How To Get Clients On LinkedIn – Find, Meet, and Close New Business

How To Get Clients On LinkedIn – Find, Meet, and Close New Business

Gary hosts a “How to get Clients on LinkedIn” livestream for B2B professionals, outlining a practical agenda: optimize your profile, build the right network, use content and outreach approaches, leverage events, and do Q&A. He emphasizes a complete, human profile (public headshot, custom banner, strong headline, compelling About section, featured content, activity, and recommendations) and recommends proactively connecting with ideal clients—preferably second-degree connections—often using Sales Navigator for targeting. For content, he advises consistency, specificity, storytelling, thoughtful engagement, and repurposing long-form recordings into short captioned clips; carousels and polls can boost reach while vanity metrics are overrated. For outreach, he argues it’s effective when relevant, sequential, and human, avoiding pitching in the first message and not including calendar links; follow-up and clear offers matter. Replays are available after the event, and he offers done-for-you appointment services.

Discover:

00:00 Livestream Welcome
04:06 Housekeeping And Replay
06:25 Agenda And About Gary
08:45 Who This Is For
11:02 Quick Offer For Busy Folks
12:09 Profile Basics That Convert
13:58 Headline And Banner Examples
19:37 About Section And Featured
24:52 Building Your Network
28:21 Sales Navigator Targeting
32:12 Boosting Connection Rates
40:28 Content Approach Basics
44:53 Niche Down Your Audience
46:22 Ignore Vanity Metrics
48:16 Thoughtful Engagement Tactics
49:39 Content Formats That Work
57:56 Outbound Outreach Reality Check
01:02:15 LinkedIn Outreach Best Practices
01:07:10 Events and Done For You Offer
01:08:34 Live Q&A and Wrap Up

Transcript:

[00:00:01] Welcome everybody. we are just a few minutes, before the start. This is the How to get Clients on LinkedIn livestream. I’m your host Gary Ruplinger and the founder of Pipelineology. So, I know we’ve got a bunch of people jumping in. I know it’s, we got a, got a lot of people registered today. So I’m really excited to, to do this event with everybody and I look forward to interacting and answering your questions.

so let’s give a few minutes. if you’ve been on one of my events before, you know, I really like to start on time. I know your time is is valuable and I wanna make sure that we’re not, not wasting any of it and doing the best we can to, to make sure that, we’re, we’re giving you the best information we can, in the time that is scheduled.

So, looks like we’re about two minutes out from the start. where’s everybody calling in from today? I am, if you haven’t met me before, I’m in the Detroit suburbs, so, just a little bit north of the city in Michigan. And, it is a bright and sunny day. It looks like it is, currently 83 degrees out.

where’s, where’s everybody else today? Oh, I should probably mention that, there’s, there’s usually a 20 to 32nd delay from when I say something on my side to when it actually shows up on your end. So there can be a little bit of a, a time delay for when comments and things do come back in. but just, just to let you know that.

But otherwise, we are, we are in fact fully live right now. Happy to, happy to be on with everybody here. Mackenzie, welcome from Victoria, Canada. Bri, British Columbia, Assumee. Oh, I don’t know if I’m saying that right. Welcome from, welcome from Nigeria, Melissa from Pennsylvania, Raji Lebanon. Oh my goodness.

We got a lot of people today. Right? Appreciate you guys jumping in there. Brian from Tulsa. Bryce is on vacation. That’s nice. hope you’re having some nice weather there in, in Florida. Naomi from Wales. And Steven. Stefan. Steven, not quite sure. I’m, I’m bad at pronouncing names. I’ll apologize in advance if I butcher your name.

I didn’t mean to, William in England. welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. Andrew Taylor at 67 in Radi, in rally. we could use some rain up here. It’s been really dry. My, my garden is very sad. It wants, it wants more water. and normally, I mean, I live in the Midwest, so normally we get plenty of rain, but, not, not so much this year.

And Antoinette from France, welcome, John from Montreal. Nice to have you today.

Dr. Doris from, ZW. good. I’m not quite sure where that is, but that’s okay. Ingrid from Mexico, nice to see everybody. and it is in fact. Two o’clock. So, and, I will stop making small talk now and I will kind of jump in and welcome everybody to how to get clients on LinkedIn. So it is great for to have everybody on the live stream today.

I know we’ve got a bunch of people joining, but I do want to get started right away. So we’ll kind of jump in with the content. if you, as you have questions, please feel free to, put them in the comments. and, as I see them, basically here’s what I will do is I can show them on the screen just like, Robert saying Cheers from Atlanta here.

and then I’ll try and answer the questions. So I may not get to your questions as you ask them, but, I’ll try and catch up to them at the end. And I do have my right hand man, Evan, he’s kind of working behind the scenes today. So, I’ve got my Slack channel off to the side so he can flag things for me and he can jump on and, and help as we’re kind of doing more q and a.

But. let’s jump into it with today’s live stream, how to get clients on 

[00:04:04] LinkedIn. So, few quick housekeeping things. there is a 20 to 32nd time delay from when I speak on my end to when it shows up on your end. overall that doesn’t really cause any issues, except that means that if you ask a question, and you have maybe some follow ups on it, I won’t see them right away.

So it can feel a little disjointed. So if I answer your question, I’m gonna do my very best to try and answer it as completely as I can so that we don’t have to do a lot of back and forth. Otherwise, you shouldn’t really notice too many other things. I do wanna mention that we are not associated with any of the people who’ve contacted you, who noticed you were attending today’s event and wanted to connect with you.

So you can see, for example, James Mason not trying to call you out. I just, I just happen to have yours in my, my inbox this morning and said, Hey, we’re both attending this event wanting to connect. So, I don’t know what James does, but, just wanted to let you know that we’re two separate entities.

I know there tends to be a lot of that, especially through InMail for whatever reason. the replay replays are real easy these days with the live streams. It’s gonna be available a few minutes, after the event ends right on this page. So, you’re welcome to watch in entirety. And then maybe you came on late or maybe you’re watching it already, but, if you want to be notified of future events, you can get on a notification list.

I know my. My network and my team’s networks are getting a little too big to invite everybody anymore. And I, I do apologize ’cause I always want to get, you know, my network invited. But, unfortunately I’ve fortunately, I guess we, I’ve got 23,000 connections now. and I can only invite about four or 5,000, throughout the course of the, of the, the month or so that we use to promote these.

So if you want to be on the notification list to make sure you don’t miss any of your future events, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events and, you can get signed up there. don’t worry, we’re not gonna bombard you with tons and tons of emails. Most of the time you’ll get two, one reminding you a week before and one reminding you, the day before.

And if I’m really on top of things, I usually remember to put out a. replay message. So sometimes three in a month. So no, no. Bombarding you with a whole bunch of, of stuff you, you didn’t want to 

[00:06:24] see. Anyway, today’s agenda, we’re gonna talk about your profile and how to really kind of set that up, how it really sets you up for success.

We’re gonna talk about building your network. if you’ve been on some of my past events, you know how we’ve really kind of taken some deep dives into really getting specific about who you want to connect with. ’cause it makes such a big difference overall in the whole client getting scheme of things, right?

Followers are great. Engagement is great. Likes are great. Yeah. All that stuff is fine. But ultimately, if we wanna get clients, we gotta have the right people in our network. And then we’re gonna talk about, the two kind of main approaches. and one is gonna be the content based one, and one is the outreach based one.

and your comfort level with them probably depends on a lot on who you are and what you like to do. we’re gonna talk about effective ways to use both and then we’re gonna talk a little bit about events and how that kind of leverages both. And we’re then, we’re gonna do some q and a with everybody.

So if you are on live, you know, doing that, ask your questions. Like I said, I will do my best to answer them. I’ll answer some as we go along and I will save some for the end if it’s not really quite on the topic we’re doing or if it’s something that is gonna get answered later. So without further ado, let’s.

Kind of jump in real quick with about me. The, you know, 15 second version is that I’m the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology Podcast. I’ve been doing marketing now for 22, going on 23 years. in my corporate career I ran call centers for car dealerships. So our job was to take all the leads that were coming in and schedule appointments at our dealerships across the country.

So. that was a lot of where the processes that we used for scheduling appointments were created. and we’ve kind of added, some, some other ones that we’ve learned along the way to kind of refine it, for maybe a little bit smaller, more, consulting types of clients or advisory types of, clients.

and, I am actively seeking New England. IPA beer re beer recommendations. It’s my favorite thing to drink in the summer, so if you’ve got any, what I really like is called M 43. It’s brewed here in Michigan. I find them to be pretty challenging to, to get my hands on them, so I’m always looking for what you guys are, are finding out 

[00:08:43] there.

