Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Mike Murphy, Co-Creator of TextTonality™

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Mike Murphy is the creator of TextTonality™, a proprietary messaging method that has generated $900M+ in new business for over 250 clients in financial services, investment funds, and B2B consulting.Learn more: https://texttonality.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemurphy-/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-mike-murphy-co-creator-of-texttonality

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Mike Murphy, who's the co-creator of text tonality. Mike, welcome to the program. Mike, thank you so much for having me on.

I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I know you work with financial services, and that's the industry that I'm in. So I think we can exchange some really neat ideas and help the industry really fully understand what you do and how you do it and why it's so important in this day and age because, man, alive, we've got so many things flying at us all from different directions and instant message and text and social media. And how do you cut through the clutter to make sure that message is clearly received and understood? So I want to, before we jump into what you do, give us a little bit of your story, your background, and then what prompted you to come up with this service?

Yeah, a little background. I was originally a journalist, and I wrote for USA Today. I was on Fox for a little bit, like the local Fox station. I wrote for NBC Sports, Philadelphia, authored thousands of articles, you know, ranging from Major League Baseball, the NHL, NBA, you name it. When I got out of school, I realized that, you know, people who are in journalism, and I don't knock journalism whatsoever. It was to build the foundation for this.

But they told me, they said, you have to go to Idaho or something like that and build up your career if you ever want to make it back to a big city like Philadelphia, which is where I am. And I was like, there's got to be a better way to do this. So I started freelance writing, and I came across a group that was doing Ricky Fowler's virtual reality golf lessons. And they had another business that was doing. sports sponsorship, but they had a little bit of twist on it. They were using blockchain to facilitate

partnerships between rights holders and sponsors. So I became their social media guy, but quickly kind of moved into more of a business development role. And they needed both funding from private equity and accredited investors. Then they needed other athletes to join them, right, and to put their sponsorships on their, on their sites and whatnot. So I started to go out and start sending messages on LinkedIn because I didn't have a roll-dex. I was 23 years old at the time. Which I'm actually surprised you even know what that word means. Well, my dad is...

Yeah, you've seen one at your dad's desk. Yeah, well, my dad's my best friend and he's also my business party. He's been there. He's been around since day one, right? So he kind of started me on the entrepreneurial path. So, but yeah, it is funny. He owned a business with his dad and they had roll decks on their desks. So they always had business cards and things like that.

I always deal the business cards and like, you know, take it home and whatnot. But, uh, which they weren't about. But anyway, so didn't have a roll of decks. And, um, I decided to start sending out messages on LinkedIn. And I was sending out these like long, like five paragraph messages with like pitch decks and links and things like that. And I got like awful responses, but it wasn't a lot. So after a while, my dad's like, hey, you should look into direct response copyright. You should look into the psychop.

behind cold email. So I started reading up on that, and I was like, man, there's got to be a way to translate this methodology to LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, 2017, it was still kind of like in its infancy, right? It was kind of transitioning out of being just a job-only platform into a platform where people could actually get business deals. So I started using this new methodology, which I later coined text tonality. And I started getting meetings with people who represent Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

and I brought $3 million to the table in the form of investor money. The guy who I worked for, unfortunately, didn't work out. None of the meetings went through after I passed them through. And I decided to leave after about 15 months. But after I left, my dad was working for a company called Castor Abbott. And they helped financial advisors with their Facebook ads. But they didn't have a LinkedIn program, or robust LinkedIn program, I should say. And so my dad said, hey, you know, I'm trying to use LinkedIn to get clients.

It's outside of the Facebook ad calls that they're giving me. Can you help me with that? Well, one month later after managing his LinkedIn, we closed $20,000 worth of new business. I brought in a little bit of commission from that. And the group said, hey, would you join us and teach our financial advisors how to do that? I was like, well, I got nothing to lose. I'm in between jobs. Let's do this thing, right?

So I did that. That's so neat. Yeah, we did that 150 clients later. We served. and a lot of people had a great success. And it became the number one selling offer, offer, not author, during 2020, I should say, when COVID hit because everyone wanted to do this in. So that was really cool. So that's kind of the story.

