Getting Clients on LinkedIn – What’s Actually Working Now (Hint: Not AI)

Getting Clients on LinkedIn – What’s Actually Working Now (Hint: Not AI)

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live on what’s working on LinkedIn amid algorithm chaos, repetitive trends, and AI “slop.” He recommends ignoring the algorithm and focusing on two tactics that don’t depend on it: LinkedIn events and direct outreach, which he says pair well together. He explains why native LinkedIn livestream events outperform external webinar links due to lower friction, and notes replays, repurposed clips, and email-list building as key benefits even when live attendance is low. On outreach, he emphasizes deliberate targeting (often via Sales Navigator), human review of lists, and cautious use of engagement-signal lists. He advises against AI-generated messages, suggests an AI prompt only to draft ideas, and stresses offering specific meeting times (not unsolicited calendar links) with gentle follow-up. He mentions StreamYard for streaming and previews a June 23 event on making meetings productive.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Roll Call
03:18 Housekeeping and Replay Info
04:42 Agenda and About Gary
06:53 LinkedIn Feed Chaos
08:58 What Works Now
10:59 Events Plus Outreach Framework
12:14 Why LinkedIn Events Win
13:30 Event Titles That Convert
15:45 Native Live vs External
18:46 Attendance and Replay Reality
21:11 Repurpose Clips and Tools
23:57 Build an Email List
25:07 Switching to Outreach
26:28 Outreach Still Works
27:13 Target the Right People
29:45 Human Review Over Automation
30:56 Engagement Signals Strategy
33:45 Avoid Preaching to Choir
35:49 AI Prompt for Messages
37:41 Booking Meetings Without Links
40:26 Events Plus Outreach Combo
41:41 Time Crunch and Help Offer
42:45 Live Q&A Tools and Tactics
46:47 Define Outreach vs Events
50:05 Set Up LinkedIn Events
51:14 Wrap Up and Next Session

Transcript:

[00:00:01] All right. Welcome everybody to today’s LinkedIn event, what’s actually working on LinkedIn right now. And sorry to disappoint you, but no, it’s not ai. Or maybe maybe that’s something you want to cheer for. So welcome everybody. I know notifications have just started going out, so I’ll give everybody a minute or two here, to, to hop on and then, we will get things, started.

So. this is your first time here. Welcome. My name is Gary Ruplinger. I’m the founder of Pipelineology, based out of, the Detroit metro area here in Michigan. And it is actually a beautiful, I would say, perfect, spring day. It’s, like sunny and 70 degrees. So hard to, hard to get much better than that.

how was, how was the weather in your neck of the woods? Where’s, where’s everybody from today? It’s always kind of fun to see where. Where everybody’s joining from. There’s almost always, you know, the people where it’s always perfect weather, you know, Southern California, I’m looking at you. And then, you know, the rest of us who, who suffer through, through all the, you know, ups and downs and seasons.

So, Let me know where you’re you’re from, and like I said, we’ll get started here probably in just just a minute. ’cause I know I always like to be respectful of the people who actually take the, who take the effort, who make the effort to show up on time, by starting the sessions on time and not I, because I hate when people do that.

Well, we’ll start five minutes late and then by the time we get done doing introductions and things like that. You know, you’re 15 minutes in, you’re like, I got, I got places to be. Let’s move it along please. So, mark, appreciate you hopping on great to great to great to see that everything is working. it’s always, I’ve, I, I live in fear of that day when the LinkedIn live stream just is, is broken and nobody like you, you do a whole session and nobody sees it.

So. Great to see everybody hopping on. Yeah. Let’s see. We got Charleston, South Carolina in Fort Lauderdale on Naples. Lots of lots of people in Florida here today. welcome everybody. And carries up in an Avoca, Michigan, never. I’ve never been there, but, Let’s see here. SoCal is chilly today. You don’t have the perfect weather, Craig.

I am un unbelievable. Unbel get, you should, you should write a letter, you know, complain, complain to somebody about that because I feel like any, if I go into Southern California, I want the weather to be perfect at all times. Alright, well, appreciate everybody. Feel free to keep, chiming in in the chat.

I’m gonna get things going here. And we’ll get, we’ll get this session underway. So welcome everybody. this is your first time here. My name is Gary Ruplinger. I am the founder of Pipelineology, and today’s session is what’s actually working on LinkedIn right now. And it is not ai. Thank, thank goodness.

Something that’s, you know, gonna be a session where we can actually talk about something other than just ai, ai, ai, I mean, right. You can watch a Google keynote or something like that and get, get that if that’s what you’re 

[00:03:16] into. a few housekeeping items. There’s usually about a time delay of about 20 or 30 seconds from when I say something to when you hear it on your end.

won’t look any different down your end. It just means that if you ask a question, And I respond to it, we won’t be able to kind of have a back and forth conversation very easily. So I will try to answer questions as completely as possible, to try and get the, the answer there. ’cause it’s a little, it’s a little harder to have a, a complete back and forth.

But I do encourage ’em, love to see your questions in the chat. So please put ’em in there and, we’ll try and flag ’em as they, they come along so they can get answered at the, during, you know, breaks and stuff like that during the presentation. replay. I know I get the ask this one quite a lot. Yes, the replay will be available and if somebody pops in, let’s say 10 minutes late or 15 minutes late, there’s almost always somebody says, Hey, is there gonna be a replay or is this recorded?

And since I’m gonna be presenting, if you could just jump in there and say yes, just wait till the session is over and click the refresh, refresh button on the page. And it’ll be right there. Usually it takes like less than five minutes now to process. LinkedIn’s gotten pretty fast at, it used to be that it could take up to 24 hours.

