How To Turn LinkedIn Into A Lead (And Sales) Generating Machine!

How To Turn LinkedIn Into A Lead (And Sales) Generating Machine!

Gary hosts a first-time live-stream LinkedIn event on turning LinkedIn into a lead and sales engine, sharing housekeeping notes (replay availability, Q&A delay, and emailing Evan at Pipelineology.com) and outlining an agenda covering profile optimization, purposeful network building, content vs outbound strategies, and leveraging connections via events/newsletters. He emphasizes having a complete, human profile with a clear, character-maximized headline, custom background image, and a creative About section, using Canva for visuals. For networking, he distinguishes followers vs connections, notes the 30,000 connection cap and limited weekly requests, recommends targeting second-degree connections, and highlights Sales Navigator filters. For lead generation, he advises consistent posting without overvaluing vanity metrics, engaging thoughtfully, using new LinkedIn features, and favoring human, relevant outbound sequences with clear offers while being cautious with automation. He also suggests leveraging connections off-platform via email and direct mail, and offers Pipelineology services with calls via appointmentlab or email.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome and Setup
02:38 Housekeeping and Qs
05:09 Agenda and About Gary
06:55 Who This Is For
09:01 Profile Basics
10:35 Headlines That Convert
15:13 About Section Template
17:34 Profile Q and A
19:21 Build Your Network
22:25 Sales Navigator Filters
24:52 Second Degree Pro Tip
28:04 Content Strategy Mindset
30:29 Consistency Over Virality
32:30 Ignore Vanity Metrics
34:51 Engage and Commenting
36:07 New Features Boost
38:22 Target Connections Q&A
41:03 Outreach Wins
45:13 Human Messaging Tips
49:26 Tools Automation Risks
52:11 Events Email Direct Mail
56:53 Open Q&A Playbook
01:09:11 Wrap Up Feedback

Transcript:

[00:00:03] All right. Welcome everybody. I know we’ve got a whole lot of people jumping on. I know we had, let’s see, almost 1200 people respond today. So, really excited to have everybody here. this is our first time doing this as a live stream, so hopefully you can bear with me. there is no Zoom link today.

so if, you do want the replay though, we’ll, we’ll have instructions for how to get that, here shortly. welcome. Welcome, everybody. We’re gonna, we’re gonna do our best to start on time. It’s 1:59 PM we’re starting at two o’clock. how’s, how’s everybody day’s? How’s everybody day? Does anybody have some nice weather?

I’m in Michigan today and, I know the south was getting hit by storms and tornadoes. I hope people are okay down there right now. It’s just cold and windy here. Anybody like in California or Florida, where it’s nice. Nice Caribbean Island or something.

Hey, good to see you guys coming on. we’ve got, yep, 65 people on so far. great. Lots of comments coming in, lots comments coming in.

All right,

welcome, welcome. If you’re just joining, as you probably noticed, we’re doing this as a live stream today, so you don’t have to log into Zoom or download Microsoft Teams, which never works for me anyway, that, that software platform hates me. So we’re, we’re trying live streaming for the first time. So it’s exciting.

Lots of people. And, yeah, this, this is gonna be a fun presentation. I think this is gonna be our second last one of the year now. Hopefully, hopefully it’s one of our, our best ones.

Alright, it is two o’clock, so let’s jump in and let’s get started.

All right, so welcome everybody to today’s LinkedIn event called How to Turn LinkedIn Into a Sales and Lead, or Into a Lead and Sales Generating Machine. I’m your host, Gary Ruplinger and welcome everybody. Hope everybody’s doing 

[00:02:37] great. So before we jump in, I just have a few housekeeping items. So this is actually our first live stream, so it gives us a lot of, additional benefits in terms of ability to engage and see questions, and things like that.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the same ability to. To, to hear questions on audio or get, get other people on the video part of the stream with us. but we’re gonna try this one today and see, see how people like it. So, if this, if you’ve been to some of my other events, I would certainly love some feedback on it, at the end to see how you like this, format versus, doing it as a Zoom event.

and we’ll keep that in mind for, for future ones as we, as we go forward. But, so far it seems like we’re getting pretty good response and it seems pretty easy for everybody ’cause there’s no extra, extra steps. one other things to keep in mind. There is a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds. So from the time I say something till the time, you hear it, about 20 to 30 seconds have gone by.

So kind of the same types of things with questions. Is if you ask a question, unfortunately it takes me about 30 seconds before I can even see it, and I’ve got two screens up. So the one I’m looking at here has got the presentation, and over here is where your questions are. off to my right. You can’t see me.

I don’t know why I’m doing that. so off to my right hand side is where the, the questions are all showing up. So, I may not see them right away, but, Evan, my, my right hand man, Evan is on the call with us. He’s my, like, my behind the scenes guy. So he’ll be either screenshotting questions and sending them me, sending them to me.

If you do have something that, You do want to get to him directly or you want me to talk about please email him. like I said, it’s I can see questions. I just, I can’t always get to them right away. And if there’s a lot of questions, I’d probably miss it. So if it’s something really important or you just want a private response, email evan at Pipelineology dot com.

And then the last thing here is I’m not actually associated with any of those people who’ve probably contacted you since you signed up and said, Hey, I noticed you were attending this event and, and they wanted to connect with you. I, I not associated with any of those companies. I don’t know what they offer.

I don’t know what they’re pitching you, but that, unless it comes from Pipelineology, it’s not us. So let’s kind of jump right on into it 

[00:05:06] here. the agenda today. So today we are gonna be focusing on your profile. we’re gonna be kind of going over kind of the steps you wanna take to really maximize the effectiveness of that profile to really well find those people in your network who are interested and, are looking to potentially, learn more about what your work does.

Talk about building your network. We’re gonna talk about two types of approaches. One, using content to bring people in and one doing outbound to go out and find people who would be a good fit. We’re gonna talk about some of the pros and cons of each of ’em, and then we’re gonna look at some ways you can leverage your LinkedIn network.

And then finally, we’re gonna turn it over to q and a. So we’ve got a lot to pack in today. I’m gonna go, go shooting for about 30 to 40 minutes today, and then at the end we will take some questions. All right, real quick about me. My name is Gary Ruplinger. I am the founder of Pipelineology and I’m host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been doing marketing work now marketing, business development sales now for going on 22 years. in my corporate career, I ran call center, that was marketing director, business development director, and I worked at car dealership. So our job was to handle incoming leads for our stores and turn those into scheduled appointments for our sales reps at those stores.

These days, I’ve taken that, some of that approach to helping generate leads and help my clients get more scheduled meetings on their calendar. And I am actively seeking New England IPA style beer recommendations, as if you’ve seen my LinkedIn profile. You know, I’m a big beer enthusiast, and I’m always looking for, for something fun to, fun to try.

So if you know of anything, say this is, this is your go-to, send it over, send me the recommendation. I, I’m, I’d love to see if I can find it and, and try 

[00:06:53] it. So who is this presentation for? I’d say these are probably the best, best fits for this particular presentation is if you’re a consultant, you sell knowledge or services.

I think you’re gonna find this to be really impactful. If you’re a VP of sales or a VP of business development, you run a sales team, looking for ways to, you know, get your, get your team performing better, get ’em some more leads, or if you’re actually a sales or business development rep, you’re the, you’re the boots on the ground type of person.

