Building A Sales Pipeline on LinkedIn in 2024 – Strategies for Growth

Building A Sales Pipeline on LinkedIn in 2024 – Strategies for Growth

Gary hosts a LinkedIn live session on building a 2024 sales pipeline using LinkedIn, outlining an agenda covering AI, authority/personal brand, network building, outreach, content, events, and Q&A. He emphasizes proactively growing relevant LinkedIn connections (limited weekly invites), optimizing profiles (public personal photo, strong headline, filled sections, verified ID, featured items, and visible activity), and using sequential, relevant outreach that’s short, unique, avoids pitching first message, avoids calendar links early, and usually omits connection-request notes. He advises keeping prospects on LinkedIn rather than sending external links, and using consistent, specific content while ignoring vanity metrics since buyers often lurk. He highlights events as high-leverage for authority and leads, shares tools and AI uses (ChatGPT, Midjourney), notes technical comment issues, and closes with ways to get replays and contact him.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
03:07 Housekeeping And Agenda0
5:46 Quick Intro And Audience
07:42 Pipeline Process Overview
10:05 AI Tools Reality Check
12:42 Build Your LinkedIn Network
15:36 Connection Tips That Work
18:43 Optimize Your Profile Basics
21:56 Headline And About Section
25:53 Outbound Outreach Mindset
29:36 Tech Issues And Comments Freeze
30:42 Outreach Fundamentals
32:28 Troubleshooting Low Replies
33:37 Stand Out on LinkedIn
35:15 Keep Messages Short
35:46 No Pitch or Calendar
37:32 Live Q&A Outreach Fixes
43:53 Content Strategy Basics
45:51 Avoid Generic Posts
47:21 Vanity Metrics vs Leads
49:44 Formats That Work Now
51:33 International Targeting Q&A
54:38 Leverage Events for Leads
57:27 Offer and Wrap Up
58:14 Final Audience Q&A
01:02:20 Holiday Sign Off

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to building a sales pipeline in 2024 on LinkedIn. It is a, it is a bright and sunny day here in Detroit, Michigan. A very pleasant day for the middle of December. how, how is the weather by you? Where are you calling in from today? and as always, if this is your first time with us, you know how I like to start on time.

So we will be getting started here in two minutes. I’m just giving everybody some, a chance here for all the notifications to go out, everybody to know that we’re live. And then we will start promptly at 2:00 PM at the scheduled time for things to show up.

And there is about a 20 to 32nd delay of when I say something to when it shows up on your screen. So. If you say something and I don’t respond to it right away, or it sounds like I’m way outta sync, just keep in mind that that’s probably what it is. I just didn’t, I just didn’t see it right away.

Jeffrey, it is great to have you, Jeffrey from Golden Colorado. I haven’t been there in a while. I’m, I’m in college. I was there, went to the, so I had some friends at the School of Mines there. So, neat little area. I think we did the Coors, the Coors factory, tour at the time as well.

how about everybody else? Where’s everybody else calling in from today? So,

I’m looking at this here. It looks like we have 1002, people registered today. So we should have a good, good turnout and, lots of people to kind of talk to today. So I’m, I’m looking forward to this event with everybody. this is our last one before Christmas. Actually got, I had one of those times where I was surprised on my calendar ’cause I had this down for December 19th on my calendar.

And, I completely, I, didn’t realize I changed the, the schedule on it. ’cause I thought, yeah, December 19th is probably a little bit too close to Christmas and nobody’s gonna show up. So, moved it up a week. Forgot to move it on my calendar though. But no worries. We’re, we are all set today. So very excited to get started here.

miles from Atlanta, great to have you here. Caleb from Oklahoma City, glad to have you on as well. And with that, it is two o’clock, so, I don’t wanna keep everybody waiting as I like, I’m, I always like to be very respectful of people’s time, so I appreciate you being here and being here on time. if somebody does, show up a little bit late, no problem.

You can always check out the replay. So without further ado, let’s jump into building a sales pipeline in 2024. So what are things gonna look like next year? How can we use LinkedIn to really kind of build things and have a, a healthy sales pipeline and have it, whether that’s your full strategy or a part of your overall sales strategy for your business going into the new 

[00:03:06] year. Few housekeeping items. There is a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I say something here on my screen to when it shows up on your side. shouldn’t cause any issues, but, it does mean that if you do ask a question, I probably won’t see it or be able to respond to it right away. With that said, I would encourage you to ask questions if you want, have a follow up or you want to clarification on something, or it just prompted something in some idea in your head.

Go ahead and post it. These events are always a lot more fun with interaction from the audience. and it makes me feel like I’m not talking to a blank screen, which, which, you can, it can happen. as far as replays go, the nice thing about doing these live streams here on LinkedIn is that they are available just a few minutes after the event ends.

So typically anywhere from five to 10 minutes, LinkedIn will process the replay and it will be available on this same page, with the event. if you’re, on my profile page, just click on the event. It’s, it’s right in the links beneath my, name. And you’ll be able to see where, where the event page is.

But if you didn’t get notified of this event in time or you’d like to, get notified of them in advance sooner, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events. I do try and invite as many people from my network as I can, but typically that’s about 4,000 people and I’ve got 25,000 connections, so it’s always a small group.

So if you want to be on the list that always gets notified, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events and I’ll be sure to email you prior to each event as well as to make sure you get a copy of each, each replay in case you’re not able to attend live. So today’s agenda, I’ve got probably about 30 minutes worth of content today.

So I want to, like I said, I wanna keep it short. I know with the holidays coming up, lots of you probably got lots of stuff going on. So I do appreciate you being here and I won’t keep you here too long. Today we’re gonna touch on AI just a little bit. today we’re gonna kind of talk about authority, building your network, building that personal brand.

if you weren’t here last month, check out the event that we did with Hannah Zebo at Digital Brand Kit. for more information on personal brand building, we did a whole whole event just on that topic. but we’re gonna touch on it here again today ’cause it is kind of important. We’re gonna talk about outreach, we’re gonna talk about content, and then we’re gonna open it up for some q and a.

