Getting Clients on LinkedIn in 2023 – Fill Your Sales Pipeline

Getting Clients on LinkedIn in 2023 – Fill Your Sales Pipeline

In this Pipelineology livestream, Gary explains how to turn LinkedIn into a lead and sales generating machine for B2B professionals seeking higher-quality meetings. He covers optimizing a personal profile (photo, custom banner, headline, complete sections, featured/activity, and an “about” section focused on who you help rather than a resume), then building a network purposefully by connecting with relevant second-degree contacts and using human, interesting positioning. He outlines when content is worth doing, stressing consistency, audience relevance, engaging with others, and using new LinkedIn features like carousels. He then presents outreach best practices—be human, be relevant, use sequences, and make clear next-step offers—plus leveraging events and connection emails off-platform, and briefly recommends LinkedIn ad retargeting due to cost. Q&A addresses posting on personal vs business pages, second-degree filters, connections vs followers, InMail, and leaving connection notes blank.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
06:37 Agenda and About
08:13 Who This Is For
09:56 Profile Basics
13:20 Headlines and Examples
17:42 About Section Pitch
19:38 Build Your Network
23:32 Second Degree Strategy
28:20 Live Q&A Break
36:04 Is LinkedIn Right Audience
38:44 Consistency And Relevance
40:02 Algorithm And Engagement Tips
42:45 New Features To Use
44:44 Content Q And A
46:07 Outbound Outreach Case
51:29 Human Relevance Sequencing
55:46 Leverage Network And Ads
01:00:18 Offer And Open Q And A
01:05:46 InMail Versus Connect
01:10:04 Connection Message Advice
01:12:13 Wrap Up And Replay Info

Transcript:

[00:00:03] All right. Hello everybody. Welcome to our first event of 2023. How to, actually, that’s not the name of this one. This is How to Get Clients on LinkedIn, in 2023. let’s see here.

Oh, what is that? let’s see. We’re gonna delete those.

Alright. Welcome everybody. Who’s coming on? I think we got, got quite a few people coming today. I think I’m looking here. It says 963 people have RSVP’d. where, where’s everybody, calling in from today? We’ve got, I’m in, I’m in the Detroit, Michigan area in case anybody, is not aware. We got a bunch of snow yesterday.

anybody else get a bunch of snow yesterday or somebody, you know, calling from someplace warm and, and sunny, that make us jealous?

Alright, if you just hop on here, I see you do see some people jumping on the live stream. so welcome to everybody who’s joining. we will be starting on time in about two minutes. Shelly, welcome from, Florida, Chobin. I hope I’m saying that right. yes. The, the cool thing about these live streams is they actually are automatically recorded and kept.

but, I will let you know if you want to get like a, a copy of the recording as well. but for like, even if even right after it ends, you can go right back and watch it again. Oh, Gregory, welcome from North of Boston. Evan, you guys got some snow in West Virginia as well. Nice. Nice, Greg. Hey, welcome from Detroit, Brian from, outside Philadelphia.

Welcome. Oh, Peter, you, you might win the, the award for furthest away attendee from Finland. Very nice. Nicole from Toronto. Welcome. Oh, Jerome might have you beat there. Peter, I think South Africa. That’s, thanks for, thanks for staying up late, gentlemen. Thank you for staying up late. yeah, Shani, it is, it is summer there if I’m not mistaken.

In South Africa. Correct. Where I think we’re right in the middle of winter. You’re in the, in the hot time of year. Oh, Bangladesh, Faed, welcome Carolyn from North Carolina, Bucharest, Alabama, United Arab Emir to welcome, man. We’ve got, we’re, we’re covering all the continents here. We’re getting pretty close to having them all.

I don’t see anybody from Australia yet. Anybody from Australia. welcome from England. Lizette. Welcome from New York. Joe England, new England, Linda, Florida. Excellent, Romania. Very nice. Welcome, everybody. All right, we got about one minute left, before we get started, and, then we’ll get, get things going next.

Welcome from Chicago. All right.

I think everything, so it sounds like everything’s working. like I said, we, it is, it is in fact two o’clock, so, well, let’s see here. It looks like we got a bunch of people coming on. Unfortunately, I can’t see the, it’s, it’s weird. These live streams are a little out. I can’t see the live tally of number of people.

It fluctuates, like up and down, and then all of a sudden, like I’ll see 30 people and then another second later I’ll see 60. but yeah, I can see a lot of people coming on the stream now. So welcome everybody. Juan, welcome. Sunny Miami. I’m jealous. Alright, Jean Paul from Michigan. Me too. Alright, let’s get going everybody.

so today’s, this is gonna be our first live stream of 2023. this is gonna be how to get clients on LinkedIn, turn your LinkedIn into a lead in sales generating machine. and I’m looking forward to this one. It’s been actually a couple months. We didn’t do one in December. Normally we do one every month, but the holidays got the better of me and I was a little busy and did not manage to, to make it.

So, this is our first, first one a couple months. So it’s been a little while, so we’re shaking off that rust and getting going here. Let’s, let’s jump in to the presentation. Please bear with me. We’ve got a little bit different setup than last time. If you were on the last one, we’ve been using a new live streaming software and the slides are a little bit in, a little bit different places, but, I think we’re gonna, we’re gonna be okay.

All right. So few housekeeping items real quick. There is a kind delay of about 20 or 30 seconds, so if you post something in the, in the chat there, it does come in. I do see it, but it, it takes about 30 seconds. So, I am able to respond to questions, but it just will, it will feel like I took a while just to see it and reply to it.

I’m not associated with any of the people who’ve contacted you or noticed you were attending this event and wanted to connect with you. So, I don’t, I don’t know what they’re trying to pitch you, but, they’re not, they’re not with us unless it literally says they work at Pipelineology, which, unless you’re Evan, Evan Ner, or Kim, you are, you are not.

if you would like a replay, like I said, on the live streams, they just automatically show right up on the events page. But if you want one, once we finished editing it, so you don’t have to, you know, skip through the first five minutes or so of me just rambling about where people are from. please feel free to email Evan, that’s Evan at Pipelineology dot com and we’ll actually get you that edited copy.

if your question isn’t getting through or it’s too much noise or you know, it’s something that you have a question about but you don’t really wanna ask it in public, that’s no problem. Just email Evan at Pipelineology and, we can either cover it during the, the q and a at the end of this, or if it warrants a private response, then we will re reply to it privately at the end of this session.

I know that’s a little cut off ’cause my video is, on the bottom here, but, we can. Let’s see here. Wonder if we can, we can change that there. We’ve got the the option to do that as well. So now you can see the whole slides very good. Learning all this technology today. All right. yes, Gabriel, this is being recorded.

and like I said, replays will be available and you can go to the event page at any time and watch it without even waiting for us to get back to you on it 

[00:06:36] Agenda today. So we’re gonna talk about building your profile, building your network, which I think is one of the probably, these are some of the underutilized, parts of, of, of LinkedIn.

And then we’re gonna talk about content based approaches. We’re gonna talk about outreach based approaches, how to really leverage your network. We’re gonna touch a little bit on LinkedIn ads. Some of the LinkedIn ads can be tough, but there’s some things we’re seeing that can be effective. And then we’re gonna open it up to some q and a at the end.

All right, so real quick, the 32nd version of the About Me, I am the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology podcast, which we are, are gonna be putting out some new episodes again this year. We’ve been a little, little, lackadaisical on doing new episodes, but it’s one of our 2023 initiatives internally.

So look forward to some or look forward to some new content there from, some good guests we got coming up. I used to run call centers for car dealerships. So, basically our job was to handle leads and turn them into appointments, so that our salespeople could, ultimately turn those into sales for our dealerships.

