Post Less, Close More – How Consultants Get More Clients On LinkedIn

Transcript:

[00:00:02] Hello and welcome everybody. we are just gonna get things kicked off here probably in about, say, looks like about 90 seconds. So I’ll give, give everybody a minute or two here for the notifications to go out on LinkedIn, and then we’ll get today’s session started. But we’re gonna be talking about posting less and closing more deals, how consultants are getting more clients on LinkedIn, posting less content, which I, I realize in this day and age of you need to post more, you need to engage more.

All that kind of stuff is, is very counterintuitive, but this is really what we’re kind of seeing is that the, the content should basically exist but doesn’t need to yet. But I’ll give, give everybody a couple minutes to get 

[00:00:45] on. in the meantime, where’s, where’s everybody calling in from? I know, I know today here it’s it’s 49 degrees in on, in the Detroit metro area today.

How is it out in your neck of the woods? I know a couple weeks ago we were in, in Tennessee and having, you know, 75 degree days sitting on, you know, on the deck of a, of a cabin. I was like, this, this feels nice, especially for March. I mean, unseasonably warm, but it felt nice. I know some parts of, what Arizona and, New Mexico and Texas are, are cooking today for, for March.

I know you kind of got July weather at that one. So curious what’s what, how are things, in, in Bayou? Greg, you found, you’ve all found sun in Seattle. That is amazing. So con congratulations on, on finding that sun. I feel, I feel like every time I’ve been out to that area, it’s always been cloudy.

Mark in Detroit too. Welcome. Appreciate you having you here, Tom, in, in the Boston area. Cool and sunny. Glad to have you here. Appreciate you taking the time today.

Steve from the DC area, appreciate having you here. Got a Baltimore, Ida. it’s sunny, hot and humid in Houston. You can please keep it there. I don’t need that until July. gsa, it’s, 70 in Wisconsin today. My, my old stomping grounds, I was born and raised, a little bit northwest of Milwaukee and the on between Fond Dulac and West Bend.

see, Nel says it’s, 50 in central New Jersey. Kerry says it’s 45 and cloudy up in Avoca, Michigan. And I’m probably, I live in Michigan and I’m probably not saying that right, but I know it’s up, up near Lake Huron. so Jacksonville, looks like you got some great weather. 73 there. Sherry says it’s 80 86 in Dallas.

It’s crazy. 86 in Dallas. Thank you. And, Bertrand says it’s, chilly in New York, so Oh, thanks so much for everybody for being 

[00:03:00] here today. Let’s, let’s get things kicked off. So today we’re gonna be talking about how to post, post less and close more on LinkedIn. So how consultants are getting more clients on LinkedIn, but actually posting less.

And I’m kind of, as I’ve been looking at actual client performance, and things of that, of that nature, I’ve been looking at clients who, who post pretty regularly, including some who they have, you know, they’ve got their, their constant calendar is full and it’s scheduled and they get crickets for engagement and, and they’re, they’re just not pulling in the way they want.

And then I’ve got other people who, who don’t do hardly any posting and they, they’ve got a consistent pipeline. So we’re gonna kind of dig into deep under what’s really happening behind the scenes. And what’s really going on that is helping some of these people deliver. And some of these people are, are kind of struggling with, with their content and, it’s not all ai, but we we’re not gonna let them, we’re not gonna let AI off the hook.

Just, just, just 

[00:03:57] that easy. So jumping in today, a few housekeeping items before we get started. There’s a time delay of about 20 to 30 seconds from when I tend to say something. so if I ask, so if you ask a question, it will take about 30 seconds for it to get back to me, for me to see it. so it means we can’t really have a good chat, but when I do see a question, I’ll try and answer it as completely as possible.

If we need to follow up, we’ll get back to it later. there’ll be a replay that will be available about one to 24 hours after we get done. I think last time, I think in the mark session, it was available in five minutes and then I think in November when, when we did one, it took two hours. So. Your guess is as good as mine and it all kind of depends on LinkedIn.

but if you come back to the LinkedIn event page, you’ll be able to see it as soon as it’s ready. And if you wanna be notified of future ones, just go to Pipelineology dot com slash events, throw in your email address and we’ll make sure that we put you on the list of people when we want to get, when you, we have another event coming up and we’ll also send out the replays there in case you wanna, check them out for ones you weren’t able to attend.

on the agenda today, we’re gonna talk about your profile. ’cause it matters a lot in LinkedIn’s been saying they’re gonna emphasize it even more. and then we’re gonna talk about content. What, what you should actually post what you and what you don’t really need to worry about. and I took events off the, agenda today.

I forgot to delete it from this, this slide. I took it off today just ’cause we got quite a bit to cover. And I wanna make sure I don’t take all of your time off today. And we’re talking about network building talk, something about outreach. and then we’ll do some quick live q and a. but I do wanna mention if you do have questions, feel free to post ’em anytime it, comes to mind so you don’t forget about it.

and I’ve got some help working in the background. Carrie, one of my team members is on today, so she’ll be kind of starring and flagging them so that we can make sure that all the questions do get, 

[00:05:57] addressed. So, real quick about me, if this is your first time here, I’m the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology podcast, and we’re always looking for great guests.

So if you’ve got a suggestion, even if that’s you, if you’ve got some good stories to tell and it’d be a kind of a relevant topic for, you know, business, marketing, sales, anything that would be relevant to the B2B space, would love to have you on. I used to run call centers in the car dealership world back in my corporate career and.

Once, you know, my, my, once my department got eliminated, I pivoted over into the consulting space and, you know, it’s been, it’s been, where are we going at nine years now? So, it’s been, been, been good and been getting, getting busy, into these days. Really what we focus on is I really work with small teams, typically, a lot of consulting firms, agencies, some manufacturers here and there.

really kind of helping them get more meetings, kind of keep their sales pipeline steady and with, with the right people that they can meet with. So, you know, I tell people we kind of do a quality over quantity approach where I don’t want to fill your calendar, just wanna get you the right people there.

And if you have any recommendations, I always, I’m the, oh, I’m always on the lookout for New England. IPA, style beer recommendations. So. 

