[RESCHEDULED] How To Use LinkedIn Events To Fill Your Sales Pipeline

[RESCHEDULED] How To Use LinkedIn Events To Fill Your Sales Pipeline

Gary hosts a rescheduled LinkedIn Live on using LinkedIn events to fill a sales pipeline after a prior failure caused by LinkedIn’s live streaming API issue. He outlines an agenda covering benefits of LinkedIn events, setup tips, promotion for maximum impact, post-event tasks, and Q&A. Key points include using native LinkedIn Live or audio events for greater platform push versus external Zoom/Teams events; consistently building a purposeful LinkedIn connection network; and driving registrations primarily through manual invitations (up to 1,000 per week per account) rather than relying on posts or ads. He advises hosting from a personal profile for better turnout, avoiding lead forms that reduce registrations, repurposing replays into clips (e.g., VIDYO.ai), and following up with replay messages and engagement.

Discover:

00:00 Welcome And Reset
02:40 What Went Wrong Yesterday
04:53 Housekeeping And Agenda
06:47 About Gary And Who This Is For
09:43 Why LinkedIn Events Work
13:01 LinkedIn Makes It Easy
14:10 Build Your Network First
16:11 How LinkedIn Promotes Events
23:12 Inviting And Promoting Strategy
27:22 Choosing Event Types
30:12 Audience Q&A Display
30:52 Live Event Delivery Tips
33:02 Co Hosts and Speakers
34:13 StreamYard Plan Choices
35:22 Lead Forms and Email Capture
36:50 After Event Follow Up
44:27 Fix Low Attendance
50:12 Tools and Planning Milestones
54:39 Best Times to Go Live
58:44 Wrap Up and Thanks

Transcript:

[00:00:02] All right. Welcome everybody to the rescheduled version of how to use LinkedIn events to fill your sales pipeline. I am Gary Ruplinger. This is your first time here. Welcome. And if you’re, a frequent, visitor for our events, welcome back. It’s great to have you again. So thank you so much to everybody, kind of who tried to come yesterday, who was bearing with us, where we just couldn’t, we’ve got backups for pretty much.

Everything we can think of to be able to make sure live events go off without a hitch. But unfortunately, when LinkedIn’s live streaming API collapses. Well, we couldn’t get around that one though. We tried. but, I do appreciate everybody kind of coming on today. It is, it is Happy Leap Day, February 29th, 2024.

So welcome to everybody here. We will be getting started here shortly. I’m just gonna let everybody know via email that things do appear to be working today, which is, is great. That makes me happy. I’m just gonna check and verify that in fact, we are working za. Excellent. All right, so I’m now, your head was nervous.

Very nervous. So I know we’re gonna have a small group here today. I see. We’ve got, do have 12 people on already, so that’s, that’s great. I know yesterday we had, 1,323 people who registered, for the event. Today we’re significantly lower than that. So we’re gonna have a small group here. but, please feel free to just let us know, hey, where you’re, where you’re calling in from.

Like I said, I’m in the Detroit metro area. It’s a, it’s a sunny day. It’s a, it’s a very average day. other than it being, you know, out of, out of, an unusual leap day. otherwise a perfectly normal, February day here in, in Michigan. but, anybody play and we gotta place warmer. It’s about 33 degrees here and, we’ll be getting here.

Like I said, we’ll be getting started here shortly. I just wanna give everybody a couple minutes to, to hop on. I normally do try and start on, on time as much as possible, but I’m gonna give everybody a couple minutes today since this is the rescheduled version, and I want people to get a chance to come on and see it, after our, our fiasco, yesterday.

so it looks like, yep. Looks like we got people coming on. Good to see everybody. lemme just check and make sure I can see comments here. Brian, good to see you there. Alright, stuff is coming through. Alright. Everything is 

[00:02:39] working. So without further ado, let’s start jumping into things here. So this is the how to use LinkedIn events to fill your sales pipeline and event if you, Are here for the underwater basket weaving, seminar that’s actually down the hall to the left, and then left again. So wrong, wrong room. But, thanks. Thanks so much for being here. Like I said, this is the rescheduled version. We were trying to do this yesterday and everything broke, so, Actually just one thing.

LinkedIn’s API, which there, there was no getting around it. We’ve we’re trying to see if we could do, do a restream, use some then nothing worked. So, appreciate everybody bearing with me. Like here’s, here’s what I was greeted to yesterday when I logged into StreamYard is their version of the blue screen at death, the LinkedIn live issue.

LinkedIn is experie. Experiencing an issue causing live streams not to go live. And it is investigating. And it wasn’t until, about 9:00 PM last night that I received a notice that it was in fact fixed. and, Jordan here, who was on, I don’t know if you’re here today, Jordan, but you said if the opening line isn’t, and that’s how a LinkedIn event can go wrong.

I, I did, I did in fact, check your message. And, yeah. So yesterday was, how not to do it and, what can actually go wrong. You can try and think of as many things as possible to make sure that everything is going to go right. Like I said, we have backup. I can do backup internet. I’ve got multiple devices that we can do the stream from.

But, yeah, so there’s still, there’s still a way that Murphy’s Law can find its way into your events. So today we’re gonna show you how to actually do them. In a way that, is gonna be productive for, you know, what you’re trying to do, which in our case, we’re gonna really kind of focus on doing these from a let’s bring in new business type of, of, of events, versus some of the other types of models that are out there.

I’ll briefly kind of touch on the different ways you can do it, especially if you’re thinking, I don’t think I’m ready to, to kind of host my own and just have it all be me. but I’m not comfortable with that, or I don’t want to be on video at all. I, I’m just not comfortable with that. 

[00:04:50] So. so a few housekeeping items.

like I said, if this is your first time here with one of these, there is about a 20 to 32nd delay from when I say something. So when you’re hearing it till the time, I would see your response, via comments. So, otherwise I can see any type of comments. I would, like I said, we’ve got a small group here today, so, please, please feel free to be doubly or triply, you know, louder today and.

Be, be great just to kind of have, have that type of participation. If you want to be notified of future events, you can go to Pipelineology dot com slash events to get on the notification list. And replay is the nice thing. One thing, one of the things I really like about the livestream. I said I don’t have to take the recording and then send it off to the editor to get it all polished up.

