Episode 323: Five LinkedIn Activities to Prepare for Fall Prospecting

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, 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. 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.

0:00:00 – (Bob Woods): Today, Stan, Brynne, and I will walk you through the five key activities that will help you maximize your visibility and engagement on LinkedIn. These tips are designed to make your prospecting not just more accessible, but more effective and authentic. As we head into the. And I don’t believe I’m saying this already, the last third of 2024. Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business.

0:00:34 – (Bob Woods): 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. Hey, welcome, sales and marketing pros, to Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the Social Sales Link virtual Studios. I’m Bob Woods, and I’m joined by my SSL teammates, Brynne Tillman, and Stan Robinson junior. How are y’all doing today?

0:01:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Good. How are you gentlemen doing?

0:01:14 – (Bob Woods): Very good. How are you doing? Excellent. Very, absolutely excellent. Good. Good. So, if you’re joining us live today, we’re just one week away from the Labor Day holiday weekend here in the US. And if you’re listening to us on the podcast, chances now that we’re just barely into September, that means it’s time to look at LinkedIn, to use it to its fullest potential for your sales efforts. So today, Stan, Brynne, and I will walk you through the five key activities that will help you maximize your visibility and engagement on LinkedIn.

0:01:49 – (Bob Woods): These tips are designed to make your prospecting not just more accessible, but more effective and authentic as we head into the. And I don’t believe I’m saying this already, the last third of 2024. That’s. Yeah, absolutely crazy. So, ready to roll everyone? Should we just get right into it?

0:02:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Rock and roll.

0:02:15 – (Bob Woods): Let’s rock and roll. Absolutely. So, number one is something that we talk about all the time, and yet it’s very important, although we are going to have a little bit of, in addition to what we have talked about in the past, or most of the time, until recently, at least. And that is updating your LinkedIn profile. Not only just all the profile stuff. But to really concentrate on your services section as well. And for me, the services are every bit as important, maybe even a little more important, than everything else that’s in there.

0:02:52 – (Bob Woods): Too many people aren’t using it. They don’t know about it. Or if they look at it at someone else’s profile, they’re like, okay, what is that? And then they forget about trying to do it themselves. So this is the one section where you actually get to truly sell yourself and the products and services that you bring to your clients. So throughout most of the profile, we’re always talking about changing it from a resume to a resource and really speaking to your audience of prospects and really helping them out.

0:03:23 – (Bob Woods): One section where you get to go, hey, here’s exactly what I do. It is the services section. The other nice thing or two other nice things, One also significantly boosts your discoverability because it increases your chances of showing up in LinkedIn searches for your services and you can even take requests for proposals directly from your profile. So I think that all of those are great. Brynne, I’m, I’m trying not to combine both of your guys’s names and it’s coming out as Bran or whatever. Brynne, what do you think your couple’s name is?

0:04:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I like s t y n n e. I don’t know. Or Stein. I don’t know. Anyway. Yeah, so, so you kind of covered most of that, but the surfaces are still in beta. I believe there are huge benefits to doing this and you would still be in the early group of adoption. Right. And if you look at the search inside of LinkedIn, you’ll see services is an area where people can actually search when they are looking for solutions.

0:04:40 – (Brynne Tillman): I have now gotten three pieces of business through the services area. So while we’re saying now that we’re heading into the last third of 2024, make sure you’re taking advantage of all of the profile sections. But absolutely spend some time in that services section. Build it out. It’s not hard. I think there are 500 characters in the description, but this allows you to, as Bob mentioned, really promote your stuff. And the request services is really important. I’ll throw it in.

0:05:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Unfortunately, there’s still a limited number of industries or topics. You get to choose ten. But it’s not, I don’t think it’s complete yet as it’s still in beta. So do your best to match the services in the list to what you do. But we do 100% recommend that you add those services to your page. It also, by the way, follows you around. So if you share content under your name, it will say request services.

0:05:51 – (Brynne Tillman): So there is a CTA automatically now added to everywhere you’re showing up. Stan, anything you want to add to that?

0:06:01 – (Bob Woods): Yes, Stan, if you, especially if you want to hit on.

