Consultants: Get Clients on LinkedIn in 2025

Consultants: Get Clients on LinkedIn in 2025

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live session on getting clients on LinkedIn in 2025, emphasizing that success comes from relevance – relevant connections, messages, and content rather than AI-driven fake personalization. He outlines an agenda covering authority and personal brand building, purposeful network growth (focusing on connections vs. followers), profile optimization to build trust (including completing sections and using LinkedIn’s free ID verification), and content strategies that prioritize business results over vanity metrics, with stories and solving small specific problems highlighted. He explains how LinkedIn events can build authority, generate leads, and reactivate old opportunities, and why a targeted network improves event invites. For outreach, he recommends blank connection requests for cold prospects, short message sequences, soft offers (e.g., virtual coffee), and avoiding first-message pitching and calendar links. He briefly covers LinkedIn ads as a later-stage scaling tool, especially retargeting, and answers questions on video tools and cautious automation.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
01:50 Housekeeping and Replay Info
03:53 Agenda and Session Flow
05:12 Meet Gary and Background
06:45 LinkedIn Success in 2025
09:50 Network Building with Purpose
12:13 Profile Trust and Authority
17:29 Content That Drives Business
22:00 What Works Now Stories and Specifics
24:59 Carousels Stories Repurposing
25:45 LinkedIn Events Formats
27:58 Invites Network Authority
30:47 Outreach Works When Relevant
33:25 Connection Requests Sequences
35:49 Fixing Bad Outreach
40:47 Outreach Fear Reputation
42:53 LinkedIn Ads Retargeting
45:30 Offer Help Next Steps
47:00 Q&A Video Tools
49:27 Automation Tools Limits
50:52 Final Thanks Wrap Up

Transcript:

[00:00:02] Hello and welcome everybody to today’s session, how to Get Clients on LinkedIn in 2025. so we got about, about a minute or so before things officially start, but I just wanted to get the screen started and get things kicked off here. So give everybody just a minute or two here to get on the stream and then we will kick things off.

In the meantime, where is, where’s everybody from today? today it is a, I’m gonna go cloudy day here. It’s a cloudy day, in the, in the Detroit, Michigan suburbs. I’m actually in Troy, Michigan, a little bit north of, of, Detroit’s about 16 miles north of the city. but yeah, it’s actually a pretty, pretty pleasant day here.

I think it’s 39 degrees at the moment, so. Hard to complain in January about that. I would, I would com I would complain in April, but in January, yeah. I’m not complaining. So, but welcome everybody. Like I said, we will be getting started here in just, just a minute or so. I just wanna like, give, give everybody a chance to get on and get the, get the screen running.

Hey, Wendell, Wendell in Southern California. Nice to have you here. Appreciate you hopping on today. All right. We got, Zach, Zach from PKC. I don’t know what that abbreviation is, but I’m gonna take your word for it. That that’s a place. Hey, Steve, in, in, Washington, DC Oklahoma City. Gotcha.

Alright. And I think looking at the time here, if you like, if you’ve been on these, you know, I like to get started on time and I think it is gonna be about. One after. So let’s get started 

[00:01:49] today. there will be a, this will be recorded. So, if you happen to be on right now and somebody’s asking in the comments, Hey, is this recorded or anything, can you just let ’em know?

Yes. It’s being recorded. would really appreciate it. That way we don’t have, and that way I don’t have to answer it over and over again. and somebody in the comments would just let ’em know that, Hey, this is me. You can watch the replay right after the session gets started. So let’s jump into it. just a few housekeeping items.

With these live streams, there’s always about a 20 to 32nd delay from when I actually say something to when it comes through. this is the nature of live streaming on LinkedIn. So. shouldn’t affect much of anything except that only means if I like talk, answer your question and, you may not hear it right away.

I will, answer that one though. Wendell is asking if we lost the stream video looks paused and there’s no audio. So oftentimes the way to fix that is to refresh the page. So, I’m not sure, I’m not sure what it is about LinkedIn live streaming, but yeah, that’s one of the, one of the weird quirks about it is, probably for, probably like the past six months, maybe more.

I, I’ve seen that pretty frequently where the, the solution is to refresh. it look, ’cause I can see it’s live on mine. I can see the audio. I know sometimes the connection to you though, gets, gets pushed out anyway. replay will be up a few minutes after this event. Same, same link, same everything.

So just go there, click, refresh, and boom. You’ll get the whole replay about five to 10 minutes after I finish up here. Which will be sometime around three o’clock, depending on the number of questions we have today. And if you’d like to be notified of future events, I do try and send an email blast out to my list at Pipelineology dot com slash events if you wanna get on that list.

sometimes I forget to do it a little early. but, otherwise we should be 

[00:03:51] set. Let’s jump into the agenda today. We’re gonna talk about kind of authority brand building that personal brand building that works well on LinkedIn. Talk about building your network, especially building it with purpose, not the willy-nilly, except in just a spray and pray type of approach.

But how to actually build a network with purpose so that you have a valuable asset for building, you know, your business. we’re gonna talk about content, events, outreach, and ads. I will do as much detail as I can, but, we will be limited on time. So, if you have specific questions, please feel free to throw them in at any time.