Who is this particular session for? Well, it’s for anybody who’s doing business to business work. So if you sell to companies, you need to work with companies to, to build your book of business, this is probably for you. So that might mean consultants, coaches, you might be a VP of sales, business development, even works for sales reps.

we’ve seen it, seen it be pretty handy for them. manufacturing, I know we’ve worked with the, many small manufacturers who don’t really have the need for or want a large sales team. we’ll talk about some of those companies, but if you’re just small and you only need a, you know, that, that small group of clients to kind of really build your, your business.

’cause I mean, manufacturers, you don’t need a whole lot, right? You just need the right people. so we can talk about, this will, this will work for you there too. So. One thing I do wanna mention is don’t just take my word for it. I hope to give you some insights today, things you can try, but I really, really want you to take them and go try them out.

When you start doing this for yourself and you’ve kind of got the information in your hands and you’re, you’re seeing the data, you’re seeing the feedback, you’re, you’re actually doing it. You learn so much more than you can from just hopping on a, on an event with me like this today or, or anybody else’s event.

And it really kind of insulates you from, from bad advice. Now, I don’t hope, I hope I don’t give you any bad advice, but you might find that there’s some nuance to the market you’re targeting and you gotta do things slightly different. And then you can say, okay, 90% of what I said was good, but this 10% doesn’t apply to me.

So having your own information is, is having your own data doing this and, and really trying it out really makes a huge, huge difference. And you’re gonna learn so much more if you actually just go and try this and put some of this into place for yourself. I know like when we start talking about content.

for, for years we really did very, very little on the content side, and I didn’t have much to share on that. But we’ve been doing it ourselves. We’ve been getting data, we’ve, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been attending and hiring experts and getting their insights too. But the big thing is that, you know, we’re doing it and now we’ve got our data.

So we can say, okay, how does this, how does this work for us? So I encourage you to do the 

[00:11:00] same real quick. ’cause I did a post earlier or a poll last week and said, what’s your biggest problem with getting clients on LinkedIn? And if 38% of people said they don’t have time, which made me realize that if you don’t have time, you may not have time to watch the whole event today.

So, real quick, we aren’t gonna dwell on this. We do offer a done for you program for people who just don’t have time that needs this done. They want the clients, they want the appointments, they want the meetings. They need somebody to help them. You can schedule a call@theappointmentlab.com or you can email directly me directly at garriott Pipelineology.

I decided to start putting that one in there ’cause I started looking at the analytics on, on our events for the past 18 months. And every time the, the, the attendance peaks right around the 15 minute mark and then it slowly, slowly drifts off from there, but by an hour into it, we’ve, you know, people, people are busy and I get that.

So, I just wanted to mention that especially, especially for busy people. ’cause that’s really where our, our offer is really designed to shine. So, that’s all the housekeeping and other items 

[00:12:08] I wanna mention. Now let’s kind of start talking about what we really need to do in terms of. Kind of building yourself up to really position yourself so you can start getting clients on LinkedIn.

So the first thing you’re really gonna wanna do is make sure your profile is well, is in good shape, and make sure it’s something interesting. It’s up to date, it’s got information about you. right. There’s, there’s some basic fundamentals. You wanna make sure that your, your profile picture is there.

It’s a picture of, of you, you know, you don’t want to, not your logo. I see that once in a while. I see some people who, they forget to turn it public. So you send out connection requests and it’s just kind of a fuzzy little, or just kind of a gray box or box there, that you’re, it, it, it pretty much takes away any types of credibility and people’s like, I don’t, I don’t wanna connect with this person.

I don’t wanna work with this per, I, they’re anonymous. I don’t know who they are. So that’s what we’re gonna kind of, kind of jump into here is what, what should be on your profile and how do we use it to, well, to start getting, getting meetings. real quick here, Roderick, yes, there is going to be a recording.

this live stream actually automatically records. The technology’s pretty cool now. It used to be, you know, I would take this and I’d send it off to the video editor and hopefully two days later I would get it back and then we would upload it and, we’d put it on a page and then I’d have to email and send messages out to everybody.

Fortunately, now with the live stream, it just automatically will appear on this page as soon as we’re done. So five minutes afterwards, boom, there will be the, recording. so I see, it was answered Ali. Oh, Alyssa did answer that. So thank you Alyssa, for, for jumping in helping out 

[00:13:57] there. Alright, so building your profile, your headline, this is probably one of the more important things, that you can put on your, your page here.

And that’s this little stuff that shows up right underneath your name. and here’s kind of what we have found to be the best. Now there’s a lot of ways to do this. We’re gonna see several examples today of different ways that this is being done. but ultimately I find that it’s usually helpful just to, to put what your job title is.

You’re the founder of a company, you work in business development. just put that there. It’s, it, it tends to immediately lend credibility. It used to be that you would kind of put the helping, you know, whoever types of, of companies that you work with, type of stuff first. we found that you, it actually works a little better to put your job title, first.

I’m not quite sure why, maybe ’cause it, it seems just a bit more professional. but, you know, basically start with what you do. Then a little bit of explanation about who that actually is for. So in my case, I’m the founder of Pipelineology. We help businesses line to have high value clients. I also host the podcast, so I throw that in there.

I really like memes, so if you want to send me memes, I love them. I will respond to pretty much any meme you send me with a meme. So, just keep in mind what you’re, what you’re signing up for there is, you’re probably gonna get a lot of meme responses. And I put in beer enthusiasts, which you’ve probably already gathered from the about section.

But those last two are there intentionally. They make me seem more like a real person. And I’m not saying I’m, I, I, I’m, I’m actually not an AI generated talking head today. I’m actually a, a real person sitting in a real office in Michigan. But those are the types of things that help the profiles feel less kind of robotic, and they’re just, just out doing business development and things like that.

It, it helps people connect to you as a person. so I know sometimes the pages here are a little bit small. If you’re on a big screen, if you can, if you wanna maximize this, you can kind of see the other two I put over here. But the reason your headline is so important is simply because they’re, they’re gonna see three things basically when four things, when they connect, when you send out a connection request, they’re gonna see your picture, they’re gonna see your name, they’re gonna see that headline or most of it.

They’re gonna see any mutual connections you have. So that’s why you want to have, you know, this here. ’cause it kind of tells, it lets somebody kind of look and say, is this somebody I want to be connected with? Okay, sounds right. That sounds relevant to me. They sound like they’re the type of person I should connect with.

the less information is here, the more that they’re, the more likely they’re just to click, ignore. and you don’t want ’em clicking ignore. You want ’em to click accept, and or at least to click on your name and go check out your profile. In which case they’ll make a decision there. But if there’s not enough information, then most people are just gonna click ignore right away.

Some things to keep in mind. The other thing, we’re gonna talk probably more about this here is the background image too. I recommend you always customize that. The default one is pretty boring on LinkedIn and there’s a ton of ways to do it. mine now always shows our mo the next upcoming event we’ve got.

So I use that background image to promote our, our events, but we’re gonna see some other ways to do that. so you can take a look at Brian Carter here. So, I liked Brian’s, I really liked the background image he did here, but you can see here it’s kind of got the same type of format in terms of what does he do?

He’s digital marketing sales strategist. You know, he works in Medicare and health insurance and he’s an abstract painter, right? A little bit interesting. Carries a little bit of intrigue. and then you can see up here he is, It’s not on here. We just a lot of keynote speaking events. So we’ve got him from times where he’s spoken on stage, his book, and at the very top here you can see basically what I would call your pieces of flyer, different types of, lo different logos from companies that he’s worked with.

So again, another example of, of an effective profile that gets people to connect and gets people to reach out, be interesting to your target market. And this is, this is always a little bit hard to explain, but here’s what I can tell you. Here’s, Damien Taylor’s, profile and I can tell you that this profile had more people just reaching out and asking, Hey, can we meet?

Hey, can we meet this profile? Got more than any other that we’ve, we’ve ever worked with. And, and again, you can see here kind of it’s a little bit more about what he does. It’s a good picture of him. It’s an interesting background image, right? People, people would ask all the time, what is Tech Witch?

What is that? They wanted to know. ’cause it looked, it looked interesting, it looked intriguing. And so people would connect with him and just reach out and say, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m interested. Can we talk? So, more, more so than probably any other that we worked with. And just, it, it, it kind of managed to tick all of the, that’s interesting boxes.

So, so let’s talk about a little bit more about some of the other things you want to be doing on your profile. So, right, you wanna make sure you get those, take the easy ones, right? Make sure you’ve got a custom background image. Make sure your picture’s on there. Make sure your headline’s there. But what about some of the ones that really kind of help?

