How To Get Clients on LinkedIn – What’s Working Now

How To Get Clients on LinkedIn – What’s Working Now

Gary hosts a LinkedIn Live session on getting clients on LinkedIn in 2025, outlining a practical agenda covering authority building, network building, content, events, and outreach (skipping ads), with Q&A and a replay available. He emphasizes that success isn’t about AI or fake personalization but about being human and relevant in connections, messages, and content. He advises growing a curated connection network (up to 30,000), generally sending blank connection requests to strangers, and optimizing profiles with clear positioning, a complete profile, and optional verification. For content, he urges focusing on qualified leads over vanity metrics, using stories and specificity. He highlights LinkedIn Events to build authority, generate leads, and re-engage pipeline prospects. For outreach, he recommends short, relevant, multi-step follow-ups, avoiding calendar links, and offers an AI prompt for drafting “folksy” messages. He briefly covers intent-signal tools, advising careful filtering for relevance.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
03:10 Housekeeping And Replay
04:50 Agenda And About Gary
08:11 Relevance Over Automation
12:13 Network Building Basics
14:22 Connection Requests That Work
18:46 Profile That Converts
23:32 Premium And Credibility
25:47 Content Strategy For Leads
29:37 Vanity Metrics Vs Revenue
32:18 What Content Works Now
34:38 Using LinkedIn Events
38:31 Event Length Strategy
40:54 Event Formats That Work
41:51 Why Outreach Still Wins
45:02 AI Prompt For DMs
47:00 LinkedIn Sequence Basics
50:25 Fix Low Reply Rates
53:58 Cadence And Reputation
58:24 Intent Signals Caution
01:02:19 Mailbox Reality Check
01:04:34 Live Q&A Wrap Up

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to today’s, uh, session. Uh, this is the How to Get Clients on LinkedIn in 2025. The What’s Working Now, presentation. I’m Gary Rubinger, and, uh, we’re gonna give everybody here a couple minutes for the notifications and everything to go out. Um, but if you have, if you’ve been on one of my sessions before, you know how I do like to start on time.

So, uh, I know everybody’s busy, so we’ll give everybody a few minutes, like I said, for that, uh, to, to hop on. It’s not quite two o’clock yet eastern. And then we’ll then we’ll get this show on the road. But, um, hope, uh, at least for all the Americans, uh, in the, in the, uh, session here today. Hope you had a great 4th of July weekend.

Uh, did everybody get to go see some, some fireworks? I know we went and saw, uh, went down to Toledo, Ohio, so I live in Michigan. Drove down to Toledo, saw some at the, at their ballpark down there. That was cool. And then kind of came back up here on the, for the actual night of the fourth. And it was just like, my neighborhood was just, it, it was just like blowing up everywhere.

Everybody had a, had a good show it seems like. Um, but, um, yeah, no, I always appreciate people kind of come on during the summer ones, because I know between vacations and kind of all that stuff, trying to find time for these types of events can be a little bit of a challenge. So where’s, where’s everybody come calling in from today?

Are you, uh, how’s the, how’s the weather there? I know actually, it’s actually cooled down just a little bit here so it doesn’t feel so oppressively hot. Um, uh, I mean, I oppressively hot for Michigan. I gotta mention it’s not like Arizona Heat or anything like that, but, uh, for us, for us Northerners feels a little warm sometimes when it’s 90 plus degrees.

Um.

But, uh, okay, so I think it is just about two o’clock here. I’m gonna give about, we’re call it 30 seconds and then we’ll get, then we’ll get things kicked off today here. I’ll get the, um, get our, uh, presentation queued up here so we’re ready to go. And, um, yeah, looking forward, looking forward to this, this is always one of my favorite, uh, events to host.

’cause I feel like, I feel like everybody can get a lot out of this one. And as, and you know, we try, I try to make these as content dense and not just some, some like pitch that, Hey, buy my stuff, you know, or kind of, you know, all the stuff you need to know. I try to, we really kind of try and flip it on it.

Its head here that it’s really as much content as possible that I can fit in to about, I try and do about 30 to 45 minutes these days. ’cause I feel like an hour gets a little long, but. Sometimes, depending on questions. This, this is, if we’re gonna go late, this is probably the session where we’ll go late because I think we had, I think we had like 700 and some people signed up today.

Um, and I know not everybody shows up. I get that, I get that. Uh, but, uh, generally this is a, this is a good one, but anyway, enough of me chitchatting about, uh, the weather and, uh, fireworks and, uh, everything else you don’t actually care about. Let’s talk about how to get clients on LinkedIn in 2025. What’s working 

[00:03:09] now? So few housekeeping items that there is a delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I’m actually saying something on screen here to when it shows up, uh, through LinkedIn. It’s just kind of the way the live streaming stuff technology works is that’s, you know, the, there’s delay between. All, all the softwares.

Uh, but so basically all that means for you is that if you ask a question, um, and I respond to it, we can’t probably talk in real time. Uh, so I try to answer the question and as completely as possible. ’cause we can’t probably just go back and forth or it’ll be kind of a weird, we’ll have a lot of dead time.

Um, yes, there will be a replay, uh, available. I did see some people asking about that in the comments, uh, as well as people who emailed me about that. Um, and yes, I always try to make sure that there is a replay available. ’cause I know not everybody can show up at this time. Um, typically it, it used to process like immediately, like I’d be done and off the stream and then boom, two minutes later, the replay was there.

Uh, seems like they changed, uh, and didn’t tell like any, even the LinkedIn people, like customer service people, what they are doing. But it seems like now you get like 30 minutes of the presentation and then the rest doesn’t unlock for anywhere between one and 24 hours. Depends on how LinkedIn’s feeling that day, but the replay will be available.

So if you wanna come back that, you know, that Thursday on the 10th or afterwards, it should all be here. And if you want to be notified of our future events, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events and you can sign up there and we’ll make sure we get an email notification out to you. Uh, either the, you know, the, usually a day before or so to let you know that we’ve got another event coming up.

And we’ll have another event coming up in 

[00:04:49] August. So today’s agenda, we’re gonna talk about authority building, kind of network building on LinkedIn, using content, using events, using outreach. Yep. We’re gonna definitely talk about outreach. Um, we’re actually gonna skip ads today because I found that that one’s not as relevant to, to most people on the shows or on the, on these, on these sessions.

Um, and once you are at that stage, you know, you, you can just find an agency to kind of help you scale that, that up. Um, and then we’re gonna take, do, take some time for q and a. Well, I appreciate, I always appreciate, you know, the first person who come comes in and comments. Ontario, Canada, most awesome weather in the world.

Oh, our, our, our neighbor’s in on Ontario, so kind of like it. Yeah, it, I’ve lived in Michigan, so you can actually go south into Ontario. So I can go to Canada by going south. Um, uh, thanks for being here today. Um, so about me real quick. I’m the founder of Pipelineology and host of the Pipelineology podcast.

Been doing marketing now for about 24 years, uh, with a brief detour into, into the world of sales. But then I moved back into marketing, uh, and business development. Um, and my corporate career actually ran call centers. Um, so a lot of what we were doing was handling all the incoming leads for our various dealerships around the country and setting appointments for that 10 these days.

That’s now what I do with a focus more on the consulting and agency space. Um, and uh, where I find, I find that a lot more fun. It’s a lot more fun to work with consultants and, and, and agencies than it is to work with car dealers. They are a, they’re a grumpy bunch. Um, and, um, as always, I am still actively seeking New England style.

IPA beer recommendations if you got any out there. Please be filled. Please feel free to put them in the comments. So, in a nutshell, today, I, I posted a, you know, kind of a long pitch for the, for the session, and somebody, uh, Kara here, Kara McMaster came in and commented with what’s working for them, is that for us right now, it’s a combo of content, comment and outreach, keeping a clean pipeline and watching all the data we’ve been playing around with new tools that are showing us some signal intent to, which has been fun.

