from like, because I think everyone just says six to nine months depending on what size of the deal is. How did you, how did you get it down to 45? 

Yeah, average deal size was at the first year around like 80 K a year. Yeah. And average deal size got over six figures in that second year, which is kind of interesting because people, you know, typically would say, hey, if it's faster, it's smaller. And we didn't see that. So typically the conversation would go right. 

For our whole life in sales, we've been built and trained to like walk into that meeting and be like, hey, like this is, this is going to take us a little bit of time. Right. You're going to have to go through finance. You're going to have to go through legal. We're going to have to probably mess with some stuff on SOC2 and GDPR. 

We're going to have to probably build some things in. You got to meet all these people. We got to meet all these people. So you do that in the first couple calls and all of a sudden your buyer looks at you and they're like, I don't want to do that. Right. And it's like all of a sudden it just takes forever. I don't care if you're using one of those tools where like everything's in one place and you can see what's going on. 

I forgot what it's called now. So I just switched the script and in the first call, you know, I sold the chief learning officers and VPs of organizational development. And in the first call, I say, hey, listen, some people take a really long time to implement this. The majority of folks, we get this done in 30 to 45 days. At most we're in the 60 day range. Here are the things that we need to accomplish in the next like 10 days. 

I'm going to push you hard because I know you need this. And as long as I said that, they were, they were pretty good. Like they don't want to work on a project for nine months. No buyer wants to try to implement your company in nine months. 

So you're at the implementation stage, not at the buying stage, or that is the combination of both. That's in the very first call. No, no, no. But when you're talking about the time frame, are you talking about the time frame to buy or are you talking about the time frame to implement? 

Oh, time to implement is a whole other animal. Okay. Time for contract signature. And then I mean, most companies that I've worked with, right? I think y'all probably see this as an AE from contract signature to full launch date has to be less than 90 days. Yeah, 100%. And if it slips, then the likelihood of it continuing in a slip is pretty high. 100%. But yeah, so implementation. I don't really care about that because it doesn't have my job. 

Don't confuse sales and execution. 

Yeah. I would tell everybody I've ever interviewed with, I am a really good starter. I would get you to a million. I will not get you past that. And I'm not going to be the AM. You sure? 

Is it really? I want to push back a little bit on this. Yeah. So, and you shouldn't be the AM. And I agree that implementation isn't sales' problem. Yeah. But we deal with a lot of companies dealing with one now that is having an incredible amount of churn, like ridiculous churn. Sales is closing deals fast, but I think that when it comes down to it, are they closing the right deals? Everyone likes to say when churn happens, oh, it's because CS isn't doing this or COMP management didn't do that or the handoff wasn't this. How do you balance the we need to move fast, but we got to sell to the right people as well? 

I think it depends on what stage of the business that you're in. If you're pre-seed seed, there is no wrong deal because you're learning, right? I will always be in that camp. I used to hate, I mean, it happened last week on LinkedIn. Somebody was like, you got 100 leads, they're all wrong and you're wasting your time. There's no wrong lead when you're a seed stage startup. I don't care if it's Joe over here that runs the long care business that wants to talk about coaching. I'll have the conversation because it's just at bat. 

But I think as you grow and you get bigger, right? This is an interesting conversation to have because if you're a cog in the wheel and you're just an AE at an organization, you're just trying to make a ton of money, you don't really care. 

I think people are trying to hire to that as well. Where does the root of that come in from? Is it like the investor? Is it the old school sales thinking? Where do you see that root cause of that happening? 

Well, I think it's just because every single all hands we've ever been on, it's like, we got to get to this AR. We got to get to this AR and it's not like, hey, we've got to fix our net revenue retention. 

We don't talk about those things. It's just like, and then it's in every quarter, like, get these deals in, get these deals in, get these deals in, get these deals in, right? And it's like, all right, well, I'm just going to do what you told me to do, right? 

It's up to everybody else to figure it out. But I mean, listen, like I try to have conversations like my reputation has been on the line being a seller for the rest of my career. So if I sell somebody a shitty deal, they're never going to sign up for me in the next company. The one beautiful thing about Sky is after I was gone from the last company in the same space, I was able to convert a majority of my customers over, right? Because I sold them something great back then and they knew I was going to take care of them here. 

It wasn't all about the product. They trusted you. 

Yeah. I mean, listen, like I'm always in the camp of like, sure, is there always a premier player in the space that's just like a better platform, better this? But at the end of the day, when you get to a certain point, like, they're going to do the same things, right? It's like thinking about CRMs. 

