Episode 309: 7 LinkedIn Activities to Amp Up Your Summer Prospecting

Intro

Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show!

0:00:26 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson, Junior, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show. Welcome, sales and marketing pros to make live. Coming to you from the social sales link virtual studios.

0:01:00 – (Bob Woods): I’m Bob Woods, and I’m joined by Brynne Tillman and Stan Robinson. How are y’all doing today?

0:01:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Good, Bob. Stan, how are you?

0:01:08 – (Stan Robinson): Very good.

0:01:10 – (Bob Woods): Excellent. Good stuff here. So, it is summertime 2024, and you might think that everyone is on vacation, but there are still a lot of people in the office, in the field, in front of their computers, doing zooms, all that other type of stuff, and business is still being transacted. So with that in mind, we have seven activities you can undertake during the summertime so that your book of business is burning as bright as the hot summer sun. And it’s been pretty hot here.

0:01:42 – (Bob Woods): So I think it’s been kind of hot everywhere from, from what it seems like. So, guys, let’s get this right underway with, Brynne, do you want to take number one there that we have?

0:01:58 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So, the number one activity that we can be doing in the summer is let’s just take an audit of our mission, our vision, and our story. Let’s take a look at what have the challenges been that our clients have had over the last six months or so. What are some of the solutions we brought? Have they evolved for a year or two? For us, the last 18 months to 24 months have had a significant evolution with adding AI into what we do. Right. So it’s really time that we take a look at our messaging.

0:02:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Are we incorporating all of the new things that we’re doing? Are we taking a look? Is there a new market that we’re serving? So what we’re saying is one of the best activities you can do this summer is really just take inventory of everything going on inside of your company and make sure what you’re actually doing is aligning with what your marketing message says, what everything on LinkedIn is saying and so forth. So your website even really just takes a deep dive?

0:03:18 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, essentially it’s to take a step forward, you need to not necessarily take a step back, but maybe go up a little higher and really look at things from that proverbial 30,000-foot view and make sure that your mission is still there, your vision is still there. Do you have new challenges? I think that’s fantastic, Stanley.

0:03:45 – (Stan Robinson): Yes, I was just going to say, and it applies to your clients as well. What new challenges do they have? And we’re dealing with AI. They probably are also. And there probably will be others that they’re facing.

0:04:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And once we’ve done that, we now have the opportunity to update our marketing messaging, the way that we’re, and our content. But if we don’t take an audit of where we are and ensure that we’re aligning with our targeted market, we’re missing the boat. And so the summer is a great time to do this.

0:04:24 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Actually, what Brynne touched on in terms of looking at marketing and things like that spins really well into our second point, which is the LinkedIn profile. So we were talking about the entire business and things like that before. Now let’s talk a little bit more about more personal things. And that starts with potentially updating your profile. So look at it. Is it still relevant? Does your banner still speak to what you do, your headline?

0:04:57 – (Bob Woods): Does it focus on who you are currently helping, how you’re helping them, the services that you provide, and the benefits that you bring to people who work with you? Is your featured section stocked with good current content? So I’ve. I’ve always used the analogy of the featured section is like the produce section of a grocery store. Do you have the freshest, best stuff out there that people will see as appetizing? And of course, in, in this vein, with the type of content that they can use, that they want to consume, that they need to consume for them to be successful in their businesses? So, I mean, look at every single thing in your profile.

0:05:43 – (Bob Woods): Spin it up to what Brynne was talking about before. You know, as you evaluate your mission, vision, challenges, and all that stuff, you can bring that entire thought process down to the more granular level with your profile as well.

0:05:58 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. Stan, do you have any? Yeah.

0:06:02 – (Stan Robinson): And also just take a look at, along with your profile, are there any new features that LinkedIn has added that may be helpful to you, like request services, for example, if you offer services that are still relatively recent and we’re buried in this world. So all of this is, we’re keeping up with it, but most of you listening are not. So it’s a good time to take an audit. Okay, what’s new on LinkedIn that I can take advantage of?

0:06:33 – (Brynne Tillman): Stan, just talk a little bit about request services. I think that’s a big one. So I want to make sure people.

