Episode 398: Establishing A Productive Daily Routine 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.

0:01:07 – (Bob Woods): And we also do have an ebook available for this upcoming subject on establishing a productive daily routine on LinkedIn. You can download that @SocialSalesLink.com day I am Bob woods and I’m joined by Bryn Tillman as Stan has the day off. How are you doing, Brynne?

0:01:26 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m good, Bob, how are you?

0:01:29 – (Bob Woods): I’m doing well, thank you. Appreciate that. So you hear Brynne, Stan and Myself Talk about LinkedIn and how to use start sales conversations without being salesy like all the time. It’s our gig, it’s our thing. But you might be thinking, hey, I’ve still gotta sell. How do I do all this great stuff the SSL team talks about and sell at the same time? Well, Brynne is here to tell you how to establish a productive daily routine on LinkedIn while still having that all-important time to sell.

0:02:06 – (Bob Woods): And since this is one of Brynne’s favorite subjects, just going to have her just take things over and take us home.

0:02:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Brynne, I love this. Thank you so much, Bob. You know, I really love the idea that we have a really good, solid foundation in what to do every day. And so I’m going to kind of quickly run through some of the things that I do every day. There are some things in here that you’re going to say, you know what, that’s just too much. I’m not going to do that. But here’s the thing, when we get into a routine, like I don’t even notice the time, right? Like I just don’t. It’s just part of like I have time where I’m looking at email, I have time where it just becomes part of the fabric of the day. So as we build out this kind of list, it can feel like a lot, but a lot of it is just quick little things to do that are not necessarily going to take up that much time.

0:03:14 – (Brynne Tillman): So the first thing I do in the morning, and typically I’m doing this right on my mobile, is I look at my notifications and my network tab. So my notifications are going to tell me if anyone commented on my content, or anyone mentioned me, or if someone that I rang the bell for that I’m following posted content. This is really an important opportunity to engage with the people that we want to engage with that and it’s necessary to engage with the other members of my network.

0:03:55 – (Brynne Tillman): And this is where you can go in and engage, nurture, really, the folks that have a work anniversary or birthday. And so I check those out first thing in the morning. Now side note on this, on the desktop I use getmagical.com, which is a Chrome extension that can house a lot of these messages because these messages will probably be used over and over again. But what’s wonderful is that in magical, you can have like kind of fill-in-the-blanks so you can add in something that makes it very personal.

0:04:37 – (Brynne Tillman): So you can add in their company name or something that will help to customize or tailor, let’s use the word tailor, a message. So I highly recommend magical.com on your mobile. There’s a native like did you ever type in your on your mobile like something and it goes, it spits out I’m on a call or I’m in a meeting, I’ll call you later. That is part of text replacement. So every mobile phone has it, it’s in different places.

0:05:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Typically, it’s called text replacement, and you can actually email yourself templates that you’re using over and over again. So I have five or six that are in my mobile device, so that when I am in the morning looking at my notifications and my network, I can quickly send out messages, but also tailor them to each person. So that’s the first thing that I do. Also, by the way, I’ve got like happy birthday messages and engagers of my content that I want to connect with. I have a connection request.

0:05:54 – (Brynne Tillman): So really having those templates in place is really important. And by the way, if you need help creating them, we have a complimentary session if you’re here live, the next one is May 15th, where you can come into our coaching and we can help you build out and tailor the messages, or Even set up GetMagical.com in your Chrome or Edge. And if you are hearing this after May 15th, no worries, because we run it every third Thursday at 1:00 Eastern. So you can go to SocialSalesLink.com

0:06:31 – (Brynne Tillman): events, and we can help to tailor these for you. Bob, did you want to add something?

0:06:36 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, I was going to say this is probably a good time to mention the ebook again for people who want to have it too. It’s at Social. A lot of, lot of URLs today, socialsaleslink.com day D A Y. It’s the easiest way to do it. You’ll get all the stuff there that Bryn is talking about today.

0:06:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. So the next thing I do is I hop into who’s viewed my profile. So, who’s viewed my profile? I’m getting first-degree connections, people I’m already connected to, and people I’m not connected to. So I’ll take a look, and I view this like it’s caller id. I do not return everybody’s call, but I look to see if this is someone I’d like to have a conversation with. And if it’s a first-degree connection, I’ll send a quick little note that says thanks for visiting my profile. It’s been some time since we last connected. May I ask what brought you here today?

