Consultants : Fill Your Sales Pipeline on LinkedIn WITHOUT Burning Out!

Consultants : Fill Your Sales Pipeline on LinkedIn WITHOUT Burning Out!

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live event on filling a sales pipeline on LinkedIn without burnout, outlining an agenda of process overview, network building, outreach, ads, content, and Q&A, and noting the replay will be available in the LinkedIn Events section. He argues content shouldn’t be the primary driver initially because it’s time-intensive and inconsistent, recommending prioritizing scalable, delegable outreach, then using LinkedIn ads to scale, and treating content as support. He emphasizes building the right LinkedIn connections (often via Sales Navigator), using a short multi-message outreach sequence that doesn’t pitch first, following up persistently (including email), keeping messages brief, and avoiding calendar links in favor of offering times. He shares early results from vertical-style LinkedIn video ads and explains repurposing live events into short clips using tools like Captions and vyy.ai.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Replay Info
03:12 Housekeeping and Agenda
05:45 About Gary and Who Its For
08:39 Why Content Comes Later
11:30 LinkedIn Network Strategy
13:37 Get Help and Offers
14:08 Connections and Targeting
18:02 Outreach Mindset and Messaging
21:14 Sequence Setup and Follow Up
23:44 LinkedIn Time Reality
24:28 Follow Up Systems
26:38 Avoid Pipeline Panic
28:09 Soft Offer Outreach
29:57 Automation Tool Caution
31:15 Fix Low Responses
34:01 LinkedIn Ads Scaling
36:34 Video Retargeting Funnel
39:03 Repurpose Live Events
44:01 Tools for Short Clips
45:36 Q&A and Wrap Up

Transcript:

 

[00:00:01] All right. Welcome everybody to this month’s event. Fill your Sales pipeline on LinkedIn without burning out. So I’m your host, Gary Ruplinger, and I will be getting started here, in just about a minute or so. and for the. People who are wondering if this is going to be recorded, if you wanna share it with anybody.

yes. So for, for Charles, appreciate you, appreciate you hopping on right away. Yes, we’ll be recording this session today. it will be available about five or 10 minutes after the stream. So the pager on currently, that’s where the replay will, will show back up. So if you go into the, my Network at the top of your LinkedIn, or at the bottom of your LinkedIn if you’re on the mobile app.

you’ll, see the, my Network go to your events and, this, this replay will, will be showing up there. So, we’ll give everybody just a minute or so here to get on. in the meantime, where, where are you coming in from? Where are you calling in from? I’m here in Detroit, Michigan. Actually, technically I’m in the suburbs.

I’m a little bit north of the city in Troy, Michigan. It is, pretty pleasant, September day that it was a little bit hot last week, but actually really pleasant. I’d say really seasonal weather here right now. how about in your neck of the woods?

And like I said, we’ll be getting started here in just a second. I just want to give, give LinkedIn a chance to get the notifications out to everybody and all that so that they, they see the, that hey, we are in fact live. Everything is started. ’cause I know sometimes that can take a minute or two to, to get populated out.

especially, I think we had about, I think we had about 500 people register for today’s, today’s session. So I wanna make sure people get a chance to view it. and if not, we’ll, we’ll make sure everybody gets the replay if they weren’t able to check it out live. Hey Paul, Paul in New Jersey. Great to have you on today.

Stephanie in, in Waukesha. Welcome. I’m originally from, the Fond LAC area in Wisconsin. And Charles is in Atlanta with the storm coming. I hope you guys stay safe. Hope you guys got your food, your water, your generators, all that, all that stuff. Mike’s in Gainesville. Kieran’s in Halifax’s. Got a fellow Michigander there, clay in Marin County.

someone who’s, just showing, showing me LinkedIn news out in Boston. Nice to see you there. Kenneth also in southeast Michigan. Welcome. All right. So I think with that, appreciate everybody coming on today. let’s get the show started. I don’t wanna make anybody wait too long and, we’ll get things going.

we’re trying a little bit different, format with the streaming today. so if you like how this one looks, let me know. We’re trying to do this one in a little bit higher resolution, so, we’re, we’re testing new things out, so hopefully everything runs smoothly. that would be, you know, that’d be great for today.

But, Otherwise we’ll have, like I said, we’ll have that, we’ve got everything backing up right now, so it’s all recording locally here as well, just in case we run into some technical 

[00:03:11] difficulties. But without further ado, let’s kind of jump in just with a few housekeeping items here. When I do these live streams like this, on LinkedIn, there’s about a.

A time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I’m sitting in my office here until the time you hear it on your screen, shouldn’t make really any difference. It does mean though, and if you ask a question, I won’t necessarily be able to kind of have the conversation with you, but I will try to answer anything as completely as I can.

as people have asked already, if we’re being, this is being recorded. Yes it is. And the replay of this will be available. A few minutes after the event. So if you go into the, into your LinkedIn under the event section, this, this video recording will be there, usually within about five to 10 minutes after the stream ends.