[00:07:18] Enough of that. basically in a nutshell, here’s, here’s kind of the gist of what we’re gonna talk about today in that right now it’s a combo of content, comment and outreach.

so that’s from Kara McMaster. She said it about as, as succinctly as as possible. So we’re just gonna, she’s not affiliated with us in any way, but I think, you know, really that’s what we’re seeing is content comment, outreach. If you remember that you, you, you’ve figured you’ve got things under control for today.

bottom line though is just success isn’t about doing more with ai. And I’m not saying this as an AI hater. I’ve got multiple subscriptions and API fees that I’d rather not talk about, as a, it’s a tool that we use here internally quite a bit. It’s just, I don’t send it around masquerading as as me.

There’s no AI clone tried that, hated it. There’s no AI voice tried that, hated it. It just, it just, it’s all so uncanny and so weird. And the thing is, if you’re trying to use that to kind of beef up your content on, on LinkedIn or via email or whatever you’re trying to do, people, people aren’t dumb. They, they notice and if people don’t like it, right, the algorithm eventually will catch up to it.

So maybe you, you might be seeing more AI spam and stuff in your con in your feed today, but remember that, you know, the people, the people running the, the ship at, at LinkedIn want, want people to engage on their platform and want people to be there. so if they can get rid of the AI stuff, they, they will.

So if that’s your, if that’s your strategy is just all ai, all alop all the time pro, you’re probably gonna have a rough time. If not, if not this month, six months or 12 months down the road. So really the big thing we found is that it’s all about relevance. And that’s, that’s been true for, that’s been true for the past few years.

That was true 10 years ago. It’s true today still is relevant connections, relevant messages, and relevant stories are, are kind of that winning formula or said, said more simply just be human, right. You can’t, you’re not gonna write, you know, like a, like a like chat GPT if you say, Hey, I’m a masterful storyteller, and it will spin a tale that, you know, looks great until you try and read it and say there’s just no soul to it.

So you have a soul use it. so this is kinda the process we’re gonna be looking at though, not in this particular order, but essentially it’s, a combination of using, outreach and content. Events and LinkedIn ads to highlight your winning posts, the ones that get the most attention into a, a strategy that consistently brings in new business, whether that’s new leads, new meetings, and, and really even kind of helps support the, the, the closing of, of new deals and even brings back people who’ve churned.

So I know these are always a little bit small, especially, especially if you’re not looking like on a giant monitor. If you’re watching from a mobile device, this is probably impossible to read. I understand that. So if you’d like a copy of it, just shoot me an email, garriott Pipelineology dot com. just put flowchart in the subject line and I will get back to you with, with that, give me until tomorrow.

tomorrow by noon. Should be, should be good. I know we’ve got quite a few people on today and, I’ve got one other client event we gotta run today, so a little bit, little bit backed up this afternoon, but I will make sure we get to you by tomorrow with, with all of those flowcharts. And if you don’t have time to do this yourself, we do have a done for you program, but we’ll talk more about that later at the end.

Just wanted to mention it in case you’re short on time and you’re not gonna be able to stick around to the end. You can check it out, at the appointment lab.com, get something scheduled and we’ll, we’ll talk about 

[00:11:07] it. But right now let’s really focus on LinkedIn itself. I like to call it the drive by platform.

Why? Well, because people do spend about 51 minutes per month on the platform, which is up. It used to be only 19 minutes. So LinkedIn’s done a good job. They’re getting more people to the platform, but compared to other networks, your Facebook’s, your Instagrams, your tiktoks, and the King YouTube sitting at 48 minutes per day, well, then it really pales in comparison, right?

YouTube gets almost 30. People are spending almost 30 times more of their time on LinkedIn, or excuse me, on YouTube every single day. So when you kind of start thinking about what is, what is my strategy for, for YouTube or any of the other kind of big networks versus LinkedIn, you say, okay, yeah, I can see why it needs to vary a little bit and why you have the same strategy that might, might perform like gangbusters, say on Facebook where people still do spend a lot of time.

It’s gone down some, but people do spend a lot of time kind of scrolling through their feed there. They just don’t, on LinkedIn, they’re not spending a ton of time. They might come to LinkedIn, they check their, their connection requests. They might check their messages, might even reply to one or two, see their notifications, see a post or two, and then they’re gone.

And they might be gone for a week or two weeks, and they might only come on once or twice a month. So if your strategy is just relying on them seeing you every day, they’re not, they’re not gonna be there every day. So that, that’s why LinkedIn can be so challenging is that you may have built a big network of people from past colleagues and current prospects, but they’re not, they’re not there every day.

They’re not engaging with your content every day. So you might make a post and it’s does great one day, and then next week you do, you know, one, you think it’s even better. And, and it’s crickets. Just ’cause your, your network just, there isn’t enough of ’em. And you don’t mind, even with a big network, like, I’ve seen people, you can take mine for example, as, you know, third 30 with about 30,000 or so followers, you know, some, some of the posts yeah, do great.

They look great. And then other times it’s, you know. 300 people see it. And this is this with somebody with 30,000 followers. you know, I’ve seen smaller accounts get 15. so, so the vanity metrics aren’t everything, especially on 

[00:13:39] LinkedIn. So what should we be doing? Well, let’s talk about building a network, getting, getting more connections, more of the right people into your network.

’cause on LinkedIn you’ve got two types of, of essentially people. You’ve got your followers, which you can have an unlimited number of and connections and you can have up to 30,000 of these. And I really like to focus on the connections, especially ’cause you can have so many of them up to 30,000.

You can have them, you can send out invites, you can interact with them a lot more easily than you could just a follower, right? You can send, an invite for someone to subscribe to your newsletter. You can send out an invite for somebody to attend an event, which is probably how you heard about this particular event, if not from me, from one of my team members.

Somebody sent, they were connected to you and sent you an invite to attend. Also, it’s easier to get contact information and probably most importantly, it’s easier to send them a message if you know you wanna, if, if it’s more than just you want them to be a follower, it’s like, Hey, I’d like them to be a client.

Then having the ability to message them is a lot easier. But this does take time. So start now and be consistent about it. LinkedIn, really maxes you out somewhere between one and 200 connections requests that you can send out at any given week. Send, send as many as they will let you, give you a pro tip though, if your goal is to get more people to engage.

With your content and comment and you, you want to be the type of person who’s getting that, that type of content that you’re getting, that type of engagement. You see when you load up your, your LinkedIn feed, comment with those or connect with those people. Go through other people’s posts that have gotten a lot of engagement, connect with the people engaging there.

