Episode 198: Who to Connect with on LinkedIn

Bob Woods  00:00

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to Making Sales Social Live brought to you by Social Sales Link. I’m Bob Woods, and I’m joined by fellow LinkedIn and social selling professional Brynne Tillman. How’re things going, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:15

Everything’s going great, except for my camera. So we have a little bit of a different view today, which is okay with me, especially for the podcast listeners later.

Bob Woods  00:25

Yeah, exactly. And the people listening later don’t even know what’s cool. 

Intro  00:25

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  00:54

Let’s talk about connections on LinkedIn. Yeah, as we all know, it’s important to have a first-degree connection on LinkedIn. But ideally, and as a salesperson, you may not want to connect with just anyone. So the connection of the era of collecting LinkedIn connection said that three times as fast as some people collect baseball cards has been over for quite a while now. And that’s a good thing. Right, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  01:22

Well, Yeah. And, you know, we say it’s over, but so many people are still doing it. 

Bob Woods  01:27

I know.

Brynne Tillman  01:28

We really need to kind of fix the way we look at our connections. In fact, I just got off a coaching call with someone who had an enormous amount of shared connections with his ideal prospect. But he didn’t know any of them – hadn’t engaged, just connected with people at scale, and it really was not that productive. 

He’s actually a lion, a LinkedIn open networker, which we’re changing. But if you ever see some people even say lying on their headline, or in their profile, and you’re right, and this means they’ll connect with anyone, Bob, you are so right, that this should not be happening anymore, but it still is. 

And what happens is it dilutes your credibility, it dilutes your connection with your connections, and you’re not able to leverage them the same way. A lot of people think you know, the more connections you have, the better off it is. But the more relationships you have, the better off it is the more rapport building. So let’s talk about the three kinds of connectors Bob. With the LinkedIn open network, I’ll connect with anyone. What’s the middle one?

Bob Woods  02:48

So the next one is probably better to take the extremes, and then do the one that we are, I think so the next one would be purist. So this is the exact opposite of Eli. And this is the person who says, “I will only connect with people who I know,  who I’ve personally met”, although, personally nowadays it is probably a little bit different with their stuff. 

Yeah, who I’ve engaged with. These are only people who I know, which is also not a good thing, because it’s really difficult to grow a network when you’re only connecting with people who you have somehow had a connection with essentially.

Brynne Tillman  03:34

Yeah, So this peer is so let’s lick a lion, LinkedIn, open networker, you’re walking into a networking meeting, you’ve got a whole handful of business cards and you walk around handing yours out and collecting theirs. Then you go back and you put a big rubber band around them and stick them in the corner of your desk, Right? 

That’s a LinkedIn open network. So you’ve collected connections, but you haven’t had any meaningful conversation, let alone have converted anything. The purest is when I walk into a networking meeting, I make a beeline for Bob Woods. We talked the whole time because we know each other, and I don’t really want to engage with anyone else because they don’t know that. 

That’s a challenge that is not networking, Right? That’s the purest view. If I haven’t met you, in some cases, If I haven’t, you know you have gotten kneecap to kneecap, eyeball to eyeball. I’m not connecting with you. But that’s not productive either. What is productive when it comes to connections and connection requests?

Bob Woods  04:34

The one word that we’ve been using quite a bit already is networking, so someone who actually networks who wants to go out and meet people who wants to connect with people, but just won’t connect with anyone. 

They are connecting with the right people, the people who can help them as well as just as importantly and probably more importantly, the people who we can and help because it shouldn’t be about us giving first givers gain like they used to say, and I’m guessing probably still say in BNI circles, but It’s so so very true. “Give, Give, Give,” and that is what networking is all about.

Brynne Tillman  05:16

Yeah, so let’s so we get these inbound connection requests, and we’re taking a look at them. And we’re saying, hey, is this someone that I could be a value to? Or could it be a value in my network? And I say, “Yes”, that’s great. And we connect with them, we accept their connection request, but we want to start a conversation or they’re gonna fall into the business cards with the rubber band in the closed drawer. 

So we want to start a conversation in this case, Right? And there are lots of different ways to approach this. But ultimately, what we want to do is get back and forth. We might look at their profile and say, “Hey, I noticed you went to Wake Forest. So you know, Joe?”, No, don’t do that! Don’t make it silly. 

But you know, find something in common. Start a conversation around that, find content that they’ve shared, engage on that. And then share, find and share additional content by the author, by you know, find out, go down into their influencers and see who they’re following. 

And then go into listen notes.com and find a podcast and say, “Hey, I know you follow Brene Brown, I really love her stuff recently, came across. If you didn’t listen to it, you have to be honest, I came across a podcast on Brene Brown and put it in my queue, but I thought you might get some value from it. Let me know if you’re interested. I’m happy to send that link”. 

Now there’s a conversation going they have to say “Yes, Please send that link”. We’ve got “Okay, Great. Who else do you follow?” “Is there anything you recommend?”. Have a little bit of a conversation at one point, you could say, “Hey, I’m not sure if you’re exploring this kind of content, but my company just posted a blog post on this, or we did a video on this and make sure it’s educational, not pitch”, Right?