And then, you know, it’s 48 hours or 72 hours, or if somebody’s busy, it’s a week later before I get the recording back and uploaded and on the right page. replays are available just about immediately, so that’s long story short. So the agenda for today’s event is. we’re gonna talk about the advantages of LinkedIn events.

We’re gonna show you how to set up your own event with some of the tips that we’ve learned over doing these since I think we started doing these back in, at the end, towards the end of 2021. So we’re going on our third year doing these. we’re talking about promoting your event for maximum impact.

That’s probably gonna be the thing we spend the most amount, most amount, most amount of time on. ’cause there’s, there’s a lot of good ways to do it and there’s a few pitfalls you wanna be aware of. some of the post-event tasks. And then I’m gonna open it up for q and a. So, if you’ve got questions though, as I’m talking about a certain topic, I will be able to kind of see them in the comments.

they’re over here on this screen for me, so on the right hand side. So I may not see them right away, but I will try and respond to them if it’s kind of relevant to what we’re talking about at the time. If not, I will save it till the end. With all that out of the 

[00:06:46] way. I think, real quick, the 32nd version about me is that I’m the founder of Pipelineology, host of the Pipelineology podcast.

I’ve been doing marketing, sales, business development now for. And you actually need to update this slide. This is now my 23rd year, doing this in my corporate life. actually ran call centers at collar dealerships, so we would handle all the incoming leads and set appointments and get people scheduled to come visit, any of the 16 stores we had across the country.

these days, Pipelineology is really a business development company, so we help our clients get meetings, do outreach, do events, get, get on podcasts, get interviewed, all that good stuff. So all the things that kind of go into that top of the funnel, getting, getting awareness out there, getting, and getting, ultimately getting business meetings.

That is what we do, and I’m actively seeking New England style. IPA beer recommendations. and, I know the, the comment section is usually pretty good for one or two. Good, good recommendations every single event. So, keep, keep up the good work everybody. this, event is for is, is for consultants, coaches.

it’s probably, you know, the most top number one type of. A client we work with is typically a consultant with a small team of maybe one to 10 people. Typically we’re kind of before you bring it all in house and hire a whole team, we’re kind of there to, to do that, that work. Or if you just want to stay small, stay a boutique agency, you, we, we can kind of help you there without all the added costs of extra employees and all that kind of stuff.

also works good for SaaS providers, analytics companies. If you’re a VP of sales business development, this should be helpful to you. Basically, if you work in the business to business or sell business to business. This is kind of designed for you. So real quick, I know that, you don’t have to try and screenshot this.

If you’d like the copy of this, just, send me an email, Gart Pipelineology. But here’s kind of an overview of the process we’re gonna be covering today. And like I said, I know that this is always a little bit small, even in high definition, to try and get this, so it’s not blurry. So. But this is basically the process we’re gonna be going over.

Don’t worry, we don’t, you don’t have to be able to read it right now ’cause we’re gonna actually talk about all of those different things as we go along. But we’re gonna talk about connecting with your ideal client profile to make sure you’ve got the right people to invite to your event. We’re gonna talk about choosing the event type and topic, inviting people to attend, which is really, really important.

when doing these on LinkedIn, sending out reminders, send them replays. And then as Mon is kind of repurposing them. So again, if you’d like a copy of this, just shoot me an email. probably get it back to you this afternoon. If not by tomorrow morning I should have them all sent out. So Gary at Pipelineology dot com and I’ll just send you that.

PDF, there’s no opt-in or anything like 

[00:09:41] that. so some of the advantages to doing, you know, LinkedIn types of, of content and this, this even applies to a lot of. That even aren’t on LinkedIn, like just, just overall kind of webinars, but in this case it, it’s, it’s really good way to engage with your network without them being pitchy or spammy.

as somebody who runs a company that does a fair bit of outreach, there’s only so much you can do to reach an, an individual person before they just tell you to go pounce, sand get lost, and they never wanna talk to you again and you’re blocked. so we find that content like this is, is a good way to.

Ease them back into your, ease them into what you do. It’s really easy for a prospect to engage with you and your company in a no pressure environment. They don’t feel like it’s a sales conversation where they’re gonna be pressured into buying, some, you know. I know we’re all professionals here, but you know, people, people will still try and avoid a conversation if they think it could, could even potentially even, they smell even the whiff, most faintest whiff of sales.

Sales. This. So, also a great way to Elevaate your authority and kind of be viewed as an expert, on, on a topic. And, you know, kind of some of the obvious ones is bringing in new leads to your company for people that you know, you’re, you’ve been trying to get ahold of and you haven’t been able to.

This is a good way, an alternate way to bring them in really reduces. We find this is one of the big ones. It kind of reduces sales resistance in general, reduces price resistance when we talk to people, helps streamline your overall sales process. we find that if there’s somebody sitting on the fence, this is often a good.

Inviting them to one of our events is typically a good way to kinda help them move forward in advance, in our sales process. And ultimately we even find it’s good for bringing back lost clients. So with those advantages in mind, that is some of what we’re really looking for. And I will mention here that this is not just limited to presentations like a PowerPoint like I’m doing today.

You know, if you wanna, I’ve had clients where we’ve done interviews. one of the, one of the ones to keep in mind here is round tables. I had a recruiter. That I worked with, where that was, that was the model she went with is because really for her topics, getting, you know, the right people on for HR positions was pretty challenging.

But this was a good way for her to kind of be, you know, get, get out there for topics that were in the news, like AI and, and different things like that, and how that’s impacting the hiring process. And it, it’s kind of a little bit, I don’t wanna use the word sneaky, but a clever way to gain influence with the people you ask to be on the round table.

So you can carefully select those people and now they’re well aware of you. And if those are some, some people that you know, eventually you’re hoping that in the next year or two could potentially be clients, that’s, it’s probably a good way to invite them to. Get to know you a little bit better by participating in a round table.

So it’s not a format I’ve used a lot, but just one of the ones to be aware of. You can also find networking events. I’m not a huge fan of that model, but, I know some people that’s what they do every week. ’cause they’ll host a networking event on, on LinkedIn. So just want to let you be, help you be aware of some of the other models.

for this to do this is that you don’t have to just sit here and, and talk, talk to a 

[00:12:59] screen. but why, why LinkedIn has been specifically and not just doing a webinar or anything like that. Well, we’re gonna kind of go over the ways that LinkedIn helps you to kind of promote this and probably the first one here is how easy LinkedIn tries to make it for you to attend and accept an invitation.

