Episode 386: 8 Mistakes Sales Pros are Making on LinkedIn

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:01:13:11 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone. It’s time for Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the social sales link virtual studios and is brought to you by Ask SSL dot AI. And if you’re joining us live right now, you can see a little QR code in the bottom left corner. Yeah. Click or take a photo or whatever that. And that will take you straight to the page.

00:01:36:03 – (Bob Woods): I’m Bob woods. Brynne Tillman is off today. And Stan Robinson Jr is joining us. How are you doing Stan?

00:01:43:85 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Really good Bob. Good to be here, as always. 

00:01:48:91 – (Bob Woods): Are we wrapped up and ready to go because where we’re going to be talking about a bad thing, but we’re going to turn it into a good thing for our people here.

00:01:58:28 – (Bob Woods): So a lot of sales and revenue-generating professionals are making a lot of mistakes on LinkedIn. Y’all see it. And trust me, Stan and I, we see it all the time too. Right, Stan? 

00:02:13:05 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes, we’re on LinkedIn. I won’t say all day, every day, but a lot and waiting. And there are things that we see over and over again.

00:02:25:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And so that’s why we’re here to talk about them. So that was the foot. Yes. 

00:02:31:75 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. That’s why we are here. So here are the eight biggies in terms of mistakes and what we see. While some of these we see, others are mistakes that you’re making that we don’t see. But they still are mistakes. But no matter what, we’re going to tell you how to avoid them in the first place. So, Stan, why don’t you go ahead and take numero uno? 

00:02:57:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So the first thing that we see a lot of times is people having a LinkedIn profile that is purely self centered, and it looks like the perfect resume. Now, if you are actively job hunting, by all means, that’s great. But if you are in sales, you want to make sure that you position yourself as a resource for your audience.

00:03:25:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): We all listen to the same radio station WII FM? What’s in it for me? And when people visit your profile, the first thing that they want to know is how you can help them. So structure your profile in a way that’s what we call customer-centric. Talk about them, their pain points, their needs, and then how you can help them address them. Bob, any additional thoughts on that? 

00:03:57:11 -(Bob Woods): Yeah. I mean, we all three of us Brynne, Stan and I, we have published a ton of resource sources on LinkedIn profiles. If you are wondering what one actually looks like, just go to Brynne’s, Stan’s or my profiles and because I think that we’ve done it the right way, we teach it and we, you know, we walk the walk and talk the talk.

00:04:21:09 – (Bob Woods): So if you want to get a good idea of what is like, or what a proper one is like specifically for a salesperson, you go ahead and do that. And I’m a little distracted right now only because now I have the old style OG radio jingle in my head for WII FM.

00:04:43:13 – (Bob Woods): So, and I can’t get out, I need help. So before we do that, Jeff Young says great point. That’s actually two mistakes. Yeah. And there are many mistakes that people can make in their profiles that are, you know, that are either a resume or sometimes they just come across as way too salesy and they’re not a resource.

00:05:08:22 – (Bob Woods): So, I mean, you know, you got both right there. So I’m going to take number two, which is connecting. And then immediately pitching someone what we like to call. And it’s accurate, and it’s a little naughty, too. We call it a pitch slap. Imagine where we got that from. But it’s really bad, though, because if you’re in person, chances are you wouldn’t pitch immediately to someone else if you’re in a 1 to 1 conversation.

00:05:43:29 – (Bob Woods): If you’re in a group conversation, I know some people would. Most people would not do that. They do not do that. Instead, establish a relationship to see, quite frankly, if your product is something that they even truly need, they also don’t know you. You haven’t built any kind of value with them, any kind of trust with them. My friend Alicia Bar, her entire thing, which is one of the reasons why we get, along so well together is, her saying is, don’t be a Dbag.

00:06:19:24 – (Bob Woods): You. I can imagine what you know what that means? I don’t want to get a an explicit for this, rating for this episode, so I’m not going to say it, but, just keep that in mind all the time. Don’t pitch slap. Don’t be a Dbag. What do you do instead? Share content with them?