0:06:04 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Ready third?

0:06:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, we’ll start with Stan on the next one.

0:06:11 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Well, when you say regular stuff. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

0:06:16 – (Brynne Tillman): All right, so go ahead. Next one.

0:06:18 – (Bob Woods): Bob, next one, taking inventory of your current connections using export and searches. So which is a game changer when preparing for your fall prospecting? I cannot talk this morning. You can tell it’s a Monday. Stan, why don’t you just take it from here?

0:06:42 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yes. So when I look at export, it’s funny, I literally have to grab the last data export that I did over the weekend. So comes in when you ask for everything. And Bob and Brynn, let me know if this is your experience. Mine came in two parts, so I got one part with some of the basic information I’m about to open after this call. The second is data export, so we can pull it into a CSV file and start to look through who I haven’t been in contact with in a while.

0:07:19 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): And that’s why it’s a good idea to go ahead and export your data regularly, at least a couple of times a year.

0:07:27 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And in that particular data, you don’t have to do everything. You can just check connections. I do like that you did everything. And I would say the recommendation today is to do everything. At least a couple of times a year, you should export all of your data. That is going to give you everything from your profile, any of the shares, everything you’ve ever done on LinkedIn can now be captured. And I think that for this tip, absolutely do all of that. But one of those data points is your connections.

0:08:02 – (Brynne Tillman): You can just export those or gather them from the entire list. What we love to do is take inventory of those exported connections. I can’t tell you the success stories of people who now look through connections and go, wow, I didn’t know he moved to this company or when did she start her own thing? Or. Right? And so as we’re preparing here in this, preparing for this, the third, 3rd, or even Q four, having a grasp on who we’re connecting, who we’re connected to and we’re ignoring, I think is important.

0:08:43 – (Brynne Tillman): So, Bob, I am passing the proverbial.

0:08:47 – (Bob Woods): Baton, and I will, ooh, ooh, that worked out pretty well, actually. So I will take that thing. Especially because you know what I think what Brynne said about not only just seeing who you have, but, you know, who’s moved to a new role, who’s in a decision-making position, all of that is really important, too, especially because it gives you another potential talking point as well. So all that stuff is very important.

0:09:15 – (Bob Woods): Point number three, make sure you have connected with all of the stakeholders in all of your clients and prospects. So we’ve all heard that 6.8 figure, meaning that there are 6.8 stakeholders each influencing the decision-making process in a purchase. So you can’t have just that one connection or contact at a prospect company. There are others involved in terms of making that decision. That’s why you need to build a network of internal champions at all of these companies.

0:09:52 – (Bob Woods): And sales navigator is a great way to do that. It has a tool that will help you build that out. Stan, why don’t you go ahead and take a little bit more of that?

0:10:07 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yes, Ellen, hopefully.

0:10:09 – (Bob Woods): Stan, are you there?

0:10:10 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Because my Internet keeps reconnecting. Take it to Brynne. My Internet is in and out. Well, so.

0:10:22 – (Brynne Tillman): No, you’re fine. Keep going, Stan. All yours.

0:10:25 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, we can hear you now.

0:10:27 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Okay. All right, good. So one of the things that we talk about is socially surrounding decision makers because one of the most common questions people ask, you know, the key decision-maker I’m trying to reach is not that active on LinkedIn. And what do I do? Well, one of the things that you can do is for people above horizontally and report to that person and see if you can reach out to them to engage with them on LinkedIn and build those relationships.

0:10:58 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Anyone who’s been in sales has had a situation where their champion has moved to another company. Sometimes, unfortunately, it happens in the middle of a deal, and most times they will not inform you that they’re moving. So having multiple states is key.

0:11:24 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. Brynne, any thoughts as far as that goes?

0:11:28 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yeah.

0:11:30 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. I mean, I love socially surrounding, you know, something that, and I actually just posted on this coincidentally, multithreading, right? Is a term that that’s often used. And I think that especially in larger accounts, we need to take it, you know, really a look at all of the people that will be involved in that decision-making or influencing position. And a couple of things, once you have that list, run it by your champion and say, hey, is it okay if I reach out to these folks and mention we’re having a conversation even very early on now, don’t do it without informing them because they will feel like you did it behind their back and you do not want to isolate that channel.

