LinkedIn Lead Generation – Leverage LinkedIn To Close New Business

LinkedIn Lead Generation – Leverage LinkedIn To Close New Business

Gary hosts a LinkedIn lead generation livestream outlining a framework that starts with identifying ideal prospects, proactively building a targeted network, and using outreach and/or content to drive people back to an optimized profile. He emphasizes completing key profile elements (banner, verification, headline character limits, About section with clear CTA, Featured section, activity, experience, and recommendations) and shares multiple profile examples. He advises deprioritizing content in favor of targeted outreach when networks are small, warns against relying on AI beyond drafting an About section, and stresses responding promptly to inbound interest and having follow-up systems (e.g., CRM tools like Surfe). In hot seats, he reviews profiles (Jasmine, Paul, Lydia, Chester) with feedback on clarity, differentiation, and growing connections, and previews a future Sales Navigator deep dive.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Setup
02:28 Housekeeping And Agenda
04:35 About Gary And Audience
06:15 No Networking No AI
08:44 Try It And Get Data
09:47 Lead Gen Framework Overview
11:41 Define Ideal Clients
13:56 Build Your Network
14:51 Profile First Impressions
17:30 Live Profile Walkthrough
23:34 Featured Section Examples
25:39 Verification And Q And A
28:28 About Section Pitch
30:31 Profile Completion Basics
31:12 Responding to Leads
33:21 CRM Follow Up Systems
35:04 Fractional CTO Clients
36:24 AI About Section Writing
39:30 Hot Seat Jasmine
45:51 Hot Seat Paul
48:28 Hot Seat Lydia
52:45 Hot Seat Chester
55:30 Wrap Up 

Transcript:

[00:00:01] All right. Welcome everybody to the LinkedIn Lead Generation session today. So I’m excited to see everybody here. we’re gonna give everybody a minute or so to hop on, but we’ll be starting right around 2:00 PM Eastern time today. So good to see you. I gotta see few people are hopping on already.

Jackie, it’s good to see you. Glad you could join us today. Gary, I see you’ve, you’ve made it in today. I know for here it’s a. It’s actually a pretty pleasant day in Detroit, Michigan. It’s a little cloudy, but That’s nice. It actually makes it not quite so hot, you know, up north here. We don’t, we don’t really like it that hot.

So, I was talking to somebody in Phoenix, earlier this week and, you know, it’s 110 degrees there and I said, man, it’s 86 here. And I think, you know, it’s, it’s just, just too much. So, where’s everybody calling in from today? how was, how was the weather by you?

Alright. I do see that the live stream has in fact started. That’s, that’s always good. I’m always a, always a little bit nervous that, things aren’t quite, working. So I had it, I had it happen like three or four months ago and now I’m scared that everything’s gonna break. So good to see you, Tom.

Welcome. nineties in Atlanta. Yeah, it’s probably seem too warm for me. Too warm for me. That’s why I have to live up north. Michael, good to see you today. Jackie’s in, in New York City. You guys got a heat wave going on there, a share in, in Phoenix, but it’s a dry heat. I, I have, I have experienced that, but to me it still feels like I’m in an oven.

Gary’s in Boston. Meredith in Pennsylvania. Also real hot there. I’ve, I’ve heard that too. So, but it is 2, 2 0 1 and I don’t like to start too late. So appreciate, appreciate everybody hopping on, there will be a replay. So if somebody hops on late or wants to, just make sure you go back to the beginning and catch all of it.

You can certainly do so, and the replay will be available about, five minutes after we get done recording here. So let’s kind of hop into it here. For some reason, my, slide didn’t update. Quite right there. Do we have the right session here? One sec. One second. Yep. Okay. I think we got enough of it right?

I, I had two versions working here and this was, this is actually the LinkedIn lead generation session 

[00:02:26] today. but anyway, just a few housekeeping items. there’s about a 20 to 30 second delay when we do these live streams where I’m talking on the screen here and from the time you hear it, so. All that really means is that if you ask a question and say in chat, I will see it a little bit later and you’ll hear my response at in a delay.

So we can’t probably converse back and forth as easily as we would like in, in a real time chatter if you were on video here. but overall I do try and answer the questions as completely as possible. Testing out some new technology today. Actually, had one of them just completely failed to work today.

We had a. I had a nice setup here where I was gonna be able to draw on the screen nicely, and I had it all tested last night and it was working, and then I got in this morning and that broke. But we got a, a different webcam today that kind of supposed to follow me around, to make, to make things look a little bit better.

So if you have any feedback on the video quality today, of course would love to hear it. But if you do want to be notified at future events, I do try and get as many invites out to people as possible. but we’re typically only able to get a few thousand of them out every month. ’cause LinkedIn does limit us.

So if you do wanna make sure that you hear about all of them, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash event. So I’ll make sure we get you an email sent out from those as well. The agenda today, we’re gonna be take talking about, our lead generation framework here on LinkedIn. We’re gonna be looking at your profile because that’s gonna be kind of the centerpiece and what we’re kind of building around, in order to kind of build this lead generation system.

and then we’re gonna look at some options basically to feed that system. we’re gonna look at content and we’re gonna look both at. From an outreach standpoint, and then we’re gonna do some hot seats. so if anybody’s here today and saying, yeah, I’d like, I’d like somebody to take a look at my profile, gimme some, gimme some feedback on it, time permitting.

We’ll do, I’ll do as many as I can. It might be, might be two or three. if we get through everything fast today, it might, you know, might be, you know, five or six or seven. So do, I’ll do as many as I can and I’ll let you know when, what info I need from you and when, when to post that stuff. 

[00:04:33] So real quick about me, I am the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology podcast. I’ve been in marketing now, I need, actually need to update this site. It’s been 23 years now, so I’m kind of an old man in the marketing world. I used to run call centers at dealerships. So what we used to do is we would take all the leads coming in.

