Advanced LinkedIn Strategies To Fill Your Sales Pipeline & Gain New Clients

Advanced LinkedIn Strategies To Fill Your Sales Pipeline & Gain New Clients

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live event on advanced strategies for filling a sales pipeline beyond basic content and outreach, focusing on higher-effort and higher-cost tactics that most people skip. He outlines an agenda covering finding and connecting with the right people, using direct mail, maximizing LinkedIn events, and when to use LinkedIn ads. He demonstrates Sales Navigator list-building tips such as ID verification, filtering to second-degree connections, using “posted on LinkedIn” to target active users, negative keywords, technology filters (e.g., Shopify) and account lists, and uploading external company lists for hard-to-target segments. He shares direct-mail examples (coffee mug/coffee, promotional pens) and event tactics including team-based invites, manual reminders, replay follow-ups, repurposing clips, and using panels plus thank-you notes and custom CDs/vinyl to build relationships. He closes with LinkedIn ad guidance: start with retargeting, then connections, then cold audiences.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Pre Show Chat
02:56 Event Kickoff and Goals
04:02 Housekeeping and Replay Info
05:25 Agenda and Speaker Intro
07:07 Why High Effort Wins
08:51 No AI Today Quick Aside
09:59 LinkedIn System Overview
11:28 Connect With Right People
12:53 Sales Navigator Demo Setup
14:37 Basic Targeting Filters
18:34 Advanced Ecommerce Targeting
23:32 External Lists and Q&A Examples
27:45 Long Term Networking Mindset
28:41 Direct Mail Coffee Mug Outreach
31:29 Promo Pen Follow Up Strategy
37:56 Events Promotion Playbook
42:41 Panel Events For Key Accounts
46:30 LinkedIn Ads Reality Check
51:35 Wrap Up And Q&A

Transcript:

[00:00:02] Hello and welcome everybody. This is the advanced LinkedIn Strategies to fill your sales pipeline and gain new clients event. it is currently 1:58 PM Then we will be starting on time at 2:00 PM So just giving everybody a couple minutes to hop on and get on the stream. and then we’ll, we’ll get things started, I guess.

In the meantime, it’s, currently, Let’s see. It’s, I would call it a cloudy day here in, in Detroit, Michigan. It’s a little bit, a little bit on the cool side today, at least for late April, but, it sounds like we got some nice weather coming up soon. How about, how about you? Where’s everybody calling in from?

What kind of weather are you experiencing? everybody got some nice, you know, 70, 80 degree, weather. Today. let’s see here. It looks like the live stream is in fact up. That always makes me excited. I know a couple months ago we had a little, some technical difficulties, so now it’s every, every time I, I do one of these, there’s a little bit of a, you know, cross my fingers and really hope that, things are, things are happening on.

Okay. So, but it looks like we’re, we’re good here. So, just give everybody a couple minutes to, to, get on the stream and then we’ll get things started. And, and as always, thanks so much for, for showing up today. and I’ll just kind of do my final checks here just to make sure everything, appears to be, running as it’s supposed to be.

And, then we’ll get going. How’s everybody calling in from today? How’s that? How’s everybody doing today? How’s your, how’s your, your start of quarter, two month? Been going? How’s, how’s April been treating you? Has it been rainy, rainy area? I feel like it’s rainy in a lot of places in April.

All righty. It looks like it is 2:00 PM so lemme just check here. Give everybody just one more minute or so to get on and then I will get things kicked off. So, thanks everybody for being here. Hey Charlie. Nice to see you from, Rockville, Maryland. Appreciate you joining today.

And Terry from, Charlotte, North Carolina, appreciate you being on. All right. I feel like it’s been, been kind of a quiet, I feel like it’s one, like here, it’s one of those cloudy days. Feels like it takes people a little time to, to wake up, get the energy going even though it’s, in the afternoon. But, I’m just kind of looking at those numbers. They like slowly creep up in terms of like the streaming numbers, but but fortunately there’s, there’s a replay in case anybody does show up late. But for anybody who is here now, I do appreciate and wanna respect 

[00:02:55] your time. So with that being said, let’s kick things off.

So. Welcome everybody to Advanced LinkedIn Strategies to Failure Sales Pipeline. My name is Gary Ruplinger and I am the founder of Pipelineology. And today I’m gonna be talking about some things that go beyond just the basics of using LinkedIn to get more clients. If you’ve been on some of my previous events, you know, we’ve talked probably quite a lot about using this pla, using this platform to get new clients.

We’ve talked about using content, we’ve talked about outreach. we’ve done events just on doing events, like we’re doing right now. but today I wanted to kind of dive into some of the parts that I think people tend to skip, or don’t pay much attention to, or, or. You know, they’re just, they, they’re just not quite what they’re looking to do.

’cause they’re not quite as easy to automate. So we’re gonna look at those advanced strategies. and the advantage is, if you take advantage of these, is that most people don’t do this because they’re a little harder. They’re not just set it and forget it. They take a little bit more effort. 

[00:04:00] So. A few quick housekeeping items.

There is a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds, so if you do ask a question, I may not see it right away. I usually, like I said. If I say it by the time you post it and typed it, it’s usually 30 seconds have gone by. so I’m always happy to, to kind of keep an eye on comments. And I always appreciate when you comment and ask questions.

Just keep in mind there’s a little bit of delay in between things. there will be a replay of today’s event, and it will be available right on this page, a few minutes after the event. Or if you come back to the, if you go to your My Network, click on events, click on the name of this event.