I currently am in the business of helping clients get meetings, so basically I’m a, I run a business development company, I think is the easy way to say it. I’m actively seeking New England. IPA style beer recommendations. If you got any, please throw ’em in the chat. there aren’t a, there aren’t a whole lot of them, at least in my area.

like I said, I’m in the Michigan area. There aren’t a whole lot of New England style IPAs, out there compared to, you know, everything else it seems. So if you have any that you really recommend, let me know. I, I try and try ’em if I can find 

[00:08:12] them. All right, so who is this particular session for? it’s for people who, you know, work in business to business that are looking to get meetings that are looking to kind of build their sales pipeline.

So this works well for consultants if you’re a VP of sales or VP of business development or you’re, you’re a, a sales rep, a business development rep who’s looking for some, some help to get LinkedIn, make that a more, more powerful. tool for you to really get quality meetings. I’d say that’s what, that’s what LinkedIn does best.

LinkedIn’s not great at the quantity, but the quality there is is really good. The people who commit to meetings show up and, and convert at a much, much higher than average rate. and I, you know, people ask me where, where does, where does, where do pipeline knowledge, where does Pipeline knowledge get?

It’s, it’s, business from? I tell you, most of our clients do come from LinkedIn and YouTube ads are our number two. But, LinkedIn by far produces the, the higher quality, types of meetings for us. Keep in mind, we’re gonna cover a lot of information today. We’re gonna go through a lot of different, things.

You don’t have to do it all. You don’t have to try and do it all tomorrow. Pick something that you think you can do and, and start implementing it. And once you think you’ve got that, you can start adding more. ’cause I feel like sometimes it’s kind of like a fire hose. We’re gonna throw a whole bunch of stuff at you.

Things that we’ve learned over the course of years and have tried, and now we’re trying to condense it all into about a 35 minute presentation. so it can feel a little, a bit overwhelming. So do what you can. Pick something that’s gonna, you think, you know, this could, work’s, gonna kind of fit your time constraints and your skills and, and start 

[00:09:55] there. So without further ado, let’s just jump right into your profile. Like I said, this is kind of what we wanna build everything around. And keep in mind when I’m saying your profile, I mean your personal profile, I don’t mean your business page, your company profile. Those are good to have. But at the end of the day, LinkedIn is built to be a person to person networking site, which means people to people.

So your profile is far more important than your company page. Sorry. That’s just the, that’s just the way it is. So even if you say, well, I, you know, I, I don’t really wanna people to see my face or anything like that. If you’re on LinkedIn, my advice is, is get over it. but let, let’s kind of talk about kind of what, what you wanna do on there.

And really some of the basics is just make sure you fill it out. Make sure you’ve got a, a profile picture in place. A, a picture of you. I know some people will use caricatures or some people will use the new, image generator ones from, oh, it’s not Dolly, it’s the other one. I can’t, there’s, I know there’s a few of ’em, but they’ll use those, those, and those look good too.

So. The one that actually looks, you know, looks like you don’t post your company logo there, you know, put, put a picture of you. ’cause that’s what people want to see. And that’s, you know, it makes, it makes a huge difference in terms of how successful you are in getting, you know, people to actually connect with you.

also I’d recommend, you know, putting up a custom background image, the stock default ones that LinkedIn has are, are pretty boring. And you can put, you know, you have so much room to be creative here. It can be, you know, anything from, you know, another picture of you. I if people, if people have it, I recommend you have a, a picture of you maybe speaking from on stage.

If you’ve written a book, you can put up a picture of that. you can put information about what it is you offer. all all kinds of creative ways to do it. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna see a bunch of different ones, as we kind of go through this. so, underneath your picture, you’re gonna see that’s kind of your headline area there.

and I recommend, you know, putting what it is you do. So you’ll see that I’ve got, you know, founder of Pipelineology. You know, I help businesses land high value clients. I put that I’m a podcast host in there, and I put some kind of fun, personal stuff a little bit there. again, because it’s, it’s a human to human, you know, thing.

So if it’s, you don’t need to be all business all the time, yeah, this is a more professional network than say, Facebook or TikTok. But nonetheless, you can have a little bit of fun. So I put Meme aficionado, beer enthusiast, and I’ll tell you, you know, that, that, that starts a lot of conversations. beer enthusiast people, people will, will say that or they’ll, they’ll shoot me a meme as a, as a message.

and, and that gets, that breaks the ice and that gets the conversation going. Other things I do would recommend is just kind of fill things out completely. Put your website there. I think that’s open to everybody now. you know, put what company you’re at, put what school attended, just so that it looks more complete and there’s not a lot of empty white space there.

So those are some of the basics there. We’re gonna look at some others 

[00:13:18] here. like I said, the headline is really important. ’cause if you look on the left, and I know it can be a little hard to see, but, when people connect with you or when you post a comment, that’s what people are gonna see. So you may as well use it.

So you can see the top example there I’ve got from MM Chavez. you can see all sizes. You know, PPC, Amazon Ad Consultant, kind of doesn’t really give any other information, whereas, you know, look at Kevin Holmes beneath it Operational Head. I help businesses dominate search engines for any keyword. And, you know, if you clicked on it, it would have all the full, full amount of information there. So you get, you get the space there. You may as well tell people, you know, what you do, who you help, things like that. Or, you know, have, have a little bit of fun with it. Throw some emojis in there. Again, just make sure you kind of are filling everything out there.

’cause this will make a big difference in how well people connect with you. They see you, they know, oh, this is the guy I should connect with. This is the person I should reach out to. So fill, fill these out here. And I know I do see some questions coming in and I will kind of, at the end of every kind of section, I will, have Evan help me, grab those questions and we’ll, we’ll do our best to answer them.

John, if you’re at the epicenter of, new England IPAs, you, you gotta tell me what you guys are, are drinking up, up, up there in the northeast. Anyway, be interesting to your target market. So this is Damien. This is a, you know, we’ve worked with Damien to help him get clients and what I will tell you is Damien, more so than anybody else we’ve ever worked with, was the epitome of somebody connects with him and says, Damien, let’s talk.

I’m interested in what you do. we’d probably get one or two of those people a week. And if you’ve got a good profile, that’s, that’s kind of what happens is you, you, you don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to do any content. You don’t have to be, you know, doing a lot of outreach. If, if you’re doing this well, have a good profile and are getting in front of the, the right people and you’re connecting with them.

You’re gonna get some of this, I’ll just, just, it’s it’s gonna happen. Now I realize, you know, one or two meetings a week probably isn’t enough for most people. And this was a, a little bit of an edge case in that most, most clients don’t get this. But it, it was interesting. Well, I get interesting background.

Got a good profile picture. You know, if you look at his, his whole profile, you’ve got good information there about what he does, who he helps and things like that. so it doesn’t have to be just a straight, you know, here’s exactly what I do. It can be, you know, here’s some of my side projects. We’ve got this, tech witch, show that he, that he works on.

So, and that, that got people’s attention too. So, be interesting to your target market. Some other examples here, this is Brian Carter. you can see here the reason I grabbed this profile as an example is, he chose to put, some of his, speaking event stuff, put his, but that he’s an author and at the top, very top you can see there.

I know it’s a little bit, hard to make out. Sorry. I know. some of these things don’t, they look much better when I’m, I’m on my, my screen and a full, 4K. but, you can see companies that he is worked with in the past in Microsoft and Hardee’s and, NBC and Salesforce and Citrix and and, and on and on.