And we’ll, we’ll make a couple little tweaks and everything too. It just so that it’s, it, it’s a little, little bit tighter. But, in terms of. The intros and outros. And if you want to be notified of future events, I do try and invite as many people from my network as I can. but with 27,000 connections, LinkedIn will not let me send that many out.

typically I can send about four or 5,000 out before I get cut off by LinkedIn. So if you wanna make sure you get invited, make sure you see them, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events. just put your email name and email address in there. Then you’ll be on the list and we’ll make sure we get, you get those emails, sent out.

I think we’ve got about 5,000 or so people on the list currently. So, and you also will get all the, the replay notifications. Alright, so today’s agenda. So we’re gonna do kind of an overview of what the process looks like today. It’s gonna be a lot of delegating and automating. and apparently, I forgot to spell, check this slide.

network building outreach. We talk about ads, and then we’re gonna talk about content. And this is, this is always one of the ones where content is kind of taking aback seat today, simply because it’s, this is, it’s kind of, this is the thing that often leads to burnout is it’s a lot of work.

Results are a little inconsistent. And then finally we’ll do some q and a. So if you have questions as we go along, please put them in the chat. I will do my best to answer them. if it’s, if it’s relevant to that section, if we’ll cover it later, I’ll just let you know. And anything I miss, we’ll come back to, at the end during the q and a part.

So I will try to get to as much as possible, unless it’s something that, you know, we just can’t cover on the, the live stream, in which case I’ll try and get in touch with you, via like a private message or 

[00:05:43] something. So real quick about me, I’m the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been doing marketing now for a little over 22 years. Actually closing in on, on 20, actually, I think over 23. Now I gotta update this slide. I used to run call centers at car dealerships, so my teams were responsible for writing kind of the email templates, the messaging, the, the making, all the phone calls.

And really what our job was, was to set appointments for our dealerships. So there were 16, stores around the country, and our job was to set up. Those meeting, or excuse me, appointments, for people to come in and actually test drive a car or get, get financed. these days I’ve kind of repurposed those skills.

I help clients get meetings. Now we do a lot of focus on outreach via LinkedIn, simply because we work with a lot of consultants on the quality is, is, is really high on LinkedIn. just finished watching the Umbrella Academy I think. What are we, I currently watch currently watching Chaos on Netflix.

interest. Interesting. but I am always looking for good, good. Show recommendations. If you got anything you, you would recommend. so who is this particular session for? This is really for people who you, you don’t have enough time in the day to do all the, the business development work you, you think needs to be done.

You’re struggling to create content consistently, or you’re just not getting enough results from your current efforts. So really this is about making, making the most out of the time you do have, and then. Delegating the rest. So the reason, kind of the inspiration for, for this session was a colleague of mine who last month posted that after seven years of posting almost daily, I’m kind of burned out.

and, and then, and I, and I, I really, I really resonated with that. And I know he’s, he’s done well. He’s. With what he’s doing. But it’s also a, a whole lot of, of effort, to kind of keep up with it. And as, as soon as you know, you’re going on vacation, you’re out of the office, you start to feel like, oh gosh, every, everything’s gonna, everything’s coming.

Not, you know, nothing, nothing’s getting done. What are we doing? So really we’re gonna focus in on delegating and automating what we can. And then for the things that do require our time. We’re, we’re gonna try and make those as efficient as possible. So this is really gonna be focusing in on the, the business development side of things today.

you know, sales, sales will, we’re probably gonna get a session in on kind of converting, converting those meetings into. Into actual paying clients. I’ve got a guest that I’m working on bringing on, so look for that one coming up later this year. This, this session, like I said, all about the business development with a specific focus today on LinkedIn.

So let’s start with, let’s get kind of this, this, this one out of 

[00:08:38] the way here. Why I don’t recommend content. First, and I’ll tell you, I, I recently spoke to a gentleman who started his, his, his consulting firm, around the beginning of this year. So probably about, eight or eight or nine months ago. and he, he’s got a book out.

He’s been doing podcast interviews, really, really doing, you know, good quality content types of things. There’s just one problem. The clients aren’t coming, you know, I, and he kind of mentioned, you know, thinking the book would be kind of one of those, if you build it, they will come field the dreams type of things where, you know, get the book out there and you’ll have all the clients you need.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case, so I’ve actually gotta follow up meeting with him tomorrow. So we’re gonna talk about, well, kind of imp implementing some of these. Systems that do the outreach, that do that business development work that’s maybe not as, not as exciting, not as sexy, not, you know, not as much fun, but things that, that really do move the needle and, and are effective, especially, especially in the consulting world.

We find that these, these tend to work pretty well. I, and like I said, and we’re gonna, we’re not saying don’t do content. That’s not what I’m saying at all. but we’re gonna look at it more as a support tool than the driver, especially initially. So kind of, here’s, here’s kind of the priority we’re gonna be looking at today is one we’re gonna be looking at at Outreach because it’s, it’s one of these things that when done well is, is very effective.

