Podcasts about inmails

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2024 74:05

FORECASTING THE YEAR IN RECRUITMENT 2024,Pt1 Start of the New Year and we are going to collate our thoughts and project forward on what we think is going to happen in 2024. None of us are prophets but can we gather together enough intuition and trends analysis to produce some viable forecasts? Lets try: - Global Economy in 2024 - State of VC / Investment Markets - Tech Hiring will it bounce back? - What is happening in the world of RPO? - Where in the world are we continuing to hire? - Which segments will remain challenging / difficult? - How will recruitment shift in dealing with a variable market? All this and more as we bring back Brainfood Live for the first show in 2024 We're with Amit Taylor, Founder (TrueUp), Sarah White, Founder (Aspect 43), Richard Bradley, OVP of Global RPO (Kelly Services) & Shereen Ghanem, Head of TA (Medtronic) Ep239 is sponsored by our buddies Poetry "This is a blueprint for improving our talent acquisition maturity." TA Leader, Engineering Poetry is a recruiter workspace including solutions for recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, recruiter learning and a launchpad for all the other tools you need to accomplish your daily tasks. We enable recruiters to be better marketers through enhanced collaboration, genAI assistance and automatic recommendations. These are the days of brilliant content. Gone are the days of re-writing InMails, social media posts and email copy. We save you considerable 'toggle tax' by providing so many solutions within the one app. Rapidly locate your job ad templates, competitor intelligence, interview policies and TikTok sourcing tools. Everything's in the one place. Managers, this is for you too. Our workspace analysis and reporting tells you how the team are using the solutions and provides you with automatic coaching, recommendations and ROI. Get started for free at www.poetryhr.com

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep238 - 2023 Year in Review: Economy, Labour Markets & Jobs

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2023 81:59

2023 Year in Review: Labour Market, Jobs, Vacancies, Work Final part of our 4 part series looking back at the year 2023. This time, we are zooming out to the macro and looking at state of the economy, the labour market, the vacancy market and our verdict of the year in the recruitment really has been. - Economy in 2023 - US, UK and elsewhere - Impact of high interest rates - Labour supply - Economic growth - Company formation vs company growth - Job applicant behaviour - Workforce participation - Impact of AI, if any? - Sector specificity - White collar recession? - Market for recruiters....are we good canaries for this coal mine? We're with Emma Mirrington, Founder (The Firm), Neil Carberry, MD (Recruitment and Employers Confederation), Dr Sarah Ali, VP of Economic Forecasting (Indiana Economic Development Corporation) Ep238 is sponsored by our buddies Poetry "This is a blueprint for improving our talent acquisition maturity." TA Leader, Engineering Poetry is a recruiter workspace including solutions for recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, recruiter learning and a launchpad for all the other tools you need to accomplish your daily tasks. We enable recruiters to be better marketers through enhanced collaboration, genAI assistance and automatic recommendations. These are the days of brilliant content. Gone are the days of re-writing InMails, social media posts and email copy. We save you considerable 'toggle tax' by providing so many solutions within the one app. Rapidly locate your job ad templates, competitor intelligence, interview policies and TikTok sourcing tools. Everything's in the one place. Managers, this is for you too. Our workspace analysis and reporting tells you how the team are using the solutions and provides you with automatic coaching, recommendations and ROI. Get started for free at www.poetryhr.com

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep236 - 2023 Year in Review - Recruitment Advertising & Employer Branding

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Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2023 79:01

2023 Year in Review: Recruitment Advertising & Employer Branding Part 2 of our 4 part series looking back at the year 2023. This time, focus is on Recruitment Advertising and Employer Branding. What the heck happened on these two domains this year? - SEO / Changes on Google Jobs - Behavioural ad targeting / retargeting - Impact of Search Generative Experience - CPC vs CPA - State of Job Boards - State of Programmatic Advertising - Employer branding during recession / lay offs - Rise of candidate ghosting as recruiters get overwhelmed - Career site chatBots to deal with FAQ - Candidate portals....did this become a thing? We're with Alex Chukovski, Founder (Crypto Careers), Robin Stander, VP Sales (Appcast), Josh Willows, Head of Programmatic Sales (Veritone), Jeff Dickey-Chasins, (The Job Board Doctor), Steve Ward, Head of Employer Branding Solutions, (Universum) & Vicki Saunders, Founder (EVP) & Charu Malhotra, Head of Global Talent Branding (PA Consulting) Ep236 is sponsored by our buddies Poetry "This is a blueprint for improving our talent acquisition maturity." TA Leader, Engineering Poetry is a recruiter workspace including solutions for recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, recruiter learning and a launchpad for all the other tools you need to accomplish your daily tasks. We enable recruiters to be better marketers through enhanced collaboration, genAI assistance and automatic recommendations. These are the days of brilliant content. Gone are the days of re-writing InMails, social media posts and email copy. We save you considerable 'toggle tax' by providing so many solutions within the one app. Rapidly locate your job ad templates, competitor intelligence, interview policies and TikTok sourcing tools. Everything's in the one place. Managers, this is for you too. Our workspace analysis and reporting tells you how the team are using the solutions and provides you with automatic coaching, recommendations and ROI. Get started for free at www.poetryhr.com

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep235 - Year in Review 2023 - AI, WorkTech Investment & DEIB

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2023 81:16

2023 Year in Review: AI, DEIB and Worktech Investment Coming in for the final 4 Brainfood Live sessions of the year and we are going to do a series on 'Review of the Year 2023. We've 12 topics packed into 4 sessions, so make sure you follow the channel in order to be notified of them all when we go live. We being with AI, WorkTech Investment and DEIB - what has happened in 2023 on these three domains? - Timeline of AI events and milestones - Major impact of AI on recruitment industry - AI enablement of candidates - AI roll out across all major consumer apps - AI as a disruptor to the workforce - VC Investment in Work Tech - what is the situation Mr LaRoque? - DEIB - have we taken backward step in 2023? - What has been the DEIB domain of the year? - How do we know where we're at with DEIB? Let's take a look back folks at three critically important domains of the recruiting industry. We're with Martyn Redstone, Founder (PPBOTS), George LaRoque, Founder (WorkTech), Joanne Lockwood, Consultant (SEEChange), Theo Smith, Founder (NeuroDiversity World) & Friends Ep235 is sponsored by our buddies Poetry "This is a blueprint for improving our talent acquisition maturity." TA Leader, Engineering Poetry is a recruiter workspace including solutions for recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, recruiter learning and a launchpad for all the other tools you need to accomplish your daily tasks. We enable recruiters to be better marketers through enhanced collaboration, genAI assistance and automatic recommendations. These are the days of brilliant content. Gone are the days of re-writing InMails, social media posts and email copy. We save you considerable 'toggle tax' by providing so many solutions within the one app. Rapidly locate your job ad templates, competitor intelligence, interview policies and TikTok sourcing tools. Everything's in the one place. Managers, this is for you too. Our workspace analysis and reporting tells you how the team are using the solutions and provides you with automatic coaching, recommendations and ROI. Get started for free at www.poetryhr.com

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Brainfood Live On Air - Ep235 - Do You Have A Menopause Plan?

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2023 88:20

DOES YOUR COMPANY HAVE A MENOPAUSE PLAN? Worldwide Menopause day went by last month and I - like most men I suspect - totally did not know about it(!). And yet menopause is an inherent and potentially significant moment in women's lives, one which is under discussed in society at large and certainly in the world of work. Does your company have a plan for menopause? If you have women in your workforce, you had better. You will learn: Basics: - What is menopause, who is affected, when does it happen? - What are stages of menopause? - How does menopause manifest? - What can women expect to experience during menopause? - How long does menopause last? - What do we think of the recommended medical advice? - What is the state of menopause in the workplace? - What can employers do to normalise menopause, whilst also helping employees who may need extra help? - How can other employees assist? - What kind of work configurations, work designs should be considered? All this and more as we dive into a critically important yet neglected topic in the workplace. We're with Angela Cripps, MD, (Recruiting Gym), Kellie Millar, Recruitment Manager (Space & Time), Sally Higham, Head of Talent Attraction, (Lonza), Clair Bush, Founder (CareerSix), Lou Furby, Senior Events & Communications Manager (SpecSavers), Marisa Esteves, Manager, Talent Acquisition, (ScribeAmerica) & Jennifer Candee, Global Director of Talent Acquisition (Cargill) Ep234 is sponsored by our buddies Poetry "This is a blueprint for improving our talent acquisition maturity." TA Leader, Engineering Poetry is a recruiter workspace including solutions for recruitment marketing, recruitment operations, recruiter learning and a launchpad for all the other tools you need to accomplish your daily tasks. We enable recruiters to be better marketers through enhanced collaboration, genAI assistance and automatic recommendations. These are the days of brilliant content. Gone are the days of re-writing InMails, social media posts and email copy. We save you considerable 'toggle tax' by providing so many solutions within the one app. Rapidly locate your job ad templates, competitor intelligence, interview policies and TikTok sourcing tools. Everything's in the one place. Managers, this is for you too. Our workspace analysis and reporting tells you how the team are using the solutions and provides you with automatic coaching, recommendations and ROI. Get started for free at www.poetryhr.com

190. [Replay] How to Run a Nurture Sequence on LinkedIn

The Business Development Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2023 55:13

An episode so good we decided to play it twice. Jump back in with our first replay episode as we dig through some of our best and topics to bring back to light!Running sequences on LinkedIn seems time-intensive. Obnoxious. Manual. Have you seen Sales Nav's inbox?!You're probably thinking a sequence is based off profile views, DMs, and InMails over days and weeks. And companies then try to automate this for scale. (Obviously... it fails every time)Here's the secret: nurturing leads is actually the easiest to scale with little to no software at all on LinkedIn. You just need to focus on the right activities.Join us for this B2B Power Hour workshop on:✅ Using Sales Navigator to identify and track leads✅ How comments can change your booking rate✅ Why content is the salesperson's best friend✅ Timing your outreach to leadsJoin us to learn how to nurture leads on LinkedIn without buying new software or becoming a professional scroller.Follow Nicholas Thickett on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nicholasthickettFollow Morgan Smith on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/morganjsmithJoin the 1Up Club to power up your prospecting. Get access to power plays, special briefings, and even DIY enablement docs that help you prospect better. Learn more at b2bpowerhour.com/join.

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Utilize Linkedin Like a Pro

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2023 38:58

Episode 19 of The Business Development Podcast with host Kelly Kennedy focuses on the importance and utilization of LinkedIn for business owners, entrepreneurs, and individuals in sales and business development. Kelly emphasizes that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for generating real person-to-person relationships and connections within the business community. He highlights the benefits of joining LinkedIn groups, using the platform to market and promote business products and services, and leveraging LinkedIn as a modern space for building relationships, finding partnerships, and creating synchronicities. The episode provides tips and tricks on utilizing LinkedIn effectively, making connections authentically, and differentiating oneself from generic sales pitches and messages.The host also emphasizes the value of having a premium business account on LinkedIn, as it provides additional features and advantages. He encourages listeners to have a professional and complete LinkedIn profile, including relevant information about their business and themselves. Additionally, the episode explains the importance of keeping personal and business life separate on social media platforms, using LinkedIn exclusively for business purposes. The host closes the episode by expressing gratitude to the listeners and their ongoing support, reiterating the necessity of being on LinkedIn and making effective use of it in daily business strategies.Key Takeaways: Instagram is great for B2C and generating information, but LinkedIn is the preferred social media platform for businesses.LinkedIn is a powerful tool for connecting with other business professionals, building relationships, and finding partnerships.A premium business account on LinkedIn is highly recommended for maximizing its potential.It is important to utilize LinkedIn as part of your daily business strategy and regularly update your profile with accurate and relevant information.LinkedIn can be used as both an active and passive marketing strategy, but it is important to post relevant content and avoid coming across as robotic or spammy.LinkedIn provides the opportunity to connect with industry leaders, CEOs, and decision-makers, making it a valuable resource for business development and sales.Personal branding on LinkedIn is important, and having a professional photo and a well-structured profile can help you stand out from the crowd.Building genuine relationships and providing value to others on LinkedIn is more effective than broad-stroke strategies.Utilizing LinkedIn groups and starting discussions can help generate interest in your product or service.Consistently engaging with LinkedIn and its features, such as InMails, can lead to greater networking opportunities and business growth.

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EP 43 LinkedIn : Messages et Inmails, quelles différences ?

LinkedIn Routine

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 3, 2023 6:30

Le podcast LinkedIn Routine est conçu par les équipes de l'agence BOOST YOUR ACTIVITY. Nous sommes une agence spécialiste du marketing et de la prospection LinkedIn basée sur Montpellier. Nous aidons les entreprises BtoB à mettre en place des stratégies de communication et de prospection basées sur l'intelligence des relations humaines afin de générer des leads qualifiés de manière régulière. Un retour sur ce podcast ? Un commentaire encourageant à nous partager ? Ou tout simplement envie d'échanger avec nous ?

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#79 Wat kan je doen aan de krappe arbeidsmarkt?

De Werkimago Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 15, 2022 12:43

Je herkent namelijk vast ook wel dat kandidaten vaker afhaken. Of eigenlijk dat er überhaupt kandidaten minder of niet reageren op Inmails. Als ik in gesprekken met recruiters vraag hoe dit komt hoor ik bijna altijd het antwoord: 'Ja, door de krappe arbeidsmarkt'. Misschien heb jij dit ook wel eens gezegd of is het door je gedachten gegaan. Wat kan je doen aan die krappe arbeidsmarkt? En waarom een krappe arbeidsmarkt niet de schuld is van het niet kunnen invullen van jouw vacatures. Daar ga ik het met je over hebben in deze podcast.

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128. Using Social to Break Into Enterprise

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 22, 2022 51:54

Most recommend using content to drive inbound...but honestly? That takes too long to see meaningful results and won't help you achieve quota this quarter.Buyers hang out on social all the time. But how do you kickstart a large deal with a big logo?Creating a social-first prospecting strategy means you're running actual outbound on social – it just doesn't look like connect and pitches or InMails for enterprise deals.Join us for this B2B Power Hour workshop on:✅ Creating your account research plan with social✅ How to route into an account without using InMails✅ Multithreading conversations✅ When to STOP using social in the deal...and more!Join us to learn how to use social to break into larger accounts!Follow Nicholas Thickett on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nicholasthickettFollow Morgan Smith on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/morganjsmithVisit our site b2bpowerhour.com to learn more about our upcoming live shows, community, and more.

Recruiter Mistakes #3: Relying on LinkedIn as Your Primary Source of Candidates with Mark Whitby and Leanne Sara Jones Hunt, Ep #141

The Resilient Recruiter

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2022 19:38

Where do you find most of your candidates? If LinkedIn is your primary platform for sourcing and engaging with candidates, this episode is for you. We are not telling you to stop using LinkedIn. But we believe that it's a mistake to be over-reliant on LinkedIn as your main source of candidates. In this episode, you will hear the downsides of being dependent upon LinkedIn. You'll also learn what specific steps you can take now to enhance your candidate engagement and increase response rates to your outreach. Episode Outline and Highlights [00:57] The six pillars of a successful seven-figure recruitment business. [2:22] Clients versus candidates - which do you need more of? [3:31] Why it is essential to track the source of the candidates you place. [5:14] The downsides of being over-reliant on LinkedIn as your primary source of candidates. [6:47] Why using InMails may not be the most effective method of outreach. [8:05] Going further - how to leverage multi-channel communication strategies. [10:04] Isn't a 12-step candidate recruitment campaign going overboard? [12:36] Benefits of developing a multi-step, multi-channel approach. [13:38] Two more reasons why it's risky to rely too much on LinkedIn. [15:14] Strategies to increase candidate response. [17:02] Simple steps you can take to put this into action. The Downsides of Being Over-Reliant on LinkedIn LinkedIn is actually the number one source of candidates for the majority of recruiters out there. But there are downsides to being over-reliant on LinkedIn as your primary source of candidates. Some of them are: Your competitors and clients are searching on LinkedIn too. Candidates are inundated with messages on LinkedIn. Not every candidate is active on LinkedIn. Also, you have to remember that you do not own the data on LinkedIn. The data belongs to LinkedIn and they could at any time just cut you off. They can restrict your account and remove the facility. All the time you have invested in curating that network can be taken away. So we always recommend that you extract data from LinkedIn and build your own database. Then your ATS will become your number one source of candidates in the future. Going Further and Leveraging Multi-Channel Strategies We are not saying to stop using LinkedIn. We just want you to go much further when it comes to your candidate outreach and activities. Your goal should be to have a sophisticated, multi-touch, multi-channel recruiting campaign in place - one that leverages automation technology. In this episode, we will be giving examples of strategies you can use to increase candidate response and engagement. The Benefits of Implementing a Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Recruitment Campaign Do not leave money on the table. You owe it to yourself and your candidates to make them aware of the opportunity on offer. As a recruiter, increasing your response rates translates to more placements and profits. Plus it enables you to have a positive impact on more lives. Here are some of the benefits of utilizing multi-channel strategies: Increase in response to your candidate outreach. Increase the number of quality candidates that you can present. It will shorten the time to fill positions. Save time in leveraging tools and automation. Have a sense of control over your candidate pipeline. Our Sponsors This podcast is proudly sponsored by i-intro and Recruitment Entrepreneur. i-intro® is an end-to-end retained recruitment platform. Their technology and methodology allow recruiters to differentiate themselves from the competition, win more retained business, bigger fees, and increase their billings. Their software combined with world-class training enables you to transition from transactional, contingency recruiter to consultative, retained recruiter. Instead of being perceived as a “me too” vendor, you'll be positioned as a “me only” solutions provider. Be sure to mention Mark Whitby or The Resilient Recruiter. Book your free, no-obligation consultation here: www.recruitmentcoach.com/retained Recruitment Entrepreneur is the world's leading Private Equity firm specializing in the international recruitment industry. If you've dreamed of starting, scaling, and selling your recruitment business, this is your chance. James Caan and his team at Recruitment Entrepreneur are actively seeking ambitious recruiters in who they can invest. They provide everything you need to grow a successful recruitment business including funding, financial expertise, coaching and mentoring, operational strategy, back office support, marketing, and talent attraction solutions. Be sure to mention Mark Whitby or The Resilient Recruiter. Start a conversation here: https://www.recruitmentcoach.com/vc People and Resources Mentioned Download the Job Order Scorecard here Connect with Mark Whitby Get your FREE 30-minute strategy call Mark on LinkedIn Mark on Twitter: @MarkWhitby Mark on Facebook Mark on Instagram: @RecruitmentCoach Related Podcast You Might Enjoy TRR#70 How to Boost Candidate Engagement and Win the Next War for Talent, with Alan Cutter Subscribe to The Resilient Recruiter

113. How to Run a Nurture Sequence on LinkedIn

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2022 55:01

Running sequences on LinkedIn seems time-intensive. Obnoxious. Manual. Have you seen Sales Nav's inbox?!You're probably thinking a sequence is based off profile views, DMs, and InMails over days and weeks. And companies then try to automate this for scale. (Obviously... it fails every time)Here's the secret: nurturing leads is actually the easiest to scale with little to no software at all on LinkedIn. You just need to focus on the right activities.Join us for this B2B Power Hour workshop on:✅ Using Sales Navigator to identify and track leads✅ How comments can change your booking rate✅ Why content is the salesperson's best friend✅ Timing your outreach to leadsJoin us to learn how to nurture leads on LinkedIn without buying new software or becoming a professional scroller.Follow Nicholas Thickett on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nicholasthickettFollow Morgan Smith on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/morganjsmithVisit our site b2bpowerhour.com to learn more about our upcoming live shows, community, and more.