Now it’s real fast. Usually by the time I click the end button within 60 seconds, it’s there. So, and if you wanna be notified of future events, please go to Pipelineology dot com slash events. Throw in your email address and I’ll make sure you get an email, there first. 

[00:04:41] So. Today’s agenda we’re talk a little bit about kind of the state of LinkedIn as it is with.

What seems to be consistent algorithm chaos in some fashion, you know, the AI slop factories. And then we’re gonna talk about kind of what to do about it and really kind of the two areas we’ll be looking at today in depth. They’re going to be LinkedIn events and using outreach and then kind of discussing how they are.

Very complimentary. Peanut butter and jelly-like pairing, they go go together surprisingly well. And then we will finish up with a round of q and a. So if you’ve got questions, like I said, please post them at any time they pop in your head. And I’ll take kind of the ones in each section as we go along and then come back to anything I missed at the end, or if we’ve got, you know, more, more ones that are gonna take a little bit longer to answer, we’ll grab those at the end as well.

So. Real quick about me. I’m the founder of Pipelineology and host the Pipeline allergy podcast, by the way, I’m always looking for great guests. If you’ve got somebody you wanna suggest, you think somebody would be good on the show, we kind of, it’s usually a B2B marketing consulting themed show. send me an email.

I would love to, would love an introduction. Would love to hear somebody think that’d be good for the show. And yes, you can recommend yourself, but it’s totally cool. As long as you can tell good stories. We’re gonna be, we’re gonna be cool and have a good time. So. Back in my corporate days, I ran car dealership, call centers where my team would handle all the inbound leads and do the, you know, phone calls and text messaging.

Set of scheduling appointments for, for locations around the country. And these days, kind of take some of that skillset to do outreach and pipeline development, sales development pipelines, for, for clients, a lot of times working with consultants, small teams, SaaS companies, things like that. And I am actively looking for New England.

IPA beer recommendations. I find that to be one of the more interesting, beer styles in my, in my humble opinion that’s out there. So let’s kind of jump into the presentation today. So lemme kind of change my view here a little bit so we can see, see the 

[00:06:50] slides. But lately on LinkedIn, you’ll, you’ll see that there’s been, it, it’s just, it’s kind of felt like chaos, right?

Is there’s been, you know, it’s like from basic, you know, there’s like one thing that is just flooding the, the, the feed that people are complaining about. Right? This week, if, you’re watching this live this week, it’s the new Ferrari car. Everybody’s complaining. It’s every other post in my feed. Last week it was the Spotify logo.

And so on And so forth. It seems like there’s always like one thing that just gets stuck versus where I, you know, in my opinion, if I see something, I read it, I look at it, cool. I don’t need every other post to be about the same, same damn thing. And I see here a couple people mentioning that, if you, you’re, if you’re, you’re getting, no sound, I think a lot of people have said you may have to rejoin or you may have to refresh.

I know sometimes mobile can be a little inconsistent. The, the one, the website version should be good. but again, just click refresh and usually that sorts everything out. But it is being recorded. And we’ll make sure we’ve got a good recording we can send out if you do run into to long-term issues during the session today.

but back to the algorithm, chaos. it seems like between repetitive things, ai, slop comments And so on And so forth, that it’s just tough to, it’s, it’s tough to be on LinkedIn these days sometimes. and I know LinkedIn, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re saying, Hey, we hear you and we’re doing something about it, and they’re gonna get rid of, you know, you’re gonna see a lot less of AI comments and kind of these low quality posts, things like that.

So, so thank goodness it should be more fun for us, but. Also kind of a i’ll, I’ll believe it when I see it. ’cause I feel like sometimes LinkedIn’s a little little bit slow to the party, even though right? They’ve got all those Microsoft dollars floating around. Microsoft dollars are going to AI right now, so.

So a little bit of a challenge. so that’s kind of the, the 

[00:08:57] scenario here. So kind of what, what do you focus on? What’s actually working then if content’s been very unpredictable and that has very much been the case, it seems like for most of 2026. Anybody who’s, Trying to, you know, post consistently and engage on the platform has, has found it to be a struggle.

’cause it seems like it’s really tough to gain traction and get that consistency. So here’s my recommendation to you is. Forget about the algorithm. Just let’s, let’s just say, let’s let LinkedIn get that, get that figured out and then we’ll we can go back to how do we post and do that kind of stuff. Let’s focus on two things that really don’t rely on the algorithm, almost at all.

That’s LinkedIn events and good old fashioned outreach. I will give an honorable mention to leaving thoughtful comments as they are still a really good way to kind of bring people into your profile and, and see what you’re saying. not a great, I’ve not found them to be a great. lead generator, but a good awareness generator anyway, so, but the events on the outreach however, are much better for actually driving business, though they do take a little bit more extra effort.

So those are gonna be two things we’re gonna be looking at today, but. At the end of at, if you take one thing away from here, the bottom line really is just, just be human. Just kind of take that approach is is right in, in a day. In a day of increasing automation and AI agents and all that kind of stuff, focus on the thing that that makes you use.

Just be human, talk to people, have conversations, tell stories. And you’re gonna be way, way further ahead than if you go lock yourself in a closet for the next two months. You know, programming the perfect AI agent, digital twin, whatever, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, to pretend to be somebody, to pretend to be you, when you could just spend those two months just being you and, and be, be way further ahead.

[00:10:58] So. Here’s kind of the process we’re gonna be looking at today. I know this, this is small, so if you’d like a copy of this PDF, just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. I’ll send you the high resolution version, but feel free if, if your screen’s big enough to just screenshot it and take it from there.