It’s scalable, and most importantly, it’s something you don’t need to do yourself. I think that’s kind of one of the, one of the big ones is, is I know people don’t like to do it. Here’s the, here’s the nice thing about it is you don’t have to, it, it’s easy to either hire somebody, train somebody, or, or outsource it to another company, and have it still be done at a, at a high level that you would find acceptable.

And then two, we’re gonna look at ads to really kind of build upon the outreach and scale that, Whereas, because I know, especially on LinkedIn, you get a little bit of a bottleneck on the outreach side of things. so if you’re looking for growth ads can be a really good avenue to it. And, and again, you can do that without them being super, super time intensive.

You know, even if you’re doing video ads and things like that, you can still have a, you know, have a team that really is responsible for most of the work and only a little bit is on you. And then finally, we’ll look at content. In a, in a time permitting way. So we’re gonna talk about how to make it as efficient as possible for the time you do spend doing it, so that you get the most out of your content so that you don’t burn out.

Is that, is, that is really the goal. So, let’s, let’s kind of jump in with it 

[00:11:29] here. I know this is gonna be really small, on most screens here. if you do want a copy of this flowchart, just send me an email and I will be happy to send over the full sized PDF so that you can, can take a look at it later.

we’ll be covering kind of everything here in in the presentation today. I just kind of wanted to give you an overview. What we’re gonna be looking at is, is really connecting with the right people on LinkedIn. This is probably one of the most important things. Doesn’t matter if you’re doing outreach.

Doesn’t matter if you’re doing, doing content is getting, getting the right people in your network so that the right people see your message is, is really what, what it’s all about. I, I can’t tell you how many times I, I’ve talked to a consultant who’s, you know, they’ve, they’ve got a big network of people and we say, great, is there anybody in in your current network, network we should contact?

They say, no, I’ve just kind of accepted everybody over the years. There’s, there’s really no rhyme or reason to it. I, I’ve had, you know. You know, had people, clients ask me, Hey, can we, can we look at my network and, you know, see who we can leverage? And I, I’ll go through, you know, we’ll look through 2,500, 3000 or so connections and, you know, pops out, you know, we applying their search parameters they want to use, applying the targeting and you know, they’ve got five, five relevant connections.

So we’re gonna look at making sure we’re building the right connections at the beginning. Because that’s gonna make everything work. Remember, you talk about using outreach to get meetings, to get conversations started using ads to scale, using contents to support outreach and ads. So I’m gonna show you the strategy that, I like and that we’re gonna be really kind of, kind of testing out here.

As LinkedIn has made, as the, as they do, has made some changes to what’s prioritized and what’s deprioritized. And, and then finally, we’re talking about delegating and automating, this along the way. So if you do wanna, like I said, if you do want a copy of this flowchart, shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

Just put flowchart or something in the, in the subject line. we’ll, we should have all those out, out by tomorrow. So, and I’ll make sure everybody, like I said, gets a copy of 

[00:13:36] it. So if you don’t have time to do this yourself. Get help. we have a done for you program. We also have a build it for your team and train your team program.

if you’re interested in something like that. So I know I like to put this early in the presentation ’cause I know busy people may not be here at the end, especially if we have a lot of questions. So if you, it is something you’re curious about, happy to discuss it with you. You can go to the appointment lab.com.

That’s where you’ll see my direct calendar. Or just shoot me an email, Gart Pipelineology and we can go from 

[00:14:07] there. Anyway, so let’s, let’s kind of talk about your network. As I said, this is really the most important thing and on LinkedIn, you’ve really got two types of, of, of people is you can have followers and you can have an unlimited number of those, but your interaction with them is oftentimes pretty limited.

The one I really like to focus in on is connections. So this is like, having friends on Facebook except you know, you in a professional business sense. And the nice thing is on LinkedIn you can have up to 30,000 of these people and this gives you more ability to communicate with them. You can invite them to subscribe to things like newsletters, attend events just like you’re doing right now.

It’s easier to get contact information and your messaging is more likely to go through. But the big thing is that this is a slow process. It takes time. LinkedIn, it used to be kind of a free for all. You could send out a hundred, 200 connection requests on, on a day. I know some people will send out over a thousand of ’em in, in any, any given week.

at that, but that was, that was 10 years ago. That was kind of the wild west of, of, of LinkedIn. these days it’s capped. So really between 102 hundred is all you’re gonna be able to send out. so it’s a bit of a slow process using things like InMail can get you more messaging out there, but, but it’s one of those things, build it now.

you know, and, and start getting the, the right connections now, and, you know, in a year or two’s time, you’re gonna be really happy that it, even if you don’t have everything else in place, just start doing it now and, and the rest can, can follow. Connecting with the right people. as I’ve, as I’ve kind of emphasized here, this is, this is really one of the most important things oftentimes gets overlooked or you don’t spend a lot of time on it.

I will tell you when we’re working, with a client to build campaigns, this is an area we spend a lot of time talking with the client about who are the right people to talk to, who are the right connections. As we’re, even, as we’re going along, we’ll, we’ll keep checking with them. Are we getting the right, are we getting the right people?