If, I will, if it kind of is relevant to the sessions. Section we’re in, I will try and answer it there. If not, I will try and circle back to them at the end during q and a, which we’ll do once, once we’ve kind of finished everything up. So, welcome everybody who’s on, I know we got a few more people jumping on.

and Daniel. welcome, welcome. Glad to have you here today. Mike, I see you there too. Okay. Thanks everybody. yeah, looks like. We had about 500 people. Now, almost 600 people sign up today, so, should be plenty of room though. These live streams technically are unlimited in what they can hold. but I think right now we’re, we’re definitely well under 

[00:05:11] any, any limitations.

So, real quick about me, if this is your first time here, you’re not familiar with me, you’re wondering who the heck this guy is. my name is Gary Rubinger. I’m the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology Podcast. I’m gonna work on bringing that back in 2025. It’s kind of been a little bit dormant the past couple years, but I wanna get back into doing some of that and having some good conversations with people.

Do you have any recommendations for business to business, people I should be talking to or you wanna recommend yourself? That’s okay too. just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. been in the marketing, space now for actually 20, 23 years now. Used to run call centers for car dealerships, so we handle all, we had one kind of central office that handle all the leads for 16 stores around the country, and our job was to help them get appointments.

so I built all those processes and wrote those scripts these days. actually a little less stressful kind of working with, other consultants, smaller businesses and helping them kind of build their businesses and get more meetings. And if you’re a beer person, I’m actively seeking New England style beer recommendations.

It’s actually in, San Diego, last week. Got to try some, some ones I hadn’t had before. but I’m always, always looking for new ones to try as out as, I dunno. I got, I got hooked on that style, I don’t know, five or six years ago. And, really, yeah, really enjoyed trying the new ones and almost all of ’em are good.

But let’s jump into the actual content of 

[00:06:43] today. bottom line, if you take nothing else away from today, success on LinkedIn is not about. Ai, fake personalization, pretending you listen to their podcasts. Having a bot that goes and likes other people’s posts and PO posts, you know, AI generated comments or any of that.

Bottom line in 2025 LinkedIn, it’s gonna be all about relevance. Relevant connections, relevant messages, relevant content. If you can nail that, you’re 95% of the way there, just be a real person. So I know there’s right lots of tools, lots of fun stuff out there to, to experiment with, but, but really what we’re seeing over and over again, especially over long term, is right, people get real excited about a new chat, GPT or perplexity or Deep Seek or whatever the AI personalization tool of du jour is that they’re using the run through clay waterfall cascading, whatevers.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the relevant message, relevant people, all of that. If, if you can nail that, the rest of it just becomes window dressing. So this is the process we’re gonna be looking at today, and I know this is gonna be really small on your screen. If you’d like a copy of this, just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

We’ll be going through it all and I’ll be breaking it down and making it larger, as we go through each section. but I just wanted to kind of give you an overview of kind of the whole process that we’re gonna be looking at today. It really just breaks down to you want to connect with the right people, use your profile to establish authority, build trust, and then use a combination of outreach and content to get meetings with those people.

And then finally, when you really know who you want to talk to, you really know that message. You know who that ideal client profile, what that looks like. You know, what they’re responding to using LinkedIn ads to really leverage things. but that’s usually the last step. So, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll cover that last, but I will mention, usually we don’t start there because it, it ends up being oftentimes cost prohibitive and you waste a lot of money, so you’ve really got everything else dialed in and running.

So real quick, if you don’t have time to do this yourself, maybe you decided you’d try and pop on for 10 minutes, see what this was all about. see if it was all a bunch of fluff and you’re looking and saying That looks cool. I don’t have time for that. we do have a done 40 program. You’re welcome to schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com or just email me directly, Gary at Pipelineology.

That’s all I’m gonna spend on that now. I will give you some more details on it later if, if that’s you. But, I know, I know I like to put put this in at the beginning now because I know for a lot of my clients, the big thing is they just don’t have time to do it themselves. So let’s do the content here for those of you who are interested and wanna learn and see how you can implement this yourself.

To build your book of business as we go into 2025. Happy New Year. By the way, I think this, this is my first live session of the year, so, happy new, good day. Good day. Good to be 

[00:09:47] here. So let’s talk about building your network. And what I always recommend to people is do this with a purpose. Now you can have unlimited followers and you know, there’s limited engagement you can have with your followers.

You’re always kind of dependent on LinkedIn’s algorithm with those. So I like to focus more on connections. You can have up to 30,000 connections. It’s a lot. It will take you a long time to get through all of them, especially with LinkedIn’s current limitations. and with those, you can invite people, those people to subscribe to newsletters, attend events like you were attending right now, you can get their contact information, which makes it really easy to, if you want to try and contact them off platform.

I try to stick to on platform these days ’cause LinkedIn tends to be more of a trusted communication, versus, you know, Hey, I got your. Phone number off of LinkedIn and it’s like, who the heck is this person? but anyway, it is, it is possible to get their contact information if you need to follow up with them that way.

and it is much easier to message somebody that you are connected to. So building that network and finding the right people you want to be connected to. Think about the old fashioned networking way, where, right, where you’d go out and you shake hands, you go to Chamber of Commerce, you go to a, you know, a brunt of those breakfast types of meetings.

