Episode 412: Converting Connections to Conversations with LinkedIn

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, me, and 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.

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

0:01:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Howdy.

0:01:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Happy to be here. Excited to talk about converting connections to conversation.

0:01:25 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, exactly. So let’s get right into it by saying we all have connections on LinkedIn. I’m assuming that if you’re listening to us, you are on LinkedIn and you have at least one connection. So hopefully you have a lot more than just one. What we’d like to ideally like to do is to start conversations with those people we’re connected with. Remember, your connections are people; they can help you. You can also most definitely help them.

0:02:00 – (Bob Woods): So whether you’re looking for new prospects, new partners, strengthening current relationships and so on, use LinkedIn and what we’re going to discuss today to help you build your business. And I do think, guys, that, you know, strengthening connections and really reaching out to people is what LinkedIn is all about, because it’s all about network.

0:02:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Absolutely. Should I jump in on my thoughts? All right, I’m going to jump in.

0:02:30 – (Bob Woods): This is your thought segment on Making Sales Social Live.

0:02:34 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it. Okay, so here, here’s what I know about me is I’ve got a ton of connections and I’ve forgotten a lot of them and a lot of them are people that I’d love to have conversations with. And I spend a lot of time looking at my second degrees to build relationships there and I’m kind of ignoring these first degree connections. And so I am really excited today about talking about how do we take inventory of our connections, how do we identify the clients, the prospects and the referral partners? That live inside of our current connections and things that we can do to reengage them in a way that, that’s meaningful to them.

0:03:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. That brings them value and starts that conversation not around how I can sell them, but how we can bring value to one another, which is what you said early on. And I kind of just reframed that. So that’s where I want to start. How about you, Bob? Stan?

0:03:41 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, so, I mean, yeah, not only start, but. But burn did the whole thing. So thanks, everybody for joining us. Bye. Bye. No, we are going to get a lot more into this. We’re going to get a lot more into that. Stan, do you have anything to add?

0:03:56 – (Stan Robinson Jr): One of the things that, as we say in this PS segment, is focus on the value that you bring to others rather than being concerned about how they can help you. And that changes your mindset, and it makes it much, much easier when you take that perspective and you’re talking to them about how you can help them solve a problem rather than how they can help you earn a commission.

0:04:26 – (Bob Woods): That is a perfect segue to the very first thing that we’re going to be talking about in converting connections to conversations with LinkedIn, and that’s with your profile. So, as you know, most people have their profiles like, you know, here’s why I’m great, here’s why I’m good. Here’s, here’s what I do and here’s what I sell. That is not good. What you really should do, and we’ve been practicing this for years and years and years now, and we’ve helped a lot of people with it, is shifting your profile from a resume to a resource.

0:05:04 – (Bob Woods): So this is where Stan’s thing comes in. Because when you provide value right away in your profile, you create curiosity. You get your buyers thinking differently about their situations, and then they’ll be excited to take your call or to click on that link to schedule a call with you or whatever, essentially because they want to learn more about what you’re doing because you’ve gotten them thinking differently.

0:05:33 – (Bob Woods): You’ve gotten them saying, hmm, I wonder if Stan’s thing, what he mentioned in whatever piece of content that he shared, I wonder how that can help me. All of that immediately gets started with your profile.

0:05:50 – (Brynne Tillman): I love this. And I, you know, often I say, I want you to start looking at your profile like a landing page. And this is where you’re going to earn the right to get the conversation or at least start, because your content can do that too. But if we’re talking about converting connections to conversations. And we reach out in a lot of ways that we’ll talk about. Typically, if they don’t remember you or even if they do, the first thing they’re going to do is click through to your profile.

0:06:18 – (Brynne Tillman): So is your profile doing its job of converting that visitor to a conversation? And that is going to run kind of through a few elements. And I don’t know how deep we’re going into this, but your banner, if your banner is doing its job, it creates that kind of curiosity. And actually, I’ll probably say this a few times, so I’ll watch that I don’t go too deep. But all content, including your profile, should hit five elements if we want to convert to a conversation.

