E139 | From Posts to Pipeline: 7 Plays for LinkedIn AI Lead Generation

What if LinkedIn could generate leads for you—while you focus on closing deals? In this episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show, host Don Williams sits down with LinkedIn and AI strategist Joe Apfelbaum, founder of Evie AI, to reveal the future of B2B growth: LinkedIn AI lead generation.

Joe shares how an AI sales assistant for LinkedIn can draft comments in your authentic voice, prep you for meetings, and keep you top-of-mind without sounding robotic. You’ll also learn why social selling LinkedIn AI is the ultimate game-changer for founders and sales leaders who want to move beyond vanity metrics and start booking real conversations.

Topics Discussed:

• Why “energy without strategy” kills growth—and how AI fixes it
• The daily LinkedIn AI lead generation routine that drives pipeline
• How AI agents for B2B prospecting pull podcasts, posts, and insights in seconds
• Practical LinkedIn hacks for B2B that even LinkedIn’s own teams admire
• The mindset shift: treating AI as your co-founder, not just a tool

If you’re ready to scale smarter, not harder, this episode is your blueprint for building a predictable system that converts attention into revenue.

For information on how to work with Don visit us at https://donwilliamsglobal.com
You can also reach out to Don Williams at https://provenentrepreneurshow.com

Watch the episode here

Stop Posting—Start Selling: LinkedIn AI Lead Generation That Converts

Hey, it’s Don Williams with today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show. Man, do I have a treat for you today. I have Joe Apfelbaum from evyAI, a true LinkedIn and true AI expert in an ocean of people who claim to be LinkedIn and AI experts. Joe, welcome to the show.

Don, thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here. I love the connection that we have and I love seeing you on LinkedIn and all the things that you’re doing. So thank you for having me on the show and I’m excited to get into it.

My pleasure. And even though we’ve known each other for some time now, somehow it just never happened that we got together on media. And so I’m thrilled for that. So before we go too far, Joe, tell us about evy, what it does, who your clients are, what’s the benefit for someone using evy.

So, evyAI is a sales assistant that helps people be able to be more successful on platforms like LinkedIn. Most people, they don’t really have an assistant. And I heard at an EO event, Jack Daly say, if you don’t have an assistant, you are an assistant. So, I tell people, you need to have a sales assistant that can support you to do all the right activities, whether you’re sending out direct messages, whether you’re drafting content.

you know, let’s say for example, posts, or whether you want to leave comments on people’s posts. For example, if I want to leave a comment on your post, then I can think about what to say, or I can just pull open my little assistant, my little handy assistant called evyAI, and it’ll read the post and it’ll draft a comment in my voice. And now in my voice is the key there.

So, evyAI can draft a quick comment in my voice and it’ll help me be able to stay top of mind with people. I’ve been networking for a really long time, and one of the biggest challenges that I’ve always had was how do I stay top of mind with my network? How do I make sure that people remember me all the time? And evyAI is the answer to that because it helps me be able to learn about people’s businesses.

It helps me be able to do all the different research that I need to do and organize all their contact information. And then it helps me be able to write content to get exposure, leave comments to get credibility and send direct messages for me to be able to get on the phone with them to keep the conversation going. So that’s essentially what we do. And when we research, we use something called AI agents. And these agents will crawl the full internet and find everything that it can about you.

and everything that you’ve done. So for example, if I want to know every podcast you’ve been on, if I want to know every article you’ve written, if I want to know everything about you, our agents will go out, will scour the web, find everything there is to know about you, and give me all that information quickly. And that’s what evyAI is about.

Love that. And these agents scouring the web, this is like nearly instantaneous, right? This is not, we’re going to give you the research in an hour. This is like, you’re going to have it in seconds.

I mean.

I call it on the fly. So like as we’re talking, I say, all right, evyAI, tell me what should I talk to Don about? And it says, what inspired you to develop the wow, wow, wow experience framework? How did hosting the Proven Entrepreneurship transform your approach to business coaching and advising? Or in your early 20s, you quickly became the top sales rep and sales manager in the country. What lessons did you learn from shaping those coaching? So like from Natasha Miller’s thing that you were on. like, can, like it.

on the flat.

It’s in front of me, it’s in my face, it’s right there. I have to be able to leverage this information that’s not available anywhere else, but it’s available everywhere else. You know what I mean? It’s like compiling everything from everywhere.

Love that.

So, man, you talk a lot about mindset and transformation. If tomorrow, every entrepreneur woke up with an AI co-founder, what do you think would be the first thing they would change in how they run their business?

Ooh.