So, in a nutshell, this is what we’re gonna be covering today. So, as I jokingly put, I think I’ll just delete this. I, I’ll, I’ll just screenshot this and just delete my PowerPoint. So that’s what we’re covering. Thank you for, thank you all for coming today. Appreciate it. Okay. So yeah, we’re gonna have a little bit more nuance.

We’re gonna dig a little bit deeper into it. Uh, wonderful. Switching to West Coast. Which one should I switch to? David, I’ve, I’ve had, I’ll, I’ll even, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be got a little spicy take here for you. I’ve had Pliny the elder. Um, I, I, I like the, I like the hazy style. Um, so what, what’s, what, what’s out there that, uh, that I, that I gotta try?

I know you’re, I think you’re in California, so, uh, I know you guys, you guys got some good beer out there, so I’m, I’m, I’m eagerly, I mean, I’m listening. I’m listening. And Dennis Sierra, Sierra Nevada, HTA Moon. I’m gonna try that one. I think I can find that one around here, so for sure. Alright. So let’s jump 

[00:08:10] into it today.

So the bottom line, success on LinkedIn in 25, 20 25 isn’t about a, believe it or not, it is not about ai. Uh, despite probably 75% of your posts either being about AI or written by, by ai, really, that’s, that’s a very small portion of what we’re doing. I’ll even show you an AI prompt later in the session. But ultimately what we’re seeing is that, you know, this fake personalization, this whole, Hey, I’m impressed by your background at the blah, blah, blah.

Or, you know, copying some snippets from your, your, your profile. All this stuff to kind of, uh, fake that familiarity just. It doesn’t have that same impact now that everybody’s doing it. And now it just screams to me automation that I know, I, I know you didn’t pay attention and I can just skip it and move right on.

So things like pretending to listen to somebody’s podcast. You’re just having a bot that comes through and likes all my posts. Uh, there’s like two of you out there doing it and hey, I appreciate the engagement, but it’s not, you’re probably not gonna get any extra kudos and ker muffins from me, but which whatever you’re, whatever the slow play pitch you, you, you’re coming up with are just, just be human.

Okay. Be a real person, be relevant. And that’s really the big, the big takeaway here today is just be relevant. If you build relevant connections, send relevant messages, post relevant content to the types of people you wanna work with, and you’re gonna go a lot further. You’re your, your posts may not go viral.

You know, uh, you, you may not have a calendar full of, of endless, of endless meetings, but you’ll have good meetings. You’ll, you’ll get good leads in from, from what you’re doing, from your content and from your messaging. Uh, if you focus on relevance instead of some of the other vanity metrics, which we’ll, we’ll, we’ll cover, cover some of that.

Um, so the process today, I’ve actually taken this, uh, flow chart and we’ve trimmed off a bunch of it to kind of really focus on just the things that are really kind of moving the needle and really most important right now. And I, I know you can’t read that flow chart. It’s way too small. So if you’d like a copy of it, uh, just shoot me an email, um, just like put flowchart in the subject line or something.

Uh, and I’ll make sure I send you a copy of it. But essentially what we’re gonna be looking at is kind of three, three kind of sections here. We’re, we’re focusing on using. Basically building, building those connections, getting your network growing, getting the right people into your network and then reaching out to them using events to help better position yourself and get, you know, get a different group of people into your, your sphere of influence.

And also using, um, content and commenting on other people’s content to drive awareness and bring people, you know, again into, into what you’ve got going on. So, um, but um, like I said, I know it, I know it’s too small to to, to read. I keep trying to blow it up and then I’ll put it into a, the presentation software and it just sucks.

It sucks it smaller again. So, um, like I said, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure you get a copy of that. But don’t worry, we’re gonna cover all of that in, in a lot more depth here, um, as we go along. I do wanna mention, ’cause I know one of the things I know about my clients is they tend to be busy people.

So if I don’t get to this within the first 10 minutes. They probably have already left. So if you do need a done for you program where you’re like, I don’t have time to do this. I, I’m, I’m way too busy to be, uh, you know, trying to, to follow up with all these people and I don’t have a staff that can do it for me.

This is kind of that in between section where you don’t have time, but you don’t have, you know, a, a sales sales team yet. Uh, where somebody can kind of help manage that middle part of doing that business development, doing that outreach, managing your pipeline, following up, all that kind of stuff. Uh, if you are interested in having that conversation, you can schedule a call with me@theappointmentlab.com or that email address, carry it.

Pipelineology dot com works well 

[00:12:12] too. Um, so let’s talk about building your network. ’cause really this is, this is where it all starts, and there are two types of, uh, kind of people you can have on, uh, you know, in your sphere of influence on LinkedIn. One is followers and that is the one that is on unlimited.

Um, where basically as many people as, as c fit can, can follow, follow you. So this would be kind of like on, on an Instagram, uh, or a TikTok where you can just have a mil, you could have a million followers. There are a handful of people on LinkedIn, I think you do. Uh, but not too many. You don’t run across ’em too often.

Um, but then the other one, probably the more important one is connections. You can have up to 30,000 connections. So still a very, that is a lot of people. But the nice thing about this one is that you can curate it, it can, it, it, it is who you want to connect with. You can focus on the people who fit your ideal client profile.

Um, and you can also do more with them, including you. It’s easier to send them messages. You can invite them to subscribe to a newsletter. You can invite them to attend your events, um, which is right where, how I think the majority of you have connected with somebody on one of, on my team. May not be me, it might have been Kaylee or Evan who, um, or Katie who could have sent you a, an a request to, to attend this particular event.

But being connected to somebody gives you some of those, those abilities to just be a little, basically have a more ability to message and communicate with people. But it takes time. Um, if you’re at a thousand connections right now, you’ve got many, many years. So don’t worry about, don’t worry too much about getting just the right people are only sending out five connection requests in a week.

Just send out is try and try and max out your, your bandwidth, which can be a hundred or 200 people depending on which LinkedIn, you, LinkedIn subscription you currently have. So basically my in summary, just do it right. If you’re, even if they’re people you don’t necessarily know, just do it. You know, not sure if they’re the right person to connect.

Just do it. Just send some out, get stuff going, get some momentum going. 

[00:14:20] Um. But what about actually sending out those requests? What, what should I send? What should you put in for a message? Right. LinkedIn will will tell you, Hey, you know, you should, you should personalize this connection request. Yes, yes.

If you’ve met them in person that works, you maybe been a, to like some type of chamber commerce event or some mixer. Maybe you went to a trade show, met ’em in real life, shook their hand and you know, Hey, hey, met, met you at Vegas in that, that show in, in, in Vegas last week. Something like that. That’s, that’s a good, that’s a good message to put.

But when we’re talking about connecting with people you don’t know that you’re hoping maybe one day you could do business with. We’ve, we’ve done this enough that I can pretty confidently say, just leave it blank. Don’t put anything in there. ’cause pretty much anything you say could is, is probably likely to work against you versus for you.

So on this screen here, what I’ve, I’ve got is that it is one of these people I’m going to connect with. The other three are just gonna click ignore because they’re just, they’re, they’re, they’re not relevant or they’re trying to pitch me. Um, either obviously or, or not, or they’re just ob you know, un unlikely to be a, a real person.

Um, so let’s start with the good one here at the top, Scott. He’s got a good profile picture. I can see his name, I can see roughly what he does some type of, do I know what all that means? I don’t know what business transformation is or what margin optimization, how, what all that is. But he’s a founder of something.