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HubHeroes EP 3: The Buyers Journey ~ Hey, they're lost again!

The HubHeroes Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 23, 2022 42:46

This episode of the HubHeroes podcast talks about the buyer's journey. We hit it from the marketing, sales, and even customer side of what it is, why it's essential, and so much more. Heck, we even take time out to debunk some buyer journey myths.TRANSCRIPTION OF THE SHOW:George B. Thomas (01:09):So I'm unsure how to start because I'm still giggling. Just so everybody on this episode knows, I will clip out what happened during that intro. It just put it on the internet because, oh my gosh, it's crazy. Speaking of crazy. It's funny to think about that. We're gonna have a conversation around buyer's journey or the buyer's journey today because if you've been doing inbound since 20 10, 20 11, 20 12, whenever you're like, oh my gosh, I've heard about buyers journey or the buyer's journey so much and so many times, but have you heard about it? How we're gonna talk about it, cuz we're gonna bring out some things that we don't think are stated enough or maybe even thought about. And honestly, here's where I go with this gentleman. Today is somebody's day one. Today somebody purchased HubSpot. They just learned about the inbound strategy, like the buyers. Woo. And we're gonna help 'em out right here right now. So let's start very at the top of this conversation, kind of the foundational piece, historically, when you two were training folks, and you had to talk about this framework, this methodology, the buyer's journey, how did you teach it? What did you talk about?Max Cohen (02:33):Yeah. And I'm hoping for anyone listening to this; if you haven't listened to episode two first, listen to episode two, then listen to this one. Cause we talked a lot about the idea of what you're doing and attract and the idea of what good content is, goals, challenges, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We might have even mentioned buyer personas at some point. The way that I always kind of framed up the buyer's journey is a tool to help you explain what your content should be doing? What is the change in mindset? What is your prospect's mindset, and what do you need to do with your content versus just making sure it's valuable. Cause the idea of solving a goal or a challenge at every stage of the buyer's journey. Yeah. You want to make sure your content's doing that, but there's this mindset shift that you have to facilitate with your content to get someone to a place where it makes sense for you to eventually say, Hey, we got this product that solves for a problem. But if you haven't already figured out that you have that problem, marketers don't have a right to say, Hey, you should buy our product. The buyer's journey is kind of like utility. You can kind of; it's like an extra layer. You can put all your content to gut check yourself and say, what am I trying to do with this content? What mindset change am I trying to facilitate? So and so forth.George B. Thomas (03:49):Well, and it's interesting, right? It's interesting because max, if I unpack just for two hot seconds, the fact that you went marketing and content, okay. I wanna sum that up for a second now, Devin; when you think about the buyer's journey, where does your brain go? How have you historically talked about it?Devyn Belamy (04:08):I usually talk about it from a sales perspective. Mm-hmm so when salespeople are talking about what they can do for somebody, it's like max said, a lot of times, people aren't even aware that the problem that you're solving is a problem, or they're like tangentially aware, they're aware of something that's problem adjacent. They might be aware of a symptom of the problem. They might even be trying to solve that symptom but not getting at the root of the issue, not knowing where to begin. And so having a conversation about the buyer's journey is when I'm talking to people that I'm training, I say you think of it as where you're first going to find out the awareness phase, understanding for you, understanding what the person's problem is, and then helping the other person understand what the problem is. And that happens through a conversation.And then the consideration phase is when we're talking about the different ways you can solve the problem because, you know, we're all HubSpot fanboys here. We're gonna talk about HubSpot until we're blue in the face. But the fact is there are several different ways and tools you can use to solve your problem. And there are a lot of methodologies and different things that you can implement to get you to your goal. Of course, we, as HubSpot fanboys, always say HubSpot's the best because it is. But you know, that's just our bias, professional and expert opinions. So, you know, take it for what it's worth. But then there is the decision phase. So now we've talked about and identified what the problem is. We've talked about different ways to go about solving the problem.Now let's talk about what tool we will use to solve this problem. If you want to talk about using generic tools, you have a piece of wood that you want to Fasten to another piece of wood; that's the awareness problem. And then the consideration is like, how can I do this? I can use a hammer and nail, or I can use a drill and a drill bit. And then we talk about the decision phase where it's like, yeah, we can go hammer and nail, but you know, if we use a screw, it's gonna hang onto the wood better. So you know what? I'm gonna buy a screw that is, in a nutshell, the buyer's journey.George B. Thomas (06:30):So here's the thing: I love that you went max into marketing and content dev. And I love that you went into sales, and I love that. We kind of did this high overarching awareness consideration decision because here's the thing I don't talk about it either way. Like yes, it's all of those things. But when I talk about the buyer's journey, I say it's something we all do. It's not HubSpot specific, but I love to map it out in HubSpot, but it's something that we all do. It's an unconscious thing that human beings do. Let me explain, for instance: I got a couple of little stories. I like to tell you you're on vacation with your other half. You are at the beach; there's a sunset. That ocean is soft and beautiful, and it's just like beautiful.You lean in to get a kiss. And all of a sudden, you get the Heisman. Woo. You are aware that you have a problem. That's right. Bad breath. Yes. Lord black hits again, bad breath. So what do you do? You run to the local store and consider mince, gum, or something else. But you then go to the cashier. You put the mince on there, and you make a decision. You hand them your money. Now that's a very small thing. It's like a dollar 25, $2. I don't know. Now maybe $7 for some mince pretty soon, but it's a, it's a small purchase, but you were aware, the bad breath you considered, what do I need to fix it? You decided you got your wall out and paid the same amount on an extremely large purchase. You're driving down the road.You happen to be driving in your 1989 Toyota. And all of a sudden, you're aware that you have a problem because there is a transmission on the freeway behind where you once were driving. Now you are aware I am not going anywhere anytime soon. So do I just start walking? Do I get an Uber? Do I call the tow truck? What do I do? Also, your brain then goes into, well, do I wanna get it repaired? Do I wanna buy a new car? You're considering all of these things, and you decide, Hmm, maybe I want a new 2022 Lexus. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know what you decide you want to do, but small or large, it is about the consumer. It is about you, the human. It is a thing that we unconsciously do. So should sales be leaning into it? Yes. Should marketing be leveraging it? Yes. Should the service be paying attention to it? Yes. And by the way, I haven't even mentioned that there's an emotion you're feeling across each one of these phases that you're going through daily. I'll pause there. Yeah. Where do your guys' minds go next?Max Cohen (09:12):So I think it's a good thing to remind all of ourselves, and you just illustrated it well. George is that the buyer's journey is not rocket science. It is just a blown-out version of fundamental human decision-making. And you go through probably millions of buyer journeys every day in your own life. You go, ah, something's not okay. You figure out what's not okay. You make the quick decision on how you wanna solve the problem. And then you choose the thing that's gonna do it. So like sometimes it's very fast. Sometimes certain parts are very quick, and others are longer, but all it is is a basic human decision, making those two examples of gum and buying a car. Same idea. The other is like a big thing to kind of think about here. A lot of marketers are only operating in that decision stage.Going back to your gum example in the consideration stage, you were like; I could get gum, or I could get mince, or I could go by toothpaste; whatever you ended up choosing, that's your consideration stage in the decision stage. That's why you're saying, okay, I've decided I want to mince, but am I going to go with TAC or Mentos depending on how good the marketing and Mentos are in the decision stage? That might help you make your choice. The problem with most marketers these days is they spend 99% of their time on the content creation and marketing they're doing. Just talking about the decision stage because we're all trained to make content, media, or whatever about how fantastic our product is and why it's better than our competitor and all this other stuff. Cuz traditionally, that's what we've been doing traditionally.That's what, that's what advertising has been forever. The problem is the number of people already in their decision stage, where they've already figured out their problem. They've decided on the way that they wanna solve it. Now they're saying who does this specific thing, the best, the number of people already there is minuscule compared to the number of folks in your audience or potential audience that are in those awareness and consideration stage phases where they don't even know they have a problem. They don't know the way to solve it. The thing that I always kind of come back to is the idea of earning the right. I haven't earned the right to tell you my product is better than my competitors. Until I have shown you that our type, our kind of solution or product or go chewing gum or whatever is the best way to solve your problem compared to the other ways you could solve it.And I have no business or any right to tell you that this is the best way for you to solve a problem. If I don't know, you already have that problem yet. And I haven't done the legwork to help you figure out your problem. So it's like these layers of earning the right to communicate in a certain way because people are in all different stages of it. But the vast majority are awareness and consideration, so you need to stop focusing on your decision stage content and shift your focus up that buyer's journey into the awareness and consideration.George B. Thomas (12:13):It's good. No, because I, as you're talking, imagine going into the doctor's office and the doctor's like, I think we should amputate yo, oh woo. Let's back up, doc Devin. What are your thoughts?Devyn Belamy (12:25):My thing is that when we're talking about, and this was something I, that I mentioned in the last episode where, uh, we're talking about not getting, you know, just focused and getting hyper-focused on the problems that you solve, but talking about the, uh, industry in general and being a thought leader on the industry. That is huge regarding awareness level content. So true. I mentioned earlier that the problems that they might be aware of are adjacent to the problems you're trying to solve. They might not be aware of the problems you solve. You might not know that you have bad breath; you might be walking around burning people's eyebrows off. And they're just too polite to say anything. The thing is, is that creating, if you're talking about content, creating content that talks about industry challenges, in general, might bring someone to a point where they're like, oh my goodness, I didn't even think about that as an issue I like to talk about.I did, uh, a specific buyer's journey-focused campaign, uh, some years ago. And, and I'm kind of proud of it. What happened was that the goal was to get auto repair shop owners to buy this piece of software that gives these millennials access to seeing what's wrong with their cars on their phones. We could tell them, " Hey, you need to start sending out a text with PDFs of inspection reports. And they could have told me what to go do with myself. if I'm telling them from the awareness phase is like, Hey, there's a whole new market out there of these people who were just figuring out how to get their cars taken care of and don't have the kind of one-to-one relationship with their mechanics and, and trust of a mechanic like people used to when they were older. And it's like, okay, so how can you market these people on social media?So that was like the awareness. Here's how you market to younger people as an auto repair shop on social media. Was it the problem that we solved? No, but it was what used to be called the top of funnel content, where it was just content that made people aware of an issue. Even if it's something that's not directly related to the problem we solve, the thing is, is that what we brought it down to was the next step was, oh, Hey, you know, there are ways other ways that you can connect with these young people as well, not just using social media. So now they're considering how to connect with young people. We made the, a problem awareness that you know, there are issues connecting young people. Now we need to talk about the different tools you can use and then the decision phase; oh, by the way, this is one of the tools you can use.Here's how it solves your problem of connecting to these people, which was the awareness that we brought up initially, which had nothing to do with what we sold. That's the path. And it worked well and made lots of money, and people came and bought stuff and lived happily ever after; the point is, is that when you're dealing with content when you're talking with people, you have to be more open-minded about what they need, what they need to solve as a problem. And yes, by leading them down the buyer's journey, by leading them down that path, you can bring them to how you're solving the problem. And then also help them become more aware of the larger picture mm-hmm . And they'll be grateful even if you're not solving the more prominent, big picture problem.Max Cohen (15:54):If I could add something in there too, you don't have to overengineer it to think that I have to have an awareness piece of content. That's like totally trying to get them to change their mind, to perfectly slot them into this arc that I have in the consideration stage, which is going to mold their brain, then go to a place where they have to buy something. You could make a piece of awareness and stage content. That's just helping someone like figure out a problem in their industry that doesn't have to directly tie this down the line selling 'em something. Again, a big piece of this is building community, building thought leadership, and genuinely educating people. So you have trust built. You don't have to say this must lead down a perfectly clean arc to a purchasing point. Mm.George b. Thomas (16:37):Are we gonna have our first disagreement on the actual hub hero's pocket? No, no, no, no. I haven't opened my mouth yet.So here's the thing disagree. So here's the thing. So here's the thing I'll say. Yes. And because I don't like disagreements and agree with your max, sometimes it can be a standalone article. Mm-hmm, however, as a marketer, as a strategist, as a business owner, as somebody that understands the power of story for the humans that are going through a journey called the buyer's journey, there is a magic place that you can get when you start to think about content in threes, by the way, I do this with blog articles, I do this with videos. I do this with lead generation opportunities. I think to myself, how can I craft a fantastic piece of awareness content that the end or somewhere in that article links to the consideration, article the act two of part one. And once they're in that consideration piece of content, how can I get them to act three?In act three, the happy ending is they find the princess, the prince, and the solution to their problem. And it's because I've taken the time to craft three pieces of content threaded together. Tell the entire story that they've been able to either sit and do at one sitting or bookmark and do over multiple sittings. And again, think about your lead conversion opportunities. When I talk about a pillar page, I talk about ensuring you have an awareness lead conversion opportunity. Make sure you have a considerable lead conversion opportunity. Make sure you have a decision towards the bottom of the pillar page conversion opportunity because now we're mapping to their needs and where they are in the journey they're placing. Yeah. So not disagree. Not every piece has to have that, but I think people need to lean into that content model.Now, I also am gonna backtrack off that for one hot second because Devon, you said, and I love this, and we always go in this direction, a problem they solve. I can tell you in the multiverse, there is another type of buyer's journey that I wish people would start to think about creating because it doesn't always have to be about a problem. Many times it can be about aspiration. Where are they trying to get? And what awareness problem is stopping them from getting to the mountaintop. Yeah. What do they have to consider to pack in their backpack and put on their feet to climb that mountain to what they're trying to get to? How do we get them to that decision phase now? I am a professional speaker. Now I am a business owner. Now I am 100 pounds lighter, whatever it may be. Yeah. How do we start thinking about the problem and aspirational buyer journeys we can put people through?Devyn Belamy (19:37):My thing is that when you start there and, and I do, uh, encourage people looking at that, one of the things that you have to take into consideration is that you can open a can of worms in a good way where you can by pointing out or setting a goal. Then what happens is that you have more goals, or if you're pointing out a problem, then you have more problems that are like a subset from this, it's like, so, okay, I want to get here. So I need to accomplish B, C, and D. Now we're back to the awareness phase on ABC and D. It's one of those things when you're doing a content exercise. HubSpot has an excellent tool for it. When you are trying to identify topics, what you can do is you can start looking at your core topic and then branching off of that topic and looking at things that are related to it.The point of the exercise is to identify long-tail keywords and, you know, get into your little SEO rabbit hole and push up on your glasses. And, but what you want to do is look at what's related to the goals and the aspirations or the problems you're trying to solve, understanding that it's not a linear process. Or, uh, I heard George say, it's spaghetti. You started in one place, and then you have so many different paths you can take. And so many different things you can address just come from that one thing.George B. Thomas (21:08):Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, it's spaghetti. It is spaghetti. We are all crazy, weird, unique human beings that Bob and weave and twist and turn, and it is, oh God, it is not a linear path. Max Cohen (21:23):Couple things. One, I don't think you can make an honest attempt to understand what people are searching for or concerned about within the awareness and consideration stage. If you don't do that, we discussed the idea of goals and challenges. All this comes back to building your buyer, persona people, and over-complicate buyer personas like crazy. I can't tell you how many people have been here. Here's a little template, go build a buyer persona or whatever. And they come back and say like all the information they have, like, this is how much money we think they make a year and they're this educated, and this is their job title. And their goal is that we wanna sell them software. That's the challenge. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. For anyone watching this, a buyer's like a very easy way to get started with a buyer persona.So you can get that out of the way and start creating content is a list of goals and challenges. And that's it because that ultimately informs what people are searching for online. They have a goal they're trying to achieve. So that aspiration, you just talked about George, they're on the way to achieving that goal. They're hitting a bunch of challenges that are getting in the way. They're also trying to figure out ways that they could hit that goal faster or just figuring out what the path is. All those things would fall into awareness, stage content around getting to that goal, or consideration stage content around solving a particular challenge. So I don't think you can start touching the buyer's journey without thinking about those goals and aspirations because that should inform what they would be doing. So for example, instead of paying some marketing firm to go out and do a bunch of like research if you know, you're selling to the owners of small mechanic companies, you can probably, or mechanic companies, small mechanic shops, I don't know, auto body shops, whatever.Let's say you sell software to auto shops. If you know that you're trying to reach the owners of auto body shops, you can probably come up with some pretty good educated speculation around their goals and aspirations. They're trying to run a successful auto shop like an auto body shop. That's like one of their bigger goals. You know, maybe some of them want a franchise. Maybe some of them just want to get cut; in general, you can safely assume they want to grow and operate as successful, whatever type of business it is from there. You can start thinking, well, it's like, all right, what potential problems someone might face going there? Even if they don't even know that those are problems and what are some symptoms of an issue they might face trying to achieve that goal. That's where all your inspiration for awareness and consideration comes from again. That aspiration piece is like; you can; I don't think you can do it without that. Like you have to have that and your, your buyer's persona or whatever you wanna call it, your ideal customer profile. Like I don't care that should heavily inform all of this from goals and aspiration perspective.Devyn Belamy (24:06):I wanna jump in real quick. People will turn around and ask. So, so then why are the demographic questions on there? If they're not necessary, they're not necessary for the topics, but what you have to consider. But the most important thing with that content is how you say it. You don't talk to a mechanic like you talk to a doctor. And that's when that information comes into play, regardless of the person's education level, colloquialisms, vernacular jokes, whatever cultural norms may apply to this person, be it racial identity, professional identity, whatever it is. You're missing a step if you aren't solving their problems. You need to know what you're solving for before you figure out who you're talking to and how.George B. Thomas (24:58):Yes. Yeah, yes. And listeners, fellow hub heroes. Let me just say this. We dipped our toes into buyer personas, and we're gonna come real quick back out of it because today's conversation is the buyer's journey. By the way, I flipped to our notes and hashtag strategy for the win. Next week's episode is actually about buyer personas. Who are they anyway? Where I'm going to get a chance to talk real deep about how I teach people to do personas when they're starting with HubSpot. And it's gonna be a really exciting conversation, but getting back on today. The buyer's journey, why, and all of the things we've talked about might be the answer to this, but I wanna dig a little bit more profound; by the way, this whole, almost 30 minutes conversation has been based on the, what the Harkers, the buyer. Why is it vitally important for anybody listening to this to pay attention? Is that a question for us? Well, there's nobody else in the room.Max Cohen (25:52): Well, it's a structural sort of guardrail for you to view, okay? What am I tactically doing with my content? And I think the only other thing I want to make sure I, I like to get in here is an easier way to synthesize what you should be doing when you think about these different stages. Because it's one thing to understand the definitions of each stage. And I think we've done a pretty good job about that. So far, to recap for anyone who hasn't caught it, I don't know my problem in the awareness stage, but I have symptoms. I'm trying to figure out the consideration stages. I know my problem and want to figure out the best way to solve it. Decision stages. I know how I'm gonna solve it. Who's gonna do it best.It's one thing to like, know those three stages, but I've still had people know the stages but then get confused on how that should guide them. Something that I've preached about for a long time to try to simplify this is that there are two sorts of mindsets you need to be thinking about when you're using the buyer's journey. There's the mindset your potential customer is in that's doing all this research, going through this whole phase, and then knowing that there's the mindset of how you should act as the marketer when creating the content. What's the introductory sentence you can tell yourself to ensure the content you're creating does its job. So in the awareness stage, the mindset of that buyer is, I don't know what my problem is yet, but I'm trying to figure it out. So you, as a marketer, when you create content, you should be saying this piece of content should be helping them figure out what their problem is.And if it's not doing that, that content that is gonna do that in the consideration stage, they're going all right. I know what my problem is. Who does it best? So your content as the marketer, your, your mindset as the marketer is I need to create content that helps people figure out the best ways to solve those problems. This is how you should solve your problem, not why our products are great, our category is outstanding, or how we solve the problem. And then, in the decision stage, the buyer's mindset is I know how I want to solve it. Who does it best for you as the marketer should say, this is why we do it? The best marketers are already pretty good at that. Or maybe you're not so good at it, but the marketers are the majority already doing this. They're comparing their product to other things, all that other kind of stuff. They're saying why the features are so good, da, da, da, da, all this stuff you're used to doing. So that decision stage should be pretty easy for people, but it's the mindset of the first two. It's tougher.George B. Thomas (28:07):I'm going to jump in here for a second because I want to piggyback on something that came to my brain when you said, well, it should be the easiest because it's what you've already been doing. But since it's already what you've been doing, it's also the most accessible place to get better. And so the pro tip on this decision stage that you've already been doing is I would give these words to you please, by all that is holy learn, the subtle sell. There is a way to have other people talk about you. There's a way to say things that aren't the two-by-four moment where the customer is picking themselves off the ground going well, that didn't feel well at all. Let me see if somebody else talks about this more eloquently, customer-focused way; instead of just telling all of the features, talk about the benefits again; it is about the buyer.It is about the ideal client profile. It is about humans. And if you position the excellent things you do in a way that is in it for me, from the human perspective, then suddenly, this subtle cell becomes much easier to pull off. Max. I love that entire section, by the way, I would say maybe that's a rewind section where people listen to that again because there's so much there. And I can't wait to get it, I'm gonna give Devin some time to unpack his thoughts on what just went down, but I wanna make sure we spend five or 10 minutes kind of debunking the buyer journey, myths that we hate. We'll get into that because I'll backtrack your conversation. And I wanna talk about how there are layers two, three, and four of what you just unpacked. So listeners rewind, re-listen to that, jot down some notes, and get ready for exciting conversations moving forward. Still, Devyn, unpack where your brain is right now on the buyer's journey conversation.Devyn Belamy (29:56):Cool. So the buyer's journey, Max hit it on the head from the marketing side. Let me talk a bit about it from the sales perspective. I know it's cliched as salespeople. You hear you don't ask for, uh, wedding on the first date, but so many do, and mm-hmm, , don't realize it because the problem is care more about what you have going on than what's going on with your prospect. And I know it seems counterintuitive because you have quotas, deadlines, and thresholds and want to get to the president's club and all that good stuff. The thing is that you have to take into consideration that this conversation isn't about you. You are here to add value. Hopefully, they give you money to add value, but at the end of the day, every interaction you need to have as a salesperson adds value.They need to be better off after that interaction with you; when conversing about awareness, the most important thing you can do is listen and ask probing questions. Even if they tend to go on a tangent or outside of what it is that you're trying to solve, talk to them and then help them understand what's wrong and not just understand what's wrong from the perspective of what you do but understand what's wrong, period, from the perspective of your expertise, because you know what's going on in your field because you are a student of the game. You read your marketing department's content. That's how you get through with the awareness. Then consider having a candid conversation where you are not the hero of this story. Have a candid conversation where you're talking about the problems themselves and the different ways to solve them.Your first instinct is to talk about why you're so awesome and why this thing is the best thing on the planet. Oh my goodness, you need to be doing this because this is how I make money. That's not the case. The number one place you see this done wrong is in email or going past email. Now it's InMails and LinkedIn. When some random person is going to ask you about buying a list or saying, Hey, I noticed you don't have a logo, dude. I work at HubSpot. We have a logo. I don't know what you were looking at, but you just came and told me about everything you do. And you're an accountant. You can do all of my accounting for me. You don't even know what my problems are. My problems aren't accounting. My wife graduated with a degree in finance. We have a budget spreadsheet that goes back to 2012; I met her in 2015.No, I don't have a problem with calculating any of that. But you might have found a different thing if you had bothered to converse with me instead of just bashing me over the head with all the cool stuff you do. That is an issue that I have that you can solve. Or, and this is the hard part, know someone else that can solve my problem, because the thing is is that with the consideration phase, I know now know how to solve my problem. When we get into the decision phase, even if, let's say, I'm talking about email marketing, I have several different options to choose from. I can choose HubSpot. I can also choose MailChimp, constant contact with Clavio. The thing is, talking to you in the amount of value that you've added to me, I'm gonna trust you. And wherever you're coming from is the direction I need to go. So that's why I'm going to get your service as opposed to the other ones that could solve my problems very well. Probably not as well as what you're offering me because you have given me so much value during our conversation. That's how you successfully transition from the decision phase to being a customer and delight throughout the entire process.George B. Thomas (34:05):There are two things that I have to unpack out of this because one is a dirty little secret that everybody needs to know. I love when they go on a diet tribe, when they just start going into left field, when they just start talking because, many times again, dirty little secret, if you let them go, they will uncover the actual problem they couldn't see. But because you're an expert, you can see swing it back into the actual conversation that everybody thought we were having and just knock it out. The park. The other piece that was just screaming in my brain was I have found historically that, especially on the sales side, if your focus is how do I help this person get one, five, 10% better from where they are right now. And you do it in a way where you're worried about their pocketbook or their wallet more than you are yours.And you have enough self-awareness to realize what their pockets are and not sell out of your pocket. Have that ability to be like; I know this is valuable to you. I know that it's in the right place for you. And I know that it's gonna get you to where you need to go instead of, and you mentioned it, Devyn, the quota and the gold medallion and the ring and the what? No, no, no, no. All of that will come. If you have basic human principles in place to move you forward. All right, let's use the next like maybe five-ish, seven-ish. I don't know; minutes to talk about some myths we wish we could debunk on this episode before we send people back to their regularly scheduled days.Devyn Belamy (35:49):I got one. The myth is that the buyer's journey is a one-way road. We've talked about how finding one problem can lead you to another. One of the things that we didn't discuss so much is that the problem they're trying to solve isn't the problem at all. They could be trying to make iterative changes to their website. It turns out that it's not about your calls to action color. It's just the fact that your copy is horrible. It's the fact that no one knows what you do. So you can be AB or multivariate testing until you're blue in the face on your UI. But it's an entirely separate issue that requires a separate set of skills to accomplish because you're not a writer, and you have blinders on when it comes to your customers, and you know what you do. And so you look at the website, it makes sense that that isn't always the case. And so that would take them as far as the buyer's journey, back to square one where we're making them a whole new level of awareness and taking them down that journey.Max Cohen (37:03):Again, if I had to look at something from like a mythical perspective, I can't tell you to like how many people I've seen in the inbound community who like to create content and get clicks on, oh, the buyer's journey is dead, or there are six steps to the buyer's journey. And it's called this different thing. Or its demand generation inbound is debt and like all this stuff. And then they go and explain their strategy. And it's like, literally the same thing, call this what we're talking about, whatever you want. Fundamental human decision-making will never die. It's physics that's grained just into how we all operate. We all have problems, issues, challenges, goals, whatever. We look for ways to figure out how to solve them. And then sometimes we buy something to help us do it. You can break that down into any number of steps, call those phases, whatever you want.It just exists. Humans are humans, and they're always gonna human. As long as you're looking at it from that perspective, I don't care what you call it. I don't care about any of that. Just make sure your content supports that basic human decision-making process. And I think it's not always just a selling motion. Yeah. It's called the buyer's journey because maybe some people will eventually buy from you, but not all of 'em are; that's also just marketing. Just keep that in mind. Don't look at this as such a rigid thing. Also, don't use any of this to say why I can't make that next piece of content again; get good at creating content first, and then use this to get better.George B. Thomas (38:21):I have two that I'm gonna do. One's real short, sweet, and straightforward. One myth that I wanna debunk is that the buyer's journey is the be-all end. All, this is a great place to jump off and start the conversation. But what is the customer journey if you're not also thinking about it once they turn into a customer? And having that mapped out through the rest of your organization, which by the way, maybe customer journey and journey mapping. They might potentially keep tuning in. They might be future episodes that will talk about, but here's the thing I wanna double down and Devin, I thought you were going in this direction. I love the direction you went in, but I want to double down on where you went, but this idea of spaghetti and max circling back around to the conversation you're having.And here's what I'm gonna say, busting the myth that it's a linear path, but the action item tip is to plan for the pivot. Hmm. Plan for the pivot. Let me explain. I wake up in the morning and make a pot of coffee. Oh, the coffee pot is broken crap. I go to let my dog out. Ooh, the dog ran away. Uh, oh, crap, time to go to work. I go get to go in my car. Ooh, the car got stolen. The human being is always going by the way. If that's your morning, I am sorry. And I will pray.But the point is the human, and God max, I love that. You said this, human are humans, and they'll always human. Well, what is that? Humans will pivot. Humans will transition into the thing they are given and try to do their best with it. And so if you, as a salesperson, as a marketing person, as a service person, as a business owner, start to think about everything that we've talked about today and plan for the pivot of the human in the journey that they're on your content strategy, your sales strategy, your email strategy, your chat strategy, all of your strategies, which I hope you have will be headed in the right direction. Gentlemen, any final thoughts before we end this episode,Devyn Belamy (40:22):Stop sending me and mills about trying to sell me stuff. I hate it. If you want to have a conversation with BDRs, stop trying to book calls just to meet a quota and meet with someone and find out their needs. And if they're a good fit for the AE before you book the call and AE, stop hitting me over the head with a demo before you even get to know me. And if I haven't said it before, stop sending me InMails. just period. Just stop. Just like no, no good comes of InMails at this point.Max Cohen (40:52):It kind of sounds like you're reiterating the idea of earning the right to do those things. I mean, that's like a good thing. It's like one piece of advice I'd say is like, you know, a good, a good gut check for yourself is like, have we earned the right to tell this person this yet? If I haven't done the legwork to say this is the best way to solve it, why should I be telling you my product? So great. I think that's a big piece. I think the other thing use all these tools that we're talking about, you know, the whole idea of a track gauge delight buyer personas the buyer's journey, layer it in, in the right way, but never let it get in the way of you creating content. And that's the most challenging, fundamental, and significant shift, but use all these tactics to mold that clay. Once you've become good at making ugly statues, the more complex part is like getting that statue built first, and then you can make it better over time and more times you do it. And the more you implement these different strategies, the better over time. Don't feel like you have to do all this stuff overnight cuz it's never gonna work if you overwhelm yourself.