And have some strategies here, that are gonna be helpful for, for you as to kind of work at any level of the company and anybody who works or sells business to business types of services, ser you know, business service providers, things like that. This should, you should all find something you’ll be able to get, get out of the presentation.

Alright. Keep in mind you don’t have to do everything we’re gonna talk about today. I know we’re gonna, we’re gonna have a bunch of different things we’re gonna cover and it might seem a little bit overwhelming at times to say, I don’t know where to start. Just, you know, pick something that, that spoke to you and start with that.

’cause it, we’re gonna, like I said, cover quite a bit of ground and it might seem like more than you can try and do right now. So don’t try and do it all right away. Do take baby steps, do do it in parts and pieces and, and kind of go from there. and, if anybody, Evan, could you do me just a quick favor?

If anybody is having trouble getting, onto the live stream or they can’t view it or something like that, just shoot a, a quick message into the chat and just tell anybody if they’re having trouble getting on, to just send you an email and they’ll make sure they get the replay. I think everybody should be able to get on, but, the number of of attendees hasn’t budged here in a few minutes, so I just wanna make sure that, if somebody is trying to get onto the, to the, to the string, that they’re able to at least, Get it later. Like I said, this is our first live stream, so I do appreciate everybody kind of bearing with me, on this. So let’s, let’s jump into 

[00:09:00] it. So let’s start with your LinkedIn profile. we’re gonna look at a few different types of profiles. and the first thing I’d just kinda like to say here about this is there’s no one right way to do this.

creativity is your friend. your, your goal really is to kind of stand out to the, the people that you want to work with. so for example, we’ve got my profile pulled up here. so there’s plenty of room for improvement on it, but this is probably a good starting point. kind of some of the basics here is you want one, you just wanna make sure you have a picture of yourself.

On, on the, on your profile. And I realize it’s kind of silly to say that it’s pretty ob it seems pretty obvious, but I do still run across people who they, you know, they’re, they’re trying to do business development work and their profile picture doesn’t exist. They’ve got the setting set to private, or, it’s a logo or, or something like that.

You know, you, you don’t have to get carried away. It doesn’t have to be super professional, but you just want a picture of, of you probably a headshot of some sort. Like I said, it doesn’t need to be professional. Everybody’s got a good phone on their camera these days. so just, just, make sure you’ve got a picture of, of you on there.

I would recommend also having a kind of a custom background image. again, this can be a lot of different things. We’re gonna look at a few different styles that you can use, but again, just something that, helps it kind of stand out from the, the generic, LinkedIn profiles out 

[00:10:33] there. So from there, you probably next most important section, and because this is kind of gonna show up anywhere you post, anytime you try and connect with somebody, anytime you’re messaging with somebody, people are gonna see this part and that’s your headline.

So they’re gonna see, you always see your picture, and they’re gonna see your headline and name basically every time. So what goes into a good headline? Well, we, we’ve kind of narrowed it down to some things and we’ve, we’ve found that more, the more you put in there, typically the better A short one is, is okay, but you’re gonna get a better response the more you use.

So use all of the, the characters you can there. there’s no need to be short. It’s already, it’s li LinkedIn’s already limiting you to how much you can say there. Just use as much of it as you can. It will get cut off a little bit so it’ll get truncated, in the feeds and stuff. But on your profile, all of it’s gonna show, what we have found had pro to be.

The most effective in terms of building connections. Now, if your strategy is all gonna be all content focused, you don’t necessarily have to do it this way. What we find is leading with what you do, your job title, who you what, what, what do you do at the company is helps a little bit in terms of getting people to connect with you.

and then letting people know, kind of a little elaborate a little bit on what you do and then maybe some other things you might do on the side. Maybe you’re a volunteer, maybe you’re a marketing instructor, a professor, or something like that. And then maybe find finally some kind of fun or maybe personal types of things.

For example, you can see mine’s got beer enthusiast on it, Meem, affection Ado, things like that that just, they’re there to kind of help. Well lighten things up a little bit and make people seem, make me seem more like a real person, right? You’re, you’re on this video right now, you know, I’m a real person.

But when you’re first connecting with somebody or they see you there, you know, they’re saying, is this like a bot account? is this just some, you know, shell of an account that’s just there to try and take my money? Or is this actually a real person? So the more you seem like a real person, the better off you are going to be.

So, like I said, headline, put your job title in there, put what you do in there and have, have a little bit of fun with it. And then over there you can kind of see on the left hand side what that looks like. If you’re sending out requests, what they can see, or if you’re commenting or, or messaging people you wanna be interesting to your target market.

this is, this is Damien Taylor. We worked with him, for a while earlier this year, and you can see we’ve got a lot of. Interest, good things going here. We’ve got a good picture to work with. We’ve got a pretty cool looking, background image. You know, he got a lot of comments on that. People would click on his profile just to figure out what the heck Tech Witch was.

and, and a be pretty detailed headline there. And what I can tell you, and the reason I wanted to show you this one is that this particular, if, if your goal was to get people to reach out to you and say, Hey, you know, I’d like to talk and learn more about what you do, this is one of the best ones that, that we’ve had in terms of, of getting results where you connect with somebody and the next thing they do is they reach out and say, Hey, I’d like to learn more about what you guys do.

people found it very interesting, and, and they wanted to talk to him. So I figured I would show you this one as well, just ’cause we found it, it really helped get more, you know, get, get that interest, built up there. So, being interesting. Here’s, here’s another approach you can take. This is Brian Carter.

So you can see again, it kind of starts with what he does. some of the fields he works in a little bit of fun. He’s an abstract painter. but if you look at his backdrop image, I think this is probably one of the better things to look here. You can see that, it’s a little bit cut off on the screenshot I took here.

But, you can see he’s a, says he’s, he’s an author. You can see speaking engagements. He’s done, you can see him up on stage. And at the top of, that background image, you can see that, it’s different logos for companies he is worked with. So, kind of a lot of of subtle things that, you know, really shows that, you know, he’s an expert in his field and what he does, right?

He’s, he’s an author, he’s a speaker, and he’s worked with, you know, these Fortune 500 companies. So. You know, things that you may not have all of those to work with when you’re putting your stuff, when you’re putting yours together, but kind of work with what you’ve got to kind of, like I said, make it interesting and, and kind of demonstrate your authority.

You wanna be somebody that people wanna connect with and, we’ll, we’ll get more into 

[00:15:11] that. Now, if you scroll down on a LinkedIn profile, you’re gonna get to that about section. And this is, this is really your chance to make your pitch. And over on the right hand side, ’cause I know I’m gonna get asked, I’m gonna get to get that question every single time.

Is, what do you write? Can I see some examples? So what I’ve done here, feel free to screenshot it. you should be able to, you know, go full screen on this, on this stream. If you wanna just take, like I said, take a screenshot, copy and paste it, we’ll get, or we’ll get you the replay where you can, you know, pause it and take a, a closer look at it.

In fact, I think you can actually pause the live stream. So that’s kind of one of the benefits of the, of this technology as well. So anyway. and if you’re listening to the replay, obviously, or watching the replay, you can see this as well. So, you don’t have to do it this way, you don’t have to structure it this way.