Good enough. Um, you can click accept, right? We’ve got 159 mutual connections. Is he pro? Is he gonna pitch me? Maybe, maybe not. Don’t know, but probably a good connection to have. But after that, let’s look at Sandeep here, right? We still have the picture, we have the title, we have got mutual connections. But what are you doing?

The message here. Hello Gary. We provided exceptional quality assurance testing services, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pitch, immediate pitch, right? If you click the see more button, it’s just a long line of here’s all the crap we do, send me an email. It just pointless. That account is not gonna stick around long.

So I’m gonna click ignore on that. Um, we’ll skip to the bottom one here, RJ Par Palmer. Um, again, this is one where, well, now the picture is, uh, somebody holding a cell phone in front of their, in front of their face like this, so you can’t see who they are. It’s, it’s just weird. Um, and I’m like, what, what?

And when I looked, I was like, okay, well this is clearly some fake Indian bot account. Click, click, ignore. Um, but the one kind of here with Dalan, Dalan need here is the one I think where people probably get tripped up the most. ’cause they see this, uh, from their perspective when they want to connect with somebody is like, oh, this is a good, this is a good message.

This will get me more, more people to connect with me. And what I want to tell you is that when you’re on the receiving end of this, even though everything else looks right, good picture, you know, it’s, he’s got a premium account. We’ve got a bunch of mutual connections. A lot, right? 233. Um. You know, I, uh, even the title is, is what I would recommend somebody write, but he is telegraphed here that that pitch is gonna be incoming shortly thereafter.

Um, somehow we’re both interested in brand growth, right? This is, this is kind of one of those self-owned moments where you’re like, you were so close. If you’d just left it blank, I probably, I would’ve clicked, accept, and moved on. Um, so if you want your connection rate to be good, get, just leave it blank.

It will, there’s, there’s almost no message. You can write to people again, to people you don’t know that will outperform a blank request. Just, just just saying that and, and I know, I know. Somebody’s like, well, dude, that’s like your opinion, man. It, it is. But I’ve also sent somewhere in the neighborhood of one to two millions of these requests out for, between myself and clients.

We probably, I’ve got a little insight into what, what works and, and, and I’m just telling you that that looks like it should work. It sounds good. If I sent that to a client, said, we should use this, they’re gonna say, that sounds good. We can use that. And it’s gonna hurt your connection rate. So if that’s, that’s all I’m saying here is generally just leave it blank unless you’re really, really 

[00:18:43] sure.

Next, let’s talk about, you know, your profile a little bit here. So, right, we just kind of saw the tip of the iceberg here with the little parts you can see from, from, from outside before you actually click on their name and, and view the whole thing. But what happens when somebody does click on your name, right?

And that you’re gonna see this, if you track your numbers and you look at everything that LinkedIn shows you in terms of profile views. If you’re sending out connection requests, your profile reviews are going to go up. So you should probably think what’s gonna happen if somebody clicks and looks at my profile.

And it’s pretty simple. You wanna let people know who you are, what you do, who you work with, and probably more, most importantly, have a little bit of fun. This goes back to be a real person. Um, don’t, don’t just look like some, uh, autonomous AI bot who’s, you know, fostering an environment of empathetic, you know, relationship, you know, optimization.

I whatever. A lot of big words, just, just to be real. So putting your title in your, in your headline, letting ’em know kind of who you work with. Um, and then I put things like, you know, meme aficionado and a beer enthusiast. Just things that are a little bit of fun. I even put emojis in mine, um, because I like them because I think they’re fun.

Are they profe? No, they’re not professional, but I, I like to use ’em on my messaging, um, which I, I know these days, right? Uh, AI is, likes to use a lot of that and I’m, I’m, I’m trying to fight the good fight and still, still keep my emojis in my messaging. Uh, but use, use a picture. Make sure your background is some type of custom thing.

This is an older one. I probably gotta update my, my guidelines here for different types of background pictures now that everybody’s on mobile. So it’s all gonna look like this now. Um. But really just, you know, fill it out, put your company name in there. If you went to wherever you went to college, put that in there.

Just kind of lets it fill in with a little bit more color and, and makes your profile look a little bit more complete. And what does that mean? Well, when you start sending out message connection requests, like we looked at before, but also when you’re commenting on LinkedIn, when you’re making posts on LinkedIn, part of your headline is going to show up.

They’re going to see kind of who you are and what you do. And probably I should mention here that that little verification check mark does in fact help. Is it, is it a huge difference? No, but it does make a difference and it does help with, uh, um, getting, getting those connections in, into your space and kind of building that.

It helps kind of advance the trust a lot. ’cause they know they’re not just connecting to a bot, again, assuming that they pay attention to that stuff. And not everybody does. And not everybody cares. But considering it’s free and takes like five minutes, I would just do it if it were me. Um, but you know, again, it’s, it’s all about kind of these, what are, what are these things that are gonna draw people into your, your profile.

And that’s kind of that headline, that picture. And then what happens after that, I just tell people, is with your profile, fill out as much as you can, put your work history in, um, you know, people you’ve worked with, get recommendations, you know, use the featured section for, I use it generally for, for events, uh, for, for showcasing those.

You can put what basically whatever you want there, whether it’s different posts or, uh, maybe it’s, you know, different, um, slideshows or anything like that. You could feature them there just to, like, when people get there, featured stuff’s close to the top. So let ’em, let ’em see it, let ’em see the stuff you want them to, to, to see.

Um, activity, um, not shown on this particular one, but, uh, activity is another one that is, I, I would say the people who are paying attention is certainly something they’re gonna look at again, to kind of assess, is this like a real person or is this just some, some somebody who’s getting ready to, to pitch me.

So having that activity there, whether it’s from posts or comments or, uh, events, there’s articles you’ve written, um, and there’s one or two other, you know, things you can have there. But just, just fill it out. Be, you know, be real.

So if your goal with content here, so we’re gonna kind of shift now from, from your profile. And I, and I know I’m going through this fast, kinda like a fire hose of, of information mostly. ’cause this, this presentation, I feel like I, I was like, I try and tell myself if I’m gonna add a, a slide, I needed to delete a slide and I, and then, then I add two slides and I only delete one.

So I try to end up going through some of this stuff pretty fast. So I’m take, take a quick look here to see if there’s any questions, um, other than, other than be a recommendation, which I will go back and, and review them all, but I 

[00:23:31] appreciate that. Um, uh, but Sarah, Sarah asks a good question here. So, how big of a difference does being a premium member make when people are reviewing your profile, determining validity?

Um, by itself probably. I’m trying to think how the best way to answer it by itself. It may not make a whole lot of of difference if you’re already kind of actively engaging and have some of those other markers. Um, but if you’re, you know, if the, it’s kind of otherwise quiet, like there’s not a lot of activity, it doesn’t have any of those verifications or anything, then I would say the premium member status might make a difference.

Uh, from, from that perspective. I find the premium member thing just kind of more is, is is more to let, to get LinkedIn to leave you alone, to let you kind of operate a little bit, to, to kind of view more profiles, message more people, connect with more people. That’s where we really find, you know, kind of the benefit of, of paying LinkedIn for.

Uh, for, for premium status is that they generally are, give you more leeway to do, to basically use their platform to, to, to build a book of business. Uh, especially like sales navigator where right, you say, here, take my money LinkedIn, but you know, you, you and I both know this is the deal. There’s that I’m, I’m here to try and, you know, get, get business.

Let me, let me do, so, and they generally do, they’ll let you send out more messages and, and that kind of thing. And they’re, they’re less likely to ban your account down if you’re going crazy, they’re gonna do it anyway, but Right. When you’re paying them, um, that, that’s generally kind of how we see that, that working is that, yeah, there’s a, they, they try and give you some pers but really it’s just to give you more leeway, uh, there and not a huge difference in terms of building connections and things like that, that, that I’ve seen anyway.