’cause if, if it’s the wrong people, they, you know, aren’t, aren’t involved in the decision making process. All of our efforts tend to tend to just be, be substandard. So, so I recommend tools like Sales Navigator for, for probably most people doing consulting work. simply because it helps you with additional filters like.

Finding the right sized companies. it’s, it’s entire, you know, you think about it, it’s, it’s hard to serve a, a company of 10 people the same way you would a thousand people. and depending on your skillset and who you’re looking to work with, what your offer is, can make a big difference. So just, just connecting with the pe, the right size companies for what you offer.

Or, or different size companies may mean you’re connecting with a different job title entirely. You know, a small company might be the CEO, a large company might be a, a vice president of, of communication or a supply chain director, just kind of depending on, on where they fit. But, Where a, where A CEO wouldn’t, wouldn’t even give you the time of day ’cause it just, what you offer isn’t on their radar.

They’ve got too many other things going on. So that’s one of the big things as you’re, as you’re thinking about building your network, is find the right people to connect with. It may not be the people who are most actively posting on LinkedIn or commenting. Those people may not, may not be a good fit for your offer, even though they’re, they’re easy to connect with, but are, are they actually the right types of people that are gonna move things forward in terms of having conversations, having meetings, and, and closing 

[00:18:00] deals?

So let’s talk a little bit about outreach. so I like to give this spiel probably just about every time, but I, I always like to remind people that, you know, people are not excited about outreach, right? Somebody will say, well, it feels, it feels spammy. I don’t want to interrupt people. Some people are gonna get angry.

Yeah. And here’s the thing I’ll tell you. Most people also tell you that they don’t like TV ads. They don’t. Like their news interspersed with ads or, or radio, or they’re ignoring all the Google ads, or, you know, they always click skip when on YouTube, if they’re watching a video, they’re gonna throw away all their junk mail and they don’t want to go to another tedious networking event.

So here’s, here’s kind of the bottom line on all that is. Nobody’s coming into the office today hoping that today’s the day they get your pitch. But if you do have a relevant, timely offer that they think will help them, they will respond positively. So that’s just the thing I always like to mention is think, think of outreach as just another advertising tool.

And people don’t like advertising. I mean that if you get ever talk to a TV rep, they’ll tell you it’s very prestigious and, and looked highly upon. and, and bring. Nobody, nobody’s excited about your ads unless it’s the Super Bowl. So sometimes really the only way to get a busy professional’s attention is to interrupt them.

so you know the, the content that you’re posting, all these things. Oh, I gotta just a pop up on my screen here. Hopefully everything’s still good. Alright, I think we’re okay. Anyway, sorry for the interruption there, but, see, LinkedIn interrupted me. That was the only way to get my attention today is by interrupting my, my live stream.

It’s on the screen over here, just, letting me know anyway, so sometimes the only way to get a busy professional’s attention is to interrupt them. Just keep that in mind. So let’s talk about how to structure these so that you do get responses that you are building your, you’re building your network, and not just everybody you connect with immediately.

Disconnects. So when you do outreach on LinkedIn, I recommend not pitching on the first message. This is probably the biggest, biggest one, and it’s also probably the most unintuitive. You say, well, well, what do I say? I, I, I like to call it a friendly greeting, is say hello. Don’t ask them questions about how their business is, how they got started, how their day is going.

You don’t need to pepper ’em with questions. and, and believe it or not, just, just doing that will set you apart so that you can, can actually stay connected and they’re more likely to respond when you do actually have something to say. But most people don’t do it. They get in a big hurry. It’s immediately all about, all about me, all about them.

I, you know, it’s, Hey, you know, let me tell you about this, you know, kind of here’s my calendar link, which don’t, don’t send that either. why you do 

[00:21:13] it? So here’s, here’s how I recommend you do it, is think about this in terms of, of a sequence. So it’s really easy for messages to, am I frozen? let me, let me see here.

If we can get things restarted here. let me just,

as I did mention earlier, we are recording this locally, so, I’m gonna check here if, if not, I’m gonna post here in the comments real quick and, we’ll get, we’ll get started again. But, my apologies if we’re running into a little bit of technical difficulties. I know sometimes with the streaming.

You run into some, some issues. I got a message here. It looks like things are are going, so, it looks like if you refresh, everything should be okay. So I’m gonna keep going. I’ll keep an eye on the comments just in thing, like I said in case things go down again here place in case we need to restart them.

Anyway. So with LinkedIn Outreach, I recommend thinking of it in terms of, of a sequence. And in a lot of cases, I recommend also say, think about it as if you were actually going in person to a networking event. You’re gonna walk up to somebody, you’re gonna introduce yourself, you’re gonna shake hands, and you might exchange pleasantries about, you know, what you guys do and, and things like that.

And if it’s relevant. Then you can, then you can kind of move things forward. If it’s not relevant, you move on and you keep going. So I recommend sending out a, a sequence of messages no more than four. I three tends to be the sweet spot, so it’s easy for messages to get buried on LinkedIn. So I find it to be at best practice to send more than one message.