You go to industry events, you go to trade shows, all that kind of stuff. So that you’re building that kind of network. Same type of thing here is you want, you want to connect to people who, you know, would, you know, potentially be fists. They’re in the right industries. They’re the right. You know, type types of job titles, all that kind of stuff.

And what I’ll say is it takes time. So start now, even if, if it’s small now, it, it will continue to grow slowly. as long as you’re consistent about doing it. I know I’m kind of right around that limit. I know I’m just around 29,000 connections. So, we’re kind of at that end of, at the end of like just bringing in as many people as possible and really focusing in on.

Am I connecting with the right people? Like, you know, I don’t take as many new connection requests these days. if you, if you are not currently connected to me, please do tell me you are on the event today. So I know to accept, your, your, connection. ’cause I, like I said, I’m running, running out, but for, for the vast, vast, vast majority of people out there, you’re not gonna be anywhere near 30,000.

So you’ve got lots and lots of time left. You got many years where you can build and, and reach out to people. 

[00:12:12] So. Let’s talk about your profile. So you basically, it’s not, it’s not rocket science, but also a few tips you want to know here is that you want to let people know who you are, what you do, who you work with, and I like to have a little bit of fun with it.

And I think the, the little bit of fun really does help to make you human. Also having that, ID check mark there next to your name. We have found that that actually does make a difference. And one of my, one of the team members here, didn’t have it and, just messaged him and said, Hey, let’s, let’s see what happens if you go ahead and do the ID verification.

I just wanna see what the difference was. And it was, we did see a good size jump in the number of people connecting, with him. just because they no longer thought he was some type of automated bot. which right. And, and that’s a real thing that’s out there, right there, right? All kinds of bots on, on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn does a good job of, of getting rid of, of a lot of them, but certainly not all. So having that, little Id check mark there is certainly worth, worth doing since it’s free. I know it’s not available in every country yet. and I know there’s some in, in instances where you may not want to do it, but, if you can.

And it makes sense. You, it’s, it’s worth the, the five to 10 minutes that it takes to do it. It will make a difference in, in your ability to kind of connect and communicate with people on the platform. but otherwise, you know, just letting ’em know. I find just leading what, you know, what your title is, who you are at what company is, is, is good.

And it sounds, that sounds boring, but, you know, kind of then kind of elaborating a little bit, you know, kind of who you work with. and some, you know, like I said, some of the fun hobbies and things you have. Kind of round out the overall kind of what the headline looks like. So couple more examples here for you to take a look at.

feel free to, you know, screenshot this and just kind of take a look at it. but really what your headline here is critically important because this is kind of what you use to draw people in and it works across kind of all the engagement you might do on LinkedIn if you’re making a post, if you are sending a connection request, if.

You are commenting on somebody else’s post, you’re sending a message, any of that type of stuff, they’re, they’re going to see part of it. and I think it gets cut off at around 75 characters. Whereas the whole thing can be longer. but nonetheless, it, this is kind of where you’re able to get your message out there and in front of people.

and this is what you can kind of use to draw people in to come check out your full profile, which. Is a great place to sell yourself, and, and really kind of put everything out there. much harder to do that fully, via other types of, of engagement. But your, your profile’s a great place because you can put so much there and we’ll cover some of the, some of the big ones there.

But my, my recommendation here is just fill the whole thing out. so building your profile. So your goal is to build trust and authority. I would say use the about section, is a great place to kind of make your pitch, give, give more details about what you do, write it all out and just let people know this is, this is who this is for.

You can use the featured section to go deeper. lots of ways to use those, those kind of featured sections kind of towards the top of the profile. I generally use them to show past events, just ’cause that’s pretty easy and it gives people a chance to learn more about, you know, kind of what, what we do here in a very.

Non-pressure, non-salesy type of environment. so I like to use those. But if you don’t have those, you can use it to link to white papers. You know, detailed breakdowns of, of different services, handouts, you know, all, all kinds of things you can, can put there in the, in the featured section or just, you know, post that you SA are particularly relevant to, to what you do.

So, definitely recommend using that, activity. Yeah, probably explains itself as if you’re a little bit active on the platform. It shows. What you’re, what you’re commenting on, what you’re posting, what you’re reposting, all that kind of stuff. recommendations, work history. Just, just fill it all out.

’cause again, it’s all about just, just be a real, real human being. and you’re, you’re good. So let’s kind of pivot here. I guess I should ask any more questions about the, the profile section. I know I’m going through each of these pretty quickly here today because I. When I do the, the get clients on LinkedIn session, I feel like every time I do it and I try and do it maybe twice a year, just kind of to update it with all the kind of latest, what’s working now.

Stuff I feel like it always gets, I always add just a little bit more and I try, I try to lead as many slides as I add. I think usually one, at least one more always tends to creep on there because I always feel like I have a little bit more to say, a little bit more to say. So. but if you’re good, we’ll keep going, with 

[00:17:28] it here.

