How To Get Clients On LinkedIn – Fill Your Sales Pipeline

How To Get Clients On LinkedIn – Fill Your Sales Pipeline

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live training on getting clients on LinkedIn in 2024. He outlines an agenda covering authority branding (profile optimization), purposeful network building (prioritizing 30,000-cap connections over followers), content strategy, outreach, and scaling with LinkedIn ads. He emphasizes being human, keeping profiles active, using a real headshot, banner, a clear headline, and the About/Featured sections, and recommends LinkedIn ID verification for higher connection and response rates. For content, he notes rising skepticism, advises focusing on stories and solving small problems over vanity metrics, and avoiding politics and irrelevant posts; events and repurposed video remain effective. For outreach, he recommends relevant, short, sequential messages without pitching early or using calendar links. He advises not starting with ads, using retargeting first, and warns LinkedIn ads are costly and best for higher LTV offers. He ends with Q&A on Sales Navigator, automation, events invites, and sharing the slide deck by email.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
03:43 Housekeeping And Agenda
05:31 About Gary And Audience
08:02 The LinkedIn Client Flow
10:31 Network Building Basics
12:16 Profile Trust Signals
18:49 About Featured Activity Tips
22:38 Content Reality In 2024
28:01 What Content Works Now
30:14 Content That Works
30:39 Live Events Engagement
32:42 Invites And Network
36:12 Outreach Mindset Shift
40:06 Message Sequencing Tips
42:25 Targeting And Pitfalls
45:58 LinkedIn Ads Scaling
48:38 Tech Glitches And Q&A
52:37 Automation And Navigator
58:30 Wrap Up And Next Webinar

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to How to Get Clients on LinkedIn. I’m gonna be your host, Gary Ruplinger, and we’ll be getting started here in, just about two minutes. So, just give everybody a chance to get the notification out there for things to, to refresh on the screen and all of that. All that good stuff.

When you start a live stream, you cross your fingers a little bit and hope all the technology is playing nice today. So, welcome everybody. It is a, it is a actually a really nice, nice spring day here in Detroit, Michigan. It’s nice and sunny, pretty pleasant outside. So, where, where is everybody, calling in from today or, logging in from today?

How’s the weather by you? What? and like I said, we’ll be getting started here in, in about a minute or so now, so. And it, while we’re doing that, I’m just gonna check and make sure that the stream is in fact working. ’cause I’m always, if you weren’t, I think two or three months ago, we had one where, the, the LinkedIn stream itself, you couldn’t get into it through any system.

So, we ended up postponing once and now every time I’m like double and triple checking and making sure everything, It’s hopefully working. Hey Craig, nice to see you from, in New Jersey. Cool. And cloudy. Excellent. you know, I guess this time, this time of year, I, I like it to, you know, like it to be a little bit, to feel a little cool.

Otherwise, before the summer heat really kicks in Walton Atlanta. Welcome. Glad to have you here. James in Dallas. I, I feel like you guys been getting a lot of rain down there in, in Dallas. See this, this is me. I keep watching all the, the weather live streams on YouTube. I’ve been finding them endlessly entertaining.

Marty in Fort Lauderdale, Kurt in Maryland, Randy, also with a, a rainy day there in Boston. Welcome, everybody. Glad to have you guys here. Right? So we’ll be getting started here in just, give it 30 more seconds or so and, and then we’ll get started here as I do like to get things, started on time.

Eddie. Eddie in Seattle, where it’s nice and sunny. Okay. I feel like I don’t hear that too often from Seattle, but glad, glad to hear you got some sun today, Jeffrey in South Florida. also very hot mark in Minneapolis. Charlie, that sounds like you guys have a beautiful day down in Atlanta today.

Alright, well thanks so much everybody for jumping on today. like I said, my name is Gary Rubinger and. This is the how to get clients on LinkedIn session. So this is always one of my favorite ones to do. if you’ve been on before, we’ve got just a little bit different set up today. So, I’ve been kind of testing it out, making sure it’s working, but this time I’ve got my iPad beneath my computer instead of my big dual monitor setup.

basically so that we can do, so I can kind of doodle and draw and make notes on the screen. So I’m hoping that, that the format is good. ’cause I feel like sometimes I’m just sitting there talking about a PowerPoint presentation, so I’m hoping this can make it a little bit more engaging and interactive.

But we’ll see. you, you guys will be the judge and you’ll have to let me know what you think about it. But anyway, without further ado, let me switch around here and get this, get this show on the road as they say,

and that is the wrong. PowerPoint presentation. So that’s always a great way to start. Okay. One second here. Just bear with me. and we’ll get the right one. Pulled up here.

We just had it. I just had it. I really did there. It’s 

[00:03:40] alright. So welcome everybody to How to Get Clients on LinkedIn in 2024, not the 2022 version, though some of the things are a little bit, similar. So just a few quick housekeeping items. There’s about a delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when you, when I say something, when it actually shows up on your screen on LinkedIn.

So, a lot of times when I’m seeing your questions and things in the chat there, I’m not seeing it until about 20 or 30 seconds till after I set it. So just keep that in mind for the most part. It’s not an issue though if we’re trying to have a back and forth conversation. Sometimes that time delay can get in the way a little bit.

There will be a replay available today. it will actually be right on this page again, so if you come back to it or go into, if you want to come back and check it later, go into my network, click under events on LinkedIn, and then it should show up in the list there, and you can click right into it and see the whole thing.

And if you wanna be on the email list so you get notified of future events and things like that. You can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events and just put your email address in there and we’ll make sure that you get the notifications, about, future ones. Quick, quickly. Today, the agenda. Today we’re gonna talk about kind of your authority brand.