But like I said, don’t get carried away with this. And, and don’t, like I said, don’t ever do it. also one thing we find to be, that can be pretty helpful is if you’ve connected with them on LinkedIn, but they don’t respond on LinkedIn. One of the things I would say is remember that people don’t necessarily spend a lot of time on, on the platform.

LinkedIn’s continuing to work on that, right? It’s, it’s owned by Microsoft and Microsoft wants, wants, wants you to use their platforms and use their services. And the more time people spend on their network, more ads they can sell. Right? That’s what, that’s what these types of things often exist for.

LinkedIn’s get right’s, got other ones like Sales Navigator and Recruiter and other tools for, for job. For 

[00:23:43] jobs too. So there’s. There’s more than one path here, but they would really love more advertising revenue, and that means making the platform more sticky. But that’s the big thing on LinkedIn is people are on and off pretty quickly.

usually I’ve got a slide here. I, I took it out today for, you know, in the interest of saving time, but, basically LinkedIn. I think the average time spent on their platform is like 19 minutes a month, 20 minutes a month. Whereas something like an Instagram or a YouTube. Is over 40 minutes a day. So huge, huge difference.

Over a hundred times more, more time spent on things like Instagram and, and YouTube than is spent on, on LinkedIn. So that’s just not as much time to for people to see 

[00:24:27] your messages. So following up via email after you’ve messaged somebody on LinkedIn, if they don’t respond, it can be a nice little way to boost the response of, of what you’re doing.

And like I said, follow up with people. Send more than one message. If somebody says, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m interested, can you send me some information? Send it. Follow up on that. This is one of the big areas where the ball gets dropped pretty often, and this is, this is why it’s so important to either delegate or or outsource is, is because this area right here is where meetings and clients and new business goes to die.

Somebody said, yeah, I, I would be interested in having a conversation. And you reply back, great. Here’s my, here’s my calendar, or, great, what time’s worked for you? That person doesn’t respond and it, it’s gone. It’s often to the ether. Nobody, no, nothing happens. And then people say, well, didn’t work for me.

Follow up on that. you know, we’ll, we’ll check back with people for. We don’t, we don’t pester ’em, but you know, we’ll check back after three or four days. We might check a week later. We might check two or three weeks later, maybe a month after that. Just again, checking with people to see if it’s something that’s still interested.

People get busy. Things happen in their own personal lives. Right, right. As we’re we’re talking about this, there’s a hurricane heading for Florida and Georgia. Those people probably don’t have, you know, a meeting with a consultant on their mind right now. They’ve got other things going on, so. Checking back in in a few weeks.

Probably a good idea. Once, you know, once all the dust is settled, so Right. And, and people’s personal lives have their own little personal hurricanes and all stuff kinds of stuff going on. Things happen at work. Things get really crazy. So just, just keep all that in mind that following up, make that you know your best friend, but also.

Delegate that to somebody because you’re gonna run out of time and, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve seen it so many times where as soon as somebody gets busy, all of this prospecting stuff falls by the 

[00:26:37] wayside. I talked to a person yesterday who they had a long engagement with a, a client in the HR space. And didn’t need to do any other business development work ’cause they, they were at capacity, that engagement ended and now, now they’re, they’re really trying to find work again.

’cause they didn’t, they didn’t do anything for the, the year or so that they had that other engagements. And now they’re, now they’re in a hurry and now they’re kind of desperate rather than kind of having that ongoing pipeline built up of, of people who are ready to talk. So. Follow up, keep things going.

Have somebody who’s kind of always running this in the background for you, because that way you’re, you’re never kind of in that, oh gosh, where’s my next client coming from? Now it’s panic mode now. Now everything needs to happen right now, and I’ll tell you that this stuff all works a lot better if you can let people buy when they are ready to buy instead of when you need them to buy.

just. Everything is gonna be a lot, lot smoother for you right now, that once you get to that point of you’re desperate, then all of a sudden you’ll take deals you shouldn’t be taking, you’ll discount one. You shouldn’t be discounting. you’ll work with people that you don’t wanna be working with, but you know, you wanna, that mortgage has gotta get paid.

So having a system that’s always running, always, always doing the work, you know, so that you never have to wonder where the next person is coming from. Is, is. In my opinion, one of the most valuable assets, you know, of any business can 

[00:28:07] have. So continuing on with the outreach here is just making an offer.

and this is, I would say this is kind of a, a soft type of approach Now, instead of saying, Hey, I’m super confident in, in what we’ve got, can I. Can we schedule a call for it is, you know, something along the lines of, you know, Hey, here’s what I do. We’d love to introduce it to you. I’m not sure if it’s relevant to you.

I like, I like to use that a lot. Not sure if it’s relevant ’cause, ’cause I’m not, and people will reply that, yeah, actually it’s not relevant. Or, Hey, you know, it’s, it’s not a good fit for me. Or other people will say, actually, yeah, that, that would be something I’d like to take a look at. I am interested but being a little, a little less confident, which always sounds.