That's how we got here today. And after a little bit, my dad and I, we decided, you know, we wanted to do this on our own. They wanted to take the business in a different direction. So we just decided to start our own business. And that's where we started. We've done partners and built text tonality for our, um, our friends. financial advisor clients. And we have about 80 to 90 clients who are currently working with, who are in the financial services space that enjoy using text tonality to generate a few meetings a week

from LinkedIn. Yeah. You know, if we could take everything you just said there, that journey and put it into some type of like a, I don't know what you want to call it, but like an image, you know, timeline and do some callouts. It's just so neat because you hear this kind of framework over and over and over again. had to have been open and aware and watching for opportunity. Otherwise, you would have been like, I'm just going to punch the clock, get a nine to five, or I'm just going to stay at this place because, but you, you've got an entrepreneurial spirit and vision and you watch for things and you were like, well, let's try this. And then let's just improve and improve and improve.

You probably could show text tonality version one back in the day compared to today. And it's, you know, completely different because probably you resonate with Tony Robbins, concept of Kani, constant and never-ending improvement. So I just think that is such a neat journey that you just described. Oh, you should see how much different it looks today. It's, it's completely different. The methodology stayed the same, but the structure of the messaging is much different. And the way we deliver, it's much different too. And it's funny. My dad always said, he's like, listen, you know, you're going to have your antennas up. You're looking at opportunities, right? When I was, and I, this, that whole time period, by the way, that was a very rough time.

Because I had had my heart set on being a journalist. And it was really difficult. There were some times where I was like, man, what am I doing with my life? You know? Yeah. So now that we've come to this point, it's like the things that I was hoping I would have accomplished, I did get there. But there's so much more left to do, though. But yet, you still are using your journalism skills.

Yes. Yeah. Have you ever read the book called Smart Brevity? I haven't. No. No, no, yeah. Okay. You should read that because it is written by journalists who came up with a concept called, you know, smart brevity, but it's just a writing style where basically it's like exactly what you said. You know, hey, if you could take that nine paragraph, you know, whatever, it turned it into nine sentences. It's in and have headline bullet, bullet takeaway implementation. That's just the way. But what you're describing makes so much sense. And also, have you ever heard of the nine word email? I have heard about that, yes. Yeah, I always attribute that to learning it from Dean Jackson, but it's not literally

nine words, it's just the concept of, just say it quick and short and sweet, because if I wanted to email you and say, hey, do you want to go see a movie this weekend? I'm not going to form up a header graphic image with, you know, flashy graphics and then do nine paragraphs. I'm just going to email and go, hey, you want to go see a movie. And so I think it's that conversational style. So you've taken this concept, you've polished it and perfected it, you work with financial professionals to help them get in front of their target audience. Where do you start?

When you have an advisor that goes, I need to get a handful. Now, you know, you always hate here like 58 appointments a week on your calendar because A, it's overstated. B, I couldn't handle that anyway. But when you say a handful of nice clients of your target audience on your calendar, that seems feasible and doable. where do you start with that advisor to go, okay, here's what we do and how it benefits you. Yeah, great question. And honestly, what advisors tell me all the time is like, if I just got one or two new meetings a month with a really high quality prospect who has, let's just say a million or more in investable assets, they're like, that's better than what I'm doing now for the most part. So where we start.

So I like to drill into who their ideal client is. and if I could photocopy their favorite client over and over and over again, what does that person look like? What are the intangibles that make them a great client? Are they a business owner? Are they a C-suite, right? You know, are they a lawyer? And then what are their pain points specifically?

What do they, you know, are they looking to exit their business? Do they have a tax exposure problem? Are they looking for alternative investments? Things like that, right? Do they have RSU stock options, you know, a 401K that they're looking to convert to a Roth, right? Whatever the case may be, we drill into that. And then we we also discover what they're, what's unique about that advisor. Because every single person you included has something unique about them,

about your process, right? The way you do interviews, the way that you, the way that you put people on TV and in Forbes and things like that, right? You have a very unique process. And so every single person we work with, we identify what makes their process unique. And sometimes we even give the name to their process. Just like I get a text to my name because it's so important.

