Episode 174: Apps for Linkedin Every Social Seller Needs
As Social Sellers, you’ve always been told that you must be equipped with the right skills and tools to succeed at social selling. We’ve covered some of them in our past episodes. For this conversation with Brynne Tillman and Bob Woods, they’re putting the focus on the Five Social Selling Apps every social seller must own to thrive on LinkedIn.
What are the top social selling apps for salespeople?
- Calendly – for booking meetings
- Magical Text Expander – for storing message templates
- Grammarly – for helping you write with confidence
- Listen Notes – for finding podcast episodes that experts and influencers are featured in and also find topics they’re interested in
- ChatGPT – the hottest tool in the market today that do research and creates content easier and faster
Listen now and find out how these five apps should be used for social selling success – the do’s and dont’s and some PRO TIPS from our experts.
View Transcript
Brynne Tillman 00:00
First of all, Hi, I’m Brynne. Bob. Say Hello.
Bob Woods 00:03
Hello, Everyone. So when it comes to doing what we need to do on LinkedIn is social sellers. There are five apps out there that can help us handle a wide variety of tasks that help us work smarter and easier.
Intro 00:19
(Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! As we share LinkedIn, and social selling training strategies and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me Bob Woods every week, making sales social lives. This is the recorded version of our weekly making sales social live show.)
Bob Woods 00:02
So let’s get right into them with number one which is Calendly, Brynne.
Brynne Tillman 00:47
Calendly is by far one of my absolute favorite tools. We use this in so many places, why do I love Calendly? I love it because it makes the connection to conversations so much easier. Now, there are lots of places to use this, we can use this in our profile, we can use it in messaging.
The key though, sometimes is on occasion, we’ll run into someone that feels really uncomfortable, or they think you’re prospecting me, and you want me to do the work and click on your Calendly. Well, you know, there is an alternative. And by the way, in your profile, it’s fine. It’s great. You can even use it in the hyperlink, schedule a call with you. It’s a great place for it.
But in a message, if you’re looking to schedule a call with someone and using Calendly. Here’s what I recommend. Bob, thanks so much for engaging with me. I’m really looking forward to the next steps, please let me know your preferred way to schedule, if it happens to be via calendar link, here’s mine. So what happens is, we are acknowledging that there may be another way that they’d prefer and they won’t feel like we’re pushing that calendar link on them.
As a social seller, we have to make sure that we’re honoring the inbox, and we’re not making them feel spammed. So by offering that it gives us that opportunity. One last thing is that often, they will actually send you their calendar link, which is amazing, right? So they send it back. And you know, they don’t want to do the work. But that’s okay, you’re happy to do the work. So Calendly absolutely love it. Now I use this. Other people have acuity and other things, I guess any calendar link will work. I just find Calendly to be so seamless, Bob, back to you.
Bob Woods 02:40
Yeah, So, Calendly is great. The other place that I like to use it, and this is really simple, is just in the E and your email signature. So, in my opinion, there’s actually two things from LinkedIn, a LinkedIn and social selling perspective that you should be putting in to your signature one is a link to your LinkedIn profile, so that they can go ahead and just check that directly every person out there, when you are on your profile, the URL that shows up in the web address box is your URL. So you can use that like anywhere, essentially, one places I would use that would be in the signature.
The other thing that I would put in your signature is your Calendly link, because someone may read an email and this is outside of what Brynne and I were talking about just more in general someone may read something and they say, you know, hey, I actually want to have a conversation with this person, they can schedule directly from there and it also avoids the entire situation that Brynne said there as well. So with that, we’re going to go on to number two, which is a truly magical thing to do and I make that joke all the time. But you know, y’all probably don’t hear it all the time and that is magical, Brynne.
Brynne Tillman 03:53
I absolutely love magical. So, magical is way more than a shortcut application. It gives you such control and ability and so much time is saved when you use magical. So at its core, it’s a text expander you put in shortcode and you add in messages, templates that you would use over and over again. But the traditional text expander you have to continually add names and other things with magical, You can create a short link with it says name and it will pull the name out of LinkedIn and the ability to send lots of messages using magical is absolutely incredible.
So, right now we have a webinar that we’re running on April 3rd and we have like 180 people that said they wanted to attend and I needed to send a message to every one of them to actually register and it took no time at all using magical you just put in a shortcode the whole message pops up with the links and all those great things. Magical is also rolling out an AI capability in the next couple of weeks. So, I’m really excited and how that integrates into LinkedIn.