We’re gonna talk about network building, we’re gonna talk about content, because I feel like that’s always a really popular thing people want to talk about. and then we’re gonna talk about outreach and I feel like that one’s a little less popular to talk about, but probably the more important one in terms of especially early, in the early days of, of getting clients on LinkedIn.

and then we’re gonna talk about scaling the whole system with ads. It’s a little bit more of an advanced one, but I do wanna at least touch on it. as that’s kind of where, where things all eventually all roads eventually lead there, especially from a scalability standpoint if you’re looking to 

[00:05:30] grow.

and then I’ll open it up for some q and a as we get time Real quick, the 22nd version of About Me is that my name is Gary Rubinger. I’m the founder of Pipelineology and host of the Pipelineology podcast. we’re looking for some good guests. If, if you’ve got a a, B2B type of consulting business and have something you’d like to share with the, the community, Just send me a message, Gary at Pipelineology, or just look me up on LinkedIn and, and let me know you’re interested in being a guest. I’ve been on in the marketing game now for actually 23 years. I need to update this slide. So I’ve been around quite a while. we used, in my corporate career, I ran ca call centers for car dealerships.

So we took all the leads from around the country that came in and we called them up. I had a team of about 14 people, and we handled about 4,000 leads a month, and our job was to set appointments. So I. These days I work more on the LinkedIn side with consulting clients, helping them get clients, helping them get clients and get more meetings.

And I am actively seeking New England IPA beer style recommendations. Is that, a few years ago I got into it and I really, I really enjoy that particular. Style. I still like IPAs, but the New England kind of hazy style really, really has become my favorite. So if you’ve got any recommendations that can be a little hard to find, would, would, would love to know what, what your recommendation is.

Alright, so who is this presentation for? Well, as I’ve mentioned, consultants is probably the number one type of person or. We tend typically work with a number one type of company. this can also be helpful to you if you, a VP of sales or business development, even sales reps and people in that are just kind of doing the day-to-day of business development.

I think you’ll find this helpful. we even work with, you know, the occasional spa, small manufacturing company, but really anyone who’s in kind of that business to business space where you’re calling on, you know, other types of professional customers and doing some type of sales, this, I think you’ll get something out of today’s presentation.

But please don’t take my word for this. I know sometimes that’s, you know, you, you hope to sit down and hopefully get some things via osmosis and then you kind of forget to implement and don’t do them. So, you don’t need to take my word on any of this. try ’em out for yourself. See what works for you.

We’re gonna talk about a whole bunch of things. You don’t have to try, do them all at once. pick something that you say, yeah, this sounds good. This sounds like the thing I wanna focus on right now. And just do that. Focus on doing that, and you can kind of build as you go 

[00:08:00] along. So here’s kind of the process that we’re gonna be looking at, and I know that that, flow chart there is really, really small.

You are welcome to try and screenshot it and blow it up and try and make it bigger. Or you can just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com and I’ll just email you, a PDF of that so that you don’t have to try and, ask, you know, AI to enhance it. And then it, you know, tells you to, you know, that rocks should be part of your, your diet or something like that.

But really kinda the process that we’re looking at is, number one, is connecting with the right people and then making sure that your profile helps establish authority and builds trust in what you do. we’re gonna talk about, you know, using a combination of both outreach and content to get meetings with your new connections, and then how to leverage LinkedIn ads when you are ready to scale.

if I could kind of sum the whole thing up though, in one thing is. Really be human in that with, with so many new tools and so many things coming out right now that are all talking about, you know, ai, this and AI to customize this, really, the, the big thing that I think is going to help you stand out right now is actually taking a, a human approach to it.

AI is great. AI is, you know, AI will eventually replace us all. but Right now, I think, you know, you’re, we’re we’re seeing the biggest advantages anyway, is that kind of maintaining that, let’s make it human and, you know, we’ll use AI where it makes sense. But don’t, don’t just turn the keys over and assume that it’s gonna handle everything the way you want it done.

So again, if you’d like a copy of this flow chart, you can shoot an email to me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. Just put flowchart in the subject line and I’ll make sure we get it sent over to you, by the end of the day tomorrow. So. Real quick, if you don’t have time to do this yourself, if you are busy and say, this all sounds great, but who has the time for that?

And, you’re not gonna get a chance to do it, that’s okay too. we do offer a done for you program if you want somebody to just kind of. Instead of showing you how to do it, teach you how to do it, someone who’s just actually gonna do it for you. So, if you’re curious about something like that, we’ll talk more about it at the end.

But, if it, you’re the type of person who, you’ve only got a few minutes today and you just wanna see what it’s all about, you can, schedule an appointment directly with me@theappointmentlab.com or again, just shoot me an email at Gary at Pipelineology dot 

[00:10:28] com. Kind of the first step to getting clients on LinkedIn is really your network.

And there’s two types of people kind of call them. you know, people, followers essentially is everybody’s a follower. If they’re a connection of yours, there can be unlimited numbers of those works just like that would on any other type of platform. That can be right, just like an Instagram or a Facebook.

Right. Followers or followers. But connections are the ones I’d say really focus on building these. You can have up to 30,000 of them, so you’re, you’re not really that limited. It will take you many, many years of building connections to hit that 30,000 mark. especially with the way kind of, with the limitations LinkedIn has put in place.

But you get a lot of extra ability to basically communicate with somebody that is a connection of yours. you can send out invites for them to subscribe to a newsletter. You can send out an invite to attend an event like I did with you today. you can actually get contact info, so if you want to email them or something like that, it’s right there.

It’s, it’s in their, their profile and it’s much easier to message them. there’s a lot of message filtering that kind of goes on for people not in your network. So. I always recommend, you know, getting as many of those connections built as you can. But like I said, it takes time. If you’re thinking, man, I’ve got two or 3000 connections.

I’m doing great. You are doing great, but you got 27,000 more that you can still still build into your network. So, in this case, more is more, is probably still gonna be, be better. So that’s, that’s at least what we found, in with that. And, you know, follow followers are great. There’s nothing wrong with followers, but get those connections when you 

[00:12:14] can.