It’ll be right there. About usually takes about five minutes for LinkedIn to process it after we get done. And if you’d like to be notified of future events, you can do so at Pipelineology dot com slash events. Just put your email address in the forum there and I’ll make sure that we let you know, whenever we’re doing one of these events.

as I know, my network has grown, quite a bit over the past few years and I can’t invite everybody in my network anymore. I used to be able to long time ago, but now, now with about 25, actually, I’m pushing 26,000 connections. I can only get a few thousand people sent actual invitations so that, sending out.

so if you are one of those people who wants to make sure you, you do hear about ’em in case you’re interested, go to Pipelineology dot com events and make sure you get, get those, those 

[00:05:24] there. the agenda today. I’m actually, my goal is to keep this one a little bit shorter than normal. I’m gonna go for probably about 30 to 40 minutes, of time today.

so we’ve only really got four things on the, on the agenda for today, and the first one is gonna be finding and connecting with the right people. we’re gonna talk about mail IE, direct mail. we’re gonna talk about some strategies that are a little bit more on the advanced side and. Probably, perhaps more that people just don’t realize you can do with them, with LinkedIn events.

And then finally, we’re gonna take a look, look at LinkedIn ads for those who just need a little bit more, More of a push and have the budget to do so. So that is what we’re gonna be covering. real quick, the 32nd introduction about me. My name is Gary Rup Lunger. I am the founder of Pipelineology and host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been at marketing now for 22, actually 23 years. I need to update the slide. In my corporate career, I worked at car dealerships and I ran their call centers. So my team was responsible for handing all the incoming leads and we would set appointments and get those people to come in in person. at the 16 stores that we, we had around the country, these days, I work in the client, helping, I help my clients get meetings with the people that they’re looking to talk to.

And I am also actively seeking New England IPA beer recommendations. And I, I know I put this in probably every slide from my presentations, but I’ve gotten a lot of good recommendations, so hopefully today is another one where I, I get another, Another good recommendation from somebody. So without further ado, let’s kind of jump into 

[00:07:06] today’s event.

And I think what you’re gonna see is gonna, today is probably gonna revolve around probably two things you don’t often see, which is things that are a little bit higher effort and things that are higher cost. and I know in the days of, in these days of, of automation and outsourcing, everything’s about, you know, reducing, you know, cost and effort as much as possible.

and that’s why this event, I think, kind of runs counter to all of that because that’s what everybody else is doing. And if you’re getting the results that you want from all those, from, from those things of the automation and reducing costs and everything like that, keep doing ’em. By all means, if that’s working for you.

But if you want to gain an edge, you, you want something that’s a little bit extra, something that’s just a little bit different, that’s what we’re gonna be covering today. So, like I said, if you, what you’re doing is working and you’re happy with it. Don’t worry about these today, just keep these tucked in your back pocket, pocket for the time when you need ’em.

But if you are at that point where you’d say, yeah, I could use something that’s, you know, a little bit different, a little bit, you know, that’s gonna help me really stand out from other people that, you know, it’s not, it’s not as easy to do. It’s not just push a button and magic happens. this is kind of what we’re doing.

Basically, it’s doing the work that the others don’t wanna do. And I find that that’s really a lot of what, you know, we’ve built our whole, my whole business on, Pipelineology is really based on freeing up consultants, time to do outreach and manual, you know, messaging of people and coordinating schedules, and helping people build those connections that they just don’t have the time, time to do themselves.

So I understand if you don’t have time for them, but if you do have a team, you do have, do, have resources, I think some of these ideas can, can really help you. Get, get 

[00:08:50] to the next level. So probably surprisingly, we’re not talking about AI today. This is not one of those use this magic whizzbang AI tool, to do this.

And, yes, that image was in fact AI generated. And, Side note I said, told the, image generator, and I think this was, Dolly. So the, chat GPT one and I said, can you please take that cigarette out of its mouth? That’s not what I actually wanted. I just wanted the red, the red circle with the line through it and, it figured that part out.

But it. It, when I said, take the cigarette out of its mouth, you know what it said, it doesn’t have one. I said, yes, it, it sure does. Can you do that? I said, sure. Regenerating image. And it came back and it moved the cigarette to the other. So it’s, AI is still a little bit weird sometimes where it doesn’t quite understand what the object is.

It doesn’t understand that that’s still a visual representation of it, so. And appreciate. Yep. I see more people are, are, are hopping on now. Michael in, Los Angeles. Good to see you, Tina from Steven’s Point. Welcome. I’m originally from Wisconsin myself, so always good to see a fellow on Wisconsinite 

[00:09:58] there.

so this is kind of the system that we’re looking at here. So if you were on last month, this is what we went over. I know this is really small. You can’t read it. That’s okay. You don’t need to be able to read it right now. We’re gonna talk about kind of the important points, and we’re kind of building upon this today, but essentially last month what we talked about was having a system that helps you build your network, helps you create content, helps you do outreach, and then helps you put ad campaigns together.

Today we’re gonna be kind of covering ways to maximize those connections, use direct mail in places that other people just, just aren’t going to or haven’t considered. I know when I first got started doing LinkedIn, I kind of went with the basics of, I guess I’m doing LinkedIn, and then I had a mentor explain to me, well, actually.

You can do this, this, this, and this. And he had a whole, whole list of things. And it kind of really opened my eyes to this is just the tip of the iceberg. And today my goal is to give you some of that, experience and, and information now that we’re, what, six years later from that. So if you do want a copy of this, however, just shoot me an email.