Alright, I see more people jumping on here. We got people from Namibia welcome, from the continent of Africa. Appreciate you staying up late to attend. We got more people from California and the New Jersey store. Welcome everybody who’s just jumping 

[00:05:45] on. So real quick about me, the 32nd version. I’m the founder of Pipelineology and I’m host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been in marketing now actually for 23 years. I need to update this slide. I used to run call centers for car dealerships, so we would handle all the leads that would come in from websites and different You know, advertising things that we were doing. And our job was to set appointments, call those people up, follow up, do business development types of things so that our salespeople could be freed up to actually talk to the people who are interested these days.

I do that for consultants, so I help consulting clients, small business owners, get clients by, by getting more meetings on their calendar. And I’m always actively seeking New England. IPA beer style recommendations. So if you’ve got any for me, please let me know. Right now my favorite is the M 43 from Old Nation Brewing.

so if you have a recommendation though, let me know what it is and probably where I can find it. ’cause they’re, I find that they’re really good, but they’re hard to find. Right? They’re very, very localized. so who is this event for? Well, number one would be consultants. But if you are in a vice president of sales or vice president of business development, or you work in sales or business development, I think you’ll get a lot out of this.

Or if you’re in a business to business space where you’re just kinda working with people who are also in business, if you do B2B sales of any kind, this would probably be relevant to you. Don’t take my word for it though. I would encourage you to try these things out, right? Just sitting here, we can talk about it all day long, but unless you take action on it, is probably not gonna do you any good, a good idea.

But, without, without implementation, it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna get that You’re not gonna have a sales 

[00:07:40] pipeline. So let’s jump into our process. So I know that this slide is always a little bit small, but this is what we’re gonna be kind of covering and going over today. If you’d like a copy of it, feel free to screenshot it, but I know it’s not super high resolution.

so just email me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com if you’d like a copy of the flowchart. Or you can post in the comments if you’d like it. we’ll try and go back and grab everybody. It would be easier though, if you emailed, emailed me directly at Garret Pipelineology and we’ll go through that, make sure we get all the, all those sent out.

but here’s essentially what we’re gonna be talking about is we’re gonna be identifying the right people that you want to connect with. We’re gonna talk about building your network in a proactive manner that gets you the right people in your network so that you’ve got the right people you can sell your products and services to.

We’re talking about optimizing your profile to be attracted to those people. We’re gonna talk about outreach strategies, we’re gonna talk about event strategies. we’re not, we’re gonna skip over the third column here ’cause that one’s pretty self-explanatory. and I had to cut it for time. And then finally, we’re gonna be talking about some content strategies you can use on LinkedIn.

As well to kind of have a fully rounded out healthy sales pipeline. So you can use some all bit bits and pieces of this. Each of these sections will work on their own. They work better together, but all, all of them do tend to work pretty well. So, if you can use all at the same time. So that’s our process.

Again, feel free to email me gary@pipeline.com if you’d like a copy of that in PDF form, so you don’t have to try and magnify it and enhance the, the stuff. I I didn’t try and make it too small to read. It’s just that it was, I can tell it’s just a little bit small on the screen if you don’t have time to do this yourself.

I get it right. sometimes you get busy, you’re busy working with clients, you’re busy doing other things, and business development is the first thing people tend to put off. So we do have a done for you program. I’m not gonna make a big pitch about it, but, if you do want to discuss it, you can go to the appointment lab.com.

That will get you on my calendar directly, no sales person or other intermediary for you to talk to. You’ll talk directly to me or just email me at Gary at Pipelineology and we’ll do it the old school way. We’ll, we’ll find a time that works for 

[00:10:04] both of us. So, but first, before we get started into what we’re seeing in terms of what we think is gonna work pretty well in 2024, as we’re working on building that first a word from our future AI overlords.

And I have kind of been avoiding talking about AI on most of my events this year, simply because by the time I say something, it’s usually outdated or it’s improved or it’s, it’s started hallucinating and you say, oh, that’s kind of embarrassing, but. I think at this point it’s pretty clear that there are AI tools out there that are here to kind of make your life easier.

For example, I was on a call yesterday, or not excuse, excuse me, I was on a call last week where they did a live demo of a calling software. So this software can call people, call leads back, check out the information that they filled in and discuss them. So this was in relation to a real estate thing for people who are looking to sell their homes.

And it could go through qualification questions and if you got it off track, sure, I’d be happy to chat about your kids or anything else. Quite frankly, I was pretty impressed it had a little bit of a delay. but it, it, compared to say hiring a, a va, that where English isn’t their first language, I would say it’s actually better than that.

So. very impressive stuff that that’s coming out and stuff definitely to pay attention to. but we’re seeing lots of tools, right in the email space. we tend to use them internally just for helping with image creation or if you’re not feeling very creative on a particular day, I know I’ve used it to help write some of the descriptions for events we do, either for us or for clients.

Or I say, ah, I’m just not feeling creative today. So I’ll grab some of the old ones that I like. I’ll tell ’em what we’re doing. And it, again, it, it doesn’t get you a hundred percent of the way there, but it gets pretty close and you kind of fill in the gaps a little bit and boom, you’ve got a nice, nice, description though, right?

You’ve seen plenty of, times where that’s been controversial this year. but nonetheless, things to be aware of, things to kind of look at as we head into 2024, this stuff isn’t going away. So knowing which tools to playing around with tools, experimenting and using them to. See where, see what works for you is probably a, a good idea.

I’d say, you know, AI isn’t going to replace you next year or put you outta business, but somebody using AI tools, certainly might. So, but with that outta the way, let’s jump into LinkedIn ’cause that’s why we’re all here, right? We wanna talk about LinkedIn and, you know, building that sales pipeline. 

[00:12:42] And I’d say building that sales pipeline starts with your network.

So on LinkedIn you’ve got kind of two types of people. You’ve got followers and you can have an unlimited number of followers or you can have connections and you can only have up to 30,000. 30,000 is a big number. so it will take a long time to really do that. But I would say focusing on building up your connections should probably be your number one priority if you’re not already doing so, because LinkedIn limits the number of people that you can invite in a given week.

you can use things like Ulin or U Link or Octopus, CRM and there, there’s quite a few tools out there, and I’m not gonna, expand these. Another one there. There’s fine, buzz data to buzz that ai, I, I’m not endorsing any of them or telling you that any of them are better than the others, but using some type of tool to help you efficiently build connections is, is really helpful because the more people in your network that are relevant, the better things are gonna gonna be because now you can get your message in front of more of the right people.

so, and if you have connections now you can do more than you could say with just followers. For example, you can invite them to subscribe to a newsletter, attend events like we’re doing right now. it’s easier to get contact information in case you wanna say email them. and it’s easier to get a message through to ’em, and they’re not likely to be filtered like they would if you’re not directly connected to ’em.