This is just something to get you started. In fact, I would again, recommend creativity here. It it’s all about really kind of getting your message out to people and, you know, letting ’em know what you do, who you can help and what you want the next step to be. The, the big thing here is have some fun, be creative, and don’t make it kind of like a stuffy work experience or resume style.

One that’s probably not gonna get you those, the results that you’re looking for. So, some of the other things to, to mention here about building your profiles, just make it complete. you see this quite a bit where you, you get start, you know, people will get started, they’ll start sending out connection requests and there’s not a whole lot of.

Content there on, on their profile. You, they’re not taking advantage of things like featured the feature section. There’s, there’s no activity. ’cause they’re not active on the platform. They haven’t given or received any recommendations and their work history might have one or two, two companies on it. And that’s all you got.

That’s okay. But fill it out as much as you can. Put information there. Again, you want to, you wanna help basically this, this is kind of the building rapport section of, of, of a, of a sales call where peop this lets people get to know you a little bit without any pressure where they can just say, oh, this is what this person does.

So fill, fill everything out even if you’re, you know, not sure what to write there. Just get, get started on 

[00:17:33] that. So, so once you’ve gotten your profile built, so, Evan, are there any questions there that I, I should cover from, from building a profile before we move on to the next section? 

[00:17:47] Evan: Yeah. One is from Arson. he asked if it’s a good idea to put so many job titles.

[00:17:56] I would, I would probably say, you know, you want kind of the one you want to focus on most. some of the things that there are, there are things that you know, are good for like business activity and there’s some that are good for building connections. for example, if you are a, if you’re a teacher, you’re a, a professor you teach at a college or a community college or something, putting that in your title that you’re a professor of this or you’ve got your PhD in that or, or something like that, really helps with the connection rate.

So even if it’s not necessarily totally relevant, putting in that you’re an author, things like that, are, are all good things to put into, your title. Good. Good question. anything else? 

[00:18:42] Evan: that looks like that’s everything so far. 

[00:18:44] Okay, perfect. Oh, I see one here. Quick, from Emily. what do you think the best way format to put together?

High rack resolution background photo. Ken’s exactly it right. Use Canva unless you’re pretty familiar with things like Photoshop. It’s Photoshop’s good, but Canva has the templates already, so, makes it, makes it really easy. and it’s, it’s either way it’s way cheaper and they have free versions of it versus Adobe, which wants all your money all the time forever.

alright. so we’ll move on then to the next section 

[00:19:20] here. Building Your Network. Purposefully. So, if you’re not aware, we’ll, we’ll kind of just cover the fundamentals of this real quickly. There are two types of basically, people on in your network. So you’ve got followers, so that’s people who, they’re not necessarily a connection of yours, but they follow you.

This is, think of it more, let’s think of this like Twitter, where you can’t necessarily easily as easily engage with that person, but they, they want to see your content. That’s what a follower is. Somebody who, who’s clicked a button and says, I’d like to see more of this person’s content. And then you’ve got connections.

Now connections are limited. You can have un up to 30,000 of them, which is, is still a lot. And it will take you years to get, up to 30,000 with the current environment on, on LinkedIn where they’ve really restricted the number of new connections, you connection requests you can send each month. whereas it used to be you could send out hundreds, several hundred a day, without much issue.

Now it, it’s, it’s a lot more, more unlimited. I think the, by default now it’s, you can send out only a hundred connection requests a week. Of course you can receive unlimited ones. but basically this really slows down the, the growth so. You wanna, you wanna build these connections with, with purpose now and, and kind of really think about who you’d want to be connected to, because these are the people that you, you get a lot, you can engage with a lot more easily.

These are people you can invite to subscribe to a newsletter, to attend an event like you guys are doing right now. you can get their contact information and like an email address, phone numbers, things like that, that they’ve made available that are only available to their connections and it’s easier to message them without things getting filtered or, or limited.

So, we’re, we’re gonna mostly focus this on building connections, because we can do that with, well with purpose and we can kind of pick and choose who those people are. And then the followers can be anybody. But the connections is, we want, we want to know who those people are. So the first step to this kind of goes right back to what we’ve been talking about is you want to be somebody they want to connect with, humans, connect with other humans.

Not businesses. And on LinkedIn, it’s the same type of thing. where pe you know, I’ll have conversations with, with people and we start talking, Hey, should we do this for a business page too? when we start talking about their profile, and the answer is, people don’t connect with your business page. they want to connect with people.

you know, on Twitter, they, they might connect, people might engage with brands, but that’s really not the case on, on LinkedIn. so it’s a human to human type of thing. So my recommendation is be human, be interesting, you know, kind of work on that with your profile is, are you the type of person that if you want to connect with lawyers, are you somebody that a lawyer wants to connect you?

you know, type of thing. Just, and kind of ask yourself and that are you the, are, are, are you, or you look like somebody who’s, who’s not a, who’s an unsavory person, you know? but. 

[00:22:24] Building your network purposely. So here’s kind of one of the tools that we use for building, getting connected to the right people, you know, and, and with our goal, it’s, it’s pretty simple, is we want to connect with people that, you know, could be good partners for us, good prospects for what we have to offer.

Basically, they, they fit the profile of somebody that we could, could work with in some capacity. so, you don’t have to use a sales navigator. This is a LinkedIn tool. I don’t get anything for telling you about it. it’s one of their premium software tools. basically what it does, it just gives you a lot more, more data points to work with.

So it lets you filter people not only by geography and what industry they work in, but you can filter things like, well, how many people are at this company, right? I, I know this is pretty important. And, you know, for certain types of consulting projects and things like that. Is what, is, well, is the company too small or is the company too big?

And it’s also really good for finding people with the right types of job titles. maybe you need to connect with people who work in the HR department. Well, you don’t, you know, if on Facebook, that would probably be much harder on TikTok, probably pretty challenging. LinkedIn is very easy. You just click what’s their job title and, and you can find those persons.

So it helps you kind of work your way through companies where it might be a little bit more complex and it lets you say, you know, I just want to connect to, you know, the owner if that happens to be the case at a, at a small company, small company. So, tools like this really make it a lot, a lot more effective to kind of build and grow that network.

And yet I apologize for anybody who’s, who’s having trouble with, with the live stream. you know, go ahead and refresh that and. It, it should, it should be working. So appreciate y’all. Y’all kind of bearing with me here on the, on the, the live stream. Evan, I see you here, saying, yep, same thing that some people are saying, the live stream as we started.

and yeah, it looks like refreshing. I just tried it too. The only thing it did is I can’t, see the, unfortunately I can’t see the, the question, so if you do have a question, I didn’t answer it yet. go ahead and repost that and that way Evan can see it and we can bring it up at the end or, or you can just wait for q and a at the end.

alright, so we’ll kind of get back to 

[00:24:51  that here. So some other things that are gonna help with building your network in terms of sending out connection requests is mutual connections. So if you remember on the last slide here. Oops, wrong way. Last slide here. I showed you a screenshot here, up here on the green side, it has second degree connections.

This, it’s a different checkbox if you search LinkedIn regularly, but you can do the same type of thing. And I’d say if, if you want like a, a super secret, pro tip on how to build connections effectively only connect with people who are second degree connections, because. Well, people connect with, you know, if they don’t know you, at least if they know somebody who’s connected to you, they’re more likely to connect with you.

we’ve, we’ve tried this, gosh, probably dozens of times to try and do well, third degree connections and things like that. And every time that second degree connection is the biggest difference, of pretty much anything you’re gonna try. Everything else is probably minor little adjustments, minor little increases or decreases.