So let’s talk about your profile. So with, this is, this is kind of an example. generally, and I’ll, I’ll show you a few more of them here. But really what you wanna do is you want to let people know who you are, what you do, who you work with, and also be human and have a little bit of fun with it. And that’s probably one of the, the key ones here when it comes to that, is.

Things can get kind of, you know, sterile and boring and it just kind of has a real dry feeling where, you know, LinkedIn is the, the business network where business people hang out and for some reason people think that the business people don’t like to have fun. I, I don’t, I don’t know. Or that they’re, they’re all robots.

But nonetheless, when we’re looking at your profile here, there’s a few things I wanna kind of draw your attention to here. So. First and foremost is just make sure there’s a picture of you there, not a logo of your company, not, you know, a sunset or something like that. and you don’t have to get super crazy with it.

It doesn’t have to be you in a, in a suit and tie or a dress or anything like that. Is there something that you think, yep, that’s me. That looks good. Put that, put that up there. The whole background image here. You can make it customizing just by clicking that little button in the right corner there to edit it.

And again, you don’t have to get oat carried away here, but if you don’t put one, it’s just this black and or just kind of white and gray, nothing there. You may as well use it for something. So basically to kind of let people know, either you know who you are, what you do, if you’ve done, you know, engaged speaking engagements from the stage, great place to showcase that.

we’ve had clients who showcase, you know, logos of companies they work with, things like that. Be creative. It’s basically a banner, kind of an advertisement for your company, and it’s a great place to use it here. So, there’s that there. One thing I’d like to actually mention here, and I know it’s really small and, I’m trying to get my, my little thing out here, but this little check mark here actually matters probably more than, a lot of other ones these days.

And that’s, oops. See, still, still learning how to use this. This little pen gizmo here on the screen. But, the little ver ID verification mark, it’s not available in every country. for example, I know we have somebody in the Philippines who said it’s not available on her account, but there’s a wait list for it.

But I know in the United States for sure, and I think you know, Canada and I think a lot of Europe, this ID verification is now available. and you know what, it actually makes a difference. One, in terms of connections and two. Basically people responding because they know that you aren’t, just another fake profile and account.

so, one of those subtle little things, but one of those things that really is making a pretty big difference, we’re finding in terms of overall response rates on the platform. So, Definitely recommend doing that. I know, actually one of my, my, my employees is on with me here. he kind of runs things in the background.

His name is Evan. but I know we recently put it on his account and we noticed that it was probably an immediate 20% jump in connection rate and. probably a 30%, 35%. Don’t quote me for sure on that, but in 30, 30 to 35% response rate increase in terms of messages. So, just a co just keep that in mind is that it’s, you know, it, it’s, it’s, it’s helping.

but, otherwise headline here, you know, standard stuff here is let people know what you do. Again, my pen’s broken, but letting people know what it is you do, who, who you are, who you work with, and like I said, have some fun. I, I find that, you know, those last three ones are probably ones that help get people to check out my profile and view me more often.

So things like podcast host me aficionado, and beer enthusiast, by far is the number one thing that people want to talk to me about. So, So just a couple of things here. and the reason I’m kind of spending so much time on just the top little portion of your profile is really because when you post on LinkedIn, when you message somebody on LinkedIn, that’s what they’re seeing.

They’re seeing your picture, they’re seeing your name, they’re seeing that check mark, and they’re seeing that that headline there. and I do see a comment here from Felicia, and normally I’d pull it up on the screen here, but I, she does comment. She said it does not currently work with, in the US with passports only with, driver’s licenses.

So, keep that in mind that, I guess it’s not fully rolled out for every, use case yet, but if you do have a way of doing it, it is in fact, worth doing it. I know that, yeah, I see, I see a comment here from Manny who says, you know, his uses his name, his man, it goes by Manny, but, his, passport says, manual on it.

So verify doesn’t work. Because the names are different. I know people would have that same issue with getting verified on Facebook, but so they’re not perfect yet. but nonetheless, if you can do it, it is worth given, at least trying to do so.

We will kind of move on to the next section here. I do have a couple other ones I want to mention here. so here’s a few other examples In case you’re curious is, like I said, this headline here, lots of different ways to do it, and I just wanted to show examples of what they look like when you’re actually posting.

So write, Then that, that’s why is because, and that’s why the headline is important, is because you can see, let’s take a look at Joe here, right? This is a post that he did on LinkedIn and now we can kind of see what Joe’s all about because it says, well, Joe’s into business funding and, equipment financing and things like that.

And kind of the same thing. That’s, you know, that’s why you wanna spend some time, even though it’s, I think it only shows about 70 characters. It won’t even show the whole thing. But nonetheless. Having that there is, it, it will, it will bring people to your profile and ultimately that’s what we’re trying to go for here.

[00:18:48] couple more things. So the goal here is to build trust and authority with your profile. Use that about section to really make your pitch so. You can see on the right hand side here what mine looks like in terms of the about section. It’s, it’s a little, it’s me having a little bit fun about how I’m not good at networking.

and you can kind of make it however you want. You can make it more salesy, you can make it less salesy. It is totally up to you. This is your, your, have free reign here to kind of make, be as creative as you want. Just don’t make it a resume about how you’re, you know, a visionary, you know, leader, great team player, blah, blah, blah.

If you’re trying to get a job on LinkedIn, that’s fine. if you’re trying to run a business and get, you know, clients, get all that out of there and talk about what you do and who you are and have, you know, really, you know, again, be human. And, and again, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll keep coming back to that, that theme today is that, be human, be human, be human.

Really kind of focus on doing that. And you’re gonna get better, results on LinkedIn. the featured section, so you can see in the top, right hand, portion of your screen here. I, I use it for put putting up. That’s the events that we’ve done, kind of like this, the live streams that we do.

You can use it for PDF types of handout content posts you want to feature whatever you want to put there. You’ve got quite a bit, quite a few options you can put there. but I recommend using them because they’re gonna be very close to the top of your ones and it gives you a chance to kind of tell people, if you wanna learn more about me, here’s some good ways to do it.

