Consultants: End the Feast or Famine Cycle – Get a Steady Stream of Clients

Consultants: End the Feast or Famine Cycle – Get a Steady Stream of Clients

Gary hosts a live LinkedIn event on helping consultants end the feast-or-famine cycle by building a consistent client pipeline, with notes on streaming delay, replay availability, and event notifications. He explains four core sources of new business—network, content, outreach, and advertising—framed around LinkedIn’s quality-over-quantity strengths for small firms without large sales teams. He shares ideas for when you’re not busy, including reactivating dead leads with playful DMs and using targeted direct mail like branded coffee mugs or cookies after connecting on LinkedIn. He then focuses on what breaks when you’re busy (networking, content, outreach, ads) and introduces a modular system designed to be delegated. Tactics include purposeful connection-building, turning one monthly event/podcast into repurposed content, human outreach using templates and an “introduction sandwich,” and an ad overview emphasizing retargeting and longer timelines on LinkedIn.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
00:41 Stream Troubleshooting
04:31 Housekeeping And Agenda
07:45 Four Lead Sources
11:40 When You Are Not Busy
14:44 Direct Mail Coffee Mug
19:14 Busy Consultant System
24:55 Network Building On LinkedIn
26:49 Proactive LinkedIn Networking
27:32 Connection Limits and Patience
28:49 Networking Style and Referrals
30:21 Monthly Event Content Engine
35:49 Outreach That Feels Human
37:30 Templates Relevance and Soft Asks
42:53 Why LinkedIn Outreach Builds Trust
46:05 Ads Strategy and Retargeting
50:26 Scaling Funnels and Next Steps
52:55 Wrap Up and Q&A Close

Transcript:

[00:00:03] All right. Welcome everybody to today’s event. Today we are gonna be covering consultants, end the feast or famine cycle, and never wonder where your next client is coming from. So we are getting started here in just a couple of minutes. if you’ve been on one of my events before, you know how I like to start on time.

so we will be starting at two o’clock today Eastern time. it’s 1 58 now. So in the meantime, I’m, it is a, it’s actually a nice, bright and sunny day here in Detroit, Michigan. where are you calling in from today? Where’s everybody? Where is everybody at in the world 

[00:00:39] today? And, just, I’m gonna probably mention this a few times, but just one kind of housekeeping item here real quick is that I know there’s always a little bit of a time delay from when I say something to when you hear it.

So if you ask a question and I don’t respond to it right away, just know that, you probably heard it 30 seconds after I said it, so there’s a little bit of a lag time in between us there. So I’ll just check my streaming here, make sure we’re all set. I know if you were on, if you tried to be on, I think, what was it, last month’s, event, we had some major streaming issues where, the, like LinkedIn, API like crashed and our whole stream just died.

and we couldn’t, couldn’t do anything at all. I tried multiple streaming services. I even tried like getting the phone out and seeing if we could stream nothing. There was, there was no good way to stream it. So, Hopefully everything is up and running here. I’m getting like some weird errors on my, I try to keep the event, running in a side window away, off to the side here.

so if you can hear me, let me know. I know sometimes it takes a minute or two for things to really kind of kick on. Evan, if you’re in the Slack channel there, can you tell me, are you seeing the, stream working on your end, on LinkedIn or, are we getting an error again here?

Hey, Brad. Yeah. Scaling issues sometimes, you know, you, you, you think you’ve got, you know, things are, things are working. You think about, you know, it’s like, okay, yeah, we’re, you know, we better make sure we have backups for everything. And, nope. At some, somewhere along the lines, there’s that kind of single point of failure.

And, that was what we hit, hit last month, and, Hopefully, yeah, it looks like, okay, I got a confirmation here from, from Evan. He’s kind of my behind the scenes guy making sure things are running. He says, yeah, stream is, stream is working on his end. 49 people are, are on so far, so we’ll just give it a minute here for things to kind of spool up and get people a chance for people to get, get going on.

Yeah. Chris, I just kind of running into the same thing. My, my, my computer here, it’s not, it’s not loading on my computer for some reason today. the stream, so. But it looks like we’re getting, getting some, it looks like some of the stuff’s going here, so, we’ll get, we’ll give everybody just a minute or two yet, just, just hopefully for that bug to work itself out, and hopefully people can get on.

if not, we’ll we’ll do it from the people coming on, from their phones and mobile devices. And I’ll, I’ll just have to get the, replay link sent out to everybody else and we’ll just have to, to make due. Right. That’s, that’s, that is the, danger of doing things live is that. Sometimes things don’t work quite perfectly like you want them to.

But, anyway, I do appreciate everybody who, who is here. So, Evan, can you just gimme a count one more time? Can you give a refresh and let me know if it’s, still working on your end Now? I know you’re looking in from a, I think you’re, seems like it’s working on your Mac, but my, my PC not so much, but Yeah. Christie live is definitely, is a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a different experience than kind of trying to do prerecorded stuff where you can do multiple takes and take out the ones you don’t like and, and all that stuff. It’s kind of, you get one, one shot to, to do it all here, so. Alright, so Evan, Evan has given me the thumbs up.

Looks like I’m getting comments from people here. So it looks like we’ve got, a mostly functional stream going here. So, I don’t want to keep everybody waiting around since you all, you all managed to show up. so let’s, let’s jump in here guys. Welcome 

[00:04:30] everybody. My name is Gary Ruplinger and welcome to consultants and the feast or famine cycle and never wonder where your next client is coming from.

So just a few quick housekeeping items here. there is about a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I’m talking right now into my microphone and the time it comes out your side. The live streaming technology for whatever reason, has that delay. I’m not quite sure why, but that is unfor.

That’s just the way it is. So. so basically what I’m telling you is I will certainly do my best and I certainly encourage you to ask questions. Please, please ask questions, post your comments. They’re always great to see. I just keep in mind I, I see them on a little bit of a delay, so if you’re asked a bunch of follow up questions and, it’s a little bit trickier to kind of have a back and forth conversation.