It's CRM. Are you going to be really good? You're going to have a really good AM. You're going to have a really good seller. 

You're going to have a really good founder. That's what people care about right now. And especially with like the younger generation, Adam and I were talking about this the other day. The average B2B buyer is 36 years old right now today. And 77% of B2B buying decisions are based on whether they can see content and see human behavior in the C-suite. 

So like, it's not even necessarily about is the product the best. It's like, can they feel comfortable doing business with this individual? And so that's kind of why I focus so hard on social selling. 

It's like, if I'm in the final round of a, you know, 17 meeting deal and it's me and two competitors. Well, I want them to know that like, I've got two kids and I love the outdoors and I love to travel because they want to do business with that person versus the person they know nothing about. 

You do a really good job of that and of teaching others to do that of humanizing yourself, right? Like, I think, and I say this often, it used to be that if you were a halfway good salesperson with a halfway good product with someone who had half a budget, you can show up and be like, oh, we can do this and fix this. Oh, I have some money to spend. Great. 

And today's sellers were a little older, but most of today's sellers have never worked in a different world where they have to work to get a sale. It's again, you're halfway decent and people have money. Great. 

It's changing where I want to shift gears slightly. You in my opinion, and I've said this to more than a few people, no LinkedIn better than 90% of people out there. You don't have some secret path and secret backbone to, you know, the CEO of LinkedIn. It's not like they're feeding you super secret information. I'm sure people ask you all the time, well, Taryn, what's going on with the Algo? I don't fucking know. 

Like, I know it's not good. But LinkedIn is changing. Where, and this is going to be a very broad question, where is LinkedIn going and what are the fundamental changes you believe we're going to see in the platform and how it helps or hinders sellers? 

Over the next 30, I don't know if they know where they're going yet. 

I don't think they know where they're going yet. You know, let's face it, y'all. Hiring sales talent is a real pain in the ass. Getting a player is key to bridging your go to market gap, but it's harder than ever. 

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You know, one year, like, we're fully into creator, we're fully into social selling, we're fully into social media, we're fully into just being a social media platform. Then the next year, it's, hey, we've taken the word creator out of everything on our entire platform. We don't want people to go viral. We don't want this to be social media. And now it's like, okay, let's implement this video feed and have a 4U page and have all of these things. So we're now social media again. And it's like, I think they're trying to figure out what's happening in the space. 

I have a very strong idea of where we are going. And I don't think it's B2B. And I think it's direct to consumer. And so I think, I think LinkedIn becomes a place where people go to learn, people go to buy, people go to find exactly what they need to have. 

And direct to consumer becomes the primary force. And the only reason I say that is because I track the people that are signing up for my classes. And it's the long care guide, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, it's the roofer, it's the fence guide, the landscaper, it's the coach. It's the individual selling to an individual and a solopreneur because it's the only platform where humans are traceable. There's no other platform where you can trace a human task, a username. 

I agree with you 100%, but I think we're seeing this across the board, not just LinkedIn, like IG in my opinion, and you, I don't know how recent, but you have recently started popping up on my IG feed. Don't know if it's paid or if it's just or not. 

I don't know what I'm doing. But you have started showing up on my IG feed, but you know who else has showed up on my IG feed is the local AC guy, is the local, you know, long guy showing a video of the great lawn he's cut. And forget a year ago, three months ago, you would never see the long guy or the electrician on Instagram promoting his services. I think, and that is coming over to the B2B world of LinkedIn. I think it's a fundamental shift and it goes back to this human nature of people want to buy from humans, not from companies. 

I mean, I think it goes down to the whole, like this is probably counterintuitive to this, you know, or both of our businesses. But it's never been easier to make $70,000 online. And so why would you go be, why would you go work 60 hours a week at a startup when you can make... 

Only 60? 

Only 60? 

See what I did there? And there's cross advertising from Facebook and Instagram, right? So it could be that they're just putting it on Facebook and they pay to cross pollinate it into IG. Like the localization part of like a Facebook or an IG is that it's easy to segment audiences there. That's not the way LinkedIn works. 

Like you're not segmenting audiences online in that way. Not yet. Not yet. 

But maybe they're getting there. And I think people from a business perspective are more scared about LinkedIn because like, are you on LinkedIn or you're not on LinkedIn? Many people are on Facebook or IG, especially if it's a visual thing like long cutting, you know, any of those things. Like it's easier to do a picture on what you're doing than like... 