0:06:38 – (Stan Robinson): Are getting that, in short, because it’s an area that I have to update as well, but in short, it’s what we call the one area on LinkedIn where you should sell. It’s there so you can talk about what you offer. You can promote your offering. That’s where you can sell. That’s where you’re expected to sell. You can provide pricing. You can say, follow up with me for pricing, and outline exactly what you offer.

0:07:06 – (Stan Robinson): And so those are the main things.

0:07:09 – (Brynne Tillman): So I have now closed three pieces of business from request services. So that’s pretty exciting. So I love that.

0:07:17 – (Bob Woods): Very. Yeah, very.

0:07:19 – (Brynne Tillman): What’s next there, Bob?

0:07:20 – (Bob Woods): Next is taking inventory of your connections, which is always a good one. And Bryn, I know, loves to talk about taking inventory of connections. So we’re going to let her fly with this one.

0:07:34 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. There are really two ways to do this. One, you can export your connections and you’ll get your first name and last name. There is a column for email. You won’t get a lot because people have to opt into that. You’ll get their LinkedIn URL, so you can click on that to get back to their profile, their role, their company name, and the date you connected. So at the very top is their most recent connection.

0:07:59 – (Brynne Tillman): There’s such great value in this, right? Because we’ve got hundreds, if not thousands of connections that we’re ignoring. So the summer is a fabulous time to start to take inventory. If you’re a little bit slower in some other areas, kind of invest a couple of hours and get this in a CSV file so you can open it in Excel or Google Spreadsheet and create a column on the left-hand side where you can take inventory. Now, we often say CPR, client, prospect, referral partner.

0:08:32 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s also breathe life back into your connections. You know, have a little fun with that, but ultimately take. Take inventory. Who are the people that we’re ignoring that we really should be having conversations with? The other one is search. Stan. Talk a little bit about the search that you could search your first-degree connections.

0:08:54 – (Stan Robinson): Search it. Yes. So LinkedIn is wonderful because it’s such a large database if you want to look at it that way. But if you weren’t able to search by keywords like title and a number of other areas, location, etc, it wouldn’t be very helpful. So the fact that you can search, and we’re talking about free LinkedIn sales navigator has a whole slew of additional search filters, but free LinkedIn, the search is extremely powerful in terms of what you can do.

0:09:25 – (Stan Robinson): So you can look at your first-degree connections, you can look at how many of them meet your ideal customer profile and see who you want to follow up with, because, as Bryn said, they’re people that you’re connected with but probably haven’t been in touch with in a while.

0:09:44 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love that. Anything you want to add, Bob, or we’re going to the next one?

0:09:49 – (Bob Woods): I think we’ve kind of encompassed everything there, especially because our next one, dovetails pretty well out of what we were just talking about it. it’s a little bit of a flip on it, though. So, ensure you are connected to everyone you’re engaging with. So, you know, there have been times where it’s like where. Where I’ve looked at someone and. And I was on LinkedIn later and wanted to message them, and I looked them up, and it’s like they’re a secondary connection. How the heck did that even happen? How are we not connected?

0:10:24 – (Bob Woods): I’m sure that if you’re like me if you’re like everyone else out there, you probably have people who are similar to that with you who are not first-degree connections, yet you’re talking with them all the time, so why not connect with those people? Also, look at your CRM. Look at people who you just email back and forth with. See if you’re connected with them. If you’re not, connect with them and they should know you already. So you have to go through, you know, kind of a song and dance to try to get them connected. Once that request comes through, they should know, and it’s like, oh, yeah, they’ll probably have the same reaction you did. Why am I not connected with this person? I should just connect with them. 

0:11:08 – (Bob Woods): So, I mean,  It’s a real easy thing to do, yet it’s something that you should be doing.

0:11:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love that. And, you know, Every time I have a meeting with someone and I’m doing my little bit of pre-call planning, which sometimes is very little, it’s just going to the profile to identify where they live, who are shared connections? What are they sharing about? I mean, there are some times that I’ll go deeper, but ultimately I will send a connection request that says, I’m looking forward to our call in an hour. Let’s connect.

0:11:38 – (Stan Robinson): Yep.

0:11:38 – (Brynne Tillman): If someone else shows up on that call that I didn’t expect, which happens often, then I will send a connection request that says, great meeting you on the call. Looking forward to the next steps, whatever those are. Right. And so that’s really important. And if you are emailing back and forth, go find them on LinkedIn and connect. It is so important that we are building a network of people that we are really having conversations with.