00:06:40:29 – (Bob Woods): Just, Jeff Yang, I knew Pitch Slap would be Jake Yang says. I knew Pitch Slap would be would be one of them. And yeah, I mean, just because you see it all the time on LinkedIn and I mean all the time on LinkedIn. So, you know, instead of connecting and immediately pitching, why not offer the them a piece of valuable content. Content aid or that will provide value to them?

00:07:07:24 – (Bob Woods): Something that will actually help goes back to my saying, don’t talk about helping people, just help people.

00:07:14:03 – (Bob Woods): The caveat here, though, is ask permission to share it before you actually share it, because then it’ll seem like spam, even though you don’t mean it as spam, it may come across to them as spam. So, ask permission to share it first.

00:07:29:28 – (Bob Woods): If they say okay, share it, and then follow up, follow up, a couple of days later. Hope you enjoyed the content. You know, and then however you want to phrase it then offer a call and not a discovery call, just a call to talk about what they’re doing, and, you know, very not slowly necessarily, because it’s going to be pretty evident if you’re a match right away.

00:07:56:19 – (Bob Woods): But, you may not be a match at this particular point in time, but you may be down the line. That’s why you build relationships. So don’t connect that immediately. Pitch, don’t pitch, slap. Don’t be a Dbag. Build the relationship. Yeah. Number three Stan. 

00:08:14:08 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So number three is connecting. And then forgetting as opposed to connecting and then engaging with your new connection.

00:08:28:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And I know it’s easy to do because we’re all so busy and so forth and so on and only have a limited time to spend on LinkedIn. But if someone has sent you an invitation to connect or you’ve sent them an invitation, particularly in the latter case, if you’ve invited them to connect, you know it’s a person of interest to you.

00:08:49:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You know it’s someone that you can offer value to. Now, I do realize, and this relates to what you were talking about earlier, about when we’re in sales and we talk about value, we think that our solution, our product or service offers value to the person. Yeah, that’s not what we mean by value at this point. We mean a content that helps them do their job more effectively that they would share with a colleague or appear in the industry.

00:09:27:19 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So it may be industry related content, statistic that you’ve come across, but not your latest product data sheet or promo. Now, when we talk about connecting and engaging, when someone accepts your invitation as opposed to a pitch slap, send them a welcome message saying, hey, great to be connected with you. Look forward to continuing our conversation.

00:09:52:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Something along those lines because you need to build that relationship. As Bob was talking about, when you first connect, you have not earned the right to get their time and to start to sell them. So when you connect with new people, make sure that you take the time to continue the conversation on LinkedIn. Don’t connect with someone and then wake up three weeks later and say, oh, Bob accepted my invitation.

00:10:23:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And that was the last message. I never thanked him. Bob then any thoughts on that one? 

00:10:31:45 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. No. You, you did that absolutely with perfection. Chef’s kiss. As they say. We are going to talk a little bit more about the types of content that you should be sharing a little bit later. But just keep in mind what Stan said that has got to be content that is of value, not because you think something is of value.

00:10:55:08 – (Bob Woods): It’s got to be of value to them. That helps them with whatever business type of thing that they have that your product may or that that your product may solve. But at the same time, it’s got to be something that, you know, it’s like, oh yeah, I can do that right now. That way you are being of help rather than talking about how you help someone.

00:11:14:15 – (Bob Woods): So yeah, that was absolutely perfect. So the next one kind of goes in line with what Stan was saying. And that’s, doing, performing whatever you want to say. Random acts of social. In other words, you don’t have a process for sharing and engaging with other people’s content. So sharing your own content and engaging with other people’s content and yes, you should engage with other people’s content.

00:11:40:06 – (Bob Woods): And that’s important because not only are you helping to promote the other person who you are engaging with, you’re also exposed to their networks. So keep that in mind as well. If for no other reason you don’t want to engage with someone, just think of it as, oh, people are going to be seeing what I am engaging with.