Yeah, it's fun. I think the more real you can be right now, the better, right? Like I saw somebody yesterday talk about like how, you know, the reach was so down and they now grow them was so bad. And the same person that said that was the same person that was having their posts boosted and promoted all over LinkedIn over the last two weeks. 

So like they were flooding and there's multiple people that are talking like this. But it's just the same post. I see over and over and over and over again. And I'm like, I don't want to see your face anymore. So a lot of people are clicking, I don't want to see this. 

And then LinkedIn is saying, okay, well, you don't want to see this human. And so then they're gone. Right. 

And so they're out of the, they're like promoting a post on LinkedIn as a death sentence. Right. Tell me more. Tell me more. Yeah. Well, because it just has promoted by, you know, the brand that you... 

And then all this... Six months ago, everyone there was saying, this is the best thing ever. You could promote your posts. Yeah. 

Well, now it's like, it's like, I don't want to see, you know, let's just, let's just say I did it. I don't want to see Darren's face nine times on my feet in a day. 

A hundred... A hundred... Right. With like knowing that it's boosted or promoted. And it's like, it doesn't really make sense. And then the next post, like somebody complaining about it. I don't know. 

Just weird to me. So like keeping it organic and keeping it real is probably the most, you know, impactful thing. I mean, we can get into what happened two weeks ago on the platform if you're all wanting a little bit. But I think like, you know... 

Are we talking about... Oh, I don't know. Seamless and Apollo? 

Well, I mean, it's just like, I love both of them. I've used both of them. They're great humans. But... But like, that's just the first domino. 

Yeah. No doubt in my mind. No doubt in my mind. You've got intent tools. 

You've got enrichment tools. You've got every... They're all good. It's going to be a disaster. 

So let's go down that path. Because I think there's a lot of people trying to figure out like, what is the evolution coming? Because like, one of the people... One of the things that we hear from a lot of people when we talk about their gap and their go-to-market is, we need more top of funnel. We want more top of funnel. Like, all of these different things that are happening within top of funnel. And so, like, keeping it real and organic is one thing. But then you have all these data providers and aggregators and et cetera, et cetera. Like, what is going to happen? You said it's the first domino. 

I think there's a lot of people that just continue to take risks because they have to. And, you know, tie a lot of those things to their accounts and go that direction. And I think that that's just a risk that they're going to have to take. You know, the other thing that is going to have to happen if it just continues to go this route is like, LinkedIn's going to have to build some better tools inside of Sales Navigator so we don't have to, you know, do these things, which I think they're probably thinking about. But, you know, that's the route that, you know, we're going to go. 

And I think you talk about top of funnel, right? Like, you know, I'll go out on a limb and say that, like, you can buy 13 sales tools for your team. And you're going to pay, what, 7,000 a person per year, probably? You know, so, do the math. You have $4 million in sales tools for a team of 20. Or you can pay, you know, somebody like myself, $50,000 to come in and help all of your leaders learn how to write. And you're going to get way more, I've always, you're going to get way more engagement. 

You're going to get way more inbound than, like, all of these things that you just, like, paid $4 million for. Now, it's way harder to do what I do. But, like, I think that's the future. And I think that's why my business has grown so fast right now is because people are so scared to automate. And they just want to figure out how to be a human again because they forgot over the last 10 years how to write. 

Yeah, but the interesting part about that is, like, will people really do the work, right? I mean, you take 10 people, do two people do the work, and then, like, now you're back into that iteration of, like, I need to hire people and you hire journalists. 

Who are you hiring? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's why that's why that is a huge role right now for a lot of tech firms, head of creative, head of journal, head of writing, head of EGC, right? Like, these are all, I think, you know, those are going to be the roles that, like, we're looking at, right? 

Like, how do we build there? And, I mean, it's already happening, right? That's why you see it all the time. I mean, I made a post about Alexis Bertoff at Megaport the other day. Look what she's doing at Megaport. 

She's changed the entire perception of what that company is across a myriad of different industries now. You know, so, like, for me, like, honestly, I'm sitting here and I'm, like, trying to grow this team. If I was trying to grow this team to 10, of course, I need to get an engineer because I don't know what to do about anything on that side of the house. But very, very quickly, I'm hiring somebody that has a 10 times my brand. And I'm paying them a lot. Yep. 