Um. But, uh, if anybody’s got actual, you know, experience, otherwise they’re in specific scenarios where they’ve seen it, please feel, please feel free to chime in with, with that. But good question, Sarah. That’s actually the first time I’ve gotten that question, so very thank you for bringing that one up. Um, okay, so I think we’re in good shape here and, uh, we’ll, we’ll go from, we’ll go from 

[00:25:46] there.

So let’s jump in with content here, because I think this is, this is one of those ones that I think a lot of people want to start here. And we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about it too, but I’m gonna tell you, you may not want to start here. Um, ’cause if your end goal is to increase new business, this is probably one of the slower paths to actually do it.

Um, it’s good to do and, but it’s, it’s a long play and it’s gonna take time and it takes time to build a following on LinkedIn. Um. It’s not, it’s not, um, as it can be as much different from, you know, your tiktoks, uh, your Facebooks or Instagrams of the world. Um, but let’s talk about how to do it. So basically part of the idea here is to kind of increase awareness of, of who you are and what you do.

Um, and you know, I know LinkedIn is not its own like little self cap. You know, you isolated, you know, eco echo chamber. People come from the outside world to check you out. Maybe you, you know, maybe somebody got a recommendation about you. And they, they’re like, I wanna, I wanna learn more about this, uh, this Gary Guy.

Uh, so they go on LinkedIn and they check out your profile. So it’s, it’s, it’s kind of like having a, a Google listing except it’s for you personally. Um, is, is one way to kind of think about it. So, um, but what does content do for you? Well, it can wanna increase your wear awareness of, of. What you actually do.

Um, you don’t need to be the best kept secret in your industry. Um, I know a lot of people probably are ’cause they’re just not sure how to promote themselves. But, um, one of the things is content can help Elevaate your authority. It, you just, you get seen and you get seen as an expert on things. Um, and some of the, you know, more tangible benefits of that is that it reduces price, resistance or streamline streamlines your sales process.

Um, I kind of use, I use this example when I’m talking to people quite, quite frequently versus using kind of LinkedIn say, compared to, to. Especially if you’re doing cold, uh, any cold outreach, uh, right. You send somebody a cold email or even a cold call or something like that, and their first thought is, what is this, this Nigerian prince wants to give me, you know, million dollars.

Yeah, yeah. Rights. It’s a scam. Or, or whatever, whatever the current scam is today. Um, versus LinkedIn where you message somebody, they’re oftentimes, they’re, they see you’re a real person, they look at your profile or, okay, you may, it’s relevant or it’s not. But if it’s relevant to them, they’re, they’re more likely to say, okay, yep, let’s talk to this person.

And, and they’re less likely to put up all those hurdles and barriers of saying, well, I don’t really trust these people. I don’t know, you know, having, having your profile be active and, and there helps kind of streamline that process and then you can actually get to the heart of the matter. Um, so. I will say content on 20, in 2025 has certainly been getting harder for a while.

You know, you’d see people saying, yeah, engagement and everything has been, been going up. Uh, 2025 has kind of flipped. That is, is you, you see a lot of like the, the influencers from two years ago or so saying, yeah, I took a short break and now my engagement’s nothing. Or, you know, I’m not getting any, you know, the kind of, you know, visibility that I used to, and you’re right, there’s, there’s more people who’ve come kind of started, come participating on the platform, which is just good and bad.

Um, but also the market’s a bit more sophisticated. Some of the, you know, easy tricks and stuff like that, you know, they don’t work anymore. People are more skeptical and, and and jaded these days. So, um, what, what can you do about 

[00:29:36] that? Um, well, I. Stop. I, I would say probably the big one is just stop worrying about kind of those vanity metrics.

And I think Jason here, this is post from, not a few months ago at this point now, but um, he said it best. So let’s just see what Jason here is. It’s funny observation about LinkedIn this month is reach, an engagement are down, but qualified leads and close deals are, are way up, like way up. And there’s a lesson in there.

The right content may not get a lot of likes, but it sure as hell brings in the money. So that’s probably one of the things I would kind of mention is don’t worry too much about the vanity metrics if you’re posting content for your ideal client. And one of the things you can see that not everybody else can see is the impressions are, are people seeing it?

They, you may not get, you know, a lot of comments on, on, on different posts. For example, like my posts for events and things like this are the ones that are kind of designed to, to promote our services. Just, they don’t get a lot of visibility anymore. You know, it’s the meme, you know, memeing on different, you know, cold emails or, or you know, somebody like, uh, who sent, who said they were gonna send me a bottle of bourbon.

You know, we’re playing, having fun with that particular message. Things like that. Um, that gets a lot more engagement, that gets a lot more content that does not bring in clients. Uh, it, it helps them see my next piece of content, which might actually lead them down that path. So again, it’s, it’s kind of building that awareness, getting that participation.

Uh, but really the people who are buying, um, are not the people commenting on my stuff, not the people liking it, uh, right. Some of those people are more people who wanna sell me something. Really, the people who, who I care about are the lurkers, the people who’ve seen my content and that’s it. Maybe they liked it.

Um, but probably didn’t do anything other than maybe they read it and then all of a sudden you get on a call with somebody a month or two later and they say, yeah, you know, I’ve, I’ve been watching, I’ve been to your events. I get that one quite a bit. You know, I’ve been to a few of your events. Um, you know, I saw your, you know, saw your newsletter, like your posts.

Hey, I would love to kind of talk about, you know, how you can do this for us. And, and I’m like, and to, to me, to them, I’m like a celebrity. They, they, they knew who, they know who I am already and I’ve never met ’em. And that’s what you’re going for. That’s what you want with, with this type of approach. Um, so they’re there, people are watching it.

Check your impressions, but don’t worry too much about, you know, the comments and the likes and the reposts and all that. That’s fun. That’s cool. But don’t, don’t get too hung up on it as, as long as you’re kind of working on the fundamentals of, of the business itself. 

[00:32:16] So. What’s working now. So this list has gotten a lot shorter than it used to be.

’cause it seemed like LinkedIn for a while, kind of was rolling out, like kind of almost different gimmicky types of things. So they’d really push, like, I, I don’t know, year, two years ago, they were really pushing, uh, like video and live streams and stuff like that. And then they move more to like those carousel posts, uh, where they, you know, it has the different boxes, uh, with like little different snippets in it.

You, you’ve seen them. If I, if I showed you one, you, you’d, you’d recognize it. Uh, but, but really what, what am I seeing now is it’s they, and it’s not even short form video, even though it that’s useful, but what’s kind of really moving the needle for, for a lot of people is just telling stories. You know, your, your experience.

And that’s, that’s one of the things AI can’t really take away from you is your real stories of, of things you’ve done. Uh, and yeah, being able to kind of tie ’em back to you. You know, uh, something you’ve had to overcome or just something that was interesting to you, or heck, it could even just be, you know, an interesting event that something you did this past week.

It’s, uh, it, it’s all good. Uh, but it, it makes, it makes you be uniquely you and probably the other I’ll piece of advice I’ll give you is self small problems, be specific. And that’s kinda what we’re looking at here with one of Nick’s posts is he’s a, he’s a big cold email guy, in case you’re not familiar with him.

Um, I had him on my podcast I think a couple years ago. Um, but one of the things I like is that he, he tends to give kind of real tactical advice and he’s very specific with a lot of what it is. It’s not, he doesn’t use a lot of vague Ah, yeah. You know, I use some, you know, I use six tools. He is like, no, I, here’s the six tools I use.

