Get Clients on LinkedIn – Little Known Strategies to find Quality Clients

Get Clients on LinkedIn – Little Known Strategies to find Quality Clients

Gary hosts a live session on turning LinkedIn into a client-generating channel, covering profile optimization, intentional network building, outreach, content, LinkedIn events, and follow-up, with Q&A. He advises completing profiles with clear headlines, social proof, and engaging personal details; writing an “About” section focused on who you help; and building up to 30,000 first-degree connections by consistently targeting second-degree connections within LinkedIn’s weekly invite limits. For outreach, he recommends relevance, short mobile-friendly sequences, no pitch or questions in the first message, introductions before asking for meetings, avoiding calendar links early, and troubleshooting targeting and sameness. For content, he discourages generic motivational posts, emphasizes specificity over vanity metrics, thoughtful commenting, and highlights events as the highest-impact format, plus carousels, polls, and repurposed clips. He stresses follow-up as the key lever improving all results.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Roll Call
02:49 Housekeeping And Replay Info
04:48 Agenda And Who Its For
05:36 About Gary And Offers
08:40 Profile Basics That Convert
12:08 About Section Copywriting
14:48 Network Building Strategy
22:13 Outreach Why It Works
25:35 Message Sequence Framework
28:28 Outreach Troubleshooting Tips
30:40 Mobile Friendly Outreach
30:53 Skip Calendar Links
32:49 Stop Generic Posts
34:04 Engagement Over Vanity
36:08 Thoughtful Commenting
37:19 Formats That Work
40:11 LinkedIn Events Strategy
42:48 Repurpose Event Clips
44:10 Follow Up Multiplies Results
46:21 Live Q&A Session
59:45 Closing And Flowchart

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to how to Get Clients on LinkedIn. So, we are just a couple minutes away from getting started. If you’ve been on one of my events before, you know how I like to start on time. So we will be starting at, 2:00 PM Eastern Time sharp. That is, I’m showing two minutes from now.

In the meantime, where is everybody, calling in from today? It is a, it’s actually a pretty nice fall day here in Detroit, Michigan. We actually have some sunshine and it’s about 60 degrees out, 60 Fahrenheit. for, for anybody who’s, on the metric system and in other countries that aren’t America.

Hey, hey, sa oh boy. Saad, I’m gonna say sod from Pakistan. Welcome, glad to have you here. Appreciate, appreciate taking the time. ’cause I’m sure it’s kind of, I think it’s kind of late there, right? I think you’re about 12 hours time zone difference.

Ah, sabs sabs fan. Welcome, Linda. Ah, Florida. Yes. I haven’t been to Florida in a while. Las Vegas. Excellent. Fairport, New York outside of Rochester. Welcome, crystal Bobby. Good to have you here today. Julie in Ohio. Great. Thanks for taking the time to join. All right. As asthma from Saudi Arabia. Also, also another, person who’s, who’s quite a distance away, Patrick in Nigeria.

Excellent. great, great to have, great to have people from all around the world. joining today, Charlene from Northern California. Hello, Jordy in New York, and Paul in Argentina. Welcome, welcome. Representing the Southern Hemisphere so far. You’re, so far. You’re the first one. f welcome again.

Another one from Pakistan. Welcome. Vancouver Canada, your name isn’t showing up for me, but welcome in the Poconos Kelly. We’ve got, Austin, Texas. Excellent. Looks like everything is working, so, I’m showing two o’clock Eastern time right now, so feel free to keep, commenting If you have questions as we go along, feel free to post them in the chat.

And, but with that said, let’s, jump in and get started. Welcome everybody to How to Get Clients on LinkedIn. My name is Gary Ruplinger and we’ve got a, an exciting live session today. where we talking about exactly that, that topic, is that what you need to know to really take LinkedIn from being just another social media site, social networking type of site to something that actually can fill your sales pipeline and help you get more 

[00:02:48] clients?

Couple few, few quick housekeeping items. There is a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I’m saying something here on screen to when it’s showing up for you. That’s just the way the live streaming software works. shouldn’t affect things too much. It just means that there is a little bit of a delay from questions.

So I might respond to a question, you’ll hear it 20 to 30 seconds later. So it just makes, I can’t quite communicate in real time with follow up questions. otherwise everything should, should work pretty smoothly. I’m not associated with any of the people who happen to notice you were attending today’s event.

I wanted to connect with you. Basically your, your invites either came from me, Evan, Katie, or Nicole. and everybody’s profile has my, you know, our company name on it, pipeline analogy. So just keep that in mind that I, I’m not sure what they’re trying to pitch you, or if they’re trying to pitch you anything at all.

I don’t know. I’m just letting you know in advance that we’re, we’re not associated with those, people. But, appreciate you coming anyway. the replay for those of you who are looking for it, it will be available. nice thing about doing live streams is they just automatically appear, so about five to 10 minutes after the live stream is over, so sometime around 3:00 PM, 3:30 PM or so, after all the questions have been answered.

The live stream will appear on the same exact page, as the one you’re currently on. And if you’d like to be notified about our future events, you can get on the list at Pipelineology dot com slash events and we’ll send out notifications for future ones so that you don’t miss future ones. ’cause I do try and invite as many people from my network as I can.

But with 24,000 connections, I only get through a small, small, small portion of them each time we do an event. ’cause LinkedIn does limit us to doing a thousand invites in a week, which most of the time when, especially early on, I thought, oh, that’ll be no problem. It’s real easy. And then your network grows and grows and grows.

So, but if you wanna be on the list, I just top on at Pipelineology dot com and I’ll make sure we let you know about any future 

[00:04:47] ones. So the agenda today, I’m just gonna kind of jump into it ’cause I’ve got a lot to cover and I wanna make sure that I’m respectful of everybody’s time today. So we’re gonna talk about your profile.

I’m gonna talk about building your network, and this is kind of one of those, those huge topics that I think doesn’t get enough attention. We’re gonna talk about outreach and how you could do that effectively. Still to this day and age. In 2023, we’re talk about content and we’re gonna talk about LinkedIn events like the one you’re watching right now.

