Episode 192: How to Network in Other People’s LinkedIn Events

Bob Woods  00:00

Welcome, Fellow human beings and maybe so many eyes, you just never really come to Making Sales Social Live, brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa and I’m joined as always by the fellow LinkedIn and Social selling professional also known as LinkedIn whisper Brynne Tillman. Sup Brynne!

Brynne Tillman  00:22

Hey, Bob! You know, you always make me giggle, and some guys may be listening to this. The funny thing is, that’s actually probably true. 

Bob Woods  00:00

Yeah, now I know. 

Intro  00:34

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 Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live show. 

Bob Woods  00:57

I promise you, we’re not going to be talking about AI today. But you know, it’s out there. So just everybody knows about it. What we are going to be talking about today is we’re going to take a bit of a deep dive into some strategies, tips, and techniques to maximize your networking potential, when it comes to LinkedIn events. 

So if you’re a sales pro or sales leader, you can definitely take advantage of these to learn. We’re going to talk about how to effectively search for events and to find out how to properly engage with attendees at other people’s events. So think of these events just like regular events. 

I mean, we’re all starting to, or many of us are starting to get back to going to regular events, like in person, like meeting other people. LinkedIn events, you know, they’re the same type of thing. So Brynne, talk us through what that looks like. Let’s just start with how you find events on LinkedIn.

Bob Woods  01:55

It’s kind of tricky to find them. 

Brynne Tillman  01:56

It’s tough, Right? So we’re gonna give you a little shortcut that makes it a little bit easier. If you go to the search bar, and you hit Enter, you’re gonna see a whole bunch of choices at the very top. One of them is events. So you, if you click on that, it’s going to give you all these events, there’s an old filter, and you click on the old filters, and there are no more filters. Hopefully, they’re coming. 

But in the event, you can put the topic that you are looking to attend to networking. So for example, when we were playing around with this, and in preparation for today, I put in Chat GPT, because those are events I’m interested in, and they’re attracting people I’m interested in networking with now, Bob made a really good point in the beginning here, this is like an in-person event. 

These are not leads, these are people that we’re going to start conversations with, and naturally let them progress into whatever business relationship they are intended to be. This is a journey, Right? With that in mind, We’re going to go in, and we’re going to find events. And when you search for events, and you have a type, They’ll all come up and I think there were 52, Maybe if I remember correctly. 

And as I’m looking down at them, Some of them had five attendees, and some of them had 900 attendees. Now they’re not all going to show up. But all of these people were interested in this event. So if we click attend, That we’re attending and by the way, You should attend, It’s a learning experience.

And then it’s also something else that you can talk to with the other participants. But we attend and once we do that, we can send messages to the other attendees, this message will come in very differently than a normal message, it’s going to come in saying that you’re both attending this event, and do they accept the message from you. 

So if you pitch you’re done, and if you have too many people that are really essentially saying that this is spam, not only you’re gonna get kicked out of the event, you even may get your LinkedIn shut down. So Bob and I are all about making sure you’re not selling too soon, Right? We want to make sure that you are networking. So what does networking look like? Well, let’s say let’s pick someone who we love that could be running an event. 

Let’s go Stan Robinson. Yes, going great. So Stan Robinson is running an event and he’s attracting all the people that we want to have conversations with so we’re gonna go out and we’re going to find other content that Stan has. Maybe he was on a Bob cast. How about that? 

Bob Woods  04:34

Oh, I love that. Love that Bob cast.

Brynne Tillman  04:38

Yeah whether he’s on a podcast we need to use that somewhere yeah, we do we will or a blog post or maybe he published a eBook or something else right now when we go in all these people are interested in seeing Stan and that we’re interested in engaging with them around there. So, you can start with “We’re both big fans. I’m curious. Did you have a chance to hear his podcast on X, Y, and Z? Let me know. If you’re interested, We can connect. I’m happy to send you a link.” So now we’re talking about the note. Right? We are networking, you may connect, you may just stay in messaging for a little bit. I don’t know, Right? You’ll figure it out. And you’re gonna play it. There’s no 100% right way. 100%. Right, well, 100% wrong ways to pitch that’s the wrong way. 