People learn more 

[00:19:36] about you. And that’s the about section. So, what I will tell you here is that in most cases when it comes to writing these days, if you need some help chat, GPT is your friend, it’s, well, it, it does a really good job of rewriting or taking prompts. So you could take one that you like, paste it in there, say, Hey, I like this example.

Give it the parameters that you want for it, and it will spit one back up. That’s usually pretty decently written. And what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna say it just lacks personality. So go ahead and manually add the personality parts and make it, you know, make it just that little bit more interesting and, and boom, you’re done.

So it’s much usually, you know, I used to say, yeah, take some, some copywriting fundamentals and it still does a little bit. You just want it to be a little, just to kind of do that last little, you know, 20% or even 10% of the way just to make it kind of pop a little bit. But, you know, Chachi PT. Does, does a pretty good job of rewriting and helping you, you know, take a profile or an about section you really like and turning it into, something that is basically written about you.

So, real quick here, I do see your question, Lucy. How long is best, as you’re limited to, 5,000 characters? I think, don’t be afraid to use them all. As long as it’s interesting. people will, will read it. If they’ve gotten that far already, they’ll check it out. it doesn’t start out expanded.

It kind of starts out small and they can click to see more. So don’t worry about it being too long. ’cause LinkedIn will, bridge it, by default and then people can read more about it. So you really want this top part to kind of pull them in and be intriguing and then they can read the rest. parts of it.

so, but, but good question. But yeah, we, I try and use everything. They’ll, they’ll let me use there. the one thing I do wanna mention here, and this is, you know, I know by and large most places, most people are still have kind of their work experience and, you know, achievements and stuff like that. Go ahead and put that stuff in your work experience section.

They give you a whole section to talk about every, you know, places you’ve worked and stuff. So you don’t need to rehash it there. This is all about what you’re currently doing, who you help, who you work with. if your goal is getting clients on LinkedIn, if your goal is to get a job, then absolutely you can kind of keep the, the resume type of, experience there.

But, forgetting clients definitely switch over to the, you know, basically think of this as your landing page on LinkedIn. That is what I tell all my clients is think of your profile page as your landing page and really make sure you’re. Kind of putting, putting everything in there. It’s a safe place to make you pitch.

Essentially, if somebody’s clicked on your name that they’re reading through it, you know, they’re, they’re checking you out just like they would your website. So build your profile, make it complete. Some other things, the featured section, any posts, again, I use it for pro promoting, promoting upcoming events, or promoting podcasts.

it can be a great place to promote your services. So if you’ve got a video or a post you’ve done, you can just go in there and feature it. your activity there, you, you want to have some activity on LinkedIn. I’m not saying you need to spend all day, you know, three, four hours a day or even an hour a day on LinkedIn, making sure you’re active, but having some activity there.

I will tell you, your profile looks really thin. If somebody goes in and clicks on it and there’s, there’s no activity, it will hurt. Maybe not to the same extent that the other things will. But it will certainly hurt the trust factor. It may not hurt the connection rate that much, but your, your trust factor goes down.

If you can get recommendations from colleagues, you know, coworkers, you know, previous people that you’ve, you’ve you’ve served and worked with, you want them, your work history, like I said, that’s your great place for your, kind of, your achievements at each position. You did fill that all out. you know, the, the more complete your profile is, the, the better overall that you’re gonna kind of get people all the way down that road to, to new closed clients.

Susanna asks, how often do you clean or refresh your LinkedIn profile? It kind of depends how often kind of things are changing. my background image gets swapped out every single month. Most of the other stuff gets maybe, you know, we make adjustments to it maybe every, maybe every quarter it gets looked at.

Might be every six months. Like my about section I think has been the same for, probably going on six to nine months. And it’s time for a refresh on that. I just want to tweak some things to it. So, but again, another good question is, you know, you as long, as, long as kind of, you got the big parts there, you’re okay.

You know, you do not to, you don’t have to swap out your banner every month. I only do it ’cause that’s how often we’re, we’re switching, switching events. before that it was usually pretty 

[00:24:50] static. alright, so next up is let’s talk about building your networks. So once you got your profile done, and I I will mention this again, don’t let that be the thing that holds you back.

You know, if all you’ve got time for right now is just to do a quick about section picture, background image and, and Canva for free or something, and, and quickly write a headline, go for it. You don’t, don’t worry too much about it. ’cause getting some action getting started is gonna be more important and just kind of do the rest as you go.

Right? When we start with a new client, the very first thing that we start doing is we wanna start getting connections. So the, this part we’re gonna talk about then, and throughout those first couple weeks of working with them, we’re gonna make sure the rest of it kind of is filled in. But we know that we want to build, build a network.

’cause we need people, we need people to talk to. We need people to engage with. So getting that going as soon as possible is, should probably be the priority. ’cause that’s, that’s ultimately where the clients are probably gonna come from. So, there are two types of, well, I guess you’ve got followers and connections.

So for building your network, we’re gonna mostly focus on the connections here. Followers are unlimited, but there’s also some limits to the engagement you can do with them. Connections are a little bit different. You can only have 30,000 of them, which is a lot. I mean, it’s a lot, a lot. we signed a new client on.

Oh, up this weekend, the owner said, you know, I, I reached out to, you know, we had a mutual connection. So I, I reached out to him and he said He never heard of you. And, you know, ultimately he said he didn’t know me. which is fair, ’cause again, 23,000 connections. You don’t know everybody personally, but you don’t need to.

but some of the things you can do is if you’ve got a connection with somebody, not a follower, you can invite them to subscribe to a newsletter or to an attendant event. it’s easier to get contact info on ’em. So let’s say, you know, you need to email ’em, 90% of the time their email is gonna be available to you under if they’re an actual connection of yours.

Rarely is it available if they’re just a follower. So it’s easier to message ’em, write followers. It gets filtered a lot. like when we do our follow up post event, I try and email people, simply because if I’m, if I’m not actually connected to you, and I know there’s probably about 30% of you on here right now than we’re already connected and the rest of you we’re not.

It’s much easier for me to message and communicate with, people like, Ken Frampton here. I can see him in here. I know we’re connected because I, I see him, we, he, you know, he’s, he’s active and we’re actively, you know, talking to each other quite a bit. But, other people here, not necessarily.

So, connections are kind of really what we want. Once you reach that point where you’ve got 30,000, okay, then you’re, then you’re done. Or you’ve, you’ve really kind of tapped out. You know, you’ve connected with everybody in your network. That would make sense. Maybe you’re in an industry. Again, we worked with a client in gaming who, you know, there’s about 6,000 potential, you know, leadership people that there are interconnected.

It’s a fairly small industry. So once we kind of hit there, that was, that was about it. So, so we wanna build your network purposefully, and that means finding people who fit the profile of the people that could be service customers of 

[00:28:20] yours. So who is that ideal client profile? So if you weren’t on last month’s event, we did an event called, what was it?

unlock the Power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, find Target and Close Deals. I’ll have Evan post a link in the comments here, for you guys. by the way, in case you’re, in case you’re not aware, Evan is my right hand man. Like I said, he’s kind of behind the scenes today. So he’s, he’s just kind of making sure, monitoring, chat and all that kind of stuff.

So he’s, here’s your, he’s helping me out to make sure that somebody’s there paying attention to everything, because I’m really trying to focus on the, the content as best I can. But, So he’ll, he’ll post that. in case you really want to take a deep dive into this, but for the purposes of today’s event, we’re just gonna touch on it.

You can see a screenshot of it here, but essentially this is the tool we really like to use to find those people, that we want to connect with. So if I’m saying, you know, I want to connect with, the chief executive officer, the, the president of the company, the founder, but I only want smaller companies.

So, you know, maybe, maybe it’s self-employed or maybe it’s up to 200 employees. There’s a lot of parameters I can look at that I can’t do just in regular LinkedIn. That really lets me focus on my target, ideal client profile. So I’m getting the right connections because ultimately. If you don’t have the right connections, it’s really hard to get those next steps to happen.

If you don’t have the right connections, then well, you know, your messaging is gonna not be relevant, then you’re not gonna get meetings and then you can’t do demos or presentations. You can’t have any conversations with people unless you’re just trying to network. And that, that can be really painfully slow on, on LinkedIn.

’cause usually if somebody’s agreeing to, to do a networking call with you, they, they usually are hoping that you’ll send them some, some business that way. I mean, it can work. I’ve, I’ve certainly seen it work. It just, it, it can be slow and feel like a lot of work for very little result. So find the people you want and act.

I recommend you actively send out connection requests no matter which way you decide to go, whether you’re gonna, you like the content approach we talk about, whether you like the outreach approach we talk about, I recommend building those connections, sending out connection invites to these ideal types of, of people who fit what you want to do.