And you can work your way into that. But that’s how the network is. We choose to connect with someone that to your point, we can either help or we can be a value to or are valuable in our world. And we start sharing value and resources to really stand out. And so I think that’s really important. I do want to talk about now I want to jump ahead. So you keep me on the spot. But I want to talk about the three things we can do except ignore or send a message. Are we ready to go?

Bob Woods  07:46

Yeah, yeah. 100%, go for it. 

Brynne Tillman  07:50

Okay. So when you get to your inbound connections, Right? You go to the “My Network” tab, and you’ll see lots of invitations for pages for newsletters, and one of them is, you know, if you go to your “See all” you’re gonna see people, Right? So, who is outstanding? And we’re making a decision. 

So we may say, “Yes”, and we connect and send a welcome message, if we know for sure. We may say Absolutely, “No.” If someone from Australia with three connections, and I’m in New York, how did I get to be there for Right? like, sometimes you’re gonna get and you might go, this definitely a spam, you know, something’s up. 

And usually when they have zero or one connection, It’s not a good connection. I don’t typically completely ignore people. But if they fall under that I do. The third is you can reply. Now, if they put in a note that it’ll say reply to James reply to Bob reply to an easy peasy, and that’s on mobile or desktop if they did not include a note, although I hear it’s coming. Yeah, I looked. I don’t have it. But I think Kevin has it. Kevin Turner, I think, has it. Is that who posted? 

Bob Woods  09:11

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think it was Kevin. 

Brynne Tillman  09:13

So I think it’s coming. But right now, only on the desktop for me. You have to go in and click the message to reply. We’re hoping we The rumor is that at least it’s in data that you can send a reply message to connect your requests from mobile. So hopefully, that’s coming. But I’ll send a message. 

I’ll say, “James, thanks so much for your connection requests typically only connect with people I’ve engaged with me. I asked how you found me”. And James may say, “Oh, I saw your post or I was talking to Bob Woods, and he mentioned you, but if I’m on the fence”. And I don’t know who James is, and I don’t see a connection, I won’t ignore him. Because you just don’t know. But you don’t have to accept them every single time.

Bob Woods  09:59

Right? Yeah, So that was the point I was gonna make. That is just because and that third scenario that we’re talking about just because you reply, it doesn’t mean that you’re accepting, you’re just replying to ask a question basically, just like, just like Brynne said. So I think that that’s an important distinction that you can communicate with these people, if you choose to, without having to take that. Yeah, without having.  

Brynne Tillman  10:26

Yeah, and I think that’s a big deal. And I will also hit ignore, and then people, some folks will say to me, you know, well, what happens, you know, if you ignore them, they’re gone. Well, if you send them a message, they’re actually in your messaging box. So you can always go back there and connect with them if you choose to.

Bob Woods  10:44

Yeah. So Harry, Harry just said that, of course, you don’t have to accept everyone. It’s your choice, which is absolutely true. We were just talking about more of the functionality that LinkedIn has behind it, that you can apply without accepting, but you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to accept what everyone should accept anyway. 

Brynne Tillman  10:45

And we don’t think we should.

Bob Woods  10:46

Yeah, Yep. So with that, let’s get in really quick to just a couple of groups of people who we do want to connect with. So I’m just going to list them out really quick. And then we’re going to talk about a little bit more prospects, clients, networking referral partners, and and I’m going to toss another one in there just anyone who, who we can genuinely help and then, you know, maybe get a referral from in the future, but that’s not predicated on helping them out.

Brynne Tillman  11:39

I’m gonna throw one in: community leaders, heads of chambers of commerce, or associations, or people that are influencers and highly connected. And wait, let’s do another one: influencers, literally influencers? 

Bob Woods  11:54

Yeah, That’s another good one.  

Brynne Tillman  11:55

Attracting your prospects. Because those are folks that would like to be connected to as well.

Bob Woods  12:03

Well actually, actually, if you think about it, people like, heads up chambers of commerce and people like that. Those are actually influencers in their own way. Right? I would say.

Brynne Tillman  12:12

Micro-influencers. So at least.

Bob Woods  12:15

Yeah.

Brynne Tillman  12:16

Yeah, Right? Yeah. Good point. Good. Good point. So what do we do? Let’s go through the list? How do we connect? What was the first one you said about prospects? So how would you connect with the prospect in a way that’s meaningful to them without it being salesy.

Bob Woods  12:31

You just reach out, you know, with the prospect, you should probably ideally be connecting with them because of, or something that they’ve said in a comment to someone else because at that point, you kind of know what they’re feeling about a certain topic. And hopefully, you agree with them. And then when you reach out to them, you can offer a little bit of value-added content as well, that’s hopefully related to whatever it was that you were talking about in the first place.