107. How to Book a Meeting with Anyone in the Comments

The Causey Consulting Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 11, 2022 56:27

It can be annoying to transition from cold outreach to social selling. Your sequencer doesn't do it for you.But the power on social is in the conversations. Those conversations that don't require connection requests or InMails. It only needs to happens in the comments.So how do you use comments to generate quick wins?Join us for this B2B Power Hour workshop on:✅ 3 most productive comment strategies✅ Finding the conversations to engage with✅ Using comments to warm up accounts✅ Transitioning from comments to booked meetingsJoin us to learn how to book a meeting with anyone in the comments!Follow Nicholas Thickett on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nicholasthickettFollow Morgan Smith on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/morganjsmithVisit our site b2bpowerhour.com to learn more about our upcoming live shows, community, and more.

transitioning inmails

LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging Ads Demystified - Ep 62

LinkedIn Ads Show

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2022 24:51

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Announcement about the left-hand navigation being reverted Offers Epsiode NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript LinkedIn Sponsored Messaging, Message Ads, Sponsored InMail, Conversation Ads. These are the ad formats on LinkedIn that are most confusing, and also intriguing to advertisers. I'm about to demystify them on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics. For years, I've been getting questions about the sponsored messaging ad formats on LinkedIn. And honestly, I've been waiting a long time to do this episode, I was waiting until I found a whole bunch of success with these ad formats. And honestly, I've been really disappointed. I was hoping to find a formula for what always works. But I've collected all of the opportunities for success that I've been able to find on this episode. And I'm excited to finally share them with you. First off in the news, LinkedIn has a little message across the top of every account that says we've temporarily changed the design of our navigation menu, learn more. You can click there to see the note in the Help section of LinkedIn, or just look in the show notes down below, I've linked to it there. And what they've explained is they've reverted the new left hand navigation experience that was released just in the last handful of weeks. And it's been temporarily reverted back to the old top navigation experience. I reached out to a contact at LinkedIn and I got the inside scoop. It turns out, they didn't revert it because of any bugginess or anything like that. It was actually the second order effects of it. They noticed that the new experience adversely affected advertiser behavior on the platform. I won't go any deeper into that. But just I expect that after they make some minor adjustments or improvements, we'll get it back, there wasn't a problem with the navigation experience itself. It's more about what us advertisers did after getting that navigation experience. Alright, with that, let's jump into the actual content. Let's hit it. So first off, you need to understand what the different ad formats on LinkedIn are. It's the whole class of ad formats that are pushed right to your messaging box. Rather than being seen somewhere else on LinkedIn. These are called Sponsored Messaging. And there are two different kinds of ad formats that fit underneath that umbrella, we have Message Ads, which used to be called Sponsored InMail. And then we have Conversation Ads, which are one of LinkedIn's newest ad formats. And it's that choose your own adventure kind of chat bot experience. And the way that they work is they show up directly inside of your message box when you're on LinkedIn. And the only way for you as an advertiser to pay is to pay per send. Now LinkedIn is only going to send these to people who are actively logged in. So thank goodness, you're not going to be paying for all of those inactive users who haven't opened their message box in a year or more. Now, I did get to use the message ads format back when it was Sponsored InMail back before it even came to Campaign Manager, it was when you used to have to work directly with a LinkedIn rep. And here's what it was like it was probably the worst investment I've ever made. It cost $3 per person you sent to. And so it landed in a bunch of inactive accounts. When I ran these years and years and years ago, it was, like I said, the worst investment that I ever mad and we promptly stopped as soon as we saw that there was just nothing good coming from these. But thank goodness back in November of 2016. It was released as an ad format that you could access within Campaign Manager. And as soon as they did that, they made it so it could only show up when someone was active, which is fantastic. They also lowered the price you could pay all the way down to I think I've seen as low as like 25 cents per person you send to. So those were the Message Ads. Then we got Conversation Ads back in March of 2020, when it was released on Campaign Manager as well. We were part of the beta. It's a really good ad format. But it suffers from a lot of the same issues that message ads do. And one of the things that I always talk about when I talk about this ad format is how these are the most expensive ads on LinkedIn. And a lot of people are shocked when they hear me say that because they think that it's one of LinkedIn's cheapest ad formats. So here's the logic around it. So an average cost per send of one of these ads might be somewhere if it's in North America between about 50 cents to $1 per send. So say for example that you sent these messages to 1000 people, that means that you'll be paying between $500 to $1,000 in total. And in this case, the average open rate is about 55%. So of those 1000 messages that you sent, you can expect about 550 opens. Now an average click through rate on these ads is around 3.2% And that's for message ads. Conversation Ads, it's significantly higher. But at 3.2%, that would result in about 17.6 clicks. So all of this calculates out if you do that division of 17.6 clicks with your $1,000 in spend, you come out to a whopping cost per click of between $28 and $57. It's pretty wild. That is per click, that is not per conversion. I will say though, don't let the possibility of the high costs dissuade you from using Sponsored Messaging because with the right offer, and it does have to be the right offer, that is the key here, you can drastically reduce those costs to the point where this ad type can even be more effective than sponsored content, or any of the others. For instance, we had a client who instead of getting the normal 55%, open rate, they were getting an 80% open rate, and instead of the 3.2% click through rate average, they were getting a click through rate of about 20%. And that means we were getting costs per click in between about $3 to $6. All just depending on how much you were paying per send. And of course, for sponsored content, most of the time we would kill to get costs that low. And that's why these ad formats are so special. If you have the right offer. If you don't know what I mean by offers, go back and listen to episode 10. We've linked to it below in the show notes as well. It's all about offers. But here's what you need to keep in mind for these message ad offers. It has to feel very much like a personal invitation is how I like to think of it. The reason why is when you send one of these ads, it's going to look like it came from a person. And it shows up as a message rather than just a banner ad, which feels a lot more invasive if it's spammy. But if it's not spammy, it feels a lot more personal and inviting. If you're gonna send one of these and just say like, click here to talk to our sales rep, or click here to sign up for our webinar. And these are to cold audiences, chances are these are going to be the most expensive clicks you've paid for on the network. It's not going to turn out well in your favor. If however, your offer is really good at either fluffing their ego with something like because of who you are in the industry, we want to offer you a sneak peek or early access to something that your peers are going to be jealous of. Or maybe it's an invite to an in person swanky event where you're going to get to rub shoulders, with important people in the industry just like you there's going to be hors d'oeuvres and drink served and all that, that works really, really well here as well. We've also found these to work quite well for hiring. You can essentially send someone a message that says, here's what we're looking for, you look pretty qualified, are you interested in applying, and we can get people to show interest that way. We've also found some recent success with offering something like a gift card in exchange for someone being willing to take a demo. So that's pretty cool, too. Hopefully, these types of ideas are getting your brain spinning. So you can be thinking about ways that you can utilize this. New offers you could come up with that feels special enough to be sent out through a Message Ad or a Conversation Ad. Some of the times that we've seen these ad formats work out really well. We of course had the one client I was telling you about the head 80% open rates and 20% click through rates. That was for an in person event that worked really well. We've worked with many of the largest hiring services on LinkedIn. And we also had a client who was offering a gift card through Conversation Ads that ended up converting really well. Okay, here's a quick sponsor break. And then we'll dive into the differences between Message Ads and Conversation Ads. 8:41 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you, B2Linked is the partner you'll want to work with. We've spent over $150 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting you the lowest cost per lead at the most scale. We are, of course, official LinkedIn partners, and you'll deal only with LinkedIn Ads experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com to chat about your campaign and we would absolutely love to work with you. 9:19 Alright, let's jump into the differences then between these two ad formats that you get underneath the Sponsored Messaging umbrella. So first off, you have Message Ads, which is like getting an InMail message from a person and it'll say promoted or sponsored. It's a single message. It has both a headline and a body. But it doesn't work exactly like an InMail message would because the person can't actually send a reply back. The reply is all grayed out. It's basically like, click on one of these options that I'm giving you and if not, there's nothing else you can do and they just click on the next message. Conversation Ads, on the other hand, is very, very different. We talked about them being a choose your own adventure are more like a chatbot experience. They are quite similar, they show up in your InMail the same way, but they don't have a subject line. Instead, it's just the body copy opens immediately to multiple calls to action that you can thread together like a conversation. And then recipients can interact by selecting calls to action that you've put together. And then they receive an automated message back along with an additional call to action that they might want to select. The way you could think of this is like, let's say there's a big trade show going on in your industry, you can send out a Conversation Ad asking someone, are you going to be at this big trade show next week or next month? And if they say, yes, you could say great, come by our booth, we'll give you swag, and we'll treat you really special. Or if they say no, you can say well click here to get on our list for when we come back, we're going to be teaching a webinar all about everything we learned at this show this year, and about how the industry is changing and all that. So you can see how depending on someone's response, you can give them a different pathway that they might be interested in responding to. And we have found conversation ads to be about 30% more efficient than Message Ads. And I would chalk that up to basically a Message Ad, if you're not interested in the one thing that's being offered, you just shut it off, and you just move on to the next message. But a Conversation Ad, there are multiple chances to convert there. And the chances are a lot higher that you're going to find one or two that are actually interesting to this prospect. And so you'll end up with about 30% more conversions, which is great. That being said, they do take a lot more time to build. So keep that in mind, it's a lot harder to actually build those ads, but they do perform well. I mentioned at the beginning about how some people think that these are some of LinkedIn's cheapest ads. And the reason for that is definitely fixable. And I really wish LinkedIn would fix it. When you're inside of your Campaign Manager dashboard. And you're looking at one of these campaigns, the columns that you're used to looking at like average CTR and average CPC, these metrics are just going to be straight up wrong. And the reason why is campaign manager calls it a click when someone opens one of these ads. But I have a very different opinion on what a click actually is. In my mind, a click means that a prospect should be then presented with an opportunity to convert. But according to LinkedIn's definition of a click being an open, you can't convert right from there, you have to do one extra step. So here's what you want to keep in mind, you're looking at campaign manager, you see average click through rate and you think, Oh, this says 65% click through rate. That's amazing. Well, that actually is pretty good, but that's only your open rate. That means of all the people you send it to 63% clicked to open it. Now what we don't know, we don't know how many people click open, just to market is read so it's not standing out in their inbox as a message that needs to be read. So I don't necessarily think that an open is a high vote of confidence of whether something had a good headline or good initial like hook. You also look over and see average cost per click is 57 cents. Well, that is not what it is per click, that's your cost per open. So if under columns, if you move away from performance, which is probably defaulted to, and moved to Sponsored Messaging, some of the metrics in here are still wrong. If you scroll all the way over to the right, average CPC is still says the exact same thing as cost per open. But you will notice that there's a column there called sponsored messaging clicks. This is your actual clicks, when someone clicked on one of the calls to action that you put inside of your Sponsored Messaging Ad, you'll see your open rate was also called click through rate for before, but now this is the proper definition for it. And then you'll also see a column for click to open rate. That is your actual click through rate. That is the Sponsored Messaging clicks over the number of opens. So basically, if you're using this ad format, make sure that you are looking at it through the columns sponsored messaging, rather than just ad performance, because otherwise it'll throw you off. I've had so many people tell me that, oh, we're using these sponsored messaging ads, and we're getting like $1 cost per click, and they're way outperforming everything else, then we dive in and find out like as soon as we can see that their cost per conversion is significantly higher than any other ad format. And they realize, Oh man, I got tricked. My cost per click was actually $25 to $50 rather than $1. And we as advertisers should know this better. And I do think that LinkedIn should do a much better job of educating that and make it very, very clear for us. If you end up exporting this data. When you pull it out into Excel, you'll notice the column AO is called clicks Sponsored Messaging. And that's when generating a campaign level report. That's the one you'll want to use in all of your calculations for a click. Now, these are a very special kind of ad format, because they have incredible capabilities. The first one is that you can use what LinkedIn calls macros, or dynamic fields. That means inside of your message, you can insert dynamically, someone's first name, their last name, their company name, their industry, or their job title. So imagine you had a message like hi, first name, I see work at company name, we found other people with job title have found this really interesting, we thought you'd want to take a look. Something special to note is this is one of the ad formats that is eligible to be used in conjunction with LinkedIn lead gen forms, and we would highly recommend it. Because the cost on these are so high, you definitely want your conversion rates to be as high as possible while you're evaluating them. So you can make sure that it's it's going to be an ad format that works well for you, there isn't a way to preview these ads as you're writing them. So what you do is you can send a test message as you're crafting it. And that way, while the message is still in draft, it'll send directly to your LinkedIn account. And you can go look in your own messaging box to see exactly how it looks. I mentioned that it comes from an individual, if you work with your LinkedIn rep, they can turn on the ability for it to come from your company page instead. But I highly, highly want to discourage you from doing this. When it comes from a person, it generally gets a much higher open and conversion rate. When it comes from a company, it definitely feels like an ad. Something else special about these is that it will allow you to create a 300 by 250 pixel banner image that it says it's optional, but I would not call it optional. This is ad inventory that when someone is on desktop, and they open up your message, you get a free ad that accompanies your conversation ad. I think this is huge. Don't bypass this just because you think oh, I don't have the creative, it's worth it, go into Canva, create a quick 300 by 250 pixel image and be done. Imagine what this would look like if you sent someone a personal message. And then an ad for your top competitor happened to show up on the page at the same time, it's not a good look, you will notice that there are some limitations along with these ad formats. The most noticeable one is that there is a tight frequency cap. And this frequency cap is a person on LinkedIn can only receive one of these ads every 30 days. It used to be every 60 days, then they lowered it down to 45. Now it's 30. I wouldn't be surprised to see LinkedIn open this up to being once every 15 days in the future. But for right now, it's still one every 30. And that's not one from you every 30 days, that's one of these period. So no one else can send someone one of these, you've essentially monopolized their inbox for the whole month, which is kind of a cool feature. LinkedIn says that they do this frequency cap because they really care about their member experience. And they feel like if they sent any more than this, they would get annoying. But that seems really silly to me. Considering that people on LinkedIn who are popular, who are in high positions, they end up getting Sales Navigator InMails, like three, four or five a day, some of you may be getting considerably more than that. So one of these every 30, I don't think people can even tell that which ones are sponsored, versus which ones are sent by someone with Sales Navigator just trying to spam their inbox. A big downside here is that when someone sends you a Sales Navigator InMail, it actually sends a copy of that InMail to your email as a notification so that you can click to open it right there. But when you send one of these as a sponsored message, LinkedIn is not going to send an email to notify them, it'll just appear in their box when they're logged in. If you are a large advertiser, these are very hard to budget for because that inventory is unpredictable. You might run for three or four days with a large budget and say, Oh, this doesn't make sense at all, we're not spending anything that we want to. And then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of your inventory opens up from people who haven't received one of these in 30 days. Now they're open. And then in one day you spend 17 grand, that actually happened to us. So make sure when you use these, you're probably going to want to use them for a month or more just to make sure that you're taking advantage of all of your audience who may have already received one of these before and they're going to open up sometime during your campaign where you can send them. As you go to evaluate these, realize that there's going to be a lag in performance because oftentimes people will receive the messages and end up opening or clicking on them. days or even weeks after the initial send. So you don't want to run this for two days, look at the performance and say, Oh, this obviously isn't gonna work for us, because it still could. Give it some days for those sends to mature into opens and clicks. Unfortunately, these don't have any sort of retargeting that you can do, except for just lead gen form opens, I really wish we had the ability to exclude someone who had received multiple of your sponsored message ads without opening them or without clicking. I hope we get this kind of functionality in the future. We mentioned that you can't really respond to these, but if you are sending these in mass, there are going to be people who want to respond to you and want to get in touch and have a real conversation. So tell the person whoever this is coming from their account, that they might expect additional people sending connection requests, sending InMails, and maybe otherwise trying to get in touch. And here are the specs for these. So first off, we have Message Ads, where the name of your ad, because you can of course name most ads on LinkedIn, you get 255 characters there. You get to select from any sender that you've gotten permission to send from their account. Your subject line gets 60 characters, but it's truncated on mobile so I would suggest going shorter than that, if you can. The text section will let you have up to 1500 characters here. But again, if it's a giant wall of text that's daunting to read, chances are people are going to just move on to the next message. So I would recommend keeping these really shortened to the point. You can put links, you can put a main call to action that's up to 20 characters. You can put hyperlinks inside of your actual text, and you can't insert anything like video or other types of media. I would absolutely love it if we could put like animated GIFs and embedded audio into these, hopefully in the future. Then we have Conversation Ads, and again, these have names that are up to 255 characters, the same options with adding senders and having that 350 by 250 pixel banner image. Your intro message is shorter, it can only be up to 500 characters, then it will show your calls to action and each one of those can be up to 25 characters. You can have up to five buttons per message. So what I want you to take away from this episode is I want you to understand that these are ad formats where if you have a special, a VIP, a personal invitation kind of offer, then these are the right ad formats for you. If you don't, they're probably going to be too expensive so I would still recommend test out your offers on Sponsored Content first, maybe even text ads and dynamic ads, and come and test into Sponsored Messaging when you have an offer that you feel like could work really well. All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up so stick around 23:06 Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. Okay, here are the episode resources. First of all, if you go down into the show notes, you'll see a link to the announcement about the left hand navigation being reverted. So you can go and read LinkedIn's whole answer in their help section. Also, check out our episode on offers, episode 10 if you haven't already. It's one of our tried and true episodes, it's definitely one you're going to want in your toolbox. If you or anyone you know, is looking to learn LinkedIn Ads, definitely point them towards the link that we have down below for the course on LinkedIn Ads. This is one that I did with LinkedIn Learning. It's about an hour and a half long and it is by far the highest quality and the lowest cost that you'll have for a LinkedIn training. Look down at whatever podcast player you're using and hit subscribe if you haven't already. Please do rate the podcast on whatever player you're using. Please, please, please, and I mean you, please go and review the podcast if you like what you're hearing. People reach out to me all the time saying that they love the show, but I'm not saying the reviews come in and that will help more than you know. So please, please, please, I'm begging, leave a review. With any comments suggestions, questions for us about the show, reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

Low Response Rates? You're Not Alone.

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2022 15:50 Transcription Available

Feeling like your email or InMail campaigns are going almost nowhere? You're not alone. Key topics:✔️ Most sales & marketing jobs (staffing & recruiting definitely included) will attract people who want to pose and posture: "Oh, my business is great! Every sales email I send out gets a response." Bull

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How to get your brand featured on Top Networks without paying a PR agency.

Dan Ashendorf Internet Marketing Savvy

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 21, 2022 24:42

Join us here for daily traffic tips, life hacks and all good things. https://www.facebook.com/groups/20265... What PR agency means? A public relations firm is a professional services organization, generally hired to conceive, produce and manage un-paid messages to the public through the media on behalf of a client, with the intention of changing the public's actions by influencing their opinions. Have you ever wondered how to get more exposure for your small business or brand? Being mentioned in a big publication or top networks can give your business a huge boost. But there are ways you can get your brand featured without paying a PR agency. You might not consider yourself a writer, a speaker, an authority but you can have an event, guest blog or post, go on a podcast, get featured in a magazine or paper, and so much more and reap the benefits of your public relations efforts. Keypoints on this video: PR or a show string - LinkedIn - Sales navigator -send InMails to journalists PR companies $5k per monthly they charge Make your story newsworthy, be vulnerable, honest - most importantly interesting!! eg Business Insider, Buzz Feed - write to them, arrange a call, feed them info I noticed that you wrote about X, and I thought your readers will enjoy Y everytime you get featured - use that in your signature / website Go to your Local newspaper - and then use that in your signatures scalex.ai - it can do specific search on people's profile.

pr brand local paying agency buzzfeed business insider networks key points pr agencies what pr inmails

How LinkedIn Lost Its Way - The 10 Minute Talent Rant

Hirewell Recruiting Insights

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2021 13:36

“Every time I log into LinkedIn Recruiter, part of me dies inside.” -Jeff Smith When it launched in 2008, LinkedIn Recruiter was a game-changer for recruiting. A worldwide company directory that could source damn near any hire? We take it for granted what recruiting was like before that. Since then? Massive time suck for recruiters. InMails spam machine for end users. And limited af integrations. And now recruiters (and job seekers) are going elsewhere. Jeff Smith and James Hornick break down where things have gone south. Connect with James Hornick and Jeff Smith James Hornick's LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshornick/ Jeff Smith's LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-smith14/

lost talent massive rant 10 minute jeff smith inmails james hornick

Help, I'm Almost Out of InMails! with Mikey Weil

Sourcing School by RecruitingDaily

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2021 15:58 Transcription Available

On today's episode of Sourcing School, Mikey Weil lets us in on the secret sauce. How the heck do you plan ahead when you're almost out of InMails?Mikey is a Talent Sourer at Cielo Talent, a lover of animals, a comedian, musician. He has over seven years of experience in Sourcing, where he's filled entry to VP-level positions across a multitude of industries and is AIRS CIR Certified.In Today's PodcastWhat to do when your LinkedIn or Indeed messages are running out. Basically, what you can do in the meantime to keep actively sourcing.A few questions we'll answer:Why does Mikey regret hitting the 30,000 LinkedIn contacts checkpoint?Indeed vs. LinkedInTips, tricks, and different tools you can utilize when you're almost out of InMailsAnd more…of course. But you have to listen to learn.CodeSignal Tech Screen: A better way to evaluate your candidate skills fairly and consistently.

weil sourcing in today inmails

Getting Results with LinkedIn DMs

Growth Everywhere Daily Business Lessons

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 26, 2021 67:27

This week I chat with Kim Arnold, the author of the brilliant new book 'Email Attraction' about how to write better direct messages and InMails. Plus a couple of news items and a brilliant post of the week.

getting results inmails

How to Write Cold emails and LinkedIn inMails That Get Responses

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2021 7:12

Today we are going to talk about How to write cold emails and LinkedIn inMails that get responses!

