Episode 342: Building Genuine Relationships on LinkedIn: Quality Over Quantity

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 teach 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.

0:01:06 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m Brynne Tillman and today I’m looking forward to having Michael Kainatsky on the show. Michael is not your typical entrepreneur. He’s a dynamic leader who thrives on challenging the status quo and making the seemingly impossible possible. With a career journey that spans from C-suite roles to founding his ventures, Michael brings a wealth of experience in sales, recruiting, and business growth strategies.

0:01:37 – (Brynne Tillman): He’s the kind of problem solver who not only sees the flaws in conventional systems, like the broken hiring ecosystem costing companies billions but also dives headfirst into fixing them. Michael’s approach is refreshingly honest, often contrarian, and deeply rooted in his passion for teaching and helping others succeed. I’m excited to dive into his unique perspective on the power of building community through the House of Bricks community.

0:02:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome to the podcast, Michael.

0:02:12 – (Michael Kainatsky): It’s great to be here. Thank you.

0:02:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I’m thrilled to have you. And we’re going to jump into a lot of really cool conversations around community building communities and what it takes. But before I do, we ask all of our guests one question, which is, what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:35 – (Michael Kainatsky): That’s a good question. I think to me, it’s the idea that you don’t have to sell anything. I think too many people on social networks are spending their time trying to sell. For me, it’s curiosity. It is about building relationships and helping people to, you know, either give them something they don’t have or take away something that is annoying them. And you can’t find that out by just setting somebody an offer. You have to take the time to get to know someone, and that means investing time and getting to know who they are as a person, getting to know some of their pain points, and building trust.

0:03:16 – (Michael Kainatsky): To me, I’ve. I’ve had this, I’d say ethos for my entire career. I just never quite formulated it into words until I started actively commenting on other people’s posts and then really creating content myself. Not too long ago, consistently, probably maybe January or February, I started doing it and I started building it naturally, building a community. Because I am somebody who doesn’t go with the flow of what everyone says. I think there’s LinkedIn has become kind of an echo chamber.

0:03:46 – (Michael Kainatsky): People all like to agree with each other, either because that’s their AI comment, they’re doing it and it’s just easier that way, or they just. That’s what they want. For me, I think it’s a matter of challenging the status quo and getting down to the bottom of how things work, why they don’t work, and calling out the things that are maybe not, you know, popular to call out, but are certainly problematic.

0:04:10 – (Michael Kainatsky): So really, for me, it’s just naturally being in a relationship scenario where you don’t have to sell anybody anything. You’re more of a. You’re helping, you’re solving, you’re compelling. But I don’t think selling and social even go well together, to be honest. I think by the time you get to a point where you have a good enough relationship, you don’t have to sell anything. People kind of ask you how can you help.

0:04:31 – (Michael Kainatsky): And you offer them how you can help. And if you can, you can. And if you can’t, you still have the relationship to fall back on versus if you just make an offer and they say no, you don’t have much to build on from there.

0:04:41 – (Brynne Tillman): So, interesting perspective. I want to dive into something that you said or two things that you said and share with me how you balance building relationships and being a contrarian. How do you balance the two so that you are helping and not insulting?

0:05:00 – (Michael Kainatsky): Well, it’s interesting because there are a lot of people that probably have a belief system. They’ll tell you what their belief system is, and why they do something, and it’s very important, especially if you’re coming from a place where you don’t have an agenda. And if somebody tells you something and you genuinely believe that There may be a better way. I try to approach it by offering people value.

0:05:26 – (Michael Kainatsky): Not necessarily critique, but more of what about the other way of looking at it. And for me, I try to look at it as there are a lot of people out there who probably won’t offer guidance, advice, or coaching without wanting to be paid for it. So one of the things I do a lot, you know, my contrarian viewpoint usually shines through in my posts and sometimes in the comments section, because truth, I think, goes a lot further. But if somebody reaches out to me, which I get a lot of, and does the traditional LinkedIn pitch slap, I don’t use this as an opportunity to say no, thank you, block them, or ignore them.