0:07:31 – (Brynne Tillman): And it’s not, I’m not prospecting, I’m not. I’m just saying, hey, what brought you to my profile? Simple. If it’s a second degree or beyond, you can send a quick little connection request. Right? Thanks for visiting my profile. I had a chance to look at yours and noticed something, right? Something that’s the tailoring part. What did I notice? Right? So if you’re open, let’s connect. P.S., may ask what brought you to my profile?

0:08:01 – (Brynne Tillman): And this is a great way to just start that conversation. The next thing I do is I check my inbox, I check my messages, right? Just like I check my email. Actually check my messages a few times, at least twice a day, if not more. I’m also getting notifications, which often will bring me back into my messages. But at least twice a day, check your messages, and if you have Sales Navigator, make sure you’re checking in both places because they are segregated. If you started a message thread in Sales Navigator, you’re likely not going to see that on LinkedIn.com, and I want to make sure you’re not missing those messages. So make sure that you’re looking at both.

0:08:49 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s, you know, checking your messages a couple times a day obviously is really, really Important. Okay, so then the next exercise is managing my inbound invitations. I go in and say, Who’s asking me to connect? And unfortunately for me, I’ve got 30,000 connections, which is the max. So I have to disconnect from people in order to connect with people. So this can get backed up for me, but I don’t want it to get backed up for you.

0:09:19 – (Brynne Tillman): And there are three ways that we want to handle these inbound invitations, right? The first way that we want to handle it is we want to take a look and say, if I were in a networking meeting, would I want a conversation with this person? And if the answer is yes, you’re going to accept the connection and send a welcome message that starts that conversation. If they have a message, use that message. Right? To have that conversation.

0:09:48 – (Brynne Tillman): The next one is, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to connect with this person. I don’t see that we have a lot in common. It’s not really an industry I serve. But, you know, they’re local or there’s something. Or maybe we have 25 shared connections. And so I want to know why they’re connecting before I connect, but I don’t want to ignore them, which is number three. So now we’re on number two, which is I want to reply before accepting. And you can do that on a desktop, or you can actually do that on mobile if they have sent you a message initially.

0:10:25 – (Brynne Tillman): If they just send a connection request, you can only respond without connecting on the desktop. But you want to have a quick little message that says, Thanks so much. I’ll start with that, and then I’ll go back to the welcome message. But it might be thanks so much for your connection request. Typically only connect with people I know or engage with on LinkedIn. May ask, hey, you found me. Then I can hit ignore.

0:10:50 – (Brynne Tillman): But because I now sent a message, they’re in my inbox, I can connect with them later if I should choose. But now I’ve. I’ve responded; I haven’t ignored them. Now, if I know I want to connect with them, what my welcome message is, something like, Thanks so much for connecting with me on LinkedIn. I’m not sure if you’re using LinkedIn for sales, but if you are, I’ve got some great, valuable resources in our library. If you’re interested, let me know. I’m happy to send a link. And I ask permission to send a link, and I’d say maybe one out of three or one out of four, ask for it.

0:11:23 – (Brynne Tillman): So. And it’s okay if they don’t. I haven’t spammed them, and by the way, realize they’ve asked me to connect. So I want to know, like, why do they want to connect? And this will help me to identify if what I’m doing is of interest to them or did they are connected to sell me, which is very possible. Hopefully, they don’t pitch me too badly. Okay, so that’s managing invitations, the next thing I might do, and this is in no particular order, and actually, sometimes I will do this for the week.

0:11:54 – (Brynne Tillman): I will look at who I am talking to this week, and I’ll mine their connections. So I’ll identify exactly who they know that I want to meet. And so, I actually use Sales Navigator. So I actually will save that list in Sales Navigator that I can pull up. If you’re using the free LinkedIn, you could use your bookmarks to save that list. But then, if the opportunity arises, typically when they’re like, oh, you did such a great job. Thank you so much.