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What is the difference between Connect and Follow on LinkedIn

Linking in with Louise

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2021 14:56

Have you seen some LinkedIn accounts with follow instead of connect on their Introductory card? What does this mean and which should you have on your profile? How to Connect with someone on LinkedIn The default setting on LinkedIn profiles is to show the ‘Connect’ button. It appears to the right of your profile photo. When you connect with someone on LinkedIn, you are automatically following their content. How to follow someone on LinkedIn When you ‘follow’ someone on LinkedIn, you will see posts from that person in your newsfeed, but they will not see yours. When you follow someone but don’t connect, they are not following your activity on LinkedIn. Why do you choose Follow first rather than Connect? According to LinkedIn, your network should consist of people you already know. The follow option is to follow posts and articles from someone you want to hear from, but you don’t know. For example, the above profile is the News Editor for LinkedIn News. So you may want to follow her articles on LinkedIn news. Having a smaller network of people you want to engage with on LinkedIn usually provides a better experience than connecting with lots of people you don’t know. How to build a powerful network on LinkedIn One reason to choose to follow someone rather than connect, is if they are a thought leader within your industry and you want to keep on top of what is happening in the industry. Examples of people you may want to follow – speakers, podcasters, authors, politicians. The key differences between Followers and Connections When you are connected, you can see each others posts in your feed Followers can see your posts in their newsfeed. If you want to see one of your followers posts, you can follow them. You can only send messages to people you are connected to unless you have LinkedIn Premium* You can only endorse your connections for their skills You can only recommend (or request a recommendation from) a connection, not someone you follow *With LinkedIn Premium, you can send up to 15 ‘InMails’ per month to people who are not your connections. Conclusion If you wish to build a network of people to engage with on LinkedIn, then it is probably a good idea to keep your profile as ‘connect’ first. If you wish to build a following of people who want to learn from you and read your content, then set your profile to Follow first.

followers news editor inmails

Greatest Hits Volume 1: Thirteen Recent Pearls of Wisdom in Under 20 Minutes!

Recruiting Trailblazers

Play Episode Play 52 sec Highlight Listen Later Apr 8, 2021 17:07

To celebrate our 40th episode, we feature 13 short clips from recent podcasts that each contain pearls of wisdom courtesy of previous guests.Enjoy clips from Marcus’s conversations with Adam Conrad, Hung Lee, Jamie Beaumont, Joel Lalgee, Mitch Sullivan, Will Staney, Laurie Ruettimann, Vanessa Raath, Jonathan Kidder, Mike Myatt, John Randolph, Mike “Batman” Cohen, and Henna Pryor.What You’ll Learn in This Episode:● [02:08] Adam Conrad on the impression you leave with every candidate● [03:04] Hung Lee on the future of the workplace● [04:14] Jamie Beaumont on getting engagement on your social media posts● [05:11] Joel Lalgee on how content on LinkedIn can lead to more exposure● [06:24] Mitch Sullivan on telling your readers what’s in it for them● [07:10] Will Staney on employer branding● [08:38] Laurie Ruettimann on the four keys to taking control of your career● [09:53] Vanessa Raath on the top three skills of a competitive sourcer● [11:14] Jonathan Kidder on tools for automating your outreach● [12:22] Mike Myatt on the importance of thinking about business outcomes during the search process● [13:38] John Randolph on Benaiah Consulting’s mission● [14:43] Mike “Batman” Cohen the importance of authenticity in your emails● [15:42] Henna Pryor on writing insanely effective emailsKey quotes:● “You only place maybe 2-to-5% of the people you talk to. But you leave an impression with 100% of those people.” ~Adam Conrad● “There are going to be a bunch of companies that will successfully go on-premise only. They will basically be trading their ability to retain and recruit staff for what they get on-premise.” ~Hung Lee● “What people don’t realize about social media is that it’s a conversation.” ~Jamie Beaumont● “As you put content out [on LinkedIn], you start to see people checking out your profile. The biggest ROI that you’re going to see is more profile views and potential DMs.” ~Joel Lalgee● “What’s absolutely critical if you’re going to start getting more of the right people with the right qualifications responding to your ads or your InMails or your social media posts, is you’ve got to immediately tell your reader what’s in it for them.” ~Mitch Sullivan● “What I’m seeing—and this pandemic has brought it on, too—is this humanization of company brands overall.” ~Will Staney● “I think fixing work is an inside-out job.” ~Laurie Ruettimann● “A sourcer has to have a good online brand, […] is brilliant at identifying talent, [...] and is a wordsmith.” ~Vanessa Raath● “There are a couple of [great automation tools] out there: MyRobotWorks, Machine Sourcer, as well as Phantombuster are some of my top suggestions.” ~Jonathan Kidder● “Making the hire is not the endgame. [...] Where most search firms’ roles end at the placement, that’s where ours really begins.” ~Mike Myatt● “We want to work with clients and candidates on chasing down those lions that they’re facing in their career or in their business.” ~John Randolph● “When people ask, ‘What is the one thing I could change that would help me get better responses?” it’s, ‘Stop writing shitty emails!’” ~Mike “Batman” Cohen● “Think of how you feel when you’ve gotten a communication that was clearly for you [...] and how different

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Jonathan Kidder: He's Back! Top Talent Sourcing Tools for Recruiters

Recruiting Trailblazers

Play Episode Play 51 sec Highlight Listen Later Feb 11, 2021 42:25

Jonathan Kidder - the "Wizard Sourcer" is back! He's published two books since we last spoke - "Top Talent Sourcing Tools for Recruiters" and "A Guide to Diversity Talent Sourcing”In this episode of Recruiting Trailblazers - Marcus quizzes Jonathan on Top Talent Sourcing Tools for Recruiters - the tools he recommends for different aspects of the job.Episode Highlights1:25- Introduction2:07- The inspiration and reason behind Jonathan’s book4:08- Evernote as a great tool for LinkedIn 5:30- Evernote and its integration on LinkedIn6:32- Top few ATS tools recommended for an agency or in house6:39- Loxo and its different integrating features 7:23- Airtable, a great personal ATS tool for in-house, plus Greenhouse, Jobvite and Salesforce8:57- People search engines - PeoplePro, Spokeo, ZoomInfo 11.30- Free tools: Free People Search Intellus Peoplesmart 12.00- Contact finding extensions: Hiretual, Seekout purchase from PeoplePro and Spokeo13.00 Lusha, Nymeria, Improver, Swordfish (get the book - there are loads!)14:20- LinkedIn and how they view these tools15.25 - Connectifier, TalentBin16:43- Candidate outreach tools and email automation - primer on outreach18:00- Take the time to personalize emails!19.50- What percentage of messages are personalized?21:43- Gem and its features as a top candidate outreach tools22:19- Intersellar and its integration24:34- Sourcewhale and its integration25:03- The power of InMails - great for follow ups.27:35- Recommendations of things for people to automate in order to save time and remain safe on LinkedIn28:44- Tools to reach 1st degree connections MyRobot.works, Machinesourcer, PhantomBuster)30:20- PhantomBuster and the meaning of web scraping and how it works32:01- Recommended Boolean Generators-Recruitin.net33:39- Email tracking tools- Saleshandy35:00- Writing tools -Textio, Joblint, Gender Decoder, Graammarly36:50- Scheduling tools -Calendly, Mytime, Setmore, Appointlet38:44- How to get the book (Top Talent Sourcing Tools for Recruiters)40:00- An overview of the second book “A Guide to Diversity Talent Sourcing”42:26- Conclusion

LinkedIn Co-founder Konstantin Guericke - The keys to building a long lasting B2B Network

Metrics that Measure Up - B2B SaaS Analytics

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 40:05

B2B Communities caught fire in 2020 - especially B2B sales communities. Revenue Collective, Sales Hacker, Modern Sales Pros, RevGenuis, and Bravado all dramatically increased their membership and levels of engagement following the onset of COVID.Who better to discuss the trend of B2B communities, than a founder of the world's largest B2B network, LinkedIn. Konstantin shares the key differences between a B2B community and a B2B networkKonstantin shares the four variables that are required to build a scalable, sustainable and engaging B2B network. He also discusses the techniques that LinkedIn used to quickly reach 1M+ members, and how "Social Capital" was key to gaining initial momentum.Did you know that Inmails used to cost $10 each, or that the only way to join LinkedIn initially was through a referral?In a classic entrepreneurial pivot, we moved quickly from the back story of LinkedIn's early success to how walking meetings were a hallmark of the early days at LinkedIn, and have retained their allure to Konstantin as he mentors and advises new entrepreneurs.Lastly, we discuss Konstantin's founders' journey and he shares some advice based upon his own experiences at LinkedIn.

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Ep 32: The REAL 7-day free VOICEMAIL+ program with Tibor Shanto

Limitless: A Sales and Marketing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2020 1:41

Why register for VOICEMAIL+ program? Leave the right voicemail and you will get more call-backs, more conversations, more sales. Complete this VOICEMAIL+ program and see how many extra conversations you can have with the right voicemail. About the speaker: Called a brilliant sales tactician, helping sales teams and organizations translate strategy to results. Tibor develops sales people who understand that success in sales is about Execution – Everything Else Is Just Talk! Get started now: https://bit.ly/3hCro3z

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Episode 962: How to fill your sales pipeline, with Stephen Woessner

Onward Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2020 46:35

Good Morning Onward Nation – I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host. Thanks for coming back — it’s an honor to have you here, Onward Nation — and this episode is going to be a solocast…where it’s just you and me…taking a deep dive into a topic where I’ve been answering a lot of questions in my daily calls and meetings with business owners just like you. In addition — several weeks ago — we aired Episode 936 which was my interview with Shay Rowbottom — one of today’s foremost influencers on how to crack the LinkedIn code in order to gain more visibility and to build community. And the feedback we received from you, Onward Nation made me think it was time to focus a solocast around LinkedIn — but in a super specific way so that you could walk away with specific strategies and steps for filling your sales pipeline with an abundance of right fit prospects. My thought is — that if you and I could have that type of strategic yet tactical discussion…and we could do that in August…you’d have one more arrow in your lead gen quiver and be ready to make the remainder of 2020 as fruitful and profitable as possible. So that’s what you and I are going to cover in this solocast…how to effectively use LinkedIn like a pro so you and your team can generate a steady stream of well-prepared prospects so that you have a full pipeline as we step into the final 4-months of the year. Before we dig in…I want to first make sure that we have a brief discussion around expectations. Generating leads is not hard work…in fact…it is simple work…especially when you have the right recipe to follow, which I am going to share with you in full transparency in this solocast. But…just because the work is simple does not mean it is easy. In fact, I can almost certainly guarantee that you or someone on your team will be frustrated at the beginning because you don’t see immediate success. You may even pound your first on your conference room table and wonder why the results are not better — or — you may get upset at your sales team for what seems to be a lack of productivity. The key is — to get out there and start testing for yourself the recipe that I’m going to share with you in this episode. You need to get as many at bats as you can. And if you strike out — to realize that that’s okay — that that’s too be expected — and you get up, dust yourself off, and you step back into the batter’s box to get ready for another swing. Because the more at bats you have — the more opportunities you have to make adjustments — to make improvements — and to perfect your swing. Case in point…let’s take a look at Derek Jeter…arguably the greatest New York Yankee to ever wear the pinstripes. Jeter is a lock to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer with his long list of impressive accomplishments including five World Series Championship rings But…what most people don’t know about Derek Jeter is that of all players in Major League Baseball history, he is number 12 on the all-time list of total strikeouts. In fact, Jeter struck out 1,840 times during his 20-year career. To say that another way…there have only been 11 people in the history of baseball who struck out and failed more often than Derek Jeter. So in baseball terms, Jeter failed 1,840 times – but yet – he continued to get up there – to take another at-bat – and he kept on swinging. And through it all – he recorded 3,461 hits, which is 6th all time and he finished 11 of his 20 seasons with a batting average of .300 or better. A Hall of Fame resume to be sure. He never got up to the plate – struck out – and then headed back to the dugout and said, “Well, Skipper — I guess I don’t have what it takes to play ball after all. Thanks for having me but I’m hanging up my cleats.” To minimize your strikeouts — I’m going to coach you through the right recipe for success…so that you not only have the ingredients you will need…but…you will also have the process so you know what ingredient to blend in and when. That way — all you need to do is follow the recipe and then rinse and repeat. Sound fair? First…some quick words as to why we love LinkedIn as much as we do…and why it should be the cornerstone of your lead gen strategy. There are approximately 706 million LinkedIn members — yes, 706 million. And according to research done by Hubspot — LinkedIn is 277% more effective than Facebook and Twitter at generating leads. And 79% of marketers see LinkedIn as a very good source of leads with 43% of marketers saying they have sourced at least one customer from LinkedIn. And B2B marketers shared with Hubspot that 80% of their social media related leads came from LinkedIn. Next…want to guess the average number of LinkedIn connections for a CEO? 930. Interesting. Why? Because if 930 is the average — some are higher — some are lower — but you tend not to get 930 connections by accident — you work at it — so if someone has 930 connections — it is likely intentional. Meaning, LinkedIn is a platform that he or she values — and a place where they spend time — that is great news for you. Okay, next…some additional insight into why you should care about LinkedIn…27 percent of all members are between the ages of 30 and 49…and another 24 percent are 50 to 64 years old…and 13 percent are over the age of 65. So to say that another way…over 64 percent of LinkedIn members are over the age of 30…and 38 percent of total members earn $75,000 or more per year. Bottom line…there are 706 million people on LinkedIn…64 percent of them are over the age of 30…and 38 percent earn more than $75,000 per year…with the average CEO having 930 connections on the platform. All of that speaks to your opportunity of finding and connecting with the prospects who can fill your sales pipeline, Onward Nation. Okay — let’s press forward by reviewing the seven ingredients within our recipe. Our recipe for how to effectively use LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline consists of seven core ingredients. I’m going to share the full list with you — and then we will go back and dissect each one. Ingredient #1: Improve your LinkedIn profile by adding video / audio clips, value proposition, etc. to your Summary. Ingredient #2: Import your existing email list in LinkedIn and send connection requests. Ingredient #3: Build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s advanced lead gen tools like Sales Navigator. Ingredient #4: Send InMail messages to your top prospects — and be sure to speak the language of your “client avatar.” Okay — let’s dive in and go tree-by-tree so you can see all of the tactical ingredients of this recipe. Ingredient #1 is all about making sure your LinkedIn profile is not just good — but that it is excellent — dare I say optimized. Why does this matter? Because when you send InMail messages as part of Ingredient #4…the very first place your recipients — your prospective clients will go to learn more about you — is your LinkedIn profile. And if your profile is sparsely populated with value propositions, your connections count is low, you haven’t taken the time to include a quality profile picture, you have zero recommendations, etc. — then it looks like you don’t care. And if you look like you don’t care — they won’t either — and they won’t respond to you. Maybe your InMail was just spam — you are ignored — and they move on. Or, if you take the time to include audio and video clips, Slide Shares of recent presentations you delivered, links to articles you have written recently, blog posts, recommendations from current clients — it not only takes advantage of all the profile building tools that LinkedIn provides you — but — you also visually demonstrate your thought leaderships and expertise to your prospective clients — and that is a very good thing. Now when they receive your InMail message as part of Ingredient #4 — they move from skeptical questions like “Why did she send me this?” to “Oh, interesting…they would like to talk with me? Awesome.” Think of your LinkedIn profile as your personal landing page and it needs to be excellent — just like everything else in your business. And — at Predictive ROI — my team and I have been experimenting with long-form LinkedIn posts…typically about 800 to 1,000 characters…with a bold headline that includes a search term…and we have seen Google indexing this content and ranking well in search results. So — you’ve undoubtedly heard people talk about “optimizing” your LinkedIn profile for search…yep, it’s a thing. Okay — this is going to sound self promotional…and hopefully you know me well enough now to know…that I’m only mentioning this to give you a good tangible example. Go to LinkedIn and look me up — send me a connection request…and you will see illustrations of each step I just shared with you. Now on to Ingredient #2 — import your existing email list into LinkedIn and send connection requests. To make sure we’re on the same page here — I’m talking about taking your email list — the list you communicate with often — consisting of customers, prospects, your full community of email subscribers — people with whom you have a relationship — and then uploading that list into your LinkedIn account and inviting them to connect with you on LinkedIn. But why? First…when you increase your number of LinkedIn connections — your network and credibility grows. Instead of having several hundred connections — you move to several thousand or more. And the next time a prospective client checks out your LinkedIn profile — they may see the larger number — and for some people — the larger the number — the more impressive and more credible. Second…your number of 1st-degree connections in LinkedIn impacts the number of prospects you will be able to see during Ingredient #3 of this process — when you use LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool. To cement this into place — let’s quickly review what LinkedIn defines as 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. A 1st-degree connection on LinkedIn is — let’s say you are listening to this solocast — you like what you hear — and decide to send me a connection request on LinkedIn — and by the way — you should totally do that! Anyway — when I receive the request — I personally accept it. And so you and I become 1st-degree connections. Rock solid awesome! Now, here’s what’s interesting. My nearly 27,000 1st degree connections instantly become your 2nd-degree connections. And all of my 2nd-degree connections become your 3rd-degree connections. Again, why is that important? Well, back to my connections…my 26,000 1st connections theoretically extrapolates out to a total network of 680 million people when considering 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. Yes, 680 million…which means I can roughly see just about everyone in LinkedIn. HOLY BANANAS! I can search through a huge number of people during Ingredient #3 in finding our ideal prospects we might want to reach out to. So, Onward Nation, building your number of 1st-degree connections is essential to your success on LinkedIn — and uploading your email list and sending out connection requests is a quick and easy way to boost your connection count — and the size of your network — with a couple mouse clicks. Very powerful. Here’s how you complete the step. And unfortunately, LinkedIn does not make this process very intuitive or easy. But — hang with me…here’s how you do it. Click the “My Network” tab in the main navigation. You will then be taken to a screen that on the left side reads “Connections” at the top left column all the way down to “Hashtags” as the last open in the left menu. Click on the first option…”Connections.” From this screen — this is where it gets wonky. On the far left…you should see an option that reads… “Your contact import is ready. Connect with your contacts and never lose touch.” And you should see a button underneath that reads “Connect”. Click connect. Next you will be taken to a screen that shows a list of a whole bunch of people from your contact list, etc. that are on LinkedIn…and LinkedIn is offering to send a bulk connect request to them. Click the little check box in the upper left — and then the blue “Add Connections” button and by doing so — you will invite hundreds if not thousands of new people into your network. Awesome…but we’re not done yet. The next screen will give you a list of people who you know who are not yet using LinkedIn…and LinkedIn is asking you for permission to email them on your behalf to entice them to join LinkedIn. To me — that feels a bit yucky — so I recommend that you click the “Skip” button. Okay — then finally…we have almost arrived to what I actually wanted to show you. When you skip the last step…you will receive a screen with a headline that reads, “Didn’t see anyone you wanted to invite?” Well — at the bottom…in hard to read gray text…is a link that reads “Done for now.” And when you click the “Done for Now” link…the magic happens. You will be taken to a screen where you can do several things…you can connect LinkedIn to your email service and it will pull out your list of contacts for you…awesome. Or — from this screen…you can also upload your email list and send connection requests to all of them instantly. BOOM! Okay, back to lead gen and Ingredient #3: How to build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator Tool. Sales Navigator is a premium version of LinkedIn — but and my guess this happens to you a lot, too — I am often offered the opportunity to upgrade from the Free version of LinkedIn into one of the premium versions several times of year. And when we have a major biz dev push or campaign taking place — we definitely make the upgrade. But for maintaining your profile and sharing your thought leadership content — LinkedIn’s free version works just fine. So let’s do a quick tour of Sales Navigator. From within this powerful tool…you will be able to search through your entire network of connections using several powerful filters, such as: Keywords First Name Last Name Title Company Name Location — or mile radius from your office or location And then you can take it deeper and make your searches more refined by including your prospect’s years of experience, their function within their particular company, seniority level, what they are interested in, company size, and so forth. By taking the time to get specific about your prospect — you leverage LinkedIn’s database — to deliver back to you a list of prospects who match your criteria and you eliminate the time wasting of sending direct mail to a purchased list and hoping for a better result outcome than the last campaign. So let’s say that in your first attempt — LinkedIn returns a list of 100 people. You can then click on the profiles of each person (see — Ingredient #1 is really important) and from their profile — you can better determine if he or she is a good fit for your lead gen efforts. If yes, add the person and their details to an Excel or Google Sheet so you can keep a running list of who you have reached out to…and no…LinkedIn does not offer any sort of automated CRM functionality. This is tedious work — I get it — but — it is also where the rubber meets the road in the success of your business and it will fill your sales pipeline. Okay, so I’m going to assume you did all of the work you needed to do up to this point. You have built a solid profile — you expanded your LinkedIn network by leveraging your email list — and being smart — to also reverse the process and cross-pollinate your connections back into your email list…and now…you have mastered the Advanced People Search tool with the resulting outcome being — a highly targeted prospect list — perhaps the most targeted list you and your sales team have ever had. So now what? Ingredient #4 is next. Crafting your InMail message and sending it to each of the people on the list you just created. There are seven sub-ingredients, if you will, that make up the InMail message…and they are: Include the first name of the recipient in subject line Your first 255 critical characters need to be awesome Speak to your “Avatar” Include credibility indicator(s) Include a client testimonial Include a call-to-action – reason for your prospect to reply to your message Include your email signature In today’s show notes — I included an actual InMail message — a template — you can use to create your own. Please use it. My Predictive ROI team has sent thousands and thousands and thousands of InMail messages on behalf of our client’s lead gen efforts — as well as for our biz dev — and the template we included in today’s Show Notes is the resulting outcome of all that testing and hard work. You will dramatically shorten your learning curve by using the template. One last point about the InMail and the template you will see in the Show Notes — there is a reference to “speaking to your client avatar.” And yes, we have a recipe for that, too. If you go to our free Resources Library at PredictiveROI.com/Resources you will be able to download our free workbook on how to create your ideal client avatar. Having and mastering this knowledge is a must in writing effective InMails. Before we close out for today…I’d like to leave you with a couple of important thoughts. Now that you have learned the recipe – and have seen the typical result outcomes – there are two questions you and your team need to answer. First…how will we take immediate action based on what you learned here today? How will you apply it right away to fill your pipeline? And that leads to the ultimate question. Are you committed…or are you just interested in having a steady stream of well-prepared prospects flowing into your sales pipeline? Being committed means knowing exactly how much new business you are seeking, from what sources, and having a strategy in place to fill the pipeline to get it. Let me share a quick story about Coach Nick Saban from the University of Alabama – who, in my opinion, represents the epitome of being committed. Alabama is consistently one of the top-ranked teams in college football each year. They were the 2015 National Champion and played again this year for the title but lost to Clemson. Coach Saban’s reputation is one of precise detail and process. And once he uncovers a “recipe” for success…he uses it over and over again. But he also freely shares his secrets without fear that his competitors will be able to duplicate his results. How is this possible? Case in point…my good friend, mentor, and three-time guest on Onward Nation, Don Yaeger, interviewed Coach Saban as they considered writing a book together. During one of Don’s visits with Coach, he asked if there was a secret formula or recipe that gave Saban an edge to recruiting the best talent out of high school year-after-year. Coach told Don that his recipe is simple. He committed himself to watching every single play that any of their 85 scholarship athletes every played while in high school. Every play…so he could evaluate talent, effort, and other qualities. Let’s just think about the magnitude of that for a minute. Alabama has 85 scholarship athletes…who likely played at least 2-years of high school football…at 10 games per year in high school…and many high school players play both offense and defense during a game, so let’s call it 100 plays per game. All totaled, Coach Saban watches film on 170,000 plays to make his recruiting decisions. It is an overwhelming number, right? How could anyone do that? But Coach Saban does. And the resulting outcome is that Alabama is consistently the best on the field each year. So Don asked him, “Coach…aren’t you worried that if we put your secret recipe into this book that people will steal it from you?” And Saban looked at Don and said, “Nope…not worried at all. Because no one is going to be willing to put in the same amount of effort that I am willing to commit to our success.” Don’t give up So my hope is that you don’t leave this solocast thinking – yeah, I knew LinkedIn could do that. My challenge to you is…but is your business doing it? And as Tony Robbins says…“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” So I hope you will decide to put this sales pipeline-building recipe into action and then please drop me a line and let me know about your success. So with that said, Onward Nation… I want to say again, thank you for taking the time to be here with me today. It is an honor to have you here — your time is sacred and I am delighted you chose this episode to be what you listen to, study, and take with you on your morning run, or maybe Onward Nation has become part of your daily commute, or in some other way has become part of your morning routine. However our daily podcast fits into your daily routine — I want you to know how much I appreciate you sharing some of your invaluable 86,400 seconds you have in your day with me and the strategies we learn and share each day from today’s top business owners. Remember — now’s the time to double down. The data is on your side. Onward with gusto!