So we call those, you know, little, little pieces of flare to just kind of show what, you know, some, some companies people have worked with says, oh yeah, if they’ve worked with big companies, he can probably help us too. So, you are probably not gonna be able to read this one, so let me just kind of walk you through it.

If you’re, you wanna see an an, an example of an about section? Go to my profile and just scroll down and read it. That’s I don’t think, I don’t know if that’s the current one I’ve got. It might be, if, if you wanna see, you know, what exactly that one is, just email Evan Evan at Pipelineology dot com.

He will send you a screenshot of what that actually is so you can read it and if you want model it. You don’t have to, I’m not saying that’s the one way to make a, a LinkedIn profile. I’m just saying it’s a good 

[00:17:41] starting point. So the about section is what I would call, it’s a good place for copywriting fundamentals.

This is a really safe place to make your pitch, kind of tell people what you do, who you help. Kind of put the, those, those features and benefits in that all in one place there. So what I will tell you is that what, this is not, this is not where your resume goes. This is not a great time to talk about your work experience.

What you wanna do is let ’em know, you know, about who you can help and what you do. you know, if you’re, if you’re looking to get clients on LinkedIn, use it for that. If you’re looking to get a job, yeah, then stick with resume or work experience. That’s fine. If you want clients though, this is, like I said, make, make your pitch.

Tell people like you, like you would on your website. Here’s what we do, here’s how we can help you. Here’s what you should do next. So, and I’ll kind of finish up here with, make it complete and, use the featured section, use the activity. So featured is where if you’ve made a post or shared a video or something, you can kind of basically pin that to your profile so that next time somebody comes by, that’s the one they’re seeing.

Activity, it just shows kind of rolling activity, things you’ve commented on, things you’ve, you, you’ve posted kind of all your most recent activity and you know, it’s good to have that because it makes it look like you’re, you’re a more real person. Can’t tell you how many times, and you’ve probably seen it yourself where somebody connects with you and you click on it.

You say, I don’t know if I wanna connect to this person. You click on their profile and you’re look, and it’s just real thin. There’s very little information. There’s no activity. You can tell it’s really just a shell account. That’s, you know, immediately there just to pitch you. So, you know, give recommendations, ask for recommendations, put your work history in there.

Just, just fill it all out, alright? As, as you want it to be, as complete as 

[00:19:36] possible. So we’re gonna move over to building your network purposefully. But before I jump into that next section, Evan, can you just let me know are there any, questions that kind of came up or anything we need to cover here before we move on to the next section?

[00:19:58] Evan: I don’t see any, any questions that stand out, but as they come in I will save them. 

[00:20:05] Perfect. So if you do, if you do a new question and we did miss it, just, you can message us, message us again, during the q and a and, I apologize if we did miss, miss one, but we’ll, we’ll jump onto the next section here then.

So building your network purposefully. So on LinkedIn, you’ve kind of got two types of, I guess, what they call connections. One is called followers, and as many people, anybody can follow you. So just think of this more like Twitter. You could have, you could have, theoretically, you could have a million followers.

You could have 2 million followers. There’s no limit to them. But, there’s also, there are some kind of communication limits to those in that, you know, you can’t invite them, invite them to events. Your messaging can more easily get filtered. And then you’ve got what, you know, I would say you, you want more of is connections.

These are limited to 30,000. So that’s, that’s still quite a few people. And these are people that it’s more easily, more easy for you to communicate with. You can message them freely, you can invite them to subscribe to, you know, your newsletter, attend events. you can get their contact info, which we’ll talk about some info, you know.

Talk about some ways that that can be leveraged and they’re just a little bit, you know, it’s easier to message, you’re not getting sent to the filtered messages section, which we, we do see, for example, when we do follow up after our events with people, if it’s not somebody that I’m directly connected with and I’m kind of looking through, the comments over here and I’d say it’s about 50 50.

I’m connected to about half of half of the people here, and half of them have come from outside my direct network. So, but we want to be building connections that we think would be a good fit for what we have to offer. it’s kind of like, you know, if you’re running ads, you know, it’s kind of how you, you dial in that, that ad targeting might, you know, depend.

Where do these people, where do these people live? What type of job title do they have? What type of industry do they work in? how big is the company they work at? And on and on. So the, the more you can kind of dial this in and connect with the right people, the more you’re gonna have the proper, the right connections to grow your business and get more clients.

And, I, I see this done quite a bit where people will kind of connect willy-nilly. And I, you see this, you know, somebody comes and they’ve got 20,000 connections and I’m thinking, this is great, this be really good and effective. and you realize that, you know, well, you know, at one point, you know, I bought some connections and then somebody said, well, you know, I’ll just connect with everybody who, who tries to connect with me.

And all of a sudden you, you realize you, you’ve got a network, but only a, you know, a thousand or a fraction of those people, of the 20,000 are the right types of connections. I’d recommend trying to build your network purposefully. People that you would wanna either network with, that can help you, you know, give you introductions, expand your network of people that you would ultimately want to, you know, become a client to yours.

So how do we do that? So let’s talk about, first we want to be somebody they want to connect with. And I’ve talked about this. This is humans connecting with other humans. that’s, it’s not businesses. They’re not connecting to your business page. So be a human, be interesting channel, your inner most interesting man in the 

[00:23:29] world.

You want to connect with people who can, could be prospects for what you offer and they kind of fit the profile. So you can see here on the, this image here, and I, again, I will tell you for, like I said, I know these are all a little bit small, but this is a sales navigator screenshot. And these are people that we’ve chosen, said, okay, we want people who work in software development.

We want companies only up to 200 employees. And you know, I want to connect with the leadership at that company. So that might be somebody with a title job, title of founder, chief executive Officer, partner, things like that. And one of the tricks here, and it’s up in the top, the top section’s, the very first one there in green.

And the under connection, it says second degree connections. If you are trying to connect with people on LinkedIn, always, always, always check that box and make it say second degree connections. It, it is gonna be probably five times more effective people will it. It’s like getting an introduction at a, at an event versus trying to make your own one’s much harder.

One’s. Very easy, right? It’s really easy. Hey, have you met, have you met Evan yet? You know, have you met, have you met Vincent yet? Have you met Ken yet? You know, I’d like to. I, he, he’s, he helps these, these people. So, and that’s what kind of the second degree connection is. They look and say, oh, this person’s already connected to, to Tatiana.

They’re probably okay. I can connect with them too. So always use that if you’re, when you’re building your network. some accept, I would say rarely are there exceptions? Maybe if it’s somebody in your city, you can get away with not using it. Maybe if it’s somebody who went to the same school as you around the same time, you could get away with it.

But even in those cases, I would highly recommend using second degree connections. So, just, just kind of a little pro tip there. We’ve, we’ve tried many, many times, and we still occasionally try just to see if we can do it, and ultimately, every single time. It fails. So use second degree connections if you’re trying to add new people to your network.

Some other things. So we’ve already talked about mutual connections. you know, the more well connected you are to a particular industry, the more easy it is to connect with other peoples. And this works across every single industry. and it can even be, you know, government organizations you even found with, with politicians.

If you’re connected with the mayor of one city, they’re probably connected to other mayors and it’s easier for you to connect with mayors. I, like I said, we haven’t found a single industry where that doesn’t matter. You always want those, those second degree connections. They, people will connect better to people who are like them, that they might see as more of a colleague.

So if you are the, you know, the VP of sales, you’re probably gonna find yourself most easily connecting to other people who are in a, a VP of sales role. you know, or in some type of similar role. For example, dentists. By the way, if you’re targeting dentists, it’s really, really hard to do on LinkedIn.