0:06:04 – (Michael Kainatsky): I use it as an opportunity to ask them about their approach and ask them if they think there might be a better way to do what they’re doing to get the result that they likely are not getting right now. And generally what that does is it sparks a conversation. And I don’t try to sell people on trying to help them fix their problems. What I do is I try to get them to think about what a better way to do it is. And most people, 95% of the time, they don’t say to me, hey, Michael, you know what?

0:06:32 – (Michael Kainatsky): This is perfect. Thank you so much. I want to work with you. They’ll say, God, you know, thank you for this, for that help. I’m going to apply this. I appreciate your time. And I think that being a contrarian is not a bad thing. If you’re taking the time to build a relationship of trust with someone and giving them some pointers and let them go off into the, you know, into the wilderness of LinkedIn to try to do it again without just saying to them, hey, this is broken. Let me fix it for you because what you’re doing is horrible.

0:06:59 – (Michael Kainatsky): So I, I kind of balance it with, I’m building the relationship by offering them value that normally they would not get from someone. People will just say no and, or ignore them and block them so they’re not even getting feedback. So I think the contrarian approach with the value that I’m giving them back after 20 years in sales, which most people won’t, is where the balance probably comes in.

0:07:20 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. I’ll just let you know at every. Whenever I get that connection and pitch. My response email I just brought up was as a LinkedIn trainer, I’m curious if the Connect and pitch is working for you. If you’re open, I’d love to share some free resources that can help you start more sales conversations by adding value. Let me know, I’ll send a link and so that it becomes permission-based. So I just wanted to share that.

0:07:47 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that you’re doing this and one of the areas that I have found to not become insulting is to ask them how it’s working. Some people will come back and say it’s working swimmingly. I’m like, that’s not true. It’s not. I know it’s not right. And typically when I get a response like that, it’s from their, the company they hired to spam people. So they’re not, they don’t ever even see that message.

0:08:15 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s typically when I get a response that it’s doing well, but it doesn’t do well. And you’re right. Value-centric relationships when you are coming in to help them do better always win the day. I do come from a permission-based approach so I don’t typically send the advice. I offer it and if they want it we actually a b test it and we get significantly more people that want it and click through when you ask them permission.

0:08:48 – (Brynne Tillman): So that was just my little add value.

0:08:51 – (Michael Kainatsky): I love that. I think that that’s, you know, there’s not a right way to do it. There’s a lot of wrong ways. Right. We know there’s a lot of wrong ways. There’s no one right way. I mean that’s just, you know, it’s the thing about it and most people don’t do this, and why I’ve had the most success with anyone, probably including even the conversation you and I started. I always tell people I’m here for the relationships.

0:09:14 – (Michael Kainatsky): It’s genuine, it’s true. I don’t have an agenda. And a lot of people aren’t used to somebody saying I don’t have any agendas. I’m just looking to meet great people because they think that, everyone must have an agenda. Two, well, we must. I don’t have one, I need to have a purpose for the phone call rather than just meeting someone new, which again is so rare. But it always was baffling to me that somebody would go through the effort of finding you, they would go through the effort of connecting with you and the. And this goes for people you’ve been connected to for years. That’s my issue. I’m so busy and I think everybody’s so busy building new relationships, connecting with as many people as they can every day.

0:09:55 – (Michael Kainatsky): And then you look back and Say, what about the 15 or 20,000 or 10,000 connections I’ve had for 10 years that I have never tried to nurture and find out more about? So I think that LinkedIn is rewarding us with the wrong things. We should be backward facing off. Look at all these great people I’ve connected to for whatever reason instead of trying to add new ones and starting from scratch.

0:10:16 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that we call it taking inventory. Who have you been ignoring?

0:10:20 – (Michael Kainatsky): Everybody.