And then at the end I will do some live q and a with people. So if you’ve got questions, I will do my best to kind of answer relevant ones during the presentation. but if I don’t see it right away or, or it doesn’t quite fit into that, I will come back to it at the end. So that said, let’s jump 

[00:05:35] in. Real quick, the 32nd version of About Me. My name is Gary Ruplinger. I am the founder of Pipelineology, and we’ve got a podcast, the Pipelineology podcast. We’ve got some new episodes that have gone up recently, so if you wanna really kind of dig into some of this stuff, feel free to check the podcast out.

I’ve been doing marketing now for 22, going on 23 years. my corporate career was actually in the automotive world. I ran call centers at car dealerships. So when leads would come in, my team was tasked with calling those people back, emailing them, texting ’em, and helping get appointments scheduled for our dealerships.

These days, we do that type of approach for our clients. So we work with, lots of consultants, primarily small manufacturers. SaaS companies to help them get more meetings with their ideal clients. And I am actively seeking, new England IPA style beer recommendations. So, if there’s any beer, beer fans out there, please, please feel free to chime in the chat with your recommendations, especially this time of year.

I, I like a good crisp ipa. So, who is this particular presentation for? I’d say if you’re a consultant, this is, this is gonna be right on topic for you if you happen to work in sales or business development. this should be a session. You should get a lot out of this one. And anybody who’s selling to people kind of in a business to business scenario, this should be a good fit for you.

If you’re in, like any types of financial services, insurance, financial planning, things like that, this should be a pretty helpful session for you as well. So. Don’t take my fort for it though. Please do try these out for yourself. I don’t have a monopoly on all the ideas out there. I, I recommend trying these out and, and actually seeing what works and maybe what doesn’t for yourself.

That’s, that’s really the best way you’re gonna get something out of today, is actually if you put it into action. And real quick, I’ve, I’ve learned this, that if you don’t have the time to do this, normally I would mention this at the end, but what I’ve learned about busy people is they also don’t have time to watch, you know, 45 minute long, sessions.

So if you don’t have time, we do have a done for You program. you can get details@theappointmentlab.com or just feel free to reach out to me directly, Gary, at Pipelineology. Again, that’s for people who say, this is sounds cool. I don’t have time for it. So. This is our process and this is what we’re gonna be covering today.

I will just say right now that I know that flow chart, on your screen is probably a little small. It’s a little blurry probably, unless you have a really big screen. so if you’d like a copy of the flow chart, just just shoot me an email, Gart Pipelineology and we’ll make sure we hook you up with A-A-P-D-F version of it so you can, can see it in detail.

But essentially we’re gonna be looking at how do we connect with the right people and how do we use a combination of both outreach and content to build your sales pipeline. So that’s, that’s the process that we’re gonna be covering. We might cover a couple steps out of order, but I just kind of wanted to give you an overview of what we’re gonna be looking at today.

[00:08:37] So. Let’s start with your profile and, and again, just to let you know, feel free to put your questions in as we go along. And I, like I said, I’ll do my best to answer ones as I see ’em if they’re relevant to that particular topic that we’re covering. And then we’ll do kind of a catchall at the end, live q and a with everybody and, and go back and get any of these questions that I missed at the time.

So let’s start with your profile. ’cause I think this is probably one of the more important things, about being on LinkedIn is it’s kind of about you. People want to know who you are, who they’re connecting with. So let ’em know. Let ’em, you know, make sure your picture’s up to date. Make sure you’ve got, you know, a custom background image.

Make sure you fill out the headline, fill, fill everything out, have a little bit of fun. For example, you’ll see that mine, you know, it’s got founder Pipelineology, you know who the types of businesses we work with. And it also mentions that, you know, I, I’m a meme aficionado and guess what? People will shoot me memes or ask for my favorite ones and we can get a conversation started that way.

And beer enthusiasts at the end again. Right? That’s why I asked for, new England IPA beer recommendations. ’cause it’s, it’s kind of fun, it’s kind of personal, but it helps get the conversation started. And I’ll tell you that those are things that can get, get, get a conversation started that maybe otherwise wouldn’t have, have, have happened.

Just ’cause it’s, it’s more of a, a human interest type of thing. So this headline is, is really important. like I said, have some fun with it, but also let people know what it is you do. I will tell you I like to. Put the job title first. I’ve found that that tends to work better from a connection standpoint than just the helping businesses land.

High value clients. subtle. It’s a subtle difference, but switching those around actually decreases the connection rate with people. So let people know who you are and what you do, and then some fun things about you. We find that this formula tends to be the one that you know is the most effective. You know, you could put emojis and stuff, like I said, if that, if that’s what you’re into, do it.

If, if it’s not your thing, you can skip it, no problem. Another idea here. Here’s another one. this is, Brian Carter used to work with him. I think he’s with, I think he’s still with Gerner and Associates. but I really liked, his, here you can see at the top, he’s got logos of different.

Client or different companies that he’s worked with. Microsoft Hardee’s, NBC, universal, Salesforce. you can see that in his background image there. He’s got times where he’s speaking engagements, things like that. Kind of, these are all little subtle social proof cues. So if you’ve got ones to put there, feel free to put ’em up there.

That’s another kind of alternative way to do it. But again, your profile is you just want to take some time, spend some time on it. You want to be interesting to your target market. So here’s one here from Damien Taylor, and I’ll tell you that his, profile, I would say is probably the one that got the most people just to reach out.

So you would connect with them, you wouldn’t pitch ’em anything. He wouldn’t post any content. he would just connect with people and people would reach out to him and say, Hey Damien, you look like a really interesting person. We should talk. So the more interesting you are, the better things are gonna gonna work for 

[00:12:06] you.

Okay, so let’s talk about building your profile. So I would say this is a great time to talk about kind of copywriting fundamentals. This is your profile is a really good place to make your pitch, right. I know a lot of people say, you know, there’s a lot of places they say, don’t make your pitch, don’t make it too long.

And all that. Your profile is kind of the opposite. This is your place to write as much as you can and get, get as much information out there, let people know what you do. this is just one example of one we used. I think I still, I think this might be on, I think this is on Katie’s profile, Katie WinDor, if you wanna check hers out.

so just, just to kind of give you an example of different types of ways to do this and it really kind of make that about section focused on. Who you help, who you work with, what you can do for them. So take all that stuff about where your resume and work experience and all that kind of stuff. Just delete it or throw it into your actual work history, which you did at each individual job, but you know, the, the real passive, you know, experienced sales leader, blah, blah, blah.