So, no, no big deal. But. Essentially what we’re gonna be looking at is, is, is using LinkedIn events and outreach together to find new, find new connections. You know, get them interested in what you do, reach out to them, try and engage with them, and ultimately try not to, not only to get meetings, but to land new business.

So that’s kinda the process. We will go over that in more depth here, but I just kind of wanted to give you that snapshot profile of. Here’s the, here’s the overview of what we’re talking about today, and then we can kind of jump into it. So. If you are one of those people who says, this is all great, but I don’t have time to do this.

I don’t even have time to stay for the whole section today. We do have a done for you program. We’ll do all the heavy lifting, you can go to pipeline knowledge.com, schedule a call and kind of learn more about it there. But I always like to mention it early in the presentation because I know that some people are going to to run out of time towards the 

[00:12:12] end.

So why LinkedIn events and not just sending out email blasts about webinars or, or podcasts for that matter. And the reason I like the LinkedIn events is ’cause they’re, they’re highly visible and it’s still one of those things that LinkedIn still makes very easy to kind of engage with. So. Say for probably 99% of people here, you probably heard about today’s event from either me or somebody on my team sending you an invitation just like this, that you got a little notification on LinkedIn and it said Gary Ruplinger, or whoever it was on my team, is inviting you to attend.

what’s actually working or what’s working on LinkedIn, right now? hint, not ai, right? That one. and you had the chance to click Accept, ignore, or if you clicked on the link, you could get more details about it. And the nice thing is, is that if you click accept, cool, you signed up for it and it was, it was just that easy.

So that’s, that’s kind of the difference between say, you know, rent something out of email blast or something like that where it’s, you know, multiple clicks and multiple links and registering and all of that. Where it’s here, it’s click accept or click ignore and cool. You’re done, you’re signed up, you’re 

[00:13:27] in.

So let’s talk about kind of the most important part of that whole section there then, is the topic, right? The topic’s gonna have the biggest impact on whether somebody says, you know, I am, yeah, I’m interested in that, or I’m not. Right. Everything else is pretty, pretty boil in place. It’s got the time and the date there, it’s got a profile picture of you and, only people are sending out invitations.

Even if you, even if you say, Hey, I’m gonna do this through my business page, the invitations get sent from a person. ’cause that’s how, that’s how invitations, tend, tend to work. And I tell people that kind of all the time with, with, when they say, well, you know, I’m promoting my business. Should we do outreach through my, my LinkedIn account?

And I say, you can’t. Business pages cannot connect with people. They can’t message people. ’cause they’re, they’re businesses, they businesses advertise, people talk to each other, people connect with each other. So just kind of think about it from that distinction here. So even if you’re doing it through a business page, it’s still gonna be coming from a person.

So you get 75 characters to work with. I recommend using them all. And I would say make sure people know it’s for them. I’ve seen this happen quite a few times where you, you, you kind of think, well, I, I’ve got this really clever title, but then you’re sending it out to people who are in the manufacturing space or the HR space and they, they look at it and they say, it looks, looks generic.

Whereas just, if it’s for, if it’s a session for salespeople. Tell them that, you know, it, it, it will make, it makes a difference there. So just kind of letting people know that, hey, this, this is who it’s for. things like that. And kind of lastly is with the topic, is solve small problems. There’s, there’s a tendency to get really ambitious and kind of broad and overreaching in, in, in your titles.

And what you’ll find is the bigger and broader and more ambitious, the scope of your. Your, your title or your LinkedIn presentation is the fewer people are gonna say yes to it. so the more you can kind of find something that’s, that’s small and narrow, topical things like that, the the further ahead you’re gonna 

[00:15:43] be.

So let’s talk about kind of formats here. There’s really two options right now, and that’s the native livestream. So the livestream is what you’re watching right now where it runs through LinkedIn’s platform. And then, you know, some days are like this where some people keep getting kicked out and having to rejoin, which makes you, is always a little bit frustrating.

But I appreciate everybody bearing with me on this. But, so this is the native live stream. And then the other option is kind of doing what’s called an external event. So something that’s hosted and done off the platform, which would be something along the lines of like a Zoom or a Microsoft Teams or, or, or any other type of webinar hosting technology.

And I’ll tell you, I recommend even, even with the technical difficulties that you might every once in a while run across. The native live streams pretty much always went out because you’re gonna, it makes it, again, it’s that ease, ease of use factor. There’s no clicking external links, there’s no trying to register and get, get on somebody else’s platform.

There. You’re not bouncing between there. As soon as you, you’ve signed up on LinkedIn, if you clicked into to the, to the event. It’s right there. You can see it playing in the background. You click the little join button and you’re there no extra, you know, steps necessary. And it’s all within LinkedIn. So it’s all already all where you’re, you, you are for that.

plus, you know, LinkedIn’s got notifications. So if you have those turned on on your mobile device, things like that, you, you’re gonna get all of that kind of built in. So. I recommend sticking with the live streams unless you have a, a very specific reason for doing them, because you’re just gonna see so, so many people who kind of fall off and are no longer on the, and just don’t make it to the session.

And trust me, getting people to attend a live stream anywhere or an event is hard enough as it is. So don’t, don’t make it worse on yourself. By kidding, even fewer people. and just to kind of show you what I mean, here on the left hand side, you can kind of see this is what my live stream kind of format looks like.