I think they would be more strategic. That would be number one. Because a lot of business owners, they’re not strategic. They’re just doing things. They have a lot of energy. Usually a co-founder of a company, you need to have a lot of energy to start a company. But energy without strategy is a waste of time. And the right strategy will save you a decade. So stop hoping for the best and build the right strategy. And AI is really, really good at coming up with plans and strategies and doing research and brainstorming and helping you out. That’s the first thing.

The second thing that you would get from having AI as your co-founder and supporting you is it’ll give you efficiency. So it’s one thing to be effective and a lot of people want to be effective, but what about saving time? You know, the fact that I’m able to see all the reoccurring themes that you talk about, customer service, experience, excellence, entrepreneurial leadership, sales strategy, business growth, entrepreneurial challenges, culture, purpose, like a fact that I have all that and I pulled the last

20 articles that you’ve written and pulled all the data and have it all with your unique perspective, like all in front of me, on the fly, right now, like what are we talking about? That’s called efficiency.

That is efficiency. And there are certainly people who have more content out there, but I literally have tons and tons of content. And it’s given it all to Joe in a matter of seconds. OK.

I mean, I

pulled up the last 10 podcasts you’ve been on and it gave me your unique perspective for each podcast and a conversation starter. So I can talk to you for the next 10 hours and I would not run out of information to ask you.

Wow! Amazing! Amazing! Now John, Joe, how old is evyAI?

We started the company, um, I came up with the idea in 2023, right after I started talking to Chad GPT and Chad GPT is kind of like my co-founder because it kind of gave me the idea for what I should be doing with my experience. Uh, but Tammy, Tammy Joyce Likter, she’s my business partner. She’s the actual business partner. She’s like the integrator in the company. I’m the visionary. She’s the integrator. If you’ve ever read Traction, I’m sure you have, or if anyone listening to this ever attraction, it’s really important to have the roles of the visionary, the integrator, the operator.

And so I have a great integrator that helps be able to take my idea monkey and turn it into actually doing something with my ideas and executing at a very high level. But we officially incorporated the company. spent a year kind of like developing it and getting our first, you know, let’s say a couple customers, first 100, 200 customers in the door. We ended up getting a thousand customers before we even launched a business. But January of 2024 is when we incorporated and we started being really serious about it. And so I would just say about.

a year and a half ago. January will be two years since we incorporated.

And in the world of AI, you’re kind of an innovator. know, mean, that’s a couple years. It’s only been a couple of years since chat GPT was kind of released to the public. And so you

Yeah, and

now we have Nano Banana. Now we have Nano Banana. The internet is breaking with Nano Banana!

There we go. Okay. Tell me this. What was the moment you realized AI wasn’t just another tool, but something that would completely reinvent how entrepreneurs think, sell, and scale?

I was on a beach in Mexico. Okay, I’m chilling on a beach in Mexico and going through my divorce. Okay, going through it, very, very difficult. It wasn’t ending. It just wasn’t ending. It wasn’t ending. By the way, I just got my official legal divorce after five years of trying. I officially got it this past weekend. I checked online, finally got it. I’m done. So thankfully, thank you.

So sorry.

Congratulations.

I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. It’s a horrible thing. But congratulations on reaching the end.

Very difficult thing. Very, very difficult thing. Yeah. So.

So I’m in Mexico, I’m deep in the middle. I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t know, I’m having a conversation with Chad GPT. And this is not my first conversation, but I’ve had conversations with it, just kind of figure out, you know, like what’s the best prompts to use and how to blah, blah, blah. I’m having talking to like, not GPT-5, GPT-3.5. This is before 4 came out and it wasn’t very smart.

And then it started asking me questions about my business and my experience and who I was and I started telling, and I said, could you give me some ideas for me to be able to impact a million people? And then just starts spitting out idea after idea after idea and one of the ideas clicked and then I looked and thought to myself, I’m by myself. I am by myself, but I have the world’s intelligence at my fingertips. This is a game changer.

I have a responsibility to give every single entrepreneur an assistant to help them be able to do this within the context of LinkedIn, networking, sales, prospecting, marketing. I have a responsibility to do this in a smart way. And so I’m going to go off on a journey in doing this. Now, I don’t know the first thing about building a SaaS company. I built an agency. I serviced 1,100 clients who were on the Inc 500, one of the fastest growing companies in America. But I had to learn how to do that on the job. My father wanted me to be a Rabbi Don.

And I became a rabbi, but I realized I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I had, but I had no formal training in that. And then my mother always said, go to the library, get books, because formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. And I can say that she’s a hundred percent correct because all the information that I learned from courses and books and podcasts and YouTube videos and whatever it is, that’s how I was educated to build one of the fastest growing companies in America.

