Episode 01 – How To Get Clients From LinkedIn
Welcome to the first episode of Pipelineology. On this episode, Gary shares the strategies he uses to help his clients get new business from LinkedIn.
In this content packed episode, you’ll learn how to create a profile that gets prospects to raise their hand and say, “I’m interested. Tell me more.”
Gary goes through all the optimizations you should make to your profile before you start any type of campaign on LinkedIn whether it’s an outbound prospecting campaign or an organic engagement campaign.
He discusses your title (tagline), cover image, about, and work history.
Finally, he shares some tips on how to leverage your newly optimized profile in an outbound prospecting campaign and how to stand out from the spammers and keep your account from getting shutdown.
Resources:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator – the best tool for finding highly targeted prospects on LinkedIn.
Optimization and Managed LinkedIn Outreach – Pipelineology offers custom solutions to help you build a pipeline of prospects on LinkedIn – if you’d like to learn more about or available solutions, please schedule a time to get a demo of our system and see if it’d be a good fit for you.
Episode Transcript
Gary Ruplinger: Hey everybody, welcome to today’s episode how to get clients from LinkedIn. So, this episode is going to be a solo episode, but this is one of my very favorite topics to talk about and I just want to jump right in and.
Kind of get to it, so we’re not we’re going to kind of skip over the the real kind of basic stuff about LinkedIn. I’m sure if you’re in the beta, beta B space, you’re already familiar with LinkedIn as a platform, so let’s kind of jump in right with who should be using it. And then we’ll talk about some ways that you can really well, kind of.
Turn up the turn up the juice and start getting some clients from it so.
I like the I like LinkedIn for its ability to find B2B decision makers. Now there’s some consumer techniques, consumer focused techniques you can use to, but but really, for our purposes of those podcasts, we’re going to really talk about it from a business to business perspective as a tool for essentially.
Booking meetings let’s generally what we like to do. There’s some other other tips out there for ways to, you know, get people on webinars and things, but I really think that LinkedIn is is best suited for getting face to face one on one with people.
So the great thing about LinkedIn is that it has up-to-date information on decision makers at different types of companies and the nice thing is, people share updates when they get promoted. They change roles. In fact, that can be a great way to find prospects. Let’s say you work with car dealerships and you found that when people get promoted to.
General manager, they want to make some changes. Well if you knew when that happened and if all you need to do is just be connected with people on LinkedIn. For example, sales managers in general or general sales managers. Those are the people that oftentimes getting promoted to that position and some service managers.
But if you know that now, you can see exactly when it happens and get in touch with them. So just kind of a quick tip there is that you can think about this from an event event based thing, not just demographics.
But that’s one of the beauties of the platform. Is that open information is up to date, so if you’ve struggled with other lists for prospecting and find that you get, maybe you’re cold calling an you get on the phone and say well, they’re no longer with the company. They’re no longer in that role. Those types of messages you’re going to find a lot less of that.
On LinkedIn and any data you get from there is just so much cleaner because people update it themselves.
And it’s a free platform which from from a getting started perspective. If you’re maybe Europe, yeah, brand new salesperson to accompany you can jump in and start doing this stuff without needing to spend hundreds of dollars on tools and thousands of dollars on managed services.
You could just kind of jump right in and get and get started, and then add the add those extra extra tools on as you as you grow and evolve.
So I want to kind of focus in here on some of the most important areas of LinkedIn. Well, to to really get clients and we’re going to be looking at. Here is we’re looking at your profile, the people you connect with, what you say to the people you connect with, and we’re going to touch a little bit on on.
Posting content, but really we’re going to focus on the 1st three things before that, so let’s talk about short LinkedIn profile and others.
A lot of people out there whose profiles, if you went and looked at him, are still very much what you would call kind of a classic resume type of.
Uh, I’ve profile works pretty much, you know, here’s my work experience. And yeah, here’s my capabilities.