Just, just get that out of there. ’cause it just doesn’t help very much. fill everything out. Make sure your featured section, activity section recommendations, give some, get some your work history. Just make it as complete as possible. Here’s this is, because here’s probably the big thing is that this pro your profile on LinkedIn is what really sets this apart from other, types of, outreach or social media, right?

On a cold call, you don’t, your profile isn’t there. They don’t know who you are on a cold email. It’s the same type of thing. They, there’s no. Extra social proof or anything like that. It’s whatever was written there. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s what they see on LinkedIn. However, somebody might message you and if they liked your message, they’ll click on your profile and they’re gonna learn, who is this person, who’s this Gary Ruplinger guy?

And they’re gonna read and they’re gonna look and they’re just like, and without you having to do anything else, all of a sudden you can go from, I’ve never heard of this person to, oh, this guy sounds interesting. I think I, I think we should talk. And I will tell you that’s kind of one of the metrics that we look at when we’re building a campaign is that if you’re, you’ve done a good job with your profile once or twice a month, somebody is probably just gonna reach out and wanna talk to you.

so that’s kind of the rule of thumb there. A good profile does, does a lot of that heavy lifting for 

[00:14:45] you. Building your network. and if you do have any questions about your profile, feel free to, throw them in there while I talk about kind of building your network as we kind of transition over.

which I do see a good one here for Melody. Do you think he got, sign off to use all those logos, social proof? No, I’m sure he didn’t. right. If you, if you’ve worked with somebody, generally speaking, you, you know, you can, you can ask and they’re gonna say, yeah, it’s okay. But usually it’s just better to, you know, ask forgiveness than ask permission for, for those types of things.

But if you’re worried about ’em, ask, and usually, you know, usually clients are gonna say, yeah, no problem. If you’ve done a good job for ’em, it’s okay. So building your network. So with intention, I think this is, this is one of those areas where I think people maybe are a little bit timid, especially at first, they don’t wanna.

Get turned down by people. They, they wanna make sure that, you know, they, they get as many people to accept their request as possible and they end up kind of really limiting themselves. So there’s really two types of, kind of, essentially people you can have on LinkedIn, you can have followers and that can be unlimited.

And that’s pretty similar to any other type of social network, like your Instagram, your Twitter or X or, your TikTok, things like that. But, and there’s connections, and these are kind of the ones that you really wanna focus on. You can have up to 30,000 connections, so it’s a pretty significant number.

but over time you will in fact start to get close to maxing that out. But once you have connections, you’ve got more abilities to communicate with them, right? You can get, contact info. So if you need to follow up with somebody via email, you can, you can invite them to attend an event. You can invite them to subscribe to a newsletter.

So having up to 30,000 of those people you want to over time fill that out. And I will tell you that it takes time. LinkedIn has definitely put limitations in place, so that you might only be able to send out a hundred or 200 connection requests in any given week. So you wanna be consistently doing that and maxing that out every single week because it, it’s gonna take time.

But having that network, as you’ll see as we go through everything else really kind of enhances and, and makes everything you do a lot more effective. So, Melly, I do see your question about current limits of the algorithm today. so like I said that you know, right now it’s about one to 200 connection requests that you can send out, directly, in terms of.

Actually messaging or getting, adding new connections. Hence why I’m telling, what’s I try to recommend to everybody is even, even if you’re not planning to do anything right now, or you just don’t have time to do anything right now, at least do that. Make sure somebody is, is maxing out those requests with the people that you intentionally want to connect with each and every week.

because at one to 200 per week, it’s gonna take quite a while for you to kind of hit the limit. And the more and more people you have that are kind of those right fit people, the easier and more effective all of this becomes. So just kind of keep that in mind. question here from, Charlene, what about those who use the connection process like a dating app?

How to professionally shut this down without losing the connection? I, I’m gonna, I’m gonna be honest, Charlene, I know this is for, for women on a social network or on a networking site, like that’s supposed to be business oriented. It’s a little bit more complicated. Where you get people who, yeah, they’re, they’re not just interested in business.

It’s, it’s kind of an issue. but I, I, I would just, I would just shut it down. I would just remove the connection and, and move on, because I don’t think you’re gonna find the value you want there, from those people unfort, unfortunately. I know that’s kind of one of the issues you’ve gotta deal with.

And I, that would be my recommendation, is just get rid of it and, and move on and clear that space up for somebody else. melody asks, should you try and move third levels to first level levels or let them stay on that hierarchy as the network expands? So here’s how I, so basically what she’s asking is, you’ve got different degrees of connections on LinkedIn and when building your network.

I’ve got this on another slide, so we’ll talk about that in just a, a second, but. You’ve got different levels. And second degree connections are people who are basically, you’ve got somebody in common, so there’s somebody that you’re mutually connected with that you can use basically as a sort of, kind of a say, Hey, we’re both connected to this person.

We should also connect. so I recommend exclusively focusing on second degree connections. And as your network grows, you’ll have more and more second degree connections. when we’re doing this at, on a, on a campaign, we never use third degree connections for anything other than maybe like InMail types of connections where I, I have to make my own introduction.

So I’m gonna use LinkedIn to really use, do the heavy lifting through sales navigator and some of those tools instead. instead of, and eventually, hopefully they’ll become a second degree connection. and then we can, can build a connection that way. So, This is just another screenshot. Again, I know some of these are a little bit small, especially with all the details here.

You really want to focus on building your network purposefully. So connect to people who could be the right prospects for what you offer that. And the nice thing about LinkedIn is they’ve got a lot of data points. so you can see here I’ve picked second degree connections. You can pick which industry they’re in.

You can pick how big the company is. Heck, you can even, if you really want to, you can even look at ones that are how fast each department’s headcount is growing, which technologies they use, right? If you are only working with people that use HubSpot or Salesforce, you can actually pick those. I don’t have ’em in the screenshot here, but there’s, there’s tons and tons of data points here that you can really dig into.

And I’m just gonna move my, the presentation over here to a different one just ’cause I’m missing one of the slides I wanted for you guys. So gimme one second here. Bear with me. My apologies. but we’re gonna get this, back on track here because I do have a couple slides that looks like we uploaded the, the outdated version.

Alright. And I want that one. Alright, I think I could see it. Okay there.

Alright, so I am missing the, the questions right now. So, I think we’re okay though. Evan, can you just, do me do a quick check for me. Just let me know if that is in fact working. Can you see, the outreach approach on the screen right now? 