So we’ll jump into kind of the next section here is content. one of the, one of the kind of big ways to push business on and, and draw people in and attract business is through your content. And just remember, the end goal is to land new business. so don’t worry as much about all the vanity metrics out there.

Is it, but look at it. Is it. Bringing you new business? Is it elevating your authority? Does it help? It can help reduce the price resistance. It can streamline your sales process. So even if it doesn’t necessarily directly convert, there’s a lot of things it can definitely help with. For example, we find that, you know, as a company that does a lot of outreach.

What the content does is the content may not bring in as many people directly as it influences to respond to some of our messages. ’cause it, we don’t feel, we feel more real, we feel more out there and they can see what’s happening so they feel like they can trust us. So, so that’s some of the benefits of content, however.

Content in 2025, just like it was in 2024, is getting harder, right? There’s more and more, you know, fake engagement, I would say, out there with people with AI generated content, AI generated stuff, you know, comments and all that kind of stuff. Clogging up the feed, and again, LinkedIn’s always working on it.

Trying not to highlight the, the, the stuff that’s not just oh, insightful or the great post types of stuff. but, at the end of the day, the market, the people you sitting there in front of, you know, your screen or watching from your phone, you are getting more sophisticated, you are smarter, you are, and you are probably getting more skeptical and jaded than ever.

So content does does become more of a challenge. So here’s kind of the approach. Write with your ideal client in mind. Don’t worry about vanity metrics. And the money is in the lurkers, but don’t take my word for it here. Take, take Jason. Jason Ana’s, you know, a post on, post on this is that funny observation about LinkedIn This month, reach and engagement are down.

qualified leads and close deals are way up, like way up. And there’s lesson here. The right content may not get a lot of likes, but ensure as hell brings in money. and, and that’s really what we have. That’s really been my experience. I really started with, Facebook kind of doing this content side of things lesser so on, on LinkedIn.

We, we are, we are probably more, more, outreach focused and we’ll get to that in just a second. But I know the content is, feels like a safe place for a lot of people. So I’d like to start there. ’cause it’s, it’s, it’s not as intimidating I feel like, to start there. but anyway. Just write for your audience and work worry about, you know, how are you serving them instead of trying to go viral and get the, you know, the, you know, super, you know, Mimi types of stuff out there.

for example, Yuri, who’s last name I’m not gonna remember here. I used to work, I think for Wood Woodpecker, one of the cold email solutions. But he does a pretty good job of using what I would call industry relevant memes. you can see one of the ones he’s used here, or you know, his, you know how he sees his gold emails as, you know, this gourmet burger and his prospects CMS spam usually posts funny, interesting stuff.

so I would say, you know, avoid arguing politics. On LinkedIn, unless it’s really relevant to you, and I know it’s tempting to kind of jump in sometimes you want, you wanna, you wanna jump in and have your piece, but it’s, it’s not gonna change anybody’s mind. And really, you know, it at best, you know, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re alienating kind of half your addressable market in many cases.

Things like that. So just, just kind of keep that in mind. Is, you know, some of that stuff that people say to build engagement and do sounds good until you kind of think about it a few steps ahead. How is this affecting the people that I really want to engage and talk to and work with? and are they gonna be soured by some of the stuff I’ve been posting?

you know, like that. So I just, I just try and steer clear a lot of that 

[00:21:57] stuff. What is working now? tell you two things that tend to work pretty well, are telling stories, and solving small problems wherein you can actually be specific. So to give you some examples here, here is one of the posts, of somebody who, had on my podcast, I wanna say two or three years ago, his name’s Nick, Nick Abraham.

and he posts, posts, lots of content. and one of the things I like about it is that. even sometimes when it’s, it may not be always fully complete. may not, heck, sometimes I’m like, yeah, I wouldn’t agree with that. But you know what? He does a good job of using specifics where it’s relevant to somebody who’s working in that industry.

He’ll use site tools by name. He’s not trying to explain the whole world of, of outreach in every single post. This particular one is just about, you know, list. List, you know, list building to get started, you know, and little ways to use it. and really I think that’s, that’s kind of where things are headed is you don’t need to solve, you don’t need to be the giant thought leader on every single post is just little things are gonna draw people in.

Little ones that they can engage with that they’re gonna see and say, ah, this guy knows what he’s talking about. Right? The devil’s in the details. He, he’s got some of the details or, I hadn’t thought about that. This guy seems like he knows what he’s doing. Maybe, maybe I should check out more of his stuff.

Maybe click on his profile. Oh, look, there’s, you know, one of the services he offers, I should, you know, hook a call with it type of thing. You know, that, that’s obviously the goal there. but some of the specific stuff really kind of helps move people down that path of, of warming Up to you. we already covered that.

Push the right button. Gary. Another example here. whereas, you know, again, solving small problems, somebody might say, you know, I help SMBs 10 x their leads and build a seven figure agency. Which o okay, that’s, that’s very ambitious. That’s a big, you know, big gnarly goal. But what if after it just, I help consultants use their current network to get three high intent meetings in the next seven days?