0:12:26 – (Brynne Tillman): You can now kind of move into. Well, I’m so glad we’ve been able to help you do X, Y, and Z. You know, I don’t know if you know, but the way I’ve typically grown my business has been from introductions from my happy clients. You’re connected to quite a few people that I’d love to get in front of. Do you have five minutes where I can quickly run these names by you and get your thoughts? And now if I’m talking to five or six clients a week, I have the opportunity, and it may not be right in every call. Right. Like if there’s an issue or there’s a challenge you’re solving, wait till that’s solved and they’re happy. Before you ask for an introduction or even permission to name drop, you know, it’s really important.

0:13:07 – (Brynne Tillman): But ideally, if you’ve built relationships, this is the ultimate opportunity to grow your business through your warm market. Now the next thing I might do, and I used to do more of this, and as I’m, you know, going through my list, I realized I probably should start doing this again, is send a mobile message. So I used to do, like during COVID times, five messages a day. And I would send video messages. Excuse me, five video messages a day. Now, these are so easy to do, but you can only do them on mobile. So you hop into somebody’s LinkedIn profile, and you click on message, and you go down to send a bit. Take a video, send a video.

0:13:57 – (Brynne Tillman): And you just do a little selfie. There’s an over 90% response rate. Now you can only do this with your first-degree connections, but this is a great way to re-engage with someone that you know, even if this is they looked at your profile, sent a video message, or you know, they engaged with your content, send a video message. There are so many ways that you can do this. The other is to just do a search of your first-degree connections that meet a certain criterion and just kind of go through them methodically. Five a day, send a video message. It’s amazing how strong that connection will be. And if you have a great piece of content that you want to share, send a video message. Say, hey, we recently put out this blog post, and I thought of you, thought you might get some value from it. I’m going to stick a little link below.

0:14:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Or if you like the permission to send a link, you could say, if you’re interested, let me know, I’ll send the link. But when I send a video message, I typically send the link. I feel like I’ve warmed that up. So, hey Bob, I hope you’re doing well. Recently put out a blog post on Prompt Writing Made Easy from our best-selling book Prompt Writing Made Easy. And you know, I just, I thought you might get some value from it. I put a link below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

0:15:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Right, that’s it. Simple. But you’re engaging on a daily basis now. I also love giving back, and sometimes I just do this weekly, not daily, but this might be, you know, I’m making an introduction for someone or many introductions if it’s a networking partner or I’m sending a recommendation or endorsing someone for skills that they have that I’ve experienced. Right. Quoting them in a blog post. Right. Those are like kind of give back.

0:15:55 – (Brynne Tillman): So, you know, often we’re sharing, I think we’ve done a podcast interview. We’ll share that content. Right. Anything that will help someone else is exactly what we’re talking about. And so that could be once a week. You could do that for five or six people, or once a day. I’ll also look at ringing the bell for folks. This isn’t working as well as I’d like it to work because now, when you connect with someone, it’s automatically ringing their bell. And so I have to unring bells, and it’s not really that thrilling for me. But I do try to follow purposefully three to five people a day, whether they’re prospects or referrals. Partners or influencers that are sharing content that my network would love. Like I try to do that on a daily basis.

0:16:50 – (Brynne Tillman): I also find, share, and engage on content. And you can do this in search. You can do this by ringing the bell. You can do this. I use Sales Navigator to find content to engage with. Based on my prospects, I want to engage with their content, and I try to engage. So my thing so we teach Bob, Stan and I teach 10 to 1 ratio engage 10 times more than you post. And since I post every day, I really try to engage 10 times at least a day.

0:17:23 – (Brynne Tillman): That doesn’t mean like it could be a comment, a like, share, you know, mix it up. But I do try to engage as much as possible on other people’s content every day. We recommend three to five times a day, unless you’re sharing every day, and then we do recommend 10 times a day. And if you have marketing support and that to you is overwhelming, how am I going to find that kind of content? One of the things this is sort of a really, I think, a really great way to leverage a VA or some support is as your company page, they can go out to the content, engage, and then mention you.