So I do try and kind of answer questions. As completely as I can. and then I try and move on to the next one. the replay today will be available on this page, just a few minutes after the event ends. That’s one of, one of the perks of the live streaming though, is that I don’t have to send it off to the editor.

We don’t have to, you know, make any. You know, major, you know, changes and trans coding and all that fun stuff. It’s pretty much I push a button that says end stream. And then in, you know, LinkedIn lets me know like five minutes later, Hey, your stream is ready to go. and everybody can see it right away without any, major work on our end, which I like.

And if you wanna be notified of our future events, you can get notified. Go to our page, Pipelineology dot com slash events. Put your email address in there. I’ll make sure you get an email, for future and upcoming events. So today’s agenda, so we are gonna be talking about what to do when you’re not busy.

and probably the more important one is what to do when you are busy. we’ll be talking about network building content, outreach ads. And then at the end, we’ll take some time for q and a. So, real quickly about me, I am the founder of Pipelineology. We are a business development company. I’m also host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been, working in marketing for about 20. Actually 20, I gotta update this slide. 23 years now, my corporate career took me in the, automotive world. So I ran call centers for car dealerships. We handled incoming leads for, about 16 locations around the country. And our job was to basically turn those leads into live and in-person appointments at our stores.

all, all throughout the eastern part of the United States. these days I work on helping clients, mostly consultants, actually a little bit of SaaS companies every, occasionally a manufacturer here and there, but mostly work with consultants, helping them get meetings and fill their sales pipelines.

And I am actively seeking New England. IP or IPA beer recommendations. My current favorite is up from a little tiny place in, Michigan. and it’s called M 43. It’s a New England hazy style. IPA really good stuff, but I’m always looking for ones that are, you know, right like that. So if you, if you know of any, please do let me 

[00:07:44] know. So without further ado, let’s kind of jump into the content today. So, really. When we’re looking at, for most businesses, you’ve probably got, especially in the consulting world, you’ve really kind of got four main sources of, of new business. And if, you don’t see your favorite one listed here, probably could fall under a subcategory.

Or maybe I forgot about it, but, you know, typically it’s your network. That’s your word of mouth, your referrals. You know that warm people who you know, know, like, and trust you already. You’ve got content. and that’s. You know, it could be content on, you know, social media like a LinkedIn, a Facebook and Instagram or content on your website, your blog, things like that.

you know, quite frankly, your content could be speaking engagements that you’re doing from the stage if, if you’re a bit of an old school consultant and, and still going around talking, talking to people and in real life and meeting them and shaking hands and, and, and all that. outreach, which, you know, is a, is definitely a, a tried and true bread and butter of a lot of, a lot of consultancies.

Very consistent way of, doing it. And, you know, the, the scalable one that, you know, I think a lot of places aspire to, but maybe don’t necessarily always need. But, always good to have is, is, is effective advertising campaigns. So we’re gonna be kind of looking at each of those, specifically through the lens of, of LinkedIn and really kinda like.

Being able to kind of leverage LinkedIn One ’cause it actually can do all four of these. And from a consulting standpoint, what we’ve really found is that LinkedIn is, is in, in many, many cases probably the ideal platform. because. Of how good it is at doing a quality over quantity type of approach.

And I think right, especially, you know, for a topic like today where it’s kind of trying to end that feast or famine cycle, what you probably don’t need is somebody, you know, talking about here’s how we’re gonna get you 147 calls in the next week. if, if you’ve got a sales team in place. Great. You can throw that to them, but you’re probably not on today’s session, especially if you’re a small consulting firm where, you know, you got a lot of people who are really kind of focused on delivering the work and you, you don’t have, you know, a, a sales team of 10 people that you can just fire, fire leads away to at that point, you probably already got scalable systems in place and we’re kind of trying to talk about.

If you’re taking the calls, especially if you’ve got one key person who handles them, we’re trying not to overload them so that you can most efficiently handle them, and more importantly, make sure you do good work for your current clients and continue to feed that sales pipeline with a consistent amount of new business.

That doesn’t completely break all your systems, and I think that’s one of the big things I see when I, I see posts like that. You’ll see ’em, you know, on LinkedIn or Facebook, Hey, this post got me, you know, a hundred and you know, 150 new leads or 47 booked calls in over a three day time span. And you say who’s who’s, who’s trying to make sure they’re following up on all that.

I talked to, you know, I was on a workshop earlier this week and it was, you know, make sure you’re having a hundred, a hundred messenger conversations a week. And I’m, I’m, that, I’m immediately overwhelmed. I said, I don’t, I, I want to have like three conversations a week. and that’s, that, that work, you know, for me, that’s gonna keep my sales pipeline full.

I don’t need to do more than that. and the business will grow if I do just that. So that’s, that’s a lot of what we’re looking at here, is trying to make sure we’re, we’re continuing to do things and have systems in place to continue bringing new, new business and new opportunities to our, to the plate.

Without completely overwhelming everything and, and just making it, a, a huge, a huge mess where systems break and then current, you know, people aren’t getting followed up with or people don’t get what they asked for. And then, you know, current, you know, the, the current load of work we’ve got, we’re not getting client work done and Yeah.

You know, no, nobody wants that cycle. 

[00:11:38] So. So let’s kind of talk about this whole, what happens when you’re busy, right? It’s, you probably know how to bring in new business. When you’re not busy, I, I find if you’ve been in business for more than a year or two, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve kind of got the drill down, you know, you know, you go shake every tree, you can see what falls out, talk to people, take take meetings.

Maybe you wouldn’t maybe show up to a networking event here and there and, and really just try and get those conversations started where, wherever you can, but just in case you need a few ideas. Here’s, here’s a few things that, you know, we’ve, we’ve done, and this one goes back to, to 2020, so things you do when you’re not busy, right?