I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you are a dentist, you can in fact connect with other dentists. If you’re not, you’re gonna have a tough time of it. Same with, same with most of the medical, industries. If you’re a doctor, you can connect to doctors. If you’re not a doctor, find somebody else in the organization to connect you.

like I said, make sure your profile picture is a person, make sure it’s public. I see that once in a while where somebody will, will connect, send a connection request, and it will just show as a gray question mark where it doesn’t have a picture of the person. If you click accept, well, yeah, then it shows ’cause they, they’ve set, have their privacy settings set that way.

but people will not connect in general with people who don’t have a picture. so just kind of keep that in mind. if you, you set it to private, you, you shouldn’t be trying to build your network by sending out connection requests. And, and finally, kind of other types of job titles that will help.

If you are a professor, maybe you teach at, teach at a community college, you know, you can, you know, put that, that you teach, you know, whatever class that is. If you have a PhD, absolutely put that in there. Author, speaker, podcast host. We found all of these can definitely help increase your connection rate.

Anything interesting about you. So you don’t need any credentials at all to say something interesting whether, you know, you like half, right? You really like coffee, maybe you’re, you like to bake cupcakes. we’ve tried all kinds of ones that are a little bit, off the wall, spreadsheet geek, you know, things like that.

Just something that just kind of breaks up the Manhattan of all the, the request person typically gets these will all 

[00:28:17] help. Alright, I’m gonna just take a quick look, see if there’s any questions here before we jump in. Any more questions about, building your network work?

Melissa, I got, I see yours here. What if you’re working a couple jobs at a time? I’ll pick the one you want to, to, to focus on. You can put the first one, first, second, one second. and that’s totally okay. oftentimes people will have, you know, multiple things they’re working on or maybe they, you know, an investor on the side and they, you know, working, working a job.

Pick the one you want to feature first and then kind of put some of the other things you’re doing. In there too. if one is just totally irrelevant, you don’t want to put it out in there. You don’t have to, you can kind of say what what you want. Evan, are there any other questions I missed here?

[00:29:16] Evan: Yeah, we have a question from Katera. Sorry if I am pronouncing that incorrectly. they ask, do you recommend posting content on your business page or your personal page to track clients 

[00:29:27] personal page? every time it’s, it’s okay to up updating your business page isn’t gonna hurt anything, it’s fine. You know, LinkedIn will occasionally send you a notification if you don’t saying, Hey, your people who follow your page haven’t heard from you in a while. But ultimately the visibility is a fraction of what you’re gonna find, that your personal page is going to get. like I said, it’s just, just kind of the way LinkedIn has designed it is that they really, you know, your personal stuff is just gonna get a lot more attention than business page stuff.

Any others? 

[00:30:05] Evan: yeah. Kiva asks, where did you say you can click for the second dropdown? 

[00:30:12] so a couple, couple ways you can do it. If you’re doing just a regular LinkedIn search, it’s gonna be right across the top, right under the search bar, under, I believe it’s under people. I don’t have it pulled up at the second.

and then you can click either first, second, or third plus degree connections. Just check the second degree one if it’s in Sales Navigator. it’s right on the left hand side. It’s one of the top ones. there you can go back here. I’ll just go back a couple slides just to show you. It’s under connections.

So it’s, it’s literally the, the top one under connection, there. Alright, any others? 

[00:30:49] Evan: yeah, John Paul asks, should I deactivate old pages? 

[00:30:55] Prob probably if they’re just not, not relevant anymore, and they can kind of go into the, you know, history books there. but yeah, if they’re not, if they’re not relevant, you can just deactivate that page and you can, like I said, if they’re not operating anymore and just kind of leave it as part of your work history.

if it’s still running, you can certainly leave that link there to the, you know, companies that you’ve worked with in the past or have managed. But, they’re not, they’re not super important to, to leave, leave around if, if the company’s, you know, defunct or anything like that. Old profiles. guess if you, you oftentimes LinkedIn doesn’t really like you to have multiple profiles.

you can see people kind of getting, a slap on their wrist, if you will, from having multiple profiles. And they’re all of a sudden, you know, you see two, two or three profiles and now have the exact same picture. Things like that, it could say, Hey, you know, like you’re using something against your terms of service.

’cause LinkedIn says you can only have one profile per person. so I, I probably would just to be safe if, if you’re, if you’re not using them, I, I probably would just try and have, have one that you kind of feature there. I see another one just popped in, from Camilla. Hope I’m saying that right.

Is it necessary to write my English language at my profile? I’m from Brazil. I’m asking ’cause that’s what most people says. It’s better. so what I would tell you, Camilla, is my question would be for you is are you trying to reach an audience that speaks English? are you targeting people in the United States or Canada, Australia, you know, the uk places like that, you know, are the people you’re trying to work with, do they speak, are, are they primarily English speakers or, or are, are you working on people in Brazil that speak Portuguese?

In which case stick, stick, stick with your home turf and stick with your home language. so I guess it really just depends on who your market is. For example, if you lived in France and your clients are French, guess what? You can fake all your posts in French. so it just, it matters what people say here.

It looks like if you are gonna stick with the English language stuff, I would probably hire somebody to help you write. ’cause it’s, it, it doesn’t read the way a native would read that. so get, get somebody to kind of help you write it. because it, it’s gonna, it looks really, it looks, I guess what I’m trying to say is it looks like it’s not your first language, which obviously it’s not.

but it’s tough. It’s tough to kind of read. Gabriel, I see yours there. Let’s see. What if I would like to connect with people in different countries, but offering different services? Sure you can, you can certainly do that. You know, the, the hardest thing is, you know, what language do they speak? If they all speak different languages, it’s, it’s gonna be tough.

I would kind of pick a lane and, and try and stay in it, if the language is gonna flip, but, connecting with people in different countries with different services, it’s fine. you know, you can, if you, especially, you know, if you’re, the biggest challenge is really just kind of manage those different, ones or, or not.

this one’s see LinkedIn user, sorry, I’m, I’m sure you have a name. It just doesn’t show for me. So, it looks like you’re kind of outside what My network can, can show articles and activities set to public or not set to public. Yes, I would absolutely recommend that.

Liz, how much do you use groups with posting content? I’ll be honest, I don’t use groups and I, I know, I know for what I, what I found is that people groups are just not very active on LinkedIn and we just haven’t found them to be all, all that terribly useful from a connection standpoint. It hasn’t been terribly fruitful.

So we, we just generally skip it. we find it’s, it’s better to just not, not to not go the group, group route. not saying other people can’t be successful with it, I’m just saying we, we don’t have any experience, doing that here.

Michelle, we’ll cover that one later, so I’m not gonna. Pull that one up right now. So I think I’ve got ’em all a, answered here. So I’m gonna move on here just so that we’re not, not doing q and a only halfway, middle, middle of the presentation. So, but I will get back to that one. Michelle, Evan, just if I don’t answer that one, can use, make sure to, to note it later, so that we do talk about it.

But I think, I think we’ll kind of cover some of that. So let’s talk about content and then we’re gonna talk about outreach. So, but let, before you decide that you’re gonna post content regularly and engage on LinkedIn, I actually want you to ask yourself this 

[00:36:03] question. Is my audience on LinkedIn? And, and, if they’re not, then this is not a good strategy for you.

Now, lemme give you some examples of people who are and aren’t, and there’s a whole bunch of in the middle. But if you’re primarily trying to target restaurant owners, they’re not, I, I can just tell you right now, if you’re looking for contractors like you, especially the small, like home repair people, plumbers, electricians, you know, handymen also very not, not very active.