So. It takes time. So if you’re not, like I said, if you’re not doing that right now, start now. ’cause you wanna just keep doing it, be consistent, and start building it. And you’ll find that, you know, maybe, maybe you only have a few hundred connections, now do it for a few months and then you’ll be at a thousand and then 2000 and just, you know, eventually you’ll be at the point where you say, okay, I’m, I’m almost at 30,000.

But that’ll take about five or six years. But I do recommend doing it just because it gets the right people in your network. Molina asks, what AI software do you use? you know, for us, I have, most of the time when we’re doing stuff, it’s, we’ve got a subscription to chat GPT directly. we’ve played around with some of the plugins.

For the most part we’re using it to, to kind of do. You know, kinda help us write things a little bit better, tweak some of the stuff we’re doing. and I think I also have a subscription to midjourney, which we use for some images. Some of them you’ll see in, in the presentation today. for some of the more advanced ones, like I said with the, the outbound calling and things like that.

I don’t have one of those that we’re actively subscribed to and I don’t have a recommendation. Like I said, I attended a demo. It looked pretty cool. It’s not quite ready for release yet. so, but, they, they’re certainly out there. So things to definitely be paying attention 

[00:15:34] to. So building your network.

So how do you maximize those connections? Like I said, it’s limited in how many you can send out at any given time. So first of all, start with people who are mutual connections, people that will show up, according to the way LinkedIn categorizes them as second degree connections. The more well connected you are in, in any in given industry, the more mutual connections you have.

some easy places to start would be people who went to the same school as you. people who live in the same city as you are great. but if you’re kind of in a rural out in the middle of nowhere type of area, the same state works pretty well. Otherwise, the same industry is, is usually a good place to start.

For example, a people, if you’re like somebody else, people like to connect with people like them. For example, dentists connect pretty well with dentists. Chiropractors connect well with chiropractors. Somebody who’s a professor will connect well with other people. With PhDs, it’s people of the same professional status are good places to start, and that even works for same job titles.

If you’re a VP of logistics, finding other VPs of logistics can is a really good way to expand your network out fast. Now, if those aren’t necessarily your ideal people that you want to work with, then. Figure out who those people are, and well start building that and start getting connected in that industry.

It may take a little bit of time, but it’s, it’s one of those things you’ll, you’ll wanna start, you’ll wanna start doing sooner than later. as the old saying goes, the best time to plant an oak tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is right now. So start now. a couple other tips though. Make sure that your profile picture is a person and set to public.

And I know this is a really, really basic suggestion, but I see it still every single week. I’ll get requests from people who, you know, their, their profile picture is their logo. people don’t connect to logos on LinkedIn. You, they just, they’re not going to, you’ll get a handful and maybe you’ll get 5% of people to do it, but ultimately people connect with people.

So if they can’t see your picture, they’re not, they’re probably not going to connect with you. So just kind of keep that in mind and. Couple other things that will help with your connection rate is just have a little bit of personality and we’ll, we’ll show some examples of that here in a second. But if you are a, a professor or you’ve done, you know, some teaching at a university or, or even a community college, having professor in there, if you’ve got advanced degrees, please put, put your alphabet soup in there.

If you’re an author, a speaker, a podcast totes, anything interesting about you, maybe you just really like Excel spreadsheets. Put that in there. one of my, assistants, has that, she, she loves to bake cookies. And you know what? People ask her all the time, what’s your favorite cookie? It’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s kind of, it sounds, it sounds dumb almost, but really it works because people, this is a human thing still.

and people are still wanna connect with other humans. They want those interesting little tidbits about 

[00:18:38] you.

Alright, so let’s talk about your profile. You want it to let people know who you are, what you do, who you work with, and you want to have a little bit of fun with it. So here’s mine. We’ll use to use, use that as an example. Is it the very best profile you’re ever gonna see? Absolutely not. But it gets the job done.

So let’s just kind of talk quickly about the different elements here from this little snippet, of this. So, like I said, the profile picture there is, it’s an old one of me and probably should get a new one. but nonetheless, it’s present. It’s, you know, I think I was in, where was I in there? Either in Florida or Monaco.

I don’t remember where. but the background image there is, us use them typically to promote my upcoming LinkedIn events. You can use them for your own services, but if you have that kind of gray scale background, one, it, it looks boring. So use a po It’s a great chance to use kind of a pop of color or have something look a little bit striking you.

Have something that’s black and kind of offset the, the colors a little bit there. Feel, feel free to play around with it. You be as creative as you want to there, but it’s a great place to, to really help your profile pop and stand out. you wanna make sure your headline there. I guess I should mention now, now that LinkedIn has been doing verifications, having your ID verified on there can get you a little extra check mark, which these days is not a bad idea given, the amount of kind of spam and stuff that people are getting, have an i having an ID verified account is going to add trustworthiness.

So it’s a small little thing, right? It’s like the little blue check marks that you see on Facebook and some of the other sites and stuff. it just lets them know that, hey, this is in fact a real person. and I know yesterday we saw that with, one of our clients at her most recent event is all of a sudden the spam bots found the event and we’re posting, here’s the Zoom link, here’s the live stream link.

And there was a whole long list of ’em. and it, it took us probably about 10 minutes to go through and get them all blocked and removed from there. But, you know, you see that type of stuff. But here’s the thing, none of them were verified. None of them had verified little check marks that they were, in fact, real accounts.

So we’re able to get rid of ’em. But you know. Little, little things like that are, are gonna make a difference these days. on the right hand side, making sure that, you know, wherever you went to, to school, whatever your current business is, try and have those filled out. And probably one of the more important ones is your headline there, letting ’em know who you are.

so if you’re the founder of a company, the owner president, a VP of, of whatever you’re doing, or, or if you’re just an accountant executive, that’s no problem either. Let ’em know, you know, what, what do you do? You know, and then maybe elaborate on that. Some other things. For example, towards the end of mine, you can see me aficionado, my family gets sick of me, probably every day.