But you’re gonna feel each person as an individual. If you’re at a networking meeting, and I’m having a conversation with Jane, I really like Jane, but there’s no real synergy. I’m not gonna have coffee with Jane. But I’m thrilled that I met her. And then I’ll go on to Fred. And I’ll say, “Oh, Fred, this is someone I want coffee with”, we’re going to do the same thing with the attendees. We’re not going to go to coffee with all of them. 

We want, you know, really qualifying to have a conversation, see what makes sense. And a lot can come from this big one, our referral partner is Stan, attracting sales trainers, you know, so at this point, we’re just building reports. They’ll see our content, maybe we’ll ask them to vote on a poll, maybe when we have an event, now that we’re connected to them, we can invite them to our event. This is all about networking. 

Now. Warning, Big warning! This is not positioned to poach, do not go on to a competitor’s event and try to steal their audience because that is not cool. 

Bob Woods  06:35

That’s precisely the phrase that went through my mind when you said that “It’s not cool”. It’s just not cool. Don’t do it. I mean, that’s just like It’s classless, I think you have no class. 

Brynne Tillman  06:47

So yeah, Right. So we need to treat this with the respect of the person running and be even the respect of the people attending the event. When Bob and I were deciding to do this, one of the things that went through my head was, are we going to teach people to spam. 

So obviously, that is the antithesis of everything that we teach. So it’s really important that we look at this from a pure networking, not prospecting, not poaching. This is about building a report with folks. 

Bob Woods  07:19

And one of the things that I like about what Brynne just said is, “We’re always talking about adding value”. So you can add value. While you’re networking. Obviously, you do that all the time, in person, the way that we do it in a LinkedIn event type of thing is exactly what would Brynne said is “To find content that the person has already published, that you think would be beneficial, and I mean, truly beneficial to someone else, especially because you’re offering their content, you’re not offering your content. So it’s obvious that you’re not pushing yourself when you do that”. 

Brynne Tillman  07:55

Yeah, I love that! I do, Right, you need to slow down your outreach, to speed up your outcome, right, detach from what the prospect is worth to you, and attach to what you are worth the prospect, bring in that value. So you know, this is one of our shortest, Right? because this wasn’t a really, really long loser in the easy kind of pop in a special time timing for our live audience. 

Bob Woods  08:22

Yeah, but it’s still important, though. I mean, because a lot of people I think, just show up, and you know, and they’re showing up for the content, which is good. And like you said, Brynne, people, you know, this is a learning opportunity, you should really take the opportunity to learn about whatever, whatever the speaker is talking about, but you can get more juice out of it. 

You just need to do it the right way. So it’s really worth your time to be there. But again, do it in the right way. Don’t spam. Don’t be the proverbial finger-snapping kind of salesperson, who’s just there to just build up, you know, to collect baseball cards in the form of new LinkedIn connections. 

Brynne Tillman  09:09

Right. Be purposeful, For sure. 

Bob Woods  09:10

Yes, to be purposeful. 

Brynne Tillman  09:09

This is a short and sweet one, Bob.

Bob Woods  09:15

That is okay. Because every once in a while, you just gotta be short and sweet. So that’s what we’re doing here. 

Brynne Tillman  09:21

Well, You’re tall and sweet. 

Bob Woods  09:15

Well, Just make sure my wife doesn’t hear that. So thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, why not go ahead and hit that subscribe for Follow button. 

You can access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop. If you’d like more info on the podcast, socialsaleslink.com/podcast Again, that’s socialsales.link.com/podcast We do two shows weekly. This one And although we actually did this week, but normally we do this, we do two different types of episodes. This and are making sales social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing business and many more areas that we know you all absolutely love. So when you’re out and about, be sure to make your sales 

Brynne Tillman  10:22

Social. 

Bob Woods  10:23

Exactly. Thanks everybody. Buh bye.

Outro  10:26

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