You can see here a couple that were in my inbox, earlier. Yesterday I took a screenshot. so all I, in these cases, all I have to do is click the accept button and, and I’m in. Don’t fill out any long registration form or go through multiple steps of upsells and whatnot or confirm anything. It’s, it’s as easy as clicking accept, which is a little bit of a double-edged sword.

Sometimes people just accept, accept, accept without reading stuff. Those people do exist on LinkedIn. I, I’m certainly not one of them, but I know they’re out there, so. If you accidentally subscribe to, to an event, that’s, that’s oftentimes what happens if somebody says, I never signed up to this. I said, did you get a thing that looked like this?

And click the accept button. It’s like, oh, maybe, I don’t know. I forgot. I, I just click accept on stuff. So, but, it does help make it easier to get people to, well eventually come and, LinkedIn will send reminders out on your 

[00:14:09]  behalf. So, but in order to make all this work before we get to the actual event, part, one thing I wanna mention is.

You should be always consistently building your network purposefully. So there’s, on LinkedIn, you’ve got two types of really one’s a connection and one’s a follower. And as many people, right? This is think of like a, a TikTok or a, an Instagram type of thing. You get ’em as many followers as you want.

There’s no limit to it. And these are kind of the people that are not really connected to you, but they see your stuff or at least they might. the other one, this is the one I really want you to focus on, is the connections. You can only have 30,000 of them. But which is still a really big number. It takes a long time to get above the 30,000 number unless you really kind of start hitting it with a lot of viral content and stuff like that, which is, can be a challenge.

And I would say even then, you would still wanna focus on finding the right people to connect with it. Are the fit your ideal client profile versus just accepting everything that comes in is go out and proactively find those people. You get a hundred invites a week, send out those invites. It’s gonna take time.

That’s why I always tell people, start now. You know the best time to start, you know best. That’s like the best time to plant an oak tree, right? Best time to plant an oak tree was 30 years ago. Second best time is right now. So. Same thing with LinkedIn. Yeah, it’d be great if you had a huge network. you’re already existing and maybe some of you do.

I I did take a look at some of the attendees who aren’t registered for the event yesterday. And yeah, plenty of people who’ve, who’ve already got a big following, already got got a lot of connections. You know, these, these are, are a shoe in for you. These can be really productive if you’re not there yet.

Start building now and, and these are the types of things. Start doing them, start small and, and, and grow with them. So. I just want to recommend that you always be building your network and always be adding new people until you hit that, hit that maximum because it’s gonna give you kind of a lot of, a lot more ability to get people to show up to your, to your 

[00:16:09] webinars.

So this slide here is, I think will help you understand why LinkedIn likes to promote and kind of push, Live events. I was looking at some, some data and LinkedIn event attendance, overall on the whole platform is up about 60% year over year. it, it’s something that LinkedIn’s really been pushing and probably one of the big reasons why is LinkedIn isn’t really like a lot of your other social media platforms, right?

Your, your Facebooks, your Instagrams, your TikTok, your X or whatever, where, or YouTube, that’s, you know, for. You know, live stream or something. You might be thinking YouTube or Twitch. but a typical YouTube user, I think, is on the platform about 48 minutes a day. I think that’s the, the most recent data I could find on it.

And that’s for the United States. I didn’t have data worldwide, but, but on LinkedIn, as you can see here, it’s, it’s less than a minute a day. now it has, I, this was, this is a little bit older screenshot. it is gone up. It is now 19 minutes, for the average monthly user. So what does that all kind of mean?

Well, it means that people, LinkedIn wants people to spend time on their platform, right? LinkedIn’s got advertising and different things that help ring in their revenue, but if nobody’s on the platform, if it’s a ghost town and people aren’t spending time there, then that really kind of limits their reach for advertising.

And things like that. So by bringing people into an event and helping you push them and promote them and, and getting people to be on their platform, especially for live, like, live streaming ones that are through the LinkedIn platform now, those people will spend 30 minutes, 45 minutes, maybe an hour, on something on their platform.

In a day, not just, not just over the course of a month. So, events really, I think for LinkedIn they’re finding alright, and, and hence why, you know, they push ’em so hard is they’re a really good way to get that user engagement and daily time spent on LinkedIn. Number trending upward. ’cause these are something that’s sticky, right?

The LinkedIn newsfeed. Isn’t usually so sticky. Ty. If you think about typical behavior on LinkedIn, it’s typically, well, I got an email from LinkedIn. I haven’t checked it in about a month. Let me go in, check your network invitations, accept a couple, decline a couple, maybe view a couple messages. If you’re really feeling ambitious, you might, you might reply to a couple and then you’re gone.

You probably didn’t, you probably hardly read anything that was in the feed. But you know, the event side of things, right? You’re, you’re here, you can comment, you can engage, we can, we can spend some time, you know, looking at, you know, something you wanna learn. It’s business focused. Lots of good things.

So just, just kind of keep that in mind and in the back of your head when we kind of talk about, well, all the different ways that LinkedIn’s gonna help you promote, share events. So, first one here is, this is from yesterday. So this is. the event. And on the right hand side of any event, there’s other events for you.

So if you attend an event, LinkedIn’s like, well, you attended this event. You might, you, you must be, you must like events. So here’s a few others. So, and if, you’ve done a good job promoting your event on the right hand side, your event can show up here if it kind of people say, Hey, this is relevant.

I don’t know the exact criteria for getting here. I think it’s typically, typically kind of from anecdotal testing. Anyway, we find you. Probably need at least 500 people to have, RSVP, maybe a little, maybe a little less for some, some more specialized ones. but showing up here, this will give you a big boost within that, that last 48 hours coming up to an event also.

I wanna mention that this is really only for native events. that means live streams and audio events. And I’ll kind of show you what, what, all that kind of looks like when you’re setting things up. But if you’re thinking, Hey, you know, I’m gonna do, I’ll just do it as a zoom, then LinkedIn’s like, well, that’s fine.

You can, you can do, you can do the event, but we’re not gonna really push it. ’cause now you’re not on our platform anymore and you’re not keeping people on our platform. You’re taking them off our platform, which isn’t, isn’t what they want you to do. So, I, I recommend everybody do, do them natively on the platform, simply because you’re going to, LinkedIn’s gonna help push it.