2020. This was. Oh boy. Did things just like fell off a cliff there, remember, remember March, of 2020? Yeah, that was a, it was a, it was certainly a challenging time for us back then. so one thing, I think this must have been, I think we sent these out in sometime around July. So, you know, I. Just messaged everybody in messenger that I had had any conversation with.

These weren’t even like super. These were basically all dead leads. Hey, John, long time no talk. How’s everything going? And I fully realize that in this day and age, what used to be a friendly message is now all too often used. Right before I spam you with my latest Bitcoin C-B-D-M-L-M offer. Right. Little, little tongue in cheek, a little bit playful.

There’s no offer there. It’s just mostly trying to say hello again. Shake, shake the tree, see if something falls out. And I think I went through everybody and you know, and you know, I think, you know, two or three clients ended up, ended up coming from that. There’s no offer there. It just, you know, things, things that, worked a little bit.

here’s another one, that I used on, this is another one from Facebook actually. And this message is both dumb and poorly written. and it still worked. Not gonna read it to you ’cause it’s, it’s very, very awkward. but essentially, you know, another kind of just connected with somebody and Right.

You know, people get used to getting pitches from people for whatever weird opportunity. So, mostly just making fun of that opportunity. Feel free to screenshot it. I, I don’t know that this would still be relevant today. I’d probably. You’d probably have to update it and of course, make it coherent. That third paragraph, man, I, you know, copying, you know, copy and paste is easy.

I don’t know what I did there to make it so, so awkwardly written. But, But, you know, again, things like that, you can see the, the response messages over here in the bottom right corner, from, you know, one of the people who I, I sent that to and they said, actually, no, I’m actually interested in what you have to offer.

Again, you know, I’m looking to book calls, and it was, it was weird how that message actually was. Far more effective in generating leads and appointments for the business than an actual pitch for my business. right, right. Doesn’t, doesn’t make much sense, but it was interesting. It was different. It was fun, it was refreshing.

then some people didn’t get it right. Some people were like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna block you immediately. You’re a terrible person. You know, we’re just having fun. you know, again, things you can do when you’re not busy and you’re just kind of trying to get conversations to 

[00:14:42] happen. Another one you could, do you need another idea?

want, wanna get a little bit more involved with it? Well, you can show up like nobody else and, this is something we did. we actually had been doing some work in the biotech space through, through a partner agency of ours. We wanted more meetings in that space and it was really, it was definitely a challenge to get meetings with, with the decision makers we wanted.

So we thought, let’s try something a little bit different here. Here’s kind of the strategy, feel free to take it and run with it and make it your own. but I would have these coffee mugs, had ’em printed with, you know, our logo and stuff on it. I went and would. Go and put a little instant coffee in them and then we would actually physically mail these things out.

So we put a little box in ’em and put some nice, nice little bright colored paper and a little note in there and say, you know, Hey, we recently connected on LinkedIn and that’s important. We make sure that we connected with these people all on LinkedIn first. so we kind of had good targeting, at least in place before we mailed these out.

It wasn’t just the spray and pray type of thing. so we’d connect with them on LinkedIn and we’d send these out and say, Hey, you know, we recently connected on LinkedIn. And, you know, I, I thought, you know, I wanted to invite you to a virtual cup of coffee, but I thought it be fair if I at least bought the coffee.

especially this was during the pandemic when you weren’t just going to invite them to Starbucks to go have a cup of coffee with you. so we thought, you know, we’ll kind of do a play on the virtual cup of coffee thing, send them a coffee mug, send them some Starbucks instant coffee in it, and, This was, this was probably the only thing that was effective in that space and actually turning those people into to meetings. I’d say for, you know, every hundred of these we’d sent out, we, we got, you know, a few appointments and, you know, for every thousand messages we would send out in the same space, maybe we’d get one.

It was, it was surprisingly. Effective here. Problem is, it’s a lot of work. It’s not scalable and we ended up stopping ’cause the employee who was doing it moved. And so I, I don’t have the space to handle everything for that. Which, which brings me to my next thing in case you would like to see this one in action.

I still have a case of these in one of my closets somewhere. You wanna see one of these? I’d be happy to mail you one if you’d like to, you know, kind of see it, feel like I said, feel free to copy it and, and make, see if it’ll work for you. Especially if you, like I said, you got a little bit of time. You, you’re going after high value you.

You have the high value clients and you don’t mind putting a little bit of work. You got an assistant who you know has the time to do it. just email me Gary at Pipelineology dot com. Make sure you include your mailing address, because I need to know where to send it to. Well, I will physically mail it to you.

’cause I would like to get these, or maybe not me so much, but my fiance really would like those out of her closet. So. feel free to message me and we’ll make sure we get you, get you one of those sent over, this year. And then speaking of direct mail, here’s one that I got. This was a box of, of cookie.

I ate all the cookies, so there’s no, no cookies in this box anymore. This is the last piece of direct mail I got from anybody trying to solicit business from, from me. I received this in 2020. so it’s, it’s been a little while since anybody has even bothered to send one. Right. I’m recording this. It’s, it’s March of 2024.

It’s, it’s been three and a half years since anybody’s is bothered. So if you really want to show up somewhere where, you know, there’s not a lot of competition. Your, your LinkedIn inbox or your Facebook, your, you know, messenger, your Instagram dms. Very busy places. Write your emails. Probably got 15 pitches from people for various things in it.

You know what? Probably doesn’t sending something in the mail. I don’t think I’ve received any, like business. I haven’t received any business mail this whole, whole week, and it’s already Thursday. My mailbox has been empty. You want to, you want to get my attention, that’s the easiest place to do it. offer, you know, the, the cost of a stamp or if you really wanna get creative for the cost of a, a coffee mug, a packet of instant coffee in a cardboard box.

So, just, I wanted to give you guys some ideas here. If you’re thinking, gosh, I, I don’t know what to do, you know, I’m trying to, to grind away and hustle, and I, I just can’t get any traction. I wanted to give you just some ideas you can try, right? Some are free, some are just, you know, some. A little kind of off the wall dms.