0:06:53 – (Brynne Tillman): The first one is of resonates with our buyers. When they show up, they need to know we serve them. Because if they don’t know that right away, they’re going to hop. They don’t have time. The second thing is we have to create enough curiosity that they lean in and do what Bob said, which is interesting. Right. The third thing, and I am reframing a lot of what you said under this, is we need to teach them something new, something they didn’t know before they got here. It could be small, but it needs to be impactful.

0:07:29 – (Brynne Tillman): And what you’ve just taught them needs to get them thinking differently about their current situation. And ultimately, whatever that call to action is needs to work. We need to move them from spectator to engager. If we don’t know they’re there, we can’t start a conversation. So is your profile converting that to a message, to an engagement on content that they found on your profile, to them accepting or responding to the message you sent them?

0:08:12 – (Brynne Tillman): So your profile has a big job. And your profile’s job is to convert that connection to a conversation. And not necessarily a sales call all the time, but a meaningful conversation that might lead to that opportunity. Okay, back to you, back to you.

0:08:35 – (Bob Woods): And over to Stan.

0:08:36 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Boy, that was. That was great. And I was just thinking, as you were talking, Brynne, your profile may not cause someone to reach out to you directly as a result of having looked at it. What it can help them do, though, is stay on your profile rather than clicking through to your competitors, because yours does resonate with them. And number two, even if they just look at your profile, and the good news, of course, is you can see who’s viewed your profile most of the time.

0:09:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yep.

0:09:10 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Even if they don’t take any action when they’ve looked at your profile and see that you’re positioned as a resource that can help them. When you do reach out to them, they’re more likely to respond.

0:09:22 – (Brynne Tillman): True. That’s awesome. Yeah. And by the way, if you have the free LinkedIn, you have to make sure that your profile is open, not in an anonymous mode because it’s your pay to play. You have to be open to seeing other people who are viewing your profile. And the one thing we do know is that if they are not open, we’re not going to be able to see them. So. But I love that, Stan, because I think that that’s so powerful.

0:09:51 – (Brynne Tillman): We know they’re visiting most of the time, we know that they’re visiting our profile, and that is adding to our credibility. So that when we do reach out. Oh, I love that. Thank you.

0:10:05 – (Bob Woods): Absolutely. So now we’re going to move on to the next item in converting connections to conversations with LinkedIn and that’s taking inventory of specifically your existing first degree connections and then identifying the people who you’d like to engage with. And if you’re like, God, I have no idea who that would be, well, we’re going to tell you who it should be. So past clients to see if they need help nowadays, potentially current clients, potentially expanding your offerings within their organization, or just to say, you know, hey, what’s up? And, catch up with them and make sure that you are obviously continu, continuing to serve them in a quality way.

0:10:48 – (Bob Woods): Prospects are obvious there. Referral partners, really big. You should be connecting and communicating with Referral partners on LinkedIn as well. Your vendors are another big one. Not only to communicate with them, to make sure that they’re doing what you need, and they’re getting what they need to do for you from you. Yeah, I think that’s right. As, as well as, you know, potential, potential referral opportunities and networking as well.

0:11:21 – (Bob Woods): And then the last group is potentially community leaders and influencers, and that could be a wide variety of people. If you are serving a local base, that would be the community leaders. If you’re more regional or national, community leaders may be more along the lines of influencers within your industry or sector or whatever. And you can take inventory very easily through LinkedIn. And this is where I toss it over to Brynne because this is one of her favorite things to talk about, and we call it doing CPR.

0:11:55 – (Brynne Tillman): Yes. So there are two ways to truly take inventory. The first one is to download your connections, which is now kind of hidden, and download all your data. So if you’ve done this before, and you show up and go. Oh my gosh, it’s gone. I can’t download my connections anymore. It’s hidden. So just download all your data and within 24 hours you will get a big zip file that you open up and connections CSV lives in there when you open that up. And if you open that up in Excel, I typically will go into a Google spreadsheet.

0:12:29 – (Brynne Tillman): I add a column. So you’re going to get first name, last name, their email if they opted in to allow you to have that, a link back to their LinkedIn profile, their company, their title and the date you connected with them. That’s a lot. Add a left column on the left-hand side, and that’s where CPR comes in. So Bob mentioned lots of different folks we want to have conversations with. I tend to group them into three clients: prospect, referral partner.