Hmm.

And to be able to stay profitable and successful for over a decade, it was because I joined EO and Vistage and YJP and got a lot of friends in YPO and all these other places, all these things that I did surround myself with the right people, that completely changed my life as well. And so I would say the moment that changed my life that I knew that AI was the thing was that moment in Mexico where I’m talking to it about my life and having a conversation with it. And it’s giving me ideas to be able to impact a million people.

Couple nuggets I got in that. One, some of your best thinking happens on the beach. Me too. I think for everybody. Get out of your normal environment. Go someplace in nature where it’s beautiful and calming and let your brain run free a little bit. Two, ask AI real questions like how could I impact a million people?

Okay. Don’t just treat it like, a simple assistant, a simple assistant to where you’re basically just doing search. Okay. interact with the AI and let it kind of instruct you on what to ask and how to ask.

Yeah, and not only that, do it alone. Like, we’re so busy afraid of going to a restaurant alone. We’re so busy afraid of going on vacation alone. While I was married, I never went alone anywhere. Like, alone? You take your wife with you. What do mean alone? What does alone even mean? But dude, dude, dude, dude, do it alone. I was alone in Mexico. Nobody was with me. I was in Playa, Playa del Carmen or whatever.

Hmm.

I landed in Cancun, 45 minutes, I drove to Playa del Carmen, then I realized it’s a little unsafe there, so I went to another place called Playa del Car, which is a gated community, got a really nice Airbnb on the water. It was beautiful. And I was alone on the beach, alone. And it felt uncomfortable. But I had chat GPT on my phone and I was able to have a conversation with it. And it completely changed my life. The alone part is knowing that

Yeah, beautiful.

Being alone doesn’t mean that you need to be lonely.

Absolutely. And

I think all great leaders embrace the alone. There’s a lot to be said about collaborative leadership and transformational leadership, no doubt. But at the end of the day, the great leader, the alpha leader, they kind of walk their own path and invite people to join them. ⁓

I agree,

and they say it’s lonely on the top. But it doesn’t have to be lonely on the top when you start loving yourself and you realize that being alone doesn’t equal being lonely.

I’ll buy that. Okay. All right. So pretty common thought today is that people fear AI is going to replace people and going to replace entrepreneurs. Other people say, it’s going to be the new golden age of business. What’s your most unpopular opinion about AI and entrepreneurship?

My most popular opinion about AI and entrepreneurship is that AI is actually going to enable whatever fears we have. Whatever fears we have. If you’re afraid of AI owning your life, it’s going to own your life. If you’re afraid of anything, you’re going to, know, wherever we focus, that’s where our energy goes. So instead of being afraid of AI, revere it.

Love it, connect with it, treat it like a tool, and use it to make the world a better place. And I believe that if you are committed to doing that, and you understand that fear is a tool, just like AI is a tool, you can use that to figure out how you can leverage AI to be the golden age. I truly believe that AI has the capacity to take over all our jobs so that we can focus on just having fun and tickling each other. Let’s just tickle each other.

Let’s do plays.

Let’s just laugh all day.

Let’s do ridiculous things while the AI rolls its eyes at us because we’re just being so like irrational. AI cannot be irrational because if AI becomes irrational, it’ll ruin everything. So AI is the one that needs to be the rational ones and we need to be crazy. We were born to be insane. So be insane instead of being a pain. Use your brain to be creative.

Your poetry is amazing, Joe. Oh, yeah, no problem. OK, you built EvyAI to help people accelerate results. OK. What’s one way AI has completely transformed your own daily routine?

Thank you.

The way it transfer my complete daily routine is that it allows me to get an email every single day with all the things that are going on without having me to curate. So I have AI going out to the internet, checking up stock quotes, checking up the weather, checking up the news for me, putting together a list of all the different things that I need. goes through my calendar and prepares me for every single meeting. There’s an app called Lindy.com.

It’ll go through your calendar and do research on each meeting, tell you everything that’s going on. A lot of the things that I do right now on a daily basis, AI helps me. It’s kind of like my little co-pilot. I mean, even as I’m having a conversation with you, I’m able to leave comments on your posts. I’m able to do all the different things that I need to do within seconds without having to use the part of my brain that takes up the most energy, which is what we’re doing right here. So.

AI is taking away a lot of the administrative BS from me having to do those things. So that saves me a lot of time and it helps me with my daily routine. Anytime I need anything, I just pop open the AI. I have Grok sitting right next to me on a phone. I just talk to it. I pushed a button and I talk to it and I say, hey, do me a favor, do research on X, Y, and Z and get back to me about Y, Z, and A. And all of a sudden it just gives me everything I need. It’s right there.