And that big banner there, once the live stream is, is happening, it automatically flips over to a live video feed and you know, there’s just a join button there. Right. So there’s, there’s just that friction is gone. There’s no extra clicking versus you look on the one on the right hand side looks very similar, but you see, okay, now I have to click on this event link, and is that gonna take me to where I actually wanna go?

Do I have to do a separate registration? And guess what a lot of people say, yes, you have to register again. So it, it all just becomes a lot of extra points of friction and you will see a very big drop off. In the number of people ver doing, attending a live stream versus that actually go and, and and attend, that, that one on the other 

[00:18:44] side.

But still, at the end of the day, most people won’t attend live. And that’s okay. So for example, I think, if I remember right, we had, a little over 1600 people who registered for today’s event, which is, is great. Big number. Huge, right? Looks great. And typically, you know, it’s gonna be, I don’t actually have the live counter up ’cause I can’t, the platform I’m using here, I can’t see the little live counter at the moment.

but it can be anywhere from 20, 30, 50 people who will show up live. And you say, gosh, that’s terrible. Kind of is. but. What ends up happening is that these notifications that LinkedIn sends out, Hey, you know Gary Ruplinger is live. He’s hosting this session that you signed up for. They’re gonna get this notification the next time they pop onto LinkedIn as well.

So remember, link people aren’t on LinkedIn as much as they are, say like YouTube, where they might use it for 45 minutes to an hour every day on average, or Facebook or some of the other ones. LinkedIn’s not as sticky. People aren’t honest frequently, so it’s entirely possible that somebody just completely forgot, missed it, didn’t, didn’t, didn’t see it, but they wanted to.

So they can check some out the replay later. And that’s what we see is that the performance will see a. A lot of people who will watch parts of it after the fact, so maybe only 50 people saw it live, or 40 people, or whatever that number is, right? It’s not great, but all of a sudden you look two days later and now it’s 400 people or 600 people.

Like in the, in the example here. so you get a lot, a lot more traction from it. And do those people turn in And so yeah. Lot, lot of times that those are the people who reach back out and say, Hey, I’m interested in this, or, Hey, can we talk about this a great session? Things like that. So they’re, they’re almost as engaged as people who are.

Are are coming here on, on, on the platform live. It’s just right. They, they can’t quite comment and things like that. But overall, it, it really helps. And I, I know Renee says, yep, sounds like wedding RSVPs is right. You gotta. You gotta keep, you gotta keep tracking them down for that. I got married a couple years ago, I remember.

It’s like, okay, who’s get, get back on that person? Are they coming? Who’s coming? What’s going on here? track ’em 

[00:21:10] down. But here’s the thing is once you do the, the event. The, the benefit of it doesn’t just stop there and it doesn’t stop with the replay either, is you can now take that recording and you can repurpose it and turn it into short little video clips.

And now here’s the thing is this is not gonna go viral. These aren’t, you know, gonna be masterpieces of, of video content, but what it is, is key little insights from your event, things that get you back in the feed, that get you back in front of your audience, but it’s content that’s in your voice. There’s no ghost writer.

You’re not trying to communicate your style or your thoughts or your stories to somebody else is you just, it’s just you talking to a, to a camera or interviewing somebody how whatever format you like. Right? I’ll tell you long term, most of my clients that do like the defense don’t stick with this PowerPoint presentation format.

They like the, the engagement of the, of the, interview, which is what we’ll be doing next month is another interview. So I like to bounce between. Kind of the, the presentation, presentation style, and the interview style, because that’s kind of what, what I, what I like to do is kind of mix it up. But feel free to do whatever format works best for you.

But the next thing is right, it’s content that’s in your voice. it’s right, not, not AI generated slop or any of that. It’s, it’s what you meant to say. and that video content. People, people who are really interested in it, like that style of, of content compared to Right, just generic platitudes and stuff like that.

So. and just one quick little note on that is it’s easier if you record your video stream separately, using a tool like a StreamYard or something like that. there’s several of ’em that do that, so you don’t need to use that particular one, but I know they have a free version I think you can get most of that stuff from.

But it will help with the repurposing for the live stream. Just quite frankly, you can just pull out your phone and. And, and stream it from, from your device without needing anything else. and then, Renee did ask here is, are the recordings automatic or premium only? so the recordings on LinkedIn are automatic and they’re there for everybody and they, they stick around whether you’re a premium member or not.

If you’re using some of the other software that kind of to do some of this stuff behind the scenes, some of that costs extra. Like this particular can cost 50 bucks, a hundred bucks a month depending on which package you want. But again, most of these places also have. Free, tiers so you can try it out and test it out before you have to commit to doing anything like that.

[00:23:54] So.

But the LinkedIn event benefits don’t stop there even. I feel like this is one of those, but wait, there’s more. but there is, and that, that is, that you can use this to build your email list. If you were on last month’s session, this is what we led with, is that using LinkedIn events to build an email list easily of high quality, engaged people in your network.

Today we’re kind of reversing it. We’re leading with LinkedIn events and saying, Hey, as a bonus, you can build an email list from ’em, but however you wanna slice it, this is a great way to get a jumpstart or continually add new quality people to your newsletter list. And I’ll say it’s an overlooked strategy, but anytime I email my my event list, I will get leads and I’m very lazy about it, very lazy about it.

I only email people twice a month once to let ’em know the event is happening and once to let ’em know that the replay’s available. And that’s, that’s it. And I still managed to get leads from it by, with, with, with that super lazy approach to it. So imagine what you could do with it, with a little bit of effort.