0:13:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So that influencer or community leader, I may put under that referral partner tab just to make it streamlined. And so I go through, and we recommend doing 10 a day, just look through. About 10% of the people you’re connected to are people that you want to have a conversation with. So if you do 10 a day or 20 a day, you’re only getting to one or two people on average to reach out to. We can talk about lots of different ways to do that, including video messages and a couple of other things, to reestablish that communication.

0:13:40 – (Brynne Tillman): But I think it’s really important that we drill it down to the right people. My real favorite is the search, and I love searching in Sales Navigator. However, even in the free we have the ability to search and filter our first-degree connections. So identify if you are geographically, you know, I guess obligated, or your prospects live in a few states or a few cities, a few towns. Right.

0:14:14 – (Brynne Tillman): If there are industries that you serve specifically, you can drill down your first-degree connections. Even titles. I only want business owners, CEOs, entrepreneurs, or I only want a VP or a director. Through using Boolean search logic in the title, you can drill down your first-degree connections to all the people that we’re ignoring that we want to have conversations with. So, really love those two methodologies to just take inventory and identify who we are connected to that we’re ignoring, that we should re-engage.

0:14:54 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yep. And I thought that your suggestion about 10 a day makes it much more manageable. Especially when your network starts to grow and you say Oh my goodness, I can never get to all these people. But 10 a day makes it bite-sized.

0:15:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And if no one is in those 10, keep going. Even if you’re engaging one or two dormant connections a day, it is going to add up significantly over the weeks and months, and years. And it’s so much easier to start conversations with them than it is with brand-new people that never heard of you.

0:15:34 – (Bob Woods): Yep. And one thing that I’ll add real quick, just because I’ve been on a tear when it comes to this lately, is video messaging. So in other words, putting that phone in front of your face and saying, Hey, Mark, it’s been a while, and then going through with whatever message and then sending it directly in LinkedIn as a video message, that’s great because it’s much more personal. They get to look you in the eye, and you know, while you’re delivering the message, you come across as real and genuine. Especially if you, you know, you may mess up a little bit or whatever.

0:16:08 – (Bob Woods): That’s okay. You are a human being. Don’t treat it like a TikTok video that’s going to be like massively edited and chopped up and things like that, so that it looks perfect. And then, you know, you’re also just going to stand out from the crowd because hardly anyone else is actually doing video messaging. So you’re going to make a big impact just by showing up, you know, figuratively speaking, in their faces, although obviously you’re not in their faces. But it’s more face-to-face communication.

0:16:37 – (Bob Woods): So, definitely wanted to mention that as well.

0:16:40 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I mean, we know that there’s over 90% response rate when you send a video message, and the people that aren’t responding are the ones that are just not looking at it, are just not.

0:16:51 – (Bob Woods): On LinkedIn, which is possible as well. I mean, it’s entirely possible as well. So keep all that in mind.

0:16:57 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m just going to add to that because I think that that tip, I don’t want that to get lost in anything that we’re saying. If you take away nothing else, that video tip in the message is so important. Also, recognize that what you’re sending them needs to be of value to them. Make do with that little. Is this a pitch about what I want? I’m going to go back to what Stan said. Is this, is this something that they will see as a value, not as a pitch?

0:17:33 – (Brynne Tillman): And it’s really sometimes a fine line for a lot of salespeople where you think it’s value, but it’s not landing as value.

0:17:42 – (Bob Woods): Right.

0:17:43 – (Brynne Tillman): So here’s the litmus test. Is what I’m sending them valuable even if they never talk to me again? If they don’t respond, but they learn. Did they learn something? Did they gain something of value that, even if they don’t communicate back, I have left them better for having listened to that video?

0:18:06 – (Bob Woods): Yep, 100%. That’s a great rule to live by, quite frankly, for any communication, but definitely for video communication there.

0:18:16 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yeah. And just a quick yes. And with the video, as we say, it may go without saying, but try and keep it under 60 seconds.

0:18:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

0:18:24 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Don’t make a five minute video in this context, especially if you haven’t been in touch in a while.