Now, ideally you would do it as well, this person fits kind of my, you know, an ideal, ideal client profile. They’d be able to be a good prospect for me down the road. but if you’re just, just trying to get the numbers in, just go ahead and connect with the people who are, who are already engaged in commenting.

I know it sounds, it, it sounds obvious, but I, I, I know a lot of people kind of miss that one. So, just a pro tip for 

[00:15:44] you. So let’s kind of talk about when you are connecting with people, how do you do it? Because I think a lot of times I’ll see, I had one today, somebody pitch pitching me immediately when they connected.

And you know, if you’re, you’re pitching me something as soon as we’re, if you’re pitching me something before we’ve even connected, I, I know that there’s, there’s really no value in connecting with you and I just click the ignore button. So kind of, here’s what I’m looking for when, when I’m doing it, and when we kind of look at the numbers of what works kind of across many accounts from many different types of people, this is, this is kind of what we’re seeing works.

Asbe one, make sure your profile picture is, is there not a logo? Not your dog. I’m sure your dog is a good boy. Everybody’s gonna love your dog. It should not be your profile picture. Okay? you know, having it, your, your profile, your headline of your profile, say what you do. you can lead with, you know, if you’re a, a founder or a consultant and just kind of giving some people some insight into to what it is you actually do.

helps a lot. but yeah, you can see here on, on two of these, if people, between people pitching me some, you know, putting pictures where you can’t see their face, where it just looks obviously fake, things like that just are not really making, are really gonna, gonna kill your connection, right? so what, what message should you send?

What note should you put in there? I would leave it blank. Unless you actually know somebody, like you’ve met ’em at a conference, or they’re an old colleague or an old, you know, person you knew in college. Something like that. Just leave a message blank. You’ll get a better connection, connection rate. I know again, sounds a little weird, especially since now LinkedIn wants sending a note with your connection request to be a premium thing.

The thing is, you don’t, you don’t need a premium account to do 

[00:17:29] that. So let’s look at your profile just a little bit more, and I think I’ve got a question here and we’ll get, we’ll get to that one from Marcelo here just after this. But you want to let people know who you are, what you do, and who you work with, and have a little bit of fun along the way.

Again, that goes back to the Be Human thing. So my, my profile is certainly not the end all, be all. There’s PR probably work to do, like if I got on a call with a LinkedIn consultant, that person would probably find half a dozen if not more. Things with that could be improved on it. But overall, this is a good start and it does.

The important thing is, is it works. So oftentimes my LinkedIn banner is promoting, an upcoming LinkedIn event. Doesn’t get swapped out nearly as often as it should, but, that’s kind of the goal behind it. But, you know, we wanna make sure we’re using custom banner, actual images. The image on your banner and your profile picture do not need to be the same.

I was lazy when we’re doing that. but really it’s, you know. Making sure you know, that you’re, you’re kind of filling out that, that next section of under your name, what is that you do found? for me it says founder of Pipelineology, helping businesses land high value clients. Also a podcast host am aficionado and a beer enthusiast.

And the one that really gets the most attention and strikes up the most conversations is the beer enthusiast and then followed by the meme aficionado. And then some people do like to wanna talk about the podcast host, right? So you’re like, well, Gary, you’re what? But, but you’re supposed to be getting clients.

And here’s the thing is those things can all lead to conversations about clients, but that’s, that’s not how you break the ice, is you can break the ice with all those other things that, hey, make you human, make you relevant, make you interesting to somebody else. So I got a question here from Marcelo. I’m sorry for butchering your name.

I know, I’m sure I did. But if you connect with people who comment on other posts within your industry, isn’t that circular? Circular, wouldn’t it be better to get engagement from people in industries where you want to work? That is something I’ve heard a few times that somehow doesn’t make sense. Can you elaborate?

I would be happy to because I think that is, that is a good question and there’s a kind, and the answer’s a little bit nuanced, but one of the things is LinkedIn. You want, you want LinkedIn to show your post to your, you know, the relevant people in your network who might be interested in it. And we’ll, we’ll kind of, we’ll get in the weeds a little bit on this.

We’re gonna dig into this a little bit more here. But really as you’re kind of thinking about connections, one of the things is if people are commenting on your post, that is a sign that is a very, you know, huge signal to LinkedIn that says More people should see this. So what LinkedIn will do is they will show it to more people within your network and within the person who’s commenting network.

That’s a big one. So basically think of comments as additional visibility and distribution of your post. So yes, ideally you want to connect with people who are both engaged and commenting on LinkedIn and are, are relevant to your, to, to what you do. but I haven’t really run into too much of that, that circular thing.

Obviously, if that’s the only people you connect with, you can start to, to run into issues. But if you kind of balance it with, I’m gonna connect with some of the people that LinkedIn recommends that it says these are kind of the right fits for me, plus people who are commenting. That’ll give you kind of a good, good mix.

But ultimately if you’re posting for people who. Are are, are already engaged. It just, it gets you more visibility and it’ll get you more visibility to those people where you wanna work. That’s, that’s, that’s kind of what, what we’re seeing there. and, Renee asks another good question here. How often should you swap out, freshen up your LinkedIn banner?

it is up to you. I don’t, I don’t know that it matters that much. It’s kind of when you have something new you wanna show off, or if it looks a little dated to you, right. For, for the most part, people aren’t gonna, aren’t spending a ton of time on your profile. It kind of occasionally visit it. So, as long as it kind of communicates clearly what you’re doing should be good.

And if you’re like, yeah, it looks dated, I’m, I’m not happy with it. Freshen it up. but there’s no really hard, hard and fast rule to how often you should be, be doing that. Just make sure that it exists. If it’s kind of that old like grade background. Do it, do it right now. Well like pause the video and go, go update it right now.

but if something’s there, you know, take a look and say, is this kind of, does this really describe what I do? If somebody who, who, who’s a potential client for me, I saw this, does it, does it get them to read the next part down and will it get them to read the about section and, and, and so on. So on and so forth.

So, good question, 

[00:22:22] Renee. Alright, so let’s, let’s jump in a little bit more onto building your profile. So why is this headline so important? It’s, ’cause this is kind of, this is the, this is your pitch that people see and it’s not even the full thing. Like people don’t even see a hema fiction out on beer enthusiast unless they actually click on my profile.