0:10:21 – (Brynne Tillman): This is so fun. So I’m sure you know this, but I’m just sharing. You can export all your connections into an Excel spreadsheet and we typically will tell our clients to categorize them and we call it cpr. We’re breathing life back into our network, but it’s client prospect or referral partner. And so we’re going to engage each of them slightly differently. Right. So, you know, you can also search your first-degree connections, but we always say start. You’ve been, if you’ve been collecting connections like business cards and sticking rubber bands around them, you know, metaphorically, it’s time to take business cards out and to take inventory.

0:11:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love how aligned we are. We’ve never even talked about this, so it’s awesome.

0:11:09 – (Michael Kainatsky): But that’s the thing. I think there’s very, there’s probably, and I don’t want to say the older LinkedIn generations. You know, I’m going to say older, I’m going to say more of like the old guard that remembers LinkedIn where it was, hey, I need a job. I need it, It’s a resume. You used it as. And I remember talking to people even five years ago. And I’d say, well, how come you only have 50 connections? They say because I know 50 people.

0:11:34 – (Michael Kainatsky): And I’d say, well, God, that’s. Then go meet a hundred people, go meet a thousand. And those same people that said, would I connect with someone? I don’t know, you’d look at their, you know, Facebook and they’d have a thousand friends and you say, how many do you know? Like, I don’t know, 50. Like exactly. So it’s. A lot of people didn’t want to even venture out to meet new people. But then it went the other way, which is we’re gonna, I’m gonna fill my network up with all these amazing connections.

0:12:00 – (Michael Kainatsky): Why though? And so I think that this is where people don’t have system strategies and tools to take the inventory like you’re talking about, you know, do the CPR method. And even if you don’t have a CPR method. Like, I don’t care if they’re a prospect. How about no agenda, Just, you know, I. A lot of people follow Justin Welch. This is always a funny example for me. Everybody’s all about Justin Welch.

0:12:23 – (Michael Kainatsky): And I. About five months ago, I was going through my first connections and I realized that Justin and I have been connected since 2012.

0:12:29 – (Brynne Tillman): Wow.

0:12:29 – (Michael Kainatsky): When Justin actually worked at ZocDoc and I had just interviewed there briefly at a time for 2011, and we connected probably in 2012, whatever it was. And I’m just. I remember thinking, that we don’t even realize the gold that we have in our network because all we’re busy with is trying to conquer new territories. But we already have so much that we can go back to. So it’s just, I think that we all need to slow down and we need to kind of like you take, take inventory, figure out who are all these amazing people. I chose to, or they chose to, or we chose to.

0:13:07 – (Michael Kainatsky): We chose. Right. Like, you have an option that says, do you want to accept? And yet a lot of these people and I, look, I’ve done this at the beginning of this year, I set out that, you know, and it was never going to happen in a year. Is that going to happen at 5? But I was like, I’m going to just send messages to all of my first connections. And I just systemically started doing it and just saying, we’ve been connected, but we’ve never connected.

0:13:28 – (Michael Kainatsky): We don’t know each other, so why would we be connected for five years? Do you want to have a chat and figure out who we are, who you are, who I am, and how we can potentially do something to benefit each other? Or do you just rather disconnect? And to my surprise, I got neutral answers that were like, okay, no thanks. You know, the typical buttons somewhere, yeah, we can disconnect. And, you know, quite a few also said, oh, my God, you’re right, let’s connect for a chat.

0:13:56 – (Michael Kainatsky): But it wasn’t universally just, oh, my God, we connected. Of course, why don’t we get to know each other? It struck me that people are connecting to collect connections. That’s it. And that’s what’s been happening. That’s why people are so, you know, immersed in follower counts and connection counts to the point where they put in their headlines, 25k followers, 25k connections. It’s like, who cares? How many of them do you have in your phone book? And you call them on a Friday night when you need to be bailed out of prison.

0:14:23 – (Michael Kainatsky): And the answer probably is like zero. So let’s value the connections instead of the quantity, the quality. And that’s probably where my contrarian side comes in. A lot of what’s happening on LinkedIn these days.