Strange to anybody who’s been, you know, done any sale, you know, taken any sales training or anything like that. but in this day and age, with, with so much messaging going on, that, that the little bit, the, the, is this relevant type of questioning is oftentimes welcomed by people. So, but I do recommend making some type of, offer a soft offer.

And that could be sending information, sending a video or meeting for a virtual cup of coffee, just depending on, you know, what it is, who you’re meeting with, things like that. I do like the virtual cup of coffee tends, tends to work, especially at bigger companies where they may not know if it’s a good fit for them, but they’re happy to talk to you.

Give it a try. Alright, quick couple quick things here about when people aren’t responding, and then we’re gonna talk a little bit about the, a side of things and then we’re gonna talk about, the content side of things to finish things up. So I know we’re, we’re already getting close to 30 minutes here, so.

and like I said, if you do have questions, sounds like the, the stream is working again. So feel free to put them in the chat and like I said, I’ll do my best to answer 

[00:29:56] them. for example, we’ve got this one here from Charles. So what software do you use for sequences? I don’t make any specific recommendations on different types of software, simply because LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s official stance on it is that you shouldn’t be using it. So I don’t wanna tell people to use something that all of a sudden is, is gonna get your account in trouble. But there’s good stuff out there. I would say find something cloud-based that’s, not running locally on your computer. one, I can tell you, we, we’ve had it, two, we’ve had trouble with.

now this has been a while, so, but Phantom Buster created a bunch of problems for us. so it’s like I said, two or three years ago. and Duck Soup has been one that. I, I, I wouldn’t, I think they’ve changed it quite a bit since we last looked at it, but has resulted in some client accounts, having issues before they worked with us.

but, just, just kind of do, do your homework on it. something cloud-based. And, and, you know, test it out. Be, and the big thing is, is be gentle with it. Don’t try and max out everything you could possibly do. ’cause too, too much will, will, will hurt the kind of long-term health of your account.

So, just some things to keep in 

[00:31:14] mind. a few other things to keep in mind here is if people aren’t responding to your messaging, number one thing I look at is, is relevance. It’s, it’s oftentimes, you know, the wrong message or the wrong person that. You know, it goes back to building the right connections in the first place and what their particular pain points are.

What, what has are, are they a decision maker pretty high up where you’ve gotta kind of have a high level strategy type of message? Or is it a very specific pain point that, somebody who’s a, you know, in finance or, or, or logistics or something is experiencing. and, and you want to be very specific about what you can help.

His his next one is your message. Just sounds like everybody else, there’s, there’s a tendency to be a little bit over professional on LinkedIn. nothing wrong with being professional, but, well, hi. I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to you, introduce blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It just immediately, you just, anything that starts with, I hope this message finds you well.

I know I can immediately ignore and just keep going. keep it short. You don’t want, you don’t want the messages to be super long. If I can’t read the entire message on my phone, if I have to scroll, go on. And that’s, that’s generally the, the rule of thumb I will tell people is, can, can I, can I read it on, on my phone without having to scroll down?

If it is, it is just way, way too much. And then at that point, I’m just gonna scroll to the bottom and say, say no thanks. not having that call to action. So, like I said, you don’t want it to be too aggressive, but you also do want to ask if you want to meet with them, ask to meet with them if you want them to look at some in, you know, look at your slide deck, look at a video, ask them to look at a video.

we’ve already mentioned it, but don’t pitch in the first message. And finally, I’ve, I’ve mentioned this as well, don’t put your calendar link in there if somebody agrees to meet with you. Go old school and offer up some times. Let ’em know when you’re available. You’ll find that people are more likely to respond to it.

People are more likely to schedule, and when that scheduling is done, they are more likely to show up. I can’t tell you how important that one, that last one is, especially when you’re busy having people no show to meetings. Just drive what would drive you crazy. so. And doing it kind of schedule, you know, having a little bit of extra time spent getting that meeting scheduled is absolutely worth it.

Versus here’s a calendar link that most of the time people aren’t gonna use, and then they may, you know, may or may not show up even though you’ve got a good reminder system in place. Alright, so that’s outreach. if you have any more questions on that, like I said, we’ll 

[00:34:00] cover those at the end. But I want to jump into ads here.

Because I think this is really one of those areas where it gives you a lot of opportunity to scale and some changes. Recently, I used to tell people that LinkedIn advertising was very expensive. So only do it if you’re really, really sure. You, you know, you, you need this, these days with some, some of the changes, especially on the video side where LinkedIn is really pushing, pushing for video.

Now with these kind of vertical oriented, you can kind of see the. The screenshot there on the the page, one of the ads that we’re running is just me sitting in my office. But it’s that vertical real style that you would see on TikTok or Instagram, but LinkedIn is really trying to push that too, and we’re finding that the cost per click is actually pretty reasonable on it, and it’s generating.