We had 16 stores around the country. And my team, I had 14 people working for me, and our job was to call, email, text, get in touch with any leads that came in and any way we could and get appointments scheduled for our, for those individual stores. These days I’ve kind of taken an, an adaptation of that. I work on helping clients.

I work with a lot of consultants, you know, some small manufacturing companies, things like that. And I help them get more meetings with the people they really want to talk to. And I’m feeling a little spicy today. So I think pineapple is the one of the top five best pizza toppings. Yep. Yep. I know, I know some people that immediately this disqualifies everything I’m gonna say from here on out, you can’t, you just can’t trust those people.

I get it. But that’s, that’s just me. I like pineapple. What can I say? So who is this session for? consultants. I think this is gonna work pretty well for consultants, coaches. This should be good one, good for you as well. If really anybody in sales and business development, or if you’re just trying to get more business from LinkedIn, but maybe you don’t fall into one of those categories.

I know sometimes we’ll. Talk to people, you know, in, in the financial services, or insurance types of things. And they’re trying to build a book of business and there’s, it can be a little bit harder to do that on LinkedIn, but it’s still a good place to try and basically find the right people that you’re looking 

[00:06:12] for.

So, couple things. This is not a how to network session, so I’m gonna tell you, you do what works for you. But, we, I’ve, here’s, here’s, here’s kind of what I found on this is. I don’t really care for networking. I’ve, you know, I’ve been that person who gets up early, goes to the, you know, b and i meetings or, or whatever, you know, one is local to you and you know, basically it’s a bunch of people kind of sitting around crossing their fingers and hoping they get, the business.

But it never really brought me much. And even I hear on LinkedIn kind of hopping on calls. I, I just don’t have time to do it. And here’s the thing about referrals, ’cause right, that’s why you’re supposed to network, is for referrals. My best referrals come from my customers, so my best bet in order to get more referrals is to go out and find more customers and clients, and then they will refer me.

My, my more of people like them. So that’s just been my take on it. Do, like I said, do what works for you. I always know that’s a little bit of a controversial take. but, but sometimes you just don’t have time to just talk to everybody and cross your fingers and hope that maybe someday you’ll get lucky and they’ll send you something good.

So if you’ve been networking and saying, gosh, this doesn’t work for me, how can you help me today? I’m gonna tell you this. If it’s not working for you, stop. And we’re gonna talk about some other things you can do today. So. There’s also not an AI session. We’ve got one AI slide right at the end here, and we’ll kind of talk about that one when we get to it.

But really, AI is, is just a tool. It’s, it’s not going to figure all this out for you. it can help you make little tweaks. It can help you. If you’re stuck somewhere, but if your approach isn’t working, AI isn’t gonna help make it any better. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna kind of shy away from that. We’re gonna kind of work on the fundamentals today, and then you can enhance it with ai.

But I talked to, had a guy yesterday who reached out to me who was. Bragging about how good his AI tool was. So I engaged with it. I asked it some questions and it just felt super impersonal. I said, you know, what do you think about my profile? It couldn’t, it couldn’t read my profile. Right. So it, it, it felt impersonal right from the beginning.

and, you know, for, for the types of people you’re trying to work with on, on LinkedIn, you know, unless, unless you just have so much incoming, you know, messages and stuff from people. I, I, I don’t, I, they’re not quite ready, but I did tell the guy I’m interested, talk to me, you know, on version three or four and, and we’ll see how it’s 

[00:08:43] doing.

So, and finally, before we get started here is, yes, I want you to try all this stuff at home. One of the big things, right? Any, anybody who’s teaching this stuff or, or has programs like this? You know, we, we’ve all got our own frameworks. We’ve all got things that, you know, have worked for us in the past, but we are not you.

So the best thing you can do is get your own data, go out and try things and find what works for you in your situation where you are at right now. I remember doing, doing ads, and this was several years ago. You know, you’d, you’d watch the videos, you’d sit on the webinars. You know, you, you know when you don’t know any better, when you don’t have your own data, you kind of, you just tend to believe whatever anybody says, but all of a sudden you get out there and you start trying things and you say, well, that didn’t work for me.

That didn’t work for me. And you, you can just dismiss a whole lot of advice that isn’t relevant to you because you’ve got the data in front of you. So I recommend you do the same thing here. Don’t just take my word for it. Try this stuff out. Get your own data and, and see and find out what works best for 

[00:09:44] you. So here is my lead gen framework that we’re gonna be covering today. Now, I know this is usually a little bit small and kind of tough to see on screen, so if you would like a copy of this lead gen framework, just go ahead and email me Gary at Pipelineology dot com. my assistant Evan, who’s kind of behind the scenes making sure that everything is working properly today.

he’s, he’ll put my email address in the, in the chat there. Thanks Evan. Appreciate that. So. Just email me if you’d like to get a copy of this and I’ll, I’ll just email it to you, of course, free of charge. but I know, like I said, you’ll see it on the screen and then you’re like, can I screenshot it and blow it up?

And it’s super fuzzy. So if you just wanna see it, you know, I’m happy to send it to you. But here’s what we’re gonna be talking about is probably the big one, is identifying the right prospects. If you’re not targeting the right people, you’re not getting in front of the right people. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of your system is.

It’s gonna fall on deaf ears because you’re, you’re not putting it to the right people. So we’re gonna spend some time on that. We’re gonna talk about, you know, making sure that we’re getting those people in our network. Ideally is connections with followers is okay too. And then we’re gonna talk about kind of the two paths and kind of how that diverge a little bit.

We’re gonna have outreach on one side and we’re gonna have content on the other. I know some people are gonna be real for or against some of these, but here’s the thing I’ll tell you is they both work. they both, they can both be really productive. and each have some pros and cons to which one you should be doing.