0:14:34 – (Brynne Tillman): Yes, I love this. So, just looking at our history, we connected September 6, 2018. You reached out in 2022 to just say, you know, how are you? I’m making it my goal to, you know, connect with my first-degree connections. We had a very nice response back and forth. But then at one point, you know, I said, I mentioned a fun way to reengage our network is to do a poll and ask them to vote. And you’re like, that was a great idea.

0:15:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So we’ve had all this back and forth and now the time was right to invite you on as a podcast guest. And you know, and it just came, you know, whatever comes from this, maybe I’ll refer your business now that I know you better. All of these things came out of it. But there was no, like you said, major agenda. You didn’t connect with me in 2018 to be a podcast guest guest six years later.

0:15:30 – (Michael Kainatsky): No. Right, no.

0:15:32 – (Brynne Tillman): But it comes out of that because I see your content, I see what you’re doing. I, you know, you’ve brought real value. We had a real conversation about what it takes to reengage connections and we’re here today. So I just wanted to say, you practice what you teach and that’s exactly how we ended up here today. And maybe some people in my network will follow you and refer you or leverage your expertise, but now your network is expanded into mine and when you share this mine network has expanded into yours. So it’s a win-win for everyone. So I love that that’s your perspective and I love that’s exactly how we ended up here today.

0:16:16 – (Michael Kainatsky): So I just, look, I think that what I’ve learned, and this goes from 20 years of, you know, again, I call it old school selling, but I’ve had a sales career that. And again, my contrarian point of view comes on and comes out on LinkedIn where I see people that graduated two to three years ago and they have things in their profile, let’s say LinkedIn expert, lead gen expert. You know, I’ll show you how to 5x your revenue.

0:16:41 – (Michael Kainatsky): You don’t know what my revenue is I’ll show you how to 10x your leads. You have no idea how many leads I have. That’s my point. And that’s, and I see these Headlines that they’re not screaming, build a relationship with me. They’re screaming, transact with me. And so these are the profiles that I want to reach out to these people and say, look, you’re not doing anything of value. And everyone out there is saying this, so there’s nothing about you that’s special. So if I say, why are there no agenda conversations? Better? Well, if I said to you, hey, Brynne, I want to talk to you about how I could sell you, blah, blah, blah, you may agree. Let’s say you do agree, hypothetically, say, all right, fine, I’ll hear you out. I’m a salesperson.

0:17:19 – (Michael Kainatsky): I’ll hear you out. Here’s what’s going to happen on the call. I’m going to say the focus of the, you know, like the SDR thing, the reason for the call today is because of blah, blah, blah. And you say like this, okay, Michael, go for it, because I’m blocking you. You know, jab, left hook. You know, I got my shoulder out because I don’t want you to sell me. So now all I’m trying to do is get you to open something up and you’re trying to just block me.

0:17:39 – (Michael Kainatsky): If I just say to you, I don’t have an agenda, and I just start, hey, talk to me, you know, oh, look, I noticed you have a white brick in the background. That’s a great design. I love that. And we start talking, oh, I have a house, you know, with a house of bricks community. You have white bricks. That’s cool. We just go on a tangent. Before you know it, you let your guard down anyway because you trust the fact that I’m just here to build a relationship. And you may say something that I say. Bryn, you know what I was thinking about what you said. Here’s how you can. I could help you, or you should do it even if I don’t help you. And then you go, Michael, you know what? That’s a great idea. Maybe you can help me. And you just naturally flow into what may turn out to be a relationship. This works on imagining first dates. Hey, the reason I’m here today is because I’m looking for a potential wife and I need two kids. So I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay with two kids and getting married. And you’d be like, what are you talking about? I don’t even know you.

0:18:26 – (Michael Kainatsky): But sales are treated like this every day on LinkedIn because they think I.