I give an example. And we can't do this for wirehouse guys. Like our Merrill Lynch advisors, Wells Fargo advisors, Edward Jones. They've got their own proprietary in-house stuff you can't tamper with, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But we still do reframe it as they do have new and innovative cutting-edge ways of helping people with their wealth. But so, like for an example, like one of my clients, he was looking for business owners looking to exit. And so we came up with the quantum business exit for him because all these business owners want to create a quantum leap and wealth.

And he got his investment back with us very quickly because he got his investment back with us very quickly because he, found two business owners, one who had already exited for over $100 million and another one who wanted to exit and had a business that was worth between $50 and $100 million. So that was really cool. And that was just using a very simple text-to-my message to get them hooked and then on the phone calls with them. I'll bet you that if you start that conversation with an advisor and go, okay, let's talk about what makes you unique.

The first response is there's nothing unique about me. And you probably have to go deeper and deeper, deeper, and go, oh, yeah, well, I guess the fact that I do it this way because I think that the more we each do what we do well, it just becomes commonplace for us. But when someone from the outside goes, oh, my goodness, you do it like that. That's just amazing. And you're like, oh, well, it's just how I roll. So how do you strip away those layers to help that advisor realize some of those unique qualities? So first off, I've done a lot of interviews with advisors, you know, in that first call that I do with them. So I hear everything. And whenever I hear something new, that's when I pinpoint say, you know what, you just needed someone else on the outside to tell you, this is new, this is novel.

I haven't heard that before. And I work with a lot of advisors. So that's where I read. And I have very formulated questions too. I don't want to, I won't bore you with how I go about the question portion of my first meeting with an advisor. But I use very formulated questions. Everything I do, Mike, follows a formula from the way I write the, rewrite your profile to how I build out your headline about. section because really your profile should be a landing page most people's profiles are um they're basically resumes and no hate towards you know building out a resume if you're using it for using lincoln to get a job that's totally fine but when you want to attract prospects and the keyword is attract you want them to see that you work with them you solve their big paint point and that you have a new and innovative way of solving it right and then the about section shouldn't be about you it shouldn't be about your barons list it shouldn't be

about your Forbes, Best in State, wealth advisor, it should be about how it should speak, first off, it should speak to that person. It should be, and this is how I structure it, by the way. I'll give me the secret sauce is I structure it in four segments. Innovative hook, right? Hook that speaks directly to the person. It's very conversational, and that makes the person hit the Seymour button on the

About section. Then there's layering pain, pain, pain, you're in this pain, you can't get out of it. And then a glimmer of hope, section three is, Glimber of hope. How do I get out of this pain? Here's the new and innovative way solving it. And then at the end, very short and again, conversational, hey, leave me a note if you're looking for help with this. Yeah. You know, it reminds me of way, way, way back in the day I went to a seminar by Brian Tracy. And I know that he probably swiped this from somebody, but it always, I connected to him. But he goes, hey, what's everyone's favorite radio

station and you probably already know this but people like oh it's this nope nope nope nope he goes it's w i i fm what's in it for me and i think when people are reading that linkedin profile website whatever you can't be saying well we've got 28 years of experience and i've been and i it's got to be like hey what don't you feel frustrated when and wouldn't you feel so much and when you can have in their mind they're them kind of nodding going yeah yeah yeah so that's what you're talking about and it's not as easy as just going, oh, just flip it around. It's an art for him. My favorite about section that I ever wrote was, and of course, it's for the client that's

brought in the most money using our system. So we have a Mero advisor. He brought in $113 million client in 2022 using our system. And his about section, the first three lines, you wouldn't think an advisor wrote this. It goes, there's a lot of fake news out there today. Next line, nope. I'm not talking about politics. And it makes you, you're like, well, what is he talking about?