Some are, some, some direct mail strategies that nobody’s trying anymore. so feel free to experiment with 

[00:19:12] those. but now let’s kind of pivot over to kind of the meat and potatoes of things here. What happens when you’re busy, right? It’s, it is really easy to do the things that, you know, they take some time.

They’re not really scalable, but that’s not a problem. You’ve got some time. You’re just trying to build, build the bus, that book of business up. You need clients now. Go for it. That’s, that’s what, that’s what that’s for. But what happens when you are busy? Well, that’s oftentimes when you know all that network building stops, all those conversations, you know, following up with all those people really being diligent about it, you know, it comes a little less, a little less.

And you know, all of a sudden you go a week and you’re all, Nope, I didn’t build any connections this week. I didn’t have any, didn’t really try and start any new conversations. You know, all that content you’ve been trying to post, those videos you’ve been trying to put out, well, they become a little less in, a little less consistent.

You know, maybe you’re trying to do three a week and well, maybe you got one done last week and none this week, and all of a sudden you go, a month goes by and you realize, well those are non-existent. You know, your business development, you know, strategies a, a good old fashioned just, you know. Doing, doing outreach.

Well, that grinds through a halt and advertising. You say, well, I, I’m, I’m busy right now, turn that off. I’m not looking to keep spending money when I’m, you know, barely, you know, can, can hardly keep up with that. And so it begins that cycle, right? We’ve, we’ve probably all experienced it, that feast or famine where, you know, you said, oh, I worked so hard to get things going.

And now I’m busy so I, I can stop. And you, ’cause you think somehow it’s, you know, all just gonna continue and maybe it’s just all gonna be referrals and you know, after, you know, at some point maybe it will, maybe there’ll be enough word of mouth and referrals that you don’t need to do any of this other stuff anymore.

But for most of us, that’s usually not the case. So today we’re gonna talking about a system and a strategy that you can start putting in place for your business so that you can free up your time, your most valuable asset. And, and really have a system so that you don’t have to worry about where the next clients are coming from.

Even when you’re busy, say it’s still working for you. You’ve either got people in place or, or services in place or automations in place. It, it, it’s kind of up to you, how you want to do it, but this is kind of what we’re looking at. So this is the system. I know this is gonna be probably small on your screen.

I’m, I’m trying to, to stream in HD today, but I know, especially if you’re on your phone, you’re not gonna be able to read that. If you would like a copy of that, just email me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. Evan, can you do me a favor and just put my email address in the, in the chat in case somebody wants it so they can can have it?

just email me and I’ll send you a PDF for this. So if you’re trying to screenshot it and you’re like, it’s a little blurry, I can’t quite read it, we’re gonna go through each column. We’re gonna break each one down. but if you just want a copy of this for reference. Go for it. We’ll, I’ll make sure we send that one to you.

Thank you, Evan. Appreciate that. Alright, so the beauty of this system here is that this is really designed for, for busy consultants and one, it’s modular so you don’t have to do everything all at once. Everything works together and plays nicely together, but you can build things just one step at a time, one piece at a time, and start to go from there.

Most, most consultants don’t need the whole thing that’s. That’s the other part that, is I think a little bit surprising. You think, ah, I need all these things. I want all these things. There’s all these fancy bells and whistles, you know, we’re like, especially like if you look at it, you know, you’ve got, like I said, I know it’s hard to read.

So you’ve got your network building, you’ve got your content, you’ve got outreach, and you’ve got advertising. We’re, we’re still experimenting on the advertising side ourselves. Really trying to dial it in for our own company too. So it, not none of this, you, it doesn’t have to be all of this or nothing.

Pick ones and do what works for you. For us, since, since we do a lot of outreach, outreach works really well for us, so we probably put more, more effort into that than, than most, and we get a lot more out. We, we get a lot out of it. So we, we’ve probably reinvested a lot more into that one than, than some others.

But, you know, ultimately it’s about doing what works for you. So. And the nice thing about this is this whole system is designed to have somebody else be able to do it for you. What it doesn’t have, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have to be us. We can, we can, we can help you with it. There’s plenty of other people out there who can’t and use internal people you can hire to do this for you.

This is designed to try and use as much of your precious Reese. That precious time resource you have as, as little of that as possible, use it as as effectively as possible so that you can still focus on, on growing the business and that you are no longer that bottleneck, holding it all together where you’re trying to, to do the outreach and send funny direct messages to people and you’re licking the stamps and signing the letters and, you know, printing off the shipping labels and all that.

You don’t have to do all of that. this is designed so that you just do the things that are gonna be. The, the highest, highest leverage types of activities for your business. So, so let’s jump into it here. So we’ll be covering like the, I said the four things where we’re gonna, talking about building your network, we’re talking about content and my kind of twisted take on it, outreach and, and advertising.

I’ll probably go through Adver. Advertising will go probably through pretty fast. I, I was in a workshop earlier this, this week, and it was, it was three, three days of like two hour calls. kind of covering just a small fraction of this. It’s, it’s a very big, big subject. So I’m just giving you just a little snippet, kind of an idea of a good place to start.

but let’s jump into 

[00:24:54] it. build your network purposefully. So on LinkedIn. So again, we’re focusing really on kind of what LinkedIn is here, and. I know I’m talking fast. Apparently I’ve had too much coffee today. and I’m drinking more, so I’m probably gonna be more and more, I’m probably gonna get more hyper as we go along.

But if you have questions and I’m going too fast, I know I’m going too fast, but feel free to post those in the chat. I will, we’ll kind of try and jump in, kind of answer some questions as we go along. Also do q and a, at, at the end. Here. So, just, again, I, I know you’re all out there, so appreciate everybody who is on today, and if you have questions, please just let me know.