It’s gary at Pipelineology dot com. In fact, let me just drop my email address in the comments here in case you want to message me. So, you can, message me there. if you do want a copy of this, I’ll send you a PDF of it after, 

[00:11:27] we get off the event here. So let’s kind of focus first on connecting with the right people.

’cause that’s, that’s really what it’s all about. on, on LinkedIn is having the right network to begin with. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do on LinkedIn. And I have these conversations with, with people more often than you’d think, where they’ve, they’ve got large networks, I’ve seen people with five, 10, even, even people with 20,000 connections already on LinkedIn, and your, your max is 30,000 and they tell me, yeah, I don’t, I don’t have a lot of the, the right connections.

It’s mostly been people message me and I just accept everybody. and you end up with the, the challenge of, alright, well I’ve got all these connections, but they’re not, they’re not the people that ultimately want to work with me and are gonna help me build my business. So I’m gonna kind of do kind of a live demo with you here on finding the right people and how to really maximize your connections and, Get, get those going here. So I’m just gonna switch over here real quick. Stephanie, go ahead and send me that email. I’m kind of running solo today. Usually I’ve got an assistant on with me who will go through the comments and make sure everybody gets that. today, I, it is just me, so, if you email me though, I’ll, I’ll make sure you get it.

I will try and go back through the comments. I do try and check them. but, we’re a little, I’m a little bit, strapped for time this week, 

[00:12:51] unfortunately. but. So let’s switch over here to. Alright, so you should be able to see now my, my screen. So, real quick, this one is not, I would say this is not one of the advanced strategies, but it really helps is if you haven’t done so already, just get yourself Id verified with, with LinkedIn it’s free, it costs nothing.

And I’ve actually found that it makes a statistically meaningful difference, in terms of people responding to your messages. ’cause they. You know, you’re not a bot anymore. it’s, it’s weird, especially, or if you work at a, you know, a larger company or that, you know, might be people trying to spoof, especially if it’s like in financial or something like that.

having your company be verified here, really, really important, in those cases. So, just, just a quick little tip. That takes about all of about five or 10 minutes to do. And, if you’re trying to use LinkedIn for, from a business building standpoint, I find it be absolutely worthwhile to do so.

But, okay, I digress. So over here this is what we are looking at is actually LinkedIn’s sales navigator. And if you have questions about how to find the right people, maybe you’ve been trying to kind of build lists and you find you get a lot of the wrong people, you’re just not connecting with the right people.

And you haven’t been able to figure out how to do it, go ahead and post in the comments who you’re trying to connect with. And I will try and, depending on how many message written, I think we’ve got a little bit smaller group than, than normal today. So I probably should have time to get through all of them.

But, go ahead and post in the comments if there’s a certain group you’re going after and I can try and show you live how, how I would approach it. but I’m gonna show you a couple examples here to get you started so that this should, should work for 

[00:14:36] everybody. So let’s take kind of a straightforward one here so we can kind of see everything that’s available.

So we’re just gonna start with a example. Let’s say you are, you’re an ad consultant and you wanna work with people in, the, the mortgage space. or you’re a, a lender of some sort. I worked with a, a hard money lender a few years ago, and that was, that was their targets and it was, it was very effective for ’em.

That particular group of people is active on the platform. They’re easy to find. so let’s kind of go through the basic here. So in this case, let’s just grab by job title. and if you spell it right, it works better. so we’re just gonna grab that. and these are mostly keywords. So if it’s like, assistant mortgage broker, that would also show up.

but. Let’s say you say, I don’t want them to be, you know, also be a real estate person or something like that. So one of the important things when doing targeting here is you can block out certain ones in most of these categories here. So using negative keywords and things like that is actually really helpful.

Helps you clean this list up quite a bit. at the moment I’ve got company headcount listed here ’cause I find, you know, you can get to ones that are too big, but if you say those are too small, you can always. Here’s kind of the breakdown that LinkedIn gives you. So you can pick people at very, very large organizations, and everything in between.

So kind of fi pick what works for you. we find that this kind of is a pretty good estimate in terms of, kind of helps us figure it out. Annual revenue as well in most cases, maybe with the exception of nonprofits. So. But nonetheless, here’s kind of how I build a basic, type of system. So I’m kind of looking here.

And one thing you want to do for any type of being proactive in connecting with people, connecting with the right people, you always want ’em to be second degree connections. Everything else is, is really gonna reduce your effectiveness. For example, if you leave this unchecked and then it’s got everybody, you’re gonna find that your, your connection rate will drop, by about 80%.

It’s, it’s pretty severe. So this will make sure everything works a whole lot better, and you can always keep keeping your list size in mind. Over here at the top right, LinkedIn will automatically update that as you do it. But that’s kind of the basics. and if you’re working with any type of tool here, you can take this and put it into the tool.

That’s what they’re gonna typically ask for, is this URL up here at the top, but where you can actually significantly bump your connection rate is right here. Post it on LinkedIn. this means they’ve been active on the platform and that’s probably one of the downsides of LinkedIn is that a lot of people have.

Accounts that are mostly dead, that they just don’t really use. So if you find yourself in a position where you’ve got a lot of people to work with, right? ’cause you just saw how many this went down. So I’ll go back here and show you here. I started with over 2000 people by flipping this on, it dropped me all the way down to 484 people.