0:12:07 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yep, absolutely. And then also just keep in mind that, you know, sometimes you have to discover the. The channel that people want to communicate with you. So sometimes it is text, sometimes it is LinkedIn, sometimes it is email. But, you know, make sure that you’re at least connected or at least know how to get in touch with them. But then also know which form they like to communicate in the best. Which channel, which, which, which we’re using channel a little bit differently here than what we normally do. But it’s. But it’s the same type of thing. Someone wants to text all the time. Text them.

0:12:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, but that’s a great opportunity. I mean, if you connect. I would always connect on LinkedIn because you can follow them if they move.

0:12:55 – (Bob Woods): Yep.

0:12:55 – (Brynne Tillman): But then your welcome message when you connect, I love that. Could say, you know, I’m on LinkedIn a lot. This is typically how I communicate. Is this good for you or would you prefer text?

0:13:08 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, and that’s why I was bringing it up. Exactly. All right, cool.

0:13:13 – (Brynne Tillman): What’s the next one?

0:13:15 – (Bob Woods): Networking Zoom calls. So, you know, it’s a good time to either sit in front of the desk or, you know, heck, maybe even drag your computer outside, make sure you got Wi-Fi or a mobile there next to you that has Internet access, and just, you know, do 15 minutes. And I hate using the term catch-up calls, but this is probably one area where, where a catch-up call wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

0:13:42 – (Bob Woods): Just, you know, just to find out what’s going on in that other person’s life. You’re not trying to make a sale here. You’re just networking to catch up to see if there’s any way that. And I mean, anyway that you can help them or, you know, maybe they’ll come up with a way that they can help you, you know, really get those networking skills going again, because that’s probably how you built your business. If not, you should be using them to build your business.

0:14:09 – (Bob Woods): You know, really just start reinforcing your network and really building a good foundation with these people.

0:14:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. And if you have any kind of association. So I just joined the C-suite network with Jeffrey Hazlett and his lovely crew, and there are hundreds of people for me to network with. They’re all, there’s a directory for me to go in, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to look at who are the people that I can refer and can refer us.

0:14:36 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:14:36 – (Brynne Tillman): And that’s where I’m going to start. So you’re right, Bob. This is not networking for sale. This is really networking, literally for the sake of networking so that you can help one another. Now, once you have a good rapport, and I would never do this on the first call, but once you have a good rapport, you can open up your network to them and say, hey, take a look at who I’m connected to. If there’s anyone that you want to meet, I’m happy to make introductions and vice versa. Maybe I can look through your connections.

0:15:07 – (Brynne Tillman): They’ll probably just offer at that point. But I think really, summer is a wonderful time to do these networking calls. And, you know, I’m going to just say for a second, a lot of folks will say, well, no one’s around. Well, there are arguably ten weeks of summer. We’re already through a few of them. People typically go away for one week. Yeah, exactly right. So that means that only 10% of the people are gone the week that you’re trying to network.

0:15:39 – (Brynne Tillman): So just keep in mind that just because it’s summer doesn’t mean that people are not around. And so, networking is great. This is a wonderful opportunity because you won’t maybe feel the same pressure as during the rest of the year to make sales, but you can set up your September to be incredibly successful.

0:16:03 – (Bob Woods): Absolutely. Stan, do you have anything to add to that?

0:16:07 – (Stan Robinson): Just that it’s a great time to nurture relationships and that’s what we’ve been talking about.

0:16:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, nurture is a great word here.

0:16:14 – (Bob Woods): And, speaking of relationships, the next one is all about determining who is within your social proximity. And then warm market prospecting. So warm market prospecting is those second-degree connections. That’s what we call, the warm market. Because you can. Because, you know someone who knows someone, essentially, you know, it’s not who you know, it’s who they know. As I used to put it once upon a time. And that is definitely in play here.

0:16:49 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love this. And Stan, do you want to add to this before I kind of go off on my thing.

0:16:54 – (Stan Robinson): No, jump. Jump right into it.

0:16:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So we talked about networking partners, but let’s talk about your clients. This is a great opportunity to search who your clients know that you might want to meet. And, you know, a lot of times as salespeople, we will ask our clients, who do you know that could use my products or services the way you have? And they kind of shrug and say, I can’t think of anyone. Well, if we have a list of 810, 1220 people, and I just say, you know, mister client, I’ve really enjoyed working with you. I’m glad we’ve been able to have such success with X, Y, and Z.