So, let’s talk about building your network. It’s probably one of the easiest, simplest things to do, especially on LinkedIn. You know, you’ve really got two types of people. You’ve got followers, you’re gonna have as many followers as you want. There’s no, no limit to it. then typically you would get those, you know, posting in the, in the feed and stuff like that.

and then you’ve got connections. Connections are limited, but on LinkedIn you can have up to 30,000 connections. So it’s not that limited. It will take you a long, long time to build up to 30,000 connections, especially with the current limitations in place on LinkedIn. But they are the most valuable, you know, people really.

Do you have as part of your network? Because you can do act, you, you’re, it’s easier to message them. You can get contact info for those people. So if you, you know, you need to email them or, or send ’em a text message, you can oftentimes do that, about 90% of the time. Then a good email address is in there, I think about half the time, the cell phone numbers in there.

but you can also invite them to subscribe to a newsletter or like I did, I can invite everybody to attend an event like this. So having connections, especially relevant connections. So that’s probably the big one, is be proactive about. Finding people, right? You’re gonna get connection requests from everybody, but probably more often than not, they’re people who want to sell you their 

[00:26:47] services.

so kind of trying to build your network with the people you would ultimately wanna work with is more of a proactive than a, than a reactive type of thing. So find those people. Identify them you to LinkedIn’s, got tools like Sales Navigator. You can find different groups or even people who are just active on the platform.

Send them, send them invites to connect, you know, people. People will say yes even if they don’t know you. and maybe you’ve always thought, you know, I don’t connect with people. I don’t know. There’s some people like that out there, and that’s okay. but especially if you’re, you’re trying to build business.

You know, and they’re probably thinking the same thing as more the more the merrier. So, so I would always encourage you to, you know, try and build as many connect, you know, max out your 

[00:27:31] connections every week. Like I said, LinkedIn limits it. it’s either 100 or 200 kind of depending on, account that you have.

with LinkedIn. It takes, it takes a lot of time, right? 200, sending out 200 requests a week. Even if you get a hundred percent acceptance rate, that’s still a whole lot of years before you’re gonna hit 30,000 and, you know, you’re not, it’s pretty tough to get a hundred percent acceptance rate. I think we had a client recently who was in like the, I wanna say we just, we were touching 80% and that was the, the highest we’ve seen to people he didn’t know, in years.

So. Mo most, most people are more closer to 30 to 40% in terms of how many people just say yes to them. So basically build your network, find people that you wanna connect with. It takes time, do it, but you know, you’re going, you know, basically consider this just kind of an investment in the future.

LinkedIn is one of those, those platforms that can pay dividends for, for years and years. and you’ll, you’ll probably, if you haven’t done it now already, you know, you’ll wish you’d done it, you know, five or 10 years from now. ’cause it’s, I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think it’s probably, it’s probably not going away.

It’s owned by Microsoft and, that they seem to be doing okay these days. So, so that’s, that’s the network 

[00:28:48] side of things and Right. Just, you know, your, along with your, your typical types of, of networking, however you like to network. And for me, I, I don’t, just as a quick aside, I think people. I think I’ll, you know, with, with me, you know, I’m big on, big on LinkedIn that I probably do lots and lots of networking calls.

I do almost know networking calls. pretty much I like to network if I’m at a live event and I can, you know, go have a, you know, a beer or something with somebody. That’s, that’s my version of networking, sitting on a, a virtual cup of coffee call with people. I’m, I, I, I have no patience for that because I, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve done the math, my referrals and word of mouth comes from.

Existing clients, so it’s much more productive, productive for me to go find another client and serve my clients well than it is to do a virtual cup of coffee. That’s just me, that’s my experience with it. I’m, you know,

excuse me, but I’m, I’m an old man and a little bit salty sometimes. So anyway, excuse me one more time here.

Ah, and that, have that a hundred day cough from, from COVID. I got it in January and I still have a, like this lingering cough. I talked to my doctor about it, she said, oh, yeah, most people that goes away after about 12 weeks or so. So, so here we are. I’m, I’m about eight weeks into my, my 12 weeks of 

[00:30:13] coughing.

So let’s talk about content and kind of the way I recommend for a lot of clients to do it, because content is tricky, right? In a, especially in a consulting space, content is generally, you know what the. The, the, the, the figurehead, the, the face of the company. That’s usually their kind of thing to do is put out stuff with their name on it and their thought leadership and their ideas and their personality.

It’s time consuming to do though. so it tends to, like I said, it, unless somebody really, really loves it, it’s easy for that to kind of fall by the wayside and it becomes kind of inconsistent and. You know, it’s like I said, you try and sit there each day and think, okay, I need to put out more content today.

I need to put out good content. You said, well, I don’t have time. I’m gonna, I’m gonna bring in an assistant to do it. And they help you create content and, you realize that it’s, it’s not the way you would say it, it’s not written the way you would want. Or you hire a ghost writer and you know, it just kind of comes off as generic and no longer authentically you, which is.

Kind of defeats the whole point of putting out content and thought leadership types of, of, of stuff. So, again, it goes by the wayside and it doesn’t get done. So here’s how we’ve decided. ’cause you know, I’ve thought about how can we offer this to our clients? ’cause they certainly want it, but, and we want it to, but it’s, it’s, you know, we we’re not gonna ghost straight for them as well as they could.

So here’s kind of what we’ve come up with and here’s kind of my little twist on content as I try and focus them on just one, one piece of content. And that would be a, it is either doing a LinkedIn event or podcast interview. And we’ll, we’ll see that one kind of show up when we get back to outreach. But this little green one here, green square on the whole thing, when you get the whole PDF, you’ll, you’ll kind of see that it can be, a, a podcast interview as well, but.

Doing monthly events, basically, this is a great time to share your expertise and get, you know, do q and a with people and things like that. So one, this is a great way to, you know, get people more familiar with what you offer, view you as more of an expert, and not just somebody who you know is trying to, you know, sneak slide into their dms and pitch them services.

It, you know, can act reactivate dead leads. It can bring new customers in. It helps you close people who are on the fence. There’s all kinds of good things that happen with doing an event, but when you think about it from a content standpoint, well yeah, you’re creating one piece of content a month, or you’re creating one piece of content.