So I really, really have restricted the size of my list. So, use this only would necessary because. There are probably a lot of really good prospects and good, good people in here that you do want to be connected with. but in some cases, the, the campaign just for whatever reason, the numbers aren’t working well enough, this is a great way to give yourself basically an instant boost and you’ll probably see your, your connection rate jump by.

for example, we often see it go from, you know, you can, if you’re at 20%, it’ll probably go up to about 25 to 30%. if you’re at 30% already, it might go up to 40%. So it makes a big difference. So that is one of those easy ones you can do if you’re, you’re struggling to get enough new 

[00:18:32] connections. now let me show you here the, the far more advanced way to do this if you’ve got really specific targeting.

So let’s now say you’re in a different field here. And I see a couple that have come in and, yes, Veronica, we are using Sales Navigator for this. So let’s take a look here at some of the, some of the fields that are available. So in this example we’re gonna look at e-commerce and then I’m gonna go through some of the ones that have just, popped in in the comments.

But I wanna show you this one. ’cause most people. Don’t even think to, you know, don’t even quite know how to ask these the right way. let’s say you are in the e-commerce space, so everybody’s kind of familiar with that, right? Here’s the problem. That is not a, that is not a, a, a category I can target.

E-commerce doesn’t work there. You can’t type in e-commerce up here and get anything close to what you’re looking for. And back in the old days, the way you would do it is you’d say, well, I can’t really target e-commerce. Maybe I can target consumer packaged goods and kind of hope, but they remove that category as well.

So now that exists in two categories that exists under manufacturing and that exists under retail. And this is, if you grab those two categories, that will grab you every sub, sub, sub retail and manufacturing category as well. And you can filter out the ones you don’t want. For example, most people don’t want, you know, defense and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

but nonetheless, so that would be all the ones that would include e-commerce. And now you probably realize the problem is that there’s a whole lot of ones that are not e-commerce in there. So here’s how we’ve figured out how to do it. And this is, takes a little bit more effort to do this because there’s an extra step here, but I’m gonna show it to you.

So let’s say, well, e-commerce, there’s, several large platforms that are out there, right? The big one most people know is Shopify. if they’re doing Amazon FBA, unfortunately, I don’t know how to target those people this way. You have, you need an external list for that. and I’ll show you that in just a second.

let’s see. I think BigCommerce is still out there. There’s WooCommerce. There’s probably others that I’m not thinking of right now ’cause I don’t actively work in this space. But nonetheless, now I can pick technologies that are used on that the company uses. And now you can see over here, it’s given me a bunch of ones that it detects that they’re using these, this technology here, and they fall under these.

So now I’ve got a much. Cleaner list to work with to know that I’m actually targeting the right people. So there’s an extra step here. You have to go through and you have to select all of these, and you have to do them your, you have to save them to a list. so you can just, in this case, I’m just doing Shopify test and I’m gonna save them here.

And, you can have up to a thousand people on a list. So it’s, it’s a little bit extra work and you’ll need to do some extra filtering. For example, I’ve got clients who, you know, they only, they want people who have sales departments of certain sizes. I’ve seen ones, they want the HR department to be of a certain size.

I’ve seen, I’ve done ones where we want people who are currently hiring on LinkedIn because if. That means they have budget for whatever type of, of service that we’re, we’re selling, things like that. So   gives you,you can, can add here, here’s the challenge is I have to go. Oh, okay. Looks like my, my screen timed out here for a second. So.

[00:22:36]  And I’m gonna say, alright, well I still want, in this case, what I want to chart connect with at an e-commerce company. You know, if it’s. Smaller. I probably want to connect with, probably the CEO. So let me put that in there. Or I want to connect with the owner that’s pro. Oftentimes at a smaller company, one of the titles they use.

I’m gonna go here, to account lists, and I’m gonna click this Shopify test. And now, and again, we still wanna make sure that we’re doing second degree connections. And now here, now it’s gonna pull up. The examples of people that I have, I that kind of fit this criteria that are in that list that I just showed you there.

So little bit more work, for sure. But it can give you much, much higher quality list of people that are much more accurate if the regular search parameters aren’t working for you and if that still isn’t enough for 

[00:23:31] you. LinkedIn, this is, for the advanced subscriptions in, LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

They have an upload section. If you have external lists that, you know, maybe you’ve bought a list from somebody, you’ve got parameters you need, it gives you the right companies that you know are for, for what you need. for example, I worked with a, a client who they wanted family offices and family offices.

basic right? Think of, for, for wealthy people, they’ll have their own little kind of family office type of thing that handles, you know, investing and things like that. But there’s no, no category for it. And the categories that it does fall under are very, very noisy. So it’s really hard to find them unless they actually put family office in there, many of ’em don’t.

so we can get a list externally and, and upload it, and then we can go through that same process, process of account list and match ’em back and find the people. So, couple, couple options there. So let me take a look here at some of these. All, I got a couple good questions here. So, Joe, let’s take a look at yours.

We’re gonna look at SaaS founders. now a couple things here that we can look at. first of all, is knowing what category they’re under. This one’s pretty common. They are almost all here, under software development. you’re gonna make sure you want to get your geography right here. So, I’m gonna assume United States, you tell me if it’s different than that though.

and let’s get this list out of here. size is up to you, depending and probably kind of depends on probably where they are at their, their growth stage. and, keep in mind if you need it, there is an. Activity section over here under account and, funding events in the past 12 months. This will really, really restrict kind of what you’re looking, looking for, but, this is ones that, that LinkedIn is aware of anyway, in terms of, of fundraising, rounds.