Um, and things like that. Or it, it, it’s specific. So it actually, it it differentiates itself from, uh, kind of that c of sameness essentially of, and everybody kind of, yeah. We’re all talking about. Uh, write cold emails that right, which is a very competitive, uh, area, especially kind of in the business development space.

Lots of people do it. Um, my inbox is it, it, it is obviously becoming more and more popular because of the amount of, of those I get in my inbox, which probably means that there’s, so, you know, it means there’s more opportunity in some of these other areas like LinkedIn. Um, and we’ll get to that here in just a 

[00:34:37] second.

So let’s talk about one more way to kinda leverage your network, and that is with using LinkedIn events, which is what you are viewing, which right now, um, and again, one of the reasons I like these is it gives you a chance to kind of showcase who, what it is you do that’s not just, you know, another.

Another pitch, and it also gives people a chance to spend a little bit more time with you, right? I’m looking, I can see there’s, you know, people, people on this session now who’ve been here for 35 plus minutes, um, and a post in the feed just doesn’t have the same type of impact as that, nor does a pitch in their, like a sliding into their dms with a pitch.

Also, it’s different impact hits differently than, than something like this. It brings in a different, different group of people. Um, so how do you really leverage these and use them? Awesome People actually attend and engage and they don’t feel it’s just a big pitchfest. And I mean, the, the pitch best part is easy.

Don’t make it a pitch fast. Um, but this is part of the reason why you wanna build connections purposefully. Why? I, I, I would probably on every single event I do, I try and mention that to people is keep building your network. Um. Uh, because it’s gonna help build that authority. And one of the things I like about the events is that you even, even, you could even do it where nobody really showed up and nothing, and you could still get good value out of it, but once you get, kind of get the ball rolling on these is it helps, it helps you get new leads.

Yes, absolutely. I think, I think that’s the pitch that people will really like about them. That, you know, they’re like, I gotta do these things. But it also kind of helps move people along that are already in your pipeline, your sales pipeline. It helps ’em close faster or perhaps they were kind of on the fence about it and they say, you know what, I’m, I’m in, I’m ready now.

I get it. Uh, we’ve even seen it be useful for kind of bringing people back who just, they kind of, they ghosted us where they disappeared, we followed up and never heard from ’em, and then all of a sudden they pop, pop in six months later and they’re on an event. I get an email from us saying. Hey, you know, we’re ready to go now.

Um, so the, the events are, are kind of a good way to just get back in front of people in, you know, in a, in a different way. So, and that’s, that’s one of the things I really like about them. And plus you can get a lot, you can get a lot of visibility for them. They’re not, they’re not really what, they’re not the hot thing right now in terms of LinkedIn’s eyes, right?

LinkedIn’s been moving more towards doing shorter form things. Um, but we still see a lot of value in this particular long form thing, excuse me, in, in doing these long form ones. Um, even if they don’t bring in as many people. ’cause they bring in the right people. So. That’s kind of the content side of things.

Um, I’m gonna check questions here, and if I miss your question, don’t worry. Um, don’t worry about it. I will go back through at the end for q and a and I’ll, I’ll try and make sure we get, get a question answered to everybody here. But, uh, so if you do have any questions, please do feel free to post them in the comments, but I think, I think we’re good right now.

So let’s shift gears here because I think this part is still really important. Um, and that’s using outreach, uh, basically that kind of, this is kind of the shortest path between you and a meeting and a potential deal closing is, is just going and reaching out and asking for it, and, right. It, it doesn’t have to be, you know, on LinkedIn, I, I just happen to like it quite a bit, simply because it’s so much easier, uh, to kind of build that trust, um, so that you’re, you’re not, you, you’re not like starting way, way behind like you would with some other types of, um.

Uh, thanks here, but, uh, I do have a question here from Sarah about events. So let’s, let’s do that and then we’ll come back to, we’ll go over 

[00:38:30] outreach here. So Sarah asks, any best practices with events in terms of length content? I provide professional development and training services. So I am looking at events that would take place, take the place of a full, I’m sorry.

So what I, so am I looking at events that would take the place of a full session or more of a sneak peek idea? Um. In, there’s, there’s a lot of ways you can do events there. So, um, I would say probably lean more towards that, that sneak peek or things that kind of use an event to pull people into a, a longer form of event.

That’s a pretty, a, a pretty classic approach to, to doing those types of things. Right. I know, heck, even back in the infomercial days when it was like, uh, real estate, you know, they wanted to get you into real estate training. They’d have you come to like a, a short little one hour presentation and then you signed up for, you know, a three day, you know, event somewhere else in some exotic location type of thing.

So they kind of use, you attended one thing, now you’ll probably much more, you’re much more likely to attend a longer thing. Same concept would apply here, is use, use the, the LinkedIn event, the kind of free event, uh, to, to kind of get attention and kind of draw people into that. Um. In terms of, of like length and content.

Um, I, I like to try and shoot for that kind of 30 to 45 minute mark. I feel like people feel like they got enough out of it, uh, but also not that I kept them here all day. Um, so that’s, that’s kind of how I try to look at it. I’ve seen people do ’em as short as 20 minutes. Um, I see about an hour kind of pushing the upper, upper limits too.

I think you’ll see somewhere depending on how good you are, uh, right. Uh, depending how good, how engaging you are. Somewhere in that probably 35 minute to 60 minute mark, you’ll, if you’ll look at your analytics. You’re gonna see ’em just sharply plummet at some point in there. It’s right, it’s usually, you’ll kind of see people keep coming on.

You’ll see engagement creep up and attendance creep up for the first 15 minutes. So you get that whole first 15 minutes or basically people, people keep coming on, people keep showing up, and then you can hold ’em for another 15 to 20 minutes and then it starts to, starts to fall off. So, um, it’s probably even some good insight for how you structure your presentation there 

[00:40:53] too.

Um, but, uh, in terms of content, um, uh, lots of ways to do it. Um, I, I tend to do a lot of presentations like this where it’s me, kind of the talking head with a presentation, uh, round tables. I’ve seen, I’ve had clients who really like to do those where they can get a bunch of different viewpoints on. Um, probably one of the more common ones is kind of the interview format.

Basically think of a podcast, uh, two people talking back and forth, um, having a discussion. That one also can, can work pretty well. Um, and then one kind of final point there I’ll make is just try and try and draw your audience in, uh, especially with these live streams, right? ’cause it, you’re, you’re not, they can’t, they don’t have a voice, so you wanna pull ’em up.

Uh, you know, if you can bring ’em in on the screen, have a conversation, you know, things like that, uh, we’ll help the audience feel like they’re being seen and hurt and they’re more likely to stick around that way. So, good questions again, 

[00:41:50] Sarah. So let’s talk about business to business outreach. And I, I like to tell people it is often the most consistent, reliable business development strategy used in the enterprise space.

And just look at the enterprise space. Go. Go. Actually, I checked this, um, uh, last week when I was trying to do some, some work. It’s just saying like, companies like Google and Apple, right, and Amazon all have people in enterprise sales. They’re basically doing effectively cold outreach. People they don’t know now, yes, they have the advantage of being a Fortune five.

Uh, you know, some of the biggest companies in the world, everybody’s at least heard of them. Um, but you know, they’re fighting for, you know, multimillion dollar, sometimes a hundred or 200, you know, sometimes billion dollar deals, um, where there’s only one or two other players in the market, but yet they still have to go in and build that relationship and, and do, do the same type of thing we’re trying to do here.

So I usually get somebody who says, yeah, people don’t like that though. People don’t wanna be contacted. People aren’t, they’re not gonna like it, so I’m not gonna do it. Um, but what I would just respond to that with, and I’m, and if I, I’m not trying to convince you, you don’t, we don’t, don’t have to take my word for it.