But anytime you’re writing a post, you’re sending people a message, you’re making a comment on LinkedIn, your headline is showing up. So what are people seeing? They’re seeing your face, they’re seeing your name and they’re seeing what you do. so. You wanna make sure you use that space to make your case that you are interesting enough for people to click on.

and, and again, the more, and if you can make it relevant right, is for me, it’s, I I don’t need anybody to click on my, and I’m not looking for just anybody to click on my, my profile, but people who say, oh, I have a business and I’d like to get more clients for it, I want those people clicking on my profile.

so when you’re thinking about that is, who do you want to be checking you out more? Who do you want to be seeing it more? And, and build around that and kind of write, write for that person. So really with your profile, what are you trying to do? You wanna build trust and authority? Use the about section, this is your case tip, to make your pitch to p somebody’s interest to get them to raise their hand and say, Hey Gary, I, I’m interested in what you’re doing.

You know, we, we could use some help with, with that. So this is, this is your safe place to make a pitch. All right. The featured section is a great place to use content that digs a little deeper. It can be case studies or white papers, videos. Mine are usually webinars, things that they can learn more and get more information about, about what you do.

activity section. This one shows all your recent activity. so if you’re commenting, here’s the thing, if you’re commenting on LinkedIn, people can see it. It’s visible if they, they can see all the comments you’re making. So, maybe just take a, take a break from, from fighting about politics and, and religion and stuff that you know that, that are guilty pleasures for you.

But just skip ’em on LinkedIn. I, they, they can, they can, they can cause a problem there or kind of turn off people you would like to work with, but also recommendations. you don’t need to have hundreds of ’em, but having at least two is good. work history, again, fill it out. Yeah, even. Even that, you know, stint then when you worked back, you know, in a, in a kind of a, you know, a sales job and it wasn’t that exciting.

Just put it in there. ’cause again, it kind of, it lets people say, it lets people relate to you, right? The more things you’ve done, the more likely it is somebody’s done something similar or, or they’ve had that experience too. Like even if it’s just working at McDonald’s, I would put it in there. Never worked there.

But if I did, I would put it in my work history. ’cause why not just gives you something to talk about and build rapport with somebody with. So fill, fill it all out in your profile. intent signals. So this is, this is kind of coming back to that, connecting with people who are active, right? So the content, right, content matters, but it’s kind of that filtering that out as best you can to find people who, who are relevant.

So. Kind of that, you know, finding those essentially needle on the haystack. People who are active on your, active on, on the platform where you want to connect with them and they fit your ICP, you know, and, and those are people you want to connect with. but, but sometimes these lists are pretty small.

So just keep that in mind that there may not be a ton of people you wanna fill out with people who maybe aren’t as active on LinkedIn, but they’re really relevant to what you do. so don’t, don’t let the intent signals. ’cause I know, I know it comes up quite a bit, especially if you’re, especially if you’re one of the people who’s active on LinkedIn, you’ll, you’ll see this one quite a bit, is well look for the, the signals that they’re, they’re actively looking for a solution, your solution.

And you know, that, that’s probably more relevant if you’re selling cars, for consultants. It’s a little, it’s a little bit fuzzier. So, Basically, I’d say if it makes sense to do it, if you’re not getting the results you want, look somewhere else. I recently started working with a client who works in the manufacturing, space.

And you know, we, you know, initially we said, all right, we’re gonna connect with people doing like injection molding and, foundry and different, different types of kind of like hardcore manufacturing services. connection rate was really low, but the weird thing was, is that those were the people that were booking appointments.

Those were the people that want needed help. And those were the people meeting with them, not the people active on LinkedIn. so I just wanna throw that out there, that it, this is not the silver bullet. It always seems to be, but it certainly can help, especially, especially if your goal is to be more active on the content side for outreach, you can get away with a little bit less than 10 signals.

[00:27:25] Alright. So let’s talk about the actual post, you mean, ’cause I know we’ve kind of, kind of been building up to this, right? As we’ve talked about your network and your profile and all these things that kind of lead people to you. but what, what should you actually be posting? I know the goal is we don’t need to post every day, do we?

Or don’t need to post three times a day and that, that’s exactly it. You don’t need to post probably as often as, as you see people saying you should post. Because really what it, it, the, a post is just a, a means to an end. your, your end goal is to land new business. At least I’m assuming that. Right. And I think sometimes we get, we get, we get stuck and we fall into little traps of, well here are the metrics I’m looking at for, for a particular event.

Or, here’s the response rate I’m looking for really. Right. And, and right. Especially if you’re, you’re analytical or you’ve been, you know, you’ve done a lot of, you know, marketing work. These are the things you’re looking at. ’cause it’s really hard to tie a post and then, you know, six months later tie that all into to revenue.

’cause yeah, we, we all wish it, we all wish that everything was that easy and, and obvious. So you’re making, the post is just kind of keep that in mind is that you want to increase awareness about what you do don’t, right? You don’t wanna be the best kept secret in your industry. and you want to Elevaate your authority and produce price resistance, streamline your sales process.

And that’s, that’s what content is really helping do. It may not immediately, you may not immediately make a post and write, tomorrow you’ve got three new, new deals. We should work that way then, then I would be posting every day too, but. We just, we just don’t see that, especially when what you’re selling is, is more complicated than a Snickers bar.

I’ve got a sticky note here, right? That says that you are not a Snickers bar. just kind of things, things remind me is that you’re, you’re just not, you’re not that kind of impulse buy at the checkout aisle. You know, you, you probably solving, solving a problem that’s a little bit more deeply, deeply rooted.

I think that requires a little bit more consideration and thought. So things to keep in mind 

[00:29:33] here. So, question here from David. So what is the most important part of your LinkedIn page? Can you also comment on personal page versus a business page? Happy to David. So, most important of your LinkedIn page.

I’d say photo. just, it really, it doesn’t need to be like some super professional photo, right? Mine’s not, you don’t have to wear a suit and tie or anything. You can, but it, you need to have a photo. ’cause if, if you don’t have it. Everything’s gonna fall apart real quickly. And then the headline is that what, what is it that you do?

What is, you know, that that 60 characters, 60 to 70 characters that really kind of draw, can draw people in. And, and then from there, you know, the about section is for, you know, people who wanna learn more, and then the, the banner image and things like that. But really picture needs, needs to be there. Make it publicly viewable.