You know, one long form piece of content. And now you can take this, this, this event, and you can turn it into short little video clips. There’s services out there, there’s, there’s tools and stuff out there. So just feel free to poke around and see what kind of fits, fits what you’re looking for. But now you can take it and break it into short little video clips that are maybe 30, 60 seconds, like little snippets and tidbits, from, from the event of, of you speaking.

So it’s in your voice. It’s things you’ve talked about. It’s things you, you know, took the time to prepare and kind of had your ideas on, and that they’re, they’re authentically what you want to share. And now you can share those throughout the month, you know, on your, on your LinkedIn or TikTok or on Instagram, Facebook, wherever you like to post.

So you can take this one activity that, you know, you, you put the effort into doing instead of trying to do it day after day. You’re even trying to do, you know. A few of ’em, you know, for the week each, each, each, each week. Now you can just do one and that was your time investment. And now you can hand that off to somebody else to take it the rest of the way and it still is in your voice.

And I think that’s the big thing about it, right? Especially like from a consulting standpoint, is you want it to be in your voice. You want that, that authority and that expertise, to come through. So by kind of taking the event and having that be the, the one thing where you’re gonna invest your time and then having, you know, like I said, teams or people around you fill in all the gaps around it.

I have found that to be kind of the, the best way, especially as you’re busy to make sure that content still happens when you’re. When you’re, you know, you’re trying to serve your clients and, you know, close, close new business and things like that. This keeps the content happening and this keeps that, that top of the funnel activity sale, you know, people are still raising their hands and reaching out and wanting to talk to you with, without you having to, you know, get into the office every Monday morning and say, okay, what do we mean to create for content to this week?

when am I gonna find time to do that? So just, that’s kind of like I said. This is all designed to kind of free up as much of your time as possible and make it as effective as possible. So that’s where we’ve landed on content. There’s lots and lots of cool things you can do with content, right? It’s such a, it’s a huge, huge, you know, space.

and there’s, there’s so many things, but we find that this is effective and it, it’s not as time consuming. So, but if you’re, if you love writing and posting and all that stuff, please keep doing it. If it’s working for you, please don’t let me stop you. This is just kind of one of those ones if, if you’re, you’re struggling to get it done.

See if, see if this might be a better fit for, for what you’re looking to do.

Alright, moving 

[00:35:47] on. Outreach. I think this is the one that’s always a little bit on the controversial side, but, again, just it’s, it’s, it’s a so effective when done well and systematic and predictable that, It’s it again, if you don’t like it, don’t do it. But if, if you just need something, especially you know that that can, can produce results for you.

Definitely something worth looking into. So, but lemme kind of give you some kind of tips on how to make this, More effective for you. and one of the big ones is be human. There’s, right, there’s all these AI types of tools that say they’re gonna, I saw one recently, I had one reach out to me recently.

It was like some type of AI agent bot that they, to their, their credit, they managed to at least get it in my inbox. which is. More than most can do. I’d say nine out of 10 messages managed to find their way straight into spam. I at least got in my inbox, but it was just so awkwardly written that you say, well, I don’t see the point of, of this.

There’s, you’re, you’re, you’re still wasting all their time. I, you know, so, you know, trying to be human and, and have some fun. Remember those messages earlier? You know, just, just make it a little bit different. Try and stand out. we’ll go so much further than trying to just nail, you know, get the message just tweaked.

Right? Of I noticed your profile and just, you know, pe people like to have fun. Try, try that. Instead, if you’re reaching, trying to connect with people on LinkedIn, second degree connections only. Don’t, don’t try and go beyond that. You’re, you’re gonna find that it’s a lot harder and you get the results 

[00:37:29] are a lot, lot lower.

So, my, my, My, my take on templates is that templates actually work. I’ve, when I worked in the automotive space, so I was a marketing director before I was the business development director. And one of my first tasks was when we were getting a new CRM is we had, some really boring templates in, in place.

And, and by boring, I mean they, they were professional. They, they were properly written, they just weren’t really doing anything. So, you know, my job was kind of going through and taking them out and basically I was. Tasked with getting rid of a lot of them. But I said, what if we rewrote them and really tried to make our, you know, sales agents more effective?

Right. Because you’ve got a sales team. I mean, you know, at a dealership, you know, he might have five, five salespeople. 10 salespeople, depending, depending on the size of the store. So, you know, I was talking to the general manager and he is like, why don’t we just delete ’em all? And we tried that actually, and it was, was better.

but I thought, well. We’re still getting a lot of messages that are not going out well because the one thing you run into is, yeah, customized is great, but customized over and over and over again all day. all of a sudden is you get lazy and Right. If you’re a salesperson, you also get busy, especially if you’re doing other things other than following up.

And we ran into the same issue that they were just as generic as the. The pre-written templates that were there. So I went in and I said, what if I rewrote them? And we, we compared the results and trying to basically put a good prompt in place, a template in place that they could use or not, but that would make it easy to follow up.

That was customized, that was unique. That built on the last messages we sent. And we saw about a, a 50% response rate, in each message compared to the previous one by using templates, simply because it. You know, well written templates, and that’s the big thing, right? Boring templates are boring. Have some fun.

Again, be human with, make your humans make your templates more human and they will outperform even the AI written content. so just some things to kind of keep in mind there. relevance. I know that one’s not on the slide deck, but relevance, big, big deal if your message isn’t relevant to people.

It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. They’re, they’re, they’re not gonna be interested in it. So make sure you’re targeting is on point. That’s really what the big thing is there, is connect with the right people so that you know your, your message is, is likely to be relevant to them. Don’t pitch on the first message.

I know this is pretty common and that’s what most people think you should do. ’cause that’s all they see. Don’t, again, this is just. If you wanna stand out, just don’t pitch on the first message. Don’t ask ’em questions. Don’t ask ’em how their day is going. Don’t tell ’em, Hey, tell me about yourself. Hey, I noticed you went to the university of blah, blah, blah.