My last thing on magical and why I think every single person no two more things. Why I think everyone should use this and not be afraid as this is funded by Greylock. Greylock is a venture capital company fund. That CEO or the chairman of that is Reed Hoffman, who is the founder of LinkedIn. So I feel very confident that this is a white hat application that we’re not breaking any of LinkedIn agreements.
So I’m real comfortable there. Number two, we’re offering you socialsaleslink.com/magical Once you’ve installed magical in Chrome, you can get 17 of our templates. So, go ahead and install at get magical.com. Once that’s done, go back to socialsaleslink.com/magical and you’ll have 17 of our templates which will make your social selling efforts really easy.
Bob Woods 06:05
Yeah, So this is one time when Brynne and I are totally in sync. I have nothing else to add, she would cover she covered everything else that I would want to cover. So, number three we’re gonna go to a tool that you might have heard of before. It’s not real cheap, but it will save your bacon. I don’t know how often I’m a writer, I’m an editor. I’ve done it for years and years and years. It saved me on several occasions. So, number three is Grammarly, Brynne.
Brynne Tillman 06:34
Number three is “Grammarly and Grammarly”. Grammarly, I think is so important because it’s how we show up and I will tell you even though I know the difference between T-H-E-R-E and T-H-E-I-R. Sometimes when I’m typing fast, I mix them up. Spell Check doesn’t catch that Grammarly does commas spell check doesn’t catch Grammarly does, they do like the traditional comma where you have it before the end.
So, it’s going to show you an error if you have an American comma versus the Oxford comma. But that’s a choice that you make, it will also show if you like the tone of the message, it will let you know. There are so many things about grammarly, Especially when you add it in with any of your messages, anything that you’re posting, you just have the Chrome extension on, it’s catching you at every single post every single interaction and I’m really I feel like I couldn’t live without grammarly.
Now, One last thing, I used to say it’s worth paying for, pay for Grammarly. It’s really great but what I used to pay for Grammarly for which is restructuring sentences we can get with ChatGPT now, so I have to start weighing out if maybe the grammarly free is all we need.
Bob Woods 08:04
That’s a really good point. So, that’s something that we’re going to be developing and if it’s if it’s not already obvious, ChatGPT spoiler alert is going to be one of the tools that we’re talking about. That’ll be interesting to see. The only thing that I wanted to bring up about Grammarly is two things.
Number one, it’s not always right, you really have to make sure and just read that what it is suggesting is what you actually want to say because it’s not as sophisticated as ChatGPT so you just have to like read it, make sure.
Number two, sometimes the suggestions that it makes just doesn’t sound right to the ear. So, I always advocate whatever you write, say out loud to make sure that it sounds good to the air because if it sounds good to the ear, it’s going to sound good to the eye. Same thing with Grammarly when it comes to the suggestions and recommendations that it makes, but everything else that I would have said Brynne said,
Especially when it comes to the tone of things. You know, it can detect a conversational tone versus a business tone versus several others and it’s just fantastic. So, Number Four, is a tool that may seem a little out of left field. But as we explain it, you’ll understand why that it’s in this list. So number four is Listen Notes.
Brynne Tillman 09:23
So I love listen notes and you may say well, first of all, I never heard of it. Many of you may not have but it is a platform, a website that curates almost every single podcast that’s out there. So why is this awesome? I believe “Sharing podcasts both in your News feed, Sharing podcasts to people that you’re engaging with in comments, Sharing Podcast by searching people in who may follow which you can do in the free LinkedIn is a great way to Start Conversations.” Most people are sharing their own content. Hey, I want Want to give you this so that you can learn why you should buy from me.
And I think most conversations really should start around something that they care about. So, I’m just going to share one little tip in how I would use this note. So let’s say I want to find people that I’m connected to that follow Brene Brown, and I do a search. And what they do is I go into the search bar, I hit enter, I go to people, I go to all filters.
And then there’s followers of so I’d put in Brene Brown, and I put in first degree relationship at the top. And if I want to go I want CEOs. Only I can do that are people in sales and title, and I hit enter and I get 85 people that I’m already connected to that follow Brene Brown that fits my criteria, maybe geographic location was put in there maybe industry right.
So, now I’ve got this great list of people I’m already connected to. Now I go out to listen notes, and I find a great new Brene Brown, not even her own, Know where she was a guest. And I can reach out to these folks and say, Hey, I noticed we’re both followers of Brene Brown, I recently listened to it. But I recently listened to a podcast. And here were some of my takeaways, let me know if you’re interested, I’m happy to send you a link.