So, but you can see here from this one is that they do kind of converge back to your profile, and. That’s where we’re gonna really start and kind of dig in today is with that. So actually we’ll start at the top and then we’ll work our way down to the profile. Like I said, we’ll do some hot seats and then we’ll kind of touch on, on a little bit of the other things you can do in terms of, of outreach and content.

So we’ll come back to, to those here in just a, 

[00:11:40] a second. But let’s talk about your ideal client first. So. The more you can know about who the right people are for your organization, the better. So let’s say that, or let’s just use one of my clients as an example. So I’ve got a client, they do supply chain consulting, and they work with manufacturers.

and they generally, for them, they want companies that are just shy of the Fortune 500. That’s where they find that they get the most of their, their good, good contracts from. ’cause once you get to a certain size, you’ve got your own internal people for that. So. What, who do we target then for them? So they’re not trying to target the CEO, they’re not trying to get on with the, the owner.

’cause that person is just not dealing with those problems. as your company reaches a certain size, right. That certain stuff just doesn’t go through the, the top person. So they’re trying to connect to VP level, sometimes director level people. so we’re using tools like, Sales navigator on LinkedIn is probably one of the best ones because you can actually target by job title.

You can target how long they’ve been in a certain position and things like that. So the more you know about who you want to connect with, the better this is gonna work. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re doing outreach or content or however you’re trying to reach ’em. If you have them in your network and you can get in front of them in some way, you’re much more likely to actually.

Get to a point where you can have a conversation and eventually close a new business from it. If you’re getting those people, if all you’re doing is, you know, kind of random other people who are out there hustling, you know, posting their own content and, you know, they’re, you’re connecting with people who, you know, they’re in other parts of the world that where you don’t work and Right.

Definitely against people in, in Pakistan or Bangladesh or, or India for that matter. I don’t do any work there, so I don’t have a lot of connections in those areas. And it’s, it, you know, ultimately it’s, and that, but you get a lot of of requests for those people. So when I’m proactively building my network, I’m going out and trying to find the right people that I know, or at least have the right title.

Could be a good prospect for 

[00:13:54] me. So that leads me to the whole proactively add people to your network, right? You can have up to 30,000 connections, and if you’re not close, it takes a long time, right? LinkedIn’s put some, some pretty big throttling in place over the past few years to try and control the amount of, you know, solicitation and stuff, and still keep it a a, a good network.

So, it takes a long time to get there. In fact, my, my account, we’ve been working on adding people to it for, gosh, going on six or seven years now. just adding people, adding people every single, every single week. and I’m just around the 26,000, 27,000 mark right now. So I’m getting pretty close, but it takes many, many years to reach that point.

So. Add, add, add people as you can get, get that network growing because then it’s gonna help you get in front of the right people, help you target the right people, things 

[00:14:50] like that. So, your profile, so we’re gonna do some, some live onscreen stuff here, but just kind of touch on it. What some of the things you, you’re looking at here is you just wanna make sure that you’ve put a little bit of time into it because what ends up happening is.

People will look at it. And again, it doesn’t matter. Are you doing outreach? Are you doing content? Are you hosting events? Are you commenting on other people’s stuff? You know what? Every, all of that leads people back to clicking on your profile. So I. How do people find your profile? They can find, right?

They type in your name on a search engine, Google, Bing, whatever you’re using. people search, in LinkedIn, typing your name in sales navigators. Other common way people find them, they might just see your activity, right? Again, your posts, your comments, or from your messaging. So there’s lots and lots of paths that lead to people viewing your profile.

So what do they see when they get there? So once they get to your profile, right, you’ve, you’ve got a pretty good idea and we’ll go through all the different things here, but when you make a post, they’re gonna see your profile picture, they’re gonna see your name, they’re gonna see what degree connection you are, and they’re gonna see part of your headline.

And if you’re making a post, they’re gonna see about 70 characters. So you can see in this first example here, Barbara Mason, where it says, female business owners pay me to help them build amazing teams and then scale, and then it gets cut off from there. So those first 70 characters are pretty important.

You really want to make as. Good use of those as pop possible as as you can because that’s, that’s kind of what, what is out there. you can see the next one here, same thing. Somebody posting a comment. You see about the same number of characters, about 70 characters of their headline, and you can click on their name and go straight to their profile.

If you send a message, however, I know this one’s getting a little bit on the small side, but if you send somebody a message on LinkedIn, they’re gonna see about a hundred characters. So. More of it. So you can see in, in Melissa Houston’s case here, it says, author, cash Confidant. I teach business owners how to create wealth from their business, and she’s the founder of She Means Profit.

And it goes on from there, but it gets cut off there. So again, just trying to make, make sure you kind of understand what people are seeing as you’re interacting on the platform in different ways, so they’ll see a little bit less information if you make a post. Or a comment, they’ll see a little bit more information if you send them a message 

[00:17:28] directly.

So I’m gonna flip over here on the screen and we’re just gonna take a look. I’m gonna kind of walk you through what we’re seeing here in terms of, so funny thing here. And like I, I had my little background banner up there. When you are live on LinkedIn though, it’s gonna show you, it’s gonna show that the person’s live and the picture shows up there.

So. we’ll, we’ll have to kind of skip that, but essentially what we’re looking at here is you’ve got your profile picture here, and behind you is the background. Normally, this is where I put information about my next upcoming live events. You can show pictures of yourself speaking from the stage. You can do, information about your services, but you know, make sure you put a banner there because otherwise it’s just kind of gray and boring looking.

So, what else we got here? Obviously we’ve got the name, but the thing that’s right next to it here is this verification button. Verification actually makes a pretty good difference now in terms of how people connect with you and see you, because if LinkedIn has verified you, you’re more likely to get that connection and people are more likely to trust that you are in fact a real person and not a bot because you’ve essentially submitted your ID to LinkedIn for them to say, yep, this matches what’s on your government issued id.