There is Now No Reason Not To Respond to a Message on LinkedIn

The Original No B.S. Job Search Advice Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2020 7:11

EP 1880 LinkedIn has always been a little clumsy to work with Now it is really easy to respond to messages and inMails on your mobile device (not yet on the desktop) ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a career and leadership coach who worked as a recruiter for more than 40 years. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with more than 1800 episodes and is a member of The Forbes Coaches Council. Are you interested in 1:1 coaching, interview coaching, advice about networking more effectively, how to negotiate your offer or leadership coaching? Use this link to schedule a free Discovery call with me. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Connect with me on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/thebiggamehunter Mention you listen to the podcast or watch my YouTube channel. Otherwise, I may not accept the request, particularly if you are outside the US. If you have a quick question for me, you can get it answered with a 3-5 minute video or schedule a 15 minute live conversation with me. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Join and attend my classes on Skillshare. Become a premium member and get 2 months free.

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There is Now No Reason Not To Respond to a Message on LinkedIn

No B.S. Job Search Advice Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 19, 2020 6:00

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SoMe Up #022: Sponsorerede Inmails på LinkedIn (Særepisode)

SoMe Up

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 12, 2020 11:07

I dagens episode har vi taget vores dygtige kollega og LinkedIn-specialist Morten med ind i studiet. Vi taler blandt andet om sponsorerede Inmails, forskellen på samtaleannoncer og meddelelsesannoncer og om de rent faktisk er ulovlige i forhold til markedsføringsloven.

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#CrystalKnows What Makes You Tick & How You Buy with Drew D'Agostino

ScaleUps And Hypergrowth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 23, 2020 54:18

#DrewDAgostino is founder and CEO of #Crystal, the AI scale up that lets LinkedIn users understand the people they are connecting with, sending InMails or selling to BEFORE contacting them. It's about 80-85% accurate and gives you a serious advantage in your preparation for any form of communication.Whether you're selling, hiring, recruiting or researching your prospects or your competition, Crystal can give you a competitive edge.Drew grew another business prior to Crystal, but he and his partner learned the hard way it isn't all plain sailing. They brought those lessons to Crystal, and have made different mistakes! He is very frank about the challenges they've faced, the important of finding the correct investors.He introduces the concepts of #goodmoney, #dumbmoney and #badmoney, and why it's vital to understand the difference up front.Drew can be contacted through his Linkedin Profile: linkedin.com/in/drewdagostinoWebsites:crystalknows.com (Company Website)drewdagostino.com (Personal Website)crystalknows.com/p/drew (Personal Website) Twitter: drewdagostino

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Leveraging LinkedIn to Build Relationships & Recruit Top Talent in 2019 & 2020 with Tammy Riley EPISODE 7

All Social Y'all Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 18, 2019 34:01