0:18:31 – (Brynne Tillman): Could pitch, like, even on the phone. It’s not even just LinkedIn. It’s everywhere culture of let me throw as much on the wall and hope that something sticks versus let me bring as much value to my network and I’ll attract the right people.

0:18:46 – (Michael Kainatsky): But nobody wants to invest the time because time, it’s hard to invest the time, so nobody wants to do it. It’s much easier to say, well, I have a million prospects. Let me send out a million emails. I mean, people try to sell me. You know, every week I get an email saying I can send out 10,000 emails a week for you. I’m like, why would I need 10,000 emails a week? Why don’t, why don’t I just reach out to 100 people probably 30 will, 40 will speak to me anyway, and maybe five of them will say, Michael, you could help me, but why just have 15 ghost emails or mirror domains just so you can send as many emails while everyone else is doing that?

0:19:22 – (Michael Kainatsky): Well, everyone is doing this. Go to the side of relationship building. I mean, if you look at the big creators, and I mean the real big creators, I don’t mean the creators that are probably, you know, using pods and pretending to be the big one. I mean the real ones, the genuine ones, they’re in it not to sell anything. They’re in it to add value consistently. And people probably reach out and ask them for their help because they end up trusting them after a certain period of time.

0:19:46 – (Michael Kainatsky): So trust that, you know, the relationship. Adam always says, relationship capital. You know, what are we doing? We’re building relationship capital. One to many, you build meet one person. Just, just one person will open up 100 doors. Or you can just knock down 100 doors and hope one opens.

0:20:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So let’s dive into this a little bit. I could talk to you literally all day. I love the conversation. But you’re the head of growth at House of Bricks, which really is a community of founders. And, you know, from talking with you, it really revolves around, hey, it’s lonely at the top. And, you know, I’m really looking for a community to help me scale my business and talk about challenges dreams, and future plans with other folks.

0:20:36 – (Brynne Tillman): Talk to me about how important an advisory community is for founders and a little bit about whether it’s a house of bricks or another community. I’ll use your conversation. Why would a founder want to be part of a community like this?

0:20:55 – (Michael Kainatsky): So depending on, I mean, we, I think when we talk about founders, there’s the nomenclature that generally, let’s say people outside of the entrepreneurial world that are working for a company and they fear founders. And I think the immediate thing in their mind is Facebook, Uber, you know, Airbnb. They think about like the tech founders who are like going to, you know, go to an accelerator, go to series A, B, C, D, exit their company for a billion bucks. And that’s in the mind of the founder. But one of the things that we embrace in the house of bricks and why Adam even, you know, did this himself, because he’s exited five companies, he’s not a tech founder. He’s done a multitude of things. He’s exited a company that went public.

0:21:35 – (Michael Kainatsky): But again, we’re looking at what if you, what if you want to scale your ice cream shop that you’ve found it, you started, you have a passion for it, you opened up a shop and now you want to add another 100, you know, thousand dollars in revenue. Well, you’re a founder, you don’t have to be a traditional founder. So really it opens up the gates for everyone. One of the things about founders generally, especially early on, first-time founders, they try to go at everything alone.

0:21:59 – (Michael Kainatsky): And it’s not because they want to, it’s because they don’t think they have a choice. They don’t have the community, they don’t know where to turn. They believe that by being the only way you can actually get help is by paying a lot of money for it or getting people to invest in your business. This is why when I talk to founders and when we’ve talked and we have this in the community, it’s almost like a joke.

0:22:21 – (Michael Kainatsky): Every time we talk to founders of any kind, they say two things. I need to raise money and I need sales. But that’s really not what founders need. What founders need. And this is where the simple framework comes in. S, I, M, P, L, E. The first one, everyone wants the E to execute. They all want execution. Right? Everyone needs an eye for innovation, everyone needs the right M mindset. But the number one thing that no one usually has because they’re too busy rushing through the process to get to a revenue point, to an MVP, an MVC, whatever it might be, is they skip the strategy.