0:18:29 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s one of those really simple things to keep in mind. But at the same time, it’s so important. You, you really can’t. You know, people used to laugh at other people who left two and three-minute voicemails and things like that. It’s the same type of thinking, just with video messaging rather than, you know, just pure voice. Although you still can do voice messages on LinkedIn as well, that never really took off.

0:18:54 – (Brynne Tillman): I get them a lot from two people. So, I like every message these folks send, and one of them is my neighbor, and that’s how she communicates, is an audio message on LinkedIn with me. That’s her choice.

0:19:12 – (Bob Woods): That’s interesting.

0:19:13 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I mean, but I, you’re right, it hasn’t taken off, but there are a few people that do like it. The one thing I’ll also add to that is you want to make sure that you’ve got some kind of next step. Because I just said bring value, even if they don’t ever talk to you. But we want them to talk to you. That’s the point of this is to convert them to a conversation. So, make sure there is some kind of next step or call to action in all of this content. Like if you’d like to talk through this or explore more or X, Y and Z. I’m always available or reach out. I’m happy to have a conversation.

0:19:52 – (Brynne Tillman): You want to make sure that you’ve made yourself available, that it’s not just, hey, I brought them value, and they’re not going to reach out. We want to make it easy for them to reach out.

0:20:03 – (Bob Woods): Yep, very good, very good. So let’s move on to the next one, which is learning what really matters to your connections. So you know, when it comes to what matters to them, if they’re a very small business or even an entrepreneur, everything’s going to matter to them when it comes to their business, because they’re attached to everything. The Business becomes, the more segmented the people you are going to be reaching out to will have their concerns. So it may be more finance, it may be more hr, it may be more it, you know, that type of thing.

0:20:43 – (Bob Woods): That’s why you really need to learn more about what matters to your connections, because each of those stakeholders is going to have different agendas. I think you would agree that an HR person and a finance person, by and large, will have two very different agendas. So you have to make sure that your messaging is aligned with their agenda. Or, you know, if you toss an HR related thing at someone who’s in sales, for example, you’re not going to schedule a conversation with that salesperson if you’re talking nothing but HR stuff.

0:21:16 – (Bob Woods): Unless they sell HR solutions, of course, then that’s different. But generally speaking, it ain’t going to happen.

0:21:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love that. I think that’s so important, and I think that goes back to sharing insights that matter to them, that impact them. And I love having similar messaging with that, just that tweak so that when it lands in the HR’s inbox, they know that it’s for them. Right. It resonates with them, creates curiosity, teaches them something new that gets them thinking differently about the way they are doing it, which is going to be different maybe than the way the CFO is doing it or wanting to or the salesperson. So I think that’s great.

0:22:03 – (Brynne Tillman): And then create that compelling moment. So bravo.

0:22:07 – (Bob Woods): And Brynne actually just went into number four perfectly, which I’m going to read straight from here and see if you recognize it from about 30 seconds ago. Provide insights and value that make an impact and just like Brynne said. But it’s very true. And I actually do think it’s very important to emphasize and even repeat because it really is about the content that leads to your solution and not with your solution. So, like five tips on how to do X would be something that leads to your solution for our solution rocks. Everybody else’s solution blows. That’s leading with your solution. Definitely don’t do that.

0:22:47 – (Bob Woods): You want true? I’m sorry?

0:22:50 – (Brynne Tillman): No, I’m kidding. I said it’s true. I’m just kidding.

0:22:52 – (Bob Woods): Okay, yeah, it probably is true. But overall, though, it does come down to not pitching. It comes down to educating. But the educational material should be with content that eventually leads to your solution. It should put them on a path that will lead them to your solution, and not put that potential stop sign in front of them because you’re blasting with your solution. Right. Away, and they may not be interested in even taking that path in general.

0:23:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yes indeed. There is so much noise out there, and sadly with with AI, that’s only going to increase exponentially.

0:23:39 – (Bob Woods): Already has.

0:23:40 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yep. So among other things, use tools like Ask ssl, AI or your favorite LLM to learn more about what matters to your audience so that when you do reach out, you can be, as we’ve already talked about, be as relevant and as specific as possible so they know you’re talking directly to them as opposed to the other 49 people that they just messaged.