In this episode with Tammy Riley of ACCI talking about building relationships on LinkedIn, she really helps us approach job candidates differently and in a way that is proven to work. Using current data as a backdrop, surveys of small and midsize US companies show that owners report that recruiting remains one of the top three challenges of the multitude of business challenges that owners face. According to a 2019 survey, by CNBC and SurveyMonkey, 52% of small business owners claim it's harder to find qualified individuals to hire now compared to just a year ago. For businesses with more than 50 employees, 63% of owners believe it's harder to find qualified hires. Another survey conducted by CNBC in January of 2019, they published that CEOs cited the ability to attract and retain quality workers as their top internal concern. For purposes of upping your game in recruiting on LinkedIn, Tammy provides really great tips that most people don't take the time to do today. That is going about one-on-one and one-on-many conversations on LinkedIn, without making people feel either like they're being creeped on or that the message is spam or canned. She also talks about setting up resources to enable continuous communication and message monitoring in LinkedIn. As well as creative ways you can capture video to allow candidates to get to know your company, your culture, and your job opportunity before they get to the interview table. Because candidates who are informed before they get to the interview table are much more likely to be hired. Why? Because if they like what they see and they hear about you online, and there's information they can consume ahead of time before the interview, they'll be able to visualize themselves whether they're a good fit or not. And if they think they are, they will have reason, and information, as to why they're a good fit. Therefore they'll feel excited, there's that emotion component, and eager about learning more. Tammy talks about similar things as what the Glassdoor survey shows, that some of the top influences on candidates include information on things like salary and compensation, company culture, company reputation, the interview experience, company mission and values, and your senior leadership. Welcome to Episode Seven, Leveraging LinkedIn to Build Relationships and Recruit Top Talent with Tammy Riley. In this episode with Tammy Riley of ACCI, which originally stood for Atlanta Career Connections, we're going to hear from her about how organizations can become much better at finding top talent by utilizing the working community and the platform capabilities of LinkedIn. Along with LinkedIn methods, she'll share with us how she helps companies build relationships with candidates throughout the recruiting process or life cycle. So allow me to introduce you to Tammy Riley. Tammy has been in the recruiting industry for 30 years. She began well before the internet age working for the second largest recruiting firm in the US. She has staffed for IT, or information technology, with data centers, computer operations, C programmers, which are like coders, WordPerfect, and data entry processors. Those are some of the types of jobs that she filled. And she left and started her own it recruiting firm out of Atlanta in 1989 I think, Tammy was that it? 1998. Oh, 1998. Okay. Yes. That's awesome. That's a good year. I know that was forever ago. Right. Tammy: Yes. Carey: So it has allowed her to stand up her own firm, and work in the Tammy way, and helping companies fill positions in such a beautiful fashion, and having surfaced with the evolution of the internet requiring a multitude of new skill sets. So at that time the internet was really taking off and people were still saying www. dot. [laughter) ....All of these new skillsets were coming about. So Tammy had to learn all these new technology skill sets that these companies needed. And she did a just amazing, she's amazing what she does for client companies, and she really engages with the hiring leadership, and the teams, to develop a modern strategy that sets the company up for success in their hiring needs. Because we need to face it. We cannot say in the nineties anymore with the way we attract workers today. So hi, Tammy, and thank you so much for being our featured guests. Tammy: Hi. Thank you. It's so awesome to be here, Carey. It's exciting. Carey: Yeah! So can you tell us a little bit in your own words about you and your recruiting from ACCI? Tammy: Absolutely. So I started in 1998. And it was right after I was managing a branch office for a CEO in Atlanta, and I needed to do a lot of hiring for that branch office, in addition to training a sales force and building a service team. And I didn't have time to do the hiring because I had taken a break from recruiting to do some management work for the companies. And I found that it was difficult to outsource recruiting to third party agencies because they weren't really building relationships with candidates. And I thought this is so difficult because I found that I was doing all the work, and then building relationships, and then paying a fee for that service. So it didn't really make sense. And I thought, "Ah, there's a need out there for recruiting to be done differently." And so with that in mind, I started at ACCI. Carey: Yes. And that just reminded me that Tammy got me into the technology world! Tammy: Yes. Carey: I mean we always talk about that. Tammy I know. It's such a great story. Carey: Tammy recruited me and she helped me. I'm thinking, I can't understand coding and guys that are software developers. She's like, "Yes you can. Yes you can. You're great at sales." So I started at sales for Tammy. And then I found that I had an aptitude for technology and I love to learn, and Tammy loves to learn, and we are just - we are the prettiest technology geeks, aren't we, Tammy?! Tammy: (laughs) That's funny. Carey: So we really, that's how I broke into it. But anyway, it's not about me. I just wanted to say that you are a technology guru and you really helped me realize that really anyone can learn technology. It kind of can be overwhelming and assumptions can be made at first but that that's kind of where you started, right, in the IT space? Tammy: I did. I mean when I was early twenties I was kind of like one of the few women in technology and that was back when, I don't know, there was WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, and everyone was programming in C. Or maybe prior to C, BASIC programming. And I had started working for a temporary services firm. They were the second technology recruiting firm in the United States. They were founded by two developers, a husband and wife team. And so at that point, if we go back to 1988, we were recruiting technology professionals without the internet. You can imagine some of these recruiters, being on the phone all day, it was prior to voicemail even being on the scene. So we scheduled 10 to 15 in person meetings a day with technology professionals, and worked with them on their career tracks and goals and objectives. And then when we would meet with our clients and we'd talk about the top candidates of week and the people we thought would be a good match for them. And it was all done proactively through building relationships, both with the candidates and then with the clients. And everybody would know about each other, we'd coordinate, facilitate meetings between the candidates and the clients, who'd get to know each other. The candidates would get to know the companies, the career tracks and then they would, you know, wait. And when positions became open, the client already had the person in mind that they were going to hire, and they were already ready to go! So it was a very proactive, engaged talent pipeline we were building back in 1988. Carey: Man, that takes me back. Yeah. But you know, it's funny because many, many companies are still recruiting the way they did back in the 90s and early two thousands. And what I mean by that is not utilizing the platforms that are available today and the social connectivity, with LinkedIn being one of the main ones for recruiting. Yet they report that their biggest challenge is finding talent or their biggest challenge is recruiting. Like the huge number of companies and leadership reports. So usually when you have a challenge or if you want something different or better results, then you need to change what you're doing. So what, what would you say be the reason for that? Tammy Yeah. Definitely. Carey: What would you say has not changed? Like what do you find is the same now as it was back then before digital and social became part of the working culture? And I guess because why I asked that is, I know you act really like a coach and an expert to your clients. And so when they are trying to do things the way they did back in the day, and they're not utilizing LinkedIn or other means to communicate and build the relationship when they're not face to face with the candidate, what do you find is the same now as it was back then before social became part of the norm? Tammy: Recruiting. Yeah, so it's so interesting because it is the same. You would think that it would be different but the challenges are the same. And if I could narrow it down to two things for clients and one thing for the candidate, the top two challenges for clients are they think every single day where can we connect, and talk to qualified candidates about who we are, about our company, about our open positions. How do we effectively connect with those candidates who would want to be involved in our brand and take their career to the next level with us so that we can support their career growth? And then how do we market our company brand and how do we market our company so that these qualified candidates that are out there looking for us can find us? So that they know where to call and to send emails to! Candidates are always wondering which companies are the best fit for my career long term and how do I find those companies? So see all the questions are the same. This is the... I would say the two things that I actually do in my career, my title is a recruiter, but I'm coaching clients on how to find candidates, and once they do, how to reach out and connect and build relationships, and start those conversations before they have open positions. To build an engaged pipeline, build credibility and trust. And then with candidates, I'm also teaching them how do I get found, what can I do so that companies can find me, and how can I become attractive to those companies for the perfect next role for my career? Carey: Yes. Okay. That makes so much sense. The way that you kind of see it from a high level. What has changed in preferences and expectation of candidates? Do they, I mean I hear the younger generations especially be like, "they're taking forever, and like why haven't I received a text reminder?" or things like that. What do you see? Tammy: Right. Yeah. I think that what I... When I coach clients on how to build an engaged, proactive talent pipeline, and I'm teaching them how to communicate their brand and to how to build relationships with candidates, I think that they have to have dedicated resources depending on the size of the company. It's a small company, one dedicated person, dedicated to relationship building with potential candidates. Larger companies may need more than one person because they have recruiting teams for each area of the company. But so it's getting involved in social media. It's getting online and connecting to people via LinkedIn messages, InMail messages, and striking up conversations, getting people to want to engage with them. Carey: Makes sense. Makes sense and a lot of people don't set aside the resources or realize the importance of that, and how it trickles down to the candidate experience? Is that what you're saying? Tammy: Absolutely. Absolutely. If you have dedicated person reaching out to candidates, you can continue to start conversations and continue those conversations, so a lot of times you have to have a tech savvy person who's going to have a mobile device. They're going to have the LinkedIn apps on their phone and other social apps on their phone. That way when candidates are getting these messages and then they're responding to them, you can easily respond back quickly, and create that momentum, and start creating a rapport. Carey: I see. So you approach the recruiting process, like you guide your clients to build those relationships in that way with all these ways and methods, I guess you could say, and best practices to find the most best qualified candidates. The LinkedIn platform, it's not just to have a profile on, right? It's used by working people to have thoughtful conversations, contribute, and get to know other professionals on, right? Tammy: Absolutely. You want to connect and you want to be with like minded. Like for instance, you're looking for people that are also in the same networking groups, like women in technology for instance. And you can connect with those groups and start networking with other people that are involved in the same activities that you are in professionally. And the same goes with clients. You want to be able to reach out. Carey: I think there's a misconception that it's (LinkedIn) just for people to go on because they have a job and they want to have a profile to show that they have that job. But it's really all people that have jobs, or are looking for a job, to have conversations on, and get to know other people on, and therefore like work... where I'm kind of going with this too, is leadership needs to be involved on LinkedIn because that way they'll be in the conversations, and get to know and take notice of people that are really great on there. Like a CEO is noticing a chief marketing officer. Tammy: I ask people their opinions of things. I network. I ask them if they know anybody who also may be a good fit for a position. But I also think that, you and I, as just normal people on LinkedIn, we can connect with other people like ourselves to create communities. Carey: Yes. Okay.... well I've seen come in and you're working with a hiring team. I've seen you in Atlanta coming in from Florida, and work with a team that you join them for a couple of days. I'm not saying this is the normal normal gig or anything, but you really work with them, and the way that recruiting is successful this year, not just this year, but in 2019, 2020 because they really don't know how to go about building those relationships with candidates seems like. Tammy: Right, exactly. And everyone's so busy that no one really has time to take the time to not only begin and create conversations, but to continue those conversations so momentum happens. And then before you know it, you're building credibility. You're building trust. You're building, you're putting your brand out there. And then those people, that are very excited about your organization, they're going to tell the people in their network. Then they're going to tell the people in their network. And that's exactly how the brand proliferates out in the work. You know, out in the communities. Carey: Yeah. Yeah. And when I do a good job on LinkedIn in having conversations, and checking in, and joining groups, and getting to know people, that's part of building a relationship. But then it just extends out to the phone interview. And then they bring them in to the face to face. And they've already seen their nice professional picture that's in line with the organization's kind of look and feel. I remember at Forester, I had a SVP come in new, and at first one of the first things he had the whole salesforce do was change their LinkedIn profiles so that they were more conducive to people, when they go there, they automatically know that we work for Forester and were in line with the Deloitte and Touche, and the all of our competitors like McKinsey. And I was like, "LinkedIn is personal. I should be able to decide what I want my LinkedIn profile to be!" But I did it because he required it and I respected him. And after I spent time on my LinkedIn profile and then I saw everyone else doing it too, we were more cohesive as an organization and our leadership was trying to, like you said, exactly Tammy, extend the brand beyond just the company page. It's the employees too. And that's part of relationship building I think. Internally to bring that out and connect with people that will fit into your culture. Tammy: Absolutely. It does extend the culture out beyond LinkedIn. And people get, they look at business page profiles and they are looking for not only a brief summary of the company, the history of the company, they click on the people in the company, and they want to get a sense of do I belong here? Do I fit this culture? They click on those videos where they will showcase an employee of the month, or a person who's won an award. Or they'll have a little clip of where one of the employees, they were speaking at a trade show or presenting or accepting an award for President's Club achievement. And that gives a great idea of vision, actually a feeling of how it is to be an employee there, like a day in the life. And it just promotes culture. It promotes the brand. It promotes the initiatives and the what everybody is believing in in that company. Like what is it that they feel they stand for. And what they do, not only within the organization, but how do they extend out into the community too. Carey: Yes, that is awesome. So is it a lofty, unrealistic expectation or goal for a company or hiring managers to say that they can find someone on LinkedIn and then develop a relationship? Not just through LinkedIn, but LinkedIn being a component of it. And then getting the candidate to a state where they're like, "I want this job.... When you have an opening." Like "you don't have an opening now, but call me when you're ready and I'll make a jump." Like is that something that LinkedIn kind of helps expedite? help it go faster? Tammy: It totally facilitates those relationships. Some of the work, in fact the work that I do with companies is I'll go in and learn all about their culture. I talk to all the leadership team members, the HR and talent acquisition team members. And then I create a solution of how they want to reach out ,how they want to communicate, who their target candidate audience is. And then I literally train them on how to handle those InMails, and then the phone conversations, the instant message conversations, and then how to, like step one to step 20, this is how we get there from here. And so it begins with learning how to identify which candidates are the target candidates for the potential rules that we're going to be growing and opening up for the year. And then we start creating full files and we'll send those messages out for each group. And then we'll wait for return messages. Or we may have an email campaign where it's message one, and then after a certain period of time message two, after a certain period of time message three. And we look for common conversation points by reading the profiles. What college did they go to? What achievements have they accomplished? Do we have people within our organization that have commonalities in alignment with what they've achieved? And then we'll have those same team members reach out and start a conversation. And so now we're creating a dialogue. And then before you know it, we do get responses. People engage with us. And then the goal at that point is to continue the conversation. So it's all about continuing the conversation. And the minute we have an opportunity to meet someone for lunch or to bring them into the office, and this is prior to the position being open, they're coming in and they're meeting us, they're getting a feel for the office, the culture. They have a chance to interview us. They're saying to us, "I want to learn more about you. I want to learn about where you're going next year." They're thinking, "Can I trust this organization?" They're building credibility. They're visualizing their career path there. And so candidates are not used to that. They're not used to a role reversal. And so when they are talking to us and they're saying, "Oh my God, you're saying I can come and have lunch with you. You're saying I can meet you at your office and tour your facility. You want me to interview you and see if this is a good fit for me." It's a total switch of what the normal process typically feels like for a candidate. So the they do. They immediately engage and they're very, very interested in doing their research. And then what's happening is rapport is building, relationships are building. And then we have, of course, our a talent acquisition databases and our CRM systems. And then we just kind of compile the data and then we make a plan to stay in touch with them during certain points in the year, leading up to when the position becomes open. And when a position becomes open, it's easy. We just give them a call. They already have planned to be with our company. They've already communicated our brand to colleagues in their network, and they're ready to go. And they're bringing their network as well. And so it is a very successful, successful, I don't know what you call it, a plan, a campaign, a process. It works. And it just boils down to building relationships. The same thing we did in 1988 without the internet. It's just a different medium. Carey: Yes, it can be accelerated. It can be easier. And it can be more interesting too, with video and with more capability to see more from behind your desk or on your mobile device. So that's how people have to think about it. So what should business owners do? Let's say they're on LinkedIn but they really haven't paid attention to it. Their leadership maybe doesn't really have profiles, or they have a profile, but it's like a picture that looks like their Facebook picture. I know myself, if I get an inbox or a DM from someone inside, - DM means direct message - inside LinkedIn, nine times out of 10, I'll go to their personal and or their work profile to kind of check out what they're all about. And it's like a first impression as a face to face, like the first three seconds of meeting someone, and it's critical to that first impression. So do you have a few things that matter to kind of get that in line with what is a better setup on LinkedIn? Tammy: I think that it's important to reveal details of where you went to school, and some career highlights, and talk about the company itself. A lot of companies they, like you said Forester Research, they create a brand. And they wanted each employee to communicate this same brand. Maybe the logo under their profile picture, everyone had the same logo. Everybody had the same first paragraph of the company mission statement, and talk about something interesting about the company that may peak someone's interest but also somehow have the link over to the company business page. Because you want them to also be able to do, they're going to land on your professional page, and see you and get to know interesting facts about you and who you're affiliated with, which is your company. Then they want to be able to easily click on over to the business page, which is the company presence, which will have the videos of employees, employee of the month, trade show, moments in time, and fun facts. And then they want to click over to the company website where they can get a traditional piece of information about what we're used to, company history, the leaders of the organization, contact us for these things. So there's three ways candidates do their research initially. And they'll hit the recruiters' page or a hiring managers' page. Then they want to click over to the business presence on LinkedIn. Then they want to click over to the website. Carey: Awesome. That's so smart. So what are a couple ways to initiate these one-on-one or one-to-many conversations on LinkedIn. How do you not be creepy when you're recruiting, or you're company and you're leadership, and you're trying to find the best people on LinkedIn. Do you have any examples or ideas how they can start those conversations? Because when they go to LinkedIn, they're in kind of a work mindset. Whereas Facebook, and we teach this, that people go to Facebook with one intention, that is to connect with family and friends. Even though they get ads and they're open to that now, people are... You go to Instagram, you have another mindset. It's same with LinkedIn. Tammy: No, you're absolutely right. And the thing that I teach my clients is to not sound like they are recruiting. Don't sound like you're marketing. Don't send the same email to 50 people at the same time. You want to personalize each message if possible. And it can be quick process if you have the right message. And then you just change the message to attract that or to get that individual's attention, something that matters to them personally. So you have to read the profile. And then you find some alignment and then you talk about the alignment. You talk about common connections that you have in common. Talk about the same groups you may be both involved in. I always ask questions that I know they may have the answer to based on their expertise or their work experience or where they worked before. And to keep it really simple and personal, and that way they know this is not just a web bot or a massive marketing message, a campaign going out to 300 people. It's very personalized and short, but also something meaningful is happening, a professional question, something about their experience. The common person we might know or a common company we may have worked. Maybe went to the same school. But I do personalize and I don't let that conversation sound as though it's "businessy", like I'm trying to sell them something or I'm trying to get something from them, if that makes any sense. Carey: Makes perfect sense. It does automatically take away, even though it takes some time, thought, and energy, - that creepiness factor. Or they don't even read the message factor because they think, "Oh this is spam." So that's super helpful. And last, I just want to close with the whole video stuff. You mentioned it earlier, videos about your company. And they don't have to be extravagant or completely, totally commercial level grade or anything like that, but videos are getting a lot of traction on LinkedIn now. People are really enjoying them. Can you talk about what brands can do on their corporate and personal pages to help candidates learn about like the company culture and hiring managers on LinkedIn. And is it worth the time even getting these videos done on LinkedIn, would you say? Tammy: Absolutely. I do believe in providing content because it gives the candidate the opportunity to feel what it is like to be within the organization. It gives them a feeling of the type of people that are there and they think immediately, "Do I fit in here?" You want them to get a feel for the type of success the company's experiencing. So I find that social media companies like yourself will be hired by companies to go in for a day, and maybe walk around, and have short five 30 second interviews with key employees. And they may describe, "Hey, this is our break room and this is what we do here." Or "Here's where we develop code." Or "Here's where we go outside, and sit at a picnic table, and enjoy our lunch together, collaborate." You want people to feel like they get a sense of who the company is, what the culture is like into, and then they think to themselves, "Do I fit in here?" So I think that the content is extremely important. Carey: Yes, those are great examples. There are studies, that you and I have talked about, that show that candidates that come to the interview table after the phone screen, or if the phone screen step is skipped, if they're uninformed about the company, then they hardly ever get hired, like it's some super low percentage. Or they don't even show up to begin with. But those candidates that are well informed, which you just being a recruiter, totally help on that because you're that liaison, and that representative of the company, and filling them in and everything. So that really helps. But it also helps to have those videos on the social platform of like LinkedIn where the worker is looking for a job. Or maybe he's really happy with his job, but he's looking maybe for something better when the timing is right. That they, by the time they get to the interview table, they are way more likely to be a fit because they know more about the company and they're excited. Those informed candidates are more likely to be hired. So Tammy, this has been super helpful, so great. And I'm sure you've really got everybody's wheels turning! (laughter) Can you tell everyone where they can find you on, I'm sure LinkedIn and your website? Tammy: So my website is www.accisearch.com. And then from there there's a link to my LinkedIn. So it's pretty simple to find me. Thank you. It's Tammy Riley, T-A-M-M-Y R-I-L-E-Y. ACCI is her company. And Tammy, thank you, this is amazing. And everybody, hope you have a great day. See you next time. Tammy: Thanks Carey. Talk to you soon! Carey: Thanks for listening to the All Social Ya'll podcast. For free resources and materials, head over to allsocialyall.com. That's allsocial-Y-A-L-L.com. Also, we'd love to hear from you. What subject areas would you like to hear about in future episodes? You can share that with us by dropping me a comment on our website or in Instagram @allsocialyall.

[InSights] Recruiter InMails are Ruining the Industry

Secrets of Staffing Success

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 25, 2019 25:38

Welcome to InSights, the staffing podcast designed to help staffing specialists and recruiters maximize their content marketing, social recruiting, employer branding and digital marketing. EPISODE 27 SEGMENTS: How might YOU develop your Brand’s voice in your content? (1:22) The Key to Improving Organic Reach on Social Media (7:25) Is LinkedIn InMail Ruining the Staffing Industry? (17:43) LET'S CHAT: Have a question or comment on the information shared during this episode? Follow Haley Marketing (@HaleyMarketing) on Twitter and let us know what you’re thinking. HOSTED BY: Brad Bialy (LinkedIn / Twitter) Matt Lozar (LinkedIn / Twitter) Elaine Materise (LinkedIn)

social media brand ruining recruiters staffing industry inmails

The Great InMail Scandal!

united kingdom scandals new features inmail inmails

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2019 57:44

Welcome to this weeks episode after a break for a week in the sun, I’m back fully refreshed and raring to go…oh and hating the cold, wet UK weather! I have had a couple of listeners contact me this week to tell me about a strange message they received from LinkedIn regarding missing InMails, at first I thought it must be a hoax…it wasn’t! Here's what you can found in this weeks episode; 06.00 - 11.30 Interesting stuff I saw this week 11.40 - 24.06 New Features 24.16 - 32.33 Do we need 30,000 connections? 32.44 - 45.20 The InMail Scandal 45.30 - 49.10 How our feed could be improved 49.20 - 53.18 Post of the week 53.28 - Question about the Daily rundown

363 Sponsrade inmails på Linkedin - kan vara effektivt

Entreprenörsdriv

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 21, 2019 17:07

Känner du till sponsrade inmails på Linkedin? Vi har testat det och pratar om hur det fungerar. Med denna typ av annonsering kan du nå en mycket specifik målgrupp till en låg kostnad.

med vara inmails sponsrade

LinkedIn Upgrades

B² (B Squared) Discuss LinkedIn

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2019 16:22

Bixler and Bennett answer a question from a LinkedIn connection, Should I purchase an upgraded LinkedIn account? They discuss the various options for upgraded accounts with the features and benefits for each type, Job Search, Business, Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite.

social media business messaging upgrades profiles job search talent acquisition sales navigator bixler inmails

➡️ What if you can improve your email response rates by 558%…..and cold calls rates by 209%

Business Growth School 2.0

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2019 4:21

What I told you that you can improve your email response rates by over 558% and phone by 209%? The solution is much more easier than you think: switch from sending emails or cold calls to sending LinkedIn messages to your prospects and potential clients. In a recent experiment, where one social selling expert sent out 100 InMails and 100 emails and made 100 phone calls, LinkedIn responses outperformed e-mail by 558% and phone by 209%. Here is a real world case study conducted by John Dougan that targeted 300 senior executive contacts. The database used for all outreach was comprised of known contacts and all three used similar language in the text or script. Read more