0:12:20 – (Brynne Tillman): By no means. But getting permission to drop their name and reach out is great if they are not willing to make those introductions. The other thing simply is to bring them a list and say, typically, here are the people that we would be including in some of our conversations. Let’s review them and have that conversation. So ultimately, by getting that list, using LinkedIn to find out all of the people that are involved will help you get move through that you know, that sales cycle faster.

0:12:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Lastly, you can see your second-degree connections. So if your champion, if you don’t have that relationship with your champion yet, you can use outside connections that are connected with stakeholders instead of that company to make some warm introduction. So, in general, do you have clients who know these folks or referral partners that know these folks? So all those good things.

0:13:24 – (Bob Woods): All those good things. And actually that kind of leads into our point number five, because one way to really help you kind of grease the skids, get into all these people is content. So curating, and creating engaging content is social selling currency. And I’m going to throw another metaphor in here, it’s also the fuel that powers social selling. I just, I know you all agree with this. I can’t stress enough how important it is to stay consistent with content.

0:13:57 – (Bob Woods): And, Brynne, why do you use the currency analogy?

0:14:04 – (Brynne Tillman): I don’t typically use currency analogy.

0:14:07 – (Bob Woods): You meeting this morning, that’s why.

0:14:12 – (Brynne Tillman): I.

0:14:12 – (Bob Woods): Thought that was a really, really, that’s.

0:14:15 – (Brynne Tillman): A really good, I guess logically, right. It is your social selling currency. It is how you, how you are attracting your buyers and engage your buyers. So really, I guess it is. I guess I have to flesh out exactly how to talk about it as the currency, but it is really your asset, right? Especially your original content. So let’s talk about it. There are really three ways to use content. The first one is curating other people’s content and adding your perspective.

0:14:58 – (Brynne Tillman): The second way is engaging other people’s content in comments and adding your perspective. The third is creating content. And this is often really difficult for salespeople because they want to create original content. They don’t necessarily have the time or the writing chops, right? And so they are relying on marketing that typically is creating great content, but not great content for the sales journey. It’s typically great content for the marketing journey, right? But on the sales journey, there are so many other pieces of content that you need. There’s content before the need. This is something that almost no marketing departments put together.

0:15:49 – (Brynne Tillman): But we know, in fact, I learned this, gosh, probably 15 years ago from David Newman, who talked about in his first book, do it marketing on in order to attract your buyers early enough in their buying cycle and to be the vendor that is influencing them, you need to hit them before they even know they need your solution. So what kind of content is relevant in helping them think through whatever challenge they’re having now that will lead to the next step, which is you?

0:16:34 – (Brynne Tillman): And then you’re getting them very early on, right? So that’s the first piece of content we need. The second piece of content we need is content that is strong enough to get them to say they understand my challenges. They are answering a lot of my questions and I’d like to have a conversation with them. So that content has a job that resonates with your buyer, creating enough curiosity that they read through it where it teaches them something new, gets them thinking differently about the way that they are doing things today, and creates that compelling moment where they raise their hand and say, let’s chat.

0:17:22 – (Brynne Tillman): That is something that is so defined. Very few marketing groups are putting that together. So the third piece is the follow-up piece after the conversation. And depending on who you’re selling to, this could be a piece that helps them sell you internally to the other decision-makers. This, you know, so maybe you’re talking for us, it might be the chief revenue officer, but now how do you get your market, your VP of marketing, and your VP of sales on board?

0:17:54 – (Brynne Tillman): So do you have content that can help them see how your solution will help them in their role and their department? So that’s a follow-up piece. Another piece, depending on where you are in the sales cycle, is overcoming objections before you have them. You may know there are seven to ten objections that you’re going to have a faq page, right? These are the questions that people ask. Right. And then overcome those objections before they even come up in your sales call.