You’re gonna get more people to attend something live. for example, right now, the, the counter, as I’m, as I’m telling you this right now, says there’s 99 people on with us right now. Which, I’m pretty happy with, given that we really, really struggled, to kind of get everything rescheduled, and moving from yesterday.

So, that would never have happened if I had just said, okay, we’re just gonna go regroup and do it as a, as a Zoom event external. you know, I would’ve been lucky if we’d gotten, you know, 10 or 15 people. So just one thing to kind of keep in mind there is that LinkedIn is gonna push these, they’re gonna send notifications out.

Like if you go live, you push the button, it says go live. If anybody else is on LinkedIn, any of your other connections, they’re all gonna get notified that, hey, you know, in this case Gary Rup is live. So, So I come in, Sean, I’m asking about Restream. So Restream, I’m assuming you’re asking about the platform Restream.

it’s one that, it’s, it’s my backup platform. If, if, the one I currently use, which is StreamYard, doesn’t work, that’s the one we turn to. But, we’ve done all of them on, on StreamYard, so that’s been the one I, I use and recommend. but, I think, restream is perfectly fine as well. we just find that.

Streamer tends to work for what we need it for and haven’t really had to go outside of, outside of that. So a couple other things you can see here. Here’s that note. Here’s those notifications. So this was, you know, screenshots. You can see here, this is LinkedIn reminding people that, hey, the event starts soon.

Here’s somebody doing an audio event. Here’s another person doing an audio event. So. here’s more notifications, right? LinkedIn loves to notify you, letting ’em know, Hey, this one took place was live. Was live, was live. So even after the effect, even after it’s done, then, yes, they’re, they’re gonna keep pushing it.

And we, we see that quite a bit. like I might, let’s say at, during a typical event, 150 to 200 people are on live with us. Within seven days, we have seven, 800 people who viewed it. So we get four, almost four times as many people to, or three times as many people to see it after it’s happened. And watching them replay them, then actually see it.

’cause LinkedIn continues to promote it and PR push it. So, lots, lots of advantages to doing it, on this platform. So, Sean, just to answer your question, yes. We are broadcasting this through StreamYard right 

[00:23:09] now. Alright, so when it comes to promoting your event, let’s kind of talk about how to do that.

and typically the way we, we do it, and this is, this is the way we’re typically going to do it, I’ll tell you how we ended up trying to, to do this one to get people back on today. this, this one was, was highly irregular since, well, we had to reschedule it. We’re gonna go over the way you 99 times out of a hundred.

It’s that I recommend you do it. So, for promoting your event, by all means, share the event, you know, put it out, post it on your, your news feeds, you know, email your list, things like that. but you are gonna get the absolute best results by actually going out and inviting people from your network. So each account, so if you’ve got a LinkedIn account and maybe you got, you know, employees or, or business partners or, or you know, anything, even a, even a, an event from, for virtual assistance, right?

Anybody that’s part of your team, all of them, even with their LinkedIn accounts, can invite a thousand people per week per account. So you want to be maxing that out, make it a team effort. Everybody, you know, whether it’s, Hey, we’re gonna have, invitation Thursday, a Thursday afternoon at one o’clock.

Alright everybody, let’s do our invites. Let’s send out a thousand invites and then get people to come. The more invites you send, the more people you’ll, you will get to, to come to it. So, Even, even if you picked a bad topic. And that’s, that’s one of the things we’ll kind of talk about in the troubleshooting section a little bit, is kind of how to pick topics.

If you have questions on that, we’re, I’m happy to kind of go over more in depth about that is the topic definitely matters. but if you just post it and make one post about it on LinkedIn and never say anything about it again. Even if it was great to never, and the the 10 people that showed up had a great time, if you don’t, don’t promote it, you’re not gonna get a lot of people to it.

So. You can see here, here’s a screenshot. So, how do you, from this one, all you have to do is click the blue share button and then click the invite button, and then it will bring up a list of all your connections. So if you don’t have a lot of connections, just invite everybody. but if you’re kind of getting to the point where, like me, I think we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000.

We’re getting, I’m getting to that end game of, of hitting the, the limit of connections on LinkedIn. but that’s taken many, many years of, of connecting. but so I have the kind of the luxury that I can go into industry and really just start filtering. So I can say I only want people from this area.

I do ’em by state now, and I can pick people who are in business and consulting or advertising or, or marketing. And I can invite people from, from just those, those areas of basically, ’cause I know who my ideal client. Client pro, ideal client profile is, so I know they tend to be in a handful of industries, so I only typically invite those industries ’cause again, we’ve got so many connections.

But for, for team members, It’s like if you received an invite from, from Evan Kasner, Nicole Jr. One of you know, a couple people on the team, you know, they, they max out with all their connections. They send everybody the connection or the connection, or excuse me, the invitations simply because. They don’t have, the, the, the extra people.

So, just a couple recommendations there. So I do have, a couple questions here for, let’s see, Jordan, should the event be set up from a personal page or a company page? It’s a really good question, Jordan. that is, we’ve got a slide coming up for that. but it is personal page and I’ll kind of, I’ll show you, one of the, kind of down, one of the things that looks really cool about doing it from a company page.

And then how it ends up really kind of killing your registration. So we recommend doing it from, from a personal page. You can do it from a company page if that’s just, you know, your, your preference or, or if the CEO says, I only wanna do ’em from a company page, then, then do, do, do ’em that way. And you can still do the invites from your personal page.

so, alright, next section 

[00:27:21] here. So what kind of event. So, like I said, you’ve got your external events and that can be anything. So if you’ve got a Zoom account and that’s what you’re comfortable with, ’cause you know, during the pandemic everybody learned, you know, what Zoom was. feel, feel free to do it, to use that.

Microsoft teams, especially if you’re just, just, if you just wanna get one done, use whatever you want. I’ve seen other webinar platforms and stuff now, kind of popping in every once in a while. But like I said, with the external events. LinkedIn is not gonna give you the same level of exposure.

They’re not gonna push as many people to show. so well, it’s good to start. And I, I, I have two clients who do them with, with external platforms. So ev even, even the people that, you know, pay, pay me to help them set these up, still like to do ’em that way, all by all means it, it’s still effective. One, one client.