So, so that’s, that’s the LinkedIn event 

[00:25:06] side. So let’s switch gears here. I’m gonna check real quick and just see if there’s any other, questions here on this. I think, I think we kind of got ’em all here and if I missed it, we will, we’ll come back and catch ’em at the end. So. Let’s switch over to the other side of this here is that’s, that’s the outreach approach.

And in business to business, I would say outbound really is this, this gold standard? It doesn’t, and it’s not just right, it’s not, we’re not talking about just LinkedIn here, we’re talking about, right? probably cold calling or door to door or cold email, things like that. But it tends to be the most consistent, reliable business development strategy in the enterprise space is.

Just this, this high effort, this lots of manual labor work required, but it’s, it consistently produces results. So when people say, I hate, I, I hate outreach. Yeah. Yep. So And so does everybody else. But also remember that most people will tell you that, you know, they don’t like TV ads, they don’t want radio ads, they ignore Google ads, they throw away all their junk mail.

they definitely don’t wanna go to another tedious networking event or round table or any of that. so basically, everybody hates 

[00:26:26] everything. And nobody’s getting in the office hoping that today is the day that they get your pitch. But if it’s relevant to them and it was presented well, and it’s interesting, you know what?

People still respond positively. Even in this day where everybody’s inundated with messages all the time. You can find a way to cut through the noise. You can get. People to respond positively and work with you, and it continues to work. So think of outreach as just, you know, an alternative to another version of advertising.

So rather than running Google Ads or rather than doing, you know, direct mail things, this is just another form of, think of it as another form of advertising. ’cause that’s really all it is. It’s just a way to generate leads. 

[00:27:11] So. Let’s talk about on LinkedIn how we would do it, which is, well, we have to start by connecting to the right people.

’cause we can’t message people if we’re not connected to them. So what I’ll tell you here is that this is worth taking time to be deliberate and careful here. Because it will make a big difference in, in your performance. And there’s, there’s very much a tendency to sign up for a tool like Sales Navigator, click a couple buttons, you know, look and say, eh, close enough.

Cool. Let it run. Let’s go. And, you know, you look two months later, say, man, I just, I’m not getting any responses. And a lot of these people really, really aren’t the person I would like to talk to anyway. So. Let’s, let’s kind of talk about how you get, get connected to the ideal peoples. Just be specific about who are the right people, is it you say, well, you know, it’s.

The one, here’s one of my pet peeves. If people say, yeah, you know, typically any SMB owner, I’m like, what’s an SMB? Well, you know, small to medium business enterprise, small, small to medium enterprise, whatever the heck that term is, right? Basically everybody. So it’s like, get, go narrow, be more, be much more specific than that.

Figure out which, which industries are best for you to start, where you can go broader later. If you say, you know what, still it’s too small. But start small. That’s a great place to do it ’cause you kind of figure out what’s gonna work there. you can look at job titles and say, you know, I find that people with the job title of owner respond better than CEO, right?

There’s, there are subtle differences, even there in, in job title, even though functionally could be the same type of person yet at a company. But one has a job, one calls themselves the owner, one calls themselves, CEO, other one, you know, says president. Somebody calls themselves, you know, the head janitor and you know, put her out, put her outer of fires or something like that.

So kind of even going, going that, that narrow into it and yeah, using a tool like Sales Navigator is great because you can block out a lot of the, the things that you, you don’t wanna target. So if you said, Hey, I wanna target people, like in the sample here, I’ve got people who are, are chief revenue officers, so people kind of the head of sales, the vice president of sales type of things.

But I’ve filtered out people who are coaches, people who are call themselves consultants, and. Things like that. So it just lets you do, do the targeting a little bit better, for with using tools like 

[00:29:44] that. And last thing I want you to remember is that even when you really start focusing in on this is that no list is perfect and you’re still gonna want, even when you’re good at it, you’re gonna want this to be reviewed by a human before you kind of kick everything off and add ’em to a, any type of campaign.

’cause there’s still gonna be noise and there’s gonna be a lot of people, he is like. Still, still wrong. So using that, taking another 30 seconds or 60 seconds to review all the names and titles, excuse me, is going to, to, to pay off and be worth that little bit of extra time. kind of goes back to, what did I say kind of at the beginning is the just be human and kind of do those human things and put is, is put human eyes on things and rely less on automation and, and AI tools to do it because I’ll, I’ll tell you, we’re working on a.

And a tool right now that will do a lot of us at scale, and I’ll kind of show you kind of what we’re, we’re working on. It’s not ready for, it’s not ready for any, anything other than internal use right now. I’ll, I’ll be honest, but even right now we’re finding is that we can do a lot of these steps with AI tools.

But it’s still noisy and it’s still not perfect, so we’re still 

[00:30:55] continuing to work on it. So let’s talk about one that’s kind of gotten pretty popular here recently, and my, little drawing here disappeared on this one, so my apologies. But, with this one here is, I had circled initially that the comments here, and this is using engagement signals.

So on LinkedIn you say, well, people who are commenting on certain types of content, certain types of posts, that seems like that’d be a good strategy. And here’s the thing. If you start connecting with people who comment on the types of things that seem relevant to your audience, you’re gonna get a very high connection rate.

We’ve seen upwards of 85% of people, so really good start. But, and here’s, I’ve got many caveats, but here I wanna start with the big one is not all of those people are relevant. It’s right. It’s other, it might be people in competitive spaces to you. It might be people from countries where you don’t work, things like that.

So really good for a high connection rate to just say, oh, I’m gonna gonna connect with all the people that are commenting on this particular post. But if you don’t filter them and don’t go through them. You’re going to run into issues where you say it’s just, it’s, it’s just a bad, it’s a bad list. High connection rate, really good, you know, really good engagement.