0:22:54 – (Michael Kainatsky): There’s no strategy to do it. So we’re trying to slow people down and show them that this community is not where we, myself and Adam are just sitting there talking at you. And everybody’s you know, an arena, listening and looking up. It’s. Every person in the community has value and has something they bring to the table. So it’s not a top-down, it’s a bottom-up. Everyone is Involved where there’s no.

0:23:18 – (Michael Kainatsky): Adam loves to say, there’s no title Envy in the House of Bricks. It’s just a bunch of people who have all the life experiences that they can bring to the table. And we give everyone a podium to do that. So whether or not somebody needs an advisory, whether or not they want to learn how to do boot camp and do the sales aspect of it, whether they just literally want to be a part of something so they’re not lonely anymore, because, you know, building in solitude is okay.

0:23:41 – (Michael Kainatsky): A lot of people build in solitude, but it’s the loneliness of it that affects your mindset and how you feel emotionally. And that’s why being a founder is depressing. And people go through these waves of loneliness and depression because you just. It never stops. So the community was built, first and foremost to bring people together and give them a place where they can exchange ideas. And then, of course, from there, they may need something else. And with Adam and Bill myself, you add up all of our experiences and what we’ve done, you’re talking about probably 80 years just between the three of us, and that’s not including the community and all of the amazing talent that we have. So once you open that up, you know, one becomes many. And the things you start. And again, we’re. We’re incentivizing them to collaborate and transact if they need to. Right.

0:24:33 – (Michael Kainatsky): Everyone in the House of Bricks can do whatever they want. We’re not limiting it to what we do. We’re just trying to bring great people together, you know, so it’s. The idea behind it is really about, first and foremost, making sure people are not lonely and have relationships, great friendships, and then you start adding value into it but bringing them together, that’s the part that really meant something to Adam because he’s been a founder for 27 years since he was 19.

0:25:00 – (Michael Kainatsky): And he’s basically built this based on all the failures that he’s had so he can help others avoid the same ones.

0:25:07 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. And for our listeners, it’s Adam House Senior, who is the founder. So if you were looking for him on LinkedIn, that’s where House of Bricks comes from. So I just wanted.

0:25:17 – (Michael Kainatsky): Because I know everything’s upon.

0:25:18 – (Brynne Tillman): Our listeners are on LinkedIn all the time going, look at them up, look.

0:25:21 – (Michael Kainatsky): Them up, looking them up.

0:25:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So, you know, this has been absolutely outstanding. I really. I’m going to have to have you back because there are so many more questions, and really fabulous. The second to last question I’m going to ask you is There any question I haven’t asked you that I should have?

0:25:44 – (Michael Kainatsky): Well, I mean, I’d say that probably the most. One of the questions that people generally ask me is, what is a change provocateur? Because I have that in my, you know, my headline and parentheses. That’s usually the primary question people ask me when they reach out to me if they go, I love that. But why? Why do you have that? And so I, you know, I believe that everything requires change, right? People are reluctant to change. And I think change is something that requires friction.

0:26:16 – (Michael Kainatsky): And for a time, as a matter of fact, it might still be there. I would call myself the frictional consultant. And people thought I made a mistake. They thought it was supposed to be fractional, and I just misspelled it. I said, no, it’s a frictional consultant. Because whenever I work with a client, the first thing I tell them is, this is not going to be pleasant. Because if you’re asking me to help you, there’s probably something wrong. And the only way to address that there’s a problem is a. You have to be uncomfortable and address the fact that something has to change and nothing changes comfortably.

0:26:46 – (Michael Kainatsky): Change happens when there’s friction, but something’s not working. Whether it’s friction in your business, friction in your family, friction with the process, friction because there’s a lack of revenue, whatever it might be, you need to do that. And then I started thinking about it. Well, I want to provoke change because everybody says, wow, thank you, Michael. That’s so thought. For years I would say things and I would have common people tell me, commonly tell me, not common people commonly tell me. People commonly tell me both, that’s really thought-provoking. And I started thinking, you know, I think people have a lot of thought provocation, but not a lot of change provocation.