It doesn’t necessarily specify which, funding series it was, but gives you an idea anyway. So one thing if you need more than that. and then otherwise we just go here, we’ll grab the job titles. oops. We’ll grab their current job title and we want the founder. This will grab in co-founders as well.

And this should give you a good start and then you can kind of work your way down from there to kind of make sure you’re getting in the right people. but that will get you a pretty good, good start again. Make sure that they are second degree connections of yours so that you get the best connection rate.

Alright. so that’s Joe, Tina, small business owners. We would need to be a lot more specific under them. What kind of small business owners. but if you, happen to get back, I can, I can do that one for you. and Veronica, you’ve got a good one here. Here’s the, here’s the one issue though. LinkedIn.

Can’t filter that way. LinkedIn will not filter by, gender. so getting women, senior level executives, this is one of the limitations. And I, I always like when somebody grabs one that doesn’t fit. ’cause I, I don’t wanna pretend that you, this will work for everybody. So we would need an external list, and kind of to upload them back in and feed them into the system so that, that section there where I said we can upload a list, we would need to grab that from another source.

That’s got them, and then we can, can push them back in. But by default, LinkedIn will not, just feed me the women, senior level executives to grab them. So those are some examples there. So, just to give you some ideas there, to kind of build your list. So, We will keep moving along here. but if you have any other questions on that, let me know and, we can try and circle back to it at the 

[00:27:44] end.

So that’s kind of connecting with the right people and really that that is kind of where a good campaign is gonna start there. And keep in mind when you’re building your network on LinkedIn, this is not for, you know, the next 30 days. This is. This is with with you for, I think I opened my LinkedIn accounts in somewhere, I don’t know, somewhere around 2006, seven, something like that.

Actually don’t remember, but. and, and you know, the connections build and accumulate over a long period of time. So, you’re, you’re getting these people for, for years and years. And that’s kind of one of the things I really like about it, is that you’re, you’re doing these Yeah. ’cause you wanna get business now, but it also helps you build business next year and five years from now and, you know, ideally 10 years from now.

So. connect with the right people now and it’s gonna, you know, continue to pay dividends, for, for many, many, many years for 

[00:28:39] you. so let’s kinda shift gears a little bit here. What are some ways you can really stand out? ’cause right, LinkedIn’s a bit noisy if you’re on LinkedIn, and, if you,

if you’re on this event,

let’s talk about some ways that you can. Stand out that don’t involve just messaging or trying to post in that way. this is one example that I’ve, I’ve shown probably quite a few times now, and.

Advantage other than me. ’cause nobody does it. ’cause it’s, it’s a little bit of extra work or a fair bit of extra work, I probably should say. but this allows you to really show up in a way like nobody else. So here’s, here’s kind of what the concept was of this. This is a coffee mug. I’ve got one on my desk here, it’s got my pens in it, but real coffee mug.

So what we would do is I would connect to somebody. We were trying to do this in the, medical device space where it was much, much more challenging for me to get meetings, than with, the, the typical marketing type of people I worked with at the time. And now we really have focused in on consulting, so we don’t need to go quite that extreme with it.

but, what we would do is we’d connect with those, those people on LinkedIn and we would reach out and say, hello, thanks for connecting. And then immediately I would mail them this, this coffee mug. And inside of it would be, you know, a little, letter that we.

I figured if I wanted to ask you to meet for a virtual cup of coffee. So what I would do then is there’d be a little, Starbucks instant coffee in there. I tried to use a name brand so that they would recognize it, and then I would take a look and af day after it arrived, I would. Go ahead and message them and say, Hey, just wanted to see if you got the coffee mug I sent you.

And you know what a lot of people would say. Yeah, I, I did. I appreciate, you know, appreciate you sending that. ’cause no, nobody else does that, right? Because it’s extra work, it’s extra money, it’s extra investments, but no. Nonetheless, that helped me get meetings in a, in an injury where we just found messaging people and connecting, especially since it was through my account.

And I’m not well connected, not, I guess I’m not, my background isn’t in that space. My background, as I said, is in the automotive space. If I needed to talk to somebody on automotive, pretty easy. I’ve done a lot of consulting and marketing work. Again, easy to get meetings in those space for me, but that wasn’t the case here.

So this really helped me stand out and get meetings that I couldn’t otherwise. Otherwise 

[00:31:28] get. So, let me show you another kind of example here. And this one came from a story that, this is a text message I got from my mother of, I believe about six weeks ago. And she sent me the picture, Hey, do you recognize this pen?

’cause they had just visited us. it’s been, been here for a while. I’ve been using it and it’s become my favorite writing instrument. And immediately my ears perked up. I said, you’ve got a favorite pen. Oh, you, I, you know what, what pen is it? I must know, right? Because I, I don’t know. I, I, I sit here on my desk.

I’ve got a, you know, a legal pad and a pen here in my hand. I always like a good pen. thinking, you know, this must be some really super fancy pen. Well, she’s like, I can’t find anything like it. There’s no markings on it, anything like that. I said, no, I don’t recognize it. But, my fiance actually, she recognized it.

She knew where it came from and told me, actually, it’s a promotional pen. You know, somebody gave me some samples of it. They were just all blank. and they happened to come home with us and I happened to take one last time. I visited them. So we managed to track it down and figure out who in fact made the pen.