You’re good to go. You’re a real person. We’re happy to have you on the platform. I know it’s, it’s not available in every country yet, and I think we talked about that last, last month too, that some, some countries they’re just not available or the privacy laws are just don’t allow it to happen that way.

but at least in America for sure, you’ve, you’ve got this available to you, so I recommend if you do take advantage of it, it’s free. So here is that headline. So here is what we were talking about when I was telling you, here’s what people can see when they message you. so mine says, founder of Pipelineology helping businesses land high value clients podcast hosts ne aficionado and beer enthusiasts.

So since I do a lot of outreach and connecting with people, we actually find it helps to kind of start. Start with your job title. I know that seemed a little bit boring, but it does, it does tend to help there. If you’re more focused on content, you can start with section two here, who you help. so, but this is kind of the one that we have found that works best and gets the best rate, connection rate for us.

And I like to put, I like to have a little bit of fun here, right? I like to throw this one in here that I get, I like memes. And guess what? People are like, Hey, they’ll send me memes and it’s, and we have a little bit of fun and it breaks the ice. beer enthusiast is especially effective, right? not everybody drinks.

Not everybody drinks beer, but if you, you manage to find somebody who does, you know, it’s a good way to get, you know, get a conversation started. And that’s what we find is that these are good kind of little icebreakers ways to interact with people.

Oh, excuse me. So a couple other things up here in the headline, ’cause this is where people are generally gonna see you is make, oops, this is what happens. Like, start clicking and get crazy. over here on the right hand side, company where you currently work and where you went to school, I recommend just putting both of those in there ’cause it just kind of, otherwise it’s just blank weight space and does, doesn’t look quite as good here.

Some of this stuff is not what you will see. by the way, if you’re thinking that this book, an appointment button, which you will see if you go on there, is a really great way to get appointments. Here’s what I can tell you. It doesn’t work at all. so don’t I, I find that, you know, it pretty much doesn’t bother.

The only people who are gonna use that to book an appointment are gender and the people center who are trying to sell you something. So, if you want to book appointments, you kind of gotta do it the old fashioned way and ask them to meet. so the about section here, so you can see here, right?

We’ve got quite a bit of information about it. here, I’ll click the expand it out here, and again, feel free to, you know, take this, copy it, you know, kind of work and craft it and make it your own here. right. I’ve filled out about as much information as I possibly can. basically kind of telling people who and what I do, and if they do want to talk to me, they can book an appointment here at the appointment lab.

Again, I’ll tell you, I do get people who occasionally use this link and I’ve got ’em tracked differently so I can tell which one comes from where. But this is actually more effective, is putting the link that you can’t click on in your profile description in the about section than actually having the easy to click on book a book, an appointment link.

I know that that seems very counterintuitive, but so far that that’s really what we’ve seen. featured section. We’re gonna look at a few different examples of these here. I generally just like to put, you know, events in the sessions that I’ve done because that makes things pretty easy for me. And it’s also a really good entry point into kind of, you know, who I am, what I’m about, what I’m teaching, and it kind of helps, you know, in my case it helps somebody look like more of an authority on the subject.

so I think that that’s what I like, that’s what I like to put there. You can put. Anything you want, any post you want to feature there, you can. And we’re gonna, like I said, we’re gonna look at some other examples, maybe some, some giveaways or, you know, lead gen tools that you wanna put there. Activity again, I just tell people, you want this to exist.

You want, when people scroll through here, you don’t want it to be empty. If it’s empty, you’re likely to not. You’re, you’re gonna get fewer connections and people are less likely to trust you. ’cause they’re like, is this just a bot? ’cause. A human being should be interacting on this platform in some way, shape, or form.

All right. Your work experience will fill this stuff out here. Same thing with education. Put things in there, recommendations. At least have some there. You don’t need to have thousands of ’em, but something there. Somebody who will say something nice about you. just kind of fill it out 

[00:23:33] completely here.

So let’s take a look at another example. Here we’re gonna look at, Darin, at Darin Palina Designs. So you can see here I like the designer ones that, ’cause they’re always very, you know, good on the, on the visuals, right? The pink here flows nicely into it. You can see it’s different kind of idea, but, you know, colors or, you know, run through here.

See different type of link. Here he is, got his five minute discoverability hack. Sounds interesting. so you can click on that and, and get more information about that. about section here, pretty similar, right? Got information. Kind of here’s what I do and one of the reasons I picked this one is ’cause again, his featured section, again, very consistent color theme and he’s got a different kind of idea here.

Take a look at his portfolio and click here to, just to, to get the 907% discoverability in just five minutes. So. Get found, by new clients and or recruiters with this five minute hack. So this is not a client, this is just somebody’s, Profile that I happened to see when I was looking at, at other people’s profiles and saying, this is actually a really good example of one.

So a little bit different, different approach to it, but kind of Right. Same verifications and things like that. Taking a look at one more here, this is Hannah Zebo. we did an, event with her back, in, the fall of last year. so she’s at Digital Brand Kit again. She’s kind of got her own personality here, so, you know.

Lots of, lots of interesting stuff here. Again, featured sections, kind of what I wanted to focus on. She’s got, you know, her brand personality quiz and if you really wanna learn how to do comments well on LinkedIn, check out her stuff. this is really something that’s kind of helped her get her own following is actually by commenting on other people’s items.

Just a couple things there. So a couple other ones you can use for inspiration if you’re, you’re looking for, for some more, examples 

[00:25:38]  there. So, I’m just checking here. so I know Ari here is, just mentioning he’s getting a verification every time he tries. Regardless of which Id, he uses Aria, I’m not sure what to tell you.

the big thing is that is does your name on LinkedIn match what your yours says Exactly. that would be the thing to, to, to look at. I know sometimes I don’t give very much feedback on what actually, what caused it to, to fail. Also, are you in the same country as your locations as you are? That can be another thing.

