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Episode · Apr 16, 2025

Is LinkedIn Dead? Nope. You’re Just Posting Wrong

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:

Discussed in this episode

  • 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)
Full transcriptRead

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 his way to this like sexy world of SaaS 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 replay it over. It was awesome. I'm excited to be here and yeah, I know we've been trying to do this for the last, you know, better part of a year. And I think this is the first time me and Dale have ever even like been on a quality call. I try to keep everyone away from him, man. Like, I'm never talking to you again. He knows like I'm going to steal everything from him, so it's all good. So that's awesome. Darren, it's awesome to connect with you in person, virtually in person. And M said 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—listening to that intro—you got 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 build or manipulate or change was like totally out of control. Could have been like your sales team was terrible or you had no process. 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 you know, 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 fourteen people in every single deal. Sales cycles take six to twelve 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 it's going to take them 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, like I just looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, "I'm not going to do any of that stuff." And how can I ask somebody to do it if I'm not going to do it? Right. And so, you know, I got in trouble a little bit and then, you know, 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 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 like the industry was just broken and kind of needed to be shaken up. And fortunately, you know, three years later, I was able to jump into a spot where I could figure that out. And even in my last role at Sky, I was able to come in and do things different and get us to a pretty good revenue clip.

What year was that? Was that '22?

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 Anise, the CEO of Attention. But you guys would totally hit it off because his whole premise is do unscalable stuff, not what everyone tells you to go out and do. And like that's how you're going to grow. And he's built an amazing multi-million dollar company that likely is, you know, 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, like it just doesn't work, right? We talk about this all the time.

When you look back at whether it was Sky or whether it was I think it was BetterUp before that, if I'm not mistaken, how long until you realize like what the real gap was? Like was it right away that you're like, "These people are crazy"? Was it a couple months in that you were like maybe we should do this different?

No, I mean 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 built out and set out to do."

And so, you know, we talk about like strength-based approaches and coaching. It's like, okay, well, let's cater to those things and let them do that. And so, you know, I think something that, you know, obviously you know this—I coach a lot of sales leaders and AEs now. And I'm like, "Hey, I'm trying to not have you be a cog in the wheel. I'm trying to have you be the unique human that you are going to be as long as you are closing deals. 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 we have that for those people too, right?

But there is still structure and guidance in what you do. And I think you're not telling people go be the 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 a plane. I mean, hopping on an airplane's a bit different because there's a big cost there, but yeah, 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 super hard. The only way that you do that is to connect that senior leader with another senior leader that has already seen success doing this, right? And then the only other thing is like I tell people, "You have to have a quick win. If you don't have a win in the first ninety 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 such a playbook that 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 sales cycle is nine months." And then I come in and I'm like, "Why?" Right? Like what are we doing? It should be forty-five days, right?

We took Sky's average sales cycle in the first year that I was there, which was like six to nine months, to the last year it was like forty-five days. And that's just because we stopped talking about it.

Yeah. So that's interesting. Let's talk through that a little bit because I think 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 portraying on, and then like the close rates. Like if you're starting to pull those levers, you're starting to scale and get repeatability. What did you do to bring it down from like six to nine months? Because I think everyone just says six to nine months depending on what the size of the deal is. How'd you get it down to forty-five days?

Yeah, average deal size in the first year was around like eighty K a year. Average deal size got over six figures in that second year, which is kind of interesting because people typically would...

Say hey, if it's faster, it's smaller, and we just didn't see that.

So typically the conversation would go, right? And for our whole life in sales, we've been built and trained to walk into that meeting and be like, "Hey, 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 SOC 2 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 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. In the first call, you know, I sold the chief learning officers and VPs of organizational development, and at the end of 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 10 days. I'm going to push you hard because I know you need this." And as long as I said that, 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.

But 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 the time frame to implement?

Oh, time to implement is a whole other animal. 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 you know, the likelihood of it continuing to slip is pretty high. But implementation, I don't really care about that because it's not my job. Don't confuse sales and execution.

Yeah. I'm a really good starter. I will 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 you shouldn't be the AM. And I agree that implementation isn't a sales problem, 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?

Yeah. Everyone likes to say when churn happens, "Oh, it's because CS isn't doing this or account management didn't do that or the handoff wasn't this." How do you balance the 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, there is no wrong deal because you're learning, right? I will always be in that camp. I used to hate it. I mean, it happened. It happened last week on LinkedIn. Somebody was like, you know, you got a hundred leads, they're all wrong, and you're wasting your time. There's no wrong lead when you're a seed-stage startup. Like, I don't care if it's Joe over here that runs the lawn care business that wants to talk about coaching. I'll have the conversation because it's just at-bats.

But I think as you grow and you get bigger, right? Like, this is an interesting conversation to have because if you're a cog in the wheel, right, 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'm just being honest. And I think people are trying to hire to that as well, right?

So where does the root of that cause come from? Is it like the investors? Is it the old school sales thinking? Where do you see that the 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 ARR. We got to get to this ARR." And it's not like, "Hey, we got to fix our net revenue retention." Like, we don't talk about those things. So it's just like, and then it's every quarter. "Let's 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? Like it's up to everybody else to figure it out."