And the third line, it's the plethora of information available at every tech business owners fingertips when it comes to exiting their business. And you're like, I got to report. This guy's right. He's spot on. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I love you.

You use that word psychology. And it really, if you can get into the head of the, you know, your target audience and be asking them questions, like skating where the puck is headed kind of a thing. Like, get asking that question. So they're coming along, coming along, and you're leading them to the conclusion of, yeah, well, how do I do that? And then the obvious answer is, if you need some out with that, reach out. And now all of a sudden, but it's done and just punchy, boop, boop, boop, boop, not 19,000 paragraphs in some long, you know, like you've already said. So where do you go when you think about targeting, you know, you get an advisor, like you've mentioned, exiting.

there's a whole lot of target audiences that an advisor could look for. You know, maybe even they would go, you know what? I used to, you know, my son's a doctor, so I want to target surgeons. Where do you start going? Okay, yes, anyone that needs a financial advisor, you know, that's way too broad. So we need to really target it down. Where do you guide them in that process to help them make sure their message gets in front of the right people? Well, two things.

Number one, targeting comes down to like, what's the pain point, right? So, like, for an example, you gave the doctor example. Doctors have high income. They're going to have a tax exposure pain point. So, you know, how do you solve that paypoint? You put them in all term of investments. You do tax loss harvesting. You do, you know, whatever the case is.

Exit in their business, there's obviously ways to mitigate tax exposure on that as well if they're going to go exit their practice someday or sell to private equity, which a lot people are doing right now. So that's number one is identifying the pain point. And then number two is using sales navigator, which I build out all. my lists for my clients anyway because there's so many filters. And a lot of people, they jump into sales navigator. They pay for it and they just get really confused by like all the filters. It's, it is overwhelming. Yeah, Boolean search parameters. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, I'm so glad

you brought that up. One of the things I'm doing, I'd love to give your listeners this is I'm putting together a free training on how to use sales navigator. I'm calling it my sales navigator secrets course. And I'm going to give them that. If they DM me on LinkedIn, just look at Mike Murphy and text tonality in the search bar. If they DM me on LinkedIn, you know, send me a connection request with this in it. Just say wealth 24. I'll go ahead and I'll send you, number one, I'll send you the swipe file of the top 10 messages I use to generate over 100 million for our clients. But number two, I'll give you access to our new sales navigator secrets course, which again, it's a very short course, but it just goes through all the little things that you're looking for when it comes to building

on a very targeted search and sales navigator. I've had, like, I've had so many Merrill advisors who I work with because they have internal training and, you know, no knock against their training. But every single time I show them what I do in sales navigator, they're like, this, this blows our training out of the water, right? It's just so much better. Like, so much more in depth. And I get it.

Most of the advisors out there, they're getting the training that says, like, go find people who have changed jobs last 90 days. And like, that's fine. But like every other advisor is skating towards that puck, right? You want to go where people, if you're zinging, right, you don't want to be going where people are zagging. You want to go in your own direction. So there's so many different ways to find like business owners exiting through keyword searches.

There's so many ways to find people with restricted stock options and narrow those down really easily. People in the C-suite, people will VPs, right? And you could just tell by certain job titles who would have RSUs and stock options and who would not, right? And your message should be dictated towards those who do and those who don't. So those are the things that I do with our clients. And I hope that answers the question.

I got a little little into the weeds there when it comes to target. No, that's totally fine. And I know that there's a formula for everything, but many times you cannot just AI chat, GPT, everything. You've got to know the reasons behind it and guide and massage that bullion search and that sales navigator so you've just got to get in front of the right people you cannot spray and pray so let's think about something else um when you're talking about crafting the right message and the right tone um how do you maintain authenticity because i i know that you i know you've gotten messages from people before where it's like oh my goodness that's just some templated thing and

it just comes off you know like the fuel felt found in sales like oh no you feel but other people have felt the same way had found this you It just feels like a script. How do you make sure that your message is maintain authenticity? Yeah, it's like, it's like, Mike, like I see we have common connections and I'd love to find synergies. Pretty please have a coffee chip of me, right? Like, it's like those messages feel like they're begging or they're like, dear Mike, I see that you're in the financial services space and you're like, first off, dear Mike, what do you write me a letter in 18? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so here's how you, number one, I'm going to give you the text night formula. Or I'm going to give you the elements, right? It's hard to recreate, but I'll give you the elements at the very least. So you need three things in every single text, time message to compel a prospect to ask you for a meeting. Number one, you need pain. What is the pain point? And I like to say, what's the bleeding neck? What's the thing that they're thinking about today?