I send them another meme every once in a while. They’re funny, but I think that, I always think they’re great. and finally beer enthusiast. And that’s another one of those things that, again, people don’t typically put it in there and it tends to start conversations pretty 

[00:21:54] well. Alright, so let’s continue with kind of building that profile out your headline.

Why is it so important? Well, if you look there on the left hand side, you can see here’s a couple of connection requests I got. So the top one there not a whole lot of information. At least the profile picture is present and the name is there, but you’ve got a whole lot of space there. In terms of other information you could add.

So the one beneath it there, Kevin Holmes, you can see that one operations head. I help businesses dominate search engines for any keyword. And the.dot.is basically where it cuts it off. So that’s how many characters you get before LinkedIn starts to cut it off. So use at least that many in your profile.

though I would use as many as they would, we’ll let you fit in there. and typically if you do it on your phone, if you’re editing it, you can get even more characters fit in there. the other thing here is you can see that it also shows if you have any mutual connections. So remember when I said you want second degree connections?

This is another one of those places where. You know, that’s an extra piece of information that LinkedIn is gonna feed you to say, yeah, you should accept or ignore. And if it’s not, not there, it’s usually an ignore. That’s typically what you see because they’re gonna try and highlight somebody that you probably know or that you’re, whose name you’re familiar with.

so it, it helps quite a bit if you have mu if you stick to mutual connections. like I said, if you do have any questions as we go along, I know I’m kind of going through these pretty fast, like I said, wanna get everything covered today. So if you do have any, please, please post in the comments as we go along and I will try and pay attention to make sure I don’t miss them.

but, I, you know, let me and Evan, he is kind of sitting behind the scenes And so I’m just letting him know, Evan, if I’m missing something. Let me know. ’cause the last one I saw was at, two 15. So I’m not sure if the system’s just a little bit, sketchy today. I know earlier today I couldn’t even get on to LinkedIn.

It just kept crashing. So, if it has timed out, I do apologize and we will check at the end and, and get back to you. So if I do miss them, nonetheless, let’s keep going. Let’s keep powering on through building your profile. Let’s talk about the about section and some of the other kind of areas you wanna highlight.

Basically, fill out your profile as much as you can. This is a great place to make your pitch. It’s a safe place to make your pitch and let people know what you do. This is not where your resume or work experience goes. Work experience is a whole nother section under work history. Put it there. but the about section is a great place to tell people what you do, who you work with, and how they can work with you.

Featured section, you can see it here on the top. Right. lots of different ways to use this. People can use, often we’ll use this to feature things like different, off services they offer, or white papers or PDFs or downloads that they’re offering. I generally use them to feature events that I’ve done, because we do a lot of events.

use them however you want, but I would recommend using it. It’s a whole nother field and it’s the top thing that’s gonna be prominently featured on your profile when people check it out, with images and all that kind of stuff. So it is definitely worthwhile to take the time to fill that out. but everything, even recommendations, making sure that there’s activity.

I see that, see that frequently where you want to wanna know the dead giveaway, that a a, an account is fake and a bot is that there’s no actual activity other than maybe some likes on a post, but there’s no actual posts, right? There’s no, the, the activity is very, very thin or non-existent at all. Dead giveaway.

That account is just a bot that’s, we’re gonna try and pitch you something. So keep that in mind. Alright, so those are the kind of things you wanna do to kind of set yourself up 

[00:25:52] for success. Now we’re gonna kind of talk about the different ways to well drive people into your, your, your funnel and get people interested in what you have to offer.

So we’re gonna talk about outreach first, and then we’re gonna talk about events, and then we’re gonna talk about, content a little bit. I might have the last two mixed up in order, but nonetheless, let’s talk about outreach first, because, well, books have been written about attraction style, marketing, you know, magnetic marketing, things like that, you know, and how it can make you millions and you can be this famous speaker, all that jazz.

At the end of the day, in the business to business world, the big dogs all do outbound billions have been made with outbound. For example, when on my commute into work every morning, keep in mind I’m in the suburbs in Detroit. So I drive past the headquarters for a company called Cox Automotive. Now, if you haven’t heard of them, that probably is because you’re not a car dealer.

but if you are a car dealer, you’re certainly familiar with probably most of their brands as they’ve gobbled up most of the big brands in the space. the two you might have heard of would be Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader. But, nonetheless, they have, probably over a dozen brands and do $7 billion a year in revenue.

And really what all they’re doing is they’ve got brands, they do trade shows, and they’ve got an army of salespeople who will go talk cold to anybody, that they can get their foot in the door with. So they’re doing outbound. So don’t, don’t feel like outbound is something you should be ashamed of doing.

The biggest companies, right? Any company with an enterprise sales team. Is doing some type of outbound, so right, anywhere, anybody from Xerox to Dell to, I’ve even been cold emailed for by amazon.com themselves. So it’s not something you should be ashamed of doing. It is simply a, a business strategy. So I just wanna say that, ’cause I know some people get a little bit squeamish about it saying, oh no, no, that would damage your brand.

When really it’s, it is a Fortune 500 type of strategy. it just isn’t necessarily talked about. because they wanna, you know, have their nice, you know, glossy commercials, well behind the scenes, right? It’s how kind of that, how’s the sausage made type of thing? You don’t wanna know. And, you know, in enterprise sales, that that’s kind of it is have a good, good brand and now you, you kind of go, go make those cold introductions.

Alright? So remember most people will tell you that they don’t like TV ads or radio ads. They’re gonna ignore Google Ads, all that stuff. They throw away their junk mail. The bottom line is that nobody is going into the office today to get your pitch right. I’m not, I’m, I’m not excited to check my, you know, cold email stuff this morning though, actually meant to have one.

I did get a, I did get an interesting one earlier today. I was gonna show it to you guys. but here’s the thing. If it’s something in, in that interests them, people do respond positively to outreach and you say, well, you know, if they’re really that interested, they would proactively reach out. And the thing is, busy people don’t, once you get to that, if you’re, you know, just getting started and you’re eagerly looking for ways to expand and grow your business, you know, you, you’re kind of in a different place than somebody who is working 60 hours a week and barely has time to.

You just get, get whatever’s kind of get done in a given week, much less proactively go out and look for your solution. So just keep in mind that outreach is kind of that, yes, it’s an interruption, but it’s that direct interruption and if it’s relevant, people will respond to 

[00:29:33] it. And Evan, can you just do me a favor here and just post in Slack and let me know what you’re seeing in the comment section.