It’s okay. But most people will also tell you they don’t like TV ads, radio ads, Google ads, any of that. They throw away all their drunk mail. They don’t want to go to networking events. Basically, they hit everything. So nobody’s coming into the office today hoping that, well, today’s the day they get your pitch.

Not, not happening. But if you do, if it, if you do it well, you’re relevant. Maybe your timing’s right, you know, you, you can move things forward. And so much business, especially in the business to business world, is done that way. That. I would say don’t, don’t sleep on outreach. Just ’cause it, it, it’s how things move a lot of times in, in this world.

Um, one anecdote I will tell you is that when I was in, in the corporate world myself, uh, like I said, I worked at car dealerships, um, and I remember early on wanting to do a direct mail campaign. So, you know, from my marketing days, I kind of looked up some people and kind of emailed some places. Um, but nobody’s like, yeah, we don’t really don’t, we really don’t do automotive.

Yeah. I don’t have anything. Nah, I don’t think it’d be a good fit. Um, turns out that the, the people, the companies that do direct, right? ’cause you’ve, you’ve all gotten direct mail from a car company before trying to sell cars. Turns out that basically the only two ways that those guys work is, you know, basically cold calling or trade shows.

Uh, their websites. This is, this is 15 years ago. So their websites were terrible. They basically didn’t exist. And, you know, good luck fi figuring out who, who did anything good. ’cause they didn’t post anything on their websites. Uh, so you basically waited for them to call you. Um, and then you could take a look at what they were offering.

Um, which I always thought was weird, is they didn’t even, they didn’t even bother to use direct mail to, to do their stuff. They just used cold outreach, straight up, cold calling. Um, and that’s what their guys did. Anyway. Anyway, that’s neither here 

[00:45:01] nor there. Um, so let’s talk about outreach. And one of the things I get so many questions about is what do pe what should I say?

And I never post templates ’cause, well, that basically defeats the purpose is that, you know, we’ve, for any type of clients who might be using that type of message. And now I’ve basically taken a paying client and you given away their good stuff. And plus then it kind of dilutes the whole effectiveness. I mean, it’s not unique anymore, right?

’cause no matter how many times you tell somebody you need to customize this, somebody is copying and pasting that thing, probably 10 people are copying and pasting it and one person is customizing it. So what I tried to do instead is come up with an AI prompt that could get you pointed in the right direction.

Um, and I will let you screenshot this and go through it. ’cause I know, I know we’re gonna run out of time here. Um, and I wanna at least keep it, keep it under, uh, under an hour today. So feel free to use that particular one. But I’ll tell you kind of the key words here that, that I found that kind of made the big difference here is going using words like folksy.

You’re not a copywriter. You’re folksy self-deprecating. You can have a little bit of fun with a little bit of fun, um, but don’t go over the top with it. I think that’s probably the big one, right? AI loves to go big, go over the top and have, have a great time. Tell it to tone it down, uh, and then get some variations and then see what you like.

And you can, you can make variations from there. So, um, like I said, here’s that prompt. Feel free to screenshot it and um, see what you, see, what you come up with. But I found that gave me some really good starting points versus kind of ev you know, a lot of the other stuff. Right. Without some of those, those words in there and you just, you get, it just sounds, it’s just filled with buzzwords and jargon and crap and well, you know, then people are like, this is, this is why LinkedIn doesn’t work is ’cause everybody tries to use too many big 

[00:46:59] words.

So basically, here’s kind of the key points about, you know, kind of putting together an outreach sequence in the world of LinkedIn is, you know, having an introduction. Let you know, right? It’s, it’s, think about the real world, right? You walk up to somebody, shake their hand, you’re gonna introduce yourself, you’re gonna say something about you and you’re not gonna like, walk up, Hey, what do you do?

Hey, what do you do? Hey, you wanna buy my stuff? You want to, you, you right there, right? Art, art. Buy my stuff, Sarah, you too. Buy my stuff. If I absolutely you want, you wanna go on a discovery call right now. You’re not doing that. You’re not doing that. Uh, but reaching out, introducing, Hey, my name is Gary.

This is what I do. How about you? Right? That, that seems like a more natural conversation. Um, you know, inviting somebody else to tell you, know about, about you. So just, um, like I said, be, try to be relevant. And that’s probably the big thing here is it’s not right. One of the big things you’re gonna notice in this particular checklist is, I didn’t say personalization.

You can, it, it. But here’s the thing is there’s been so much automated personalization, kind of that fake familiarity that we talked about earlier, that hey, you know, we are both, we’re both connected to the same people. I, you know, I admire your work at insert company here, or I, you know, a big fan of your, you know, whatever.

Just, it just rings hollow. So don’t, don’t, don’t try and fake it. Try and put a pres, you know, a relevant offer that they, they might actually be interested in, in front of them. And then don’t be afraid to follow up on, on a message. People get busy. Um, some, some messages just get long. Um, for example, we tried a new message yesterday and I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 words long.

Hey, um, lemme see if I can remember what it said. Uh oh. Just wanted to check and see if it’s okay for me to send you that loom video question mark. And this is, this is later on in a, in a sequence. I was think this is the third or fourth message. 5% of people replied and said yes, which is for us, was, was good.

We’re in a competitive space getting five and this is right. This is not the first message they got from us. Most people are gonna reply in a message one or two. They’re not replying a message. So I thought, let’s just make it shorter. Let’s give it a try and see what happens. And they did. Um, so sometimes it’s, you know, using, using multiple messages because people may not reply to the first one, the second one, but give it three, give it three shots, um, and then make an offer.

What, what does that offer? Uh, I like to say you’re not sure where to start. Invite somebody to, to have a virtual cup of coffee with you. You’re gonna learn a lot. You’re gonna get conversations going, and then you can kind of figure out where you wanna go from there, though a lot of people actually stick around with that is a good offer is just offer to meet with people if it makes sense to, to do so.

Uh. And, um, you know, like I said, we, we’ve kind of moved to, we’ll, we’ll try and get, you know, other information out there. Like we’ll send out videos and try and try and do some of that just to kinda keep the, to keep my calendar from being crazy because if I was, if I had a calendar and I had 10 meetings on it every day, I would go crazy.

Uh, I like you all, I just don’t wanna talk to you all, all 

[00:50:23] day. Um, but what happens when people aren’t responding to your messages? Typically, it’s, it’s kind of a, one of a few things is, uh, it’s just not relevant, right. I, I keep saying that word and I’m gonna keep saying that word is that it’s not the right, it’s the wrong message or the wrong person or both.

Um, and it takes some time oftentimes to kind of get that dialed in, especially on LinkedIn as getting the, the, the right people. Um. Also your message sounds like everybody else’s. So go back and look at that Ai ai prompt I gave you. Your messages will probably not sound like everybody else’s. Um, because they’re, they’re, they’re kind of, they’re going the, the, the copywriter route.

They’re going over the top. They’re like, let’s get to the point. I don’t wanna waste anybody’s time, but let’s do it right now. Just say what you gotta say. Uh, right. All those things. All those things, they make sense. Uh, but kind of taking, taking that approach to slow the whole thing down, that’s one of the big things that I, I preach to people is slow it down.

You don’t, we don’t need to, we don’t need that meeting today. Let’s, let’s go for, you know, let’s try again in a few days, we’re gonna get better results on LinkedIn. Right? On a cold call, you can’t do that. Uh, on cold email, you can’t do that. But LinkedIn, LinkedIn works differently. Um. Your messages might be too long, right?

Keep it short. Uh, say, you know, your, you may have a message that has to, to be a certain length, but here’s the thing. Look at your phone and see, and then pull up the message. If you can send it to send, send it to yourself or send it to somebody you know, so you can read it. Um, does it fit on your screen?