They’re even gonna be very responsive to messaging, right? So it looks really good from a business development standpoint ’cause there’s lots of activity and numbers go up and look good. But from a business CLO closing business standpoint, not so much. So let’s kind of, I’ll give you kind of the easy version here is if, if you want to try this is just pull out the LinkedIn app and click on it and just.

Again, put your human eyes on it and just click on the people. And most of the time just by looking at their headline, you can figure it out if they’re relevant to you. You don’t even have to explain it to an AI agent to figure it out. ’cause that that’s where it starts to get hard and complicated. So if you want to wanna try it, right?

And this thing is, you don’t need any premium subscriptions. You don’t need any tools. You don’t need anything at all. Just your LinkedIn accountant, you looking up, looking at names and start connecting with people. And that’s a really good place to start. ’cause you’re gonna get a lot of connections by doing that with, without nearly as much effort as some, some other ways of doing it are now.

Eventually you can say, yeah, I want to use, use tools to do this at more scale. Or I can say, you know, here’s, you know, 10 or 15 profiles that I, that my, my audience tends to engage with. And you can apply filters to it. But we’re gonna say beyond the scope today, because yeah, can be useful. But overall, if you just focus on connecting with the right people for what you do, you, you’re gonna be in good shape and you’re gonna be okay.

[00:33:43] So. Oh, I like this one from Craig. I see the other ones and I’ll get to them, a little bit later here. But, Craig, how do you overcome the preaching to the choir challenge? Oh, you know, that’s, that’s probably where some of these, you know, things like engagement signals and the like, can, can actually work against you.

and you say, and ultimately you can look and say, you know what? I’m just gonna put, put my criteria in and let it go. working, was working with a guy who’s, does, like sales in the manufacturing, sales training, like in the manufacturing space. And one of the things when we found we were getting his campaign going was that.

Connection rate was really low. Like, like half, like half of our typical rate. We said, man, this is, what are we, what are we gonna do here? How are we gonna fix this? But at the same time, his appointment rate was good and the people were qualified. We were getting, everybody that we were getting was a good fit.

And I think, you know, like in his first three meetings, you know, got a deal, closed, it just like that. But, you know, and then, you know, but we weren’t doing the whole, well, they have to be active on LinkedIn and all this criteria that kind of makes it feel like, yeah, we’re, we’re only getting the most engaged and active people and it’s this tiny little group of people.

It’s, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna take lower numbers. To essentially, you know, get, get in front of the right people. So sometimes you kind of have to test and kind of try a few different things to kind of try and avoid the, the pre that kind of, yeah, preaching to the choir type of approach. where it feels like it’s, yeah, all the same, all the same people that are, that are connecting to each other.

And it really depends on who your audience is and, and what, what you’re trying to accomplish with them. So, but, but good question Craig. and 

[00:35:47] then. One thing here is I will give you an AI prompt. So here’s my, my a, my little AI thing today ’cause, right? ’cause everybody needs some type of AI content and even in a presentation where we’re not really focused on that.

But what I find is that people really struggle with the, if I’m connecting with people, what do I say? So here’s the prompts that I put together for you. Go ahead, plug it into whichever, whichever tool you like. ’cause here’s the thing, we’re not gonna use the output from it. This is just gonna get us in the ballpark.

And you, you know, have it, give you five versions and read them, see which one you like best, and then when you get it, take it, grab a pen and a piece of paper. Okay? Get those out and write it down. Write the whole thing down, see how it feels, just kind of test it out and say, Hmm, no, I didn’t like that. Now that didn’t quite feel right.

And kind of scribble and you know, jot it, jot it all down that way, and then you can start to actually get. Get, get something that’s good and usable because the output of this, like I said, only gets you in the right direction and gets you feeling, gets, gets you kind of close to where you want to be. It’s still garbage.

Don’t use it, please don’t use it. But it’ll get you, get you something that’s workable, and if you write it down and go through a few more revisions, you’re gonna have something good that you’re gonna be really happy to use. So that, that’s my recommendation here. So if you’re like, I just don’t know what to say, start with this and just be friendly and folksy a little self-deprecating, and guess what you’re gonna, you’re gonna be in a good place to reach out and talk to people.

’cause Right, that’s just, you’re, you’re just trying to talk, just trying to figure how do, how do I talk to people the way a, a normal, normal person would actually just do it at a, in, in real life, at an event. And that tends to be a good approach to it. 

[00:37:39] So. Let’s talk about getting the meeting. So let’s say you actually have reached out and if somebody said, yeah, I’m interested in meeting.

What can we do? Well, I mean this, again, it’s, it sounds easy and it sounds obvious, but check your calendar, offer times, actually do the work of looking and consulting sometimes on your calendar and give a few specifics. Or if you’ve got a date where you know you’re pretty open, you can give a range of times.

I like to give specific ones, but sometimes, especially if it’s like the second or third try, I’ll give like a range. ’cause sometimes that that’s what people need. ’cause they’re really busy too. The, the obvious answer here is to send your calendar link. Do not do that. Please don’t do that. It won’t work, right?

I’m a pragmatic person. I could tell you, we’ve, we have tried this every which way, upside down left and right. Sending the calendar link does not work unless they specifically ask you for it. Don’t send it. If you really want to calendar, link, ask for theirs. But sending yours is, is, is a recipe to get no appointments.

And I’ve, I’ll, I’ll see this, like, we’ll start with a new client and they, they’re, they’re really gung-ho and they’re really excited and they’re, they’re ready to go. And then they’ll jump in on, on messages and things like that, and they, they, and it’s good. And I like to see people engage and all of a sudden it’s, yeah, here’s my calendar.