Where a second degree is, is huge. You can go from 6% of people connecting with you to 30% of people connecting with you just by checking that button. So really, really, really important. the more they view you as, as a colleague or somebody who’s like them, whether it’s you have the same status in the industry, your, Company owners will connect with company owners more easily. You know, VP is, VP of sales, is a bad example. VP of sales will connect with everybody. Just busting your chops, guys. you know, dentists connect with other dentists, you know, people who are in the same types of things. So the more they can view you as that, the better.

Don’t, don’t make things up if you’re not, like, if you’re not, it’s okay. You can kind of work around it. and like I said, make sure your, your profile picture is a picture of you and, and it’s set to public and things you can add to your profile if you have any of them. If you’re a speaker, you’re an author, podcast, host, any type of interesting things, professor, you have your PhD.

These are all things that just, you know, people make for whatever reason. People think you’re more of an authority and more like somebody they want to be connected with and have in their network. Alright, so livestream is working. Alright, Molly. are you aware the live stream dropped for everyone and had to rejoin?

it, it’s, I can see it. I have it pulled up here. I did have to refresh. which, you know, is, is certainly not ideal. I, goal here is to get the recording out to everybody. If it did drop, so email Evan, he’ll make sure we get you the, the recording in case you missed some of the presentations. So my apologies on that.

Like I said, we’re, we’re trying some new technology today and, it doesn’t always play nicely. So hopefully, everybody’s back on working and, you’ll, you’ll get the rest of the presentation, but if you missed part, just email Evan, we’ll get you the replay and you can catch the whole thing at, at your 

[00:28:03] leisure.

Alright, so let’s talk about, now that we’ve talked kind of about building your network, now let’s talk about, well, how do we. I kind of now start taking this, turning it into a, a lead in sales generating machine. ’cause you know, that’s why you guys are, are here today, I’m guessing. so before you start doing content though, I want you to ask yourself this question.

Is my audience on LinkedIn? Not just, do they have accounts there, right? Most, most people, you know, most industries having an account on LinkedIn is exists. But are they actually active? Are they, are they engaged? Are they there? Lemme give you a couple examples. If you told me that, you know, Hey Gary, you know, my company, we sell like point of sale equipment for restaurant owners.

and then, you know, we’d like to get, you know, more people in the restaurant business added to our network. I would tell you LinkedIn is probably not gonna be a good place for you restaurant owners. They’re, they’re, they, they’re not active on the platform and they’re very difficult to connect with when you can’t even find them.

So we, we’d probably need to look for a different approach if you said, you know, I work with people in the, the mortgage industry. I work with people who, you know, are in coaching. You know, I would tell you, you know, great, they’re, these people are, are, not only are they, they on the platform in droves, they’re, they’re very active as well.

And some of the ways you can do is, you know, see what types of groups are on, you know, look for groups. Are there a lot of people in them? Is there a lot of activity happening in them? LinkedIn groups are not great, to be honest, but their existence, and if there’s people in them at least kind of gives you some insight, as to how much activity there is and if it makes sense.

So, alright, so there is no actual, again, just like with the profile, there’s no one magic formula that works every time. Creativity is gonna be your friend here, for example, I can’t tell you what to write or what types of posts to do. You know, on Monday you gotta do a, you know, tell a story and then on Tuesday you need to talk about tacos and you know, so on And so forth.

It, it doesn’t work quite like that and that’s part of the fun of it is that there’s a lot of ways you can do it and it’s kind of finding what fits your approach and time constraints and all of that best. But I can cover some of the things that, if you look at the people who are successful with it, you are the things 

[00:30:28] they do.

And probably the big one is that they are consistent and in that, you know, they’re posting on a regular schedule. If you said, you know, I’m only really gonna be able to commit to posting once a week, then that’s cool. Pick that. But what I would recommend is if it’s you’re only gonna post once a week, then pick a, pick a date and pick a time and consistently post at that date and time.

And LinkedIn lets you schedule posts now. So that even makes it really easy these days. but consistently doing that, if you say, I’m gonna do three times a week, pick those dates, pick those times, and kind of stick, stick with it. And also, if you’re going to, you know, part of this is kind of be committed to it as well.

content on LinkedIn can, one post can go viral and, and be, you know, all of a sudden you, you’ve got tons of exposure and activity, but you might have, have spent three to six months or even more than that to find that one post that really performed well. so basically the thought here is if you’re gonna do it, really make sure you’re ready to stick to it.

’cause it can take some time. Right. Any you can get, you can get popular at any time, but usually, you know, overnight successes, you know, are oftentimes 10 years in the making. Not saying content takes 10 years, but, it, it, it’s usually not overnight. ’cause ones, one, you’re kind of trying to find your voice, find the right audience, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here is Right with your intended audience in mind, you know, right.

To these people. Even if, you know, you’re not getting a ton of, of, activity right away, what you’re gonna find is people are, are reading that, they’re seeing it. and they might go back if they, you know, they catch you two or three months later, they might go back and read something or old stuff and you know it’s really gonna resonate with ’em.

And you say, wow, this person, this person speaks to me. You know, they’re not all over the place and they’re not, posting, you know, about all kinds of random things. It’s kind of, they’re, they’re, they’re on point and they’re on topic and they’re really kind of an expert in this 

[00:32:29] field. So, don’t worry about the vanity metrics so much.

I know on social media, you know, can feel like it’s always all about getting likes or clicks or comments and things like that. And don’t get me wrong, those, those things do matter, especially in terms of, getting that exposure and kind of growing. But what you’re gonna find is there are people who are lurking in the shadows.

And kinda, here’s what I mean by that. a few years ago before I really embraced LinkedIn, I was pretty active on, on Facebook and not real active there. ’cause I found that LinkedIn was a much better, fit for, for our company. But what we found on, on Facebook is, and this was like I said, this is probably four or five years ago, people would be talking about, Hey, I need you to kind of engage with me and post and comment on my post.

’cause if you don’t, I’ve got this new software that’s gonna delete you as a friend. because, you know, we, we need to have people who are constantly active and engaging. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of a cool software. Maybe I should try that too. but before I did, I actually took a look at my actual sales numbers, right?

The people, my clients, the people, you know, paying me money. And I found some pretty interesting things. And the most, obvious of them was that 80% of the people, ’cause we went back and checked each person, 80% of the people that, that were clients of ours did not engage with my posts. They weren’t liking them, they weren’t commenting on them, they were seeing them, but there was no, there, there was nothing I could use to identify that they were engaging with me on, on these posts.

And the only time I heard from them was when they finally privately reached out with a direct message saying, Hey, you know, I’m interested. Can we talk? Right. So if, if I had switched to that kind of process where I said I’m only interested in the people who are active, I’m giving up 80% of my customers, right?

I might get more engagement and content and, and likes and all that stuff that, that I don’t get paid for, only to lose business and, and things like that. So, don’t worry so much about the vanity metrics. There are people lurking in the shadows, reading your content, even if it doesn’t seem like that, especially early 

[00:34:48] on.