00:11:59:26 – (Bob Woods): And I don’t even know these people. And also make sure that the share is of value and you’re not doing that. You know, great post type of thing because that is just absolutely useless. So how do you go about this? First of all, lock out time in your calendar. Now, what that is is going to be entirely dependent on what your current scheduling situation is.

00:12:26:08 – (Bob Woods): I’m really not going to recommend anything because that there’s so many different situations. It’s impossible. I do suggest that you block out the time to the point where it’s an appointment on your calendar. If you have like a calendly or that type of thing where people can book appointments with you without you knowing it, that block will prevent anyone from coming in and, and preemptively scheduling with you.

00:12:52:10 – (Bob Woods): Now, obviously, if you need to move before a meeting or whatever, move it. Don’t delete it. That’s probably the other big thing. And that’s something that I’ve just that I just added like two weeks ago to that kind of statement move. Don’t delete that block. So the next thing is to set goals and to not only set goals but to scale up to them.

00:13:12:09 – (Bob Woods): So if you’re going from 0 to 100 and doing anything, you’re going to tire yourself out pretty quick. Or in the case of a car, you’re going to tire out the car pretty quick too. So, you know, if it’s posting one time a week and commenting a couple days a week, you do that for a couple weeks.

00:13:28:07 – (Bob Woods): There you go. I could probably double that to posting two times a week and commenting two times a week. Scale up to what you can do consistently because it’s all about consistency. And that’s the other big thing. You have to be consistent. And the LinkedIn algorithm likes consistency. So the more consistent you are, the more the LinkedIn algorithm is going to go, hey, this person actually is on.

00:13:53:24 – (Bob Woods): Maybe I should you know, I being the algorithm should boost this person’s post a little bit more. So and then with commenting you can use LinkedIn searches. We have done plenty of other episodes on this. And there’s steps and things like that that it’s impossible to show. But you know, you can set up searches to search for the people who you want to comment on.

00:14:18:21 – (Bob Woods): And that gets into prospecting by influencer and things like that. If you want, you can search for previous shows that we’ve done on that. But there is an entire strategy to that. Just commenting in general, though. Do it. You will absolutely see benefits from it. Stan. 

00:14:39:10 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. Not anything I can add to that. It’s commenting helps everyone. 

00:14:47:73 – (Bob Woods): And of course posting content as well. And speaking of posting, let’s get to number five. 

00:14:53:00 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes, number five is don’t post in ghost. Now we’re not always able to find a rhyme for everything, but this one works. This one definitely works. So what do we mean by don’t posting and ghost? Well, we with Bob was just talking about the importance of consistent content.

00:15:12:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): The reason that we’re encouraging you to post consistent content is because LinkedIn’s algorithms like it. So you’re not doing it just to check a box. You’re doing it to gain visibility and to position yourself as a resource for your audience. So your goal is to have people comment on your posts. Likes and other reactions are great. Those are fine.

00:15:39:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And you can see who’s liked your content, but you really want people that to comment. When they do comment, you want to make sure that you respond, If nothing else, it’s a demonstration of the fact that you respect the fact that they’ve taken the time to comment on what you’ve written. And it also helps from the perspective of the algorithms, because now a conversation is going and that is sending signals to LinkedIn’s algorithm that your posts may be of interest to more people because people are starting to talk about it.

00:16:18:03 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So what Bob mentioned about scheduling time in your calendar or some type of tickler 30 minutes or so after you post between 30 to 60 minutes, make sure you go back and look and see if anyone is engaging with it so that you can, in turn engage with them. Bob, any other thoughts on that one? Because, 

00:16:41:11 – (Bob Woods): that’s another pitch. Pitch perfect one, especially that time frame thing after you post and people are commenting because LinkedIn’s algorithm really picks up on that. And then also the other interesting thing that I’ve been noticing happening lately is that sometimes a day or two, your comments may even pick up a little bit more. So always keep an eye on that.

00:17:06:00 – (Bob Woods): As well. Always. You know, you don’t have to be checking all the time after like a day or two or whatever. What I do is I have the LinkedIn app on my phone and it notifies me through notifications. WhenI do have someone, I would suggest engaging that. Speaking of Jeff Young’s comments, engage make it so definitely do that with your LinkedIn app as well, so that, you know, when people are coming in, I would still kind of hang out.