Don’t just, you know, say I’m gonna post great content and the right people will come to me. There’s, there’s probably one person on, on today’s event, and I don’t see the, the, the live numbers today. It’s probably, there’s probably about 150, 200 people on today. I know we had, over 1300 people register, so, quite a bit.

there’s, there’s a whole bunch of people and maybe one of you that would be, you know, the people that will connect with you are gonna be the right connections. Everybody else, I recommend you go out and proactively find the people, send out connection requests, even if you don’t plan to do any outreach to them, it’s okay.

Having them in your network is gonna gonna really make a difference for you. quick question here from Kartik. Why is there a limit for connections? probably because they, they, LinkedIn wants to kind of keep some integrity in the network. if you could just send unlimited ones, there probably wouldn’t be a whole lot of value in it and the spam would probably be overwhelming.

So, that’s, that’s more of a, I mean, you think about it, Facebook’s got a limit of, of, of 5,000, but again, nobody limits the number of followers you can have. So if you wanna be a thought leader or something like that, then, the, the sky’s the 

[00:32:09] limit. alright, so next part here is be somebody they want to connect with.

The big thing I want you to remember on LinkedIn is it’s, this is, I know it’s, it’s positioned as a business networking site. This is humans connecting with other humans. Humans aren’t connecting with businesses. it’s not, it’s not like on Twitter where people do interact with brands, which is still a human, by the way, who’s typing those out and coming up with those posts.

So I want you to remember that this is still human to human. You might be representing a business, they’re representing a business, but it’s two people. So be human and be interesting, just like the most interesting man in the world. I, I know, I know that’s getting to be a bit of a dated reference, but I still, I still really enjoy those, still really enjoy the memes from, from those especially.

So building your networks. So some of the things that are really gonna help with connection rate. So this is, Chris, former client of ours. He, holds the record for the highest connection rate overall. when we were doing outreach, people really liked to connect with him. so. And we made, we made some changes to his profile that helped make it even better and higher, but it was, was good to begin with.

So what are some of the things that help? Well, one, I recommend only sending out connection requests to mutual connections. That means second degree, it’s a toggle if you, if you’ve never played around with it, it’s a toggle in LinkedIn. So you can say under connections, it can say first, second, or third degree plus.

I recommend the ones that have, you have at least one mutual connection. It makes a huge difference. this, this thing alone can be the difference of having 6% of people can accept your connection rate, which is bad. that you, you won’t be able to send out connection requests for very long. They’ll, they’ll very much throttle you quickly.

’cause that’s too low. And I say you’re, you’re basically, you’re not relevant to people. So. Stop sending that, to 30%, which is pretty good. And LinkedIn will let you, you send out those. So, so, and I think Chris, Chris here was always a little above. I think he was, I don’t have, I don’t, I should have put it on the slide, but it was, I think 52%, was his connection rate.

So some of the things that will help is if you are like them. So, dentists, dentists can be really, really hard to connect with unless you’re a dentist. So you’ve got the same kind of professional status. Doctors will more easily be able to connect to doctors, lawyers can connect to lawyers, founders can connect to founders and just about anybody else actually.

but you know, the more, the more you’re kind of connecting with people kind of at that same level as you can certainly make a big difference. as you work into bigger companies, you’re, you know, it can be a little bit. More specific where you gotta kind of find the right departments and the right people, ’cause right, you’re not, you’re not connecting with the CEO of Fortune 500 companies, very easily.

but they’re huge companies. So there’s usually somebody in some department you can meet with and, and talk to and start working your way. So the organization where that’s, that’s more of the, the Xerox type of approach, which, still, still, still would be useful today. But, well, well outside the, the, the context of this particular session, but make sure your profile picture again is, is a person.

and it’s set to public. other things that we’ve seen help. If you’re a professor, you’ve got a PhD, you know. Professional titles like that. definitely help author, speaker, if you’ve written a book or you aren’t, do speaking engagements. Put those on there. Podcast host is great. Anything interesting about you?

Remember when we talked about, you know, I like memes, I like beer, and Chris is here. It, it’s interesting what the thing people mostly wanted to talk about. was surfing with Chris ’cause he put that he was a surfer and for the most part he was connecting with people. out on the West coast where that was more of a thing.

Nobody surfs in Michigan ’cause we don’t have any, I don’t have any waves but, out, out on California for sure. Alright, so now that we’ve kind of got an idea of what things look like from building a profile and, you know, making sure that we’re proactively connecting with the right people, let’s start talking about different approaches to start, getting people to, Kind of jump in and, and talk to you. I’m gonna see a few questions here. I’m gonna try and answer just a couple of these, because I think they’re, they’re pretty relevant here. So, Brooke says, you know, I, I have great connections. I struggle with the follow through though. You know, that’s one of the things we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk a little bit about.

and that’s usually where things, and you kind of nailed it on the head there, is you need, if you have a system in place that kind of helps with that follow through and follow up helps tremendously. and one of the slides, I don’t have it on this particular presentation, but we’ve talked about it in past events, is that LinkedIn is not like other social networks because people.

Don’t, it’s not sticky. They don’t typically spend much time there. whereas right, TikTok or Instagram, people will spend 45 to see, you know, 50 minutes a day on some of those platforms each day. whereas on Facebook, the last, the last data they, that we could find on that said 19 minutes a month, that’s, that’s less than 60 seconds a day.

So they’re not necessarily seeing your, your messaging every day and you’re not necessarily in front of them. So the follow up is necessary. Just ’cause if you, if it’s day they’re not around, they might have missed it. So, but if you’ve got the great connections, you’re off to a really good start. And now you, now you’ve got some, some great options here and those are some of the things we’re gonna kind of, kind of jump into, to kind of help with that follow through and to kind of help activate, those people.

So I think, Chris debell looks like you guys are answering your questions here. That’s awesome. Chris debell, there’s a weekly limit. I don’t know the exact number and it looks like, Ken said it is a hundred for, that is the most common one I see. I have seen 200 for people with sales navigator subscriptions.

Don’t quote me on that. but that is some of the things that we’ve been seeing on some accounts. LinkedIn’s always in flux, what I say today could be wrong tomorrow. but we have seen some of that and we’ve seen some that can just bypass it completely. especially if you’ve got a really high connection rate and a high, social selling index, which is LinkedIn’s own little stuff.

It means almost nothing except for how well your stuff gets promoted in, in the timeline and how well you can connect with people. but, just type in LinkedIn, SSI and Google will take you to the right page just in case you’re, you’re curious about that. So let’s talk about content. are the questions posted right here?

What is this one? Are the questions posted right here? Sorry, I don’t see any of the questions asked in no input field other than this chat. Yep. If you post in the comments, there, sorry, I don’t have your name, but those, those show up on my, so I’ve got a, a little, probably a little bit different kind of control panel, for the live chat where I see them off to the side here.

I know on the live stream it can look a little different depending on. Where you’re viewing it from, you might see ’em at the bottom or you might see ’em off to the right. But yeah, all the questions kind of flow through here and we’re, I’m doing my best to keep track of ’em. Evan will, we’ll kind of try and catch ones that he thinks, we may have missed, which I probably will because I know you guys are asking lots of questions today, which is great.

So appreciate that 

[00:40:27] everybody. Alright, so the content approach. So before you try this, before you say, I’m gonna really, I’m gonna be in a LinkedIn influencer, I wanna, I wanna do this, I want you to ask, is my audience on LinkedIn? And the answer might be no. ’cause not every, not everybody is, it, it’s a great place to, to find, you know, different types of professionals, can, it’s, it’s great if you need to find the right context at, certain companies.

Not every market, for example, I’ll give you a couple examples where you would be much better served to try and take this approach to Instagram or, or TikTok for that matter, or even Facebook where groups are more or more of a thing than than LinkedIn where they’re really not that great. So ask yourself, is my audience on LinkedIn?

If you wanted to target consultants, great consultants are on LinkedIn. There’s, you can’t, you can’t, throw a rock without hitting five of ’em. and I say this as a consultant, so, but if you wanna try and find chefs at a restaurant, good luck. You prob you, you’ll have a terrible time of it. If you wanna find, plumbers also terrible.

They’re, they’re there. They at least have their profiles, but they’re very difficult to connect with. They’re very difficult to get responses from. And the ones that do are bombarded with messages so they can be, it can be a very challenging place, so there’s usually better places to do that. So. With that said, I will tell you that there, there is no magic formula.

and we’ve been going through the data, we’ve been looking at it and saying, you know what? There’s it. It’s hard to kind of find that, that, you know, genie in a bottle type of magic. So I can’t tell you necessarily what to write or what’s gonna work every time. But here’s some things that we’ve found.