Some of the things you can also do is engage with others, share their content too. Because here’s the thing, it can be tough to kind of constantly create brand new content, but commenting on other people’s posts, can, can also be an effective if driver. In fact, I talked to somebody a couple of weeks ago, his, his entire strategy on LinkedIn was to comment on other people’s posts to get clients.

it’s not a common strategy that I’ve seen, at least. but, he, he said it was, it was effective. He prided himself on the fact that he didn’t post on, on, on kind of LinkedIn. I don’t know that I’d necessarily recommend that approach to you, but, engaging in other people’s content can be pretty effective.

Being thoughtful. And again, this, the idea here is to engage on content that is, is relevant to your audience. It’s gonna put you in front of other people who are relevant, to you kind of, you know. Fighting about politics and things like that in the, in the, the LinkedIn feed here is probably, is not what I’m suggesting, but kind of thoughtful engagement on, on industry types of topics, I think are gonna be, be helpful to you and even reposting and sharing other people’s content can be really 

[00:36:05] helpful.

And then finally, and I mentioned this one last because I don’t want you to depend on it, but when LinkedIn has a new feature, they’re pushing. I recommend you use it. For example, if I was doing this session two years ago, I would’ve told you, you really need to be making sure that you can do video, make sure you can post videos, share video content.

’cause LinkedIn pushes, you know, features that stuff like crazy. And now if you look in the LinkedIn feed, it’s there, there’s some video content, but it’s certainly not, it’s certainly not as prevalent as it was two years ago. It exists there a little bit, mostly because there’s some people who that’s, that’s what they do and that’s how they share their content, not necessarily being favored over any other types of content.

So, year ago I would’ve told you, you need to post LinkedIn polls, right? same type of idea. Every single post on LinkedIn was a poll. and that’s, that’s certainly balanced out too. Now it’s not, not as much. You know, if I was telling you what, what today are they pushing? Probably the carousel types of content, the little like slide types of things.

feel free to Google it. Just the LinkedIn carousel, posts. if you’re curious on how to actually do them, but they’re really good for engagement ’cause it’s people clicking 3, 4, 10 times on, on your post and, and reading it. And it’s the, the thing is, it’s also good for people who, you know, want easily digestible content.

and that’s ul ultimately that’s what the content’s for. It’s for people, not for algorithms, it’s not for LinkedIn, it’s for the people who are reviewing it. So, always got, always keep that in mind. Is that the, you know, copy paste regurgitated stuff that you think, well, I need to do this just to feed the algorithm.

I would encourage you to, to think, think, think about the end person who’s reading it. Does it make sense? Is it, is it worth posting? And you say, you know, I don’t have good thoughtful content post five times a week. Then don’t. If you think, you know, one or two, like I said, pick what you can do consistently and commit to it.

you know, as a content approach. That’s, that’s how I would approach that. so before we head over to the next section, outreach, Evan, anything I missed here, that we should cover quick? Any questions? content? 

[00:38:21] Evan: Yeah. we have a question from Andre, as a branding consultant, who would be a good target to connect with. and he mentioned that he’s also a podcast host. 

[00:38:32] So, good question, Andre. And here would be the question. And this is, this is generally what I, what I ask people is who are your clients? that, that should give you pretty good insight into who you want to connect with is who are the people that, that are, that are clients of yours and connect with those people.

you know, if, if your goal as a podcast host would be to, you know, get more guests on your show. You know, that’s certainly something you could, you know, look and find authors, people who want to share, right? Authors want to share their story, that’s why they wrote the book. or people, you know, who are, who are actively posting content.

if it’s to, again, on other people’s podcasts, connect with other podcast hosts if you wanna kind of leverage their networks. oh, and Ken, that’s a, that is a great message there. Don’t just comment. good post on there. that drives me crazy. I saw, I saw somebody who, who’s kind of, who, who fancies themselves a LinkedIn influencer who clearly this is their, their strategy.

They’ve got like a little pod of people who, you know, all they do is just kind of parrot whatever that person is saying, 40 times. ’cause they’ve got like a whole bunch of people who do it. And it was, it, he kind, it kind of backfired on ’em, ’cause it really. It really kind of exposed what he was doing.

’cause essentially he, he wanted to get people to comment on his post, to have him send the PDF or video or something like that. And, he said, you know, post, send me the video. And that’s what he asked people to do. And when you looked at the comments, you read ’em, there were 40 some comments and zero of them were people doing what he did.

’cause these people, like I said, they, they just parrot whatever he is saying, they don’t read the whole post. They just say, oh, here’s one sentence I’m supposed to comment about whatever you’re saying. And, and it, it kind of made ’em look a little bad. So yeah, it’s, you’ll see it and you’ll see people using, you know, saying, you know, that good post, you know, types of stuff, you know, is good for, for engagement or is good for that.

But, you know, from a, from a client getting standpoint right, which is, which is why we’re here. I would, I would steer clear of that. Alright. and then real quick, apologize for anybody who’s been having issues with the live stream, like I said, we’ll, we’ll send out the replay and, hopefully you can watch it, uninterrupted.

alright, so let’s, let’s move on to the next 

[00:41:02] section here. The outreach approach. This is my favorite approach, which I realize isn’t always necessarily a popular opinion, but that’s okay. right. ’cause ’cause books have been written, right? You can go to any self-help section and there’s, you know, people are writing about attraction style, content marketing, and, you know, it’s fancy, glossy, you know, papers and getting speaking engagements, right?

It’s, it’s this allure of, of being a hot, you know, a, a desire, you know, a, a thought leader in your industry and doing, you know, keynote speaking, all that jazz, right? Makes you millions. Well. you know, in, in the, in the business to business world, you know, the, the big dogs do outbound and they, they do billions, right?

you know, you look at companies like Salesforce or, you know, even, even companies like Google and Amazon that you wouldn’t think would have, these, have enterprise account teams that do outbound to try and get people for either their net ad networks, their products, their cloud services, especially.

They’ve got teams doing, doing outbound. And I know one of the big things that people will say about outbound is that, well, it’s gonna ruin your reputation. And, and again, this is, this is the big enterprise. You know, professional approach. It’s, it’s not right. It’s, it’s not necess, it’s not the one that they write the books about usually.

though, or in, or in Claf, I believe has written some good ones about prospecting. Like one is called Fanatical Prospecting. Good book, if you haven’t checked it out, if you, if you’re in interested in this even a little bit. But really this is, this is where, this is where the big, big, big companies play.

So probably not, not something you wanna overlook. even if you ultimately decide not to do it, kind of knowing some, some about it can be helpful. So part of the reason why, you know, if you’re on LinkedIn, you probably see so many messages about it, is that, when it’s done right, it can be very effective.

If, if messaging people on LinkedIn didn’t work, people wouldn’t do it at all, and they would stick to email and cold calling and things like that. but the fact that you see so many on your inbox means that it’s working for some people. Maybe not everybody who’s in your inbox. ’cause some of those messages are pretty bad.

But, but there’s certainly a way to do it effectively. And one of the things I like about outreach is that it’s something that can be more easily outsourced and scaled than a content focused approach. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve, we’ve looked at some of the, you know, doing content for people, as part of our company services and we’ve really found is that, you know, for, for, for the cost and time, it’s usually just more efficient for them to, to take that in-house for people who really know the company, what that voice should be for that.