When you want to get clients on LinkedIn, your profile. In fact, this is what we’re going to start calling it. We’re going to call it your landing page, because that’s really the best way to view.
Your LinkedIn profile on LinkedIn. This is your landing page for getting clients, so if you think about your website, spend a lot of time crafting that probably getting the messaging right. Anything you’re running ads to get some ton of focus on, but yet our LinkedIn profiles very often get overlooked.
It’s it’s one of those spend 5 minutes setting it up and and don’t think about it again. Or maybe maybe if you’re really ambitious, you’ll spend 15 minutes on it getting getting some information in there, but if you want to get clients off of LinkedIn, this is absolutely worth spending a day or two even getting professional help too.
Optimize Your Profile
Get a really nicely written profile, because this is, for all intents and purposes, this is your landing page on LinkedIn, so it should get all the same amount of attention and effort that would go into any landing page for any type of campaign.
So here’s kind of the different elements of this, and I know this is audio only, so if you kind of want to follow along with me, you can check out my profile on LinkedIn. It’s always changing. Probably update things, do it once or twice a month. Different images, different things we’re trying out.
It’s kind of the wild Wild West playground for me, really.
But in case you’re curious and wanted to see some example, I don’t know if it’s a great example right now or a bad example. Right now. Some things I try work really well and other things, well. We learned that those tests don’t always go so well, but anyway.
It’s Gary Ruplinger so https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyruplinger/ or just Google my name, Gary Ruplinger LinkedIn and you can pull it up, but if you’re in the car listening to this while you’re working out, you just follow along with my voice so.
Let’s start with the the thing that people are going to look at immediately is your picture. So profile picture is this isn’t this isn’t perhaps a decade ago, where it was really more professionally professional, headshot focused. That’s not such a big deal anymore, so don’t worry if you don’t have like a picture of you in a suit and tie.
Unless your industry really still focuses on that, you know for financial advisors or lawyers or bankers. If those are your people. Then yeah, you might wanna really nice Buttoned up professional suit and tie looking profile picture. But for the rest of us not such a big deal anymore just so much that one it is a picture of you.
I can’t stress that part enough if it’s a picture of your logo, a picture of your company, a picture of your truck.
That’s all gonna really negatively impact your ability to connect with people and prospects. It’s think about this. LinkedIn is a networking.
Networking website that’s kind of what it was built for, so you don’t network with trucks and you don’t network with logos, so.
Put a picture of yourself on there. You may not think that you’re good looking. It’s OK, I’m not good looking either. I and my picture still works better than anything else I could put put there, so just put a picture of yourself. You know a good headshot. I guess that doesn’t need to be super professional. It could be something somebody snapped with a cell phone camera.
It’s all good, just the fact that it should exist. Make sure it’s like I said that you have one and then it’s a picture of a person. You all right. So next section.
Your Cover Image
So this is this is a really great place and there’s kind of two different directions ways you can go with this. An my favorite way to do this is kind of what I call the the authority builder.
That means if you’ve perhaps done some speaking engagements, and you know if you’ve done like a Ted X talk or spoken on the stage at a conference, and this can. This applies to smaller local networking events, maybe a Chamber of Commerce or even a BNI type of meeting anytime where you’ve done some speaking in front of a group of people.
This is a great place to use. One of those pictures and essentially.
Share your you demonstrate your authority that you’re an expert on the topic and that people will listen to you, right? We don’t. You don’t have to be a Tony Robbins or a Jim Rohn or anything like that. Just the fact that you’ve spoken in front of somebody can be a great especially tool too without even having to say it. Just demonstrate that you are, in fact in authority on.
Some type of subject that people will listen to now. You may not have that. I’ve had clients who you know, they just couldn’t find a good picture of that. Or they just they don’t do that. They’re not comfortable talking in front of people. Not a big deal.
Um, some of the other tools that you may have at your disposal. If you’ve written a book. If you have a podcast, these are all tools that can do that, but the other way, and this is probably a little bit more common. Again, just because not everybody has that type of imagery or that type of experience at their disposal is.