But I mean, listen, like I've tried to have conversations. My reputation has been on the line being a seller for the rest of my career. So if I sell somebody a crappy deal, they're never going to sign up for me at 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. Yeah, it wasn't all about the product. Like 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 CRM. It's a CRM, right? Are you going to be really good? Are you going to have a really good AM? Are you going to have a really good seller? Are you 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 whether the product is 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 17-meeting deal and it's me and two competitors, well, I want them to know that 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. 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 could 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, we're all 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 like, 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, know LinkedIn better than 90% of people out there. You don't have some secret path and secret bat phone 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, Taran, what's going on with the algo?" I don't know. Like, I know as much as you do.

But LinkedIn is changing. Where, and this is going to be a very broad question, 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?

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You know, one year it's like, "We're fully into creator. We're fully into social selling. We're fully into social."

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 For You page and have all of these things." So we're now social media again.

I think LinkedIn is trying to figure out what's happening in the space. I have a very strong idea of where we are going. I don't think it's B2B. I think it's direct to consumer.

I think LinkedIn becomes a place where people go to learn, people go to buy, people go to find exactly what they need. Direct to consumer becomes the primary force. The only reason I say that is because I track the people that are signing up for my classes. It's the lawn care guy, the real estate agent, the mortgage lender, the roofer, the fence guy, the landscaper, the coach, the individual selling to an individual, the solopreneur. It's the only platform where humans are traceable. There's no other platform where you can trace a human past a username.

I agree with you 100%, but I think we're seeing this across the board, not just LinkedIn. Instagram—I don't know how recent, but you have recently started popping up on my IG feed. I don't know if it's paid or if it's just organic, but you have started showing up on my IG feed. But you know who else has shown up on my IG feed? The local AC guy, the local lawn guy showing a video of the great lawn he's cut. Forget a year ago—three months ago, you would never see the lawn guy or the electrician on Instagram promoting his services.

I think 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.

This is probably counterintuitive to both of our businesses, but it's never been easier to make $70,000 online. So why would you go work 60 hours a week at a startup when you can make 60? Only 60? Yeah, see what I said there?

There's cross-advertising from Facebook and Instagram, right? So it could be that they're just putting it on Facebook and they paid to cross-pollinate it into IG. The localization part of Facebook or IG is that it's easy to segment audiences there. That's not the way LinkedIn works. You're not segmenting audiences on LinkedIn that way. Not yet. Not yet. But I think people from a business perspective are more scared about LinkedIn because if you're on LinkedIn or you're not on LinkedIn. Many people are on Facebook or IG, especially if it's a visual thing like lawn cutting. It's easier to do a picture of what you're doing than anything else.

It's fun. I think the more real you can be right now, the better. I saw somebody yesterday talk about how the reach was so down and the algorithm was so bad. The same person that said that was the same person that was having their post boosted and promoted all over LinkedIn over the last two weeks. They were flooding the feed, and there's multiple people talking like this, but it's just the same post I see over and over and over again. 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? Promoting a post on LinkedIn is a death sentence, right?

Tell me more. Tell me more.

Well, because it just says "promoted by" the brand, and then all of a sudden, six months ago, everyone was saying this is the best thing ever. You could promote your posts. Well, now it's like I don't want to see, let's just say, I don't want to see Darren's face nine times on my feed in a day with the knowledge that it's boosted or promoted. It doesn't really make sense. And then the next post is somebody complaining about it. It's just weird to me.

Keeping it organic and keeping it real is probably the most impactful thing. We can get into what happened two weeks ago on the platform if you all want, but I think there's something to discuss. Are we talking about Seamless and Apollo?

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

No doubt in my mind. No doubt in my mind. You've got intent tools, enrichment tools, you've got everything. They're all going to be impacted. It's going to be a disaster.

Let's go down that path because I think there's a lot of people trying to figure out what the evolution is coming because one of the things we hear from a lot of people when we talk about their gap in 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. Keeping it real and organic is one thing, but then you have all these data providers and aggregators and so on. What is going to happen? You say it's the first domino.

I think there's a lot of people that just continue to take risk because they have to. They tie a lot of those things to their accounts and go that direction. I think that's just a risk that they're going to have to take.

LinkedIn is going to have to build some better tools inside of Sales Navigator so we don't have to do these things, which I think they're probably thinking about. That's the route we're going to go.

You talk about top of funnel, right? I'll go out on a limb and say that you can buy 13 sales tools for your team and you're going to pay $7,000 a person per year, probably. Do the math—$4 million in sales tools for a team of 20. Or you can pay 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 eyeballs, way more engagement, way more inbound than all of these things that you just paid $4 million for.

Now, it's way harder to do what I do, but I think that's the future. I think that's why my business is growing so fast right now—because people are so scared to automate. They just want to figure out how to be a human again because they forgot over the last 10 years how to write.

But the interesting part about that is, will people really do the work, right? I mean, you take 10 people, and two people do the work. And then now you're back into that iteration of hiring people. Do you hire journalists? Who are you hiring?