Like I said, I’m gonna share with you what we’ve seen from, from our experiences with just a little bit of, of outside data, people who’ve got just a bit, some more basically numbers that we can see. So with content, the big things you want to do here is you want to be consistent. So, you don’t have to post every day.

If you want to post every day, then post every day. And, but keep, keep in mind you wanna be consistently doing that. Don’t post every day for a week and then ghost everybody for, for a month, and then come back and post, you know, for three or four days in a row and then be gone again. And when you are posting, you want to make some time to be available to engage with people.

So if people are commenting, you wanna take the time to respond. and I believe that number is, you wanna try and anybody with who comments kind of within that first 48 hour window, you wanna make sure you get back to ’em and just kind of respond to their comment. If, especially, especially early on, if you don’t have a ton of comments, if, if you’re kind of at that influencer level where everything you post gets a lot of comments, you don’t have to do that quite as much.

But to kind of build things up in the, especially in the early stages, consistency and taking time to kind of engage, helps a lot be specific with your content. And these last two really kind of go, go hand in hand is, is kind of talk specifically speak directly to the people that you, you work with, that you want to influence and really avoid that generic ghost written type of content.

worked with a client, for, for quite a while where he had a service that, three times a week would just post generic quotes and, you know, occasional promo for his stuff. It was all, you know, stock imagery and pretty, pretty boring. No engagement, nothing. Nobody ever commented on it. It really wasn’t doing anything for him.

It was just showing activity. And even then though, that if, if all your activity doesn’t, doesn’t have anything going for it, nobody’s seeing it. Is it really helping? I don’t know. So we’re gonna talk about, you know, some, some metrics are, are certainly overrated and, you know, having that awareness in people, seeing them, and are great.

you don’t have to get too obsessed about some of the, some of the stuff like comments and things, but it certainly can be helpful to 

[00:44:52] have them. So I. Right with your intended audience in mind. I kind of, I mentioned that already in the first one, but I really kind of want to drive that point home is, is get, get specific with who you wanna talk to.

Tell stories, you know, maybe share some stories from, from the time your times in the trenches where you know, you were experiencing what they experienced or, or share some, you know, very specific data where you say, this is totally not relevant for 99% of the people out there. But if you are building that audience, that is exactly the right types of people, this is for them and that’s why it’s so important, right?

Going back to that, that one where we say build your audience. Build your audience where this is actually, this information is relevant for ’em. So that you don’t have to go broad, you can get very specific. ’cause ultimately getting clients means you’re solving specific problems for them. so being able to talk about them and share how you can solve them helps a, helps a whole lot.

I can tell you like for this particular. Event. just to kinda give you some insight into what we do. We, you know, I’ve talked about different types of ways to get meetings and build your funnels and, and sales pipelines and things like that. It’s when we really focus on specific LinkedIn topics on LinkedIn, I probably get 20 to 30% more people to register for the event.

’cause it’s specific. So the more specific oftentimes is the better. So just some things to keep in 

[00:46:21] mind there. Like I said, don’t worry too much about vanity metrics. and what I’m talking about there is, you know, how many likes did I get? You know, did we get a lot of comments and things like that. Some of the things you can’t really see, one of the big ones is called Dwell time, and that’s how much time did somebody spend on your post?

Were they reading it? Were they looking at it? And LinkedIn doesn’t share that data with us. and some of the things that we. You know, some of the content approaches you can use are, are kind of designed to make sure people spend more time on that post, whether it’s the carousel types of formats and, well, we’ll talk about those in just a second.

But, like I said, focus more on the consistency. Be specific. Don’t worry too much if you’re not getting just tons and tons of comments every time. ’cause oftentimes just that awareness is going to be influencing people. If they see you in their feed and they stop and they read it, they’re gonna see more.

Even if they didn’t comment, even if they didn’t like it, as if they’re stopping and reading it. Maybe they, they’re swiping through some of the pictures. They’re that dwell time. All that stuff is going to add up. And you’re, you’re becoming more of an expert to this small group of people. And these are all the things that leads to, getting more, more clients, from the platform.

And, I see you got a bunch of questions here. I will do my best to jump in here, as soon as I finish this section. So we’ll finish content here. Then I’ll grab some, some of these questions from me, you guys here, and then we’ll jump into the next section. you know, try and do that all as quickly as possible.

I know this, this session always goes long because we always get lots and lots of questions and I love it. So please keep ’em coming. I’ll stay as long as, as I need to, to answer ’em, but I know some people, I know a bunch of you guys have jobs to do, so I don’t wanna keep anybody too, too, too long. today, either if you’ve got something to do 

[00:48:15] next.

So engage with others thoughtfully. So engaging on other people’s, posts and things like that is good. Content pods, engagement pods, whatever people call them. Not so much right, where basically good idea, great posts. If, if that’s kind of what the plan is, just don’t bother LinkedIn. Look, the people who who work at LinkedIn, you know, a lot of them are, are very smart people and they know, they, they know what you’re up to.

If it’s same five people or same 10 people all jumping in on your post saying, good idea, that’s great. I great idea. It, it’s ultimately they’re, they’re gonna see your post all the time. But LinkedIn is not gonna push more visibility out, to, to the general feed to other people if that’s all you’re doing.

So if you’re trying to engage with other people. So make a thoughtful post. And if you can’t think of something, just you don’t have to skip it, go on to the next one. You don’t have to to engage with it. But if you’ve got something you can say you, you wanna contribute to the conversation that’s gonna help, that’s good for you, that’s good for them.

That kind of helps the whole, everything kind of move. And if you can get, if somebody replies to you, that’s awesome, but ultimately engaging with others thoughtfully is what you wanna do. Not just, you know, great post or repost and then move 

[00:49:36] on. so some things that are working well right now, so like I said, we’ve been kind of testing this and kind of looking at the numbers and trying to figure out what, what actually is moving the needle here?

What is leading to us to getting more meetings? What is leading to us closing more clients, right? Because that’s the goal here. So repurposing long form content. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about this, but kinda here’s the idea is when you do, any type of speaking, you do a podcast interview, you do a, a webinar like this on LinkedIn, make sure it’s recorded and have somebody who can go through and turn it into little short 62nd, 92nd two minute clips.

Just short little content, put captions on it so it’s really easy for people to consume even if the sound is off or if they’re, you know, on their, on their phone and they’re scrolling so that they can see what’s going on here. alright, it looked like I froze up here. I just wanna make sure that you guys can still hear me and if you can still hear me. Great. I’m just gonna check with, Evan here just to make sure, because I’d hate to be talking to a, to a brick wall here. Hey, 

[00:51:02]Evan: yeah, we can hear you. Okay. 

[00:51:04] You can hear me. All right.

So we’re gonna just do it with, my video feed frozen up here, or if it’s not frozen on your right and that’s great, but, we’re just gonna, we’re gonna keep on, on going through all this stuff here. So content approach. So what’s working well? So talk about repurposing long form content, taking those, you know, long, 30, 45, you know, 60 minute interviews or, or presentations, turning ’em into short little things you can post on your LinkedIn feed all week long.

and what I really like about those is they’re easy because somebody can take my voice and exactly what I said, so I don’t have to worry about it. Not coming out the right way or being something that, I wouldn’t say that that’s really the big, that’s the big challenge with anything that somebody else was writing for you.

And that was the biggest reason we avoided some content for so long, is ’cause every ghost writing service out there sucks. ’cause they’re not you, it’s not their fault. They’re just not you. So having, having a way to kind of take our own stuff and use that more efficiently worked great. now tins of views, do they go viral?

No, but it helps with that consistency. carousel posts. so you may have seen that LinkedIn discontinued carousels? Well, not really. It was a different type of format that nobody really used. The ones you typically see in your feed, are ones that basically they’re a series of, of images that you turn into a PDF folder.

And those are the ones you kind of swipe through that go kind of horizontal across your screen. since my, like I said, I don’t know if my video feed is still alive, but I had an example I was gonna show you kind of in the background of my, my image there. But, it looks like we’re, we’re kind of not gonna be able to do that today, but go back and check my previous posts.

The ones with the yellow sticky notes are an example of carousel content. They get more views that would take a little bit more work and to do. but we’re seeing, you know, they get anywhere from, you know, 50, 20 to 50% more views than just posting, you know, some repurposed long firm content. So I don’t do them every day, but my goal is to try and put out some, maybe one a week or a couple a month, something like that.

Polls, polls, are still an effective way to get a lot of visibility. Now here’s the thing, they don’t necessarily, do much to. Well kind of move any conversation forward in terms of getting clients, but they keep you in front of people and they kind of keep the activity there and they generally get a lot more engagement, than, than other types of things.