So without, without really knowing the situation. It’s, it’s a little bit hard to say. Alright, so let’s jump back kind of into, here is the other thing is that I’ll say is just try and be interesting. So here’s one more example of one and really here is just, you know, kind of looking background image and, the, the headline there, and the reason I wanna bring this one up is ’cause this, this one, This was a client of ours and he got more people just reaching out to them after connecting and people wanting to meet with him and talk to him than anybody else we’d ever worked with. So, just, you know, again, some more examples. The more interesting you have, the more they, you look like somebody they want to talk to, the more likely they are to reach out and say, Hey, can we talk?

So, So I see a question here from, Lydia Sugarman. Lydia, nice to see you again. So my government IDs are in my maiden name, and I can get that verified, but I’m known by my married name, Sugarman. When I switch my profile back to that, the verification goes away. And I’m seeing more and more profiles where the job history simply lists company title, just the basics, no details on company or responsibilities.

Often those are included in the data section. What, is your opinion on those two styles? I would say more information is usually better. right. You know, you’re. You, a lot of it’s kind of compressed and it lets the viewer pick and choose and jump in where they want to, but LinkedIn, right? There’s a lot of that.

See more click here type of stuff on LinkedIn, so that it doesn’t totally clutter up the whole whole thing when they’re checking your profile out. So, my opinion on that is put the information right, the, the company section there, the job history, the work experience. Fill that out as completely, you know, especially your current one, your past ones.

Yeah. They don’t really matter that much. you know, maybe a note or two about what you did there. But really the, the current one is just another opportunity to kind of help bring a person in, maybe with a little bit 

[00:28:27] different angle. So your about section kind of can cover one way to bring people in, and that should be what you’re really focusing on, the whole company one, your current one.

A whole nother opportunity there to bring people in. When they’re kind of looking at it. So another way to kind of basically take a different angle on it. So, yeah, like I said, the other ones from your past, what, whatever you were doing in, you know, 2009 or something like that, don’t worry about what that was, sentence or two or leave it blank is fine, but your current one should be another opportunity to kind of pitch, essentially you and sell them on, you know, you and your company.

So, building your profile. This is where, you know, copywriting fundamentals here are a good place. it’s a safe place to make your pitch right. They clicked on your profile, they’re interested. Give them, give them some more information about what you do. So if you saw the one that’s currently on my profile, this is, another one of my employees.

This is the one we use on hers. Again, feel free to screenshot this, take a look at it, and again, make it your own. and we’re gonna show you kind of how you can use AI to make it, make it your own here, towards the end of the session here. But the big thing I wanna mention is that this is not where your work experience or your resume goes.

You know, that just kind of talks in third, you know, third party about all your accolades and stuff like that. This is really where it’s, you know, about really engaging them. Think of it like a, a sales page, you know, something on your website with the same idea of, at the end of this, you want to call to action.

That tells ’em what they can do next. Whether that’s to, to message you, get, you know, download your, your lead generation thing, get, you know, get your assessment, take the quiz or schedule an appointment with you, however you wanna do it. Ultimately that’s, that’s kind of what you’re looking to do here, is move, move them forward.

If they’re, if they’ve gotten that far and they’re interested, you know, help, help run ’em through. Is this good for you? Who’s it a good fit for? Am I a good fit? Oh, it sounds like I’m a good fit and it sounds like something I can use. Great. I’m gonna, I’m, I see, I see a way to move this relationship forward, and if that’s meeting, meeting with you, talking to somebody on your team, however you wanna do 

[00:30:30] it.

Alright, so we’ve kind of talked about these already, but just really kind of fill out your, your profile as much as you can. Make a complete the featured section, right? Put, put stuff there. activity. Make sure, make sure, just make sure you’re doing some activity. You don’t have to post every day, you don’t have to, you don’t record, you know, elaborate videos explaining exactly what you’re doing, but have some activity.

Comment on some people’s stuff like some posts. Make a post every once in a while if that’s all you can do. but just do something. Do something. Okay. Work history. Yep. We’ve covered that. Just fill, fill it all out. Right. Alright. And we’ve looked at those 

[00:31:10] examples. Let’s talk about a couple of things here.

’cause I, I’ve had a, a few examples of this, over the past couple weeks because I’ve been getting ready to do this session and. I see people kind of missing the fundamentals in terms of, you know, they’ve, they’ve done all the work. They’ve, they’ve put the work in, they’ve got people to reach out to them, and then nothing crickets.

You don’t hear back from ’em. For example, last week I was. Looking at somebody’s tool for, basically using videos in our, in our emails. And we’ve got a tool for, and it works okay, but I’m, you know, always kind of looking for something that’s a little bit, you know, better, a little bit more engaging. And it had some, some cool, cool things to it.

And I spent probably a good 90 minutes watching his YouTube videos, which is very, very rare. but they were pretty interesting and they, they got really in depth and I said, okay, I like this. I’m interested. I’m pretty much pre-sold. Software, no free trial. But you know what, no problem. If I do have one question, I just wanna, wanna make sure that, you know, they can answer the, that, you know, see if it can do what I wanted to do in terms of being able to, you know, make videos with, with LinkedIn profiles.

And I messaged him nothing and he’s active, he’s posting on LinkedIn, you know, posting it, you know, doing all this content, reaching, you know, putting stuff on YouTube, all this stuff. And he, he got almost all the way there. I was a super hot prospect. I’m, you know, got my credit card out. I’m ready to push the buy button.

And then nobody could, nobody could answer my question. So here’s the thing, same thing. And, and like I said, this is not an isolated case. This is, this is not even terribly rare when somebody actually reaches out to you, respond to them, please. you know, even, even if you’re not sure that they’re a good fit, at least talk to them a little bit.

but you know, when people are interested, move that forward. Even if they haven’t scheduled a call yet, or maybe, maybe they’ve address, they’ve got an objection too early in your process, that’s okay. That’s still a, that’s still a good lead. Address that and, and keep, keep kind of moving things 

[00:33:19] forward.

and also think about what’s gonna happen when you get busy. Because, right. A lot of this stuff is, is easy to do when you don’t have any clients or you’re not very busy and you’re kind of waiting for your next client to come around. You can do, do lots and lots of things, but from a process standpoint, what does it look like when you do get busy, when you go on vacation, et cetera.