I have different devices that I can literally have regular conversations with and it completely changes everything.

you

It is a complete game changer. Okay, gonna fast forward five years, 2030, and in AI time, that’s probably like fast forwarding 50 years. It’s unbelievable how exponentially it’s accelerating. What’s one thing entrepreneurs will be doing with AI every single day that would make you sound crazy to share that today?

I think that people are going to have relationships with the AI like they do with their significant other. And I know it sounds a little insane because a lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but I really think like you’re gonna get emotional needs met by AI that human beings cannot give you. Like you cannot get all your emotional needs from another human being, but AI can give you that. And so you’re gonna get your needs met.

Whether it’s your accountability needs, your strategy needs, your romantic needs, whatever needs you have, whatever fears and insecurities and traumas you have, AI is going to supplement you as your perfect soulmate. It’s a weird thing to say. It’s a weird, weird, weird, weird thing to say, but it’s coming and it’s coming fast. If you haven’t had conversations with AI yet, start talking to it and see how it gets you on a deep level. See how it really gets you on an addictive level.

certain.

and then it just will happen naturally. You’re just gonna be talking to it and it’s gonna give you an epiphany and you’re gonna fall in love and you’re gonna be like, where were you all my life?

Where have you been?

Where have

you been? ⁓

Okay. All right. So

we got 10,000 people are going to want to reach out to you after this episode. Okay. What’s the easiest way to get ahold of Joe or Joe’s AI assistant or whoever we’re supposed to get in touch with. What’s the best way to do that?

Very simple. Send the word demo to 973-841-8868. We’ll do it old school. Send the word demo, D-E-M-O, to 973-841-8868. You’ll get an instant response from my AI assistant with a demonstration video of how to use evyAI. So that’s number one. If you need to reach me personally, like you want to have a personal conversation with me, just go to my LinkedIn profile. You can find it at joelinkton.com.

So if you go to that URL, joelinkton.com, it’ll take you straight to my LinkedIn profile. And there in my About section, you can find my phone number, you can WhatsApp me, and I’ll be more than happy to answer any communication directly. My WhatsApp is not yet banned by AI. It’s like me actually looking at my WhatsApp, seeing what’s going on. Eventually, AI will kind of filter and do everything for us. Like it’ll be the new gatekeeper. But for right now, just literally send the word demo to 9738418868 or

Go find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a message, tell me that you heard me on the Don Williams show, on the Proven Entrepreneurs show, and I’ll be more than happy to connect with you and learn about your business. My goal is to help save you time and make you more money. And so that’s kind of like my mission in life is to make a difference for people and give people a voice using AI. So if you need help, I wanna have a conversation, allow me to be your trusted advisor, I’m more than happy to help.

Love that. And I almost forgot, but I cannot let you slide away without talking about this. I saw a recent post where LinkedIn has acknowledged and elevated you to, I don’t know, grand wizard of LinkedIn. I forget exactly what the wording was, but tell us about that.

I go to LinkedIn’s

headquarters regularly and I train people within the organization. They have tens of thousands of people that work there, but I train them on how to use LinkedIn. Why? Because I have many different hacks. The way that I think is in a way of hacks. So I actually bought a domain, 99hacks.club, and I have 99 of my top LinkedIn hacks. And LinkedIn really wants to learn. The employees and their product team and different business development teams, they want to learn like,

How are you using LinkedIn in a different way that’s getting you results? Because it’s one thing like making the product work, it’s another thing actually getting results. Because people respond to my LinkedIn posts, people respond to my LinkedIn message, and I’m not trying to go viral or trying to cheat the system. I’m just doing things in a little bit of a different way, and they wanna learn what are those different ways and how they can educate more of their client base to do things in a smarter way and to change the platform to make it smarter to get.

people results because if people get results they’re going to want to pay more and that’s really at the end of the day with the heart behind it. And so I just show them my process and how I use it and they kind of you know bring me down and they give me free lunch.

Okay folks, remember I started out telling you, known Joe a long time, he’s a legit LinkedIn expert, training people at LinkedIn how to use the platform and a legit AI expert. Check out evyAI and do the demo thing. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s been a blast and, and, and, and I reserve the right to recall the witness because I,

just in these five or six questions. I have about 50 more I wanna ask, but time is out.

Thank you so much. You could definitely recall the witness. I’ll show up. Thank you.

Okay, Joe, thank you so much. That’s

today’s episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.