They’re like, let’s talk, let’s chat. Here’s my calendar. Let’s, let’s do this. And to, to this day is anytime I’ve said, okay, we’re, we’re, we’re just, you know, in a, in a kind of campaign review. Okay. I see you sent your calendar link out to these five people. just for, for our records that any of them book, the answer is always no or let me check, and then the answer is always no, nobody books.

So people aren’t going to book that way. I know I’m, I’m kind of on my soapbox here, but. They, they just, the calendar link just doesn’t work. But they may not respond to you sending over those times as well. I, I get it. I understand. So remember, you need to follow up still. People are busy, you know, you don’t have to badger them, but you do need to gently be persistent.

People aren’t on LinkedIn every day. You know, they, they meant to get by. They meant to check and look and see, but they, they got busy. They, they’re not necessarily ignoring you on purpose. Maybe they are. But then two or three weeks later they said, yep, I was interested in that. Let’s talk and we’ll, we’ll see that pretty frequently that somebody else will have said.

Yep. But we’ll, we’re ready to, yep. Can we meet, next week and then six weeks go by and then finally they’re ready to talk again. So. Just some things to kind of keep in mind 

[00:40:23] there. So that’s, you know, kind of the approach is use, use events to really position yourself as an authority, helps kind of get deals over the, you know, those last objections.

It reactivates, churn, churn clients even, which is one of those things that really surprised me about is how it would bring people back in that, you know, maybe we’d worked with, you know, a year or two ago, but they keep seeing you on their feed and they remember that you did good work. So you just, they had, they had to stop for some reason.

so not only does it bring in new hot leads, but it also brings in old clients and, and helps convert people along the path. So events do do a lot of heavy lifting along the way, whereas outreach is, is a good way to bring new people in, get that steady stream of new interested prospects on your calendar, and they, they really do work better together, even though they kind of seem, seem like a bit of an odd couple.

That, that they really are, are, are more, like I said at the beginning, more like a peanut butter and jelly, so. With that. I see I’ve got some questions here, so I will open it up for any more questions ’cause I, I see a bunch of you guys have them here and I’m gonna get through them all real quick.

I’m gonna 

[00:41:40] jump into this here. If you’re one of the people who says, this all sounds great, I just don’t have the time. Right. I, I know I need to be a human. I know I need to be engaged, but I’m, I just run out of time. ’cause you know, all of a sudden it’s like, I wanted to get this started. I want to get going.

And then three weeks go by and you’re like, crap, I still wanna do this, and I still wanna get going. And then you go on vacation. All of a sudden you’re looking at, well, the summer’s, the summer is over, and I still haven’t gotten started. So. If you want somebody who’s gonna kind of do this for you, execute it.

Whether you’re on vacation, working with, working on other projects, no matter what’s going on in your life, somebody who’s doing this on the background, making sure it all gets executed, we’d be happy to talk to you. That’s what Pipelineology does. So you go to Pipelineology dot com slash contact. if you’d like to schedule a meeting that’s directly with me, there’s no other, there’s no salespeople involved there.

Or just shoot me an email, garriott Pipelineology, see if it’s a good fit and see if it’s something we could. Do together for you. So that said, let’s jump into the questions ’cause I know you guys have some, some good questions today. 

[00:42:43] So. Start with, say, I’m gonna go, Gina, Jenna, I apologize for butchering your name.

but you’re getting the email addresses when you do the events. so yeah, when you do the event, the nice thing is, is that since you are doing sending out event invites to people you’re connected with, 90% of the time you, their, their contact information is available to you because they’re connected to you.

So, kind of as we talked about, that’s why we wanna make sure that when we’re, when we’re talking about earlier building connections and, and being, you know, reaching out to people, is that, that part about being deliberate about who we connect to. Makes it really easy for, for, for the event side is that, okay, now we’re, we’re connecting with the right people, so we’re inviting the right people to events.

So yeah, now we can grab the, the contact information for them as well. And there’s, there’s some tools that make it easier. You can also do it manually. It’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of a, it’s a bit of a hassle, but, it’s all things that, that can be done. And then, Marcelo asks, can you address the issue of AI generated messaging and outreach?

Because I find it so freaking transparent and you’re not the only one. Most people are getting much, much better about spotting it these days. So here’s my recommendation is don’t, If you really wanna, you know what I say is really figure out what messaging works and what’s effective before you touch a single AI generated anything.

’cause really the only area I found AI is kind of good at doing is per we personalizing it with their company name, which sounds like it should be obvious, but so many people will put, you know, their company name, LLC, or Inc. Or you know, you know, you know the lead generation company, you know, an underdog story or something like that.

And all you wanna do is just kind of make it fit grammatically into a sentence versus just grabbing a, you know, a copy and paste from it. That’s really about all it’s good at. and that part isn’t transparent to people because now it just sounds like you weaved it in there. But everything else you kind of gotta figure out.

In terms of how to, to promote and pitch it, because yeah, AI’s, AI’s not very good at it. And AI will be over the top and think it’s a copywriter. And you know what, it’s not, it’s not good at any of that stuff. and it’s gonna be way, way too long. That’s the right. AI can’t shut up. It wants to keep talking.

So. Yeah, you’re probably gonna have to figure out how to write those messages. and then you can, you know, let AI touch it a little bit. But for the most part, AI generated messages and outreach. Oh, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re not good. They’re just not good. Alright, but good question.