Not like, like, most people say like, oh, legacy planning, legacy point, estate plan. It's like, yeah, people don't want to think about death, right? What's the thing that I think about today? Number two, you need intrigue. What's something new and novel that they haven't thought about yet? or a new and novel way of solving said pain point. And then most importantly, you need a subliminal call to action,

meaning you're not asking them for a meeting. You actually have to leave them on a cliffhanger and make them come back to you. Okay. Those are the three elements. Now, how do you maintain authenticity, right? Because you can put those three elements into a message and it still would look inauthentic.

That's why I call it text tonality. The tonality of your message needs to look and feel and sound like a message that you would text to a friend or a colleague. It's very, very simple. Most people don't do it. Most people think it's informal. But in fact, it makes your message stand out because everyone's using proper punctuation.

They're using periods at the end of their sentence. They're uppercasing certain letters, right? The way, this is actually, I was at a conference once on, and they were going over the text messages between Elon and I think someone else when he was going to go by Twitter, right? And the message is there's no uppercasing. It's very broken grammar, right? Because it's like, hey, Ewan, or the guy didn't say, hey, Ewan.

He's like, hey, Twitter's for sale at such a such rate, thinking of investing thoughts. And got, Ewan goes, very cool, been thinking about that for a bit, send details. Right. Yeah. That's the brevity. So the message. Yeah. No pitch coach would say that that would have worked.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it needs to have the tonality of a message that you would text a friend or a colleague. That's the key. The three elements with that coupled makes people say, man, Mike actually is thinking of me. And you know what? I do have this pain point. So I'm going to reach back out and say, yes.

The best responses we get, by the way, are sounds interesting. Tell me more. How does it work? What's the secret sauce, right? Those sort of messages. And those, and this is the other part. too because you can get to that point a lot of people can get to that point but they don't know how to take it off LinkedIn the key to getting it off LinkedIn is not to continue the conversation in

LinkedIn it's very counterintuitive right um yeah you actually want to just move them to a phone call because if you give someone too much information whether it's your first message or in the conversation on LinkedIn they can just decide right away I don't need to work with Mike I know everything there is to know about Mike that's it I don't need to work with it I don't need to discover anymore right so that's where you want to keep them on a cliffhanger all the way up until they get on a call with you. Then you could go into your sales process. Then you can understand and ask them questions and see where are they on their financial life? Are they even qualified to work with you?

You won't know until you're actually on the call with this person. You know, I think that we could probably continue this conversation in a three-day master class and still be scratching the surface. But I think there's so many things that you've brought up are so, so valuable. Um, you people, you know, I think that some of the biggest currencies out there, which I'll do air quotes because it's not financial or money, it is time. It is attention. It is trust. It is credibility. I mean, all of these things that you're already talking about. How do you stand out just initially, just with your messaging style? And when you were explaining that, it made me think of something. Maybe you're like me, you know, you type in someone's name and you capitalize their first letter of their first name. And then. and your finger stays on there a little bit too long. So the second letter is also capitalized. And then you look back and it's like, I got to go re.

I find mess up doing that so many times. But then I, the thought crosses my mind. I'm going to leave it. The second letter capitalized too, because then it just shows a little bit of a flaw. And it shows that I wasn't a machine. Yeah.

You can even space out things. You can space out certain words between each other. Because I do that all the time, right? If I'm, you know, going back on thoughts and whatnot, or I'll use like the ellipsies or whatever, the three dots are, right? Those are things that you can do to make a message feel and look and sound more human.