[00:22:07] Speaker 2: yeah, I can see that perfectly. 

[00:22:09] Okay, thanks. So.

There’s a couple different ways we’re gonna talk about using LinkedIn today. And one of them, as you saw on the flow chart at the beginning, is outreach. And we’re also gonna talk about using content. We’re talking about events. the reason I wanna talk about outreach is ’cause I feel like this is kind of the, this is a good way to get started.

It’s scalable. It’s, it continues to be effective because it’s direct, right? There’s lots and lots of books that have been written about attraction style, content marketing, right? It’s, it’s alluring. It feels, it, it just feels good, right? but in, in the business to business world, really, the big, the big companies out there, they’re, they’re doing outbound on my commute into work, into the office every morning.

I drive by, the headquarters for Cox Automotive, which if you’re not familiar with them, they, own probably over a dozen brands that are for car dealerships. auto traders, probably the one you’re most familiar with. How do they sell their stuff? Well, probably the two big things they do is one is they do trade shows, which that’s outta scope for today.

Eventually I’m gonna bring a guest on to talk about trade shows. but the other one is that they do outreach. They’ve got a huge, huge sales team, boots on the ground, going out, making cold, cold, calling on dealerships all around the country at their, multi-billion dollar, I think last I checked, like seven or $8 billion a year type of business.

And they’re, they’re built on, on that type of outreach. And it was going around talking to people and making sales. So outbound works even for the largest of businesses, you’ll find that even companies like Amazon and Google and Apple all have enterprise teams. Their job is to essentially go call on potential prospects, other large Fortune 500 companies and build those, build those types of relationships.

Or in Apple’s case, it would probably mostly be education focused. Again, large school districts, things like that where they may not be reaching out to you. You gotta go make that, that connection. So I’ll also tell you, I, I didn’t come into the office this morning, excited to check all my, my cold emails in my inbox or any of that.

Remember people are gonna tell you they don’t like TV ads, they don’t like radio ads, that they ignore Google ads and anything else. They throw away all their junk mail and they prefer not to go to another tedious networking event, right? Bottom line, nobody’s getting into the office hoping that today is the day they get your pitch.

Or I just got one earlier today, I saw it on, on Facebook yesterday and somebody was, this won’t last long, so feel free. I where essentially the I idea is they send you a penny via PayPal because they know PayPal is gonna get delivered and, they make their pitch in the message when they’re paying you the one sent.

Will, this will go away very shortly, but right now it’s rather innovative and, kind of, kind of interesting to see people taking that approach. so right. Anything they can do to get your attention and get in your inbox. ’cause they wanna get, they want their message to get noticed. So, let’s talk about outreach, because outreach for, for all of the reasons people don’t like it, is the reason it 

[00:25:34 works.

So the key components to outreach that you need to kind of keep in mind here is you need something that is relevant. You need something that is sequential. Multiple messages are gonna work better. for example, I’ll tell you that with our sequences, we recommend our, to our clients, do not pitch in the first message.

’cause guess what? Everybody hates it. And, what happens if they hate it? Well, they’re gonna block you. They’re gonna report you, they’re gonna disconnect from you. If you don’t do that, guess what? They stay connected. They might even respond, and you don’t, you don’t have to get super crazy creative.

Basically, what I tell people to say is something along the lines of, Hey, hello. It’s great to connect with you. It, it really can be that simple. sometimes we dress it up, you know, you can, you can have, have a little bit of fun with it, but overall, that type of approach is more effective. Don’t ask them any questions, nothing.

Don’t ask ’em how their day’s going. Don’t ask how businesses, don’t ask how, how sales were in the last quarter. Don’t ask for a meeting. Nothing, and you don’t even tell ’em anything about yourself. Tell ’em, Hey, Greg, to connect now, the reason I recommend you follow up with them is well, now they’re still connected with you.

Now, this is a great time to make an introduction. Again, don’t, don’t make a, don’t make an overt pitch here. Make an introduction. Tell ’em about yourself. Tell ’em what you do. And you can pivot off of that introduction and say, you know, if it’s relevant, you know, does it make sense for us to, you know, have a, have a virtual cup of coffee, types of things.

So that type of structure to, to a message is far more effective than the, you know, Hey, John, just wanted to reach out and ask you a quick question. I do, you know, sales training for, software companies, would, would love to have a conversation with you. Doesn’t quite do the same as introducing yourself first and then telling them that, Hey, you know, I do sales training, you.

And, and then pivoting off of that to ask for, for a meeting. It, it’s, again, it’s a little subtle, but it works much better. So, and, and finally is, yeah, you do wanna make that offer is what do you wanna happen next? Do you wanna have a meeting? Do you want to them to watch a video? that’s one of the things that we’ve started, started doing probably about two years ago, was we actually were able to get enough people to say, yeah, yeah, I’m interested in what you offer.

That it was too many meetings for me to really take in a, in a week. So we back it down and said, you know, let’s send ’em information. Let’s make each appointment better quality. Let’s get a little information, get little, little yeses. And then, you know, if they’re interested, when they’re ready, we’ll, we’ll get in front of ’em and we’ll see what 

[00:28:25] happens.

What happens when people aren’t responding though, and right. This is, I, I probably see this message two or three times a week in terms of responses. Hey, we’ve tried outreach before. It doesn’t work. Didn’t work for me. It. So what happens? So consider, consider this your, your troubleshooting, message here.

One, and this is usually the, the one that, where, where it all goes wrong is that it’s not relevant, is you didn’t target the right people, you didn’t spend enough time figuring out who they are, or you haven’t spent enough time really making sure that you’re just connecting to those people. because you know, you can, you can do that on LinkedIn usually, but it takes quite a bit of time and it’s, it’s really easy for you, you know, to get a little bit lazier.

Say, you know what, it’s close enough. Just let it, let it roll. So you end up messaging the wrong, getting the wrong message to the wrong person. It’s not relevant. And guess what? And a relevant message is, is always gonna be a no. So the other ones are gonna be that your message sounds like everyone else’s.

Right, there’s, right, there’s lots of best practices out there in terms of structure. There’s lots of people sharing tips on how to do outreach and stuff on LinkedIn Today. The only problem we run into is that it’s, it all starts to sound the same. That’s why we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of success by just being totally different on the first message and sending no pitch, no questions, don’t ask for anything.