That's why head of creative, head of journalist, head of writing, head of EGC—these are all roles we're looking at. How do we build there? It's already happening. You see it all the time. 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.

For me, honestly, I'm sitting here trying to grow this. 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 quickly, I'm hiring somebody that has 10 times my brand, and I'm paying them a lot.

How do you pick the person, Darren, to do that? I'm obviously very bullish on what you do and the service you offer, but let's be real—you're not the only one out there. I get a gazillion emails a day from, 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 companies, founders, CEOs—like other than asking for receipts and recommendations—pick the right person?

How do you choose who to come in and spend that $50,000 on? Because you're right. I'm going to spend 50 grand for Darren McKay to come talk to my team for whatever your hourly rate is, however long that you come in. Or I'm going to go buy Hey Reach 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 subscription fees you've paid.

Yeah, because buried in their terms of service is some clause that says they don't have to.

Yeah. I mean, going back to what I said earlier, right? You've got to show examples of where it's happened in other organizations, right? I'm thinking of one in particular. I've been working with them for 90 days now. They've got three sellers. They were having trouble booking meetings. They've booked 22 first calls with their top target accounts in their top 70. 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 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, okay, well, if 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 the founder. We talk about that all the time. Now it's about the value and like, "Hey, I have 800 other things to do and I don't have time to do this all the time." But you're totally right about that.

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

Yeah, yeah. I think that is the best way to do it and be like, "It's so worth it because they'll do whatever it takes." I'll Loom video record. So typically what I do, and this will be fun for the podcast, but I'll go to a company that's got 80 reps across the world, right? And they've got a founder, they're Series D, whatever. I'll screen record myself in Sales Navigator, and I'll be like, "Hey, here's your competitor over 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 churn 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. Just leave it there.

It's not only the content. It's like the fact that your CEO or founder is posting content, their team's not even engaging in it. So everybody on the outside looks like, "Well, that's a shitty place to work. Like if you don't engage with your CEO's post, 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 to post from the company account, Darren. We got to 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. Yeah. And I'm like, "When's the last time you went and hung out on a company account?"

I mean, the only reason I go to a company account is to make sure that the company is real.

Yeah, I see somebody and I'm like, "All right, what's their... okay, cool. Like it's set up, great. They probably have a business. That's about it. I have never looked at a follower account of a company page. I don't care. I mean, followers on SaaS Bros. We have... I've got 2,500 on the one now. I don't care less.

I forgot all about SaaS 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 seemed 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, what's the point here?" Dale and I had that conversation about other things now.

I hear you.

Yeah, I was like, "What is this? Like, where's the ROI here, folks?"

Yeah, my time getting out of bed.

Yeah, I'm like, "Could 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 into LinkedIn but one time in the last year.

Yeah, he's great. Yeah, he's awesome. He's living the life. While us here on LinkedIn trying to figure it out. But yeah, I don't... it's a drug. It's a drug.

Yeah. Like my wife yells at me. She's like, "It's nine o'clock at night. You're laying in bed. What are you doing on LinkedIn?"

Well, I don't know. It pays for my life. So.

I was like, "Why not mine too?"

Yeah, you know. So yeah, company pages. I think there is 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. You have to be Taco Bell, you have to be Duolingo, 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, like Southwest yesterday. You know, 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 it probably hurts."

Yeah. I listen, I would love to keep going forever and ever and ever, but we are at that little thing that we call time. 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, "That was horrible. Should have never given that advice."

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

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 got 45 minutes. You got to do a lot in 45 minutes.

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

I got over imposter syndrome pretty fast. So I got really lucky. In the last company I worked with, Sky, I was surrounded by insanely successful founders pretty much every week with dinners. And I would sit around dinner and they're just the same as me, right? I remember the first time I met Alex Lieberman, I was about to... I don't know what's happening. I'm like, we just... he's just a dude. He's just a normal dude. He just tries way more things than all of us do. I think that's the success point. But yeah, 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 that everything's going to get destroyed and crumble and I'm not going to have a business and everything's going to fall apart.

That's being a founder.

That actually ties to my next question, Darren. So if you lost everything tomorrow, what's the very first move you'd make?

Very first move I'd make tomorrow: I'd 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.

Awesome. You know, that's the one thing I always say is a good interview question if you're interviewing AEs. Ask them, "Hey, are you a referral partner with any of the companies that you've worked with?" The answer is no? Probably not a good sign.

Yeah, that's a great question. You posted about that the other week too.

Yeah, yeah. So as we close this thing off, if you're a revenue leader listening to this right now and you're kind of in these go-to-market gaps, what's one thing that they need to hear right now?

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

You're going to have some really big wins. And that's the one thing I just keep telling people. I'm like, "Hey, what's the..." So we ask 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, "Lannon 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?" And I ask that in every single discovery call I go on. And it always ends in, all right, like I'm willing to see the middle ground here.

Yep. I love that. Test, try, test. See what happens. See what fails, 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 can people find you on LinkedIn? And the website is... or at my house, but don't show up. No, don't show up at the house. Don't show up at the house. But yeah, darrenm.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 RR 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. You have a great day. Peace.