So, how do you pick the person, Darren, to do that? So, I'm obviously very bullish on what you do and the service you offer, but, like, let's be real, you're not the only one out there. I get a gazillion emails a day. And my favorite is when I get an email from someone who has, like, 627 followers telling me that I'm using LinkedIn wrong. How do you, how do companies, how do founders, how do CEOs, like, other than ask for receipts and recommendations, like, how do you choose who to come in and spend that $50,000 on? Because you're right. I'm going to spend $50,000 for Darren McKee to come talk to my team for whatever your hourly rate is, however long that you come in. 

Or I'm going to go by HeyReach and Expandy and all these great automation tools that eventually are, and nothing against those companies, sorry, but eventually are going to get booted off LinkedIn and I promise are not going to give you a refund on the subscriptions you've paid. Yeah. Because it varies in their terms of service. There's some clause that says they don't have to. 

Yeah. I mean, going back to what I said earlier, right, like, you've got to show examples of where it's happened in other organizations, right? Like, I'm thinking of one in particular. I've been working with them for 90 days now. They've got three sellers, you know, they were having trouble booking meetings. 

They've booked 22 first calls with their top target accounts in their top 70. Right. And that sounds like a lot of proof. 

Right. They've shared content every single day for the last 90 days, right? And they're doing, they're doing 100 comments a week. Like, they're doing the things that they need to be doing. But the easiest way, man, is to coach the founder first and show them that, like, okay, well, let me work with you for, three hours. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, everything just changed for me. I will pay you whatever you want. 

And that's hard to get to found. Like, we talk about that all the time. Now it's about like the value and like, hey, I have 800, everything to do. And like, I don't have time to do this all the time, but you're fully right about that. 

Yeah. I just have other founders that I've coached reach out to founders for me. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is the best way to do it and be like, it's so worth it. Yeah. Because we'll do whatever it takes. 

I'll loom video record. So like, typically what I do, how I get a meeting there just to be fun for the podcast. But like, I'll go to a company that's got 80 reps across the world, right? And they've got a founder, their series D, whatever. And I'll screen record myself in Sales Navigator and I'll be like, hey, here's your competitor here. They've got 62 people engaging and creating content out of the 80 reps that they have. Let's go look at you really quick. 

You've got two and like your turn numbers are horrible. These people are about to raise more money. Tiger Capital is about to invest in them. I wonder why. And just leave it there. 

And just leave it there. And like, it's not only the content, it's like the fact that like that CEO or founders posting content, their team is not even engaging in it. So like everybody in the outside looks like, well, that's a shitty place to work. But if you don't engage with your CEO's posts, you don't really care about your company very much. 

So I agree with you, but let's now flip this. So you have the CEO's post, you have the AE's post, and you have someone in marketing who's saying, but we got a post from the company account, Darren. We got a post from the company, LinkedIn account. Everyone's got to go do that. Thoughts on that. And I know you have them. 

I mean, I always just ask the same question. I get this question all the time. And I'm like, when's the last time you went and hung out on a company account? 

I mean, only reason I go to a company account is to make sure that the company is real. I see somebody, I'm like, all right, what's that? Okay, cool. Like it's set up great. They probably have a business. That's about it. I had never looked at a follower account of a company page. I don't care. 

It doesn't matter, right? Follow some sass bros. I've got 2,500 on the one now. I don't, I could care less. I forgot all about sass bros. Yeah, 10,000. Yeah, that RIP to that business, that was hard to run. 

But I think you did some great things, but that's like, not to derail us, but that seems very labor intensive. 

It was great. We just couldn't scale over 15k a month, which split between two people in taxes. I was like, well, I don't know. 

We're having a conversation about other things now. 

I hear you. Yeah, I was like, what? Where's the ROI here, folks? Yeah. My time, getting out of bed. Yeah, somebody pay me cash. I'm just kidding. How is Eric doing? Great, yeah. 

He's doing like 20 houses a month staging. He hasn't logged in to LinkedIn, but one time in the last year. Yeah, he's great. Yeah, he's awesome. He's living the life. 

Well, us here on LinkedIn. It's a drug. It's a fucking drug. Yeah. My wife yells at me, she's like, it's nine o'clock at night. You're laying in bed. What the fuck are you doing on LinkedIn? 

Yeah, well, I don't know. It pays for my life, so. 

Why, too? Yeah, yeah. But yeah, company pages. I think there's a strategy that I'm seeing right now that's really working if you want to implement it, but you have to be extremely witty. 