’cause guess who does that? Nobody else does that. now, hopefully, you know, hopefully starting this week, that will be you, you’ll be one of those people who does that, and you’ll start to stand out a little bit, and that’ll make the rest of your, what you’re doing more effective. But some of the other things, keep it short, right?

No, nobody’s gonna read a super long paragraph. Or I, I mean, I’ve seen ones that they, if you’re on, and actually, this is another quick tip here. Look, look at your message on mobile. How, how long is it? Look on mobile, ’cause that’s where most people are 

[00:30:39] gonna be accessing it. They’re not on their desktop, they’re not reading it on a big screen.

They’re reading it on a small screen in the palm of their hand, which basically it should be about as long as a text message. So think of it that 

[00:30:52] way. And finally here is don’t include a calendar link. I know you want to meet with them. They know you want to meet with them, but putting a calendar link there, all of a sudden it puts the onus on them to book.

And it’s, it’s again, another one of those things that isn’t intuitive until somebody reaches out to you and then sends you a calendar link. And it just, it feels off-put it, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t feel right. People want to be catered to, especially in the outreach sequences. They want you to be the one doing, doing a little bit of that.

The work. So off just, just ask, hey, if they’re open to meeting, if they are, you can follow up, you can offer some times. And you know, if all else fails and you’ve gone back and forth and you can’t find a time, ask for their calendar link. They might have one. And if they ultimately say, Hey, I don’t have one, then you can send yours.

That, that’s when I would finally send that calendar link. though I do put one in my LinkedIn profile for somebody who is in fact interested and, you know, they’re, they’re engaged and they’re ready to talk right now. That’s where you put your calendar link. Just, just a hint. Otherwise you don’t need to include it anywhere else.

Alright, that’s outreach. So I’m going to switch over to content. Like I said, I’m kind of, we’ve was by switching my screen here. I can’t see all the comments here, so I’m gonna come back to them. I know they’re out there. I appreciate everybody asking questions. so we’ll, we will talk about all the different outreach strategies and the, the nitty gritty of it.

and then we’re gonna talk about content. So I’ll stick around and ask questions for as long as we need to, but I wanna make sure that for anybody who just wants to get the presentation and, and get on with their day, they’ve got time for that too. So, let’s talk about content. There’s a couple baseline things that you just wanna keep in mind here is you wanna be consistent, you wanna be 

[00:32:48] specific. And please, please, please stop with the generic ghost written motivational quotes. And, you know, just the stuff that just doesn’t, doesn’t matter where you think, oh, I’m just, it, it, it’ll get stuff out there. For example, this is, over here on the right hand side. The screenshot here is from a, a client I, I worked with who we did not do his content.

we, we just focused on his outreach and he had another service that he paid that just posted this type of stuff. And what you’re gonna notice down at the bottom there is there’s not a single comment. There’s not a single, like, there’s just no engagement happening whatsoever. Boring, generic content just doesn’t perform at all.

LinkedIn isn’t gonna show it to anybody. Nobody’s gonna be interested. If they do see it, it, it, it just doesn’t do anything for you. It’s not getting in front of anybody. Think, oh, doing, doing the content, it’ll get me exposure. Look, social media algorithms these days are smart. and they’re, they’re just not gonna show this content to anybody.

So it really is just, just a waste of space. So make it specific. So I recommend you write your content with your ideal client profile 

[00:34:03] in mind. Don’t worry about the vanity metrics, don’t worry about the likes and the comments and all of that stuff that really is just there to kind of distract you. Yeah, it feels good.

It feels good to get a lot of comments or likes and things like that, but what feels better is somebody, even if it’s you can get a hundred likes or you know a hundred comments, but if you don’t turn any of them into meetings and none of them become clients, what was it worth it? Whereas you might get three likes and you know, no comments, but if two people reach out and say, Hey, you know, I’m interested in talking, that was probably a good post.

So Jason Vanna here, I think probably says it best in here, and this is why I grabbed his screenshot here, is he said, funny observation about LinkedIn this month. Reach an engagement or down, right. That sounds bad. Quality leads and close deals are way up, like way up. So the right content may not get a lot of likes, but it sure as hell brings in the money.

And I, I couldn’t have said it better myself. Hence why I just took Jason’s screenshot there is that we’ve seen it time and time again where you, you know, it does, you know, the people who end up doing business with you and ultimately become clients are not the people who are commenting and liking every post and sharing it.

They’re lurking in the shadows. They’re seeing it. They, they stop. And there’s that, what’s called dwell time, where they, they stop scrolling and they read it. And LinkedIn, LinkedIn sees that. Then they’ll, they’ll show it as an impression and, and that’s it. But those impressions count, even though you can’t see who they are, you don’t know who that person was, but those impressions add up and that becomes an impactful, and then finally the right message is there, the right offer, and then they reach out.

But it’s, it’s hard to, you don’t get to see all the steps. It’s kind of right. It’s like the sausage being made in the factory. You don’t know how it’s being made, but you know, you like the end product and sometimes you don’t wanna know how it’s made different, different altogether. 

[00:36:07] Alright? I do recommend engaging with others, but do it thoughtfully.

So this means, yeah, commenting and engaging with other people in relevant industries and things like that. These are good, but if all you can say is good idea, great post. It’s not, again, don’t, don’t bother with it. Don’t waste your time. And I am, I am certainly not a good example of how to do this well. but what I’d recommend instead is check out Hannah, Hannah, Hannah Zebo account.

she has lots of interesting content, but I would say really the best stuff she does is, is comments. They’re always thoughtful. They’re always, they’ve always got, you know, that they’ve always shown that she’s taken the time to actually engage and read what they’re doing. And, and, you know, make it go a little further.

and just as a quick aside, she’s actually gonna be our guest next month. So, if you haven’t, signed up for events, go to Pipelineology dot com slash events and get signed up so that you get Hannah’s session next month when we talk about all about different types of digital branding strategies to really up your game here.

So a quick plug for, for that session next month with 

[00:37:18] Hannah. Alright, so what is working right now then? Well, based on the numbers, looking at my actual metrics and other data that we’ve compiled, here’s probably the ones that get them. Do, do the best for us. And I’m gonna start off right at the top here with LinkedIn events.