’cause it’s really easy to push a button. but ultimately the one that probably makes the biggest difference here from, getting, you know, people to kind of take the next step and want to talk to you more is telling stories. You know, again, that’s that whole being specific part. Tell stories from your, you know, your experiences, things, people you’ve worked with, people you’ve helped, things you’ve done.

you know, it, it’s, I know, I know LinkedIn is a, a business to business network, but adding some personal touches makes a big difference. You don’t have to tell your whole life story if you don’t want to. you know, you don’t need to, you know, talk about, you know, all your kids and everything like that.

But, you know, adding some, some human touches to it really makes, A big difference. but it can be a slow burn. So here’s, one that, we saw here somebody kind of posting about how content can, can be such a big help and how many impressions they got. And you can take a look at this and that almost all of their, you know, attention came from just a handful of posts.

and the rest of their content only produced just a little bit of, of activity. So there’s maybe half a dozen posts here that kind of. Made, make a big impact. One that made it two, that one that made a really big impact here. And then everything else was, was pretty slow. So content can be kind of a slow burn and you know, going viral is hard now if you do, if you’re feeling really creative.

And that’s, that’s the hard part is it’s hard to be kind of think about what’s gonna be that next one. ’cause it kind of needs to be unique. For example, here’s one that’s making the rounds right now that I thought was really good. from Yuri Verma check. It’s says if Spotify was a Ty of a Spotify playlist was a typical cold email.

And basically it all the song titles here, Basically make up a fairly, you know, a, a terrible cold email, but you could see it as a cold email you’ve probably received before. So, check it out in case you’re, you’re curious there. It’s pretty easy to find if you just type in, if Spotify playlist was a typical cold email or, or check Yuri out.

and you can find that, right? That one’s gone viral. That one’s huge. But the thing is, you don’t need to go viral for this to work for you. ’cause, you know, that’s, that may, he sells a, or he’s had a development for a, cold email service that I think runs like 57 bucks a month or something like that. So, very low barrier to entry if you’re kind of, you know, it, it’s got much more broad appeal, especially in that particular network or industry for, for a lot of consultants.

And, you know, like I said, some of the people that are, are looking here where they only, they only need, you know, five or six clients a year. and they’re, they’re fully booked. you don’t need to go viral. Just kind of make sure you’re communicating with the people that your, your, your content talks to the people that you, want to talk to.

So, Jim here says, you know, my experience has been that carousels have increased my reach a lot. Anything video of more than three minutes does not get many minutes viewed. That’s a great observation there. We’ve seen very similar data on our end. if I want people to view a video, I’ll have to do an event if I wanted to watch a lot, you know, a big portion of it.

Otherwise, yeah, under three minutes, you know, sometimes under 60 seconds is best. And make sure you put the captions on any video you’ve got there so that people can ex can take it in if they’ve got the sound off on their phone. ’cause that’s how people are generally gonna see it. Do, do do. Alright. I’m gonna keep, keep chugging along here ’cause I know we’re, we’re coming up on the, the one hour mark here and we still got, a few slides to, to go through. Not too many, so I’ll go through ’em pretty 

[00:57:55] quickly here. But I want to talk about outreach a little bit. And the reason I wanna talk about outreach is ’cause right, there’s, there’s all these books written about attraction, style, content marketing.

It’s, it’s alluring. It’s, it’s kind of, it’s fun and it’s sexy, right? It can, can make you millions and you can be an influencer and you can get keynote speaking engagements, all that jazz. But I wanna talk about what do the big dogs do? So on my commute into work there is, I drive past Cox Automotive’s headquarters.

It’s, in Troy, Michigan on a Big Beaver Road case. You wanna Google it? But, it’s not a terribly interesting building that I do. We have an old barn kind of in the middle of their, their headquarters, which is a little, little interesting, but this is a company that does $7 billion a year in revenue, 7 billion, and they’re, they’ve got access to the best, you know, marketing people.

They’ve got access to the best data analytics and all that stuff. Their marketing strategy, as far as I can tell, boils down to two things. And real quickly, you probably have not heard of them if you don’t work in that industry, but they own brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and things like that.

So they sell stuff to, auto dealerships. I know, like my, one of my previous employers at one point was spending over a million dollars a year with them. so pretty big ticket types of, of items that they, they sell. Their stuff isn’t cheap. but their job is to try and help dealerships sell more cars.

So anyway, so. What is their marketing strategy? It kind of boils down to two things. One, they tend to be at every trade show or industry event, and they usually have one of the biggest booths. And two is they have sales reps everywhere who, you know, their, their job is to cold call, shop in on dealerships, talk to ’em, schedule demos, and ultimately close sales.

but it’s, it’s outreach based. It’s, it’s cold based. Most of the time they’re, they’re trying to build that, they’re trying to make it warm. They’re trying to build a relationship. But once you start talking about, you know, big companies, what is the most effective way to do it? Ultimately, a lot of it comes down to go do outbound.

Go talk, figure out the people who would be good customers for you, and then go talk to them. And the more the, the shorter you, the more direct that can be, the better. So the outreach approach. So remember, most people are gonna tell you that they don’t like TV ads, radio ads, and they ignore Google ads. you know, they’re gonna throw away all their junk mail and they would prefer not to do anymore tedious networking events.

But yet people respond to TV ads and radio ads and Google ads, and they click on, you know, all, and they, they respond to junk mail, right? They’re gonna tell you they don’t like it, but they’re gonna respond to it. So here’s the thing. Nobody’s getting into the office today hoping they get your pitch today.

They’re not. I’m, I’m not, I’m not either. I do outreach and I will reply to most people with no thank you. ’cause their message wasn’t relevant for me today. But if I am interested, I will. So nobody wants your pitch, but if they think it can help them, they, they will. And that’s how most things are gonna work.

Yeah. You get the people who are, you know, standing on their soapbox preaching, but usually that person has something to sell you. So. Part of the reason why you see so many messages, especially on LinkedIn or in your inbox for cold email, is that when it’s done right, it is effective. Problem is so much of the stuff we see is kind of a copy of a copy of a copy and it’s not that good anymore.

so we’re gonna talk about some ways to kind of make it just a little bit better. But remember, this can be more easily outsourced. It’s a little bit easier to scale than content can be and often produces results faster and can help you refine and, you know, refine that message, refine your talking points for your content.

So I like to use them hand in hand. but if you only gave me one, I could do, I would, I would actually use outreach ’cause it gets me the meetings I want with the people. I want 

[01:02:12] predictably. And the reason I like LinkedIn is it actually has some limitations. So I know we’ve seen some comments from people.

Why is there a limit to connections? Why? You know, there’s, there’s a limit how many people you can connect with. And the reasons this is actually probably good is that it makes you, it makes those connections. Well, a bit more trustworthy, right? Think about an, an email from somebody you don’t know. Your first thought is what, what type of scam is this?

You know, they, are they, you know, is this some type of cryptocurrency scam? What, what’s, what’s the deal here? Well, with LinkedIn, right? Remember, go back to your profile. And now we’re saying, okay, this person worked at this place, they went to this school, they, this is the work they do. This is their work experience this, these are the recommendations from people they have.

So you can see all this information about them. And if you’re doing a good job with your outreach, it does generate profile views. That’s the whole, you know, that’s why the profile is there. It helps people connect with you. It helps people learn more about you. So, so even though LinkedIn isn’t scalable, I find it’s most effective and it kind of produces the highest quality appointments outside of referrals.

Referrals are still the best. They’re still great, but if you want a channel, you’ve got more control over. Outreach through LinkedIn is, is probably my favorite way to do it. so I do recommend being human. if you’re gonna use an approach, like, and you know, on this one, I’m not, I don’t mean to pick on this person here, Alex, where they said, Hey, you know, I listened to your podcast episode and I respond back with which episode.

And you completely ignore that and just go into your pitch. I know you certainly didn’t listen to, to that. So be human when somebody replies, respond back to ’em, you know, and, and, and get the conversation going. But the big things is you want your message to be relevant. You want it to be sequential.

Follow up with people, right? It goes back to one of the comments we had earlier, got great connections, bad follow through. The follow through is where the magic happens. And, and finally make an offer. What do you want to happen next? Do you wanna send them information? Do you wanna meet with them? do you, you know, what, what, what’s, what, what’s going on here?

So, one of the things, I, I did a poll before this one, is kind of some of the areas where people were struggling. So I said 38% of people said they didn’t have time. So that was why I did my, my quick pitch if you need it done for you service. right at the beginning of the presentation, 50% of people said, people just aren’t responding to my offer.

So why, oftentimes your message is not relevant to that person. It’s either the wrong message, the wrong person. You’re not making a connection with them or your message sounds like everybody else’s. Again, make chat GPT your friend. I hate to, I hate to, you know, just kind of have that, to say these days, just use, use AI to rewrite, you know, your messages, but ultimately it’s really good at making something unique out of, you know, a couple examples and then tweak it a little bit.