The bigger the bigger companies are, where they’ve got, you know, people working in the office and you know, VPs and things like that. But the guy who’s out, you know, unplugging toilets all day, he’s not checking his LinkedIn profile. trust me, we’ve tried, we’ve tried to get that guy, we can’t, haven’t, haven’t really found it.

So posting content means, you know, you are essentially trying to engage to a, a. To an empty stadium. There’s nobody there. It’s, you’re, you’re probably gonna find that that’s not a very effective way to do it. Quite frankly, even the outreach thing that we’re gonna talk about later is gonna be tough. I would even probably say, you know, cold email or cold calling is gonna be more for, for you, for something like that.

But, so the other thing I would mention is that there’s not like a magic formula that works every single time that you’re gonna, you know, write this type approach or write with this style or use this, you know, use a pole two times a week and then, you know, a carousel, content carousel, you know, five times a week or whatever.

It doesn’t quite work like that. There are some things that will help and we’re, we’ll talk about those. And then finally, the thing I want to remember about this is that. LinkedIn is a little bit different than some of the other social media platforms like, Facebook or, TikTok. Whereas Instagram, where they’re very sticky, people spend an average, I think it’s like 45 minutes a day on Facebook if you have an account.

whereas on LinkedIn it’s 17 minutes a month, a month. People generally tuck it, check LinkedIn once or twice a month, and they leave. So there are, there are some active types of, communities on here though. Like, for example, people in real estate mortgages, very active. They’re very, you know, networking centric.

Anything where, where networking is a part of what they do. obviously consultants, marketing people, they’re fairly active on the platform as well. Authors, things like that. So if you, if you’ve got those audiences and those who you’re trying to reach. You might try the 

[00:38:43] content approach. So let’s try, let’s kind of talk about some other things you wanna do is you wanna be consistent with it.

So if you’re saying, you know, we’re gonna post three times a week, great. If you can kind of maintain that schedule for months and months and months, good. But if you say, well, I can commit to it for, for a month. but I don’t know if we can do it much more than that, I would probably say, okay, what, what could you do for, what could you commit to for six months?

Can you post once a week? Could you post, you know, maybe post once a post every Monday in a, a poll every Thursday. Okay, so consistency does matter. ’cause it can take time to kind of build that traction and get things going. I would write with your intended Audi intended audience in mind. So if you’re trying to write to, you know, people in, in real estate, you want your topics that you’re.

Posting about primarily to be relevant to those people, things that they would wanna read. so it’s not, Hey, you know, I was, having, having lunch today and I learned about this, new game called Wordle, you know, things like that. An occasional, you know, personal interest story is fine, but you know, if you’ve got an intended audience, write to it so that they can engage with you.

so that LinkedIn shows it to more of those people. 

[00:40:01] Right. That’s, that’s one of the things I feel like gets kind of understated and don’t have a specific slide for it. But, and other, other platforms work the same way too, but the type of content you engage with will tell LinkedIn that to show you more of that.

And it’s not just, you know, if it’s, well, if you participate in polls, you’ll see more polls. That makes sense, right? People, people understand that one. But if you click on political content a lot or engage with that and you’re gonna see more of that, and if you block political content and you don’t engage with it, you’re not gonna see much of it.

it’s just kind of one of the obvious examples. ’cause I can, I can see that with different clients that we’ve worked with. ’cause we, we, you know, help them with their clients and kind of see what they’re seeing. and you see the ones that are really kind of engaged with that, see a lot of that. And the ones that aren’t very rarely see any of it.

same thing if you, you know what chat GPT is, all the rates right now is, it’s right at the beginning of 2023. So this will probably be a really dated statement, but right now, like that’s really popular and you know, and I’ve clicked on a bunch of that. So I see even more content than that, than average, but.

other people may not ’cause they don’t have any interest in it. So LinkedIn, LinkedIn wants to show you content that it thinks will keep you on the site, as much as possible. So just kind of keep that in mind when creating content as well. and what I’ll tell you is don’t worry too much about the vanity metrics, you know, the likes and things and the shares, that stuff will come.

but it, it can take time as you’re kind of working on fine tuning your voice and your messaging. you don’t have to just kind of do the little cliche, you know, daily motivational posts and stuff like that. Honestly, I, I would skip it and, you know, like I said, really it would be much more effective for you to post once a week, something that’s unique and well thought out, than, than to post daily motivational things.

It, it really would. I, I engage with others and share their content too. This is is another one of those ones where you say, well, what if, why, why would I, you know, why would I engage with their stuff? I’m trying to get my stuff out there. It does help. You’re engaging with people, you’re sharing their content.

People will share your content. They’ll engage with you. They’ll, they’ll see you, you know, engaging on, commenting on somebody else’s post. If you’ve built that profile that we talked about right at the beginning, you’ve got that, you know, good, good tagline there, and you’ve got a good profile. People will click on that and then they’ll start to read your stuff and they’ll start to see you ’cause they clicked on you.

So then LinkedIn says, oh, I should show them some of that stuff. So doing that will, will help quite a 

[00:42:42] bit. When LinkedIn has new features that they’re pushing, I recommend you use them. For example, if two years ago we were having this, we were doing this same presentation, I would tell you you probably want to be doing video.

You wanna be trying to get, live video, enabled on your account. Now everybody, as long as they’re not in the doghouse with LinkedIn gets, gets access to it. but that was two years ago now it’s, it’s still, it still works, but it’s not the, and it’s not the super end all be all that it used to be.

And then last year it was polls. Polls were really popular, super, to the point where they were annoying, really. there’s, you still see quite a few of ’em, but they’ve kind of toned that down. one of the ones now is the, the content carousels. and you can just Google what that is, but, the LinkedIn carousel things where, all of a sudden it’s, you know, they’ve got 10, 10 slides.

So the LinkedIn slide thing where you click on that and it’s a different, you know, basically picture or screenshot or, you know, quick little slide that, you know, talks about some type of topic and people will click all 10 of ’em and it gets a lot of engagement. And that’s one of the features that right now LinkedIn is trying to push.

But if you’re trying to take a content approach, use the new features that they push out. ’cause LinkedIn features them more ’cause they’re trying to get people to use that particular feature. So, kind of stay on the cutting edge of that is kind of the goal there. And once something stops working, like, LinkedIn stories, it would’ve probably been about 18 months ago.

LinkedIn stories was like, oh, this is gonna be the next big thing. And they killed it a few months later ’cause nobody used it. but for a short time it could get you more exposure. but it didn’t last long. So, but do try out the new features, it’ll get you more people. So that’s the content approach.

Like I said, there’s no magic formula, but tho those are some of the keys to doing it. before I move on to that. Evan, what questions do we have there? I’ll take, I’ll take three of ’em before we move on to the next, section. Just kinda wanna make sure we’re, we’re getting through the presentation, today yet.

[00:44:57] Evan: Yeah. We just have one question and it’s from Michael and he just asks, will I drive my network crazy by lacking too many posts? And he just mentioned that he tries to support his network, by lacking their posts. And I pretty much just answered that by saying, what really helps is like leaving really unique comments and referencing the post.

And then Ken kind of touched on that as well, if you wanted to kind of give your thoughts. 

[00:45:20] Yeah, I, I would say, you know, liking posts, I, I don’t think that’s gonna hurt, anybody or drive them crazy. People who are posting want to see, you know, their, their stuff get liked. So I think you’re doing the right thing if it’s, if it’s something you like, like it, you know, and you’re trying to support your network.

I mean, I, I, I know as somebody who posts once a while, I, I like when people like my posts, so, I think other people do too. I don’t think you’re driving anybody crazy, by doing it. I would, I would certainly continue to do what you’re doing there. Alright, I, and I think we’re, we’re pretty good there.