They, their whole sy they, they, they were doing events long before they ever worked with me and we just plugged them into, we kind of just plug into their system. And another one, they just like the Zooms because they can see the people at the top with their cameras on. which to be fair is, is something that the live stream can’t do.

but, you know, it, I think it has other advantages. But nonetheless, my favorites are the LinkedIn live, live stream, which is what you’re watching right now. Video feed, where you can actually see and interact with the person. The other one, maybe for somebody who’s a little bit camera shy, audio events.

Audio events have actually become pretty popular. and they’re pretty easy to do. You don’t, right? You could, you could do them from a home office if you have a boring, you’re just like, well, I’m just not camera ready today. And I, I get it. Sometimes you feel that way. so. Audio events can be kind of a good, good substitute.

Especially, like I said, especially if you’re just trying to get one done. It’s like I, I’m not comfortable with the camera. I do an audio event. It can still be really productive and people tend to respond pretty well to ’em. so I, I thought, I actually was surprised that when I’ve, I, I’ve attended a couple just to get a sense of them and people tend to really.

Participate pretty well, and typically the only way you can participate is, you know, throwing a thumbs up or a heart icon or something in there. You can’t even ask questions. but it, it tends to still get a pretty good response. So don’t, don’t let my, aversion to the audio events dissuade you. I, I like the live streams, but, if the audio event’s good for you, didn’t absolutely do it, so, Maria, I’m gonna say that’s Maria. Maria, how are you highlighting the question on and the person’s profile? this is actually a feature in StreamYard, so not an ad for StreamYard. It just happens to be what I use. If I see your comment, I can just click a button here and I click show and it comes up on here and I can 

[00:30:11] talk. Talk about it and then I can hide it and take it back away. So, it’s just one of those little, little things that, I, I like about it. I think it gives a nice touch to the whole presentation. ’cause then everybody knows what question I’m answering. ’cause I know, I know the comment section doesn’t always update.

Believe me, I, I spent some time in there yesterday trying to put out fires when, when things weren’t working and I kept having to click the little F five button, refresh, refresh, refresh to make sure I was getting everybody, So being able to see which question somebody answer is asked, and who it was, I, I think just helps quite a bit.

So, alright, so. That’s kind of the, the setup for 

[00:30:51] it. So, day of the event, I don’t have a ton of advice for you. if you’ve done an event before, if you, if you’ve ever done a sales call or a presentation, you know what to do. Bring energy, have some fun. One of the big ones I would say is engage with your audience.

I see this quite a bit, maybe not so much with, individual presentations for it right now. You can only see me, I’ve got, I do have a person behind the scenes who’s. Monitoring everything and making sure everything stays working today. but typically on camera it’s just me. And, I don’t have a whole lot of other options other than to engage with the audience.

But if you’re doing a round table and you’ve got other people or you’re doing an interview, it can be easy to kind of get lost in in that conversation. Forget about all the people who are there and all their comments. I find that if you engage with the audience, you will have a better event. People are gonna stick around and they’re not gonna just disappear.

They’re gonna feel like they get to participate in it and like it’s their event too. Excuse me. So. So I recommend engaging with your audience. And like I said, if you don’t, you don’t have the show button, you know, and you’re not doing it through like a StreamYard type of platform, you can actually show the comments.

Just read ’em off and say, you know, here’s, here’s Sean’s questions, here’s Maria’s questions. This is, this is Jordan’s question, and here’s what he said. It’s okay, you know, you don’t need all the polish right away. But what I’ll tell you is just, just get ’em, just do one. The first one’s gonna be the hardest.

It’s gonna get easier from there. And, you, you might find the first one that it was terrible. You hated it. You didn’t, you didn’t do anything right. Don’t worry, it wasn’t as bad as you thought. But if you still need to, to delete it, go ahead and delete it. And if it was really that bad, nobody’s gonna remember it anyway ’cause nobody was there.

So don’t, don’t worry too much about doing them. Once you get better at ’em, yeah, you’ll, you’ll have more people coming. You’ll get more engagement and you’ll get, you know, it, it’s all gonna feel better. And you, you don’t have to be, you know. A rock star at these, or you know, the, you know, you don’t have to be an influencer to do these.

You can be a regular person and, and still, still get pretty good results for 

[00:32:57] ’em. question here from Jordan, before we jump onto the next one. For an event, from a personal account, can you have co-organizers? You can have, cos speakers and that’s the way I do it. So in towards the bottom. when you’re setting it up, you, it says speakers.

so I always, you, you always select yourself, if, if you’re gonna be there, of course, but, if you’ve got other people yeah. That you’re doing it with, just click their names and put ’em in as speakers. And then that is essentially ends up essentially being exactly the same thing as having co-organizers for it.

So they’re gonna get notified that they’ve been added as a speaker. That they can click accept, and then they can, go ahead and invite their, their networks too. but in order to invite people to an event, all you actually have to do is be attending it typically. so even if you just click attend, you’re, you can invite other people to it.

So especially for your own team, even if they’re not gonna be on as a speaker or you don’t want ’em showing as a speaker, just have ’em click, you know, click the attend button for for the event. They could still invite people to it. So that’s, that’s how I do 

[00:34:08] it question here. this one says LinkedIn user. So, I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say your name is Bob. Actually, I’m, I’m kidding. I don’t actually know. what version of Stream are, do you recommend running for live? Whichever version you want. If you pick the free version, the only difference from what you’re seeing now is up in the top right corner that will say StreamYard on it.

Otherwise it will look the same. and the other one is, and if you, this one’s if I, I can stream in 10 80. If I have the professional account, and since we repurpose the content and use ’em for other things, that’s the one I use. If you’re just getting started with it, just start with a basic package though.

The middle tier, I think, I actually don’t remember what the package is called, probably basic, that does seven 20 p doesn’t have any, any, watermarks up here in the corner and it automatically records everything. So that’s probably the best one to, to start with. But if you, but I say just if you’re just, just want to do one and try it out, just use the free one and give it a try.

And if you like it, then, you know, feel free to buy it. let’s see 

[00:35:21] here. Sean, can you use LinkedIn Lead generation when you create the event from a personal page? I’m not quite sure I understand the question. I’m not sure if you’re asking if you can run ads to it. I don’t. You know what? I don’t know.

here’s, here’s the thing. We found that, with clients who’ve, who’ve tried running ads to ’em, I think you can, but, It gets, it’s such a, you, you get like four people to sign up or five people to sign up from ’em. and you put all, I’ve, I’ve had clients who, you know, they’ve, they’ve had a guest coming on and the guest is like, oh, we wanna participate here.