’cause otherwise you’ll be sending out connection requests to people who can’t see your picture. And then you’ll say, well, I have a picture. Why aren’t people connecting with me? Because they can’t see it when, when you do that. and then, yeah, the, the headline are, are kind of the most important ones.

personal page versus business page. Also a good question. business page should exist. Update it once in a while and then forget about it. Really, your personal page is what’s driving business. And even if you look at companies all the way up to the size of, of Microsoft, right, is when you see stuff.

Now it’s, you don’t see Microsoft so much. You see Satya Nadela or a president of, you know, the Windows 11 or Xbox, things like that. is you, you’re, you’re now kind of, it’s a name that’s kind of, that’s the person who’s this is, this is their project. So things are, things are more personal that way. So, think of LinkedIn the same way as that.

Your personal page is your business page, on LinkedIn. and that’s what’s gonna drive, you know, drive the, the meetings and the business and things to you. The business page just exists to people who are kind of doing some research on you, but ultimately they might go there, they might read it, but it doesn’t 

[00:31:46] get sent out into the feed. I think it’s like one 20th, so 5% as much as personal pages. and if you go to your, homepage right now, you, you, you can count, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna guess if you pull that, do that experiment, it’s gonna be at least 20 posts. might be more now with all the ads there before you actually see a post that’s not promoted from a business page.

everything else will either be personal, people posting or, or ads. So just kind of something to keep in mind there is that the business page just, just doesn’t matter that much. but good, good question, David. Alright. And this is one of the slides that, you know, you upload it to, to the system and, apparently it washes out your, your color.

[00:32:35] So. what I’m, what I’m trying to say here on this particular one is that participation is required. So this isn’t, LinkedIn’s not a kind of set it and forget it strategy. again, I, I’ve talked to people that say, you know, we’ve got everything mapped out for the next 60 days. I’ve got everything scheduled in our system for, for 30 days.

I’ve got daily posts going out. And what happens is you go and it’s like, cool, and you go look at their posts and one, like zero likes one comment a week, maybe, right? Thing is right. They’re not, they’re not focused on getting content out there that really engages with people or gets even gets people’s attention.

And if you’re not doing that with your posts, if there’s no comment, no engagement, then the right people aren’t gonna end up seeing it. ’cause there’s no other signals there. So I tell people all the time is, don’t, don’t freak out about the vanity metrics too much. but if you’re getting nothing at all from it, Probably, you know, then you certainly don’t need to be posting that regularly. How’s that? you know, then your strategy really needs to pivot over to outreach, getting nothing from your content post, post twice a month, and just strictly focus on outreach from there. ’cause if they’re, if those people aren’t actively participating on LinkedIn, there’s no point to approach him that way.

that kind of goes back to my manufacturing client. our client that works with manufacturers is they’re, his people aren’t active, so his content exists. We do things like LinkedIn events for him to kind of try and pull some of those people in. but really outreach is, is what drives basically, you know, 95% of the activity for, for that particular account.

So, just, just some things to keep in mind. We’ll talk about more of that as, as we get, Get into it. Aaron. Aaron, get into it. Aaron, I, I didn’t wanna say that you weren’t a Snickers bar. You, you, you are a unique and beautiful Snickers, Snickers bar. Absolutely. and I, I certainly didn’t mean mean to offend 

[00:34:31] you.

so let’s talk about kind of leveraging this content. And the thing is that it’s inconsistent, right? you, you’ve, you’ve probably felt that you, you’ve got a banger post one day, and then the next time it’s cricket. It’s, here’s the thing, you are not alone. Even the pros, for example, this poster here from his comment here from, from Sarah that recently popped in my feed, I think two days ago, Jesus says the results still feel really inconsistent.

One day I’m getting over 3000 impressions on a post that’s a week old and no new engagement. The next, I’m struggling to hit three figures, right? Struggling to get a hundred people to view it. and trying to understand it is, is definitely a quick way to get ahead of. And here’s the thing, right? If, if this is just a regular person off the street, yeah.

So what, but this is a person who professionally writes posts on LinkedIn for other people, this is what she gets paid to do. And even she finds it to be inconsistent. So what do you do? So here’s a tale of two posts. so here’s two that I posted. these are both from, I think last fall. but they happen to be right next to each other in the feed.

So I keep showing this one, but one is me, showing off a flow chart, explaining my process for doing, things like outreach and LinkedIn events, my flow chart, probably pretty similar to the one we’re sharing today. It’s been updated a little bit, enhanced a little bit, but really that’s, that’s the concept behind it.

and it got, a few hundred impressions, but it did get a few comments. And that’s, that’s the thing we’re gonna latch onto. Then the next day I posted a question about cold calling and I got thousands and thousands of impressions on that particular post got lots of attention. but here’s the thing, the one that that’s gonna drive me business, the one that actually brings me leads, that’s the one of me holding the flow chart.

But it got a little bit of traction. So what did I do? I turned it into an ad. and this is the way you can post fewer things, get wait for something to get a little bit of traction, and then say, I don’t have to try and get lightning in a bottle again. I don’t have to to pray and hope that the next post performs as well and just keep pushing the, pushing the promote button on that post.

and the thing is, yeah, LinkedIn ads can be really expensive and they can add up really quickly, but. the minimum you can spend on, on LinkedIn that is $10 a day. So you’re looking at 300 bucks a month as far as an investment goes. And I, I’d say that if, if you’re looking to get business off the platform is some of the best $300 you can spend for posts.

Once they get a little bit of, of traction, a little bit of attention. So what, what do you do to get these posts? You wanna let people know what you do and then telling things like stories about how you did something, how you accomplished something, results you’ve gotten, and sharing kind of the struggle, right?

I think, I think that sometimes there’s that, temptation to make everything sound like it’s all happy and everything’s good and that, you know, you, you never, you don’t have those struggles. Those are for people. Those are beneath you. Other people struggle with these things. You don’t. really what, what engages people is letting ’em know, you’ve struggled with this too, and here’s what you did about it.

Works much better. Makes you more relatable. and finally having some type of call to action in these works pretty well. You can, here’s the cool thing. If you run it as an ad, you can just edit it after the fact and put it in there later. So if you’re like, yeah, having a call to action kind of killed my, killed my response and killed my comments, don’t put it in there.