Doing live streams or you can do ’em as zooms. However, however you’re comfortable, whatever you wanna do. audio events, I see those once in a while. We don’t have experience with them, but again, I’ve seen those can be pretty popular. I just don’t like ’em. ’cause, I can’t engage, I can’t really get questions.

All people can do is thumbs up or thumbs down. a more visual oriented type of person anyway. So, but I would tell you if I could only do one of these things on this list, LinkedIn events would be the one, one thing I would choose outta here. ’cause it, it does so much heavy lifting for us. It helps us produce more content.

It helps us get new leads. It helps us, helps us with getting people who maybe they’re on the fence about working with us. It helps convert them. It helps bring people back who’ve flossed who’ve worked with us in the past and you know, for whatever reason they, they churned out. And then you may six months, year or two later, they see one of our events and they jump back in the fold.

So events do so much for you that it, it’s, it’s hard for me to overstate them. Even if you don’t get a single lead directly from doing an event, it’s usually still worth doing. ’cause you can do so much with it, and it’s, it’s so impactful in terms of, of the people you’re working with. So, but some of the other things that, still perform well is carousels.

And, what those are is simply they’re, they’re just A-A-P-D-F, different pages, A PDF file. so you upload a PDF and then boom, LinkedIn can turn that into a carousel type of thing. So it’s not, it’s not super scary and doesn’t require much technical expertise. if you’ve ever used Canva, Canva, instead of using it as an image, just convert your image or your thing into a PDF and, and boom.

You’ve got a carousel ready. definitely good for engagement polls, use sparingly. You don’t need to do them all the time, but I find that they’re just, just a good very casual engagement thing and to kind of bring, kind of, bring more people in and hopefully to get more to more of your in depth content.

Your, your events, your care sales, right, and the stories you tell. and then finally here is repurpose existing content. that’s where the events come in. we, we do this and I’ll, I’ll show you some examples of them. I, I kind of put this one down last because it really builds off of the events that I, I would say are kind of our number one thing.

It’s just another way to really even make them go 

[00:40:09] further. So let’s talk about events. You, this is why you want to be building those connections purposefully because where are the people who are gonna attend your event come from? So there’s different ways you can promote it, right? You can promote your event using LinkedIn ads.

And honestly, we found that to be both expensive and not terribly effective. You can post about it and the bigger your following is, the more people who are following you and see your stuff. That can be pretty helpful. even in the days leading up to an event, LinkedIn will show it, on the sidebar if your event has enough people attending it.

At first, you gotta get enough people who’ve RSVPed and said yes to get that extra pos, that extra exposure, that extra boost from LinkedIn. So how do you do that? You build connections and you invite your network. You invite the people that you think this would be relevant for. And like I said, you can do up to a thousand of those a week.

And if you’ve got multiple people on your team, each person can do invites. That’s why your invite to this event may not have come from me. It may have come from, from Evan who’s on the session with us today, or Katie Windsor or Nicole Junior. all of them who are part of the team here have helped kind of send out thousands and thousands of invites for us.

So it helps us get more people on there. So, but we need those people as connections. ’cause you can only invite your first degree connections, your actual network. You can’t invite people who aren’t part of your network yet. So if you want to get a. More a deep dive into this. Evan, if you could, maybe you’ve already have, like I said, I can’t see the comments rolling at the moment, but we did do an event on this topic earlier this year and a lot more detail and a lot of, you know, kind of covering the steps and how to really do them so that you can get, more people to ’em on the right hand side.

I’ve got a screenshot here. This is the one we did last month with Scott Mo last month with Scott Moss. so it was the zombie method, so it was all about reviving your dead leads and your stalled deals. And you can see at the bottom there, bottom left, we had 8,198 people who see that, saw that, right, 162 comments, 19 reposts, 1,566 attendees.

So tons and tons of exposure and people just engaging with this. So, I’ll tell you that month in and month out, the events are the ones that really. Get the best performance. You know, my, my carousels will do, a good carousel, you know, two or 3000. We’re not terribly concerned about viral content. you know, I’m never against it, but we don’t try and worry about making viral content.

We wanna make content that is relevant to my ideal 

[00:42:45] client. so, and then kind of the last thing here, like I mentioned, is you can take these events, record them, and now you can repurpose them and turn them into short video clips, and then you can share them. And you don’t have to, you’re not limited to just LinkedIn.

you can do them on, on other types of things. You can have a 32nd to 62nd video clip of something you’re talking about. but ultimately this is another way to kind of take it a little bit further. Now, the, the video clips don’t tend to get as much as many people viewing them as well. Any of the other, like, they don’t get as much as many impressions as anything else.

They’re kind of, they’re almost a filler type of content, but they’re, they’re still effective and they still, they’re, they help with that consistency. ’cause I know for me, especially in a lot of people I work with is, we’re, we’re busy. If you’re busy spending the time to write the content, especially if it’s in your voice and isn’t that generic, ghost written stuff can be a challenge to find the time.

So having this to kind of, you know, be there for you to help you kind of consistently, you know, stay in the rhythm of posting regularly so you’re only having to maybe come up with one or, you know, a handful of new ones every month. And then you’ve got everything you’ve already said from last month’s event to kind of fill in all the gaps.

That tends to, that tends to be pretty 

[00:44:09] effective. So I’m gonna mention one last thing here, and this is really, ends up being the, the missing link to all of this stuff. And it, everything else is probably gonna be a less effective if you skip this step, and that is the follow up. I’ll say this is really the closest thing to a silver bullet that will magically make everything work better at every level.

Right? If you’re talking about, and it’s not just Stripe, it’s not just outreach. It’s not just, it’s posting. That’s why you wanna do it consistently. But if you’re doing TV ads or radio ads, the, the thing, the term they would use there is frequency. If you’re running a Google ad campaign, this would be retargeting.

but in the world of, of, of sales and outreach, business development, the word is follow up. And what you need to be doing is make sure that you’ve got sequential messaging. Make sure you’re getting in front of the people multiple times they’re busy, and they may not say yes right away, even if they are interested.

So checking back in with people and you know, kind of planning ahead to realize that some people are, are, are not ready today. Check back with them. They, they may have meant to get back to you. I, I honestly, I do this all the time with people. I said I meant to get back to them. I meant to respond to them.