Alright, activity. Basically the, the idea here is there should be activity on your account if you haven’t engaged or done anything on LinkedIn. That profile looks really Barr and I had somebody wanna connect with me, just two days ago. And I said, you know, there was, and there was no activity on the account.

I said, you know, once, and there was no ver ID verification, I said, you kind of look like a bot. and. I, I don’t do that to be a jerk, but I really just, you know, I’m pretty confident it’s a bad account, so I just let them know that, you know, that, that they looked like a bot, right? The picture, the profile picture was too good and, and things like that, so, right.

Lots of little things here that, you know, you say, wow, you know, you, you. You say, oh, that looks so great, and then you realize, no, that looks, that looks too great. There’s almost, there’s, there’s certain little telltale signs of it, but nonetheless, fill out your LinkedIn profile and you’re, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna build more trust and people are more likely to reach out to you if it’s filled out.

Then if you’re just trying to engage on LinkedIn and kind of leave all this blank, right? This is their chance to say, you’ve got my attention. Now what are you gonna do with it? And some people, there’s nothing there. They can’t learn more about you. and I think trying to see if there’s an example of it here.

I don’t think I’ve got one pulled up. I know there’s that little like, kind of link you can put where it says, you know, book an appointment with this person now after testing it now, I can tell you not very, not very useful. I was kind of concerned when, when doing that one is if we put that link there, that I’d get a whole bunch of people trying to pitch me.

And actually, no, nobody’s trying to pitch me either. So I guess there’s, there’s at least of that. So just gonna check for a few questions here. I appreciate Leanne, thank you for that. beer, beer recommendation from the, from the main beer company. I appreciate that. also the, oak and ember. Excellent. If I, if I run across ’em or I can find them, I’m gonna give them a try. and yes, Felicia has kind of mentioned that there’s a lot of AI scammers on LinkedIn trying to connect with people.

but, yeah, can be, can be kind of a, an amusing 

[00:22:37] game. So, so let’s talk about leveraging with content. So let’s, you know, I know, I know content is kind of why. What people say, you know, or what you at least see, right? People on LinkedIn posting content saying use content makes sense. It’s, it’s consistent and congruent and you know it can work and can be really helpful.

And here the end goal is really to help you land business. So what do you wanna do with your content? Well, you can use it to kind of Elevaate your authority, you know, reduce price resistance, streamline that sales process. Tell stories, lots of good things you can do with it, but the thing I want to let you know is that content is hard and in 2024 it’s getting harder.

The market is more sophisticated than it’s ever been, right? We’re, you know, as we’re kind of looking in the comments here, right, we’re talking about things like AI scams and they’re getting more sophisticated and things like that. So there’s less and less trust out there and you know, people think you know your stories.

People are starting to think some of these stories are. It’s kind of predictable and made up, so it’s a little bit harder, right? Your, your prospects are smart. Now it’s not, it’s not 2008 anymore. Everybody knows that a webinar is not actually a webinar. They mean, what they mean to say is you’re, you’re having an infomercial, right?

You’re gonna, you’re gonna try and sell ’em something. You’re not scheduling a discovery call. You’re actually signing up and scheduling a sales presentation. They say with one of our, you know, highly, you know, professional coaches, they mean actually with that high ticket closer, that, you know, we hired and told, you know, we’re gonna get you so many appointments and we expect you to close, you know, 15 or 20% of ’em so you can, you know what, whatever.

right. And when they say, so that you can learn how to implement this process in your business, actually what that high ticket closer is trying to do is figure out how to shoehorn their service into your business and then make you feel dumb if you say no. So. People are smart and they’re, they’re not just saying, oh yeah, they, I’ll talk to everybody.

This sounds great. I’m, I’m gonna show up to all these webinars ’cause I’m gonna learn so much. You know what? That their people are, people are onto you. So, right. The, the market is now more skeptical and jaded than ever. So keep those kind of things in mind when you are building your posts. So. Here’s kind of an example of, of kinda what I’m talking about is that, you know, Jason here and Jason is not associated with our business is just a post that he put up.

few, actually, this is probably a couple months ago now, but really that he said, you know, reach and engagement is down, but qualified leads and close deals are way up. He says, you know, focusing on the right content, it may not get a lot of likes, you know, but it does bring in new business. I think that’s one of the things that, you know, we tend to see that you’ll, you’ll find a lot of people see.

I know when we used to, when I was first getting started, actually started doing posts on Facebook, and this is probably the, one of the big takeaways I had after, you know, probably two or three months of doing it, is that. The people who you know would reach out and become clients were not the people typically commenting.

they weren’t the people liking every single post I had. They were lurking. They would see them, they would note them, and they wouldn’t do anything else until you got the right offer in front of ’em, in which case they would just message you and say, Hey, now I’m interested. So worrying about all the vanity metrics, you know, how many comments did I get, how many views did I have?

All that kind of stuff. Doesn’t matter so much, is it? Is your message talking with your ideal client profile. If it is, keep doing that. and, and, and don’t worry so much about all of these other metrics just because they’re, they don’t often, they don’t necessarily correlate with new clients and new business.

For example, I like to tell people avoid things like generic memes if they’re industry relevant. Okay, great. Don’t argue politics, right? This is, especially in America, it’s an election year. Try to avoid the temptation to argue politics. Even, even if people mostly are agreeing with you. You, you just, you.

There’s no winning that argument. I just recommend you stay out of it if you’re trying to use your profiles. From a business perspective, unless it’s really, really industry relevant, like you’re actually a political aid for a, you know, a certain campaign or something, right? Obviously it’s different, but if you’re a consultant helping people with supply chain and logistics.

Let it go. Just, just, just don’t, don’t engage, leave the trolls alone. Don’t feed the trolls. right. Irrelevant polls, things like that. You know, again, try try and stay on topic again. You may not get as much engagement, you may not get as many comments as you’re hoping for, but what you will is you’re building that following with the right types of people, and you’re kind of guiding them down this, this story and, and path so that eventually when they’re ready.