So think about that. So do you have a, do you have a CRM that you put people in? Do you have a place that you know other people can kind of help? Follow up and make sure things are not getting missed. You have a place to capture messages, right? Just messaging on LinkedIn can, can be a little bit of a mess, right?

’cause it’s just, it is just a feed and it’s a lot of, right, it’s all the people kind of pitching you, it’s all the messages you might, messages you may have sent. So having a way to, you know, put people into its own system. for example, one I know one of my clients really likes is called surf. And it basically is a plugin for LinkedIn and you can say, oh, I’ve been talking to this person.

Yeah, please send this person to my CRM so that I’ve got their information there and I can put, put follow up processes in place. So, that one’s called Serve, S-U-R-F-E is what that one’s called. If you type in likeer LinkedIn tool, that should get you to the right place. So, I see a question here and I am going to answer that here.

hot seats are gonna come up in two minutes, so if you do want someone to take a look at your profile, if you post your profile in the chat, let me know what it is you do and who you work with, and we’ll take a look at it and run through those. So I, time permitting, we’ll do as many as we can fit in 

[00:35:02] here.

but to answer your question, Mike, so Mike says, I am a fractional CTO. How do I list the clients I work with? I’m technically self-employed with my LLC. well, I guess part of it is, yeah. Are you kind of under an NDA? otherwise, if you can post them, go ahead and, if you’re, they’re current.

You know, if you’re currently working with those companies, one thing I’ve seen is under the work experiences, you can go in and, list them as contract, work. So you can actually list them as current employers of yours. So I see that with the fractional, community quite often, where you might have, you know, three or five, different companies that are currently where you’re working at, listed as working with them, under, under contracts.

But that’s, typically how I, I see that being done. Even though that technically you’re self-employed, but that that’s some of your clients and that can, right, that’s a nice, a nice way to get that social proof in there and show your clients without being super obvious, you know, about it with, you know, and the top banner works with these companies is, is subtly putting ’em in your work experience, is, is kind of a good way to do it.

So. Alright, so hope, hopefully that 

[00:36:23]: helps. So, I did promise here we were gonna talk at least a little bit about, AI stuff and chat. GPT is pretty good at helping with your about section. I haven’t found it to be terribly great at a lot of the other ones really rough in terms of helping you craft messaging.

You can, you feed it a good message and it’s gonna, it spits garbage back out at you. Doesn’t quite have a good handle on what. What is is actually really effective. and I think ’cause there’s so much information and noise out there that the information it was trained on just doesn’t, it doesn’t have a lot of good examples to work with on LinkedIn, which would make sense.

So where it is does shine though. and, and it does, it doesn’t have to be ChatGPT. If you’re a Gemini person or you wanna use, Claudes sonnet 3.5. Whatever one you prefer, because they, they can all do it pretty good. But the about section, so if you want your about section to be better, which you’re kind of drawing a blank, you’re having trouble writing it.

Take a look at some of the examples we’ve looked at today. Paste them in to, to chat. GPT, tell it what you’re trying to do. You know, tell it. You’re trying to create a new about section for, you know, your profile that, you know, just instruct it like you would either a freelancer or an employee, and. Tell it, here’s what I do.

And you can, whether pasting you know, information from your own work experience your website, wherever you want, and see what it comes up with and tell it to mimic a style that you’re looking for. And usually it’s gonna get you a little close, probably needs a little more personality. So guess what? Tell it.

Hey, can you give it a little more personality? Can you do a little better? It will try again and then tell it. Okay, now I need you to make it a little shorter because it’s always gonna be too long. It gets real wordy. Tighten. Tell it. Tighten up. Make it a little more pithy. And you, you will have yourself a good starting point in less than 10 minutes.

You might have to tweak the very headline top. You might have to tweak the call to action at the bottom, but it’s gonna get a lot of good information. It’s gonna have, you know, a good, good amount of that in there. Just, just by, you know, 10 minutes of work here. And I know that, can I, I know the about section can be intimidating for people at times to try and figure it out because you’re not sure what to write and you’re like, I’m not a professional copywriter.

I don’t know what to say here and I don’t want it to be boring. So that can be a good way to do it is show, show, show ai some good examples and it can usually do kind of a good job, mimicking them there. So with that said, if you need some help with this, if you’re at the point where you say. I’m, I’m a busy person.

I don’t have a lot of time to do this right now, and I just want somebody to kinda help manage it because I, I, I need to be out talking to people. I’m out delivering for clients. If that’s you, why don’t you can schedule an appointment with me@theappointmentlab.com or just shoot me an email, Gary at Pipelineology dot com and we can talk about kind of getting a system in place to you that’s kind of managed done for you.

So the appointments are coming in, right? We’re not having those problems of people messaging me saying, yeah, I’m interested, and then nobody responds to them for two weeks and things like that. So not gonna make a big pitch here, but if you do need some help, I just wanted to let you know that it is in fact available.

[00:39:28] So. With that said, let’s do some of these hot seats and I’m gonna flip back over screens here. So, let’s see if I can get this one to pop in here. Okay. Afraid you’re, Jasmine Lopez, we’re gonna start with you. So, and I believe this is not you, let me know. let’s see here. Lemme just make sure that looks right, that does in fact look right.

Okay, so here’s the message. So Jasmine Lopez is, I’m an entrepreneurial consultant. How can I use my business and personal pages together to attract potential clients? Right now I feel like I’m posting to the ether. So here’s kind of a, a good way of thinking about this. And this is actually a really good question.