You know, can you tell me about how your experience was there? Skip all of that and just, you know, be, be friendly and say hello. Be human. If you want to pitch, you know, the best way that we’ve kind of found to do this is actually what I call an introduction sandwich. So here’s how we structure it.

Reach out and introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Gary. I just wanted to reach out and introduce myself. You know, I’m the founder of Pipelineology, we help, blah, blah, blah. Do this. I’m not sure if it’s relevant to you, but you know, I would be happy to send you some more information. I’ve got a video, blah, blah, blah.

Or you know, hey, I would love to meet with you for a virtual cup of coffee. Does, does that work for you? And they’re, they’re both pretty soft asks. They’re both real easy things to say yes to. and it’s when I sandwich it as an introduction versus a straight up pitch, you get a lot more people to say yes, right?

If you’re on a networking site like LinkedIn, right? If you’ve been to any live networking events, right? What do you do? You go around and introduce yourself, you tell people what you do, you hand out business cards and things like that. So that works online too, is yeah, maybe they’re not excited that you reached out to introduce yourself, but it, it still sounds like the right thing to do.

So they’re not immediately, turned off by you wanting to reach out and introduce yourself. So then they’re not immediately saying no. They’re like, oh, okay. Yeah, I guess that, yeah, they can reach out and introduce themselves. They’re supposed to do that if you. Think about it on LinkedIn. What does LinkedIn tell you to do?

Hey, why don’t you reach out and reach out to the person that you just connected with? Check your notifications from LinkedIn, right? Check, check the ones that, here’s your new connections. Hey, say hi to your new connections. LinkedIn tries to get you to engage with these people, so it, it’s one of those LinkedIn encourage types of activities.

So introduce yourself, tell them what you do and if that’s relevant to them. I like, that’s the way I like to say it. Not sure if it’s relevant to you. Again, it’s, I’m a Midwestern guy, guy. We’re, we’re not super aggressive around here. Typically it’s a little bit softer type of approach. It still works in New York though, by the way.

but you know. You don’t have to be super assertive. with, with the messaging, it just plays a little bit, little bit better in most, most areas we found. Okay, so that’s, that’s kind of my, my, my, my soapbox on, on doing outreach. Highly effective if done right, predictable, keep, keeps bringing in quality 

[00:42:52] prospects.

Here’s, here’s a weird one. You want, you want a weird story, so. Think about kind of like this whole trust factor of you’ve got, you know, different types of advertising words, word of mouth, referrals. You’ve got, you know, your organic content out there. You know, we’ve, we’ve got lots of stuff out there. So lots of different ways that people can find us.

And you think, okay, what’s, what’s gonna be the, the number one trust, you know, way people are gonna trust you? Is there probably referrals, right? A word of mouth referral. Maybe somebody who’s, you know, they’ve gone on your website, they’ve watched videos, they’ve looked at, you know. Case studies and stuff you’ve got on there, you know, those people are, are, are gonna be the easiest to close here.

Here’s the weird thing, when, when it comes to people wanting, you know, more proof and, you know, wanting to check references and stuff like that, the least amount of resistance I get is through the outreach system that we’ve put in place because it, it’s all kind of built upon. Being a, an actual live human being and, and having a little bit of fun.

It’s not rigid, it’s not fill out this form and, and, you know, click here to book a call. It, it’s all just human being stuff. So the trust is kind of baked into the whole experience and it’s, this is the most seamless process we have, even though if you take the same approach and do it in email, all of that is out the window.

It only works this way on LinkedIn. So, but, Just, just a little anecdote I wanted to share with you is, is, like I said, it, it, it’s always, it’s been strange to me as we’ve looked at, you know, data where, you know, even, even, like I said, even like the ones who’ve checked a bunch of our stuff and listened to podcasts and all that stuff, they’re, they’re still a little skeptical, but then we do the, the outreach ones and it.

It, it’s just smooth and seamless. again, I digress. So optional. You know, don’t send more than four messages if you’re not sure what to say. You know, you can always tell them, you know, I’ve got this amazing opportunity to lose weight. Make millions, building your, no, don’t say that. Don’t say that. but bonus, you know, this, this does work for getting on podcasts too.

So again, outreach. Is effective, especially, you know, in the consulting space, especially if, you know, you’re, you’ve got, you know, to get in touch with specific people at specific companies. You can’t just grab, pardon me, my phone is ringing. you can’t just, you know. Grab a list of, you know, 10,000 real estate agents and say, we’re gonna spray and pray and hope we get some, you know, if you’ve gotta be more selective about outreach can be really good about helping you very, you know, thread that needle and find just the right people to get in touch with.

So, alright, so that’s, that’s network building, that’s content. That’s, that’s our outreach. That’s how, that’s our take on outreach anyway. you’ll notice that, you know, we didn’t, we left off. Pretty much cold email there. Email’s on there. basically here’s my, my thought on email real quick is if you know what you’re doing, feel free to do it.

If you’ve got a service, absolutely do it. If you’re not sure and you’re not, you know, you don’t, you’re not up to date on kind of best practices, you can skip it. It’s not actually 

[00:46:03] necessary. Alright, so let’s talk about advertising real quick and then we are gonna get into some q and a. So. because I know we’re, we’re getting clo, we’re gonna get close to that one hour mark here.

I always, I always do that. I’m always about like, I’m right. I’m going for 30 minutes of content today, and then I’m looking at my clock and see it’s 46 minutes in. So anyway, let’s talk about advertising here real quick here. like I said, this is a whole, whole big space of things. I’m just trying to give you the very kind of bare minimum kind of starting point, jumping off point, if you will.

And probably the big starting point here is don’t start here. If you are just kind of get getting started, especially on, on LinkedIn, and, and trying to build things up. Don’t start with ads. One, if you’re gonna, if you really wanna do ads, start on a different network. They’re very expensive on, on LinkedIn and they take longer on LinkedIn to, to really process.