Added, added after the fact. Once you’ve gotten some, some impressions and some comments, and then Renar doesn’t add, like these kind of, it’s, it’s one of those ones it take it, it’s a, it’s a small investment, but one of those very worthwhile ones that will help you bring more people in. And the nice thing is, is you can then tell LinkedIn that your this post exactly who you want it to be, so exactly who ideal, relevant people are for you.

So going back, if we go back here to, Marcelo, now we’re gonna tie it all together, right? Because why would I connect with people who are commenting if they’re not necessarily my ideal client? Because of this is now these people will, you know, I hopefully comment because it’s relevant and they’re interested in right.

It’s not, we’re not trying to fake anything here. We’re not trying to use AI or pods or anything like that to fake it. It’s, we’re legitimately engaging with people and we’re, we’re legitimately, you know, getting, getting, getting content and getting these comments from people and now those people have commented.

Now I say, cool, now make this an ad, but give it to my, my ideal clients. Please just serve it to them and you will. So, but, and then they get to see it and then they see that there’s engagement on it. Now it seems more, more relevant. It doesn’t seem like some weird ad that nobody cares about. ’cause it’s got, ’cause they can read the comments from real people and they can go view those real people and see that they are in fact real and they’re not bots.

Right. So that is the concept and that’s why we do it. So I know, 40 minutes in here. So, I’m gonna grab a couple, more questions here. If you have more questions kind of on this concept, post them in here. I’m gonna go through the next section, probably pretty quickly, and so that we’ve got some time to do q and A at the end here, because I want to, I wanna try and keep it under an hour today.

But if we go a little over, I’ll, I’ll stick around a little bit, but if you have to, to run, I won’t blame you. 

[00:40:09] So, Rodnell asks, how do you value impressions versus actual responses? My posts seem to get significant views, but not as many likes or comments. If you’re getting, if you’re getting good impressions, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

keep in mind when LinkedIn, you know, is trying to figure out who they’re serving stuff to, they’re not just looking at things like likes or impressions. in fact, you’ll, you can kind of, you can kind of game it a little bit if you want, is just stop on a post. Like literally just stop scrolling on a post and, and look at it for a little while.

And what you’re gonna find is. You’re probably gonna get another post like that pretty, pretty quickly thereafter. ’cause I, I tell people the LinkedIn algorithm is by, by modern social media standards. It’s kind of dumb. It responds pretty directly to what you’re, what you’re looking at and what you’re responding to right now.

so, if you’re getting impressions, that means people are probably stopping and looking at it at least. And, and ultimately, if what you’re right doing is writing for a particular audience that’s gonna fit with who you wanna work with, then you’re probably getting what you want. Those people may, may not be terribly active on comedy.

Most people on LinkedIn are not active. They’re, they’re, they are active. Lurkers means they’re just looking. They’re not liking, they’re not commenting on anything. They’re just scrolling through a little bit, looking at something. They might read the comments on some things. And here’s the thing, LinkedIn is not showing you.

How many people read the comments and clicked on that. But they are measuring it. Don’t, don’t, don’t have any, don’t have any doubt there. They are definitely looking at that note that, to see what are people stopping on calling it dwell time, but they don’t show it to you. Alright? They just give you impressions and call it a day.

So, so if you’re getting impressions, that’s great. As long as, you’re know, you’re, as long as you’re connected with the right people, you’re gonna, you’re, you’re going to be influencing them even if it’s not as obvious as, as you’d hope it would be. So, so Aaron asks, in addition to being a Snickers bar, Aaron’s also been, tentative about including a call to action because I think it will feel too marketing forward and make my general network, which is decently strong from engaging with my post because it is an ad.

So then if you know, then, then I’d say essentially do, do the, what we talked about is make your posts. Pick the top performers that kind of, you know, that kind of lead with that story, that kind of bring people in, add the call to action after the fact, after you’ve gotten some engagement and run it as an ad.

and the thing is, you can just swap it out if next month you’ve got a better performer, one that’s stronger, it’s got a different angle that you want to pull in, run that one as an ad. so that’s, that’s kind of how I would do it, is take, take your best performing PO post and turn them into ads after.

’cause that way you’re not taking any engagement or comment because people feel it’s too salesy or ad ad like, just, just run, run them as ads that way. So, and then any question, any thoughts about balancing a call to action with not coming off too marketing heavy? I don’t know that I have any strong, strong thoughts either way is.

I kind of looked at LinkedIn as, is it, you know, I’m, I am here to do business. I don’t want people to know, know that. But also I, I don’t, I, I’ve see, I’ve seen this one a little bit more recently is that people will have a post and then every single time it’s, hi, my name is blah, blah, blah, I do this, blah, blah, blah.

kind of, they, they add that, that second call to action there. honestly, I don’t, I don’t know how effective that is. so I, I’d say, you know, the occasional, call to action type of thing I think makes sense. But yeah, it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to be every post it, it should, but occasionally remind people what it is, you know, you do in a bit more formal way than just the headline on your LinkedIn profile.

So, great questions. keep ’em coming and we’ll move into the next section and then I’ll come back to, any more that come up here. 

[00:44:19] So. Let’s talk about outreach, which I know for some people is their favorite. And then there’s gonna be other people on here say, this is the worst. Why would you even talk about this?

So, but here, here’s the thing about business to business. In, in outbound, it’s often the most consistent, most reliable business development strategy or enterprise and commercial activity. let me give you an example. So on, on my commute into work is one of the largest, ser I would call it dealer services.

So they sell marketing and support services to car dealerships, and they’re, if not the biggest, the in the top three biggest of these companies in, in, the United States. it’s Cox Automotive. it’s not right. It’s not a secret. But the one, the name you’ve probably heard if you’ve ever bought a car is Autotrader.

that is by, that is by no means the biggest property they own, right? It is a big company. How do they advertise? To dealerships, right? Their clients, they have two primary ways of doing it. There’s one, they have an army of people who go door to door and go out and shake hands and kiss babies at the dealerships and talk to people.

pick up the phone and call them. And otherwise essentially do, do outreach in some fashion. Or they do trade shows. Trade shows. if you want that, I’ve got a podcast interview on that. I’d recommend listening to that. ’cause that is, that is outside my area. But I can talk about the, the business to business side using outreach.