Well, the one problem was, you know, I was like, I’ll just give my mother some of these, but they’re promotional products, right? So the minimum order is like 240, pens or something like that. So I now am the proud owner of, 240 of these pens. so big. So I’ve got lots and lots of these pens. So I sent her a, I sent her a bunch of them, so effectively she should, you know, have, hopefully, a pen at least not, maybe not a lifetime supply, but it should last her the next 10 years or so of, of these nice little, little pens.

They, and they are actually pretty nice, especially for a promotional pen. And what I’m gonna do here is I’m using this story now as a follow up for people who, well, you know, I haven’t converted in our sales pipeline.

And we’re gonna use this as a follow up to help us show back up in a way that isn’t in the email inbox, in their LinkedIn inbox where, you know, I, things, things are easy to ignore. Your mailboxes is probably pretty, at least I know at the office I get mail, you know, maybe, you know, a handful hands a week, maybe once or twice.

Actually, maybe, I think this week I haven’t gotten. I got mail again. I got mail last week. So

people are are like that. You

[00:34:07] people sending as much

because it’s so. Much easier to send things digitally.

We’re kind of going to an old fashioned way of doing things and we’re, we’re gonna mail things.

So if you can do some inspiration, you know, maybe PI with somebody else again, is it a bit more effort? Absolutely. Is it gonna be a lot different than everybody else’s? You betcha. Right? When is the, trying to think in terms of, of, I had a, I used to keep a box next to my desk of the last. A direct mail piece I received here that was not just like a brochure from, you know, like a, from a audio media visual media company.

And it’s probably been now three years. And I threw it away ’cause I just said, okay, it was taking up space here. So this, this is a weight that will help you show up in you a completely different way that just are not, not being covered here. So keep keep that in mind in terms of if you wanna stand out.

Do that, but remember, tie it back to the platform, right? Just, just sending those out standalone, hoping that you’ll get people in will be a very, very expensive customer acquisition. so the way we do it is we connect with them on LinkedIn first. We’ve, we’ve talked to ’em be before and then we’ll message ’em after they get it.

So we’re kind of keeping it on the platform. We started. We’ve got this physical thing that we have sent them in, in between. So it maintains kind of the trust and authority you get on LinkedIn while being unique that you know also. So, okay. Mary says your streaming is frozen. One second.

All right. I’ve tried to restart my screen here. All right, so let me know if it’s, if it’s working again here. I can, Stephanie, ask, do you have a link to the pens? I can get you one. just again, email me and I can tell you what, what in fact they are. ’cause it’s like some, it, they’re promotional pens, right? So it’s like some long skew of letters and numbers that explains what they actually are. But, they’re pretty, pretty commonly available.

Quite a few vendors carry them. alright, so just an idea there for you. and we’ll keep going here. if I’m still frozen or you can’t hear me, I, I guess let me know. No. but otherwise I’m going to assume that, things are working. And as I’m kind of looking at the thing, it looks like it’s restarted. So, alright, so I’m gonna assume everything’s working unless I, I hear otherwise from, from 

[00:37:55] everybody.

So let’s kind of switch gears again here. Let’s talk about events, which is what you are on right now. So we’ve, we’ve talked about these, I’ve done events exclusively on the topic, but here’s the things I wanna talk about that don’t get covered. And that is there, there are some, some things that will really help you make this a much more effective, you know, promotional tool for your company.

and one, the first one on here is that make it a team effort. and I don’t think I put her on the slide slide anywhere, but, make it, make sure that everybody at your company is inviting people to this. Everybody’s got their own networks. They may or may not, they may not be big networks, but every little bit helps.

So. Each, each account can send up to a thousand invites, of connect two connections every week. So when we do it, everybody on the team here will invite up to a thousand connections every week, and we’ll do that until they either run out or until the event happens. So if you’ve got more than. You know, we do it for typically about a month, so we get about four weeks worth of, of inviting to do, but that really helps us get much bigger events than we could do with any just one person’s account.

I recommend doing this manually and not just posting on your feed and hoping that people show up. it just doesn’t, doesn’t really get you the same traction unless you’re a big influencer. and even then you’ll probably find you’re still getting a fraction of the people who would typically show up.

So. I recommend doing that. I recommend if you, if it’s a small event, and you’ve got less than 300 people registered for it, go the morning of the event or even the day before, go through and just manually message everybody. Go through and say, Hey, just wanna make sure you’ve got the link and let me know if you’re coming.

You know, we’ve done that for, we had a couple of client, we’ve done some client events this week and we’ve done ’em for, for all of those. The only event we didn’t do it for is the one you’ve attended here today. simply because, we had, I think 800 and some people registered and just didn’t have the time, to fit it all in.

So we figured we should do our client ones first and, you know, we’ll, we’ll, we can handle this a little bit smaller event this week. I also recommend, after the event, sending out replay links and letting people know, Hey, I’m not sure if you were able to make it. ’cause here’s the big thing I can tell you about events.

Not everybody’s gonna show up live. In fact, only a small percentage of the people who register for it are going to actually be at the event. So by going back and messaging those people, those replays, you’re gonna get a whole lot more views on that video and, more exposure to, to the overall event. And, I recommend having some type of small call to action that isn’t a, Hey, you can buy my stuff.

Type of thing. you want that too, or at least a place where they can learn more about what you do. But having something, you know, for example, there’s been two on this one if you’ve been watching is one, it’s been, you can get the PDF at the beginning I showed you with kind of our whole system for consultants.