And you have to be talk about. You have to be dueling, you have to be Airbnb, you have to be Parks and Wildlife. You have to be snarky and snippy and witty with the way that you build your brand. 

And careful that you don't destroy it going the other way. 

Yeah, well, like Southwest yesterday, it's not like we traded Luca. That backfired really bad. But yeah, I thought it was funny and then I was like, I'm not a Southwest customer, so, you know, probably hurts. Yeah. 

I would listen. I would love to keep going forever and ever and ever, but we are at that little thing that we call time. A couple rapid-fire questions for you, though. 

Yeah, let's kick it. What's one piece of advice specifically related to social selling that you gave that now you look back and you're like, fuck, that was horrible. Should never give it that advice. 

Uh, post every day and put five hours into the platform every day. I think it's probably really terrible advice now looking back at it. I used to coach people. I'm like, you gotta live here. You gotta post every day. You can't take a break. Now I'm seeing that like three times a day and 45 minutes in the morning is, I mean, three times a week and 45 minutes. 

Three times a day. Yeah, three times a day. I do that sometimes. But yeah, I mean, listen, if you're a founder, you don't have two hours. Yeah. 

You have 45 minutes. You gotta do a lot in 45 minutes. 

When's the last time you felt like you had that imposter syndrome and like, what'd you do to overcome that? 

Uh, I got over imposter syndrome pretty fast. Um, so I got really lucky and the last company I worked with, Sky, um, I was surrounded by like insanely successful founders pretty much every week with dinners and I would sit around dinner and like, they're just the same as me. 

Right. Like, I remember the first time I met Alex Lieberman, I was, you know, about to shit my pants. I was like, I don't know what's happening. I'm like, we say we just, just, this is dude. 

He's just a normal dude and he just tries way more things than all of us do. Um, and I think that's the success point. But yeah, I don't really, it doesn't happen very much. I mean, I do wake up, I don't know if this is just being a founder, but I do wake up like two or three times a month thinking like everything's going to get destroyed and crumble. I'm not going to have a business and then everything's going to fall apart. 

That is being a founder. And that actually ties to my next question there. And so if you lost everything tomorrow with some very first move you'd make, um, very first move I'd make tomorrow. 

Um, I just call all the other people I've worked with because I kept relationships with every single company that I'm a part of. I've got referral partnerships with every company that I've worked with. I would just go work with them. Um, you know, that's the one thing I always, it's a good interview question. If you're interviewing AEs to ask them, um, you know, hey, are your referral partner with any of the companies that you've worked with? The answer is no. Probably not a good sign. 

Yeah, that is a great question. You posted about that the other week too. Yeah, yeah. So as we close this thing off, um, if you're a revenue leader listening to this thing right now and you're kind of like in these go to market gaps, what's one thing that they need to hear like right now? 

Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to what I just said about Alex. Um, you got to try a lot of stuff, right? Like you've got to go to the weird events. You've got to get out and create organic content. Um, you've got to make some weird hires to see if it's going to happen. Um, I mean, you just got to do things that like everybody else isn't doing. 

Um, and I think if you do that, you're going to make some mistakes, but you're going to have some really big wins. Um, and that's the one thing I just keep telling people. I'm like, hey, what's the, so we asked our kids these three questions every single day of their life. So when they're scared about something or they don't want to do something, I say, Landon Cooper, what's the best thing that could possibly happen here? And then they answer it. And then I say, what's the worst thing that could possibly happen here? And they answer it. And then I'm like, what's probably going to happen here? 

Uh, and I asked that in every single discovery call I go on, um, and it always ends and all right, like I'm willing to, to, to see the, the middle ground here. Yep. 

I love that. Test, try, test, see what happens to a field. Do more. 

Yeah. Hang out with other founders. Probably that's another thing I'd say. Don't isolate yourself. I love it. 

Darren, where, uh, where can people find you on LinkedIn? 

And the website is at my house, but don't show up. 

No, don't show up at the house. Yeah. Don't shop at the house. But yeah, Darren Mickey dot co co. Yeah, I will tell you, I have sent people to Darren's course. I have gone through Darren's course. I am going through Darren's course. Again, you want to go through this course and maybe just maybe if you reach out and tell him our, our sent you, maybe there's a little something we can figure out. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Use the power of referrals. 

Use the power of LinkedIn. Darren, thanks so much for joining the show, man. We appreciate it. Yeah, man. Y'all have a great day. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

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