If they want somebody wants to be a thought leader, somebody who’s kind of constantly working with that person if they’re not gonna write it themselves. whereas on the outreach side, it’s easier to you, you know, deploy types, different types of messaging, and scale a campaign. And kind of grow it faster.

And the nice thing is it typically runs, works faster. and it can even help you hone and refine that offer message if you’re gonna do more content. ’cause you know what people are saying yes to, and you know what they’re not not resonating with. you know, and one of the things about, one of the things about LinkedIn is that since it has so many limitations to it, versus, you know Right.

Emails virtually unlimited in what you could send, LinkedIn certainly isn’t that case. It’s, it’s not as, it’s not as easy to scale, it’s much more difficult and you’re a lot more limited in how many people you can connect with. Right. LinkedIn over the past few years, has certainly reduced what you can do in terms of connections, which means you have to be more thoughtful, you have to be more strategic in what you’re doing.

and when you do that, you know, basically you get better quality meetings, you can close more sales, by, by using LinkedIn than then if you didn’t. So. Let’s take a look, look at a couple tips here that you can use for getting, doing, doing outbound. And my first suggestion here is to be human. how often, how often do you see ones that are just so generic and they just seem, you know, or they, they, they fake, they fake that they’re, they’re interested in you just to get the connection.

So here, here’s an example. This is, this is Alex. this may or may not be a real person. Don’t know him. I’m not trying to call anybody out. It just happened to me. I had a screenshot of this one. so basically, you know, said, Hey, I wanted to connect with you. Enjoy listening to your podcast. Let’s connect.

And I, you know, I thought, Hey, cool, there’s, who listens to my podcast? Hey, which episode did you listen to? And immediately, right, he comes back, or actually the next day, next day he comes back and says, Hey, you know, the reason I’m reaching out is that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All about me completely ignored my, my question.

And the thing is, if you wanna make LinkedIn work, you gotta talk to people, you know, acknowledge the question. He wouldn’t, honestly, he wouldn’t have even had to listen to one. He could have just said, oh, hey, you know, I listened to Click, did a quick Google search, copied, you know, copied episode, you know, 24, whatever it was, said, Hey, I listened to episode 24 episode.

Hey, now I’m gonna tell you this. So be human, respond to people. If I ask you a question, respond to it. Don’t just go by, click copy and paste forms. And I think this is, this is where people get, I think this is where campaigns go wrong, is because they say, I’m gonna outsource this. And they, they hire some people overseas who don’t necessarily speak good English.

So they give ’em some, some copy and paste templates to use for sending out messages. And unfortunately, they, they can’t respond like a human. So, all of a sudden I look and say, well Alex, this is probably not his picture. This is probably not him or somebody’s on his account, but I’m not really engaging with Alex, so I therefore I’m not interested in talking to him.

So, biggest thing to take away if you’re gonna do any type of outreach is be human. Talk to people. Some of the other things keep of mind is, is relevance. Is, are you, again, are you connecting with the right people, people that could potentially be clients for you? Can you give them a message that’s relevant?

You know, is, is what you’re offering gonna be relevant to them? If, if not, kind of change up your message? Or if, if all you wanna do is, is meet with them, then, then say, so, you know, we, we, we found that doing a messaging sequence, doing multiple messages is a lot more effective than just sending out one again.

’cause you know, on, on LinkedIn, people, people do get a fair bit of messages and people aren’t on the platform that often, remember what I said earlier, where you, they’re just not, they’re just not on the platform as much as they are on, say, TikTok or, or Facebook or something like that. Well, which you, you wanna keep in mind here is if they’re not on, very often, if they, you message ’em on Wednesday and they were on on Tuesday and they’re, they’re not back on again for three weeks, there’s a good chance that that message is just not getting responded to.

’cause it’s old and stale at that point. So. By having, you know, follow ups and, and sending multiple messages, you’re gonna get more response just ’cause you’re catching ’em, you’re more likely to catch somebody a time when they’re actually on them on the platform. and kind of same things with follow up, people are, are, again, if they’re not as active, you have to do a little bit more follow up than you necessarily would if it, like I said, if it, it’s something doing you’re doing via email.

And, and then finally, the, probably the, probably one of the most important ones is actually make an offer to people. Tell people what you want to happen next. Do you want to meet with them? Do you wanna send them a video? Do you want ’em to attend a webinar? whatever that is, just make it clear, spit it out, say it, it’s okay.

They might say no, and that’s okay. That’s part of business development, right? Your people, not everybody likes your content. Some people, not everybody’s gonna like your outreach. and that, and that’s okay, but if you don’t ask you, you don’t know. So I’ll take a quick pause here as well, Evan, anything else about outreach that people are asking about?

[00:49:26] Evan: Oh yeah, this one is from Kent. he just wanna know the difference between Premium and Sales Navigator. 

[00:49:34] you know, I haven’t used premium in so long. that I don’t know. I can tell you that it, what it, the big thing with Sales Navigator is that it has gives you a lot more filters. I think it’s like 11 or something more filters, including things like being able to filter by, job title and how long they’ve been at a certain position at a company.

basically it lets you really refine and get a cleaner, cleaner list for people if you’re, you’re trying to prospect. It’s really kind of the tool that. They, they say LinkedIn says themselves, it’s a eight city sales tool, so it’s kind of designed for business development purposes. So they let you kind of really refine the, the connections more.

anything else? 

[00:50:17] Evan: yeah, we have one from Stacy. She just wanna know, like your thoughts on automation to scale outreach efforts. 

[00:50:24] well, yeah, I’m seeing this here from, from Ken probably saying the same thing. Be careful you run the risk of getting tossed off the platform if done wrong. And that’s, that’s, that’s true.

Automation can be good and using some, some software tools to at least help you handle messaging and follow up can be pretty helpful. ’cause the, probably one of the biggest issues with trying to do any type of business development on LinkedIn is the inbox is, is hot trash in terms of, kind of going back to any types of old messages or follow up.

’cause it’s, it just is a, is a constant flow of new messages. They’ve done a little bit to address it in the past year, so it’s a little better than it was, but ones where you can actually see all the people you’re having a conversation with, most tools will do that and they’ll see, they’ll show you the people who’ve replied and ones you should follow up with, can help in terms of automation.

yeah, it’s, it, it can certainly be helpful. It can certainly. It can certainly help you do what you’re doing more efficiently, but do tread, tread lightly with that. so I won’t, I won’t say yes or no on it. ’cause you know, we, we’ve certainly used it sometimes and we’ve seen times where it may not necessarily give you the desired results because I do talk to people like that where they said, you know, we have a, we have a new client that we’re working with, and one of their things they told me is, yeah, the last company they worked with, they got put on a, on a timeout with LinkedIn because they, you know, were sending out too many messages that weren’t relevant and people, people don’t like it.

So, you know, kind of, it’s, it’s one of those, yes, they can be effective, but do your due diligence before signing on with any of those. anything else before I go to the next section? 

[00:52:07] Evan: Oh, that should be everything. 

[00:52:09] excellent. So, I know we’re kind of running outta time here, so I’m gonna cover these next ones pretty quickly.

but two, two things here is. We’ve talked about kind of building your network, what do you do with your network, right? we talked about outbound and there’s, there’s only so many times you can message somebody before they, they’re just gonna tune out or block you or report you as spam, which goes back to the whole, well, I’m gonna lose my account, types of things.