I got busy. It’s the same for your prospects too. You, you aren’t as much as we want to believe, we are just not the most important and, and unique and beautiful snowflakes in their lives. So doing the follow up, doing that kind of grunt work that, you know, it’s not pretty, it’s not sexy, but it makes a huge, huge difference in the and, and the end results you’re gonna get.

So. That is the session today. If you do need some help with this, you can schedule a call with me directly at Gary or go to the appointment lab.com or just email me directly, Gary at Pipelineology. not gonna make a big, big deal about this, but this is really for people who are just, they’re, they’re busy.

They want more people in their sales pipeline and they just need somebody who can kind of handle it day in and day out and keep that consistency going and people who will do the follow up. So that is what we 

[00:46:19] do. But with that said, I’m gonna now open it up for questions and I’m just gonna remove that here.

So we have a lot of questions, so, I feel free to keep posting them in and, I’m gonna do my best to just jump in here with them. Evan, maybe you wanna scroll up to the top and see where I started left off. I’m gonna start here at the bottom and work up. So if Evan, you wanna tag team with me here and work your way down.

I’m gonna bring you on session here. This is Evan Evan’s, my right hand man. and but he, he kind of handles a lot of our behind the scenes stuff, so, and he’s gonna help with, making sure that we get these questions answered. So, I’m just gonna start here, right at the bottom with Jane real quick.

What are your thoughts on LinkedIn audio events? Jane, I’ve never actually done one, because I like the video format, a lot better, because I can do things like this where I can answer your questions and I can engage with people. Audio events don’t have that. Audio events are limited to a thumbs up or a heart and things like that, that that’s it.

You can’t really engage with it. So I, I, I’ve seen people who can get quite a few people on them. I don’t know that they’re effective. thank you Albert. Appreciate that. Dwight asks, does Restream work to allow a broadcaster to simulcast on other platforms like YouTube? Yes, it does. So if you’re live streaming to LinkedIn, you can, you can broadcast this anywhere you want, depending, as long as whatever platform you’re using will allow that.

And I know Restream will, the one we use is StreamYard. that one just tends to play really nice with LinkedIn. I know some of the ones that we’ve tried with other clients in the past, are good at streaming, but they don’t play as well with LinkedIn as we want. so that’s the one we use. But feel free to use anything that works well for you.

All right, and Melody asks, how long would your video clips be when repurposing content? As long as they need to be. I know that’s, that’s a terrible answer, but, if you keep an eye on my feed, what you’ll see is that however long it took me to answer a question, we will do these q and as as video clips, in our as content.

So if I spent 15 seconds answering a question, I’m usually long-winded. So they’re usually longer than that. that’s, that’s how long the, but that’s how long the video would be. If I spend two minutes answering one, that’s how long it would be. I try not to go much longer than that, but occasionally the, to kind of really get the essence of what was being said there, you need to go a little bit longer, but I, I tend to shoot for 60 to 120 seconds.

I see your other questions, melody. If I have time, I will certainly get back to them. LaDonna asks, Gary Ruplinger, do you recommend posting in groups? No. you know, I, I want to, I want to be able to say nice things about LinkedIn groups, but really the, the only, the only use we’ve, we’ve really seen from them is that they’re, they can be good for kind of doing outreach from a building connections and letting people know you’re in a similar group.

it can help to get responses. Otherwise, they’re just such a self-promotional pitch fest in the vast majority that I’ve seen that, and people don’t spend much time there. The only people who are spending time in groups, typically, at least on LinkedIn, are the people who are trying to promote themselves.

So unfortunately, like I said, I haven’t seen much used to actually being in groups and, and trying to participate in them. Just not, just not much. We, we never get anything out of them, unless we’re doing outreach to people in them, in which case we’re, we’re reaching out directly and just name dropping the group just to let ’em know who, why, why we’re trying to reach out to them.

Alright. Evan, do you got any from the top that you wanna jump in with here as I go through these next few here? 

[00:50:41] Speaker 2: yeah, I was gonna actually pick LaDonna, so that was perfect. perfect timing there. 

[00:50:46]  All right, good deal. If you got any others, just feel free to jump in. Otherwise, let’s see here. Next person.

we’ll go back to Melody Davis again here. Should you add a visual, not add a visual, add an attachment. Always drive to a website. so typically. I’ll kind of start from the, the, the end one there is the always drive to a website. Here’s the thing, LinkedIn, like most platforms, wants people to stay on the platform.

So they’re gonna put barriers in place of you driving people to a website, clicking on a link. For example, if you ever clicked on a link from a message in somebody, what happens is, is LinkedIn’s gonna say, Hey, you’re leaving LinkedIn. Are you sure you wanna do that? You don’t wanna do that. Why don’t you stay here instead?

they’ll let you go if you click on it. But those, those barriers there are in place for a reason in that they prevent people from leaving LinkedIn. so anything you can do to keep people on LinkedIn’s platform, they’ll be okay with it. So if your content can be in some way on the platform, that will be better.

in terms of adding visuals, test it out and try it. if it’s a post, yeah, you always want some type of visual if it’s outreach. Visuals could, can be kind of hit or miss. not, it’s, it, it’s kind of one of those, is it worth the extra effort to to do so? but again, feel free to play around with it, and, and see what works best for you.

But typically it’s, you know, you can do really well with just text in an outreach perspective and your content on the platform should have some type of visual element to it.

Alright,

let me see here. So, looks like you’re outside of my network, so it just says LinkedIn users. So, I’m gonna call you John, your pet. That’s probably not your name, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna say that anyway, so, okay. So, so question most of my target people, CEOs, GM managers are so overwhelmed and I feel they.

and under, and I feel they hardly find time to talk about things that are not strictly related to their business. Any approach, make your approach strictly related to their business. that, that’s, that’s gonna be your only way in with, with that is don’t, don’t dilly dally and don’t try and dance around.

The subject is just go straight for it. Here’s, here’s what I can, here’s what I can do. And you know, if, you know they’re busy, acknowledge that, that they, they tend to be busy. And how the, how that is going to help alleviate some of their, I’m so busy. I, I I don’t have time pain. So make sure that you know it, you’ve got that little promise of it’ll be worth the time in there a little bit.

alright.

I will, I see the comments there at the bottom. I’m just trying to grab some of these up here at the top. Evan, did I miss any? I’m gonna let you do anything that I haven’t gotten that’s not new. and I’m gonna keep the new ones here that are coming in. Okay? Okay. Any other from the top? 