Looks like mine has frozen up on me, so I may need you to kind of feed me the, the questions as we go, go along here and get ’em refreshed. ’cause it looks like everything is, stopped on this side. I know earlier today LinkedIn was having some technical issues and it looks like we have, found them today.

So apologies in advance if I’m not responding to your comments. we’re gonna try and get back to them here in just a few minutes, but if you’re struggling with that, let me know, but Yep. Looks like, Evan has, his comments are also frozen, so. We’re gonna do this with, without the questions until hopefully they come back.

But, email me, how about this? If you do have a question and you can email me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com, I will check them at the end of this stream here in case, in case you have something. Like I said, my, my comment section is frozen up. It looks like it is for, for everybody. So, just try and post it there.

Thank you Evan, for posting that in there for 

[00:30:41] us. Alright, so outreach. How do you do outreach successfully? You know what, it’s not rocket science. That’s the nice thing about it, but you do want to not sound like everybody else. So, but let’s talk about kind of the fundamentals first. You want your message to be relevant to whoever you are reaching out to.

You want to use a sequential approach, and by that I mean you want to send more than one message. in this day and age of everybody being busy, it can be a pretty big challenge. To, get their attention in one message. And this is certainly not a, a new development. Even if you go back to the eighties and nineties doing direct mail, they’ll tell you the same thing as that.

Sequential campaigns are more effective than one and done types of campaigns. So we always do the same thing with all of our outreach, whether that’s with email or LinkedIn, or, or or whatever. We always use a sequence of messages to try and get our message through. So if you do get an opportunity, remember that somebody may agree to meet with you or receive information, and then they’re not, they’re not gonna proactively reach out and ask how they can learn about your offer or schedule a a call.

They won’t, yeah, it’s gonna happen maybe once or twice a month, but for the most part, people want to be catered to. So proactively follow up with them and make an offer. What do you want to happen next? I say that’s a really, another really important part of outreach is it doesn’t have to be, Hey, do you wanna buy my stuff?

Or, Hey, should we meet next week? It can simply be, Hey, is it okay if I send you some information about this? it’s a, it’s a great soft offer and it lets you know that they’re at least interested in what you’re 

[00:32:27] doing. so just some, some different things to kind of keep in mind when people aren’t responding well, what kind of are the troubleshooting things that we look at?

And here would be kind of the, the top list here is when people aren’t responding first and foremost, oftentimes you’re getting the wrong message to the wrong person. You don’t, you’re not hitting that relevance. You, you might be messaging your message, might solve a problem that they don’t have or that is not at their level to, to solve.

For example, lots of people want to talk to the CEO or founder of a company. but then their message is. Is more relevant to, you know, somebody who’s in operations or in hr, or in marketing. And, and it’s not a problem the CEO solves. so just kind of keep that in mind is make sure your message is relevant to the person you’re sending it to.

And on LinkedIn you can be very specific about the people you connect with. So just keep that in mind is that if your message is only relevant to a VP of marketing, then proactively reach, you know, connect with people in VP of marketing 

[00:33:35] roles. Next one is your message. Sounds like everyone else. again, this is another one of those things, right?

You’ll see people posting, here’s how to structure a message. And this is probably the big reason I don’t post any templates for people is because if I do, your message will sound like ours. And we have a bunch of clients, so guess what? Your message will sound like everybody else’s. and that makes it less effective.

So we kind of give you kind of the frameworks. Kind of tell you how to do it. and this is a great time to use, use something like a chat, GPT or a bard is let it try and help you put one together that you like. That sounds a little different. That stands out a little bit. And, you know, helps you be that person in their inbox that they’re gonna respond to.

And I’d say that’s, that’s probably the big thing that re we really, really focus on is even if people tell us no and that it’s, it’s outreach, people tell me no every single day. People tell my clients no every single day. But I will tell you that I get more people to reply with, Hey, you know, this was great.

Appreciate you reaching out. I never reply to these messages, but yeah, go ahead and send me your information. Or hey, you know, it’s not a good fit for us right now, but I just wanted to reply and say, you know, you stood out. It’s the only one I’ve replied to this month. So by being unique. You’re going to get responses that other people simply aren’t going to, even if your message wasn’t the best, the fact that it was unique and different is more likely to get you that response.

LinkedIn is, LinkedIn is a very effective place to do outreach, but it’s also a very noisy place to do outreach. So keep that in 

[00:35:13] mind. keep it short. Don’t get too long. if here, here’s another great one. If it’s longer than I can read on my phone without scrolling, it is too long and more, more, more likely.

I would like to see no more than maybe two or three sentences. So short is better because it’s easier to respond to right people’s attention. Think of like goldfish, you know, you’ve got like eight seconds, maybe, maybe three to catch their attention, tell ’em what you came to say, and, and they’re gonna decide to reply to it or move 

[00:35:44] on. Don’t pitch in the first message. That’s probably another big one. and I’ll tell you again that that’s what people have generally come to expect on LinkedIn is they tend to see those pitches. And they immediately disconnect, block you and, and you’re gone. so it doesn’t really help you to build your network if you do it that way.

and don’t include a calendar link. Please, please, please stop including a calendar link when you want, when you wanna meet with somebody. And I know this one, I always, there’s, we’ll, we’ll give it here about 10 seconds and then somebody’s gonna disagree with me and say, why I want, you should put your calendar link in.

’cause how else can they talk to you? So let me elaborate on that one. Calendar links are great. Calendar links are great if the other person shares theirs. And that’s what we’ll ask for. We’ll ask to meet with somebody. We’ll offer some times, but if we can’t, if we go back and forth a couple times with somebody, we’ll ask if they have a calendar link.

Our last resort is to say, you know, here you can schedule on ours because that other, it feels lazy. I. That’s kind of the perception people get is they, they want to be catered to. They don’t want to have to try and self-schedule the, the pitch. They don’t wanna schedule themselves to be sold. They want somebody else to do that, you know, to take the initiative and do that for them.

Just a little bit of psychology there. But time and time again, we see that that same thing is people won’t schedule on calendar links, especially in a message they might schedule if it’s on your profile. So you will see an opportunity to, if you go to my profile, there’s either one or two places where you could schedule a call with me, but in no case do we put ’em in the, in the actual messages there.