0:17:30 – (Brynne Tillman): I noticed you’re connected to quite a few people that I love to get in front of. Can I run these names by you? So you just run the names, and if there’s 20, maybe there’s two or three introductions, or maybe if there’s eight or ten people, we can ask permission to drop their names. So when I reach out and I say, hey, Bob, Stan Robinson and I were chatting the other day. Your name came up in the conversation.

0:17:54 – (Brynne Tillman): He says, hello, I’ve been working with him for the last year on X, Y, and Z, and he thought I might bring some value to you. Whether or not we work together, I’m confident I could bring some insights that can help you do X, Y, and Z. Right. And then when we do this, we are now leveraging our warm market, and our social proximity, to start conversations with our targeted buyers through our trusted clients who already trust us and love us.

0:18:27 – (Brynne Tillman): And the summer is a great time to do this. Right. The customers are more likely to have a little bit of time to review those names with you. I don’t even ask for introductions anymore. I go right to that permission to name-drop because I want to take the pressure off of a customer. But every once in a while the customer can say, oh, this is my fraternity buddy. I’m happy to introduce you to him. Okay, great.

0:18:52 – (Bob Woods): Yep, cool. Very good.  And number seven is a new one, we were talking about. Well, it’s, it’s going to be new for a lot of people. Let’s, let’s just say that. And that is start playing with chat GPT, or whatever generative AI that you use or that you’re interested in checking out for content, for brainstorming for business ideas. So when we say start playing with chat GPT, first of all, when we say chat GPT, we actually mean any of.

0:19:29 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, all of those things. But what I like about calling, calling it chat GPT is the word. Chat is in there because you have to talk to it. You can’t. You know, a lot of times we can do what’s called one-shot prompting and get exactly what we want out of it just with one prompt. More often than not, though, you have to have a conversation with it. And that’s where you not only get to have good ideas coming from it, but you also get to discover how you can put questions, how you can actually talk to Jack so that it’s giving you the results that you want.

0:20:05 – (Bob Woods): And I think that that’s really important. The only way for you to do that is to start using it and also realize that it may not be perfect every single time, but you have to talk to it to really get it, to give you the type of output that you need for whatever it is that you’re using.

0:20:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Love it. So anything you want to add to that, Stan?

0:20:30 – (Stan Robinson): Just be patient with chat GPT, just like you’d be patient with a new intern. Yeah, really smart, and able to pick up on things, but you need to be really specific about the instructions that you give the intern, and in this case, chat GPT. So don’t give up on the first try. When you give it a general question and you say, well, it comes back to me with generic information, you’ll learn to be more specific as you go.

0:20:59 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, you can up if you have, and I think four o does this, I know that our paid for does this, but you can upload if you have content in a Word doc or a PDF or anything that has your point of view, you can upload that or even link to your website and it will start to learn how you think.

0:21:20 – (Bob Woods): Yep, chat CPT now has memory, so especially in four and 40. So yeah, definitely. And I’m assuming that the other ones are really coming along with that too. And if not, you can always upload those every single time. Especially. That’s especially good when you’re creating content because. Because you want it to sound like you always remember, though. Never just copy and paste anything directly out of it into something else. You have to me, and this is where my hammering down of, you know, read it out loud.

0:21:52 – (Bob Woods): You should always do that to make sure that it sounds like you.

0:21:56 – (Brynne Tillman): And, you know, we’re starting to talk about the 80 20 rule. 80% chat, 20% you.

0:22:02 – (Bob Woods): Yep, absolutely, absolutely. So summertime doesn’t have to equal a slow time for you. Use these tips and tricks to up your activity in the summer. And hopefully up your revenues as well. So thanks for joining, guys. Appreciate it. Hope your summer is going well so far, by the way.

0:22:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, and hopefully everyone’s activity is going to increase just a little bit. We’ll have a little bit more fun, and we’re going to take this summer.

0:22:35 – (Bob Woods): Seriously, very seriously indeed. So thanks again for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or X 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 and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button to access all of our previous shows and be alerted when new ones drop.

Outro:

Thanks for watching and join us again for more special guest instructors, bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social Sales Social podcast give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.