Thank you. Catherine asks, what tools are you using to execute the LinkedIn live, StreamYard or some other tool? I am using StreamYard, so that’s the, that’s the one, kind of powering this in the background. I think we’ve tried Restream in the past. I think that one also works fine. there might be some other tools out there.

It’s kind of found that link that found that StreamYard worked well enough for me, so that’s what I end up using. But I know there’s a handful of other tools, so, feel free to to use anything you like. But yeah, I can say StreamYard is a, has been a pretty good tool for us. ’cause it lets us record.

Kind of the, the streams independently. So kind of for repurposing and things like that on the back end, after the show is over, it makes it a little bit, makes it much easier for us to kind of manage some of the stuff in the, in the background and keep things connected and, and things like that. So, but yeah, stream art is, that’s the, that’s really the only tool you need.

everything else would be, is kind of built into the LinkedIn platform itself. so you don’t need any other tools to, to do there. Alright. let’s see here. What else we got? we got a question here 

[00:46:46] from Lynn. Define outreach notes versus messages. how to navigate sales. So, I guess really outreach, is, I would say define that as you connect to somebody and you, you message ’em.

That’s, that would be to me is what, what outreach is, is once you’ve connected with somebody is that’s you messaging them and, you know, having some form of call to action, whether that’s, you know, hey, I wanna, Hey, would you like to meet for a virtual cup of coffee? Which I know it’s, it’s super cliche, but in, here’s the thing about it is it still works.

It’s, It’s just right. It’s just a nicer way of saying, Hey, would you like to, to meet? But you know, the virtual cup of coffee thing sounds like a little bit nicer way of doing it. So, that’s, that’s kind of the way we approach. Approach that is that, you know, outreach is Yeah. Sending messages to people.

and, you know, the events is kind of the, the other side of that where, you know that that is very much a, a content based thing. that, that you can kind of, I look at is outreach is kind of the thing you do when you initially connect with somebody, see if they’re interested, whereas the, the events are that kind of.

Long term ex, you know, you can do it every month and invite people every month without people getting annoyed and bothered by it. So it keeps you in front of them and kind of reminds people that you exist without you needing to be pushy or anything like that. ’cause it’s just an event to invite so they can ignore it and then, then they’re good.

So. yeah, John Stream air Stream Air can be expensive. And I believe, believe me, I had a, I had a whole conversation with them earlier this year when they wanted to, to jack up my rates on, on it. ’cause they said, looks like you’re using this for business purposes. And I said, no crap. I’m using this for business purposes.

That’s what you sell. Oh, it was, it was, it was, Well, I probably was not probably my finest moment, but Stream Air does have a free plat, a free version. You just get the little watermark up in the top corner of your, your screen. if you, if you do it that way. So kind of up, up to you for, for me, I, I like to, we, we, we do enough of ’em and it’s worth a little bit extra that it costs to, to have the premium with the 4K streaming and all that, which can be a little, feel a little pricey, but.

then again, you know, it’s, it gives us, you know, a chance to kind of get the content and everything together that we need, and we can also use it for, for multiple clients at the same time. let’s see here. and then, yeah, Wally had mentioned, you know, Riverside fm Good for podcast recording and live streaming.

so yeah, I absolutely, if that, if that’s your preferred one. I feel like I talked to somebody last week who used that for their podcast. So good to know that it also works on the LinkedIn side, as well. So, yeah, feel free to give that one a try. ’cause I think, I remember the reason they liked Riverside is ’cause the quality of the recordings was really, really good.

So perhaps worth, taking a look at 

[00:50:00] there. And then real quick here, another question from Lynn is how to, set up, LinkedIn events. pretty, pretty straightforward if you want to do this. I’ll kind of walk, I’ll give you kind of the, the steps real quickly and, Then feel free to, to give it a try.

And if you still can’t, then, this would be, this is one of those times where, type this into like Google, Gemini or something and say, can you gimme a step by step list of how to set up a LinkedIn event? But essentially you would go into my network on LinkedIn. It’s much easier to do this from, your, desktop or computer versus your, app, mobile app.

It can be done either way, but you, you, it’s easier to do on a computer. So click my network, click events. and from there, on the top right corner, there’s a button that says, create an event. Follow the, follow the instructions. There it will say, Hey, do you have an image? Hey, what’s the title when, you know, basically answer all the questions.

and then click, post the event. and you’ll be, be good to go. So, probab, it’ll take you a little while to set up the first one, but once you’ve done it, you’ll, you’ll be able to set ’em up in less than five minutes. So, good. Good questions. 

[00:51:12] Alright. Think, I think that covers everybody. So at least I, those, those are all the ones I had flagged here.

Is there anyone that I missed? if not, I will say appreciate everybody hopping on today. Really, always great to see some familiar faces again, as well as all the new people here. So appreciate you. If this was your first time, appreciate you hopping on and good to see everybody again. we’ll be doing, Another session at the, I think June, June 22nd, if I’m not mistaken, is our next one. Got a special guest coming on, so we’ll be talking about. lemme see here. Confirm that I have that right. June 23rd. So June 23rd is when our, our next event is, and I’ve got a special guest for you there. And, I believe the topic is gonna be talking about what to do when you actually have the meeting.

You’ve got a meeting, how do we make sure that that is a productive meeting that, you know, goes, goes somewhere where it says, well, hey, it was nice to meet you, and then you never talk again and nothing ever happens, right? We’re gonna use that to kind of like, how do you turn these into either. You know, do business or if not, how can I at least turn this into referrals?

So hope to see everybody there in June. Thanks so much for joining me today. Hope you have a great start to your summer, and I’ll see you next month.