[00:37:30] let’s see here. I do have a couple questions here. Let me, so it looks like things have picked back up. So if you posted a com, a question between two 15 and 2 31, I didn’t see it. so, feel free to post it again as their, As the, everything is working again now. here’s a quick, quick comment here from Sarah.

Any tips on less noisy places to outreach? here would be kind of my comment on that is yes. if you happen to on LinkedIn, the best place would be if you’re fluent in another language other than English. ’cause English is the universal business language. we’ve seen great, great results, for clients who are in different countries and are, are kind of not necessarily using English as their, their profile language works great.

But the other thing I will comment on there, on less noisy places is less noisy places tend to be less effective places. So I know there’s kind of right this blue, blue ocean strategy right to. A pretty popular book from what I think about 15 years ago, trying to find that own little unique place where you can kind of own the market versus the highly competitive red oceans.

I would say learning how to compete in the, the red ocean, the, the places where it is really noisy is, is probably gonna be more valuable, simply because that’s, that’s where the people are, that’s where the money is. So, that’s where we tend to kind of focus our efforts because trying to find those unique places, is hard and they typically don’t exist for very long.

Or there’s a reason people aren’t posting there already. so yeah, focusing on the ones that people are already doing that works is generally where we put our efforts into. And we just try to do a little bit better. ’cause that’s, that’s kind of where we, again, we see the it functioning well. Carla asks, what about a calendar link in an email?

I would say the same type of thing as I wouldn’t do it on the initial exchange. again, offer the time’s up. and for example, you could say, you know, Hey Carla, great. I’m happy to meet with you at two 30, Eastern tomorrow or on Monday. I’ve got, an 11:00 AM open. Does one of those work for you? If not, feel free to send me a calendar link and we can get something scheduled.

so that’s an opportunity again for them to share their calendar link. Without you trying to get them to schedule it themselves. again, I’ve kind of seen the same type of thing that the calendar link is more likely to get blocked and it’s more likely to not get used in the whole email just gets discarded.

So that’s been our experience with it. but, keep, you know, feel free to experiment with it, but we just haven’t seen a lot of success with that. putting a calendar link as part of a sales funnel can work. Okay. but I’ll tell you, even then we, we still see better results if we can capture some contact information and follow up with them instead.

tends to be just an overall better experience than asking them to schedule something and the show rate is much, much better by manually scheduling that meeting and actually getting that interaction from them than they schedule it themselves. It, which is bizarre, but that, that does tend to be the case.

And great question here from, from jw. When you connect with a person, what should you have in the add A note? This is a really good question. I love this one. Nothing. Leave it blank. We’ve tested it over and over and over again, and here’s what we found. If you know the person, you met ’em at an event, you actually do know the person, of course, put the note there and let ’em know how you guys know each other.

But if it’s somebody you don’t actually know, putting a note in there is a dead giveaway. You’re, you’re, you’re trying to plan to pitch them. and you’ll actually see your connection rate go down in most cases. At best, it stays the same and for no added benefit, right? If at at best you’re getting the same connection rate, then just leave it blank.

I’ve seen a connection rate of 86%, I think with one of the campaigns we did where we are connecting with other people, colleagues. Basically a colleagues network. But no, no, no connection note whatsoever. simply because if they’re connecting with your colleagues, they’ll connect with you. So things to keep in mind there is that it’s, it, it’s kind of like, it’s a, it’s a little trap basically.

Is that, that note there is just for people, you know. and one more question here from Kurt. Do you recommend directing to websites? I don’t. And here’s why is LinkedIn doesn’t want you to take people off the platform. They will put a big message in place that says You are leaving LinkedIn. Are you sure you wanna do this? Like they’re actively trying to encourage you to stay on the platform and say, whoa, it could be dangerous.

You don’t want to go there. So what I recommend doing is direct ’em to another page of yours on LinkedIn, whether that’s your profile. and that’s why we talked about that kind of at the beginning is that’s really a good place to kinda think of it, like your landing page on a website. or it can be your company profile page, or it can be an event page, something like that.

lots of different ways to do it, but ultimately if you can avoid sending them off to a different website that’s not part of LinkedIn, I would would not do it. simply because LinkedIn is gonna put, you know, put some additional steps in place to try and prevent that from happening because they don’t want them leaving the platform.

Right. LinkedIn wants the interaction, they want people to stay on their platform, they want the advertising revenue from it. So just some things to keep in mind. So great questions, everybody. Alright, so I’m gonna jump back into the content, and then we’ll wrap things up. So if you’ve got more questions, I will certainly grab them at the end, but we’re gonna try and get this here.

so I don’t keep you here all 

[00:43:52] day. So let’s talk about content. ’cause I know this is certainly, a, a pretty popular topic and there are two things I would say before we really jump into this is before you try this, ask yourself, is my audience on LinkedIn? If you are kind of in a white collar profession, the answer is probably yes.

They, they probably are. but if you are in, you know, trying to engage with, plumbers or electricians or some of the blue collar industries, freight can be another one. Truck drivers can be kind of tough. restaurants are, are impossible. Don’t even try. But before you, before you try and say, I’m gonna be kind of an influencer content creator on LinkedIn because I wanna build my sales pipeline here.

Make sure that your people actually are on LinkedIn and they’re posting. but if you’re, you know, work with anybody who’s, like I said, white collar or if you’re in consulting, coaching, things like that, your audience is probably there and there is no one right way to do this. There are tons and tons of ways that are effective.

we’re talking about some of them and some of the different things you can try. but just keep in mind that this is a great opportunity to experiment and, and kind of try, you know, try some different things out. Here would be the kind of, the general guidelines I would, would focus on is one, be consistent.

If you’re, if you’re posting cadences every once in a while, and, that’s me. I’m guilty as charged. This guy, this guy right here, is not a good example of, of that. ’cause it’s kind of that, cobbler’s son type of conundrum of, you know, we’re, we do it for clients, but we don’t necessarily do it as well for ourselves.

So don’t look to me for how to be consistent necessarily on content. but when we are consistent with it, we do see, in fact an uptick in the number of people who schedule calls with us. So it is worth 

[00:45:49] doing. be specific. on the right hand side here, you can see one of these super generic posts, with a clock in it that says, don’t watch the clock.