You know, good question to ask because I, I think a lot of people. They’re, they’re out there, they’re hearing, yeah, I need to be out there. I need to be posting content. However, you don’t have, you, you may not have a big, you know, connection base. You may not have a big list of followers here. So the first thing I’m seeing here is you, you’ve got a pretty small network, right.

All things considered. and I, I, without going and looking into it, I, a lot of times, you know, your first. Few hundred people, it’s people you’ve met or, or kind of worked with, maybe past coworkers, people you went to school with. So all of a sudden you kind of don’t have a lot of really relevant people in your network.

So when your message gets put out there, you don’t get any feedback on it because nobody’s really checking it out. So. I guess we didn’t really cover too much of this, so let’s go back just a second here and say we, we talked about kind of two paths, right? We have the content side and the outreach side.

If you have a small, smaller group of connections, let’s say you’re under, if you have less than a thousand people, maybe even less than 2000 people. Content probably is, should be deprioritized in favor of outreach simply because you can target exactly who you want to talk to. So if you’re an entrepreneurial consultant, you can just target those people, reach out to them, try and get some meetings, figure out what you know, problems they are actually having and get some, some feedback on.

It can help help you with writing better content, but it also gets your, gets your sales pipeline moving forward. I, I know that one can be a little bit more intimidating, but especially in the early days, it’s usually the far more productive, way to do things. you know, for, like, I’ll tell you, for us internally, it took a long time before really doing events and content was making any meaningful impact in our, in our lead flow and meetings.

you know, the first, the very first event I did, I think, I think we had less than 50 people registered and two people showed up. It was a little bit rough, you know, it was a little discouraging. but we kind of changed things up. We, we did it again and, you know, now typically, I think today we had over 700 or so people show up.

so, you know, we, we’ve got managed to get a lot more people like that. So that would be kind of the first thing that I would say is if you’re posting and you’re just not getting any interaction and Right, nothing’s coming from it. Switch, switch gears, focus more on the outreach side of things. The other thing I will say is that don’t focus too much on kind of the manity metrics.

really what matters is, are people seeing it? That’s about it. right. Likes, comments, all that stuff. Yeah, it looks like it should matter, but what you’re gonna find is that in, in a lot of cases, once you’ve kind of. Figured out your market, market, who you’re talking to, that your messaging may not elicit a lot of engagement, but if it’s getting in front of the right people, the one you’re not, the one you’re not really seeing a lot of is dwell time.

And that’s what LinkedIn’s looking at is to know they should show more of your post to that person is, did they stop and read it? but I know that that’s not, you know, the metric most of the times that you’re looking at. So that would be kinda the other thing to look at is. Are, are people still reaching out?

And I’m assuming probably not. Hence why I’m recommending outreach ’cause it’s a small, small group. And grow your network proactively. Reach out to the right people and, and get some, you know, get some, get some meetings on your calendar. Talk to some people and do that. So let’s take a real quick look at your profile here.

I know that was a really long introduction. The other ones won’t be that long, I promise, but, so, alright, so good start here, right? We got photo, good background picture. Supporting fellow entrepreneurs is a fractional leader and strategic partner for developmental planning through tactical execution. that feels a little bit kind of like, I’m, I’m, I’m not sure what you actually do.

I’m struggling to kind of connect that to, to, to what, what problem I might be experiencing that you, you would solve. Right. Because it, it, it feels almost a little buzzy. Like, like a little too many buzzwords, you know, make it a little bit more playful. I would have a little bit more fun with it, right?

Kind of some, like some of the things we saw before. otherwise, also get your ID verification done here. You’re, looks like you’re in Chicago, so you should be able to do that. that, that will also help you with what you’re doing. you’ve got activity on your account here, your about section. Is just pretty empty.

And again, it doesn’t really tell me what you do and who you help and how, like, like if I’m reading it, by the time I get done reading it, I should be able to say, I think Jasmine could help me. So that would be kind of my big advice here is, is re is is completely rework this here and rework this here. So that’d be the two areas I would focus on there.

So thank you Jasmine, for, for posting. I know, I know. It’s always, it’s always a little, you know, nerve wracking to post. ’cause you, you’re like, well, is it, what are they gonna say? And you know, so. Alright, so let’s take a look here.

Paul, we got another one. Lydia, I see yours. I, it looks like I skipped it. Bye. I’ll get to you Lydia. Don’t 

[00:45:50] worry. Alright, Paul Feather. So let’s take a look at Paul here.

Alright, so Paul it, risk and Compliance Advisory Services. Alright, so I might make the background image here, you know, a little bit more custom to you. right. I mean, good. I mean, who doesn’t like jet engines? Those are kind of fun and, and, you know, automation machinery. Always, always cool stuff. But, maybe a little bit more, you know, kind of you focused and kind of what you’re, you’re offering.

again, kind of same thing here. Good to see that you’ve got the check, the verification that’s, that’s gonna help you. But again, yeah, same kind of thing as we have with Jasmine. We want a little bit more information about kind of who you’re helping, kind of who you work with, however you wanna word that.

right. This, this is a good start. you got about 2000 connections, so overall a good start there. And let’s take a look at the about section. I see you’ve got some featured things here. this might be a little bit better, these verifications and stuff here. Probably better for the verifications and, stuff section of your, of your profile, with some kind of basically more information about, again, how, how you can move forward.

the about, as we look through the about section here. Same kind of idea is if I’m reading through this, how do I, how do I know if my company is a, is a good fit by, by the end of it that I want to do something, take some type of action after this here. so those are, those are kind of the things that I’m, I’m seeing there.

But, right, we’ve got, we’ve got 2000 connections. We’ve got a good start. We’ve got, we’ve got verifications. So yeah, same thing. Work on the headline a little bit here, work on the about section. and as, as you have them swap out some of this featured stuff for, for maybe a little bit more things that kind of, again, move people forward to working with you.