0:18:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So, as the company page, I could go out and say StanRobinson Jr., right. But I’m on the company page. This post on Sales Navigator is, you know, something I thought you might find interesting. And then now Stan is ping to come in at Bob Woods. This post on prompt writing for marketing is something I thought you might get a kick out of, or I’d love your thoughts. We’d love, you know, we’d love your thoughts on this.

0:18:47 – (Brynne Tillman): And so you can have a VA going out as the company page, finding the content for you to engage on and then mentioning you in that comments and so now you’re getting the brand of the company and your personal brand and you all you have to do is respect respond to the pings that your company page has mentioned you on. It’s just kind of fun. The next thing I do, and I kind of do this weekly, is engage with influencers. So, for example, Mark Hunter or Meredith Elliot Powell, or Jeb Blunt are all influencers. Anthony and Arena are all great influencers in the sales arena, and they are attracting the same people we want to have conversations with.

0:19:38 – (Brynne Tillman): So I want to make sure that in my engagement I’m out engaging with them and the people that are engaging with them and then I can actually even search all of my first degree connections that follow Meredith and I could or follow say Anita Nielsen or Colleen Stanley or Liz Hyman. Right. So maybe I found this amazing article from Liz Hyman on the sales process. I can use this by going to all of my connections, my first-degree connections that follow Liz Hyman, and I could say Hey, I just came across this amazing article by Liz Hyman on the sales process, and I noticed you follow her.

0:20:22 – (Brynne Tillman): I thought I’d send it your way because I think it’ll bring you some great value. Right? And so I get to start a conversation with an influencer easily. Right. So I’m following content from this influencer, and that’s going to really help me start conversations with my first-degree connections that lead to my solution, not with it. Networking meetings. I love my networking meetings. I recently joined a group called nrg. If anyone’s interested, reach out to me, and they literally make. I think I’ve had 50 introductions to the right people from Mike Wiener, who’s the owner, founder of the group.

0:21:01 – (Brynne Tillman): And literally I get text messages with Bryn, meet Joe, Brynne meet Sally. Like it’s amazing. But I want to prep, you know, my networking meeting prep. So I want to connect with that person on LinkedIn. I may want to search their connections and see who they know, you know, and I want to do some pre-call planning. So now I’m going to just throw in a little AI, and we have a whole prompt on this. If you’re interested, reach out to Bob, Stan or myself and we’ll give you the prompt for pre court, the crispy prompt, context, role, inspiration, scope, prohibitions and you so it’ll interview you but we can give you a great prompt for that.

0:21:45 – (Brynne Tillman): So just reach out to us because we love that. And then biweekly or weekly, you may want to consider creating content, and that could be just a poll or a quote, or you know, anything that’s coming from you, essentially in that original content. So create and post. So I think that might have covered everything in our ebook@SocialSalesLink.com day.

0:22:15 – (Bob Woods): What do you think there, there, there might be even one or two things in there that that weren’t covered, which is another reason why you would want to go to socialsaleslink.com today to download that. So everything is right in front of you there. There are some additional little nuggets in there as well. It’s a great resource to have. It’s probably one of my favorites of all of the ebooks and resources that we have, which seems like numbers in the millions. Nowadays, it feels that way.

0:22:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Maybe the many, many, many, many hundreds getting Maybe. But yes, it does. We have a lot of content.

0:22:58 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, we do.

0:22:59 – (Brynne Tillman): We’ve been doing this for a really long time now.

0:23:02 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Yeah, we do. And obviously it’s not millions, but we do have a lot of ebooks out there. But this one’s probably one of my favorites.

0:23:09 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that.

0:23:10 – (Bob Woods): So with that, we’re going to go ahead and thank you very much for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live, sponsored by Ask. If you’re with us on LinkedIn or YouTube Live right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for those live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast right now, which means we’re recorded to you and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and do that and drop us a like or a comment as well.

0:23:39 – (Bob Woods): If you’d like more information on our podcast, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast again, that’s socialsaleslink.com/podcast. So when you’re out and about this week and every week following that schedule, getting all your sales stuff in, while you’re doing your social selling stuff, be sure to make your sales social.

0:24:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Look, I did it all by myself.

0:24:03 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did. Excellent, excellent stuff. Thanks, everybody.

0:24:07 – (Brynne Tillman): Thanks. Bye.

Outro:

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