So you, you wanna, again, tread lightly with that, but, so how do you kind of stay in front of your network? Content is a good way of doing it, but people aren’t necessarily on LinkedIn very often. We’ve covered that, right? One of the things you can do to kind of. What I, we call kind of a sweet spot is doing things like events or newsletter subscriptions can work too to kind of leverage your network to kind of figure out who is interested in the topics you’re talking about.

but doing, you know, a live event like you’re seeing right now, this is, live stream with all of its technical issues. Or you can do ’em as just a zoom a zoom, put a zoom link in, and then let people jump on. And then you can actually, it’s more, it’s easier to talk to ’em. so especially if you’re, you’re trying to do small events that are more, you know, maybe a little bit more intimate, works, works great that way.

And this is, this goes back to the why you want to build the connections with purpose. Why you want to intentionally connect with the other people that would make a good, good fit, potentially a good fit for your, your services is because these are the people that you can send invites out to as the people that are actually connected with you on, on LinkedIn.

So these are, something we’ve been doing for the past year and we found they’ve, you know, really, really been a nice, little, little tool for us. To use to really kind of grow and leverage what we’ve already built on on LinkedIn. And the other two ways I would re recommend looking at, and this is what happens when you, you don’t necessarily go through your, your presentation is, is as detailed with, as detailed as you should.

But those two bullet points, say email and direct mail, going off platform with your, with, with a connection. Like I said, if you are connected with somebody, typically you’re gonna get an email and you can tell them, Hey, you know, we’re connected on LinkedIn, but I thought, you know, shoot you an email in case you’re not as active on that platform and a lot of people aren’t.

So, can be a good way to get more response. and, and ways to engage with people that you couldn’t do if you, they were just a follower, direct mail, same type of thing. A lot more work, but really a way to stand out in for somebody. So if you’ve got somebody, you, you, you’re trying to get a meeting with a certain type of company and everything has failed using direct mail to send stuff like, I’ve got laser pointers and I’ve got coffee mugs that we’ve sent.

Just things to kind of get people’s attention, not just a little letter, like a sales letter. We, we kind of do the, the lumpy mail style things, but these are ways to really get people’s attention to kind of get those meetings that you haven’t been able to get, otherwise. so real quick here before we get to questions, and I know I see more of ’em coming in, so if anybody does need some help with this, we do offer services that will basically take this, you know, basically make it as hands off as possible.

We’ll build these, these systems for you, schedule appointments to kind of free up your time. So if, if that sounds like something like, I’m not gonna make, make a big picture, but if it sounds like something you could possibly use or you’d like to look at as we kind of head into 2023 here, you know, go ahead and schedule a call with me.

It, it’s something you can talk to me directly. I don’t have a, a sales rep to give you some big high pressure spiel about what we do. You can, you can talk to me and we can just, you know, discuss it and see what questions you have and I’ll, I’ll give you some more insight into what the program actually does and can do.

so if you go to the appointment lab, you can schedule a call there or just send me an email, Gary at Pipelineology. that is probably the best email to use if you have questions about what we do. Like I said, if you need, have questions about the, replay or, or the event or something. Email Evan.

’cause he’s, he’s more organized on those types of things, whereas I kind of handle the sales stuff. So, getting the, the replays and stuff that will give you the more efficient response. so with that, thanks everybody for joining. That’s all the, the content I have. But, I will now open it up to questions.

So, Evan, go ahead and let me know here what other questions we’ve got. let me see if I can get out of the presentation here and switch back to this. I think what I can do is, feature some of these questions too, is we’re, we’re doing it, but Evan do you have anything that stood out to you? Some good questions, you should start with 

[00:56:53] Evan: Yeah, I have one from Carl. he basically just asked like, the best CRM apps to use alongside LinkedIn 

[00:57:00] Best CRM apps. there are very few CRM apps that really. Work? Well if, as, as CRM thinks, ’cause the integrate, here’s the weird thing is integrations with LinkedIn from a CRM standpoint are connected to Sales Navigator.

That’s really the only, the, the way it’s typically done. so like if you’re doing HubSpot, which has has an integration, it only works with Sales Navigator, which really kind of limits its effectiveness. And, I’m trying to think if basically there’s, there’s specific LinkedIn tools, I don’t wanna get into a whole, I’m, I’m gonna recommend specific tools because they can come and go so quickly, in that field ’cause.

LinkedIn can literally shut ’em down if they don’t like what they’re doing or they think that they’re, they’re kind of spamming the platform. but, if it’s something you wanna talk more about, you know, shoot me an email and we can kind of discuss it, privately and we’ll, we’ll kind of give you some insight and point you in the right direction of ones that work that we’ve seen work, well at least.

what else we got? 

[00:58:11] Evan: we have another one here. How do I invite people to sign up for my newsletter? 

[00:58:16] Alright, if you go, into your, my network section there, on the left hand side, there’s a newsletter section. So if you’ve got one, set up, you can invite people to, to join it though. so basically you need to create one and kind of give the frequency and things like that.

But, once you’ve done that, you can, then go in there and invite, invite people to do it. same type of thing. If you’re trying to do an event, you just click on my network, go into events, create an event, and then you can invite people to it. let’s see. that was from, you said, I think it was, sorry, or Siri. I’m not sure Sure. If I’m pronouncing that right. I’ll use the little feature, the, the question thing here. Alright. what else? what else? 

[00:59:03] Evan: we have one. What is your advice on the best first message to send a new connection on LinkedIn? 

[00:59:09] here, here’s my best advice on that. That is, that is actually a really good question ’cause it kind of sets the tone, right.

So we like to use what internally we like to call, a friendly greeting. And essentially what that is, is we try not to ask them a whole bunch of questions. we try not to, you know, we, we we’re not, we don’t pitch at all. We never pitch in our first message more of a, Hey, this is, you know, it’s, it can be an introduction, it can be just saying hello.

it doesn’t have to be anything, anything fancier more complicated than that. but we find that since so many people. Just about everybody pitches in their first message. by not doing that, you’re, you’re kind of, you’re already standing out. just simply by deleting that part of the pitch, then, you know, the second message is a good place to, to kind of give more detail about what you do in your experience and, you know, get, in that, in that case, ask them to, you know, tell them more about what they do, introduce themselves, things like that.

It’s really, more about getting a conversation started, and engaging with them than it is to just straight up broadcast and pitch. That’s, that’s probably one of the, the biggest things that keep in mind on, on LinkedIn, is that if you’re just broadcasting your message, it’s, it’s oftentimes not gonna produce the results you’re looking for.

but good question though. Really good question. let’s see, let’s see. I got one here. LinkedIn users. So I guess I’m not, connected closely enough to you. Do you use any appointment platform other than Calendly? use whatever you’d like. for example, we, when it comes to scheduling appointments, we don’t send out calendar links to people that way.

we do it the old fashioned way. We coordinate time with them and, we’ll send them a calendar invite. So in theory, you wouldn’t need to have a calendar, solution at all. Because here’s, here’s the thing. Calendar things are, are great for us as people who wanna take appointments. But the, you know, other people, the people you’re actually trying to talk to, oftentimes in most industries don’t like them.