We’ll just keep going on here. Like I said, I wanna make sure we get through everything. If I did miss something, Evan, just grab me at the, at the end here with the, with the 

[00:46:05] question. Alright, so next thing here, we’re gonna talk about outreach. So we’re gonna do a little bit of, a bit of my disclaimer here first though.

So, right. Lots of books have been written, you know, even bestselling books have been written about attraction style, content marketing. And, you know, it, it’s, it’s all luing, right? It can, people will just come to you. You don’t have to go out and try and do any business development. People come to you, they apply to work with you, you know, and this can, and right, it can make you millions.

You can get keynote speaking, all that jazz. In the business to business world, the big dogs do outbound and they make billions doing it. Billions. right? You think about, downtown of your nearest big city, right? Think about the big buildings that have their names on ’em. I, I could tell you probably nine out of 10 times those companies, all of them have outbound sales, enterprise sales teams that need to go out and approach people that cold.

They need to develop relationships, they need to build them. And, you know, anything from, from Xerox to even current companies like Amazon, Google, they’ve got cloud services that they’re trying to, you know, get, get companies to migrate to Amazon, or excuse me, apple. Apple has an enterprise sales team for education, right?

They want to get their iPads into schools. so they’ve got people who are out there building relationships there too. So outbound is something that, you know, fortune 500 companies use. They’re gonna continue to use and, you know, they’re gonna do everything else too, but out outreach is going to be one of the things they’re doing it.

remember, I know people will tell me all the time, well, people don’t like outreach. You’re absolutely right. People will also tell you they don’t like TV ads, radio ads, Google ads. They throw away all their junk mail and they don’t want to go to another tedious networking event. Basically, people don’t like anything, right?

I mean, it, it, it doesn’t matter what it is. There’s somebody’s like, I don’t like that, or, I hate when people do that. I hate when an insurance agent calls me up and asks me to give referrals, right? It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. So, bottom line, nobody’s going into the office today hoping today is the day they get your pitch, but people do respond positively, think to things that they think are gonna help them.

And their company. So we’re gonna talk about some outreach approaches you can use that can work on LinkedIn. these can also work with cold email and, cold calling and things like that. This is specifically for LinkedIn, so we’re gonna focus in on that. So part of the reason, just think about it, is the reason you see so many messages from people is that, you know, when done right, it’s effective.

So let’s talk about, you know, we’re, we’re here to provide information. You can say, I don’t like it, I’m not gonna do it. That’s no problem. Use some of the other tools we talked about here. You can say, you know what, I can see, you know, I see other people doing this. I may as well do it too, because I, you know, gonna help me build my business.

Exactly. So two of the things I like here is that, you know, this can be more easily outsourced. For example, if you have internal teams like business development team or sales team, this is something that’s a little easier to do than the content approach. ’cause it doesn’t require necessarily that consistent, unique voice, that unique writing, that unique content creation approach.

This can be more, a bit more grinded out type of approach. So whether it’s an internal team or a third party team, it, it’s, it’s better suited to that. So outreach can be the, the more effective approach there. whereas like I said, content is hard to outsource and do well, people try, but it’s, it’s, it’s much, much harder to do.

And oftentimes the results are gonna come faster and kind of help you hone and refine that offer and message. And one of the reasons I kind of like it, and one of the reasons I think that the quality’s good there is that there are built-in limitations to it. Right. It’s not as easy to scale if you’ve ever tried it, and you said, oh yeah, we’re gonna connect with 10,000 people this month.

No, no, you’re not. No, you’re not. you, you might connect with 400. LinkedIn’s got a lot of built-in barriers to that are basically there to slow you down. And they do. But, you know, you’re, you’re a lot more limited with, how many people you can connect with. You’re limited to how many people you can message on a particular day.

So you do have to kind of think about how, how do I connect with just the right people? I can’t just take a shotgun approach and blast everything. You gotta really think about how do I connect with just the right people? What, what is the type of messaging that I want that’s gonna kind of lead them most likely to the next step to whether it’s, you know, check, you know.

Accepting, you know, some information that we send to them, watching a demo video, you know, meeting for 15 minutes, to, you know, to network, something like that. so it does definitely require you to think a little harder than, well, I’m just gonna go on to one of these sites and buy, you know, oh, there’s 50,000 emails.

I’ll buy those, and boom, boom, boom, click a few buttons and boom, we’re all, we’re, we’re sending, we’re spamming people. 50,000 emails a day. right. Shotgun approach. If you can deliver ’em, you’ll probably do okay. But the thing is, you’re gonna get shut down pretty quickly on that too. So, the nice thing, like I said, the nice thing is it’s, it’s 

[00:51:28] limited.

So what you wanna do then, if you wanna be effective with it, one big thing, the biggest, biggest thing here I wanna mention is be human. these are other people reading them, right? If you message me, I’m probably gonna read it. It’s not, you know, you know, I’m a robot checking ’em and saying, no, no, I we’re not doing this.

It’s, it’s not a business, it’s a person. so here’s one. That. and I think, you guys can see it, okay, if not, I’ll kind of read it here. But, you know, somebody who wanted to, you know, connect with me, they listened, said they li they said they listened to one of my podcast episodes, and, he said, let’s connect.

And I said, cool. What, which episode did you listen to immediately? Just apparent, I’m sure this wasn’t probably Alex here, right? It’s probably some third party that he had hired. Some, you know, business, you know, some prospecting team that said, oh yeah, this is what we do, you know, we’ll, we’ll connect with people.

Didn’t read the message. Any response is a good response. Immediately pitches me. Right? This, all of a sudden you, at this point, they lost me. I, I didn’t, I didn’t really engage after that. I just disconnected and, and moved on. So. For, for, so what I’m basically saying is the bar’s pretty low. If you could just act like a human being and respond to people with, you know, if they ask you a question, reply to it with, you know, an answer.

You, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re head of, you know, half the people out there trying to do business development work on, on LinkedIn. so, and, and if you’ve got somebody who’s doing this on your behalf, I want you to emphasize that. Just be a human. Not everything is just copy and paste the response. Go ahead and, and, you know, engage with ’em in conversation.

Like compliment, you know, something on your, you know, some something you’ve done. Thank them. You know, so remember that. Be human. Other things, relevance. Relevance is really, really important. Right. If you are, trying to, to pitch the, let’s say, you know, the, the CEO of a company, you know, are, is, is your message relevant to that person?

You know, a lot. And the thing is, a lot of times you see ones that, that aren’t, it’s, it’s not, they’re, they’re not connecting with the right people. Or they’ll go and they’ll say, oh, sales navigator’s got all this cool information, or, or, you know, I did this search and I’m just gonna connect with every director level position out there.

And you just end up with people in the wrong departments that have, you know, no say, no influence and no interest in, in talking about what you’re offering, right? If your, if your offer is meant for the marketing team, connect with people on the marketing team and not, you know, the people that work in, the office and doing, you know, HR and accounting and, you know, things like that because it’s not relevant to them.

And then they’re just gonna say, I’m not interested, and that’s gonna hurt your overall campaign. if you’re doing outreach, I recommend using a sequence, right? Have multiple messages, follow up with people. Very, you know, people oftentimes aren’t responding, you know, on that first one to say, oh, yeah, you know, I, I’ve heard about you.

I, you know, we are definitely interested in what you have to offer. Can we set up a time to meet? It’s pretty rare. It happens once in a while. but it’s far, you know, it’s, it’s more the exception than the rule. And finally, you know, in the world of outreach is make some type of offer. What do you want to happen next?