And listen, I could care less if I'm giving away some proprietary process here because guess what? You still need to put the message together. And that's why people pay us to do not only to do the messaging, but also to handle and nurture the messages for them and then move them to meetings on their calendar. That's our thing, right? People need great messaging. They need great targeting.

And they need them to work in sync to get. folks who are, you know, high AUM prospects on their calendar. And that's exactly what we do for people. So what do you see as the future vision of text tonality? What are you guys looking forward to in 25, 26, 2027 on what you're going to be bringing enhancements or extra, you know, a focus for what you're bringing to the industry? That's a great question. I mean, marketing is always really fluid. One of the things I'm pretty excited about is, you know, people say email's dead.

Email is not dead, especially if it's very targeted. So one of the things that we're testing right now is a lot of cold email strategies, not just on our clients, but on ourselves too. Seeing where we can get really hyper-targeted intent-based audiences for cold emails. Because if you think about LinkedIn, your limitations are connection requests, how many connections you can send, how many emails you can send, and how much you can automate it without LinkedIn giving you a hard time, which, by the way, LinkedIn doesn't really care too much if you do automation,

as long as you pay for the system, just saying. But with email, there's not as many limitations because you can create multiple inboxes. You can send out multiple emails. And I even ran this past a wirehouse confidant the other day, one of our clients who I work with very closely, and I ran this idea by them. And other wirehouses can, you know, other advisors can steal this idea. But you just set up an inbox that's outside of, you know, your inbox and you send out cold emails to people who might be, let's just say

business owners who are exiting and you just kind of float the idea out to them and you see if they're interested. Well, then you just take that information. You know, they say, yeah, I am interested in that. You just take that information. You go find them on LinkedIn. You send them a message, right? Now they're very highly intent-based audiences.

Now you're creating your own kind of referrals. Like, hey, I heard you were looking to exit your business. Open to chatting about that. So that's where I see a couple opportunities there. Another opportunity is potentially using paid ad platforms. We use paid ads all the time. So we might go down that route. We haven't gone down that route quite yet.

But it is an option that's on the table. So, and again, you could use text tonality over email. You could use it obviously on LinkedIn. Text messaging could be an option down the road as well. But at the moment, I think I'm really excited just about email and just really growing our business too. I mean, we're really excited. This is the most clients we've ever worked with in a given setting. We started the business in October 21.

We had about 20 to 30 some odd clients we worked with and it was just consulting. And we've grown every year ever since. And now we manage almost 100 LinkedIn profiles on a daily basis. Really cool. Awesome. Well, I tell you, it's just been really neat hearing, kind of pulling back the layers and where the methodology is and your frameworks and the results. That speaks for itself. So if an advisor is interested in learning more and reaching out, connecting with you as well as getting those bonuses that you mentioned, give us again some of those contact info.

Yeah, so you can add me on LinkedIn. Just type in Mike Murphy plus text tonality and you'll find me. Send me a note with the Wealth 24 just so I know that you came from the podcast. And I will send you access to our swipe file. I'll also send you access to our Sales Navar your Secrets course. We're just putting the finishing touches on that. And then if you want to learn more about text data, see the advisors we work with, see some case studies and see a demo of, you know, how we work, how text tonight works, how our platform works. Because we have a simple pipeline platform.

That's our software that we use to manage all the profiles, manage the data that we create from those profiles, and manage all the clients that we help our clients get. You can just go to text tonality.com. That's two T's the middle. text tonality two words.com. And there's a little demo in there. And you can just book a demo call with us too. If you really want to get started and you want to hit the ground running in 2025, absolutely book a demo call with us.

You'll meet with one of our team members to go over that. You'll get a demo on that call. And you'll get, if you get anything in that call, you'll get some new information on how leverage LinkedIn and how to use it to grow your practice in the coming years. Awesome, Mike. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for having me on.

I know we meant to do this a couple of years ago, so I'm glad we finally to do it today. Yeah, man. Awesome. Nice to connect. Awesome. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www.

www. . www. www. Thank you.