Won’t use them. and we’ve, we’ve tested that a whole bunch of times as well as, and, and found that people just, they won’t use it. So, so Calendly is fine. let’s see. High level has a good one. Acuity Scheduling is good. Book, like a boss is good, they’re all fine. Microsoft has one called Bookings Bookings and Google introduced one now to their premium stuff as well.

So, they all work fine, but, big thing is, I would recommend is don’t, don’t use one when trying to schedule appointments on LinkedIn or cold email for that matter. give ’em some times, offer ’em up, do it. Old school, it, you’re, you’re gonna have to message ’em back and forth a little bit more, but the show rate and the quality of those appointments can be way, way higher.

good, good questions though, everybody. Appreciate that. anybody else? 

[01:02:13] Evan: it looks like Michael’s asking your opinion on share be. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with what that is. 

[01:02:18] unfortunately I’m not familiar with share Be so, I can’t, can’t give you any, insight into, into them or what they do.Sorry.

any, anything else? Anybody else got any before we jump off here? like I said, I apologize if we missed them. We had a lot of stuff kind of come in pretty quick. let’s see. Thoughts on, yep, we got covered that one. Evan, do you see any more that I, I missed? 

[01:02:49] Evan: let me scroll here. I think there was one from Carl from earlier.

Oh yeah. Carl asked, like for startups, where are the best resources for LinkedIn profiles, for companies and how do you best align with personal profile?

[01:03:06] Say that one one more time. 

[01:03:07] Evan: I make sure. so you wrote, for startups, where are the best resources for LinkedIn profiles for companies, and how do you best align with personal profile? 

[01:03:16] Sure. for, for startups, a lot of times most startups say startup in their, in their profile somewhere. so just using that as part of your search parameters can be pretty good.

you know, looking for companies that haven’t been around very long, right? A company that’s, you know, been been around for a year, probably by definition, a startup, especially if you filter it by industry, if you need outside information on that, tech crunch has a pretty good, feed for ones that have gotten funding.

So it will, it’s a subscription service that you can get, A little bit trickier to inter to kind of marry that with LinkedIn. but if you need funded startup information, tech crunches, feed, is probably worth subscribing to in, in that case. and then, you know, it’s kind of, if you’ve got the list of companies you can put ’em into Sales Navigator and whether you wanna find the, the VP of sales or the founder, that’s just simply a, a job title match.

So you can use outside tools and just kind of bring them in and, you know, if, if it becomes tedious, find yourself a virtual assistant to do that work. I mean, that’s, that’s what I do. If we have any types of kind of complicated data entry, ’cause I certainly don’t wanna do it and Evan doesn’t like to do it either.

So, we, we just have a, an, an assistant who kind of helps with that, with that, a little bit more tedious types of work. alright. Any, anything, anything else? 

[01:04:55] Evan: Yeah, here’s a good one. It says, I can connect to people easily, but I often stay in the friend zone. which message should be the pitch or should it be more of a casual pitch? 

[01:05:06] I like message too for that. and I, I, I, I, I do what I call it, I do an intro sandwich.

What basically, what it it will do is, here’s, here’s how I, here’s how I structure something like that is, you know, I will, will, reach back out to somebody a few days after we’ve connected and I’ll, I’ll, I, I’ll say, Hey, I just wanted to formally introduce myself. Please feel free to do the same. and it’s that second part of that message.

Please feel free to do the same. Now I’m inviting reciprocity. Now I’m not just broadcasting now, I’m, now I’m trying to invite a conversation. So now that introduction leads me into here’s what I do. You know, like give I one sentence maybe about my background and maybe one or two, one sentence about what we do.

So it’s gotta be a really good sentence. And, I’ll put something, you know. Along the lines of kind of what that next call to action is, if that’s, if we’re trying to have a meeting, if I wanna send them information, anything like that. But that’s, that’s how I structure that next one so that I can keep, keep a sales focus on, on outbound, but still not lose the connections.

’cause I’m trying, I wanna lev, I want my network to grow ’cause I want to be able to leverage it long term. for, for things like this too, with events. So we’re, we’re always trying to kind of keep that balance of yes, we want to generate, you know, sales and leads and, and do business development work without getting too aggressive, without getting blocked, without, you know, without getting put on time out by LinkedIn.

So, it’s a little bit of a balancing act. I know our approach is definitely softer than most other companies that do this, but we also keep our, you know. We, we don’t use fake accounts and things like that to, to, to scale up the numbers. ’cause we, we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna dabble in the black hat stuff ’cause it just ultimately, it’s so much work for, for a little bit of payoff.

alright. but good questions though. really good question. thank you. anything else that you’re seeing, Evan? 

[01:07:05] Evan: let’s see. Jason asked what’s one of your favorite achievements and why? 

[01:07:13] Oh, we’re getting philosophical. no, it’s an interesting one. during, this would’ve been, you know, probably about 18 months ago, we worked with a company.

They were really like a rocket ship type of growth type of company. they did, did a lot of types of, of government work, and we were instrumental in helping them land, state government contracts where, we were able to get them connected in, I think the biggest one we helped them land was something like, 30, no, 20, $27 million, contract for with, with, the state of, Wisconsin, I believe.

So, big deal. Big deal. Right. so that one I like, I like to highlight that one. It’s, cer they don’t, they certainly didn’t do consulting work, but, it was a, it was a fun project to work on. Absolutely.

anything else? 

[01:08:15] Evan: looks good. And, thanks Ken for jumping and answering. Barry, Barry asked, what do you think about posting links to articles versus writing your own stuff? 

[01:08:26] Absolutely. And actually it’s a good answer, Ken. yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the big thing is, is just kind of mix it up a little bit, kind of figure out what, which what’s resonating with your audience along with what Facebook is, or excuse me, what LinkedIn is kind of kind of pushing, right?

Doing things like polls can get a little bit more exposure, whereas, you know, doing a lengthy post at the more thoughtful post might get more thoughtful considerations. So kind of having a mix of that, and just kind of seeing what, what, what works is, is probably the best way, way to do it. At least that’s how, that’s how I like to try and do it.

so thank, thanks Ken, for jumping in there. Appreciate that. 

[01:09:08] Evan: Cool. That seems to be all the, questions. 

[01:09:10] Whew. All right. Well, this, this has been fun, guys. So I apologize for the, the technical hiccups. I think we’re gonna do this again though, as a, unless my feedback on this is, Is is is really bad and you guys don’t like it.

And wanna go back to Zoom, which send that to Evan, Evan at Pipelineology dot com. Let him know, let us let him, or I’d like to hear too, you can even email me, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. I would, I would certainly love your feedback and see what, what you guys are, are saying about do you like the new format?

appreciate everybody coming out. I, I do like how easy it was to, you know, kind of feature some of these comments. And it, I think it let us get a lot more exposure and get more people on the, on the line than when we do the, the little zoom ones. So, going forward we might do a mix of them where we do some smaller events with, with Zoom and some of our larger ones like this on and, on the live stream.

But really appreciate everybody being here. if you do have any questions, wanna see that replay, anything like that, or like I said, anything you want us to address, you know, one-on-one with you, happy to do so. email Evan at Pipelineology or gary Pipelineology dot com and, with that. I hope everybody has a great rest of your day.

we will be doing one more event before Christmas and then, we’ll be off for a little bit. But, thanks everybody and take care. Have a good one.