And one of the big things to keep in mind with LinkedIn is LinkedIn’s got wonderful targeting and that’s why people want to use it. The, the filtering, the parameters you can use, the, the, they’re getting, getting your ad in front of the right people. It is really good on LinkedIn. The problem with LinkedIn is people don’t spend much time on there, so they don’t get served a lot of inventory, which is why the ads are real expensive and things are kind of slow.

Is, I didn’t, I didn’t put this slide in here, but it’s what I usually have on the, the thing about LinkedIn is average time spent on LinkedIn is about 19 minutes a month. Compare that to, YouTube. The average time spent on YouTube is about 47 minutes a day. Facebook I think is still over 40 minutes.

TikTok is over 40 minutes a day Instagram. So if you’ve got those, so you’ve got, basically, I’m not gonna try and do the math here, but let’s just call it 50 times more ads and inventory you can serve to people over the course of a month. That, that, you know, kind of makes those, those platforms a lot easier to scale and, and run ad campaigns on.

Whereas LinkedIn, the targeting is better. You can get the right VPs at the right types of companies, you can target your networks better. so here’s how I recommend doing it is like I said, don’t start with this. Try the other things we talked about first. And then, then you can move into this one. Try other other channels first, and then you can filter some of that through here.

So that’s why I recommend actually starting with retargeting. If you’ve got existing ad campaigns and existing traffic. Retargeting can be a really effective way to get your, you know, ads in front of just the cream of the crop types of prospects on the LinkedIn platform. And that can be a really cost effective way and a fat kind of the fast way to getting a good ROI from the ads.

’cause beyond the, that kind of retargeting ones, you’re, you’re kind of in a three to six month process of building up, you know, the, the attention and things like that. so that’s why we kind of talk about having different layers of, you’ve got cold layers and warm traffic. So if you’re just getting started with it, where we’ll kind of run through it is if you, you’re just gonna build the targeting first.

You’ve gotta start kind of building up those engagements. You gotta get views to things. Maybe it’s a video. You gotta get somebody. To watch part of the video that will start to kind of build up people who are somewhat familiar with you. IE that’s what they call the warm traffic. Maybe they visited a page, they clicked on a white paper or something like that.

You know, they. they, they saw some portion of your offer and, you know, you can run ads on, you know, different types of pain points that you help results. You can get, you know what you offer and that’s a big thing, right? Let people know what you do ’cause they’re there. There’s that low hanging fruit pretty much always that somebody is looking for you.

Somebody’s looking for what you offer and the more unique it is, well you might be the only person that day that simply just said. Hey, here’s what I’m here to help. Here’s what I offer. I think, I’m trying to remember who said, I think Frank Kern once said some, sometimes the best sign you can have is to sell a horse is a sign that says horse for sale.

There’s some right, you sometimes you don’t have to overthink it. It’s not necessarily rocket science. You’ll get that person every once in a while. So make sure that that one, that one 

[00:50:25] exists. Okay, so now you’ve kind of building this, this, you’ve got this cold layer of people who don’t know you yet, and they’re starting to, they’ve, they’ve engaged with your content, your, your ad content in some way.

What do we do with that now? And now we kind of start pulling the levers and kind of the machines behind the scenes and, and LinkedIn, and we start building audiences based on those people. And now we try and give them, get them a little bit further down the rabbit hole and we, you know, show them a case study, you know, testimonials.

Some more expected results. Heck, you can do. here’s a cost of not hiring me type of video. you know, lots and, you know, lots of things that kind of move them further down. You can have them watch, you know, a webinar and, you know, eventually the idea is that whether it’s, you know, watching a webinar, or booking a call with you directly and, and getting on your calendar, you know, all, all of those are kind of the, the end goal right, is to, to sign on a new client.

But. Lots of steps. And like I said, this is why it, it’s, this is not usually a, a beginner strategy, but I did want to kind of touch on it. ’cause this is probably also the most scalable of the solutions. Once it’s in place. It’s just three to six months is, you know, you’ll get the data and now you’ll kind of know, but you might be in another three to six months after that first run to get it working.

So you can be looking at a good, solid year of, of really working and refining on these and, you know. It’s, it is gonna be a little bit more of an investment than a lot of the other ones out there. So do this. Don’t, don’t do this right away, but definitely worth, worth doing, especially if you’re trying to scale and grow the company.

And with that said, if you need any help, feel free to schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com. That just gets, you direct me on my, directly on my calendar. There’s, there’s no big long sales pitch or anything in there. That’s just my calendar scheduling link. Or just email me directly. I’m, I’m kind of old fashioned that way.

It’s real easy to get, you know, if you wanna meet with me, email me and we can probably make it happen. But if you’re looking for a system, any parts of the system, you, you don’t, again, I don’t even recommend to people when I’m, when I’m, you know, talking to somebody who’s interested. I don’t even recommend the whole system at once.

We, we take in bits and pieces and kind of build it up from there. But if you’re looking for some help getting something like this built, managed, and done for you. Feel free to re reach 

[00:52:53] out. But with that said, that’s all I’ve got for you. So what questions do you have? And like I said, I appreciate everybody hopping on today.

I know it’s a little bit of a, some technical hiccup, hiccups right at the beginning where some of the desktop stuff wasn’t working quite right. So I know, we didn’t get, get quite as many people on today, but I really do appreciate everybody who did make an honor kind of refreshed the page and stuck around.

So. Anybody who does have any questions here, I’ll, I’ll stick around for another minute or two and then, we’ll, we’ll wrap things up If, if you don’t have any more questions then I appreciate you being here today

and I think this has got, you guys are, you guys are easy today. This is great. alright, so it looks like we don’t really have any more questions today, so. I appreciate everybody hopping on today. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day, and, I will be on, again next month, we’ll do another event.

And, until then, take care. Hope you have a great, great start to quarter too. Can you believe first quarter is gonna be over here by Monday, so happy, happy end of quarter, happy Easter, and end of quarter one. Take care everybody.

Awesome.