00:17:44:21 – (Bob Woods): On LinkedIn after that initial 30 minutes to an hour thing, you know, just it in a separate browser window or whatever. But in a place where someone posts, you can see it pop up and your notifications. But, that’s really important, I think. 

00:18:01:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah, and Bob, one key you mentioned is notifications, because you can search notifications and filter by your posts and mentions, which saves you time, makes your life a little bit easier.

00:18:16:09 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. That’s a really good point..Like that one a lot. So number six is and this gets back to what I mentioned before about content specifically. So sharing or creating content that you care about, which is something that you don’t want to do. And instead you need to understand what your audience wants to consume, what they need help with, because otherwise they’re not going to care and they’re not going to read.

00:18:45:26 – (Bob Woods): And the perfect example of this, and we’ve mentioned this a lot of times, but I think it’s the best way to show how important this is. Several years ago, we were coaching an investment professional and they were like, I don’t know what’s going on. I’m getting comments, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

00:19:06:08 – (Bob Woods): So we went into their comments. The only people who were commenting on this investment professionals content was other investment professionals. So in other words, his competition, which is something that quite frankly, you don’t want. We look through some of his content and determined that he because he was talking about what he wanted to talk about, the only people who were interested were the same people in the business.

00:19:29:05 – (Bob Woods): So we shifted his strategy to talking about what his audience wanted to consume, but that around. So how do you do that? How do you find out what your audience wants to consume? You ask them. It’s that simple. You can do that just either in a post, you can do a whole if you’d like. You can ask current customers what they would like to see.

00:19:52:10 – (Bob Woods): Heck, even ask prospects. You know it doesn’t really matter. Depending on what type of business you’re in, you may want to ask friends now if you’re now if you’re like in a heavily engineering type of field, your friends aren’t going to know what to ask about. But if it’s like investment, professional real estate, everybody’s got questions about that type of stuff.

00:20:13:10 – (Bob Woods): So ask them to especially networking partners and networking partners. They can help you because if they have questions, they’re probably getting questions about you from other people. So they’ll actually know how to answer already. But you can also use that as kind of what’s the phrase I’m looking for just, ideas for your content that help other people.

00:20:39:14 – (Bob Woods): So again, this gets back to, well, no, it doesn’t get back to, just help people. Just help people. Don’t talk about what you want to talk about. Help people, Stan.

00:20:51:74 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. That is good. I’m ready to move on to the next one cause you covered it. 

00:20:57:03 – (Bob Woods): Okay. Yeah. And that’s cold calling on LinkedIn. And this is before you even get to the pitch slap. Oh my God. Yes. It’s true. How many pitch slap I you just just don’t just don’t sorry Stan. But I needed to say that. 

00:21:13:23 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Boy. Yeah. And in this context, by cold calling, we mean reaching out to people that you have no relationship with. And that you haven’t done your research on. So people who’ve been in sales for a while, when they learned that LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world, and you can filter people by industry and title, many times their mentality is, oh, this is one other way that I can cold call that I can reach out to people, because here is this goldmine of prospects, and

00:21:57:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): I’m going to reach out to them the same way I’m used to reaching out to people from the past. And as Bob was saying it, you need to earn the right to get their time because people are only going to do business with people that they know, like and trust. And it takes some time to build that trust.

00:22:18:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So please do not view LinkedIn as yet another channel for you to reach out to people blindly without having done your research on them. The great news about LinkedIn is you can take a quick look at someone’s profile, and in 2 or 3 minutes, you can find 2 or 3 things that you can use to build rapport. Let them know that you’ve done your research by bringing those types of things up in conversation.

00:22:46:29 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And again, it positions you as someone who is trying to bring value to them, rather than simply prospecting them and seeing if they’re a qualified prospect for your particular product. 

00:23:01:58 – (Bob Woods): You know, that one’s so simple, yet so important. I think we’re just going to leave it there. But it is very important. Now, if well, I, I’m going to say one thing.