0:27:21 – (Michael Kainatsky): Right? You say, man, I want to think about that. Yeah, that’s something to think about. And I always tell people, how about something to think about and do. How about change provocation? So I started saying it, saying it, saying. And after a while, I said, you know what? I’m just this. I’m going to be a change provocateur because that’s all I care about people to do the things they say they should change, not talk about the things they should change. And so that’s where the change provocateur came from and the friction that requires a change. Even in our boot camp inside the House of Bricks, which is designed to be an entire program from personal branding creation through your sales approach, and Again, I.

0:27:58 – (Michael Kainatsky): I may take it from a very different perspective because I come from 20 years of sales experience. First, I didn’t just pop on LinkedIn three years ago and say, I’m an expert in the algorithm. Which, by the way, there’s. If you don’t work for LinkedIn, you’re not an expert on the algorithm, so you should remove that from your profile.

0:28:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Because even Richard Vlum, there is one expert that I.

0:28:16 – (Michael Kainatsky): There’s one expert. And I mean, he might write the algorithm, right?

0:28:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, he studies it like no other.

0:28:22 – (Michael Kainatsky): So look, there’s. There are people who know the algorithm.

0:28:24 – (Brynne Tillman): He shares his report with everyone.

0:28:26 – (Michael Kainatsky): So. And that’s the thing, if you notice, everybody talks about the algorithm all the time. So I always tell people, like, look, it doesn’t matter about the algorithm. So in the evening, the boot camp, I call it a boot camp, because in order to have success on LinkedIn, you cannot cheat your way through. You need to put in the work. You need to care about your community, but you have to build it. You need to care about them. You got to show up every day, you got to engage with them. You got to do that for them and expect nothing. And many people give up on LinkedIn because they show up, they do it, they comment, they engage, and they go, nothing, Nothing. Why am I not getting any likes and comments?

0:28:59 – (Michael Kainatsky): Well, because it’s like going to the gym. You don’t have results in the first week. You know, you won’t lose £20 your first week. You don’t lose any weight in the first week. You may gain weight the first week, maybe it doesn’t matter. Show up every day. Every day, every day. And after six months, I mean, it took me months to get to a point where, first of all, I don’t really care much about engagement. I care about the relationships that come from it.

0:29:22 – (Michael Kainatsky): So whether it’s ten likes or a thousand, most people, ten of the right.

0:29:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Likes than a thousand of the not right.

0:29:28 – (Michael Kainatsky): That’s exactly right. And most people, get those likes, or even the fake ones based on pods and AI pods, all that stuff. So now that you have a thousand likes, what do you do with it?

0:29:39 – (Brynne Tillman): Right?

0:29:39 – (Michael Kainatsky): It’s useless. And people don’t value that. So that’s probably, to me, if somebody was going to ask me a question, that’s the most common question I get, is why change provocateur.

0:29:50 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. So the last question is if people are looking to have a conversation with or without an agenda, how? What’s the best way to get in?

0:29:59 – (Michael Kainatsky): Touch with you I make it so easy to get in touch with me which is surprising to me that more people just don’t take advantage. I mean there’s a booking link right in the right of my profile that says build a bridge. And I say it is building a bridge. It’s all we’re doing is building a relationship. Right. We don’t know what the bridge is going to cross over but it’s going to connect two worlds.

0:30:20 – (Michael Kainatsky): My mobile number is in my bio. It’s also anybody who’s connected to me, my mobile number and my email are right in my contact section. So I really make it easy for people to connect with me for any reason whatsoever if they so want. Just this weekend somebody connected with me and Saturday at 9:30 and decided they were going to text me trying to pitch me, you know.

0:30:40 – (Brynne Tillman): Well yeah, they should have read your, your LinkedIn profile first. They would have found a better way.

0:30:50 – (Michael Kainatsky): They might have, but at least they did it.