What sounds more attainable to you? What, what sounds more real and more likely to happen. somebody’s gonna 10 x your leads or somebody’s gonna help you get three meetings. Right. It’s, you know, and, and those are the types of, you know, I think that’s what really people are, are gravitating to. ’cause they’ve, they’ve been promised the moon and they’ve been, they’ve seen the Overhype stuff and they’re, they’re tired.

They’re just tired of it. So something that just sounds, that sounds reasonable. I, I would like to see what that’s all about, because they believe that one, right? I don’t believe the, I don’t believe I, I don’t know. The 10 x my leads, blah, blah. Sounds, sounds like hype. The, the second one. Three high intent meetings in the next seven days.

Alright, I believe you, you probably could do 

[00:24:57] that. So few other things to kind of look at at using, events. We’re gonna talk about that in more detail here in a, in a few minutes. care sales. Which are kind of those multi-page little things for scrolling. They’re, they’re really good for engagement and you kind of doing your stories in a text-based way.

just kind of a nice, nice, you know, way to kind of have a more engaging text post that’s not, video, telling stories, as I said. See story stories work on every platform, no matter what it is. and, and finally repurposing content. and we’ll cover kind of that more as we get into the events as well.

just kind of wanna mention those as 

[00:25:44] well. So speaking of events. What do we do there? So this is one that right now we are on a LinkedIn event, and like many things on LinkedIn, this has become a more competitive space too. There’s more noise, there’s more invites, there’s more and more people turning them off.

So how do you get your maximum mileage out of doing an event? Because doing an event takes time. but it also is a great way to produce. Content that’s in your voice with the, you know, things you wanna present, the things you want to say. and there’s lots of formats you can do. You don’t have to just sit here and, and talk to, you know, the screen and do a, you know, a slideshow.

I like that format. It lets me really present things in the way I want to. but if you’ve been on, been around a while, you’ve seen me do interviews with other people, I’ve got clients. That’s, that’s all they do is they just do interviews with other people in their industry. They bring on other industry experts, and it really helps Elevaate both their profiles, and it works really well.

other things you could do, I had a client who’s, who’s in the recruiting space and recruiting’s a pretty, pretty competitive space. Lots of people, especially on LinkedIn, are in that space. So one of her strategies with the events was to find, you know, the. You know, the, the top ideal, you know, five people in a particular industry to talk about a topic and do round tables with them, knowing that, you know, that would Elevaate her status in their eyes.

For those, those, just, those five people, with the intent that, you know, these were kind of five ideal types of dream clients for her. So inviting them on. No, no pitch. No, no, nothing else is, but bringing ’em on and, and having that there so that, you know, maybe down the road they are open to a discussion or remember her.

So lots of options here to use, events. So it doesn’t, like I said, you don’t have to just sit here and, and, and, you know, do a, do a slideshow. I like doing ’em. I kind of like talking to people in the comments. but do, do what you kind of like, 

[00:27:55] so. But one of the things I do wanna mention is this does go back to why you want to build your connections.

Connections purposefully, is because when you start inviting people to events, the most effectively to get people on your events is to invite people in your network. So that’s why I said you can have up to 30,000 connections when it comes to doing event invites. You can invite a thousand people a week.

So, If they’re relevant, they might show up and, you know, they might comment and they might eventually become clients. If they’re all irrelevant, they’re not gonna accept your invite. They’re gonna say, what the heck is this? Why am I, why are you inviting me? but what’s, what’s going on? So that’s why I always recommend, even, even if you’re not actively gonna do any type of outreach or anything like that, having a well-built, network.

It’s going to help with everything else ’cause right. The people in your network are the people most likely to see your post, your content, and things like that. So, and then as you start to do the, the events. Now this kind of helps build your authority in their, their mind. ’cause now they’re seeing you as kind of a, an expert on, on a particular topic.

Even if you’re interviewing somebody else who is in fact the expert. It, it elevates your authority on that topic just because you know you’re there, you’re hosting and you’re asking the questions. And yes, it does in fact help you get new leads. It also helps you close new close people who may have been on the fence and reactivate dead leads.

I just, 10 minutes before hopping on, I had somebody who. I think I had talked to back in May of 2024 who reached back out and said, Hey, I haven’t forgotten about our conversation. And it had gone, it had gone cold. but now they said, Nope, I’m, you know, they’re, they’re back in it. and this kind of prompted them and got their attention again.

So I really, I actually really like it as a reactivation sequence. And I’ve even had it, you know, for, for past clients of mine where, you know, they may be churn for one reason or another, but this keeps me in front of them. And kind of lets people know what I’m still doing in a, in a way that, you know, isn’t, again, isn’t super pushy, isn’t, Hey, do you want to come back?

Hey, how about a, how about, you know, trying this, very, very low pressure, low key type of way of doing it. So I really like events. Even though, you know, like I said, they’re, they’re certainly more competitive. They’re certainly harder than they used to be, but I, I still find them to be very effective, in terms of kind of bringing people in.

Plus, you know, you could, it gives you an excuse to, to reach out to people and talk to them just to say, Hey, here’s, here’s the replay. Hey, here’s, here’s the event. You know, just little, like little things that aren’t, you’re not trying to sell them stuff something, but it brings ’em back 

[00:30:45] in. alright, so let’s talk about, the outreach approach.