They, they can work with you, but if you’re being really, you know, controversial along the way and just scaring people off left and right, all of a sudden you’re saying, well, the right people aren’t necessarily following me. I’ve got a lot of the wrong people kind of with my content now, and yeah, I’m getting more engagement and I’m getting, you know, yeah.

But, but I’m not getting the right people in. So just kind of keep, keep that in 

[00:27:58] mind. So what is working now, right? It just got done telling you how it’s hard and all the things not to do. So what is working now? Two things that you know, you really see in terms of thought, you know, thought processes.

One is telling stories. People would much rather be told a story than told what should do. It also solves small problems. And what do I mean by that? I think in a lot of times we, we get really ambitious in terms of who we wanna work with and, you know, what types of services we wanna offer. We wanna be this all encompassing amazon.com.

We have everything, type of, type of company and, and really. If we just focused on some small problems and small things, we would get a lot further. So lemme give you some examples. So solving small problems, what does that mean? Well, for example, before you say help, I help SMBs 10 x their leads and build a seven figure agency.

Cool. What, and I, I use this one, and this isn’t actually from anybody’s particular profile, but, it’s. Pretty close to some that you see, right? SMBs? What, what is that? Does anybody here when they see that it’s like, oh, that’s, they’re referring to me? I, I, I, most people don’t know what it means, right?

Small and medium businesses. Does, does that speak to anybody at all? I mean, unless like, unless this call, unless you’re probably a consultant at Deloitte or McKinsey or something like that, you, you’re probably under the SMB category, but you don’t identify as that. 10 x their leads and for most people they say, what would I do if I 10 x?

I don’t know what I would even do with that. We’re building a seven figure agency again. It’s okay. So what everybody says that after, so I help you know, helping clients use their current network to get three high intent meetings in the next seven days. Much smaller, much shorter timeframe, very much, much less ambitious, but also one of those short little things you can do, try.

If you see the results, it kind of helps move somebody forward like that. So just trying to get your, just trying to make sure you kind of understand like the, the solve small problems. And, if you want kind of more content on 

[00:30:13] this. I don’t know that she’s real active on LinkedIn, but Laurel, Portier on, she’s pretty active on Facebook.

She’s got, I think the $7 or $5 a day ad program or something like that. They don’t quote me on the exact name, but check, check that out. If you’re kind of curious with some of this in terms of how you kind of can do content. so in terms of actually what types of posts, what types of content does work 

[00:30:38] well?

Events, like you’re watching right now, these live streams. Are actually still pretty effective. There’s still a pretty good way to get engagement. They, they are also becoming a little bit more difficult as more and more people do them. Right. It used to be, you know, when we first started doing these two years ago, that I’d get, you know, two or three or four maybe events over the course of a month for people doing invites from events.

Now I probably get two or three invites a day. There’s a lot more noise. we’re kind of noticing that right. We don’t get as many people live necessarily on every single event. Now we don’t get quite as many people signing up. We still get a pretty good turnout and we’re still finding it’s definitely been worth the time.

So, we could, we will continue to invest in doing those. Also carousels, polls can be effective in terms of just getting a little bit of, of good people, getting the right people’s engagement, and again, telling stories and repurposing content like, video content like we’re doing right now, we can take that and turn that into shorter clips, and things like that.

So, So I’ll just take a quick look at the questions here. And again, normally I put ’em on the screen. I’ve got a little bit different format, so I hope you’ll kind of bear with me, through that. So, couple ones here. Jacqueline Appreci, appreciate you agreeing with me on that. About the, you, you know, how, how it can be such a turn off on the politics side there.

What was the Facebook lady’s name here? Lemme see if I can type it in here. It’s that way everybody’s got it. and it’s Laurel Portier there. So. Alright, so we’ll keep going on here. If you’ve got questions, keep posting them in there and, if I miss ’em right now, the first time through. I will catch ’em kind of at the end and I’ll, I’ll, have Evan kind of help me, keep track of which ones I’m missing as, as, as I don’t, don’t want to just get stuck in, in, question land, but I do appreciate you sending them in.

So we’ll keep going and then 

[00:32:41] we’ll come back to them. So next we’re gonna talk about events and how we actually can leverage them to better build what we’re trying to accomplish and ultimately bring in more clients, get meetings and things like that. So. Network, excuse me. Events are why you want to build your connections with purpose, because at the end of the day, most of the people who come to your events are part of your network.

There’s ad program, right? LinkedIn will, LinkedIn will love to sell you ads, for your event. They would really like to do that. What they don’t tell you is that they’re really, really ineffective in terms of getting events. I’ve, I’ve had clients try it several times. And every time it’s, you know, well we got two people, two signups, or four signups or, or something like that.

And you know, I blow through a few hundred dollars in terms of budget and none of them actually show up. So what we find is we get much, much better response if we actually go through our network and invite people. And this is why, again, we need to build those connections so that we’ve got enough people we can invite.

In case kind of you’re curious what the limits are is it’s, you can send out a thousand invites. Per week from each account you’ve got. So if you have an account to one of your employees, like Evan, Evan, and you may, you may be here because of Evan or Katie, you may not have gotten an invite from me. So we all work together, right?

We’re all, we’re all on the same team here. We’re all at the same company. So we, we kind of pool that our resources together, and I’ll send out invites from our individual accounts to get more people to events. And that can be one way is make it, make it a team, a team type of effort. Just trying to do it from one account.

Whatever. Whoever your your leader’s account is, is okay, and that works too. You will get better results though if you have more invites going out from everybody on the team. right events can be a great way to build authority, just the same way as speaking engagement and podcast things. Doing events on LinkedIn is, is a kind of a good way to demonstrate and build that trust and authority, demonstrate that you are in fact a real person, not, not some type of AI bot.

at least for, for now. and yes, we do find it does in fact help you get new leads. It does also helps. Get people who maybe are on the fence about working with you to close. And even we’ve on this many times actually, is that it helps reactivate, deadbeats, people that, you know, they just kind of disappeared.