Now, I’m not saying to pitch, you know, say, do you wanna buy my stuff? No. Do you, you know, can I send you some information about this? Can I, I have a demo video. Can I send that to you? Hey, I’ve got a case study. can we, can we send that over? Things like that. May, Hey, do you mind if I, you know, I’m looking to connect with more people in my network.

Can we, meet for a 15 minute, virtual cup of coffee? Something like that. Tell ’em what you want to do next. So some people will say yes, more people will say no, and that’s okay. But that’s, you know, that’s, that’s business development. Alright. we’re gonna just gonna kind of crank out these last few slides, Evan, and then here we’re gonna, Message. we, we can get into the questions there after that, but I just wanna make sure we get this finished up because I, I know we’re getting close to an hour here, and I wanna make sure that I’m respectful of everybody’s 

[00:55:45] time here. So, a couple other things here is now leveraging your network. So we’ve talked about, you know, your profile.

We’ve talked about kind of building your network. and this is again, why I, I kind of always kind of pound in that whole, build your network worth the purpose, connect with the people that are, are relevant to you or relevant connections that you’re, are the right people to connect to, or they’re connected to the right people.

because you, with events, you can invite your network to them, but if you’re doing it on topics that don’t interest them, they’re not gonna accept. And, as your network gets bigger, for example, I think we’re a little, my, my personal one is a little, it’s almost a 21,000 people. I can’t possibly invite my entire network anymore to, to events.

I’d like to, but you’re limited. So. we can get a few thousand of ’em invited before, you know, before outside market just capped out. So I want to invite the most relevant people. And for me, that’s consultants. you know, people who work in, in software, they work in, sales, they, you know, some coaches and things like that.

You know, those are the people, people who work at marketing agency. Those are the people that I want, you know, to, to invite because those are the people most likely to become clients for me, I would say, you know, for you, who are those people so that you can, you know, engage with them as well. So. Events are kind of a, a nice way to really kind of foster a relationship with people in your network that maybe you don’t personally know, but they’re interested in what you have to offer and they’re, you know, more than more interested than just, oh yeah, I’m connected to that person.

No, I’m, I’m interested enough, I went to their event, you know, I saw them talk, I asked ’em questions, things like that. So it helps move that, move that relationship forward and ultimately, you know, can turn into meetings and, and eventually sales clients. So that’s what we want. And, a couple other things you can do here is you can leverage your network off platform.

as I mentioned when, that’s why I said, you know, those 30,000 connections are, are precious. when you connect with somebody, about 90% of the time you’re gonna get their email address. Now, I’m not saying to spam them, but you can certainly use that to, to follow up with somebody, you know, to send a, you know, if somebody says, yeah, go ahead and send me some information, and they wanna receive it via email, you, you can use that.

You mean just a, an effective way to may. Maybe it’s somebody who, you know, they just don’t respond on LinkedIn because like we said, they’re only on for an average of 17 minutes a month. And that’s average, which means half the people are on for less than that. Some people might only check it once or once every other month.

so that’s where, you know, hey, you know, you connect with somebody on LinkedIn, they don’t respond to you. Maybe, maybe next month you say, you know, Hey, I noticed we connected on LinkedIn, you know, last month. I didn’t hear back from you. No worries. If you’re like me, you probably don’t check your messages very often, so I thought I’d shoot you an email instead.

People will respond to that. Okay. And then finally here, I I, I, like I said, I said I would touch on this with LinkedIn ads ’cause it can be an effective way to grow after you’ve done some of this other stuff. I, I don’t usually recommend people start here unless you’ve got a pretty big budget. You’ve got a lot of experience in the, in this realm and you’re doing other advertising as well.

’cause LinkedIn ads are expensive. They’re on average, probably, I think, I think when I checked our numbers, LinkedIn ads cost three times as much, based on a, on a per click basis. but what I would recommend is kind of start backwards, is start with retargeting. So what I mean by that is people who’ve, maybe they’ve visited a certain page on your website, they’ve they’ve, they’ve checked out your business page on, on LinkedIn. They’ve, they’ve shown some interest in you already. This is an opportunity to get back in front of them versus somebody that’s totally cold. ’cause like I said, it’s, it’s a little expensive. It’s kind of, this is for really, it’s kind of designed for, for big budget players who’ve, who’ve got quite a bit to work with.

but the retargeting can be effective because you can filter them very specifically, and just get the right people. So, that, that would be how I would recommend using it is retarget people. See if you can make that effective and then kind of move on from there. But, given the cost is, I would start with the retargeting.

So, oh, oh, take a, take a drink of coffee here. Alright, so it’s 2 56, so we have just a few minutes left 

[01:00:16] here. Real quick. I’m not gonna make a big, big, big to-do about this. If you are interested in learning more about the services that we do offer, basically you want some help with this. You know, you could, you know, you know, it can be an effective tool for you, but you just don’t have the time.

or you just don’t have the experience to really kind of turn this into a, you know, a, a effective sales tool for you. But you see the potential in it and you wanna talk about that. You can go ahead and schedule a call with me, pro Pipelineology dot com. it’s got a video there that kind of explains what we do, kind of explains our concept.

you can schedule a call from that page or you can just email me and we can, we can put some together there. like I said, I’m not gonna make a big, big, big pitch about this here. I just wanna mention that it is available in case you need some help there. Basically, you want more sales calls on your calendar for you, so it frees up your time so you can focus on other activities.

’cause I know business development can be a bit of a grind, so. With that said, I will open it up for q and a, and, we can kind of go from there. Evan, you wanna, you wanna jump in? Pick, pick ones you like and we’ll, we’ll go from there and I’ll, I will try to answer as many of them as we can get to.

[01:01:30] Evan: Sure, yeah. We have one from Gabriel. they asked would it be better to connect with managers who would use your software, or is it better to connect with C-level? 

[01:01:41] Well, that’s a, that’s a good question. So I would, if, if we were kind of on an onboarding call and we were kind of discussing this, the thing I would ask you is are these, do these managers, how much influence do they have?

Like, how big are these companies? Are they several levels down from making a decision or are they. Are they decision makers? that, or at the very least, decision influencers. And that’s, you know, and if, depending on kind of the, the ticket size, if these are, you know, fairly high end software packages, I would target both.

and this is, this is kind of one of the old, Xerox strategies. So right. Xerox in its heyday was like the, the, the sales training company for a while. because, you know, their, their techniques worked and the way they would, would have you connect with somebody is you want to be kind of connected to people in that organization.

So you want people who, if the ceo, CEOs are oftentimes right, CEOs can be pretty tough to meet with, especially as the companies get bigger. But you want, when that, that topic comes up, that, you know, three people in the room say, oh yeah, we like that. We’ve, we’ve talked to that guy. We like what they have to offer.

We should look at that. Right. You don’t want ’em to say, never heard of it. Dunno if it’s any good. So, You know, it, it, I would say, you know, if, if you’ve got the bandwidth for it, I would connect with both and kind of figure out, well, who’s, who’s got all, can these influencers be my champion? And you’ll see that a lot in corporate spaces where, you know, somebody may not be the decision maker.

I know, for example, in my corporate career, I was not for a, for a good portion of, it was not the ultimately the decision maker on, on advertising things we did. But, I could certainly had a lot of influence if I said, I recommend this. I’ve talked to them, I think this is a good idea. There’s a very good chance that we would go with it.

And if I said, no, that was terrible, there’s pretty much that you could count on that being, you know, a, a solid no. So they, those managers may not have the ability to say yes, but they. There’s a good chance they would have the ability to be the, the champion for you that you need in those, those upper level meetings.