Meetings for, I think our, our current number is somewhere around $80 a meeting, which for us is outstanding. I don’t know how long that will hold. Like I said, this is kind of a new test we’re running. but if that’s the case, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll be able to scale that with that, with those types of types of numbers.

So of course, what, what do you run? Who do you target? So here’s where I recommend starting with that is. Target the types of connections you’re trying to build with. And in fact, the first first ads I run are gonna be to people I’ve already connected with on LinkedIn is, you know, if I reached out to them, they’ve seen, you know, they’ve seen my messages, they’ve been inviting, invited to events I’m running, they’ve seen my face.

So having it here again in a, in an ad format. is, is kind of that low hanging fruit. And then from there you can, you know, you can still target website traffic, any other types of warm traffic you might have. but then it’s kind of looking for those lookalike audiences and LinkedIn will happily, happily build those for you.

As you say, here’s, you know, 5,000 people that are, you know, I’m connected with finding people just like them. And the, the filtering. That’s one of the nice things about LinkedIn is that you may not have a lot of ad inventory, but the, the targeting is really, really good and really high quality. So you’re getting, it’s much easier to target the right people I find on, on LinkedIn, at least for the types of, at least, at least in the consulting space.

And the types of offers I do is much easier on, on LinkedIn than it is say on, on Facebook, where we’ll run a lot of ads, but we have to filter out a lot of irrelevant people on LinkedIn, not so much 

[00:36:32] so. some, some things you can look at here is, you know, what are some of the pain points somebody might be experiencing?

Is it, is it a time shortage? Is it a skill shortage? What, what is the thing that’s just really keeping them up at night? I like to do instructive stories like this particular ad we’re looking at here. Is that time Amazon sent me a cold email, so we’re kind of talking about how large companies use cold outreach effectively, right?

The biggest, richest companies in the world. Still will use that in, in their business to business relationships because it’s easier to delegate that out to somebody. It’s easier to automate that than it is to just, just do straight advertising. So real, and that really happened, by the way, I really did get a cold email from a e-commerce, store.

I, I, I ran, talking about, you can talk about things like results and actually sometimes just, just tell people what you do. Then retarget that. So that’s kind of the big thing here with, with ad, with any type of ad platform these days, is getting people to watch part of a video and then retargeting them with kind of more in depth information.

So giving them an idea what it is you do, and then, okay, here’s a case study I’d like to show you, or here’s a, do a do an interview with somebody. In a testimonial type of format, you know, share, share some results, that you’ve gotten from people. you could do a, you know, here’s the cost of not hiring me, type of one.

one’s always kind of fun to do so, and you can send people to, you know, a landing page to a book, a call page. Heck, send people directly, especially on these retargeting ones, send ’em directly to a Calendly. Really, really easy to set it up, test it out, see what the numbers look like. If, if it works, great, you don’t have to, you don’t have to go through the trouble of trying to create a landing page.

but you do have to kind of go through a couple layers of that is right. Get people to watch a video, retarget the people who’ve watched 25% of a video with something more, and then finally send ’em to a calendar link. So,

okay. It was interesting to get feedback like these. Thanks Eric. For, for, for, for that. Look at the camera. I look at the camera. I can’t see my slides. So, it’s, it’s setting up just a little bit higher. So, I’m, I’m, I’m gonna keep going with 

[00:39:01] it. Oh, anyway, making content with events. So this last section here I wanted to, to mention here is, is really focusing on.

Making the best use outta your time when you’re gonna make content. Because I’ve mentioned, right, it can be inconsistent, it may not work, as, as quickly as you want. I know I talked to about the, about the, you know, a prospect I had who, right. They did the book, they did all the content. They’re doing the podcasts.

They don’t actually have the, the, the, the actual meetings and the, the things that they need. So one of the things you can do here is. Make content now. I would say starting with LinkedIn live events like you’re looking at now and not because millions and millions of people are gonna gonna show up to these.

In fact, we have seen a pretty big drop off in the attendance of, of events because LinkedIn is deprioritized it for a while. This was like LinkedIn’s big push is they thought, get people to consume long form, comment content on the platform. And, and that’ll be good for, for the platform, right? But tough to sell ads on, on these live streams.

There’s not a good, really, a good spot to do it. They’re just letting you know, somebody like me can come and talk and teach. Not great for ad sales. So they’ve been doing a lot less of featuring the, the events now. So we’ll get, you know, we used to get, you know, 200, 200 people would show up live on the stream and five or 600 people would watch it later.

you know, we were, at one point, I think we had close to, we were getting close to 2000 people to register for some of these. Now, now we’re getting less people to register, less people show up live. But you know, what we can do with these events here is I can then take them and repurpose them. So I can still do the long form content.

I can still do this, I can still engage with people, I can still do q and a or the people who are, are really interested in it. Then I can go and take short little snippets of this so I can say, well, I really liked that 32nd, you know, little clip there. Or, I liked this, you know, 90 seconds here talking about that, or, I really liked this question and I really liked being able to answer that one.