Do what it does, keep going. And it’s, it’s one of these little trite, you know, cliche quotes. Nobody is coming on LinkedIn to see your little quotes that you’ve copied and pasted from another site. If they want that, they’ll just go to that site. and I, I’ve seen this with clients who will get some kind of cheap content, you know, thing that’s, I don’t know, let’s say it’s a couple hundred bucks a month where they’ll post on your behalf.

And here’s the thing is it’s not even worth that it, ’cause nobody engages with it. Nobody, nobody’s seeing it. It’s not getting any visibility ’cause it’s not interesting Be you talk about, you talk about your experiences, talk about what you, you know, what you want to talk about. So avoiding that generic stuff really is going to to help a lot.

So if you don’t have something to say that day, then don’t say anything. That would be my recommendation rather than going for a generic post. Skip it. Skip it entirely. And if that means you can only post twice a month, that mean means you can only post twice. But we’re gonna, I’m gonna show you some tips here on how you can post regularly in your voice in quality content that people actually like to see without having to sit down and write every 

[00:47:18] day. And I talked about this on last month’s event, but I wanted to bring it up here again because this is really important. So this is a post from Jason Vanna. funny observation about LinkedIn this month that reach and engagement are down. Sounds bad. And quality leads and close deals are way up. So one of the things that he’s experienced, and I, I remember when I first started, I had the same experience, when we were doing the, when we were doing outreach on Facebook, is that the people who would ultimately sign on and become clients were not engaging with my content.

They weren’t liking it. They, they weren’t posting in the comments. The first time I typically heard from them is when they sent me a direct message and said, Hey, I’m interested, let’s talk. and on Facebook at the time, one of the, there was a popular tool that would say you can defriend, you know, basically get rid of all the people in your network who aren’t engaging with your content, but it couldn’t detect the people that are looking at them without actually PO doing any engagement.

Right. That’s the, if you look at any of your posts on any social media site, and that includes LinkedIn, you might see that, you know, a thousand people have seen your post, but you only have five comments and you know, 10 likes. And you say, well, obviously this was a fail. But those thousand people are probably gonna see your next post.

And that’s, those people are probably the ones that are going, that are most likely to be clients eventually. so don’t worry too much about the vanity metrics. Write content for the ideal people that you want to work with. Don’t worry too much about comments. Don’t worry about reposts likes and all that stuff.

And if you can get ’em, great, but don’t make that your sole focus, because the money really is in the people lurking that are gonna reach out privately. They don’t wanna comment, and they’re not trying to be famous, in most cases, unless that is exactly what you sell. In which case they might, but in most cases, you know, they’re, they’re gonna quietly reach out.

So making sure that, you know, they know how to get in touch with you is important. But they’re, they’re there quietly watching, lurking in the shadows, not being front and center, trying to, to get your attention that way. So keep that in 

[00:49:43] mind. So some of the other things that are working well on the content side right now, events, and I’m gonna go, we’re gonna go a little bit deeper on those and I’m gonna kinda show you a couple of strategies on, on how to really use that to produce content, carousels, which, I don’t think I have a good example up at the moment.

but those can be little, PDF things which you can create in Canva. you see ’em all the time. They’re the little ones that, they scroll across the side. So it might be, you know, little one sentence, you know, advice and things like that, that are anywhere from, you know, five to 20 slides long, very good for engagement.

They tend to get a lot of, they tend to get a lot of the, the vanity metrics that you’re looking for, but they also get a lot of views, so it, it’s a good way to kind of pull people in. Same with polls. Polls are not great for. Getting clients, they’re a great way to get people engaged so that when you do have posts about, you know how you help clients, that you, they get to help you get seen, telling stories.

Now this is where it’s a really good way to kind of tell that story and kind of weave an offer into it. though they generally aren’t gonna get as much of the, the v as many views as the first three I just mentioned, but they’re probably the strongest ones. And then finally, repurposing content. And that’s where if you are creating other content, for example, if you’re on other pod, if you’re doing podcasts or LinkedIn events like this, trading little video clips from those things can be a great way to really supplement your content because now you’re not posting a little video clip of that is not generic content anymore.

It’s very specific content setting your voice with you either on video or you on audio. And now, now you’ve, you’re getting that quality content without being, well, boring. 

[00:51:31] So. Alright, I see a few questions here. Guido Ladi, I probably said that wrong. Hello Gary. Thank you for the presentation. Do you have any pointers for targeting prospects in international markets?

I, I, I’m gonna say I probably don’t because you, the culture is so different from market to market that it’s really hard to know what’s gonna be effective in any given given market where, and in some cases you’re dealing with different types of laws. Like Europe has their own different set of privacy laws.

Heck, even Canada has its own, different sets of, of laws regarding email and stuff like that. So, really, I, I, the biggest thing I can tell you though is that find one that you are familiar with and that you can kind of communicate with them with. I. Can’t actually see your profile at the moment.

So I’m not sure where you’re based out of, but if you’re not in the United States, that’s actually probably a good thing. United States is, is a great market, but it’s also super, super competitive, right? Everybody wants to target the United States, whereas probably very few people are targeting, Mexico.

actually I can, I can tell you for sure, very few people are because, you know, now you’re talking about now you need to be fluent in Spanish and now it’s, it’s more challenging because, well now somebody’s gotta meet with it in that language. So, all the English markets are competitive. so it’s, it’s Australia or New Zealand or any of those, can be a challenge, but if you can find ones where it’s, you know, you can talk to them in their own language.

even some of like places like, the Netherlands where they do tend to speak pretty good English, if you can communicate to them in their own language, you’re probably better off. so I know that’s probably not quite, quite what you’re looking for, but that’s. That’s kind of what I would, recommend there.

does reposting popular or relevant content help? you know, it’s not gonna hurt to, to repost other things and kind of engaging with other people’s content is certainly, again, another thing that, that’s probably going to help you. I guess in terms of it just, how’s the best way to answer this? yes, it helps a little.

it’s certainly not gonna hurt what you’re doing, but you want that, your own stuff kind of to be the core of what you’re offering. or, or you just, it, you’re, you kind of get lost in the, in the noise of it.

Alright, moving on here. ’cause I know we’re getting close to the three o’clock mark here. So. and then I will answer questions here. So, I do see another one here from, from jw and I will, we’ll get back to that as well as if anybody else has any other questions, feel free to start posting ’em now.