Like this one here from, from, I can’t see it. My LinkedIn crash, but this one here, from that message there didn’t all fit on my screen, so I had to scroll and here’s, and that, that will reduce response. Um, so not having a call to action, right? The whole, hey, just nice to be connected. I’m, I’m here if you need me.

Okay, cool. You will get, hey, you’ll get a lot of thank yous. That’s what people will say, but you will not get me anythings. So you, you kind of gotta balance that, right? That first message. Don’t pitch ’em. Second message. Ask for something. If it’s relevant, can I send you a white paper, a case study, anything?

Pick pick something and try it. Um, and then finally, don’t, don’t include it. Don’t include a calendar link. I still see that one quite a bit. Um, and I, I know you think you’re making it easier on, and everybody involved and including the, including the person you’re messaging, don’t include it. It will, you’re, you’re, it’ll crash.

Absolutely will crash. Um, and it, it’s, it’s more of a, a human psychology thing when you’re doing outreach, and this is probably most, this is specifically for outreach, but when, when you’re reaching out to somebody and saying, Hey, you know, can we meet? They want you to do the work. They want you to, to, to kind of go, you know, to, to do that little back and forth dance of offer some times, get it coordinated and, and, and make it happen versus them having to figure it out, right?

We all know it’s easier. I will agree. Every, everybody will agree that it is easier. They’re still not gonna click on that calendar link ’cause they want to feel catered to and they want you to put the work in my recommendation, put the work in. And you’ll also be rewarded that the show rate is quite a bit higher when you, when you do that.

’cause they feel more committed to it at that 

[00:53:57] point. Um, so Ben, uh, Benjamin Baxter here asks, what’s your typical follow-up cadence? Every two days? Um, I vary it, um, uh, but I think the, probably the, the one I’ve used most often is 24 hours later we’ll message them. So we don’t, even if we connect to somebody on a Thursday, we don’t message ’em till Friday.

Um, and then I think it’s usually three to five days between there, um, and then anywhere from five to 14 later. So I, I believe the most common one I have is a one day, three day, eight day cadence. So, um. And that, again, like I said, I, I run it slower than I think most people probably would. Uh, but it also works.

So do, do with do with that what you will. Um, and then Jeff here asks about outreach. Would you be worried about annoying potential leads in a, a niche industry? No. Uh, um, look, so at some point somebody will, will reply, will reply back, and they’ll be like, they’re, they’re gonna be angry. They’re gonna say, this is very unprofessional.

I don’t take these types of things. And, and maybe, maybe that person will remember who you were, but for example, take it as somebody who used to be on kind of the other side of this is. Who received cold calls all the time. Uh, right. I worked at a car dealership. I worked in marketing who wanted to talk to me.

Everybody wanted to talk to me. So several a day and some of them really ticked me off. Um, and you know what? By the end of the day, I couldn’t tell you who they were. I had forgotten about ’em. Your cold email message, your, your LinkedIn message will be forgotten. It’s not gonna ruin your reputation. Right.

This is, again, this is the strategy of, uh, of, of the big, of, of, of big companies, right. Your, your, for your sales force, your, your, your Apple, your, your Amazon. I got, I got a cold email from Amazon once, many, many years ago for a little, little niche product I was selling. Uh, was I like, oh, Amazon is clearly desperate.

No. I was like, oh, cool. That sounds good right now. Obviously, you know, it takes a while to have that brand behind you, and you may not ever have that brand behind you. The, the thing about it’s gonna ruin that whole annoying or, you know, ruining your reputation is just, is, is, is not really reality. Not in the business to business space.

Um, that’s, that’s my, that would be my recommendation there. And then, um, looks like here, can I see it there? I think our, our Rebecca, I know, and sometimes the privacy settings don’t show the name here, but, uh, how many times do you do follow up? I will do a maximum of free messages on LinkedIn. Other, after that you get such diminishing returns that I don’t, I don’t want to be a pest.

Um, what I might do is I might email somebody, you know, once or twice afterwards if they don’t reply on LinkedIn. There’s an easy way to kind of connect that message by saying, you know, we’ll use Jeff here. So I say, Hey Jeff, thanks for, you know, look maybe recently connected on LinkedIn. Appreciate it. Um, if you’re like me, you may, you may not check your messages very often, so I thought I’d send you an email instead.

No, I just used up a whole lot of words there to say not much of, of anything. But I did say the one thing that’s important is, how did I get your email? I got it from LinkedIn. ’cause we’re connected there, right? So, um, I, I know, right? ’cause I, I keep saying keep it short. Keep it short. Keep it short. That’s the right amount of words for some to follow up on a, on a LinkedIn one via email so that they know you’re not the Nigerian prince trying to sell them or, uh, you know, let them know you have an oil field that’s worth $20 million and you’re gonna give.

Um, so use as many words as you need to, but, you know, then, then keep it short. Um, anyway, great questions. Really appreciate it. So, um, feel free to ask any more. You’ve got there. I will come back to them. I want to get this kind of last section in here and then we’ll do q and A here. But I wanna try and get this all in by three o’clock so that.

I respect everybody’s time, and then you can all go about back about your day. But for the people who’ve got some more questions, uh, we will finish up here. So I will answer any remaining questions or any new ones that come 

[00:58:23] in. So I wanna talk about intent signals. ’cause I keep, it’s one of those ones, it kind of keeps creeping up a little bit, but it mostly, it’s on the fringes.

And here’s the thing, this is one of those proceed with caution types of things. It can be, it’s, it can be a really good tool, but it can also really, really hurt you. So there’s tools like Tri Fi, so this is kind of the big one that I’m aware of. There’s probably others out there, but if you’re kind of curious, what, what does he mean by this?

Go to trigger file. Read their pitch, and then you’ll kind of get it. And then there’s who basically. But basically they say, we’re gonna find all the people engaging with your, your competitor’s content or your content. And we can just say, here’s all the people, here’s their information. Um, and you can either connect with them on LinkedIn or we can turn them into email addresses, but you can contact all those people.

Cool. All right. Or, you know, um, like Ty Giuliani, similar type of thing, but he kind of focuses on LinkedIn events, says, Hey, the LinkedIn event list is public. Go ahead and go and find all those people who attended certain LinkedIn events, and they will, you know, be a fruitful place to kind of look for prospects.

Um, and you know, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve tested this because it sounds good to us too, and we’ve learned a few things. Here is one, this is great for boosting your connection rate. For example, if you just take a popular post on LinkedIn, try and connect with everybody if they’re in your industry and in your space.

You’re probably gonna connect with, you know, 70% of ’em. It just, that’s, uh, you know, it’s easy. The thing is, most of them aren’t gonna be relevant to you, right? Like, people in comments can be from any, you know, anybody can comment basically. Um, so they may not have any authority. They might be interns, they might be students.

They’re just not, you know, account managers, people who don’t have any buying power, um, but they’ll connect with you. Um, so there, there’s that. So, we’ll, we’ll kind of cover what you gotta do there, here in a second. Um, but like I said, it can be a little bit complicated. So you, you’ve gotta, uh, kind of do a little bit, a few extra steps and kind of here’s what those extra steps I would say are.

So one is the, the content matters. What type of content are they commenting on? So, pulled up a post here from Dale Dree. He’s somebody who I, I like his stuff. I think it’s interesting. He’s kind of a. A, uh, direct, he’s a direct mail type of guy, sales guy, um, you know, sends out things like empty dunking donut boxes, stuff that’s wildly creative and way out of the box thinking.