So I can take this now, turn it into a vertical formatted one. So we’ll cut off just the, the very left side of your screen and we’ll turn that into a kind of a talking head video instead. So now we can kind of basically do a, a real style video that’s much, much shorter and put that out there and publish that as content so that I’m not trying to come up with new content every day.

Not, not, you know, not burning out, trying to do it. I can once a month make these videos like this and then I can send them off to a team. Like I said, delegate and au and Automate. So I’ll mention a couple of tools. I like, I’ll, I’ll kind of go over them, on the next slide here. But I can take the content, turn it into short form content, and now I’ve got stuff I can share.

And, and we’re gonna really be, like I said, with, with the new changes LinkedIn has made, we’re gonna really try and focus in on seeing, how effective they really are. But early return, early results look good, but you can see here. On, on, this is a screenshot of, of the mobile app here is right now you’ve got these videos for you, these vertical videos.

and now they’ve added this video tab, the second one in, at the very bottom of your screen, didn’t used to be there. So now you can, now they’re really putting the focus on basically saying, Hey, we wanna run, we want you to run video. Hence why I think, you know, the, the, the ads. So if we go back to ads, right?

Why, why those are being pretty effective right now is ’cause these types of ads, these short form ads are really, really good for running, for running more ads versus this long form stuff that LinkedIn was pushing. So now basically what I’m saying is do these events but don’t be, don’t, don’t, don’t think it was a failure.

If people don’t show up, it’s great when they show up. Don’t get me wrong, I love when they do. I love everybody who’s here and, and I love all the questions you guys ask. I could still do these without anybody even showing up because people would watch the replay. I can send those out to my email list and I can make videos from them.

So there’s a lot you can do with them. And the same actually applies to podcasts. If you’re doing podcasts, is you see if the host will send you the, the video recording of it if you did it. I know most of the time these days you’re doing them on Zoom. or similar. So just. See if they’ll send you that.

You can take your side of the, the video feed and, and essentially turn it into short form content as well. So, couple things just to keep in mind, to kind of really think about how to most effectively use your time if you’re gonna make the 

[00:43:59] content. and like I said, the tools that I’ve been using that I like lately, our captions, which is an app for your phone, just makes really nice little polished captions that automatically can transcribe and.

Put things together. They say they’ve got some ai, video editing, stuff like that. Eh, I am not totally in love with that stuff, but the captions part is actually really nice. I really like that. and then there’s a tool called video, v y.ai. And this one, we’ve been using this one for a while now, is that it will, you can upload this whole.

Whole session like we’re doing right now. So my, my counter here says we’ve been on for almost, 40, for about 43 minutes now. And it can go through and say, well here’s, here’s 30 seconds of something that’s really relevant. Here’s, you know, here’s two minutes, here’s, here’s a bunch of little clips. and does it automatically Now, are they all great?

Are they always filled? No, they are not. But it’s pretty good. You usually we’ll get, you know, 10 or 15 good clips out of it that we can, can take and use without needing to make a whole lot of, of extra clips. Usually it’s, you know, a little slider here, make a little tweak there and we’ve got some good content that we can, can use and share.

So something we’re gonna be definitely focusing on, especially kind of going into the fourth quarter here now, LinkedIn is really prioritizing that type of content. We’re gonna try to, because usually if LinkedIn’s prioritizing, it means it’s good. Good to do. so. That’s what 

[00:45:35] we’re gonna be looking at.

So, just about to q and A here. So if you do have any other questions, please let me know. we’ll be happy to do q and a and get, get any questions answered for you. if you do need help with any of this, where you want, you know, someone to help build a system for you or you just, you don’t have time, you want someone to manage it, who, who can, who knows what they’re doing?

oftentimes it’s, it’s actually usually more cost effective to hire us than it is to bring on your own internal employee. So if you, you’re looking for, you know, a handful of really quality appointments, but you don’t wanna do all the outreach, you don’t wanna do all that yourself. I get it. That’s why I have my own team.

I, I’d prefer not to do all the outreach myself too. So I, this is more fun for me, is to do these things. So that’s why, that’s why I have a team in place as well, so we can build it, manage it for you. And really you just need to show up for the, for the meetings that we put on your calendar. and like I said, we’ll do that follow up, that, that stuff where things tend to slip through the cracks.

We’ll, we’ll make sure we, we stick, stick with them. So, at this point I will take any questions that you’ve got. And, if, if there aren’t any questions, appreciate everybody taking some time outta your day to day. always, always great seeing everybody. now, you know, you’ll probably see some of these clips in your, videos for you feed on LinkedIn here in the coming months.

’cause you, you know, I shared that you shared that little tip with you guys on why we actually can do these, even if we don’t get a ton of people to show up for ’em. Showing up is just a bonus, but we had quite a few people on today and I do appreciate that. So thanks everybody. I’ll give it one here.

Let’s say 30 more seconds. and then we’ll then we’ll give it, we’ll call it a day.

Alright, well appreciate everybody hopping on. Thank you. Thanks for coming on, Chris. Appreciate you and have a great day everybody, and I will see you next month.