Alright. And then I think Lydia and I think that that should, we’ll, we’ll probably give it a, give it a, this as the last one and then we will then we’ll call it a day and we’ll be out of here by, by 3:00 PM Eastern. So look at us. Go. We’re not. First time. I haven’t been running over, running over time in a long 

[00:48:27] time.

alright, so, Lydia Sugarman. Alright, so image here. Background image intervention. So rev ops CRM more than you thought possible. CEO problem solver. Rocket emoji. Rocket emoji. Rocket emoji. I am actually a fan of the, the emojis. I think they kind of, I think they add to. Just to, just to touch a to something.

So powering your B2B business to work smarter Venntive AI powered CRM for complete rev ops enterprise capabilities for startups, SMBs. Okay, so a couple things here. overall, this is actually pretty good, however, rev Ops and SMBs, my question is, what SMB do you know that identifies themselves as an SMB?

I would say none. Right? ’cause it’s small and medium business, I believe is what that stands for. so I know it’s probably, it’s the abbreviation that, you know, consultants use and that, you know, people use when we’re thinking about it. It is not the way people think about themselves. I don’t, I don’t, I’ve never heard anybody refer to themselves as an SMB.

so perhaps, you know, think about a little bit more specifically, right. Startups, startups. Generally know if they’re startups, right? kind of same thing with Rev ops though, is, I, I worked with a client recently who, that was his big target. He wanted to work with rev ops and sales ops. He said, you know, target those people with job, those job titles.

And I said, almost nobody uses those job titles. it’s, it, you know, it’s generally vice president of sales, right. You know, directors and things like that. so. This one’s, like I said, not bad. This, this one here could probably go, let’s take a look here about section as I’m just reading it through here carefully.

So I guess, you know, as I’m, as I’m kind of reading through this, my, my question is, okay, so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a CRM, right? There’s. When I think about CRMs, what am I thinking about? I’m thinking generally, you know, HubSpot maybe, maybe Pipedrive, Salesforce. I don’t think that’s your target market, if I’m remembering correctly, is if, right.

Write the joke for Salesforce is how, how do you know if your company is ready for, for Salesforce? Your, your CIO told you, right? It, it’s, it’s for big companies. So, again, I would say kind of the thing in here is just kind of understanding. Help maybe a little bit more here about what, what it can actually do, and maybe hear a little bit more under a featured section is maybe kind of showing people some of the examples, right?

I see here, like AI powered CRM. show me what that means. Right. I see AI in, in a lot of things, and the thing that, you know, I, at least personally I want to see is, okay, if it’s AI powered. Show me, show me an example that says Yes, this is, I can see how this would be super helpful. Right. I watched a demo on Clay, which is a, trying to think of the best, like it’s a data enrichment service.

but I’ve seen some of their, some of their stuff is like, oh, I understand where the ai, or at least the machine learning transformer models, right? The generative stuff actually comes into play here and is, is helpful in terms of filtering and. You know, kind of customizing a message to somebody based on the previous 30 parameters that it’s pulled in.

So, you know, that would be the big thing is here if you’ve got, if you’ve got AI things in there, show me what that, what that means. but otherwise, good, good start here. You know, again, you’ve, you’ve got a lot of the fundamentals there, so maybe just a few tweaks that, that would, kind of help you, you know, just make it a little bit more powerful.

otherwise. I do see, see 

[00:52:44] one more in here. So since it’s not three o’clock yet, I will, in fact, we’ll jump in here. So let’s do it. So we’ve got Chester, Lopardo

and, alright. Overall, I’m, first, first impression is I like it. good picture, not quite sure. I’m not quite sure how to say that Cus Oh, hr. Hr. No, I’m still not sure how to say it. Okay. So relationship broker, connecting industry leaders to the ultimate staffing and recruiting solutions Info. And my about.

Okay, so let’s take a look here. Let’s take a look at your about, so you know, are you facing an extensive IT listing that realistically needs assistance? so not being in this market, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say I’m not sure what that means, but as long as your prospect knows what that means, you’re probably okay there.

Right? And same type of thing here, right? No idea what these, you know what these mean. As long as your network does, like the, as long as the person who would be talking to you knows what that should be doing, you’re, you’re probably okay there. Probably just kind of a little bit more on differentiation.

overall. Good, good. So pretty good start here. yeah. Overall, I, I don’t, I don’t actually have a whole lot to, to say about it. It is a pretty good start. Big thing here is from here, build your network. 758, you know, followers so far. Just really focus on, on building that up. And doing that. So that would be kind of what, what I would, would, would really focus on is grow the network.

You’ve got, you’ve got the basics done now. Now it’s just time to kind of put the foot on the gas and, and get going there. I see if there’s, I see a lot of reposting that you’re hiring some posts yourself here would be probably pretty good too. So it looks like you’re reposting your business page probably so.

getting some of your own posts there that are not just business page repost will get you a lot more attention. Business page stuff just gets very little, traction. ’cause it’s it, right? LinkedIn is a person to person type of network, right? It’s social media, it’s person to person, not, not business to person, right?

Right. Business to person is not a thing. So, that would be kind of the way I would, would think about it. 

[00:55:28] So. but I think with that said, I think that’s everybody. I think we got ’em all. Appreciate everybody’s feedback today. so thank you so much for showing up. Great having you here today. Thank you for all the good questions.

Glad we could do some of those hot seats and, we’ll see you, we’ll see you next month. Hopefully we’ll be doing, I think we’re gonna be talking about sales navigators, so next month is gonna be a little bit geeky. I always like to do kind of in the summer months when things are a little slow, is kind of do like a technical deep dive on stuff.

So we’re talking about like data and, lead generation or list generation and finding the right people for your market. So that’s, stay tuned for that next month, towards the end of July. And then, with that said, great seeing everybody. Thank you and have a great, great rest of your day.