’cause you want it to have some personality and then make it shorter and then make it shorter again. ’cause people don’t have a long attention span. Don’t pitch in the first message. which I know that one throws everybody off is, what do you mean don’t pitch in the first message? I mean, if they, if I’ve got something I want to tell them, shouldn’t I just tell them?

our data says no. Now if you want, if, if you want ’em to be responsive and actually, you know, engage with you, wait till the second message or, or third, but don’t, don’t just immediately pitch ’em in the first message. It’s, it’s not gonna, it’s not going to be as effective, which, I mean, I know makes everything take a little longer, slows the process down.

it feels like it anyway, but ultimately you will get more meetings and you’ll close more clients if you skip that. And please, for the love of all that is holy, do not include a calendar link, in your pitch message. Please stop that. it, it simply just isn’t going to, it. It feels, basically, it feels lazy to people and they don’t respond to it.

And. You know, you, you do not get as many meetings as if you do it the old fashioned way. If somebody says, yeah, we can meet, then, you know, you can message ’em back and forth and coordinate that. Yeah, it takes a little bit more effort. If they send you their calendar, that’s great book on theirs. That’s a great use of a calendar link.

Somebody wants, somebody wants to schedule with you, send them yours, if they’re doing the outreach. But don’t, you know, people will not book on yours if you’re the one reaching out. And if you’re still not sure what to do, if all else fails, ask to meet for a virtual cup of coffee. It’s a real easy ask.

You know, again, if if you’re, if it’s the right person at the right company and you can’t think of another offer, try that 

[01:07:09] one. So I think we’re getting pretty close to the end here. I think for the most part, I’m gonna skip over mostly events ’cause I talked about them already. But basically, here’s the thing is LinkedIn events can be really helpful.

It’s part of your content strategy can help you get new liens. It helps close people who are on the fence about your services. It even helps reactivate dead leads. So definitely worth using. And it’s one of those things that helps produce more, it helps give you those con, it helps build your content library so then you can take it, even if you’re not ready to use it right now, you’ve got that content library.

and when you get to the point where you can have hire somebody to, or, or you’ve got the time to do it yourself, you can repurpose it and, and have that content, posted. So, and then, like I said, it makes for good quality content to share in your feed. you didn’t have to try and create from scratch.

So if you do need some help with this, I mentioned it at the beginning, I’ll mention it one more time. If you just don’t have the time to do this, you say, this is great. I, I want to get more clients from LinkedIn. That’s why I’m here. I don’t have time. Schedule a call with me and we can talk about some done for you options where we’ll build it, manage it.

We’ll put the appointments on your calendar. We’ll fill your sales pipeline and free up your time so that you don’t have to spend so much time on the platform trying to 

[01:08:33] engage and do it. So, from there, let’s jump into questions like I do. I do appreciate everybody sticking around. I know we are over time at this point, so I’m going to start jumping in and answering questions.

Evan, if you’ve got any that you want to, mention here, maybe if you wanna start towards the top and I’ll start from the bottom here and, we’ll just start answering questions. If you have more questions, post ’em in the comment or post ’em in the comments there. I, like I said, I will, I’ll stick around and keep answering them as long as you guys are asking ’em.

So, where should we start here?

Alright, so William asks, what about offering information not otherwise available to them? That may be helpful in an opening connection message. that is a great message for the second one. I, I, it’s, it is very strange. still find it strange, but the, the best ones that we, the best messages we use to open with, don’t ask them any questions, don’t really offer anything.

And we call it a friendly greeting. ’cause that’s really all it does is it says hello. more or less it, like I said, it, it’s, it’s, it’s unintuitive. It’s very unintuitive. but, try not to send them anything. It, it sounds very consistent. It sounds like a good idea. It’s not as effective as if you wait till the second message.

Ken says, no one likes a pitch slapper. Guaranteed way to lose a connection two minutes after you’ve accepted. Yeah. And, even worse is it’s a good way to get your account, put on timeout by LinkedIn. you will find that they’re much more likely to limit your ability to connect with people. they’re likely to limit your, ability to, send messages or they’ll filter more of ’em, and yeah, you, you can lose access to the account entirely.

that doesn’t happen too often. but it, it can, if you’re really aggressive about it and your, your acceptance rate’s low and everybody that you talk to disconnects with you. So try to try, try to think of ways to at least, you know, not have them disengage from you. Hence why our first message doesn’t pitch.

That’s why, that’s part of the reason why we do it. zuka, when, when doing outreach, can we send a link to a free ebook the recipient can download? Absolutely not. you can. but what I would do the better way to do that, ask permission if you can send it. If you just send it, you’re gonna get blocked.

and LinkedIn doesn’t want you taking people off the platform, so they’re gonna give it less visibility and they’re not gonna let people know you messaged ’em. and, you, you’re ultimately, you’re gonna run into issues with it. Ken jumping in here again, why not share valuable info in your feed?

this is a response to William West. You know, what if we offer valuable information? So here would be my recommendation on it because remember, your feed is kind of this ephemeral temporary thing. If you’ve got valuable information, go ahead and post it in your feed. Go one step further though and feature it in your profile so it shows up at the very top.

That will make a huge difference. that’s what I tell people with a lot of things that they want to feature. They’ve got a case study they want people to see. Can be a great way to do it, is feature it so in your profile so that it’s at the, it’s at the top and the things, you know, one of the three things you want people to see.

alright,

let’s see. thank you. so sorry that the screen resolution was a little bit low. is the presentation available offline? if you want the presentation, if you want the slide deck, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or if we’re not connected, email me, gary at Pipelineology dot com. So, and we’ll, we’ll send that over to you.

that goes for anybody. If you want to, if you want it, send it over and that way you can see the stuff because I know, I know some of the slides are a little dense on this particular presentation. And I know sometimes it’s a little hard to read them. So yeah, if you wanna see everything, on my 4K screen here, it looks great.

But, yeah, not, not so much. I know. So yeah, go ahead and just email me or send me a message and we’ll make sure we get that over to you. this is a great question, Raji. So whenever I’m selecting buyer intent filter while filtering my leads, nothing is showing Why is that? buyer intent is, is almost an entirely useless parameter unless you are doing a lot of ads and you’re a pretty big organization.

and you’ve seen a lot of, there’s been a lot of engagement to like your company profile, and things like that. It is not a good tool for doing outreach, things like that. It’s just, unfortunately it just ends up being useless, but it’s, it maybe someday, but yeah, it, it’s a pretty useless filter.

For probably 99% of people out there. Evan, what else am I, am I missing here? 

[01:14:12] Evan: I believe you hit all the, all the good ones there that I’m seeing. 

[01:14:16] Alright. from this one here, what is a good expectation of meetings per week using the tools you showed us today? oftentimes it depends a lot. I know that’s a, I know that is a terrible answer.

I like to, to see somewhere in one to four, one to four meetings a week, doing things like this. but you can vary quite a bit. We’ve seen, I’ve seen people who get 30 responses a week ’cause they’ve got a really good message to an audience that’s hungry for it. and I’ve, I’ve seen people who, you know, only get a handful a month.

’cause it’s. You know, it, it’s, it’s not a natural fit or it is a difficult to connect with markets. So, tho those are kind of the guidelines. I, I would typically give somebody, you know, those are when I’m kind of talking to somebody, you know, if they, if they’re interested in using our managed services, that’s kind of generally the guidelines I give them is, you know, one to four a week is, is pretty good.

but it, it does really depend a lot on the offer and the market and who you’re trying to talk to. let’s see. I’m just scrolling up here. If you guys do have any other questions here, go ahead and post ’em. Otherwise we’ll probably be wrapping up here pretty quickly. real quick, Evan, were you able to post the link, from last month’s event in the comments?

[01:15:46] Evan: Yeah, I posted the, the sales navigator one. I will post the LinkedIn events, the one that goes over all the events. 

[01:15:53] Okay, great. Yeah, if you’re really kind of looking for more, more in-depth view of, of those. check, check those events out. They’re on my profile. If for some reason you can’t see ’em here, just go into my profile.

The right at the top, I’ve, I’ve got my, my events are my featured activity, so I do try to, I do try to eat my own dog food and feature the, the stuff I want you guys to see. And in this case, my events are, are the things I put in the featured section. So, if you don’t see ’em in the comments here, I know there’s a lot of comments and they can go by pretty quickly.

just go ahead and hop into my profile and they’re right at the top and my profile’s public. So even if we’re not connected, Bryce, I’m not sure if we are. But, if we’re not, just go ahead and, and click on there and you can see the, see my most recent events. This will be the first one, and then the sales navigator.