To really reiterate who it is, you help.
Let’s say you work with plumbers an. This is a great place for as far as your cover image goes, is to let them know what how you help them. You know what you help people do. Maybe you you help them save money on their taxes. Maybe you help them get extra water heater installs.
Each and every month, but this can be essentially can be a good place to put a headline so.
There’s some things to keep in mind there, and again, the fact that it exists is going to be more helpful than the standard kind of blue backdrop that is just there by default. Make sure you put something customized in there, either that helps build your authority on the on your subject matter, or let’s people know kind of reiterates what it is you do and helps.
So below your name is a great place to put. Oh and real quick here. As far as names go, your name is fine if you’re you know you want to put any of your like MBA or PhD or type of credentials, that’s good. But to kind of like load it with keywords. You’ll see some people doing that work though, so if they say things like lead generation expert or.
Or something like that. Leave that stuff out there. It it looks kind of spammy an it will have a negative impact on connecting with people. So don’t do that. Your name is good if you’re a doctor. Put doctor that helps if you’re not, of course. Obviously leave that out if you’re a lawyer, put a square. But other than that, leave everything else.
So where we want to put that stuff is in your tagline, essentially, the little section below your name that most people will use to say manager at such and such. By default it actually pulls from your current job title so you can edit it. You can edit from the mobile app, you can edit it from desktop.
But by default it’s just going to pull whatever your current job title you have listed is.
What you want to do is.
Really take that out because your job title is not that important.
But you want to focus on what it is that you do. So let me give you kind of some current examples. I think mine oftentimes is going to lead with you know Co founder of my company Till founder of Marketing thinks we find that that helps with connecting with people. Let them know what you do but you have a whole lot of extra characters.
You can work with on this, so this would be a good opportunity to say let’s go back and use that plumber example helping plumbers get two extra water heating installed installation jobs today. Something like that. Don’t don’t use it just like that because I just made that up off the top of my head, but.
Letting people know who you help and as an extra tip, especially in kind of noisy industries, I work with a lot of agencies and coaches and consultants who get pitched a lot, so I like to put some kind of playful.
Notes in there things I’ve used in the past, and maybe if you’re checking mine out, you’ll currently see things like this, but I’ll put things like meme aficionado, and it’s often help. And you know what fun is? I get people who send me memes that are just funny, and I do enjoy them and I put beer enthusiast.
That one you are likely to see that one again just because it gets a lot of it just gets a lot of friendly response and helps start conversations. And really that’s what you want on LinkedIn. Is conversations just some type of icebreaker.
And by putting it in your profile, it makes it really easy for people to to connect with you on a.
On a personal level, which can then lead to conversation on a professional level about what it is you do, so putting something kind of playful, something kind of fun about yourself can be put it at the end. It doesn’t need to be very long. I like I said, I’ll use maybe two or two to four words to kind of put something fun in there.
But kind of having that there again really can separate you from the other noise in the marketplace when they’re looking through a profile in citing if they’re going to connect with you.
And that’s kind of that’s kind of our challenge. Number one is we want to make sure that our profile is inviting to our prospects so.
Moving along here so we kind of got all this stuff they’re gonna see immediately covered right where we talked about making sure your image you have a picture of yourself there. You’ve got a cover image an you’ve got your tagline put in there and it’s the thing that goes right under your name. Very easy to add it. Now let’s talk about some of the things that.
Well, this is what’s going to get people to actually raise their hand and proactively reach out to you and say, hey, I’m interested in that when.
Can we talk?
Just before going on the on the air with this, I had a person in my in my inbox. I sent him no pitch. I didn’t ask him any questions and he sent me a message saying hey, let’s talk an I responded back and I’m a little bit cautious these days on that type of message.
Often times it’s a pitch an I said hey would absolutely. What would you like to discuss and he said your services so we’re setting up a time to talk tomorrow. He’s he’s a local guy, he’s interested in what? What we what we can do and how we can help him. And that’s that’s exactly what this is all about. Is getting people to reach out and say hey I want to I want to give you money.