Here’s an ad budget for it and everything. And 99% of the people who attend come from doing the invites like we talked about, which is the manual labor, high effort part of it versus the automated ad platform. That’s why we do the, do the invites. Even though I would, I would really love for an automated way and I could just throw some, some ad spend at it and have it be done.

Certainly free up time for my team. but nonetheless, we get so much better results by just doing them manually, that that’s what we stick with. So, oh, like to collect emails. I’ve got a slide coming up here. I’ll show you why we don’t do that, in just a second here. So I will, I’ll, I’ll kind of walk you through.

How we do that? So good. Good to know. So just, hang, hang 

[00:36:48] tight. Alright, so after the event. So after you’ve done your event, well, what should you do? Well, you’re not, I would say you’re not done now. You could be done. and one thing that’s not on here is responding to questions. So, especially if you’ve, you’re, you’re a guest or something like that and you’ve been interviewed, maybe you didn’t get to all the questions or maybe you just wanna make sure it’s in there.

every, every time I’ve done a guest one with them. They are, they’re topnotch professionals and they will go into the comment section and they answer every question that’s in there, making sure even if we covered it on stream, that they’re gonna talk about it anyway. so really, really good look for, for that type of thing.

So after the event that is not, like I said, not on this slide, respond to the questions. I try and for me, I try and grab ’em all on stream and that’s how I typically do it. But putting those posts in there and actually having a written, written one too. Really helpful. I probably should do that too. send out replay notifications.

So again, this is, this is not, probably not something you wanna spend your time doing all the time. but if you’ve got an assistant, you’ve got a team signing this task to them is to, to send out the replay. Hey, not, not sure if you were able to attend the live stream. Put the name of it in there yesterday or.

Whatever day it is. but here’s the link. In case you want the replay, you will get more people to check it out and you’ll get, you’ll get people thanking you. I can’t recall anybody who said, oh God, that was, you know, terrible. How dare you message me for, I’ve never once gotten, you know, an angry message back, just letting people know about replays.

I think I once had somebody say, I don’t think I signed up for that. again, forgetting that they pushed the button. And that’s the, that’s the worst one I’ve ever gotten. So don’t worry too much about sending that out. You’re not, you’re not bugging anybody. Adding it to your feed like this takes two seconds, is go into your profile, and add it to your featured section so that more people are gonna see it, repurpose that content.

And what do I mean by that? There’s tools out there. There’s services out there. so if you’re not familiar with how to do it, just get a service to do it for you at first. but, you know, tools like, video, VI d.ai is one we’ve been using that’s actually pretty decent. And what it does is it will take your long form content and then cut it into little clips or little chapters so you’ve got 30 or you know, 62nd, one minute, two minute clips, types of things like that that you can then share on LinkedIn or wherever else you want.

’cause if you share this on LinkedIn, most people aren’t gonna sit in, most people are not gonna sit in and watch a, you know, we’re 39 minutes into this and you know, we’re not done yet. Most people aren’t just gonna sit the watch that on a whim, but they might watch a two minute clip of it and say, that was cool.

I’m interested in more of that, and then they, they kind of, maybe they do end up watching the whole thing, or they start to follow you and they see more of your stuff. So really good way to kind of get pe, get, get content out there without having to actually try and create it. So there’s another example in the screenshot.

So over there on the right of kind of one of those, one of those clips where, write a few sentences about it, and then post the video clip and Great. You’re, you’re off to the races, your content is created for the day. and then finally you can add them to your CRM. that’s a little bit outside. The scope of that is that there’s, there’s not a, there’s an easy way to do it and it’s not very effective, and then there’s hard ways to do it, that requires some scripting and, time with people and training and all that kind of thing.

but, It is, is it is, it is possible even, even if you’re doing it from a personal page, which I think, Sean is alluding to here. So when you create it on a business page, you can get the emails from LinkedIn. like I said, we’re gonna cover that, but I think that’s what he is alluding to here, is how do you do it from a personal page.

the, the, the short answer is it’s complicated. often, like I said, you kind of gotta go through and extract them, but some scripts can help you do it. But the reason we don’t do it, I’ll just cover it here, because I’m not sure I have the right, right slide deck up here. But, what I will say is if you do it from a business page, so you’re going to have an option, and here I’ll bring Sean’s, Sean’s message up here.

So when you do it from a business page, there’s a little check box towards the bottom that says. Create a, a registration form or a lead form, and then somebody’s gonna fill it out and LinkedIn will pre film most of it. Here’s what happens though. This is, this sounds really, really cool. ’cause it will tell, it tells you right underneath there.

You will get their emails. You’ll get the emails of everybody who, who responded. You say, that’s great. That’s exactly what I want because I wanna build my list. Right? I I, the very first one we did, we did exactly that way because, well I want those email addresses. I wanna build my list. Well, we had about 85% fewer people register for that one than the other ones that we did.

And I think, if I remember right, and this was a long, this was the 2021. So, you know, I’ve tried to block this out ’cause it was, like I said, the first one’s terrible. Nobody’s gonna be there anyway to see it. Proof in case in point, only three people, I think actually even showed up. So, we had so few people register, even though we sent out a whole bunch of invites because the registration page, having that little one there, 85% fewer people registered, and then basically nobody showed up.

So that’s why I don’t use it. I know it’s, I know it looks cool and I know it’s, it’s a whole lot more work for us to. Get those email addresses and things like that manually. ’cause we have to go through the pages and extract their profile URLs and then run ’em through a match, with some tools. And we don’t use automated scraping there because LinkedIn doesn’t like that.

So we have to go through and copy and paste. It is a pain. But, we get, I, I would say I get close to 10 times as many email addresses doing it that way. So that’s what I do. so I know long, kind of, long story, but that’s, that’s kind of our approach to it. and that’s the problem, Sean, is that, we have a, I go through, we have to manually go through each page, copy and paste that into a Google sheet, and we have a script that runs in the backend to find the profiles and then we can put ’em into, a tool that can actually match them.

So. Like I said, it, it’s a, it’s a complicated process. so I totally understand. If you say yes, I wanna just do it from the business page, and get the emails that way. I understand. Just keep in mind you’re definitely limiting the number of people that will actually see it. And when I’m doing the event, first and foremost, it’s about the event.