00:23:12:19 – (Bob Woods): If because I can’t help myself. So, if you cold call and you’re successful with it, keep doing it. I mean, that’s fine. We don’t ever discourage cold calling. It’s just unlinked in. You’re expected almost to really develop more of a relationship because it is a business networking platform. So really, if you’re doing cold calling on the phone, it’s working for you. That’s great. Just realize that it’s probably not going to work on LinkedIn. 

00:23:47:67 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. And one reason that what we’ve been talking about here are all ties together. We started with building a profile that positions you as a resource. Realize that whenever you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, they can see who has looked at their profile.

00:24:06:08 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Even if you just look at their profile, they will come back and look at your profile. And if your profile is talking about how you’re a quota killer and the master negotiator, that is not what they’re looking for in terms of value from you. 

00:24:23:74 – (Bob Woods): Right. They want to know what you can bring them. They don’t want to see or I don’t know if they want to see bragging or or whatever, but bragging doesn’t do you any good in their eyes because it doesn’t tell you how you can help them.

00:24:39:05 – (Bob Woods): That sounds good. I think it’s the first time I would put it like that. Yeah, that sounds good. I like that. So the final one that we’re going to get to is not leveraging your connections to get referrals or asking permission to mention their names, to prospect. So this is all about leveraging what we call your warm network.

00:24:57:16 – (Bob Woods): The easiest way to do this is to take inventory or CPR. Your current first degree connections, and you can do that by downloading those from LinkedIn. The process has changed a little bit. You get a heck of a lot more information than you used to, but one of the things that does come down is your current first degree, network.

00:25:19:23 – (Bob Woods): So you look through that, those names and then, you know, depending on your relationship with them, you can then go into LinkedIn and you search to find out who they know that you want to know specifically. And then you could, if you have a good enough relationship with them, ask on a call or a meeting if you could.

00:25:40:21 – (Bob Woods): If there are people that you want to meet with them and then also reciprocate and ask them before the meeting to go through your network and your second degree connection, or your first degree connections or second degree connections with them. What, you know, the people that they might want to know as well, definitely reciprocate.

00:26:02:07 – (Bob Woods): And then you can either have them set something up for you, or simply ask permission to mention their name in any type of reach out type of activity that they’re doing. That one’s really simple. This one gets overlooked a lot. This one gets overlooked a lot. This is something that more people should be doing, because Warm Network is much more effective than just going out cold.

00:26:26:13 – (Bob Woods): And I’m not talking about cold, but a cold calling. Just going out cold with people, Stan. 

00:26:41:72 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. So true. And what you said about it being under utilized and by all of us, myself included. Oh yeah. Yep. The best way to start a relationship with someone is to be referred or introduced by someone that they know, because the refers credibility transfers to you, and it helps accelerate the process of building trust.

00:26:58:20 – (Bob Woods): I could not agree more. So today’s summary of the episode is simple. You know what the common mistakes are now? So stop doing them. We’ve also given you some actions to take instead of doing that dreaded eight. And I just realized that that rhymed as well. We’re doing pretty good with the rhymes today, Stan.

00:27:22:02 – (Bob Woods): I’m just it’s just kind of working out that way. Yeah. So with that, thank you for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live, sponsored by Ask SSL Dot AI, if you’re with us live on LinkedIn or YouTube right now, we do this every week. Trust me, every week, well, practically every week we do take holidays off.

00:27:42:03 – (Bob Woods): So keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, which means we’re recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, subscribe, follow, like, comment all of the other things that all the other people out there want you to do with their content. We do appreciate that as well. Thanks very much. We do two shows weekly, this one and our Making Sales Social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business.

00:28:07:15 – (Bob Woods): Many more areas. If you’d like more info on our podcast social sales linked dot com slash podcast, it’s easy to remember, easy to type and so with that, when you’re out and about, be sure that you are making your sales social. Yes. Oh, with authority too. I like that. Very good. Thanks, Stan. Thank you everybody. Have a great day.

00:28:31:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Thanks everyone.

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