And then second was one that’s probably a little bit more involved ’cause you have to send me a mailing address, which right. Some people aren’t comfortable with and I get that. That’s why I usually tell people an office address is perfectly fine or a PO box. I don’t need your home address. But quite frankly, these days right there, there’s plenty of resources out there that I can get the, the home address if I needed it anyway.

But nonetheless just, but that’s creepy to tell people. But the other one was, was sending this pen out. So, I also recommend after the event is over. Getting that list and exporting it and taking it, and you can add them to your autoresponder for follow up. you know, signing off a replay that way.

That’s typically what we do. I also have one client who they, they have, they have a little bit bigger sales team. They’ve got a team who calls up everybody and thanks them for attending and it makes, want to make sure they got whatever handout was there and you know, if they are interested then they will kind of move them down into the sales funnel.

They actually take the time to go through and call everybody who, who registered for their events. So, that’s a, that’s a bit more aggressive, not when we actually do or do for our clients, but, by having all this in, in place helps you, helps you do that. And then finally, is being able to take these video, long form events like this is you can take little snippets of them and then turn them into short form content that you can then use for, for your LinkedIn or for, if you’re on other platforms like Instagram or TikTok, you can use them there as well.

So. Some extra things you can try there, under events. And then finally, 

[00:42:40] actually, nope. I had one more section here I wanna talk about on events. And this one here was one that I’ve, one of my clients used and I thought, yeah, this is pretty, pretty brilliant. And I think it’s one of those ones that kind of gets overlooked is you may have connections that you just.

Can’t quite seem to get, you want meetings with them, you know, you want to get a deal with them ’cause they would be major, you know, major opportunities for your business. But you just can’t seem to get those appointments landed at that company. So here is kind of the, the, the concept here as use, use an event as kind of the way to get them.

so essentially do an event and do it kind of as you have a panel or a round table and, right. This is, especially for experts, this is a pretty common type of thing that they would participate in. So, finding the person at the company who’s an expert or has some expertise on something. Is a good idea.

For example, we had a client who was in the recruiting space and we said, well, AI is, is one of those topic that’s really popular right now. And she said, but I’m not an expert on ai. And so what we came up with was, well, you have connections who. You know, they’re, they’re more, much more involved in this space.

So we talked about how AI was impacting, you know, the hiring spaces and, and job opportunities and things like that. So she invited, I think she invited five. She got five people on to come participate on a round table. And the idea here was that those were five people that she really wanted an opportunity to work with in down the road now, right?

It wasn’t gonna be instantaneous,

but knowing that this was kind of the long-term play. So we set up the event, we hosted that. So we got them on there and we, we did the event as normal, got got people to show up and everything like that. So we got, got our influence that way and exposure that way. In addition, we got the, those five key connections that we’ve got a lot more, a lot better relationship with now because we hosted an event and brought them in as experts.

Excuse me, I seem to have a tickle in my throat today.

Hmm. And then after the event, now this is where it gets really, really uncommon now, right? We’ve, we’ve done the right things. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve invited them, we brought them on. We made them feel like experts. Now we kind of doubled down on that. That’s after the event. We send out a handwritten thank you note and, we send them, you know, essentially you can get little CDs printed, like actual real CDs with put the artwork on from the event and their picture on it.

It’s like, Hey, just thank you so much for being on the panel and I just wanted you to have a record of, of this and, you know, put that in the package. And they’re gonna love it. And the thing is, that’s actually not that expensive to do. There’s a company called Kki who will do a custom CDU, just upload the artwork and the.

The file and then boom, they’ll mail you a cd a a few days later and it costs like a buck 40 or something plus shipping. And if you really, really wanna get fancy, like it’s a really high-end target, you can send them a vinyl record. So much bigger way cooler, much more expensive thing to get. but I’ve done that a handful of times for, for key for key clients and things like that, just to really stand out.

Trust me, you do that for somebody and you know, they’re, they’re always gonna take your call. So. something things to keep in mind here that really go beyond just the standard run an event. This is a way to really gain, gain, key influence in areas that nobody, nobody else is doing. So keep that in mind for any guest.

You can do the same thing with the handwritten thank you and CD thing, for like a podcast guest as well. 

[00:46:28] So. Finally, I want to get to advertising and then I’ll open it up for questions. and we should, should have a few minutes here. I’ll try and, make this section fairly quick because I think this is probably one of the more challenging things on, on LinkedIn is making this, making this work.

And the big challenge on LinkedIn, the reason that I, I like to do outreach and other things like that is because it doesn’t require them to be spending a lot of time on LinkedIn. They can pop in and out and check messages pretty easily, but people don’t really scroll through the feed as much on LinkedIn.

I used to used the, the, the idea I like to illustrate to people is that the average time people spend on LinkedIn is somewhere around 19 minutes a month, A month for the whole month, not a day. The average time people spend on, YouTube, which I think is currently the number one, as far as far as networks go, people spend, right around 40 minutes a day.

Right a day, not per month. So there’s a huge, huge time disparity there. So serving ads, there’s a much, much tinier, opportunity to serve ads on, on LinkedIn from their standpoint. So ads tend to be far more expensive. They get a whole lot less clicks and interest. So everything moves a little bit slower.

As you can see here in the notes here, I’ve got this as being a three to six month process usually takes 90 days just to have a pretty good idea if you’re going in the right direction, because things move more slowly. So why would you bother to do ’em anyway? The targeting is really, really good. You can get targets in place and get, get your ads in front of the right people at the right companies just like you would for any type of campaign.