I, I think it’s fun stuff. Um, so people who comment on his stuff oftentimes are people who I’d be like, they, they’d probably be a good fit for me too. Um, and I think that’s important is if, if the posts that you’re like, oh, there’s a thousand comments on this. But if people arguing about politics, just don’t, don’t stick your, don’t go in that hornet’s nest back away and leave, right?

Don’t, don’t, don’t try and, and harvest that one. ’cause you’re just gonna get a lot of you. You’re probably gonna get a lot of the wrong people. Um, so there’s still that kind of need to filter prospects even on a post like this though, for, from Dale is, I still want, you know, for me it’s, I, I want small companies.

I want people who are in leadership positions. Um, so we still do additional filtering. Um, from there means the connection rate is not quite as high. It’s still very good, but not as high. Um, but at the end of the day, like you, I want new clients. I’m, I’m not just doing this for my health. So basically taking that time to put a little bit of extra filtering in knowing that, yeah, I’m gonna get less connections, but they’re gonna be better quality, more likely to be a fit for what I offer.

So if you’re looking at intent signals, um, tho those would be kind of the things I would say things to look out for, but otherwise are good. 

[01:02:18] Um. Real quick, and then we’ll go to q and a here. Um, but I, I, I let, this is my running bit. I, so I gotta do it, is my mailbox is still empty. Uh, yesterday I had counted them.

I counted them just for you. 29 cold pitches via email. 24 of which went, which went to spam. That number seems to keep going up. I only got two pitches on LinkedIn. That number’s going down, which tells me that automation and, you know, bots and fake accounts and all that are, are getting harder and harder to pull off on LinkedIn.

So probably good for all of us. Um, five spam calls that none of which got answered, but I got zero pieces of mail, not a single thing in my mailbox yesterday. Um, and look, the, I’m not a unique and beautiful snowflake here. You’re gonna see a lot of people who, they’re, they just don’t get much in the, in, in their inbox, their mailbox anymore.

Their inbox is blowing up. They can’t keep up with everything they’re getting via email. But, you know. There’s nothing via mail. So, uh, just, just a little thing I like to put out there. I’ve gotten to the point, right? I can just put my, my actual office mailing address in ’cause nobody’s gonna send me anything.

So I put it there just to, just because, um, if you do need any help with this type of stuff, like I said, if you’re the type of person who’s basically you don’t have time to do all this yourself, do to follow up, do all this and keep up with it, but you also don’t have a team, like a staff that can do it full-time for you.

We kind of fit that middle part of, of your growth base where we’ll manage it, we’ll do it, uh, but we cost less than a full-time employee. Uh, but yet it’s done for you. So we’re not taking up all your time trying to get it done. So if that sounds like something you could use, just uh, shoot me a message, garriott Pipelineology dot com or you can schedule a call if you’d like.

Um. Through my calendar link@theappointmentlab.com, which is why I just tell people to email me, because guess what? People don’t use calendar links, um, questions. So I see a couple here. We’ll start with those. Um, and thank you for also, first of all, thanks so much everybody for coming. Appreciate your time today.

Uh, have a great day. We’ll be back in August if, uh, with another event, uh, topic to be selected. Uh, but hopefully we’ll see you again in August. Have a great rest of your 

[01:04:33] summer. So let’s do some q and a. Shall we, uh, Julie first connection request with a note, without a note, um, without a note for sure. Um, I did kind of cover this early, so, but, uh, what I, I do would say is that if you know them like you met ’em at a trade show, conference, something like that, put a note in, let ’em know that that’s where you saw ’em from.

But for people that you actually don’t know, no note is, is kind of the gold standard. And then, let’s see here. Do I have a name on this one? I don’t see it. Um, do you LinkedIn DM them? Last attempt after they don’t reply you to your emails? No, but that’s mostly just because my software doesn’t talk back and forth like that.

Uh, we’ve been, uh, a lot of stuff I do now is, is we’re doing like a lot of stuff manually now, um, which has its pros and cons, but, uh, mostly it’s, it that’s more just a technological hurdle. You could, you could, um, I don’t give it a try. I’ve not actually tried it, so I can’t tell you whether or not it would work.

Uh, but uh, as long as you’re not to, as long as they’re not totally bombarded both ways, um, I, you know, it, it probably, probably wouldn’t hurt. Give, try and see what happens. Um, Benjamin Baxter asks what KPIs are most important to track? Um, I look at my connection request, uh, percentage. How many people, if I send out a hundred connection requests, how many people have connected with me?

Um, that mostly because that’s, uh, one that LinkedIn is looking at. If you get, if you drops too low, like if you drop, it used to be 13.5%, which is an oddly specific number, but if it was below that, your count count was at risk of basically being put on timeout where you couldn’t really connect with people.

Um, these days it’s hard to say what that number actually is, and there’s a lot of factors that go into it, but, um, ultimately I wanna just make sure that that’s high enough. One ’cause that gives me enough new people to potentially talk to. And two is for the long-term health of the account. So that’s, that’s a big one that I tend to look at and.

Um, after that I’m looking at how many, what percentage of people are replying to the messages, and then how many meetings are we scheduling, uh, a week from, from that. Those are, those are the ones that I’m looking at, um, because I know for us, that kind of tells me everything I need to know about the rest of the sales pipeline.

And then McDonald asks, can you create your own AI agent? Who that operates you, your LinkedIn for you? And does the dms indirect messaging and find that a target audience all at once? Uh, a lot of people have tried that. Um. And I, I feel like I got into a conversation with one not that long ago, but the delay was significant in between its responses, so it felt weird.

Um, but the biggest challenge, the biggest hurdle you’ll face with LinkedIn versus say like, you could do this via email pretty, pretty easily. Um, and there’s solutions out there for it, but LinkedIn tries its very best to keep all that stuff out of LinkedIn. Uh, right. And like anybody else, there’s plenty of, you’ll find plenty of examples of them, not, uh, but you’re gonna have a, a very difficult time getting an AI agent kind of in, to go back and forth with them in a timely manner, right.

When you’re trying to do a back and forth conversation, right. You know, sitting here typing at your keyboard. It should be snap, snap, snap back and forth. Uh, whereas. Different delays in polling. And, you know, API restrictions essentially mean that oftentimes it’s more like 5, 10, 15 plus minutes between messaging.

So that’s where the challenge kind of comes in there. It’s, it’s not that instantaneous chat, um, at least from, from what I’ve observed. But I am not a professional coder. Uh, I, I, I, I don’t even pretend to be. So take that all with a grain of salt. Um, Bola asks, how useful is creating a LinkedIn training and establishing you as an expert?

Um, I, I don’t know. Um, I, I like to tell people that I continue to be a student. I’m always learning things and trying to share some of that stuff. Um, but yeah, trying to, you know, it will, it will help if. LinkedIn is a, if, if you are in the LinkedIn expert space, then a LinkedIn training would probably be helpful for kind of continuing to, to promote your, your brand and push that, uh, push that forward.

Um, it’s, it’s, it’s one, it’s establishing yourself as an expert is a thing that takes time. So just keep that in mind is that that would be one of many things you would need to do to establish yourself truly as an expert. And, and part of it’s just time. It takes time to become an expert in something. Um, and then by the time you’ve reached expert status, you’re like, I, I, I don’t know anything.

I, I, I know enough and I don’t know, I don’t know anything. So that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s my, you know, old man take on it now is I, you know, now, now I’m like, yeah, I don’t, yeah, there’s so much stuff. I don’t know. I just call myself a student now. But thanks everybody. I think that answers all the questions.

Um, lemme just check one more time. I think I got ’em all. Uh, appreciate everybody being on today. Um, and like I said, we’ll see you in August. Have a great day. And if you want that flow chart, shoot, shoot me an email. I’d be happy to send that over to you. Thanks so much for coming today. Bye.