0:30:52 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, you have your calendar link in your cal in your profile. So do I and I am shocked now at how many, how few people do that. So I’m going to share a little before we wrap this up a little an interesting don’t. I’m going to carefully say this and I’m going to hope no one abuses this but you can search your first-degree connections and the keyword calendly.com and you can find all of your first.

0:31:23 – (Michael Kainatsky): Degree connections if you have Sales Navigator especially, right?

0:31:27 – (Brynne Tillman): You know you could do it in the free.

0:31:30 – (Michael Kainatsky): Oh no, I mean I know you can do it in the thing but I always tell people, look, if you really want to be able to be more deliberate about the things you’re doing and let’s be honest, a lot of people are on LinkedIn one way or another they’re looking for some kind of relationship that may lead to sales a lot. This is, you know, people aren’t here to boast about their vacations. So I always tell people about Sales Navigator and some efficiency tools that allow you to save time with your hands, not your personality. You don’t want to ever outsource your personality to any kind of tool on this platform.

0:32:06 – (Michael Kainatsky): But time is valuable and yeah, you could search anything you want. You could search calendly, you can search, call me, you could search, you know, put a phone number. I mean there’s so much you could do. And I think that’s where it comes down to. Many people are on LinkedIn trying to chase these top creators that they have no idea how they got there, but they look at them and go, whatever they’re doing, I need to do. When in fact all they need to do is just learn the basics and learn everything you can do with it. And at your fingertips, you have a Rolodex.

0:32:37 – (Michael Kainatsky): If you know how to do what you’re doing, you have a Rolodex of potentially a billion people. What are you going to do with that power? And you don’t want to just pitch-slap everyone. You want to get to know people. Because you may get to know someone like you, like me and say, I’m looking for XYZ and I probably know 50 people for every letter of the Alphabet service. Why? Because I’ve been building relationships and building a network for 17 years here. So you don’t want to.

0:33:04 – (Michael Kainatsky): I’m not the relationship you want to try to pitch slap. Because that relationship goes away if that’s all you can offer. And it’s not something I want. And generally, the ironic part about it is for some reason for me, people try to pitch slap me. LinkedIn training for sales, which is the worst thing you could try to sell me because I’ve been in sales for 20 years. So it’s, I just find it, I find that to be funny.

0:33:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, I get all the time. I took a look at your profile and I think you could improve it. I’m like, I teach people to do this. Even if you have improvements, then ask me, ask permission, say, hey, I looked at your profile and I have some ideas for you. Are you open? And of course, I’d be open to ideas. But don’t like it, don’t start by insulting me.

0:33:50 – (Michael Kainatsky): So anyway, look at, do you see theirs though? Yeah, I always look at theirs. They’re always immediately right. And I look at theirs always and go, this is what you do. I can. If I could look at yours in five seconds and see that you are missing massive things, then how can you even offer me this?

0:34:07 – (Brynne Tillman): Right, Well, I had one and he, you know, he had the gray head. And I know that it was because, you know, he had his settings that only first-degree connections could see his photo. And I replied, I said, if you have a photo, no one can see it. Here’s a link to get to open this up. He goes, thanks so much. I said, you’re not, you can’t claim to be an expert if you don’t even know that, you know, like, you can.

0:34:35 – (Brynne Tillman): It just, it’s, it’s crazy to me anyway, again, we could talk all day and we’re about double the time of a normal podcast, which was huge value and I’m thrilled and I thank you so much for your insight.

0:34:51 – (Michael Kainatsky): Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

0:34:52 – (Brynne Tillman): I know we’re going to keep talking because we’re talking the same language and I’m loving it. And to all, to all of our listeners, make sure you go connect with Michael. Learn about House of Bricks and the value that that community is bringing. If you are, if you’re a founder, an entrepreneur and you’re looking for something where you know you can bring value and get value and build a community, definitely check out House of Bricks.

0:35:24 – (Brynne Tillman): And when you’re out and about, thank you. Thank you. Oh, I’m excited. And to our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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