One will be the second one, and then the events one will be, should be the third one, in the top and, and featured, Herman asks, what’s the best way to connect with the right audience and people? Is it best or possible to do it with a free account or should it be via a paid subscription? And which kind is best?

Good question. So is it possible to do it with a free account? Absolutely. you know, the thing is, is the paid subscriptions give you access to tools that, you know, you could, you could do looking at things by hand. It just saves you the time. So if I want to know, hey, I want a company that, you know, has 11 to 50 employees, I can find them.

If I want a company that has doing five to $10 million in revenue a year, I can find them and if I want them in the state of Ohio, I can find them. whereas it’s more of a manual process there. So the paid subscription is, is really there to save you time. so I do recommend them. Again, that’s for, you know, if you’ve, you know, if you’re at that point where you’ve got enough business to, to justify the investment in those.

the best one is Sales Navigator. that, that’s the one you really want. Every other paid subscription kind of below that tier is not very helpful. I don’t know anything about Recruiter Light, honestly, I’m not in that space. And Sales Navigator advanced is helpful if you need people to use very specific technologies.

Like if you need e-commerce companies, then you need the $180, a hundred, $170 a month subscription. but no, good question. I recommend them, but I know not everybody’s quite at that level yet. Deidre, I have multiple businesses in different industries. How do you connect, promote for each business? I would say pick a lane.

and I, I’m not trying to be dismissive of this, but really the more you can kind of focus on one from, from a content strategy, that’s going to be kind of the most effective way to do it. having, you know, putting multiple things in your title is okay. especially, you know, if they’re all kind of complimentary, that that’s really not too big of an idea, but especially if they’re very separate, that can be tricky, from an outreach standpoint, however.

So if you wanna option two, kind of, we talked about, You can segment them and kind of message ’em. And that information, again, your profile can include all your work history and things. And it can even include multiple companies that you’re active at. So if you’ve got multiple companies, put them all in your work history and explain each of them.

Yeah, it gets a little bit messier and that’s where the outreach comes in and that kind of clarifies why you’re reaching out and what you offer and what you want to do next. So, I know that may not be a perfect answer, but that, that would be the way I would approach that, especially if you want to promote each one.

if you only want trying to focus on one, which is usually where I tell people to start, then focus your profile on, on that one and just kinda include the other ones in your, in your work history. But your about section, your headline, your background banner and stuff like that can focus on the, on the big kind of one.

And really, if you’re. If you have a corporate job or something like that, and you say, that’s not really my, that’s what I do, but I don’t really have any need for it for my LinkedIn, put on your work history and then whatever your other gig is, go ahead and make that the focus of it. So, right. Your, your employer probably doesn’t care.

In fact, I’m almost sure they don’t care. but, ultimately that, those would be the ways I would, would, would try and do that here. just kind of going back through here, Joel said I struggle with search and isolating which people I can connect with. What are some good methods? I guess pretty much is who do you want to connect with?

Then go ahead and start searching for them. Put those parameters in, make sure there’s second degree connections. those are gonna be the people you’re most likely to be able to connect with if they’re not a second degree connection. Then just wait. and as you get more established in any type of industry, you will have more and more mutual connections in that industry.

For example, I will tell you, I, it is very difficult for me to find somebody who’s a consultant that I, I’m not, I don’t have a second degree connection to at this point, but that took, that took a number of years. But really is find, find people with the right titles. Find people you know at the right size companies, make sure they’re second degree and, and give it a whirl.

hildy, I think that’s how you said if I said that wrong, I apologize. LinkedIn, is on LinkedIn member is on LinkedIn, 19 minutes per month. So have articles, et cetera. often say twice a week or something. So, I’m gonna try and interpret this one as best I can, but yeah, so the average person who has a LinkedIn account is only on for 19 minutes a month or, or so It might have changed, like that was 2019 data, but it’s, it’s, it’s probably pretty close to that still today.

So really, you know, the content is having it there is for people who are active now and if it really took off or is really interesting, it will show up. They’ll, it will get surfaced for them the next time they’re back on. but a lot of times I use it, even just think about it as a supporting, supporting part of activities, since we do a lot of outreach ourselves, having these activity around our company.

Make sure that if somebody’s, you know, looking at us, they can see all this information. So, whatever you can do consistently. If twice a week is, is the right for you twice a week. It is. The big thing is, is kind of consistency. Christian asks, I’ll, I’ll throw it up here. Unfortunately, I don’t really know the answer because I don’t know all the context.

’cause this was, this was a while ago, but what about putting pricing for services? I, I, unfortunately, I don’t know where you were referencing it to. you can, put it back up here. You can put pricing if your pricing is more aggressive than say your competitors. And it’s kind of the selling point.

We’ve, we’ve done that for, clients in certain industries where they, they hit lower than their competitors and that’s one of their kind of claims is, Hey, it’s only, you know, 500 bucks a month or 9 97 a month or something if everybody else is selling it for, for 2000. Yeah, absolutely. Put it, put it out there.

’cause that’s, you know, that’s a feature at that point. But, if it’s complex or varies a lot or, or something like that. You know, it might be better to have a conversation with them first. It, it’s up to you, but I, I’m not afraid to put pricing out there when it makes sense. I just try not to put it out there if they need more context for it.

all right. I’m back at the bottom here. I’m try and answer a few more questions and I’ll let everybody get back to, doing this here. Just trying to read any, Evan, if you see any that I, I should cover here, throw them in there. Otherwise I will. just thank everybody for showing up and it was great seeing you.

el oh, I’m, again, apologies on the name, but can you elaborate more on why not to link my Calendly in the outreach message? It doesn’t make sense since I would be saving my client’s time and mine, right? No. we’ve tested it over and over and over again. I wish it worked. You’d make it much easier for us.

Here’s the thing, they won’t use it. That’s, that’s the bottom line. You’re, it makes sense. Yes. That it saves them time. People who you’re doing outreach to, don’t want, they wanna feel catered to, they want to, to kind of, they want you to do, to do all the work. My recommendation is do all the work. You will get so many more meetings throwing a calendar link out there.

It just, it just doesn’t get the response you’re looking for. So I know you want to try it, ’cause I know it’s easy. like I said, I, we, we’ve tried it over and over again, but unfortunately it just does not, does not produce the results you’re looking for. in terms of getting meetings.

Yep. Bryce? yeah, we will, yeah, just get connected with me and, I’ll make sure we get you those events. Alright. Oh, this is, this is a good question here. Bryce asks, is it better to post from a personal feed, a business page, or both personal? You’re gonna see, a huge, jump in visibility from your personal feed versus your business page.

It makes sense for your business page to exist. That’s about it. but no, really your personal page is really what’s gonna get the, the engagement, the action. That’s where events should be built around. we just, we just find that people don’t engage with companies. Remember what we said about kind of human to human, approach.

that’s on LinkedIn. That’s really where everything is. The, the business pages are there. It makes sense to have them, but I wouldn’t kind of, I wouldn’t put a lot of time into it to be perfectly honest. Alright. and as a business owner, one more question here from Bryce. Should my personal banner be different, than my company’s page’s banner?

I, I probably would, I’d probably again, kind of have it more more focused on what, what Bryce can do for you versus your company, which unfortunately I can’t pull up right now. I can’t see it from my, my control panel. dere ask, please repeat how to get the slideshow and recording on. Well, I’ll put it in the comments here just for anybody who didn’t, isn’t, isn’t here anymore, just in case you missed it.

But, you can email me or just message me on LinkedIn. So my email is gary at Pipelineology dot com or you can message me on LinkedIn. and I will get that over to you.

Federica asks, what’s the difference between first, second, and third degree connections? In terms of leads, first degree connections are people you are already connected with. Second degree connections mean you have somebody in common. So, there is a, a mutual connection that you both have in your network.

And third degree means you do not have any mutual connections or, And so third degree plus would be the same type of thing. from built from a network building standpoint, I always focus on second degree. first degree obviously are already connections of yours. CAR T asks after a filter is applied in LinkedIn, sales navigator.

Is there a way of to download the list of 25 contacts appearing on page one? There’s not, LinkedIn wants that information to all stay within LinkedIn, so, keep it, it ends up kind of all being part of, you can use certain pieces of software to do it. You can click save and save that lead and things like that.

but there is no, you can even save the list but to actually pull that information out and download it, LinkedIn does not make that possible. Chris, yes, there is a recording of this and as soon as I finish up here it will repa appear right on this page. And thank you so much everybody. It was great.

great chatting with everybody today. appreciate you bearing with the technical difficulties. Have a great rest of your day and hope to see you next month for our next event.