They ghosted you and all of a sudden, six months later they pop up at one of your events and say, Hey, you know, great event. can we schedule some time to talk? I’m ready to go And, okay. Or sometimes it will bring back, you know, people who worked with you in the past. They churn for one reason or another.

And then again, you know, a few months later they see you are, you’re active again. And they see that event and now they’re interested. And I’ve had that many times where it’s been three, four, few. last month I talked to a guy that I talked that we initially had a conversation in 2018 and, and he finally came back around to remember who I was.

so just kind of keep that in mind. That this is, is, is a good way to get people back and active in your, in your, in your system. So that is content and that that’s kind of all the different ways you can use it. I know, and now we’re about 34 minutes in, so I’m gonna go over the next part probably a little bit, 

[00:36:11] faster.

But, we’re gonna move into outreach, which I know is a little bit more on the controversial side. but also what I can tell you is definitively for most, most consultants start here and, not necessarily the case. If you’re, if you’re like in a, in the, the life coaching or type of things, or we’re more, what you do is aspirational.

but for the kind of meat and potatoes, here’s a specific problem that I solve, type of consultant outreach can actually be a really good way because it’s, it’s a. Way too fine. You say, I need to talk to VPs of this type of company who are in the, you know, communications department. LinkedIn can help you find that person, connect to that person, and ultimately let you send a message to, To that. And Rod absolutely no one ever gets offended about being invited to an event, even if it’s not relevant to them. So don’t worry about that. You, you probably see that I’ve seen that before. Right. And I’m guessing that’s what Rob was saying is that well, what if people get offended that, you know, I’m, you know, I’m sending them to an event.

It’s not relevant to them. You know what? They ignore it though. If they’re not mad, it, it’s, it’s all good. So, anyway, back to the, back to the outreach thing. It, it’s oftentimes the most consistent, reliable business development strategy to use in the commercial and enterprise space. So. When people say, I don’t like outreach, you are probably right.

Nobody came into the office this morning, right? Nobody in this entire chat and said, gosh, I was so excited to go through and check all my cold emails and go through that spam folder. Gosh, I just wanted to see if that Nigerian prints really was gonna come through for me today. Right? It’s that nobody, nobody’s looking forward to your cold call.

Nobody. Nobody wants, nobody wants your direct messages, however. Talk about how to make ’em relevant and interesting so that you know what people will in fact respond to them. Because remember, people are gonna tell you they don’t like TV ads, they don’t like radio ads, they ignore Google ads, they throw away all their junk mail, right?

Think of this as just another form of advertising. and you’ll, you’ll kind of be in the right state of mind for, for what outreach is. All it is is just another way to advertise your company and people in general. Don’t like advertising, right? They don’t even like networking events. They go because they have to.

So just kind of keep that in mind as we go through all of this. So in terms of outreach, how do you do it? Build connections. Introduce yourself. I think think of it like you’re actually at an in-person networking event. You go up to some, right? what’s the, there’s a meme out there. you know, it’s the whole how, how Ango Montoya has the, the perfect pitch is, you know, hello, my name is Ango Montoya.

You killed my father, prepared to die. but nonetheless, it’s, you know, who, who are you, you know, why are you, you know, why is this relevant? And, and what would you like to happen next? So, obviously don’t threaten to tell people that they need to prepare to die, but, unless you are in fact in Diego Montoya.

Nonetheless, make what you, you know, see if what you’re talking about is relevant. That’s, that’s probably pretty important. That means connecting with the right people where your message is going to be relevant to them. And if you’re not sure if it’s relevant, all you do is, Hey, I’m not sure if this is relevant to you, but, do you think it makes sense for us to have a virtual cup of coffee?

There, there, you’ve, you’ve actually just solved all your, prequalification form in, in, in one sentence. So. Just, just a little, little bit of a hint is you don’t have to get too crazy about trying to pre-qualify people. Just tell ’em what you do and ask if that’s, you know, and say, not sure if that’s relevant, but, and then can we have, ask say what you want to happen 

[00:40:04] next.

I also recommend two other things, and that is make your messages sequential. People don’t often respond to your first message or even sometimes your second one. so by having a few different ones, right? I don’t think I have this slide on this particular presentation, but one I typically tend to do is I tell people that LinkedIn’s a little bit different than other social networks.

Social media, and that it’s not very sticky and right. People don’t spend a lot of time on the platform. and that’s why some things like outreach actually more effective on platforms like LinkedIn is because then content is because people aren’t spending as much time there. most recent data I had on it said.

People spend about 19 minutes a month on LinkedIn. All right, so not, not great. How does that compare to, to YouTube where people spend? I think about 45 minutes a day. so not, not even in the same ballpark in terms of how much time people spend there. So doing just content can be tricky simply because a lot of people just aren’t gonna see it, even if they’re in your network.

Those people aren’t necessarily on LinkedIn. Very often. So when you’re doing outreach, same type of idea. Think nice thing about outreach is oftentimes that message will end up in their inbox, and I’ll let ’em know that, you know, Gary Ruplinger has sent you a message and it will show, you know, say you can respond to it from the email.

So sending multiple messages don’t get carried away. Three is plenty. Four is probably a little too much, but you can get away with it and don’t go beyond five if the people aren’t responding. Use something else. For example, email’s a good place to, to move to from there and, and do follow up with people.

Again, they may not see your message. People are in fact busy. they’re not even, they may not even be trying to ignore you. they, they may in fact just have never seen it. ’cause especially messaging on LinkedIn can easily get buried pretty quick. So, I do so recommending, so basically make introductions.