So, I know, I always know anytime I talk about outreach, you, you’ve kind of got two pe two kind of sides of people. People are like, I hate that, that’s spam. I would never, ever respond to that. And people say, well, do tell, tell me more. I would like, I would certainly like something that is, is effectively bringing in new people.

Does it work? So I’d say in, in, in the B2B space, right? And in the business consumer, this is not a, not an effective approach, but in business to business, outbound is often the most consistent, most reliable business development strategy, that you would use in the enterprise space. Talking to a, to a colleague of, of mine where, you know, they’re, you know, selling to, I think he was at, one of the big like email CRM types of providers.

Do they find new leads? Cold calling, you know, you say, well, what about, you know, using like the AI agents and stuff? Nope. Just regular people picking up the phone calling. you know, and, and I think it’s kind of the same thing, whether it’s it’s email or LinkedIn, which is, is my preferred approach because of, of the quality.

It still remains the most effective way to, to get people in. and you ’cause it, it goes directly to them and it gets you that, that instant immediate feedback. So what I always like to tell people is, you know, I, I know nobody is, nobody’s excited to get your, you know, your cold call or your cold message, your dm, whatever it is today.

But they are gonna respond positively, positively to things that they think will help them in their company. Things that are relevant. And remember people are gonna tell you they don’t like TV ads, but you know, people buy stuff from TV ads, whether directly or indirectly, all the time. Radio that they’ll, that people tell you then, well they, I ignore all my Google ads or Facebook ads.

I throw away all my junk mail. People, basically anything that’s designed to get customers, people will tell you that they, some, somebody will tell you that they hate it. I will tell you, I don’t wanna go to another tedious networking event, even though that’s kind of like the gold standard. I don’t like ’em, I find ’em tedious.

So just, just kind of keep that in mind is that there’s always somebody who’s, who doesn’t like whatever alternative way you thought, you were gonna use to bring in, bring in business. Doesn’t, doesn’t matter what it’s. So how do we, how do we structure it? How do we make it work? So here’s kind of how I like to do 

[00:33:23] it. I like to connect again, connect to the right people. and in case you’re curious, what, what, you know, what’s my secret sauce? What’s that message that gets people to connect? I don’t send out connection messages, I just leave them blank. I find that. Best case scenario if, if I don’t know them. And keep in mind this, right, this is for people that are cold, people that don’t know, that the best ones we’ve ever written do not perform any better than totally blank.

So why bother leave ’em blank. if you do know them right, you met ’em at a trade show or something, absolutely put in, put in that, you, you know, hey, it was at the, met you, the, you know, such and such event in Las Vegas last week. That makes sense. But if not, just stick the blank messages. But anyway, I recommend reaching out, to introduce yourself.

sending a, a relevant message, using more than one message. So sending out a sequence of messages, not because people want sequence of messages, ’cause people are really busy, and they’re likely to miss, a message, especially on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, just kind of LinkedIn’s got better, better ways to surface, you know, messages you may have meant to respond to, but for the most part, if you miss it that first time around, you’re not seeing it again.

so doing that follow up, having multiple messages, helps just to get more people to respond. And I recommend making some type of offer, and that doesn’t mean, Hey, what if I could do blankety blank, blank, blank and charge you only this much? Is that something you’d have time to talk about for. No, no more like, Hey, can I send you some information about this?

Or one that probably works the best is, hey, not sure if it’s relevant, but would you be in up for having a virtual cup of coffee with me? if you’re, and, and I know that sounds, that sounds, that sounds like a tedious networking event. I, I, I understand that. but what I’ve, I actually, I’ve found is that if you’ve done your connect, you’re targeting right, and you’re connecting with the right people.

and you’ve let them know a little bit about you, what, you know, introduced yourself, then the whole thing can be a whole lot more relevant. and then you can go into a virtual cup of coffee meeting and actually be a productive type of 

[00:35:47] meeting. so what about people who aren’t responding though?

Happens, right? Most, most, I would say most, campaigns on, on LinkedIn, especially doing outreach, are just not effective. They’re not working, given by the number of bad messages in my inbox. so here’s kind of my troubleshooting guide and I will, if, if you are trying to do outreach yourself and it’s not working for you.

Check these six items here, and see if maybe one of these is, is the, the culprit. relevance. You’re targeting the wrong people. You’ve got the wrong message. and usually that’s it. You, you’re, you’re just, your, your message doesn’t mesh with the type of person you are trying to connect with. Maybe your message is designed for, you know, the CEO or you’re talking about, you know, things, you know, things that the, you know, they’re, they’re, that they’re thinking about, whether it’s, you know.

Shareholders and, you know, the bo the bottom, the company versus, well, how do we solve this, employee turnover problem, which is, you know, probably on HR mind. so having the right message to the right person is, is usually it. Of course, it could be that your message just sounds like everybody else’s who’s kind of, kind of doing that, and that’s, that’s a pretty easy thing to get into, especially if you’re using like chat GPT or something to try and write the messages.

it writes really boring generic ones unless you can say, Hey, here’s some cool examples. Make ’em sound like that. I do recommend keeping your messages short. just if you’re, if you’re ever in doubt, pull it up on your phone and say, can I read this in one screen? If not, it’s too long. Make it shorter.