0:18:31 – (Brynne Tillman): So, you know, then there’s ROI. Content. How do you prove ROI for your solution? You know, and how, whether, and I would make it agnostic. Right. So, you know, what are the things that you look at when making this kind of decision? The decision to prove out ROI on your investment? That’s a great piece of content. There’s a piece of content that will help and that’s really kind of on that closing side.

0:18:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Then a piece of content for cross-selling or cross-solving content that can help. What are other things that you can help internally? So these are all types of content that marketing typically does not create but does help that salesperson through every step of the sales cycle. And so I’m going to, which we almost never do, but I’m going to throw out. That’s one of the reasons we’re launching our new AI program, which is ask SSL.

0:19:30 – (Brynne Tillman): That is going to help salespeople actually create the content that will move their connections through the sales pipeline and help them create more credibility faster, start more trust-based conversations without being salesy, really. And ultimately use that content to multi-thread socially, surround all of the folks inside of that account, ultimately helping you to close business faster.

0:20:05 – (Bob Woods): Sounds great. So Brynne did a terrific job on that, on the content going out now. Stan, you talk a lot about engagement with other people’s posts. Why don’t you talk about really quickly why that’s most important? That’s very, very, very important to do, as well as a couple of tips on how to do that. Yep.

0:20:30 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): So engaging on other people’s posts helps raise your level of visibility while also supporting them because people only post because they want to become more visible. And when you engage on someone’s post, it sends a signal to LinkedIn’s good old algorithm that people are interested in this and will show it to more of their network and hopefully people outside their network. One kind of best practice we talk about is tagging the person that you’re, whose post you’re engaging with, just to make sure that they see that you’re supporting them.

0:21:09 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): And this is a way you can begin to build a relationship even before you invite someone to connect on LinkedIn because you can engage with their content, and they get to see who you are. And later, when you do reach out to him, it’s, oh, Bob, he’s commenting all the time on my post. Love to connect with him. So it’s powerful in that respect. It helps them and it also helps you as well. One side note, when we were talking about currency, currency is a form of value, and we always talk about providing value before you ask for something else.

0:21:50 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): So when you provide good content that helps your audience with their job, it adds value, and it can be viewed as a form of currency in that.

0:21:59 – (Bob Woods): Respect, I guess I like that. Bringing it, bringing it back to currency, that’s just absolutely perfect. So I just want to wrap this up really quick. Just saying content that sparks dialogue, whether it’s everything that Brynne discussed or, you know what, what Stan just discussed is content that drives business. And that dialogue can be through sales conversations and or through content. So always keep that in mind too.

0:22:28 – (Bob Woods): So remember that curating, creating, and engaging with content keeps you relevant and builds up the credibility you need for long-term success. So, guys, I think we’re going to start out the last third of this year with a bang. Now that we’ve taught everyone how to do everything that they need to do with social selling and everything that we’ve discussed, what do you say? Are we going to do this? Are we going to go out with a bang?

0:22:54 – (Brynne Tillman): We are going to go out. We’re going to help everyone have the most amazing last third of any year they’ve ever had, which I’m very excited about. And, you know, we’re going to do this in lots of ways. And I got to do this, which I, you know, we really don’t ever promote very much. We’re very excited about Asks AI, which is coming soon. If you’re interested, go to socialsaleslink.com library. When you join our free library, you will be given an opportunity to try the AI for free.

0:23:30 – (Brynne Tillman): So very excited about that. Askssl AI yay. Absolutely.

0:23:35 – (Bob Woods): Yay. Absolutely. So thank you for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live. We truly appreciate you giving a portion of your day to us. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn or any other social network right now, we do this well, almost every week. Next week’s Labor Day, we’re not gonna be here. Don’t tell anyone, but so you know, still keep an eye out for our 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 or whatever, it is where you’re listening to us to not only access all of our previous shows but be alerted to when new ones drop.

0:24:12 – (Bob Woods): If you’d like more info on our podcast, it’s at socialsales link.com podcast. We do two shows weekly, this one and our making sales social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many, many other areas. So when you are out and about this week, any week, and every week, be sure that you’re making your sales.

0:24:40 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Social.

0:24:41 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us. Next. Register for free resources@linkedinlibrary.com you can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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