We are pretty close to the end. I just wanna finish things up here though. and then we can get to the q and a portion of the 

[00:54:37] program. So leverage your network with events. so this is, this is still falls under the content side of things, but this is definitely a little bit more in depth type of ones.

And a couple things I do wanna show you here in this screenshot, is just what those types of engagement numbers can, can look like, compared to regular posts. Again, I just told you not to worry too much about vanity metrics and that still stands, but these do help really contribute to overall finding those people.

Who actually do reach out and wanna work with you. For example, one of my clients in October, her first event, she got, very first one she did, with us. And she had a great turnout. She had tons of people reach, you know, talking to her and asking good questions, and she got a new client out of it. And it ended up being a, I think, a trial deal that was worth roughly $30,000.

So my question to you would be, would you be willing to do an event if it was worth $30,000 to you? And so far, nobody’s told me no. Now obviously that’s not gonna be the case for everybody. Not everybody’s, you could get zero. It could, it could bomb, it could be bad. And typically, you know, your first one, that’s what I generally will tell people is don’t worry too much about the first event you do.

Just get it out there, get it done, and your second one will be better. You can get a lot of impressions from it, you can get a lot of people to see it. You can get a lot of engagement, you can get a lot of people who can get a lot of interest in buzz out there by doing these, that is tough to duplicate by just making posts in the content feed.

So they help you build that, that authority. They help you be viewed differently as, say somebody just doing outreach. They kind of help you get a better connection with the presenter and with your audience. And like I said, it does in fact help you get new leads and close people, helps you get people who might be on the fence to say, yes, I get it now let’s do this.

And even brings people back. it’s one of, been one of the interesting kind of side effects we’ve seen doing it now. going on two years of these now is that it brings people back who may have canceled with us for one reason or another, and all of a sudden, six months, even two or three years later, they’re saying, Hey, can we, can we talk about this again?

I think it’s something we’d like to revisit. So we did a whole deep dive on this topic of events earlier this year. Evan’s gonna post it in the, chat here. it’s on LinkedIn, so you don’t have to go out to any other site. So prac, I’m doing practicing. What I preach here is I’m not trying to take you off platform, but if you do wanna check that out, you can find it in my profile or just click on that link that Evan put there, 

[00:57:25] for, for the event.

So if you can’t find it, email me at Gary Pipelineology. So real quick, if you do need some more help with something like this, you’re interested in getting, you know, a program like this, working for your business in 2024, go ahead and schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com or feel free to email me directly, Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

and we’ll, we’ll, we’ll schedule that the old fashioned way, just like I said. but where we can build it for you, manage it, put appointments on your calendar, fill your sales pipeline, most importantly, we’ll free up your time and we’ll kind of do all that legwork for you, because I, I know it can be pretty tough to try and keep up with this in addition to doing all the other, wearing all the other hats you have to wear typically in your business.

But nonetheless, thank you so much for coming 

[00:58:13] today. I am now gonna open it up for questions and I’ll probably start here with, some of these other questions. I got Amy, LBOs and jw, so, feel free to post while I’m am busy answering, these. Let’s see. Amy said I can assist with translation, so, if you need help with translation, feel free to ask Amy.

I guess, just, full disclosure, we are not affiliated in any way. I’m just mentioning that she can help so she can help you. JW can you expand on telling stories? Yes. So I like to kind of, this is kind of where you kind of go back into your, you know, experiences from your career or, or different types of things.

for example, me, I’m often gonna talk, refer back to different projects I worked in and during my corporate career in automotive. I’ll tell stories about different clients or different projects that I’ve worked on. for example, one that I like to use quite a bit is the most effective TV commercial I ever created.

And I, and, It was right. And I think part of the allure of it is most people haven’t done a lot of TV commercial spots and they’ve always said, oh, it’s not gonna, you know, they’ve heard it’s expensive and generally it can be. but when I tell people, yeah, we were getting leads for about 30 bucks a lead, and they’re like, whoa.

So when I show ’em the, the ad, they’re like, oh, that is really, really wild and really crazy. But nonetheless, I like to kind of tell stories based around things like that, that were a little bit unexpected or even a time where we made, we made a billboard ad work, and did direct response lead generation off of a billboard, which, I probably wouldn’t even bother to try now, but this was about 10 years ago and we were able to get people to text, text a billboard. So we had one where it was at a stoplight and you know, it was pretty much a big black and yellow one with a phone number, text this number. so, and again, we were probably pulling in leads for, I know, like 50 bucks a lead.

So some of those experiments people kind of find fascinating, but you probably have tons and tons of stories you can elaborate on from your types of work history or ones from, you know, projects you worked on that kind of lead to, to either some type of action, some type of action being taken. So, it’s one of those ones, you kind of gotta experiment with the format a little bit to kind of see what really resonates with people.

But that’s, that would be kind of where telling stories can be helpful. ’cause it kind of helps, you know, you’re, you’re not boasting about yourself. You’re just telling them something that happened and that, you know. People are interested in that. let’s see here. let’s see. I think that’s about it. elbows, what’s your take on post that, discuss trending topics?

That’s a good one. ’cause I, right now I think what the big one in, in my feed right now is everybody wants to ask, you know, is Die Hard a Christmas movie? ’cause it’s right. We’re, it tis the season and I feel like every day I, I run across that typa typical trending fad topic. I, I tend to sit those out, despite the fact that I, I, I love memes and, and things like that.

But I, I, I tend to, unless I, I have a way I can relate it back to what we actually do. I, I’m probably gonna set those out just ’cause I, I don’t find that the engagement it gets really, is that terribly helpful. if I can relate it back to what we actually do. then, then I think, you know, you’re onto something, but just kind of the, the kind of generic, topics, not as, not terribly helpful has kind of been what I, I’ve seen though.

Your mileage may, may vary 

[01:02:18] there. So, and with that, guys, thank you so much for attending, today. I know we’ll get with the holidays coming up, your time is very precious, so really appreciate you spending it here with us today. but it is three o’clock, so I’m gonna let everybody go. if you do have any follow up questions that I didn’t get to or you have any other things you’d like to know, feel free to reach out to me here on LinkedIn or email me Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

And I will let everybody go here and happy holidays. Merry Christmas, happy New Year, happy Hanukkah and all of the other ones that I, I missed. but I’ll be back again in January. Take care everybody.