Having no call to action, you know, and, and a for example, feel free to, you know, feel free to shoot out some times if, you ever wanna chat is not a call to action is be specific about what you want. You know, can we meet for a virtual cup of coffee? Can I send you information about blank? or, or whatever your, your messages.

Just be specific about it. don’t pitch on the first message. I know this one’s always really unintuitive. ’cause I think people are like, let’s get straight to it. Let’s get right to the point. Let’s, let’s not, you know, let’s not, beat around the bush here. Let’s get to it. I would recommend beat around the bush a little bit.

it, it just, it, it comes across as more genuinely human friendly. and, and just like I said, more like what you would experience out, out in the real world. And finally don’t include a calendar link. And there’s, there’s again, another, usually one of those ones I get some pushback on. I say, why wouldn’t I include a calendar?

It’s, it makes it much easier for the prospect if they’re interested to, to, to connect and to, to have a meeting. And what to, what I say to that is basically you’re doing outreach and now you’re expecting them to do all the work to, to meet with you and. It turns people off. that, that’s the bottom line is that turns people off and makes them say, oh, really?

I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t wanna talk to them. I have to schedule this myself. It just, it just the, the way it kind of works and somebody said it just doesn’t feel right, so they don’t do it. So yes, it is certainly a lot more work to respond to somebody offer up some times and then they respond and say, actually neither of them are gonna work.

You offer some new ones. And at that point, if that, if we get to that section, I say, or if you have a calendar link, please feel free to share it and I’ll schedule some time. So, that, that is, that is an effective way to do it, especially in the consulting space. You get a lot of people who, have calendar links, with other professionals.

If you’re. Dealing with, if you’re dealing primarily with, you know, more like the contractor space or, or people or, or real estate agents for that matter that are always super busy at any given time, you know, may not be as effective. but then, you know, only, only on the third time do I actually say.

Here’s a couple times. If those don’t work for you, feel free to schedule a time at your convenience here. At least at that point. I know I’ve tried and that might be the most convenient way at that point. It actually feels like I’m making it more convenient for them. but we’ve had to go through that little bit of struggle to make that calendar link feel like an easy and convenience versus at first it felt lazy.

If I just do it right away, that’s lazy. I do it three times later in an exchange. Now it feels like I’m being helpful. I, I, I know it’s, it’s sounds strange. I’m just telling you that’s really what we see though in, in the outreach space, especially on LinkedIn. So. Alright. let’s see 

[00:40:45] here. Do you have a question here from, from Dr.

Chris Kelly? so do you think the main challenge around outreach is our own discomfort? I would say that that’s often the case is that. there’s, you, you, you, you, you kind of get this fear of, well, people are gonna, right. It’s the, I’m gonna, that’s the whole, you’re gonna ruin your reputation type of thing.

I feel like that’s where it kind of comes along is people are okay with being told no and Right. We’re, we’re all adults. We’re all in business. We’ve been told, no, I’m not interested. so that’s, that’s, that’s fine. I think some of it comes down to, I think, that whole, oh, if, if you’re this, if you’re doing that, you know, people are just gonna, you’re, you’re gonna be kind of bottom tier.

That’s not a professional type of thing to do, which is always strange because, as, as I mentioned earlier, right, this prospecting, cold outreach, cold calling is, It’s an enterprise grade type of thing. you know, on my way into to work, down the street is one of the biggest, companies that sells to, car dealers.

Cox Automotive. They’re like a mile or two down the street. drive by their place. Huge, huge, billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And how do they get their clients? cold, cold calling door to door. is, is is pretty much it. They do trade shows obviously. but that, that, that’s really where people come from is they got an army of people that go out and go and shake hands and kiss babies and, Nobody’s like, oh, that’s gonna ruin and that ruins their reputation. I only work with, you know, the ones that you advertise on Google ads. ’cause it just, it just isn’t very effective in that, in, in that space. So, that’s, that’s the big one is just remember that the big companies have, have figured out that that’s just, that is just a professional way and effective way to build your business is with, with prospecting.

[00:42:52] So. Finally, I wanna touch on LinkedIn has here, and then we will jump into q and a. but LinkedIn has, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is really a, something you can do to scale, but if you want to jump in and try it earlier, what I would say is it’s a good way to retarget. So if you’ve got existing traffic to, say, your website, you’ve got blog posts or a podcast or something, you’ve got traffic coming in.

Doing LinkedIn ads to retarget people can be a really good way to get back in front of them, and reengage with them and, and get things going. If you do wanna do it to people who you know aren’t connected to you don’t know you, what I would recommend then is using video first, so kind of as a. basically more of a content type, style video, short form, vertical reel style, like, reels or shorts.

The vertical ones basically not what, not what this looks like. unless this is one of the clips on LinkedIn, in which case I do those vertically, but the, the LinkedIn ads, you, you serve those up to people and then people who watch 25% or more of those videos, then you can retarget ’em. and. It’s nice.