Help me, so that’s what this next couple parts are going to do. Your about section.
This is, this is if you if you’ve got copywriting skills or you’re thinking about hiring a copywriter. This is where we’re going to put those to good use. ’cause we want to focus the about section and not so much you write. This isn’t an about me, so not this is the about how I can help you.
The essentially what’s in it for me if I connect with you type of thing. So this is a great chance to do a few different things an there’s there’s lots of great examples out there, so I’d kind of recommend just browsing some of these different profiles and you’ll get kind of a feel for different ways it can be done, but.
Let’s start with some of the technical details. Essentially in the about section you are allowed to use text and emojis. That’s about it. So if you want to put a link in there, you have to paste the whole URL.
It’s not going to hyperlink anything. You can’t put videos and images or anything in there, it’s all text that’s OK. This is a great chance to. Like I said, tell your story, but in a way that lets them know how you can help them.
And if you struggling with that.
Forget it, forget the story part and just talk about what you do.
How you help and what to do next?
If you can do those things.
Weaving your story and things are all things that can be done at a later time.
But really, the about section this is. This is where you get to make your case and this is what will lead people to reach out and say hey I saw your profile. I’m interested can we talk?
Now, one of the things I guess we haven’t really discussed is we’re kind of talking about each of these sections in general, but you want your profile to be essentially as complete as possible. So that means putting your work history in, linking it to businesses. Again, little subtle things that you don’t think make much of a difference, but having good looking.
I mean, essentially when you’re connected to the companies you work for, it shows the logos and those just have that little bit of extra credibility. It just essentially makes you look more real, more trustworthy.
That’s really the beauty above of LinkedIn could because let’s say you reach out to somebody you know they see your ad. They don’t know anything about you. There’s no report. You have no relationship with them. You’re starting from scratch when you’re connecting with somebody on.
LinkedIn, essentially they they can learn all about you and they can learn different things that are going to build rapport with them. So for example, I have excellent report if I get on somebody where we’ve both worked in automotive.
Big and it it really kind of applies across the board is we can talk sales.
And so we immediately have some type of common connection when we get on the phone mean share swap, you know, war stories from back in the day and you know we can essentially skip a lot of the.
Kind of awkward small talk. We have a connection that we can immediately talkin talk about to each other and and carry on so.
That’s why I like to have a profile. It really has a lot of information about you.
Because it let’s people have that human personal connection to you versus I’m not sure who this person is. What’s this website about what’s that landing page? Say I don’t know, so that’s kind of the idea. There is more information you have on there. It’s a better opportunity somebody can say.
I can write I can relate to that. I I like this person I want to talk to them.
So on that same note, there is a part portion on there called the featured section that you can essentially set any content you’ve posted on LinkedIn to feature, and this is a great place to show testimonials. Case studies usually use videos in that place. If you’re not comfortable with that.
Don’t worry about it, just any type of content. Even a slide deck is is good there, just something to really again.
Put put more information for somebody who’s checking you out. Wants to learn a little bit more, get a better idea of what you do.
This is a great place to put those types of extra pieces of content and it goes right below the about section, so I said you can’t put any images or videos or anything like that in there. Here you know whatever you want. Images, case studies, testimonials.
Videos, especially or specially good there whatever you like, you can put there. It just has. It’s just things you feature from your a sensually content on LinkedIn.
All right?
So that is your profile. I know we talked quite a bit about that. I think I’ve been going on close to 20 minutes here already and just the profile.
And it really is that important. And in fact, if you get nothing else out of.
This episode is that your profile really is worthy of that much attention and time. And if you have to work on it for a week and then next week you go back and revise it again and make it a little better and a little better each time is going to be time well spent.
Let’s move on and let’s kind of once we’ve got our profile set up. Essentially, it works. Functions as a landing page.
Now it’s time to start connecting with people.