Find out if you’re relevant. Use sequences, follow up with people and make offer. What? What would you like to happen next when people aren’t responding? Well, it’s usually one of those 

[00:42:24] factors. You, you, you missed it somewhere, so it might be the wrong message to the wrong person. you see that pretty often, especially if you are trying to use like automation software and things like that to kind of build your, build your sequence of like, oh, I’m gonna go into sales navigator ’cause this is a really neat tool and I can find all these people, but you don’t quite.

Get the targeting right? You might say, well, I wanna reach out. CEOs would be great, and CFOs would be great, and VP of sales would be great. the director of you, you have all these job titles and you have the same message for everybody. where in a lot of cases you would be much better off by saying, what’s the one job title where this is most relevant for, where they’re also most likely to take my meeting.

And unless the company has less than 10 people, that person is not the CEO. in fact, the CEO targeting can really make your entire met, your entire dataset noisy. just just keep that one in mind. If you’re going after small businesses, you can leave it in no problem. but once you get above, you know, 11 employees, I usually leave it out.

Your message sounds like everybody else’s, common right? There’s, and right. AI is really good at helping you think it looks different. And remember, people are smart, they’re sophisticated. It doesn’t have to say exactly word for word the same thing. It just kind of has the same tone or uses weird big words, things like that.

So keep your messages short. It doesn’t mean they have to be only one or two sentences, but if you can fit it all in, absolutely do it. but you know, as short as possible and without, without an extra whole lot of extra fluff, you might be missing that call to action. You might be pitching in the first message.

In fact, that’s probably what’s happening in the majority of cases is that you’re just pitching in the first message and you’re turning people off, or you’re pitching in the connection message and you’re really turning people off and you’re not even getting the connection in the first place. So you’re, you’re basically, you’re, you’re getting way, way far ahead of yourself.

Think, think like in networking, a meeting, you don’t walk up to somebody and say, hi, my name is Gary. Would you like to buy my, my, you know, lead generation system? It’s really good. I’m running a special on it right now. What? And the person just, what, what, what do you I they walk away, right? And on LinkedIn, it’s much easier to just ignore you.

And please, please, please don’t put calendar links in your messages. It feels very impersonal. You want them to make all the effort when you’re trying to reach out. It just, the, the, it just doesn’t work. We can go over the psychology all day long and you can say, well, I’m doing it because it’s, it makes it convenient for both of us.

It, it does make it convenient, especially convenient for you, but you will find that even if people do it, the show rate is lower that way, just off do it the old fashioned way. Just, just try humor me for a month. Just try and do it the old fashioned way. See if you get better meetings and more meetings with the right people.

Just, just try it. alright. Few questions here. let’s see. I’ve got a bunch of questions today. You guys are doing really appreciate, ’em. I, I love to see all the activity here. you know what, I’m close to the end. Let me finish this and then I’m gonna flip over to a different view so I can grab all these ’cause we actually have quite a few.

Really good questions and I want to make sure I get, give good answers to, to 

[00:45:56] everybody. so we’re gonna talk quickly, talk about LinkedIn ads and like I said, then we’re gonna get back to all these questions. So here’s, here’s probably the big thing I wanna tell you about LinkedIn ads. Don’t start here.

If you, you haven’t done much with content, you haven’t done much in terms of figuring out what your market is. You haven’t done any outreach to kind of figure out who you wanna talk to. Don’t start with LinkedIn ads. This is a scaling thing. Once you’ve got things kind of figured out, simply because LinkedIn ads, can get cost prohibitive really, really fast.

if your client and your lifetime value of your client isn’t above 5,000, and this is probably not gonna be a terribly effective method for you. again, simply because LinkedIn is, you know, as far as ad networks go, they’re among the most expensive ones. So. If you are going to start with LinkedIn ads, start with retargeting.

Start with people in your network, people that have visited your website. Really good one. If you’re already driving content from other things, you’re doing other stuff to drive people. Retarget those people who visited there. ’cause now you can take people who visited your website plus all of LinkedIn’s really good filters so you can filter out just the good people.

So it makes it a lot more palatable so that, you know, yes, they might be very expensive appointments, but the quality is really, really good. here’s a couple examples. Feel free to kind of screenshot them, but if you’d like to kind of see lots of examples of them. LinkedIn, like, like almost all the platforms now have this transparency section, called the LinkedIn Ad Library where you can see other people’s ads.

So if you see somebody who’s, Oh, I wonder what they’re up to. What are they trying? I know they’re successful. You can just go there and, right. You can do things like case studies, which are good. You can show reviews and testimonials and things like that. So things that are, are really helpful from a, a.

Thanks. So thank you for attending this webinar. I’d like to invite you to schedule a discovery call with one of our coaches so we can help you learn how to learn to implement this in your business. I’m kidding. but if you do need some help with this, you do want somebody to kind of help put this together for you, put a system in place or somebody just to manage the whole thing for you.

’cause it does get a little time consuming. Feel free to schedule a call with me. There’s no, no sales person at the company other than me. I take all the calls, you can email me directly, Gary a Pipelineology and we can get something set up. So no big pitch there. But I did, like I said, I do want to jump into the questions 

[00:48:37] here.

So let’s jump in and see if I can do this. And we’re gonna try and end the show.

And, I’ve lost my, my whole system is broken here. Of course it is. There we go. All right.

And we got a whole bunch of stuff on my screen that I don’t want up here. Okay.

And this is not working the way I wanted it to today. My apologies for, not having the right stuff up. Hey, Evan, if you’re there, can you pull this whole page down that I’m, that I’ve got up right now? This, just remove it from the stream. Apologies for the, the technical difficulties here. Maybe Evan’s got the controls.

I can’t seem to to grab them right now, so,

oh, Evan doesn’t have the controls either. Alright, let’s see here. Lemme see if I can move them from a different section here. One second. Just bear with me people. I apologize here. This is what I get when I try to use new, new technology.

See if I can grab them from a different stream here.

Alright.

All right, well I guess I’m not going to, so I’m gonna just have to go through and kind of do them audio only. So appreciate that everybody. Appreciate y’all being here. Let’s jump into the question. So I’ll kind of start from the bottom and kind of work my way up. ya asked if we can get the deck from the webinar today.