’cause it is, it is one of these things. It’s consistent, it’s reliable, and it’s scalable. You can hire new people and just plug them in and, and the whole system works. And this is why big businesses use it, is ’cause you can’t, it’s, it’s difficult to just advertise. You even look at companies like Apple.

and Amazon and, and Google. They’ve got enterprise salespeople for selling cloud services or selling education things for selling to entire school districts, right? Those, those, those don’t just happen by accident. They’ve got people who are doing outreach to people they don’t know. So I just, I tell people, most people will tell you they don’t like TV ads, radio ads.

They ignore Google ads, throw away all their junk mail, and they don’t want to go to another tedious marketing event. Or at least I don’t want to go to another tedious marketing, marketing event unless they got good bourbon. So no matter what it is, I, I think of outreach as just another form of advertising.

at the end of the day, that’s really what it is. It’s just a, a more personal person to person type of type of advertising, right? Kind of like door to door sales, kind of, kind of the idea. But it’s all still, still in the broad umbrella of ways to promote your business. Right. And no matter which one it is, there’s somebody who doesn’t like the way you promote your business.

So next time somebody says it’s gonna destroy your reputation, just, you know, look, look at the nearest big city and look at all the tall buildings and realize that probably every one of those has some people in that building whose job it is to do outreach. So, and it’s not destroying their re reputation when it, it does, is it grows their revenue.

So, bottom line, nobody’s going into the office hoping today’s the day they get your pitch. But if it’s relevant and thoughtful and they think it’s gonna help them, they’re, they’re, they’re probably going to respond to it. so. Just, just just my 2 cents on it. But I mean, look at, look at the numbers for, for larger organizations, larger organizations, especially those that really just do, you know, business to business.

And that’s, that’s, that’s their growth. That’s the way they do it. Look at a Salesforce, right? Salesforce sure has big splashy, you know, stadium sponsorship things, but what do they really do? They have people doing outreach all day, every day. So, I know we weren’t gonna get too, too deep in the weeds here on ai, but like I said, I’m not an AI hater.

So if you’re like, I don’t know what to say, right? I don’t know how to do this, right? Nobody, everybody tells me to kick rocks when I send them messages. Here’s a prompt that will get you started. Whatever it spits out, no matter how good it looks, rewrite it, right. Sit down and rewrite it with a pen. But that will get you probably pretty close, and then you can kind of tweak it along the way and make some adjustments to it.

But this particular prompt will get you, get you kind of started in a way that will help you stand out and make it seem a little bit more fun and make it seem more human. And what I want you to do is then make it actually human and, and by writing it down and, and kind of fixing it and tweaking it so that when you read it out loud to yourself, it sounds like you, and it sounds like it has a soul.

And, and, and it sounds, sounds fun. So, but I just wanted to provide that because I know one of the things I don’t do on any, any of these is provide templates because I, I don’t do templates for, for this stuff because it wouldn’t help anybody, to, to do them is we have to kind of, kind of custom massage them, for, for you and for your personality and things like that.

So, that’s kinda the approach. How, how else do, what else are we looking at for, for outreaches, we think of it in terms of a sequence. Remember, people aren’t necessarily. On every day on LinkedIn, right? It might be a week. We talked about this a week, two, maybe even a month. So having, sending out an introductory message, they might miss it.

They might not even see it. So sending a follow up to it, probably might not miss it. sending an additional one, two weeks later. Now you sent them three messages and they haven’t replied, don’t be a stalker, but not, not quite. is it, you’re, you’re just being a professional, you’re just checking back.

Oftentimes what I’ve done is I don’t usually send more than three messages on LinkedIn. I feel like at that point you’re hitting the diminishing returns and then you’re kind of being annoying. but three, three seems to be okay. at least that’s, that’s kind of been the results we’ve seen is that three tend to be the sweet spot for, for doing outreach on LinkedIn.

And then after that, yeah, now, now you’re on your own and now you’ve got, you know, you’ve gotta rely on them to hopefully find you in the newsfeed or maybe your ad hits them, or, one of your events if you’re doing LinkedIn events or something like that, catches their attention. and we like to use both.

I like to use both outreach and, content strategies. ’cause that, that tends to, to work together better than the, the sum of its parts type of thing. and when you’re doing outreaches, make an offer at some point. What do you want to happen next? Doesn’t need to be a hard pitch. Hey, do you wanna buy my stuff?

It can be, Hey, would you like to meet for a virtual cup of coffee? Easy as that. Yeah. But let’s share some stories. And, you know, worst case part, part ways is a little wiser. Right? Right. Easy, easy to say. Makes it easy to say yes to. Now, the trick is you’re gonna target the right people to make that work.

If you’re getting irrelevant people on there, or you’re just kind of dealing with, if it’s, you know, just going out to, to coaches and broke people, and I’m not saying, oh, coaches are broken, just don’t cancel me. Please. but your target market is people who own salons. Then, then it’s gonna be a complete waste of your time.

’cause you’re not getting on, you’re not getting on with the right people. So connect with the right people and send them a relevant message. Three relevant messages, what I would shoot for. So that’s all I’ve got on outreach. Like I said, I don’t wanna make a big pitch about, about, you know, outreach is, most people kind of deep down know it works.

They don’t necessarily love it. So if you wanna hire somebody to do it, it’s, that one’s easier to actually outsource than, than 

[00:52:02] content. but real quick is my mailbox is still empty. and I’ve, I’ve made this a recurring theme on here is, is there’s, there’s so, there’s so much noise everywhere, right? yesterday I counted 31 cold pitches via email, right?

It’s not counting the stuff that got blocked and not counting the actual, just straight out scams, just like cold pitches that were, you know, tried to be customized to what we do. 27 went directly to spam and the other. three more I sent there and then one person was so terrible I showed them it was bad.

I received two pitches on LinkedIn, which is part, partially why I’m still high on LinkedIn and think it’s still valuable. It’s ’cause there’s, there is less noise there. It may not always feel that way, but compared to everywhere else, right? More 12 spam calls. My phone just sits on silent all day. It just, none, none get answer.