And the question is who do I connect with an? I know if you’re just getting started you there’s oftentimes some hesitation about I’m a little uncomfortable reaching out to people. I don’t know. What do I say kind of messaging. Do I put so?
Let’s kind of start with that. There’s LinkedIn change. Actually, a few months ago, the timer at the time of this recording, how they kind of default your connection request. It used to be. That would always say hey, people are more likely to connect to you on LinkedIn if you include a message. A personalized message.
They stop saying that. And here’s here’s kind of the the What we’ve kind of found in our own testing for across many many campaigns.
Is putting no message there?
If it’s people you’re just looking to connect with that you may not personally know.
A blank message will get the best response.
Because and this wasn’t always the case, it used to be that a personalized message was great. Now it is great if it’s somebody you’ve actually met. So if you know them from your college days, you might have an event, a conference, or something like that. Maybe you follow them on some other type of social media and you listen to their podcasts or something.
Any type of actual personalized message.
Still works really, really well, but when it comes to reaching out to people that you don’t necessarily know.
That’s no longer the case, so blank messages are gonna work best.
You’re still uncomfortable with it. Here’s some ways to really kind of maximize your connections.
Look at these two ways.
One look at your college. There’s depending on the size of it. I mean, if you went to, say, the University of Minnesota or something big, big public college, there’s going to be hundreds and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of alumni out there that you are more likely to connect with you simply because you went to the same school.
Smaller schools, obviously less alumni, but probably more affinity to connecting with people from there. So colleges are a great place to look. You know if you’re just saying I’m still a little uncomfortable, but I can connect with people that at least went to the same school with.
And we’ve also found works really well. Is people that live in your city. So whatever your major Metro area is, I’m currently in the Detroit area and I can tell you that people in this area just connect at a higher percentage than people generally across the United States or the world so.
But here’s the thing is, if when it comes to connecting with people.
Just push the connect button, it really is OK. You don’t get a whole lot, at least at least in the United States and Canada. You’re not going to get a whole lot of resistance to people connecting where you’re going to get constantly where you get essentially the third degree of why are you connecting with me? Why do you want to connect? You really don’t see much of that these days.
So don’t be afraid, just connect with people and.
You’re gonna be in good shape.
And the next question is then right? So I want to connect people who well.
Depends who you want to sell your services to companies you’re likely to know who the decision makers are at those companies who the decision influencers are. What types of companies. And that’s the great thing about LinkedIn is that information is all right there for you to use.
One quick tip I’ll give you is.
Check people who are second degree connections and if you haven’t spent a lot of time in LinkedIn, that’ll make sense really quickly because it will tell you if you’re a second level of 3rd degree connection or not.
Not so are more than that apart, but essentially a second degree connection means that you have a mutual person in common, so maybe one of your colleagues or something is also connected to him. Those mutual connections again just make it so that the percentages are much much higher when successfully connecting with people.
And then one of the underutilized things about connecting with somebody on LinkedIn is that you once you’re connected, you get access to other information they’ve provided to LinkedIn. Most importantly, email. But oftentimes you’ll get other social media profiles, and sometimes a phone number.
And we’re going to have an episode on Cold calling where this might be very helpful to you right now. I just want to focus on that email address.
Great thing about that is this is another opportunity for you to essentially make an introduction using LinkedIn and the report, but knowing that people just don’t spend as much time on LinkedIn as they do other social networks like Facebook or Instagram, it’s I I’d say I think the average is right now or somewhere people check their LinkedIn every two to three weeks.
Some people are really, really active, right? There’s power users to it, but the average person isn’t on there daily or even weekly. So by connecting with somebody and just reaching out with hey, we just recently connected on LinkedIn. And if you’re like me, you probably don’t check your LinkedIn messages very often. So I just thought it email you to introduce myself.
That’s very easy. That’s a very natural transition. You’re not going to get people complaining about that.
And the nice thing is, is that it’s going to accomplish the same thing as messaging somebody introducing yourself. I’m LinkedIn.