Yeah, just email me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. I’ll send you the slide deck. See Ted, this is, this is you trying to get me to talk politics and I’m not gonna do it. Not, not. See, this is where we’re not engaging with that. Bob asked another question. Should we view their profiles before requesting connect? Alright, so I think this is, I’m guessing this is in relation to a tool, so.

I’m gonna pull this, down here. Alright, so, so should we request, so, okay. So when it comes to viewing their profile, here’s a couple things you should keep in mind is not everybody has premium to begin with, and only people who have premium accounts on LinkedIn are even gonna know that you’ve viewed their profile.

So just keep that in mind. It’s, it’s less than 10% of people. So immediately we have now eliminated 90% of people from doing that. And in terms of viewing their profile, does that actually help? We’ve seen no data. To indicate that it makes any difference whatsoever. It’s one of those cool features that’s, that a LinkedIn tool has decided they, they can do and they can trigger that view, but it, it really makes no meaningful difference in terms of what you’re doing.

So just, just keep that in mind. I, I don’t, I don’t 

[00:52:35] bother. Brian asks, do you recommend using LinkedIn automation tools for invites and initial messages? it can certainly be helpful. if you’re going to use any LinkedIn automation tools, make sure that you are paying for a least a sales navigator account.

as, technically automation tools can go against the terms of service, but we find that if you’ve got, you’re paying for Sales Navigator, you’re clearly indicating to LinkedIn that you’re willing to pay for access to their data and that you’re planning to use the platform for sales purposes. So it tends to, they, they will let, they will let it slide, essentially those tools.

So otherwise, if you’re just trying to do it from a free account or something like that, I would not recommend the automation tools as you’re likely gonna get the whole account suspended. so just kind of keep that in mind. Felicia asks, would appreciate your comments on LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription models, ROI and time investment to get ROI.

So LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a wonderful tool in terms of being able to find the right people. it’s not necessarily great as a communication tool. and what is the time investment to get an ROI from it? You, unfortunately, I can’t even answer that. it could, it could be as short as two weeks or, or less.

If you find exactly the right people who are looking for exactly what you have to offer. really it’s just a, it’s, it’s meant to be a, a good tool to help you find the right people. but oftentimes it takes quite a bit more time than that, so, but it is, it is a good tool. They’ll usually give you a free trial to it, so, If you’re really looking to do things more in a pro more professional way on LinkedIn, getting Sales Navigator is a really good tool to do that, to help you do that. let’s see here. Kurt says, but keep in mind, people use LinkedIn to connect and network not to buy. So if you get salesy off the bat, you might turn people off.

You’re absolutely right, Kurt. you know, it’s built as a, as a networking site, as you know, a place for business professionals. It’s not, you know, it’s not eBay or Amazon or Etsy or place that’s a, you know, here’s a, or we can do industry specific clutch.io or something like that where people are actually shopping.

so keep that in mind. do, do, do, rod says, use your full weekly connection allowance. Absolutely. So you’re, you’re limited if you’re doing it manually, you’re limited to a hundred connection requests a week. Send them out every single week. So here’s a, here’s an interesting one. So Felicia says, I would not accept a connection request with no content.

You are in the minority, Felicia. we’ve got pretty good data. I can show it to you consistently over, over many, many years where we will get a higher connection, right, with no message than we do by including a connection request. So. I, and I, I, it’s, it’s like, and I, you, you might, I believe you, I believe that you won’t accept them without, but keep in mind that most people, like I said, people are pretty getting pretty smart and sophisticated as well.

And when they’re looking now they see, oh, it has a message, they’re gonna pitch me. So, whereas in a lot of cases, ones without, they might not, they might just be a connection request. Alright. I think I’ve got, oh, here’s a good one from Jacqueline. is there a way to send event requests to multiple contacts at a time? Yes. Yes, there is. And it’s wonderful. go, if you’d set up an event, go into your events, there’s an invite button once it’s set up, and then it will bring up a popup section for you so that you can go in and.

Invite people based on different parameters, whether it’s based on location, what, what industry they’re in. You can actually even filter by company if you want. so, and then you can go through and click one at a time, and then click, invite the bottom and build a group together. Or you can actually scroll all the way to the bottom up to a thousand people and invite the whole thing.

You might get an error once or twice by, if you do it, if you do a lot of people at the same time, you’ll typically get a Hey, can’t and send the connections. Click it again, you might get it again. Click it again. It usually goes through on the third or fourth time, right? They won’t let you send it to more than a thousand people.

But if you’re kind of splitting it up into multiple groups, like 200 here, 300 there, you know, 50 here. If you do get over the the limit, it might still let you try to send it. but if you do it all at once, it won’t. and if you’re getting an error that just is immediate, if it doesn’t go through after five or six times.

You’re just over the limit. They’re not gonna let you send anymore that week. So just kind of keep that in mind. Alright. So really good questions, everybody. Alright, let me try and grab some here down at the bottom. let’s see answering. So when, Timothy asks, when you post on LinkedIn, do your post to specific groups where the content matters.

I don’t bother with groups at all. if you find, you’ll find that I’m a member of a bunch of groups and I couldn’t tell you which ones. Because they are, they are irrelevant from a content standpoint on LinkedIn. simple, simple as that. I, I find, I, I find no benefit to doing that. you, your mileage may vary.

let’s 

[00:58:27] see.

And I think with that, if there are no other questions.

I think I, I hope I got ’em all. If I missed them, feel free to post them in here real quick. Otherwise, thank you everybody so much for, for jumping on. Really appreciate having you here today. Hope you have a great rest of your week and, it’s almost June, so summer is here. Hooray. So, we’ll be back again towards the end of June.

we’ll keep doing these throughout the summer, so hopefully you can join me on the next one. Thanks everybody, and have a great rest of your day. Bye-bye.