And the retargeting part is just pretty boring because text on a, you know, a colored background is, is about the most effective way to do it. I’ll, I’ll show you a couple examples here, but, Basically right is, you know, here’s, here’s text on the background. If you’ve been using the video portion of it or they know who you are.

right. You are a, if you’re, especially if you’re a consultant, the, the top left option there is probably the better one. ’cause it’s got your face on it. and if they’ve seen your face and they know who you are, that’s more likely to pull them back in. If you’re going kind of more corporate, with it, you’re a little bigger company and you know, you’ve got.

20, you know, business development people out there or something. and it’s not just one person who’s the face of it. having just text on background is gonna work well. But if you need to see more inspiration, you wanna get some more ideas, you wanna try more stuff, LinkedIn has a transparency on the, their ad library.

So you can just go to linkedin.com/add library and that will get you all kinds of examples. You can look at different companies, what they’re doing and stuff like that, though. Be a little bit careful there. You don’t necessarily know what’s working. but I know these, these two here are probably good ones to kind of, kind of model from people I’ve talked to.

[00:45:29] So some things there. So, that’s all I’ve got. So if you do need some help with this, you’re looking for more appointments, you want somebody who can kind of build this system out for you or you want to, you know, just do little parts of it, we can certainly help you with that. We can get it going, we can manage it.

And really, our big, the big thing I tell people is we’ll help save your time from struggling to get it going to all of a sudden, six months have gone by and you’re still, you know, still trying to figure it out or. You’re saying, I, I just don’t have time to talk to people and respond. I just want appointments.

We can help you with that portion of it. So, not gonna make a big pitch about it, but if there’s something you’re interested in, feel free to schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com or email me directly, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. I will happily offer times, manually if, if you’d like to, to talk.

So with that said, I will open it up for questions. And then, I’ll let you go about your day because I know your time is valuable and I really want to thank you for being here today, and, and taking some valuable time out of your day. So, as I mentioned, if you do want that, that little PDF flow chart that I showed at the beginning, just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

I’ll make sure I get that sent over to everybody. gimme till tomorrow, to get that done. but otherwise, I will open it up for questions and, And we’ll, 

[00:46:59] we’ll go about our day. So, Anne asks, what tool do you recommend for videos and how frequently would you recommend posting videos? So, kind of a big questions.

I’ll kind of, I’m gonna kind of narrow it down a little bit here. So what I do. And what I’ve, what I’ve been using is, if I’m not using the, the webcam here and I’ve got one of these, I’ve got OBS bot as my webcam. ’cause it can kind of pivot with me, right? You can see it kind of move. And I like that it feels a little, just a little bit.

It, it’s steady, but it doesn’t feel quite as static. So that’s kinda what I use for, for these live streams. And what I do kind of on the back end here is this is running through a company called StreamYard and they’ve got free options. I’ve got one of their plans that will record this little me talking here on the, the left hand side.

That’s full screen. So what I do then is I can then take that full. That full clip here and then chop it down and make it vertical. and then I can just plug it into, any number of tools. I think I’ve got, captions on my phone, for, for making, ones. And then, video, V-I-D-V-I-D-Y-O. Ai ai. So that’s another one that I use that kind of can intelligently break things into clips for me.

So those are the tools that I’ve been using that kind of accelerate, especially with the long form events. When I want to take ’em and make ’em short, I will use that tool to. Like the clips up and it does a pretty good job. It’s not perfect, but it’s a whole app. Sure. Beats trying to do it manually each time.

and even if you’ve got a person doing it, it can, it’s gonna save them hours of time trying to sit down and then first watch through it and kind of jot down all the, the time marks and everything like that. So that’s, that’s what I’ve been using though. There’s so many easy tools out there. If you have a phone.

You’ve got prob the world is your oyster, really. But those are the tools I’m using. I’m using StreamYard, video and there’s an app on your phone called Captions that I think does a pretty nice job for that kind of, that little text along the bottom of the screen. let’s see 

[00:49:25] here. Alright, so from Dr.

Chris Jelly. So Gary, I’ve spent the last two weeks growing my network. I’ve grown it with relevant leads by a hundred, but using this manual method means it might take a bit longer to grow. Do you recommend any automation tools? I try not to get into specifics, simply because, you know, you get into specifics, specifics and then all of a sudden LinkedIn is, you know, dropping the hammer on, on, on something.

Since they’re all automation, I will say all automation tools are technically a violation of the terms of service. Though, if you’re paying for LinkedIn premium and things like that, you can, it’s usually almost never a problem. but basically what I’m looking for is I’m looking for ones that are cloud-based, and don’t try and push things too hard.

the max, you know, the maximum really number of connection requests you’re gonna be able to send in any week is 200. if you’re doing it manually, it’s gonna be limiting you to a hundred. so, most of the tools out there are all pretty similar. If you do want to. Talk specifics, so just feel free to send me an email and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you some, some other ones you can take a look at.

let’s see here. Any other questions?

I think that’s actually everybody 

[00:50:50] today. Alright, well thanks so much everybody for coming on today. Really appreciate y’all and have a great day and I will be back next month with another session. So hope, hopefully I’ll see you there. Take care.