’cause it’s got the same targeting that we just looked at, for, for trying to approach people. So that’s the advantage and that’s why you would want to do it. But it just, it takes, it takes a little bit longer so. Now that I, now that I’m done telling you why it’s bad, let me tell you, you know, where, how you kind of approach it.

So if you have existing website traffic, people visiting other resources, start there. Start with retargeting people who’ve already heard of you, and then you can apply the filtering and make sure it’s going to the right people. And then you can start, running it to connections. So, right. If you’re building connections, kind of like we talked about at the beginning, you’re connecting with the right people.

You can take that list and then you can export it over into the ad network, and now you can serve ads to connections of people. and that can be another good way. That’s, again, we’ll keep the costs in check as you kind of start to build this out in layers. And then finally, where it’s most scalable, but also this is going to be the most costly.

So keep that in mind. This is why I always tell people, don’t start here. You can start running as people who are not familiar with your company, but if you’ve kind of got the right connect, if you’ve been building connections, you kind of know who the right connections are so you can get that targeting in place.

And it’s just a matter of kind of finding the right creative. So I’ve got a couple on the screen here, of ones you can try that, you know, kind of feature, you know, looking for pain points. One can be quick little images, image ads. Seems to work better by the way, than, than video ads. If you were running, Facebook ads, I would say flip it around. You probably want to do video ads, ’cause you’re gonna be able to get a better you, you’ll get faster and better responses with people. LinkedIn not so much. They don’t, they, they were really featuring link, video stuff about two years ago, but their, their numbers must have clearly said that that’s not what people want on LinkedIn.

’cause they, they’ve really kind of buried it quite a bit. and then you kind of build on that. So. What are the pain points? Kind of what results can you receive? What is the service you offer and kind of push those people and what are you trying to do? You’re trying to get ’em to a landing page, trying to get ’em to your website.

So what can you do with that? You can retarget them, and then you’re trying to capture their information, get them to schedule a, a meeting with you. So multiple steps. quick tip here. If you’re starting to run something like this, one thing you wanna do is do set up a separate ad on Google for anytime somebody googles your company name or your name.

If you’re, if it’s, you know, your name is kind of the face of the company, so that you kind of capture that traffic as well. that’s a super, super cheap, a super effective way to, you know, capture those, those extra searches. When you’re doing that and that no, no competitor kind of tries to siphon those up for from you.

So I know that’s a really, really fast way to cover kind of a complex topic, but, it’s, it’s one of those worth doing. Once you’ve kind of explored all these other avenues and you’re still looking to expand and keep growing the company, that’s when, when LinkedIn adds really makes sense. But again, bit, bit more of an advanced topic, not, like I said, not something you wanna start with.

but eventually down the road it can be a, a pretty valuable and. More way to kind of consistently scale things up while maintaining the really quality, good quality targeting you get on LinkedIn. That’s just hard to replicate on other, other platforms. 

[00:51:33] So. I think that’s all I’ve got for you today.

Lemme make sure I didn’t, you know, didn’t, didn’t sneak in any other, other slides. but if you do need some help with this type of thing, this is what my company does. So we help with getting companies set up and helping business owners do that outreach, get in touch with, you know, the right people at the right company.

So they get meetings on their calendar with the people they want to talk to. you know, we’re gonna start with the fundamentals first, and then these advanced ones kind of get added on later, and that’s, that’s really the goal, is we want to grow, grow with you, and kind of make it as, as effective as possible.

And right. And the big thing here is that it’s kinda us do it, us doing the work that, you know, you just simply don’t have time to do. But if you’ve got the resources internally, by all means, get your internal team working on working on these things. So, and with that, I will open it up for questions. I know we’ve had, Seems like my stream cut in and out a little bit. So I do appreciate everybody who kind of beared with me here. so I will check and see if there are any other questions here. I do see one message here from, from Arthur Rich here that LinkedIn needs a lot of manual work. I guess, you know, it depends what you’re comparing it to.

there is, there certainly some, some manual work. There’s automations you can do as well. and I think that that kind of, it’s your teach own what, you know, depending on, on what it is, right? It’s a whole lot less work than than cold calling. But, it is kind of up to you. We’ve found that, yeah, there is certainly some manual actions you can take that make things more effective.

but there are also automations and things you can put in place that, you know, help it run, you know, every day. Or you can even get a service to help you make sure it’s kind of out, off, you know, off your plate and somebody else is kind of handling it for you. and I did see one other one here that says the searches are very challenging.

it, it, it takes a little bit of practice, I would say. they kind of make broad targeting really, really easy, and that’s why I wanted to show you some of those, you know, negative targeting. You can block certain types of keywords from appearing. You can to really refine things. You can block certain companies.

Really use the target, make the list smaller at first is kind of the key. When you’re doing that. You don’t, if you have a list with a hundred thousand people on it. That’s way too big. You wanna list with probably less than 2000 people on it, probably smaller, and then build variations on that. But that’s, that’s really the kind of the way you wanna do it.

You don’t wanna go for the big, broad, broad swings. It just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t get you the right people. and you’re not gonna end up with the right messages here. So, let’s see here. It looks like my comments had died, so I do apologize, for, for anybody who is unable to, comment here.

feel free to email me and I’ll try and handle it, offline. But yeah, it looks like my comment feed died. So I do apologize for that. but thanks so much everybody for showing up today. Really appreciate, appreciate you being here and taking the time today. And as always, I will see you on the next one.

Take care everybody.