I want, I want viewers, I want engagement. I want to get these questions from people. ’cause so it’s not just about email addresses for me. If that is your number one priority is make sure you’ve got email addresses to people who registered so you can send out replays and offers to them, then by all means go.

we find that the other advantages to not doing it that way, including 10 times more people registering outweighs the the downside. Guido, I see your question. I will get to it. kind of that, I’ll grab that one at the end since that was gonna take me a little bit to just kind of bang, bang, boom. But, I will get you, there’s a flow chart I’ve got as well that I’ll, we can send you. Okay. So a couple things here. 

[00:44:26] So. Troubleshooting low attendance rates.

So let’s, let’s say you’ve done a couple and you say, yeah, I’ve done some, Gary, that was, I, I feel like I wasted my time. I, you know, I put the effort into making the presentation and nobody, nobody showed up. So, a couple things to keep in mind. There is the first, first and foremost, and this is if, if in doubt, it’s probably this, this one here is it wasn’t relevant to the people you were inviting.

So. Topic. So let’s kind of talk about what your topic should be. So one of the big ones, let’s say you are an agency, so I’ll just use one of my clients who works with nonprofits. she’s got a, a very large network and probably 40% of her network is kind of in that space. And the rest of it’s just other connections from other industries.

So we have found that if we wanna get people to show up. To her events, we will get more than twice as many people to show up. If I just put in the title nonprofits, that’s the first word, since I want, since her, her events are for nonprofits or associations. So if I put the name of who I want to attend, then people know it’s for them, it’s relevant to them, and they’re, they are much, much more likely to actually click the accept button.

Because I know it’s actually for them, it doesn’t feel generic. It’s not, it doesn’t feel like it could be for, for anybody out there they know. Oh, this is specifically geared towards me, so I know there’s, there’s always that hesitation out there to, oh, I don’t wanna be too specific. Yeah. I wanna, I wanna generalize it a little bit so I can get more people.

What I’m gonna tell you is that it is almost always better to be more specific than it is to be more general. The general topics, just they don’t get a very good response rate. That’s one of the things we learned by first doing ’em, when it came to, you know, we thought, oh, you know, one of the things that our company does is we help people get meetings.

So we would do ones on topics. Here’s how to get more meetings with, with people in your. People didn’t want that. People didn’t, they thought that was too general. They wanted to know, how do I do it on LinkedIn? And then we said, well, what? Okay, cool. We can do that. how do I do content on LinkedIn? All right, how do I optimize my profile?

How do I double a show rate to a meeting? That’s very specific. You have to have meetings for that to even be relevant to you. But boy, if you do and you’re struggling with low show rate, you know, getting people double the number of people to show up kind of a big deal. So more specific performance, better, not inviting enough people.

that’s a big one, like I said. There is definitely, I, I get it. It’s, it can be, it can be time consuming to do, do the invites again. ’cause they’re not a good, I have not found a good tool that I find reliably can do. invitations for you on LinkedIn and LinkedIn prompts upon some of them that can do that.

So we just do it manually. but you know, if you, if you’re doing an event, let’s say, let’s say you’re gonna do one in March, set it for the end of March. So, we’ll, we’ll kind of talk about, talk about the timeframes for doing this stuff. But, if you want to get as many people as possible, let’s say, let’s say you decide to do on March 28th, so that gives you about a month.

You get a thousand invites per week. So set it up tomorrow and get some invites out. And then next week, so that’s a thousand people there The next week, that first week in March a thousand more, go all the way through. Do a thousand, thousand thousand. Then you’ll get 5,000 invites out. So if you, so I know most people don’t even have 5,000 connections, but.

If you do now, you’ve, you’ve got, you’ve got, you’ve given yourself a good headstart. so don’t, don’t just invite a few hundred and call it good. Don’t make a few posts about it. Call it good. Really, really go through the, really go all in and, and really get those invites out there. Even if you’re not sure that it’s always relevant to people.

Just invite people if you’ve got the space for it. So, and if you’ve tried all of that. You’re still not getting people to show up, do it as a live stream or audio event, and you’re gonna get about three times more people to show up, possibly more, than if you were doing it like as a Zoom or a Microsoft Teams event.

So just a few things to kind of keep in mind there is you make sure that, you know, it’s a more, a specific enough topic. If it’s, if it could be relevant. So let’s say it could be, it’s a topic that could be relevant to law firms, nonprofits, you know, accountants, and you’re really only focused on accountants.

Make sure you put in the title Accounting accountants here. Here’s how accountants can, you know, triple, triple their book of business, without adding any new client. I dunno what it actually dunno much about accounting. but, something like that. Okay. so just some tips there on how to do that.

real quick, if you do need some help with this, you need some help setting things up or you are looking for somebody to do it for you, that is usually when people call us is when they don’t have time to do it themselves. feel free to get in touch with me@theappointmentlab.com and then kind of walk through some options, kind of learn about what, you know, what might be the best fit for you, or just shoot me an email directly, Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

Also same email address. If you’re looking for the, the handout here with the flow chart that we talked about at the beginning, it kind of lays out the process and kind of walks through that. again, just email me directly, Gary at Pipelineology dot com. So I will open it up for questions. and while you’re posting those in there, I’m gonna go through here and kind of add.

Some of the, ones that have been mentioned here 

[00:50:11] before. So let’s, ULI Uli, what is the software that clips the recording of an event? there are a bunch of ’em out there. The one that we have been using and actually liking. I’ve, I’ve tried a few, but the one I feel like actually does the best job right now is called a video.

And I’ll spell that again for you. VIDY o.ai. and don’t go to the.io or.com one ’cause that’s a different service, which the AI extensions, right? They’re, you know, it’s like just everybody get a.com and call your and find a unique company name. I know that’s not possible. I know it’s not reasonable.

Alright, so that’s the one that we use. Feel free to give it a try, and see how you like it. Guido as beginners, can you please give us a rundown of the sequence, things like calendar, editorial content, presentation outline, just the basic milestones. so Guido number one, email me Gary at Pipelineology dot com.