Brynne Tillman  13:02

Absolutely. And it really comes back to bring value, value, value. So this is a wonderful question. What if we don’t know each other and don’t even have mutual connections. But we work in the same field of expertise. I’m picking and accepting invitations from people with fields similar to mine, even when I don’t know them. So this is a great question. I’m going to start and then I’ll hand the baton to you, Bob. But the bottom line, you look at these, So I’m gonna go with my art philosophy, which is high tide raises all boats. 

So I will connect with lots of people in the same industry, we’ve been referred to. And we’ve referred to people that we’ve overlapped, but there are things they do that we don’t do, and vice versa all the time. So we tend to have a very open perspective on who to connect with. But if we are going to connect with them, we need to have a conversation. 

We can’t just connect and forget. So if they’re reaching out to you, and they’re like, “Hey, Let’s connect and you’re like, I don’t know yet”. Like I’m on the fence, you can reply and that’s what we talked about right now if you go into the desktop, even if they don’t have a note, you can go into the mind Network tab see all and message them and say “Thanks so much for your outreach. I love to learn a little bit more about you and your business and explore if there’s an opportunity for us to benefit one another. 

Please let me know your preferred way of chatting if it happens to be via calendar link. Here’s mine”. Now obviously you’re not going to do this with everyone but if you have someone that you’re on the fence with, have a conversation with them. Sometimes they could be the best connection ever. I’m gonna give you an example and I don’t know. I feel like I use Gunner as an example all the time. 

So Gunner Hood, as someone that works closely with us, started out really as a competitor. One of our members, Stephen Farber said,“I mean, I knew Gunner from the clubhouse”, but he’s like, “Oh, he’d be great working with you, you would love him. I spent some time he’s amazing”. And I’m like, “I like him a lot. But he’s a competitor, why am I gonna invest my time and talk to him?”, Really I thought this. And now he’s like, he’s coaching for us. 

He’s, we’re his client, from a marketing perspective that we’re launching shortly. Like, there’s so many really powerful things that came from connecting with a competitor, and our business will be transformed because of it. So I don’t want you guys to think small, think big, Right? It’s a big world. 

And we I really think encompassing now, if you don’t want to connect with them, because you’re afraid they’re going to mine your connections, which, by the way, they’re not going to if they can steal your business, because they know you’re connected to someone, you need a little bit more service training. But generally, you can reply with a message and schedule a call and have the conversation before you accept the invite.

Bob Woods  16:17

Yeah, absolutely. That’s really powerful, too. So I mean, to, for me to answer that question. It’s like, you don’t know what you don’t know. So I mean, you can look at someone and I mean, you know, just like Brynne did with Gunner. She had no, I do truly, that something like what we have now, would have blossomed, just based on that first look that she had with him. 

And even though you know, she did Calm down, like them and everything else, what she taught them versus what we have now are two completely different things. So take that mentality in when you find yourself in this situation, it never hurts to have a conversation. And with the conversation, if it does come up, and it doesn’t make sense to connect and collaborate or whatever, pinned home.

Brynne Tillman  17:09

Yeah, and you know, and this isn’t with everyone, I’m not saying have a conversation with every single person. But if you’re on the fence, and you’re on the fence, because you think there could be an opportunity, have that conversation. Really important. I mean.

Bob Woods 17:25

Have the conversation, Have the conversation.

Brynne Tillman  17:29

Yeah, you know, maybe I mean, there I’ve heard conversations of or one in particular, we were chatting with someone who felt very similar. And it ended up to be a small merger of companies, which benefited everyone. So that was a while ago, but it was a digital marketing agency and a HubSpot shop. 

And that one just did HubSpot. And the other one didn’t. And then they decided to come together and it became a pretty big company now. So you know, there’s lots of opportunities. Keep the door open for networking.

Bob Woods 18:17

Absolutely. 

Brynne Tillman  18:18

So I think. Are we completing our agenda?

Bob Woods  18:19

I think we’re exhausted. We’re absolutely exhausted, ya know?

Brynne Tillman  18:20

This energizes me. I come off of these lives. 

Bob Woods  18:24

Yeah, No.

Brynne Tillman  18:26

My grandbaby is exhausted. I’m definitely an extrovert. So like, this feeds me. I can’t wait.

Bob Woods  18:36

Yeah, That’s right. 

Brynne Tillman  18:37

I don’t get exhausted from that.

Bob Woods  18:39

Yeah, No, not at all. I was very much joking, but believe me. But we are going to go ahead and wrap things up. 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, which means that we were recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button. So you know, you’ll be alerted when new shows pop up. If you’d like more info on our podcast, go to socialsaleslink.com/podcast. 

Again, that’s socialsaleslink.com/podcast. So we do two shows weekly, and we go live once a week. And then we also have our Making Sales Social interview series, where we talk with people from all walks of Business live. Including sales and marketing and many more areas. So when you’re out and about this week, be sure to make your sales.

Brynne Tillman  19:36

Social. Bye, guys,

Bob Woods  18:38

Thanks everyone. Have a great week. Bye bye.

Outro 19:36

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