I don’t answer calls unless it’s literally somebody in my contacts and all the spam texts just get blocked to, but what I didn’t get yesterday was an email and the day before that I also didn’t get an email. So I just say am perhaps thinking about adding a direct mail. Type of component to what you’re doing, would, would be valuable.

certainly seen that and I’ve done some, events on it. if you go back and check, check some of my strategies, I think the one we did back in October for the zombie method talked about one of our best performing pieces of direct mail. So in case you’re curious about that, check out that event.

give you some, some good insights into ways you can use direct mail. It doesn’t require sending out thousands and thousands of letters, but nonetheless gets you a really high return. that probably you, you wouldn’t necessarily expect just ’cause it shows up differently from, from everybody else.

So with that said, thanks so much everybody for coming. If you need a little bit of help with this, you can schedule a call with me at the appointment lab or just email me Gart Pipelineology. Essentially what we do is that we build these systems and we manage them for you because I think that’s, that’s the big thing is you could, you could do this yourself and I hope you try it.

If you, if you’re looking to really get your pipeline going. Try some of these things, but the thing I know people run into is they’re busy. I’m busy. I have a team that does a lot of this stuff for me and really helps me do a lot of the heavy lifting, real people, not not just AI tools, but actually real people who are trying to do this stuff.

help me schedule my appointments as well. So that is what we do is we real help you kind of do a lot of that outreach. We’ll help you do things like LinkedIn events to get you good content, to get you good meetings with the ideal people that you wanna work with. So you’re looking for that. Again, don’t need to make a big pitch about it, but I just wanted to mention that it is available in case you are looking for some help with that.

So, with that said, let’s answer some more questions and then we’ll, wrap things up and let you get back to your 

[00:54:57] day. So let’s see here from, Gary. Always nice to meet another Gary. So what does LinkedIn do for your ad? How many times does it get posted? Do they find the right people to post it to?

1. Kind of start with the end one. So as far as find the right people to post it to, you get to pick who, who it’s, so, just like with other ad networks, you can go through and you, this is, you can kind of pick people in the, this industry people with just this job title. You know, even by company size I want people at companies that are smaller, things like that.

So basically typical ad targeting parameters, that get, I think are nice. They’re a little bit deeper on LinkedIn ’cause the, the data’s just a little bit more, more granular in terms of targeting. So I like that. Basically I, if I’ve, if I’ve done outreach and I kind of know who to, to reach out to, I can essentially just duplicate that for a LinkedIn ad and it stays, stays pretty close.

and you’ll you’ll see is if you start getting comments on an ad that you’re running and they’re not the relevant people, change our ad targeting ’cause it’s serving it to the wrong people. It’s how. but no, you, you, you get to pick who LinkedIn serves it to. ’cause as I said, LinkedIn, everyone’s kind of dumb, but it, you can use it in a good way.

And that’s one of the ones where you can kind of use it in a good way is don’t tell LinkedIn to figure it out. Just say, here’s the right people give, serve it to them please. And usually pretty good it. Well, as far as like how much it gets posted and all that, that really is, all depends on what your budget is.

but basically it’s just serving it in the, in the feed on LinkedIn to people that you’ve told it to, to feed it to, it’ll feed it to more people if it gets more engagement or if you’re giving them more money or a combination of, of both. So. Good. Good question though. But yeah, that’s kinda my look at LinkedIn ads is just an extension of, essentially sales navigator is kind of picking the right targets, that if I were doing outreach, this is who I would wanna reach out to.

So I just do that in the form of an ad. So, alright, Carrie, do I have any other questions here? yep. ADA, as, as others have, requested to, yes, the recording will be available on LinkedIn, same page. So, if, you see anybody else mention this, just come back, tell ’em to come back to this page.

They can start from the beginning as soon as we end here. Usually it takes. Like I said, it can take one to 24 hours. Sometimes it takes five minutes. so, but by, if you come back by two 30 eastern time should, should be here for you if you’d like to, to check out the whole thing. And I think, I think that’s it everybody.

So thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it and I’ll see you on the next one. We’re gonna be doing, one here at the end of April. And this one’s gonna be tentatively, I’m calling it send email, get leads. that may not be what ends up getting it, but essentially it’s kind of building an audience and a list of people so that you’re not so reliant on kind of urgency tactics, right?

Looking, if you go to your inbox right now, right, it’s, you can see a bunch of things. 30% off sale ends today. Buy one, get one free. All this type of stuff that’s meant to get you urgently buying right now. This is kind of turning that all on its head for a consulting crowd of letting, getting people information and letting them buy when they’re ready.

So it’s gonna be a good one. I think you’ll get some, get a lot out of it. probably, probably a little bit less LinkedIn focused though some of the, some of the techniques very much transfer over. So hope you can join us for that one. I’ll get details out, within the next week. If you’re on the email list, you’ll get all those, those details.

Then, or you’ll probably get a invite for us for the event as well. so check for that in the next couple weeks. Hope to see you there at the end of April. And thanks everybody for coming on today. I do appreciate 

[00:58:58] it. two more questions. You guys got ’em in just in the nick of time here. Real quick is reposting other people’s things.

with your additional comment, good or bad, I would do it this way is if you’ve got, comments that you said, this has been an insightful comment. Take the comment and screenshot what you’re commenting on. That would be kind of the way I do it. You’re gonna get more traction to it. You’re still giving attribution to the original poster if you screenshot it, and then write your in depth commentary.

That way the repost, just tends to not get as much traction. Again, your mileage may vary. If it works for you, I’ll just go ahead and do it. but that’s, that’s been my experience with it, is that the, that method of screenshot, make sure that, you know, don’t cross out their name unless you’re really trying to pre prevent somebody from being an idiot.

but for the most part, if you’re trying to add additional commentary, they, they posted it on LinkedIn, screenshot ’em. so good question. And then, Gary, is sales navigator worth the investment? that’s a complicated question. I find to me, yes, I, I pay for quite a few. I pay for my, my, my sales navigator subscription as well as one for everybody on my team.

So. I end up costing me thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, every year with LinkedIn. and we find that we get a good return on it. as a standalone, it’s pretty tough to do it unless you’re, you’re really, really using it. so your, your mileage may vary, but it is a good tool. It has a lot of data point.

It just, I find it’s an incomplete tool. So adding other things to it is really where the magic tends to happen. Sales navigator by itself. Yeah, it’s, it, it’s tough. Tough as a standalone. But thanks so much everybody. I will let you go. Have a great rest of your day and hopefully we’ll see you.