So, depends, like I said, depends a little bit. If you can do both, great. But, you know, tr try it out and see. but good question Gabriel. Thank you. Alright. Evan, what else you got? 

[01:04:08] Evan: Oh yeah, this question is from Satchin, I think that’s how pronounce it. 

[01:04:12] Gary: Alright. 

[01:04:13] Evan: they said I have 26,000 followers and my posts generally receive good engagement with impressions rating from 5,000 to 25,000.

The challenge is that in the current Zoom heavy environment, it has become more difficult to convert leads into business as I previously had a 90% success rate when meeting people in person. How can I replicate this success in a Zoom setting? 

[01:04:37] Hmm. you know, that’s a, that’s a really interesting question ’cause I, I would, I would be one of those people who tell you that, you know, I’ve, As somebody who I, I don’t actually really like using the phone, so all my meetings are done via Zoom and you know, my office here, I’ve, you know, I, I rarely ever actually physically meet with people anymore and it, it’s been better for business. But if everything was kind of built on, I guess for me, I’d say what, what are some of the things that would happen in person that you can’t do via Zoom?

and what’s, what’s changed that? It’s, it’s not as successful because, you know, I’ve, I’ve found that Zoom is, is very successful. and doesn’t, it’s not quite the same as a, a meeting and going in and shaking somebody’s hand. but you can get pretty close to, to kind of replicating that. So, I’m guessing, I guess I’m gonna say, you know, it, it should be possible to do.

I just, I wouldn’t know without really kind of digging into the, the, the details there of what’s, what’s different. But, thank you for the question. What else we got? 

[01:05:46] Evan: Yeah, we have another one from Saeed. They asked for outreach. Do you use InMail or do you connect it with a message? 

[01:05:52] Both. I don’t see that one in my list here, but, if I did I’d pull it up, but we’ll just kind of go over that.

So the question is, do you use InMail or do you use connection and then outreach to those new connections? And, here’s kind of, so if you’re not familiar with what InMail is, lemme kind of quickly cover that. Is InMail is essentially LinkedIn’s like premium. You can message anybody’s service. So if you’ve got one of their premium plans, IE you pay LinkedIn every month.

They give you a certain number of these to use every month. And if you, have, some, and basically if other people have LinkedIn or premium LinkedIn accounts, you can message them without using up your limited credits. ’cause usually it’s like 20 or 30 credits a month, which isn’t a whole. Excuse me, which was, which isn’t a whole lot, but if you’ve got, you’re only messaging other people who have premium accounts, you can, I think it’s about 800 a month that you can do.

So you get, get a whole lot of bandwidth, there. So the question is, do you use that or do you use connections? we use both. And I’ll tell you that the which one we p prefer depends on who we’re reaching out to. for example, if, let’s go back to kind of that example of, of contractors, as I mentioned, they’re, they’re pretty tough to reach out to.

’cause they’re not active on the platform, they’re also not very likely to have InMail. so if you said, you know, we’re gonna use an InMail strategy on that. You know, in about two weeks you’re gonna have exhausted the entire country’s worth of, of people who have premium accounts that way. So there just aren’t enough names basically to, to do that effectively.

So you’d have to do it the other way. But in other industries, like, like consulting, mortgage real estate, ones like that, where it’s a lot more common for people to have premium accounts ’cause they’re trying to do business development too. It can be a pretty effective way if you write a good message to get people in fast.

the more mature our campaigns get, probably the, the less and less we use it. There are things that kind of use more early on to kind of get some momentum going. but, you know, ultimately I wanna get those connections. I think, you know, for, for me, we’ll probably kind of come full circle on that. probably in about 18 months my account is gonna be maxed out on connections.

So we’re gonna have to kind of use other strategies like more content, more events, more live streaming, and more InMail to do it. So they’re both, they’re both good. InMail is good. email can get a little noisy, right? There’s a lot of people doing it. but so it comes down to the quality of that message, right?

A good message and people will respond. that’s the same, that’s pretty much the same for any type of prospecting though. The better your message, the more unique it is. The more, the better it’s delivered, the better your results are gonna be. good question though. Very good question. Alright, Evan, what’s next?

[01:08:49] Evan: this next question is from Brian. They ask, do you recommend the default button on your profile to be the connect button or the follow button? 

[01:08:57] Gary: Connect? follow Again, follow is is fine. if you’re really trying to do a lot of content, the the connect one, you know, for, for me. Connecting, accepting connections is kind of pretty low on my priority list is something I will, will go through.

And I, I’ll usually accept people if I, you know, if, unless they’re pitching me in the connection message, in which case I’m just gonna ignore them every time anyway. but, you know, connect connections are good and you can get relevant connections can be good people to connect with. follow once, you know, once you’ve got a really large network already, maybe you don’t want more connections, but, especially early on, kind of, if you remember when we’re trying to intent purposefully connect with people, we want second degree connection.

More connections, more means more second degree connection. So you do want a good, a good kind of baseline of connections to, to be able to, to leverage that. Or it can be a little slow going at first. good question though. Alright. next, 

[01:10:02] Evan: one last question here. This is from Steve. He asked, is it too passive to stay upfront?

Something like, I’m not connecting to sales service here and now, but to keep in touch so that when that day comes and you are in a buying cycle, you’ll be able to quickly reply to me. 

[01:10:18] So this probably isn’t a direct answer to your question, but here’s what I would recommend Steven, and I know we didn’t, we didn’t touch on this earlier, but, one of the things that does come up a lot is what’s, what’s kind of the best message for connecting with people?

And what I’m gonna tell you is leave it blank. Don’t send a, unless it’s somebody you like, went to a trade show or like a, some type of conference, you know them personally, I would leave it blank. And we’ve, we’ve tested this at best, writing a message there to somebody who doesn’t, you don’t actually know yet.

At best it’s a draw. So you put all this effort into coming up with a really good message, and nine times out of 10. I’m gonna outperform you by leaving it blank. And the 10th time will, will, will, will be a tie. So, in fact, that, that whole message is, I would not, I would not use that, at all. Just delete it all.

You know, this is one of those times where you, you know, it’s counterintuitive, but leaving it blank is actually better because people are just more likely to accept it. I don’t, I don’t know this necessarily, the psychology or reasoning behind it, I would suspect is because people have gotten accustomed to anything with a connection message that isn’t, you know, Hey, we met at that conference last week, or, Hey, we met at the Chamber of Commerce meeting, last night.

We’d love to connect with you here on LinkedIn. If it doesn’t say that they, they know that you’re just there to pitch ’em, even though you said that you’re not there to sell ’em. but they’re, they know it’s, you know, coming, don’t, don’t tell ’em you’re gonna pitch ’em. Just connect with them. so I know, like I said, probably not quite the answer you were expecting there.

but yeah, I would just. Skip all that, delete it and go, go blank. any, anybody else? anything else, Evan, that I missed here? 

[01:12:10] Evan: No, it looks like that’s pretty much all the questions. 

[01:12:12] Okay. Well, you guys asked some really good questions this time. I’m, I’m actually really, really happy when we get, you know, kind of good participation like this from people.

I know. I appreciate everybody kind of coming and taking some time outta your day. so thanks so much for coming everybody. the replay, like I said, email Evan, if you want to edited up version of it. If you just want this though or you didn’t catch the whole thing, as soon as we end here, it takes like a few minutes to process it.

The whole thing will be right on this events page. So as long as you SVP to this event, getting clients on LinkedIn in 2023, it’ll be there for you, to rewatch and, you know, if there’s different sections or you want to stop and pause on something, you can do so. So thanks everybody. Really appreciate it.

And we’ll see you next month.