0:24:07 – (Brynne Tillman): And that brings in something we teach all the time, which is slow down your outreach to speed up your outcome.

0:24:13 – (Bob Woods): Yep, 100%. 100%. So now that we are at almost the end here, we’ve got one more, and that has to do with referrals and permission to name drop. So when a professional relationship begins with a warm introduction from a shared connection, your level of credibility coming from that initial effort, it makes converting that new stakeholder prospect, whatever you want to say to a connection and then to a potential customer, it’s just made that much easier.

0:24:50 – (Bob Woods): So when you take inventory and search your clients’ connections and run that list by them to get referrals, the referrals will happen. And always make sure that you are telling the people when you are on a call with a Referral partner to 100% they should have the same list so that they can ask you for referrals as well. Do not make it a one-way type of thing. Definitely both ways. Like I said, almost at the very beginning, you are there to add value as much as to gain something from them.

0:25:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love this, and you know, we talk a lot, a lot about these second-degree connections. And about a month ago, I saw I was, I had a first-degree connection with someone that I saw speak. Influencer level, I saw a speaker. I connected with them with a personal note. That’s how I know I saw them speak. They connected, and we never had another conversation. Again, I did not follow up well, and this was like 12 years ago.

0:25:55 – (Brynne Tillman): They don’t know who I am, but I believe maybe they’ve seen me in passing. But we’ve never had a conversation. But Gerhard Geschwotner was the shared connection. So I could leverage my relationship with Gearhart, even though that person was a first-degree connection. So, just because they’re a first-degree connection does not make it easy to start the conversation through these other methodologies. We can try, but if we don’t have any kind of relationship or rapport with them, we can see our shared connections, even if they’re a first degree already.

0:26:45 – (Brynne Tillman): And that is an area that we don’t talk about a ton because we think, oh, they’re already a first-degree connection. We have direct access to messaging them. But the level of credibility that can come through when our shared connection makes that introduction is huge. And I had a conversation with them about an hour ago because of Gerhard’s introduction, so. And, actually, it was a permission.

0:27:16 – (Brynne Tillman): No, no, no. Well, yeah, I think it was a permission to name drop. I have to go look either way because we had someone that we both love in common. He took my call. No matter how much cold I might have reached out to, his only perspective was what I saw him say. Now we have a common connection, even though we’re already both firsts, and that credibility goes way up. So I just wanted to kind of throw that. Yes. And it’s something we don’t talk enough about.

0:27:47 – (Brynne Tillman): And we will be now because I’m like, you know, when we see this success story, we’re like, why are we not leveraging shared connections, even if they’re a first-degree connection, to say, hey, you should talk.

0:28:01 – (Bob Woods): So it’s a really good point. It’s a really good point.

0:28:06 – (Stan Robinson Jr): Yep. My. I was about to say the exact same thing because it’s something that’s so easy to forget. We see first, and we forget that a first-degree connection that we’ve never talked to may as well be a second-degree connection if they don’t remember us. So, leverage your common connections. You just mentioned Brent.

0:28:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Love it. Woohoo.

0:28:27 – (Bob Woods): Love it, love it, love it. So with that, whether you’ve been with us live or recorded on our podcast, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social live sponsored by AskSSL.AI. We do these live sessions every week, so join us. If you’re listening to us on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button and drop us a like or a comment as well. We love those.

0:28:57 – (Bob Woods): Besides these LinkedIn lives, we also interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas, so be sure to catch those episodes as well. The Socialsaleslink.com podcast is where you want to go if you want more info on our weekly efforts here. And we have twice weekly efforts here when it comes to that. So we’re, we’re up to. We’re up into the low 400s in terms of episodes, so that’s awesome. It’s been fun.

0:29:25 – (Bob Woods): It’s been fun.

0:29:26 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s a ride.

0:29:27 – (Bob Woods): It is. Yeah. It’s a ride. It’s a roller coaster ride. That’s a.

0:29:30 – (Brynne Tillman): That.

0:29:31 – (Bob Woods): That’s a perfect way to put it. So when you are out and about this week or any week, board that sales roller coaster and make sure that your sales are social next time.

0:29:45 – (Brynne Tillman): All right, bye, guys.

Outro:

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