We’ll get you the flow chart that kind of gives you that whole kind of big picture thing in terms of what you should be doing and invites and things like that. So in terms of things like presentation outline. I, I don’t, I don’t necessarily have one. it, it’s, I’m just not, I’m not an expert on doing a webinar and there’s way other people are way, way smarter than me.

you know, doing an introduction at the beginning, giving people an agenda of what you’re gonna cover, making sure, you know, at the end you take some questions. These are all good things. I like to make sure I try and keep an eye on the comment section and keep that engagement going, throughout the presentation.

That can be tricky, in the beginning. and maybe you find, hey, I wanna have somebody on with me to make sure they’re monitoring for questions. and things like that. That can be a really good way to do it, especially for your first few events where it can, you’re trying to, you’re trying to present and do a good job there and keep the flow going as well as watch for questions and answer those and not feel like it’s a disjointed mess, which I’m not always perfect at doing.

things like that. otherwise, in terms of things like calendar, I, I like to schedule three to four, sometimes five weeks out. so what we, for example, this is how it’s gonna look for us in March, is next week we’re gonna set it up. We’re gonna do our first round of invites. We’re probably gonna schedule ours for March 28th, so we’ll have four weeks to promote the event.

So that’ll give, everybody on the team an an opportunity to invite 4,000 of their connections, which. with, we’ll, we’ll should hit about 16,000 people invited that way. so that, that, those are kind of some of the, the basics that we’re kind of looking for there in terms of, of posting actual content on there, on LinkedIn about it.

we, we don’t do a whole lot of posting. Typically what I’m gonna do is I’ll post about it at the beginning. I’ll post a reminder. In between there, it’s just regular content, so I don’t, don’t mention it a whole lot. I might use some video clips from previous ones to promote it. I don’t do a lot of that.

I should probably do more. but really the biggest thing that, the one that really drives the views for us is, is doing the invites. doing those thousand invites every week, that really drives 90. 95% of our people. we have built an email list, so we’ve got a few thousand people that we can email. it, for, for a presentation like today where this is a reschedule and we were scrambling, we leaned really hard on it, on the email list.

Otherwise, typically it’s, you know, you get an email or two about it letting you know, Hey, it’s coming up if you wanna join us. Great. today was a little bit more aggressive. Today was, Hey, we rescheduled. Hey, hope you can make it. Then when I went live, I pushed the button and said, Hey, we are actually live.

It’s actually working today. again, just trying to push that attendance. so those are kind of some of the things that, you know, we’re, we’re kind of working on there.

Alright, let’s see here. Alright. If you have any other questions, let me know. It looks like I’m just about to the end of them here. So I do do really appreciate everybody who did, did hop on today. like I said, I know what the short notice and the rescheduling was not as convenient as, as, as before.

But, I really do appreciate 

[00:54:38] everybody meet. So, one more question here from, from Jordan. have you found that there is a sweet spot in regard to time of day and day of the week for maximum attendance? It can depend a little bit on your industry, but I’ll kind of give you the general guidelines for what we’ve done.

I know some people I know like if you go to a networking event that’s almost always in the morning or something like that before work, that that does not work well on LinkedIn. The morning can be okay, but we’ve actually found that for Jet for Attendance is actually afternoon for us Eastern Time.

So 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM Eastern, 3:00 PM might be getting a little late in the day, but especially if you’ve got a lot of people further west, maybe central time mountain, Pacific, if you’ve got a lot more connections on that side, pushing it later in the day Eastern is probably fine. as far as day of the week goes, Wednesday and Thursday are usually pretty good. Tuesdays decent, I would never do Friday. and unless it’s, unless your people have day jobs that they wouldn’t be able to watch, like if it’s some people who’ve got side gigs or side hustles, if that’s your focus, I would not do it on the weekends.

So, qan, that’s, that’s for us, you know, for us it’s the people we talk to are professionals is their full-time position. They can make time during their workday. ’cause they’re typically, you know, in a leadership role and can do that. So we do ’em during the day. you know, but if that is not your audience or an evening one, right.

Lot used to, back in the day, it was very, very common for, for, webinars and things to be in the evening, because people were off of work and the people who were, they were promoting to, or beginners who had day jobs. So, It depends, like I said. So short answer is, it depends. For us, we generally do 2:00 PM either Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Eastern time.

that is what works best for us. Feel free to experiment as, as needed. this is actually a really good question because I know some people say, oh, I, I, I, I, not everybody showed up. What’s the point? You know, those are the people, other people who are like, go get off my lawn. You know, they, so what percentage of signups show up?

I would aim for 15%. it can vary. we’ve seen probably as high as, I’ve seen, as high as 25% show up live. I’ve seen as low as 3% show up live. We’ve seen some bad ones and if, you know, so it, it varies a lot. we’re aim, we’re aiming in that 10 to 15% range typically, which I know sounds low. It is low.

some, some of the other things we’re doing is right. We get keep, we looked at some of those that way. LinkedIn helps you promote the event. And how it continues to notify people even after the event happened and continues to push it to people so you’ll get more and more views even after it happens.

So the replay, when you, at least in the case of a live stream or an audio event, the replay becomes available almost as soon as I push the end button. So, within five minutes, the replay is gonna be on the screen here available for everybody. and LinkedIn’s gonna push a notification out and say, Gary was live doing this event.

More new people are gonna come and see it, so they may not have been here live. I think today the peak I saw, I think the peak I saw was right around 105, which is more people than actually registered for the end. This is a very strange one, because we had so many people, we had 1300 people who registered for yesterday.

So, I was expecting between a hundred, typically 150 to 200 people to show up for something like that. with that number of people registering, so. Those, those are kind of the, the benchmarks I go for, when we’re kind of looking at this stuff and then, right. And it’s just following up and sending out messages and stuff like that to get the rest of the, the, the people to kind of come 

[00:58:43] in from there.

So, with that, it looks like that is all the questions, and if I missed one. email me please. I’m, I apologize if I missed it, Gary, at Pipelineology dot com I will, I will try and answer it here for you. otherwise I think you’ve, you guys asked great questions. Thanks so much for attending today.

’cause I really do appreciate the flexibility and going from one day to another and all of that, was, it’s kind of a stressful, stressful couple days here, kind of scrambling to make this happen. So I really, really do appreciate all the people who did make the time today to, to show up. So. thanks so much everybody.

Have a great rest of your day. happy, happy leap day. maybe we’ll do another one in four years on a leap day. But take care everybody. we’ll see you. I’ll see you next month. Please, please come. Please come to that one too. So.