So listen, notes is just a great place to curate. And when you send someone else’s podcast, there is not even a second that they think that you’re spamming them. Because it has nothing to do with you and that’s okay, treat these conversations, treat the Met, you know the people on the other side of the message the same way you would if they were on the other side of the table. And so by starting a conversation around someone that they follow, and a podcast they might like, it’s a great way to rekindle those conversations back to you, Bob.
Bob Woods 11:49
And that’s also good if you don’t know of someone specific that you want to send, but you’re looking for a topic because you can search by keyword as well. So let’s say you want to send someone something that has to do with robotics and AI or robotics and ChatGPT or something like that, you can actually use listen notes to search. And it will bring up individual episodes of podcasts that will have that subject.
So, what you do is you go in and you listen to them. And you figure out if there’s some information in that podcast episode that you would want to forward along. So again, you don’t necessarily need to have a person’s name in front of you, like Brynne suggested, although that’s brilliant. And we do that all the time here, you don’t absolutely need that. So, don’t feel like that you need to have like, you know, like a notable person that both of you are following or that they’re following to use this you can use this with, you know, any subject or anything like that.
So, number five is what’s hot and raging right now. We actually did our episode last week on this had a lot of great feedback and a lot of great content. Because one of the things it does is generate content for you, but you gotta be careful with it. So number five is chat GPT.
Brynne Tillman 13:08
This is a big one, ChatGPT is the big buzz. So for those of you that have not heard about what it is, it’s huge. And it is really the first artificial intelligence platform. The best people have easy access to it can do so much. But I’m gonna say three things that it can do for LinkedIn. So what you can do inside ChatGPT, you can ask it lots of things, you can ask it mathematical formulas, you can ask it to program Python, like there’s so much that you can do and at a very simple level, we can use it for LinkedIn.
I’m gonna do four so the first one I’m going to do is identifying the personality or the DISC profile of someone that you’re going to be talking with. So, if you’re familiar with discs it’s really these personality styles. If you’re not familiar with disc there’s a real fun disc done with birds go find look up Stephen Farber and take flight. Okay, help. They’ll teach you desk but you can grab the URL of their LinkedIn stick it in ChatGPT and say DISC profile and it will tell you if they are dominant and they want to dominate the conversation or if they’re more reserved, and you can get an idea based on their profile, what kind of conversation you may have when you get on a call with them.
Number two, you can help ChatGPT can help you write your own about summary or even your experience. Now while I believe your experience should mostly be about your story and why you’re helping grow grabbing the URL of your company page and putting in ChatGPT the not company page, I apologize, your website, your about section of your website or other websites, you can say recap in under an I say 1800 or 2000 characters move up to 2600.
But you’ll probably add to that. So, and that’s in the about section, you have 2000 in the experience section. So, if you’re doing the about section or the experience section will be 2000. So do 16 or 1800. So you can add to it, but it will really summarize a lot of what you do. And you can even say how this company helps their clients. And it will build kind of how I help versus what we do.
Absolutely amazing! So, that’s number two, right? We did disk, We did profile. Number three, if you are curating a piece of content, and you want to put your own text along with the post, stick the link to that curated piece of content, that blog post that article and say recap in three sentences. And then it will give you two sets, you’re there to sense your you know, your and then edit that to be your own voice.
Number four, Comments on somebody else’s profile, you could go in and grab and say you know, 10 words or less recap of this, there are so many more, but I’m not going to. I’m going to send it back to you, Bob, if you have a couple you want to add. But you can go back to our podcast and we talked a lot about ChatGPT. So Bob, I’m gonna hand it back to you to bring it in for the landing.
Bob Woods 16:40
Yes, so before we do that really quick, there’s just one thing there one thing that I want to touch on really quick that Brynne said, and that’s the in your own voice part because I’m personally am already seeing things coming out that I’m wondering if it’s coming out from this person, or if it’s coming out from ChatGPT or something like that just because it just it doesn’t sound like them.
So you know, view ChatGPT as a beginning point, not as a be all and end all. Make sure that it sounds like you and if it doesn’t, then you may need to rewrite some things to make it sound like you really quick process to do that. Number one, whatever ChatGPT puts out, read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound good to you, it’s because it’s not in your own voice then step two, rewrite it rather in your own voice step three then re-read out loud what you just did to a make sure it sounds like it makes sense and be make sure that it sounds like it came from you.
So, ChatGPT is great, it’s not the be all end all I don’t know if we’ll ever be the be all end all but man it is it’s so great at doing so much. So thanks again for joining us on this disjointed yet successful making sales social live. If you’re with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter right now, we do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions.
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Outro 18:43
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