And that’s where they’re going to go back, and they’re going to check you out and check your profile. And well, some of those people are going to reach out and say, hey yeah, I’m interested in that.
But what if you want to take it to the next level and this is where there’s a little bit of controversy, but I it’s something that we use I use. Personally, we use it internally at our company and we do this type of work for clients. It works really well still, so I want to cover it.
Reaching out to people and connecting with that you don’t know. You don’t have a relationship with an asking them for the meeting and telling them about your services proactively without them reaching out because it’s very simple, you’re going to get more people’s attention this way by just going directly and asking for something. You’re going to get some people here and there, and if you don’t need a lot of new business, just kind of doing the sit back. Just connect with people and letting them come to you. It’s great.
If you’d like to post content and share that on LinkedIn as well, that can. That can be an effective strategy, but for most of our clients we find that.
The thing that really gets a consistent flow of new leads and appointments and booked meetings is actually reaching out and messaging people, so there’s a lot of different tools out there we won’t get into the specifics, but if you reach out to me personally, a lot of I’ll shoot you a message of what we’re currently using. Share with you some other tools in case you want to shop around.
But essentially what you want to do is.
Tell people what you do and this can be short types of messages that say hey I do this.
Can we talk?
Hey I help plumbers get an extra what did I say earlier 202 water heater installs today.
Do you have time to talk?
Very straightforward, but some people will say yes plenty, will say no.
So what we like to do is we like to essentially skip that reach out with a friendly introduction. At first an we find that this does a lot of things. One is first of all, we don’t pitch them right away and we don’t ask them any questions about themselves. We don’t how you tell me your story, any of that. We don’t make any offers at all. It essentially.
When we reach out and give ourselves just a friendly introduction to somebody.
What happens is people view our profile and our profile is our landing page which makes our whole pitch for us.
If if that’s all you’re doing is just reaching out to people, you’ll get some extra meetings that way. So now you’re connecting with people. You get a handful of people here and there who just immediately reach out and say I’m interested. ’cause I checked out your profile when they connected and now you send out an introduction to people again. You’re not pitching them asking for anything.
But it get them to go back to your profile, where again your pitch is.
Now we’re going to talk about actually getting sending out pitches in their inbox.
So what do you say?
And essentially it’s kinda like what I said you can. You can be very direct about it. You can say hey, you know the one thing is pretty popular is kind of the what I like to call the Virtual Cup of coffee you hop on a zoom and you can talk to each other and learn a little bit about each other depending on your skill as a as a sales person in the amount of time you have that can actually be.
A pretty effective strategy to build relationships with people.
And as you get into higher and higher levels of prospects, it can be one of the most effective ways, because again, you’re not sounding like everybody else with an immediate pitch. You’re just trying to build a relationship.
But you’re going to be OK if you just directly reach out and say, hey, here’s what I do.
Can we talk?
Just don’t do it on the 1st message.
That’s that’s what we’ve kind of found is that you want to soften it by letting them get to know you a little bit more before you just immediately kind of kind of jump jump on it.
And for us, what we end up doing in our campaigns is we then do take that information via email and we do follow up a few times via email as well, because we want we want to book meetings, we want to get appointments.
You know the big takeaways here is make sure your profiles up to date. Connect with people who are good targets. Don’t be afraid to reach out and introduce yourself.
You’re going to go along way, and we’ve got some more guests coming on to talk about things like stories and LinkedIn ads and other outreach techniques. Even some more advanced organic influencer type of type of messaging and videos and all of that. So, recovering a lot of those in depth in the future.
Right now, if you just want to get started with something, this is a great place to to jump in. If you need some help with that, you can reach out to me directly too, so.
Just tap on to pipelinealogy.com and you can schedule a meeting with me or someone on the team or look me up on LinkedIn. Connect and shoot me a direct message.
You know I’m there. So, thanks so much for listening to this solo episode. I really appreciate it and I got some great new great episodes coming up very soon. So, take care and I’ll talk to you again soon.