[00:54:09] Speaker 2: looks like you got all of ’em.

[00:54:10] Okay, cool. Alright. All right. John Kosowsky says, my problem with LinkedIn events is the calendar issues when you try to set the date. I’m not, that’s interesting. I’ve, I’ve really never run into too many issues with, with the calendar for the most part. I think LinkedIn tends to do a pretty good job with that.

but, we haven’t run into, we’ve run into issues but certainly have not run into that one before. Emmanuel, we’ll make sure we get you, a copy of that flow chart. look for a message from Evan. after the event, he’ll, he’ll shoot it over to you via, via messenger. It might come from, from, from my account, just depending on which one of us has time to do the follow up afterwards.

fa ask, would you collaborate with a prospecting solution on LinkedIn events? It, it would depend on the solution. I wouldn’t say no, but I’m not saying yes either. Feel free to mention to me what it is and, if I think it’s a fit, it’d be something I’d be willing to, to entertain. ’cause I, it’s, it’s the type of content we like to feature, so if it was relevant and we thought it made sense, we would do that.

so feel free to reach out to afterwards and let me know, what it is. Gimme some details.

And, Emmanuel asks, do you see this working for accounting and tax practice? So, yes. However, it’s you, you’re, you need to, most of the accounting types of accounting is a boring offer. I, I’m just gonna say it, it’s, it’s boring offer, right? It’s, whether it’s accounting, you know, tax prep, bookkeeping.

It’s, nobody’s, nobody, nobody’s interested, right? It’s, but yes, the, the, the offers can be effective. But again, you need that content side of things. You need to get specific about things. and that’s where I think people kind of, that’s where I think most of the people who are trying to kind of promote this type of thing, kind of fall flat, is it’s, Hey, I’m an accountant.

If you’re interested in that, come, come message me and we’ll, we’ll chat and, Again, nobody’s actually interested in it, but if you have a specific solution that’s, you know, tailored to their industry, they’ll, they’ll talk to you. But it needs to, again, be specific and solve an actual pain point they might have.

Alright, white asks for live events like audio rooms. Is it better to do a trailer or a teaser clip and post it to build an audience for the event instead of just focus on an excerpt clip after the event for the rewatch value? probably would be better to do a trailer or a teaser clip. The reason that I oftentimes don’t end doing it is simply time.

my, my team tends to be pretty busy. so the extra effort to kind of build those ends up outweighing the, you know, the extra promotional value, whereas. Like I, like I mentioned, most of our attendees actually come from doing the invites, so actually inviting people and a little bit from posting about ’em.

If you have a really big following, like you’ve got, well, let’s say you’ve got a hundred thousand followers or more, then yeah, then you’ve probably got enough to make it worthwhile. But if you’ve got, you know, a thousand or 2000 followers, it’s probably not gonna make a difference, at least not enough to justify the extra investment into doing a trailer.

Whereas the clips after the event for rewatch value, keep in mind that you can leverage clips and let them know, Hey, this was a clip from my last event, here’s my next one that’s coming up. And for the most part, events are complimentary to each other, right? If you’re an expert on a certain subject, all of your events probably are somewhat relevant to the same person, so that if they’re interested in what you talked about in the last event, there’s a good chance they’re gonna be interested for the next.

So that kind of makes sense is unless, right, you don’t wanna be one month talking about, you know, a software solution for restaurants and then the next month is it’s, you know, an AI tool for consultants. where, where it’s just you’re, you’re spraying and praying and it’s different out to a totally different audience all the time, then you’d probably need a little bit different strategy.

Albert asks, when would you suggest we start promoting posting a flyer for an in-person event on LinkedIn? Well, that’s interesting. I guess it just kind of, there’s, it depends on, what your schedule is, and how much time you got to do it. I’d say probably at least a month, is kind of start, doing that.

Maybe if it’s, if for assuming it’s a local event, if it’s further out than that. Yeah. 90 days maybe. we haven’t done a lot with, with in-person, on the LinkedIn side just because it’s, we tend to get a lot more value out of doing the virtual streams. And then there can be other options for in-person types of things.

LaDonna, I, I see that we’ll get you a copy of the flow chart as well.

[00:59:38] Alright. And we’re getting pretty close to the end here. so if you have any last minute questions, please drop them in here. I think I’ve got, got a bunch of people saying they want copies of the flow chart. I see all of you. So if you want a copy of that, if I see your comment here, I I will do it.

There are some of you. Where I can’t see your name, the pri, your privacy settings on your account have restricted that. either you’re outside of my three degrees of network that I can see, or your privacy settings are, are a little too high. Please email me again, that’s Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

please email me and I’ll make sure we get you a copy of that. Linda, I’m, I’m not seeing your question. Can you ask it again? I, I, I, you probably, you probably asked it up there and I just skimmed through it, so my apologies if I missed it. But, oh, here’s one. Is this the one I, I think, I had a question.

Should stories be on video or just posts if video captioned? I do the videos simply because they’re very easy to repurpose. And I like the fact that the content is then in my voice. and since I’m tend to be the face of the company and the person people interact with, I like that aspect of it. so I do that.

Should the video be captioned? 100%, yes. I assume that everybody is always on mute, and Right, right. I’m assuming that they’re on their phone and, that everything’s on mute. And so they’re not gonna hear anything unless they see the captions and if the captions, are enticing to them and interesting, they might actually turn the sound on, but I need those captions to draw ’em in, in the first place.

so hope hopefully that, that was the question that you had mentioned. Okay. And. Flowchart. Flowchart. Flowchart. Absolutely. We will send it to everybody here. and I think that’s everybody. Guys, you’ve been great today. Really appreciate all your questions. And we’re at the, this is, this is, first probably for the first time and in like six months now we’re ending on time.

So I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna end at three o’clock. It’s three o’clock eastern. Thank you so much everybody. if you want that flowchart, again, email me directly. That is gonna be the fastest way to get it, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. otherwise we will go through the comments and we will get that sent out to everybody.

give me a couple days to go through all the comments there and, because there are quite a few of you there, and like I said, just, but if you wanna be on the safe side, ’cause I know a, there’s a handful of you here. That I can’t see your names, which means I can’t send it to you ’cause I can’t message you.

So just email me just just to be on the extra safe side. and yes, there will be a replay. Thanks so much everybody. Replay will be available in about 10 minutes. Take care.