rates cold call inmails

Episode 715: How to generate leads for your business, with Stephen

Onward Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2018 53:22

Good Morning Onward Nation – I’m Stephen Woessner and welcome to Episode 715 – this week’s solocast. I am excited about you and I will cover today because it addresses a gaping hole that exists inside most businesses. And that hole is the lack of qualified leads flowing into a the sales pipeline -- or -- potentially the lack of a sales pipeline altogether. Here’s the most recent data…of the 28 million small business owners in this country – over 43 percent of them cite “growing revenue” as being their top challenge in their company. That is over 12 million business owners in this country, Onward Nation. And yes, the challenge to grow revenue can be complex – there can be a myriad of factors or obstacles in the way. But, in my over 20+ years of experience in owning five different companies – and having interviewed over 700 of today’s top business owners – I will say that the inability to generate leads – or to generate high quality leads that consistently flow into a well-defined sales pipeline represents the most significant challenge to building a scaling a business. So that is going to be where we spend our time together today. We will focus on how to effectively use LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline like a pro. Today’s lesson will provide you with the tools, resources, and the step-by-step you and your team can take and apply right away to begin building momentum with your lead gen. Before we dig into the tactical step-by-step…I want to first make ensure that we level set around mindset. Here’s what I mean. Generating leads is not hard work. In fact…it is straightforward and very little tech…especially when you have the right recipe to follow. But…just because the work is simple does not mean it is easy. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you will be frustrated at the beginning, you may even pound your fist on your desk and wonder why the results are not better, and you may get upset at your sales team for their lack of productivity. I am sharing this with you so that when it does happen – instead of getting frustrated and thinking that success will always elude you – I want to you to say to yourself, “Ah, Stephen said that I would think this right.” And then push forward. Because pushing forward, whether we are talking about generating leads, or pursuing your life’s passion, is what it takes to be successful. As Vince Lombardi once famously said, “The man at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” But, if you remain focused on continuous improvement – refining your recipe — you will be successful. This is a long haul – it requires data collection – testing – adjusting – testing again – scaling – making mistakes – testing again. So let’s dig into the recipe and all of the ingredients. First…some quick words as to why I love LinkedIn as much as I do, and why in my opinion, it should be the cornerstone of your lead gen strategy. There are approximately 500 million LinkedIn members — yes, 500 million. Hugely valuable community. Next…want to guess the average number of LinkedIn connections for a CEO? Interesting. Why? Because if 933 is the average — some are higher — some are lower — but you tend not to get 933 connections by accident — you work at it — so if someone has 933 connections — it is likely intentional. Meaning, LinkedIn is a platform that he or she values — and a place where they spend time — that that is great news for you. And yes, you should be reaching out to the CEO — the top decision maker at your prospect client — but that can be a topic for a completely different solocast. Okay, next…some additional insight into why you should care about LinkedIn…27 percent of all members are between the ages of 30 and 49…and another 24 percent are 50 to 64 years old…and 13 percent are over the age of 65. So to say that another way…over 64 percent of LinkedIn members are over the age of 30…and 38 percent of total members earn $75,000 or more per year. Bottom line…there are 433 million people on LinkedIn…64 percent of them are over the age of 30…and 38 percent earn more than $75,000 per year…with the average CEO having 933 connections on the platform. All of that speaks well to your opportunity of finding and connecting with the prospects who can accelerate you biz dev, Onward Nation. So let’s press forward by reviewing the seven ingredients within our recipe. Our recipe for how to effectively use LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline consists of seven core ingredients, and they are: Ingredient #1: Improve your LinkedIn profile by adding video / audio clips, value proposition, etc. to the Summary. Again — we will get tactical here in just a minute — and I will give you tangible visual examples within today’s Show Notes for each ingredient. Ingredient #2: Import your existing email list in LinkedIn and send connection requests. Ingredient #3: Export your LinkedIn connection list and import into your client’s email list. Ingredient #4: Personalized thank you message sent to each new connection Ingredient #5: Build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search tool. Ingredient #6: Send InMail messages to your top prospects — and be sure to speak the language of your “client avatar.” Ingredient #7: Create and send consistent nurturing email campaigns with exclusive content just for your LNKD connections so they feel valued to be part of your growing community. Okay, now that the high-level view of the forest is complete — let’s dive in and go tree-by-tree so you can see all of the tactical ingredients of this recipe. Ingredient #1 is all about getting ensuring that your LinkedIn profile is not just good — but that it is excellent. Why does this matter? Because when you send InMail messages as part of Ingredient #6…the very first place your recipients — your prospective clients will go to learn more about you — is your LinkedIn profile. And if it is sparsely populated with value propositions, your connections count is low, you haven’t taken the time to include a quality profile picture, you have zero recommendations, etc. — then it looks like you don’t care — and they won’t respond to you. Maybe your InMail was just spam — you are ignored — and they move on. Or, if you have taken the time to include audio and video clips, Slide Shares of recent presentations you delivered, links to articles you have written recently, blog posts, recommendations from current clients — it not only takes advantage of all the profile building tools that LinkedIn provides you — but — you also visually demonstrate your thought leaderships and expertise to your prospective clients — and that is a very good thing. Now when they receive your InMail message as part of Ingredient #6 — they move from skeptical questions like “Why did she send me this?” to “Oh, interesting…they would like to talk with me? Awesome.” Think of your LinkedIn profile as your personal landing page and it needs to be excellent — just like everything else in your business. If you would like a tangible example — check out what my team has built for me on LinkedIn…look me up…send me a connection request…and you will see illustrations of each step I just shared with you. Let’s move on to Ingredient #2 — import your existing email list into LinkedIn and send connection requests. To make sure we are on the same page here — I am talking about taking your email list — the list you communicate with often — consisting of customers, prospects, maybe even vendors — people with whom you have a relationship — and then uploading that list into your LinkedIn account and inviting them to connect with you on LinkedIn. But why? First…when you increase your number of LinkedIn connections — your network and credibility grows. Instead of having several hundred connections — you move to several thousand. And the next time a prospective client checks out your LinkedIn profile — they may see the number — and be impressed. Second…your number of 1st-degree connections in LinkedIn impacts the number of prospects you will be able to see during Ingredient #5 of this process — when you use LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search. To cement this into place — let’s quickly review what LinkedIn defines as 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. A 1st-degree connection on LinkedIn is — let’s say you are listening to this solocast — you like what you hear — and decide to send me a connection request on LinkedIn — and by the way — you should totally do that — anyway — when I receive the request — I personally accept it. And so you and I become 1st-degree connections. Now, here’s what’s interesting. My nearly 24,000 1st degree connections instantly become your 2nd-degree connections. And all of my 2nd-degree connections become your 3rd-degree connections. Again, why is that important? Well, back to my connections…my nearly 24,000 1st connections extrapolates out to a total network of over 20 million people when considering 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. That means…I can search through a huge number of people during Ingredient #5 in finding our ideal prospects we might want to reach out to. So, Onward Nation, building your number of 1st-degree connections is essential to your success on LinkedIn — and uploading your email list and sending out connection requests is a quick and easy way to boost your connection count — and the size of your network — with a couple mouse clicks. Very powerful. Here’s how you complete the step. Click your “My Network” on the left side of the menu and then you should see an option on the right side of the screen to import your contacts. Then click “Add Contacts” and you will see a screen with options to connect LinkedIn with your email service Definitely do that — as well as the option to upload your email list and send out a massive number of connection requests all at one a couple of clicks. In the testing that we have done here at Predictive ROI over the years -- is that about 30% of your recipients will accept your mass connection request within the first 72-hours. So this is an efficient way for you to boost your number of 1st degree connections -- nearly immediately. Moving on to Ingredient #3: You should export your LinkedIn connection list and import into client’s email list. This might seem a bit backwards after you just uploaded your email list into LinkedIn — why am I now recommending that you reverse the process and export the list back out and import it into your email list? A couple of reasons: First…LinkedIn is the only social media platform that gives you the ability to export the contact and profile details of your connections — and that is just plain awesome! Second…the email address someone used when getting onto your email address may be different than the email address they use within a professional community like LinkedIn — so you should have both inside your email list. This gives you the ability to cross-pollinate — ensure your high-quality email content that you will be sending (ahem — only high-quality content here, Onward Nation) — will be able to reach them via LinkedIn posts — as well as via email. And third…there may be some hundreds of people who connect with you via LinkedIn — and not know how to signup for your email list. No problem…if you are importing and exporting on a consistent basis…you will solve that problem to ensure you are fully covered. Okay, onto Ingredient #4. Do you feel the momentum starting to build, Onward Nation? You just beefed up your profile so it is ready to be checked out by the highly targeted prospects who will soon be coming your way. And then you expanded the size of your network so you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of people you can sort through to find the right prospects. Rock solid awesome! With ingredient #4…I recommend that you send a personalized thank you message to each new connection — and — that the message includes something of value — and — it is a personal message. Not one of those automated messages that feels like a heavy-handed sales pitch as soon as you connected with someone. Ugh — those are awful and I tend to remove someone as a connection as soon as I receive one because I feel as though I got duped into a sales pitch. Yack. We will not be doing that with Ingredient #4. No...instead I recommend you send something personal — a warm hello and thank you — some personalized context so he or she knew that the message was just for them and then a link to the video. Now, here is a little scaling secret, Onward Nation — you — you personally — do not need to be the one who sends each of these messages. You can and should delegate this to a member of your team — maybe even an unpaid intern on your team — and my team at Predictive ROI has been blessed to have worked with 24 rock star interns who were assigned this project as well as other front line — forward facing activities. And if you’re thinking “unpaid interns — he is out of his mind — there’s no way we could recruit unpaid interns in this market.” Let me just say…we have worked with interns who were students at Duke University, Ohio State, Purdue University, University of Northern Iowa…and many other schools around the country — all unpaid. If you want our recruiting recipe — go take a listen to Episode 137 — because I share all of the step-by-step of how we do it in full transparency. Okay, back to lead gen and Ingredient #5: How to build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s advanced search tools. With these tools, you will be able to search through your entire network of connections using several powerful filters, such as: Keywords First Name Last Name Title Company Name Location — or mile radius from your office or location And then you can take it deeper and make your searches more refined by including your prospect’s years of experience, their function within their particular company, seniority level, what they are interested in, company size, and so forth. And if you are looking to upgrade to a premium membership -- I am a big fan of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator because of the additional granularity in data that can be pulled as well as how leads can be categorized and some of the reporting actions or reminders you can put into place. Sales Navigator is not a CRM but it is definitely getting closer to that. Okay, by taking the time to get specific about your prospect — you leverage LinkedIn’s database — to deliver back to you a list of prospects who match your criteria and you eliminate the time wasting of sending direct mail to a purchased list and hoping for a better result outcome than the last campaign. So let’s say that in your first attempt — LinkedIn returns a list of 100 people. You can then click on the profiles of each person (see — Ingredient #1 is really important) and from their profile — you can better determine if he or she is a good fit for your lead gen efforts. If yes, add the person and their details to an Excel or Google Sheet so you can keep a running list of who you have reached out to. I get it -- this is tedious work — I completely understand — but — it is also where the rubber meets the road in the success of your business and it will fill your sales pipeline. Okay, so if you have worked you way through all of the ingredients, you will have built a solid profile — you expanded your LinkedIn network by leveraging your email list — and being smart — to also reverse the process and cross-pollinate your connections back into your email list…and now…you have mastered LinkedIn’s search tools with the resulting outcome being — a highly targeted prospect list — perhaps the most targeted list you and your sales team have ever had. Now what? Ingredient #6 is next. Crafting your InMail message and sending it to each of the people on the list you just created. There are seven sub-ingredients, if you will, that make up the InMail message…and they are: Include the first name of the recipient in subject line Your first 255 critical characters need to be awesome Speak to your “Avatar” Include credibility indicator(s) Include a client testimonial Include a call-to-action – reason for your prospect to reply to your message Include your email signature Here is an actual InMail message — a template — you can use to create your own. Please use it. My team at Predictive ROI has sent thousands and thousands and thousands of InMail messages on behalf of our client’s lead gen efforts — as well as for our biz dev — and the template we included in today’s Show Notes is the resulting outcome of all that testing and hard work. You will dramatically shorten your learning curve by using the template. One last point about the InMail and the template you will see in the Show Notes — there is a reference to “speaking to your client avatar.” And yes, we have a recipe for that, too. If you go to Episode 208, I explain in full detail how to identify your client avatar — how to speak directly to him or her — and how to deliver value in the process. Having and mastering this knowledge is a must in writing effective InMails. And now we have arrived at our final ingredient…Ingredient #7…creating and sending consistent lead nurturing content to LinkedIn connections. When you export your LinkedIn connection data — and then import into your CRM like InfusionSoft, etc. be sure to add the emails to a special list tagged as “LinkedIn Connections” or something else that lets you know these email addresses are super special. This list represents your MVPs and your goal should be to create content just for them — exclusive — and then share it with them — letting them know it was created just for them — and that your connection means something to you — your connection is important — that you value their opinions — that you want to hear from them and how you can do better — and that you share your insights and expertise along the way in such a context that you are providing value that can be incorporated into their business straight away. So that when you do reach out to them to explore the potential of a business relationship — you are not reaching out to a stranger with a cold call — you are reaching out to someone who already knows you, already likes you, and may already trust you because you offered tremendous value first — and that is an awesome way to begin a business relationship. Before we close out for today…I’d like to leave you with a couple of important thoughts. Now that you have learned the recipe – and have seen the typical result outcomes – there are two questions you and your team need to answer. First…how will we take immediate action based on what you learned here today? How will you apply it right away to fill your pipeline? And that leads to the ultimate question. Are you committed…or are you just interested in having a steady stream of well-prepared prospects flowing into your sales pipeline? Being committed means knowing exactly how much new business you are seeking, from what sources, and having a strategy in place to fill the pipeline to get it. Let me share a quick story about Coach Nick Saban from the University of Alabama – who, in my opinion, represents the epitome of being committed. Alabama is consistently one of the top-ranked teams in college football each year. They were the 2015 National Champions and won the title again at the close of the 2017 season. Coach Saban’s reputation is one of precise detail and process. And once he uncovers a “recipe” for success…he uses it over and over again. But he also freely shares his secrets without fear that his competitors will be able to duplicate his results. How is this possible? Case in point…my good friend, mentor, and three-time guest on Onward Nation, Don Yaeger, interviewed Coach Saban as they considered writing a book together. During one of Don’s visits with Coach, he asked if there was a secret formula or recipe that gave Saban an edge to recruiting the best talent out of high school year-after-year. Coach told Don that his recipe is simple. He committed himself to watching every single play that any of their 85 scholarship athletes every played while in high school. Every play…so he could evaluate talent, effort, and other qualities. Let’s just think about the magnitude of that for a minute. Alabama has 85 scholarship athletes…who likely played at least 2-years of high school football…at 10 games per year in high school…and many high school players play both offense and defense during a game, so let’s call it 100 plays per game. All totaled, Coach Saban watches film on 170,000 plays to make his recruiting decisions. It is an overwhelming number, right? How could anyone do that? But Coach Saban does. And the resulting outcome is that Alabama is consistently the best on the field each year. So Don asked him, “Coach…aren’t you worried that if we put your secret recipe into this book that people will steal it from you?” And Saban looked at Don and said, “Nope…not worried at all. Because no one is going to be willing to put in the same amount of effort that I am willing to commit to our success.” So my hope is that you don’t leave this solocast thinking – yeah, I knew LinkedIn could do that. My challenge to you is…but is your business doing it? And as Tony Robbins says…“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” So I hope you will decide to put this sales pipeline-building recipe into action and then please drop me a line and let me know about your success. So with that said, Onward Nation… I want to say again, thank you for taking the time to be here with me today. It is an honor to have you here — thank you for tuning in — your time is sacred and I am delighted you chose this episode to be what you listen to, study, and take with you on your morning run, or maybe Onward Nation has become part of your daily commute, or in some other way has become part of your morning routine. However our daily podcast fits into your daily routine — I want you to know how much I appreciate you sharing some of your invaluable 86,400 seconds you have in your day with me and the strategies we learn and share each day from today’s top business owners. I look forward to being back with you again tomorrow as we spend time learning from another one of today’s top business owners. But until then -- onward with gusto!

The Class of 2017 - The New ‘IN’ Crowd!

RecTech: the Recruiting Technology Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 28, 2017 49:52

Welcome to episode 184, this week I’m expanding on the subject of the meteoric rise of LinkedIn in terms of engagement and activity and I want to to focus on some of the key characters behind that change - the class of 2017! But before I get to that….. Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week HiQ turn to crowdfunding to fight LinkedIn’s legal appeal of a recent court decision LinkedIn announces the ‘Most socially engagement employment agencies’ but the get the measures all wrong! Native video is coming to company page updates. Currently only a few have access including Mashable. See one such update here. Mashable video update Huawei and LinkedIn announce a new phone collaboration embed https://youtu.be/C5gXjyGimRA As reported recently ‘smart replies’ are improving in LinkedIn messaging and here is the Engineering blog on the detail of how it is done. The Class of 2017 (plus Oleg!) When we look back in years to come we will see 2017 as being THE year LinkedIn really became a mainstream social media platform. 2008 was a similar year, that was when LinkedIn initially became widely used but this year is different. It’s not so much that LinkedIn are attracting new members, it’s more that more users are engaging on LinkedIn. A 60% increase in engagement levels vs the same period last year is pretty phenomenal so how has this happened? I mentioned recently that a big part of this has to be attributed to the new design and LinkedIn deserve a lot of credit for that but another big part of this has been down to a new generation of LinkedIn users who have started to use the platform in different and more ‘socially connected’ ways. I have been studying this for some time now and I just love the way the class of 2017 are challenging the status quo and rewriting the rule book on how to use LinkedIn. Here is a list of some of the most impressive and influential members of the class of 2017 (in no particular order) Michaela Alexis Janet Murray Tim Queen Mike Morgan Josh Fechter Jonathan Pollard Gretta van Riel Eli Hochberg Chris Williams Ben Rea Alexandra Galviz Matt Wilson Lila Smith Tom Mallens Simon Dodson Josh Quigley Erik Eklund String Nguyen Amy Blaschka Anna McAfee Manu Goswami Simon Chan And last but not least, I can’t go without giving a mention to the honourable ‘mature student’ of the year Oleg Vishneplosky who consistently continues to set the pace with some of the highest levels of engagement ever seen on LinkedIn! I’m sure I have missed some important names, so please do not be offended if I have not listed you! I’m not stating that I agree with everything these members do on LinkedIn but they are definitely pace setters in this new age of LinkedIn engagement. Take a look at their posts and you will see similar patterns; Storytelling, often of a personal nature Use of hashtags Lots of @mentioning Large, diverse networks and followers A sense of community - many comment, share or Like each others posts A sense of fun about their LinkedIn activity Rarely, if ever, promote themselves or their businesses Use of native video Many long, text only posts As I have stated before, some of them post things that I think are not always suitable for LinkedIn but who am I to argue with the level of engagement those posts get? Many (not all) of the above are millennials and one concern I have is whether they are likely to drop LinkedIn like a stone when something ‘new and shiny’ comes along - this is very typical of how this generation use Social media and it could happen to LinkedIn. This weeks questions are all regarding last weeks topic of GDPR and were all aimed at Jeremy Kajendran following his interview. Jeremy has been very generous in answering all the questions I sent him by recording his answers. Topics covered were; Do subscribers on pre-GDPR email lists need to opt-in again to be compliant? If I work under the name of another company as a Consultant and promote them as a company etc. Do I still need to register with the ICO? Am I still able to send InMails to 2nd and 3rd degree contacts under GDPR?

social class storytelling engineering consultants large crowd native huawei gdpr mashable oleg inmails

Dean Da Costa Discusses LinkedIn User Agreement Changes and Favorite Tools

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2017 40:48

Today’s guest is ...Dean Da Costa...Dean is a Strategic Sourcing and Research Technologist at a Fortune 100 company in the Seattle area. A decorated veteran and recognized sourcing expert with more than 20 years of experience, he currently writes The Search Authority, one of the most influential blogs in the business. A frequent speaker on the recruiting conference circuit, His insight and knowledge (particularly of technology) has made Dean one of the top sourcers and full cycle recruiters in the business today. TOPICS Let’s start with the recent Linked User Agreement changes which is causing a lot of uproar among your fellow recruiters...can you explain what it says and what that means for recruiters? REFERENCE: https://www.eremedia.com/sourcecon/stop-the-madness/ Does it affect every extension on the market that uses LI in some way? You say InMails are a waste of time...why? What’s your open rate? What tools are part of your everyday souring toolbox…..elucify.com What ATS do you currently use? Luxo, Taleo, Smashfly How much do you spend on these tools each month? What has been your biggest win so far this year from a sourcing standpoint? When it comes to vendors pitching you...what are they doing wrong? How should they approach people like you?

seattle fortune li user agreement da costa luxo favorite tools strategic sourcing taleo inmails

Declutter Your Home(page)

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2017 37:03

Welcome to episode 163, it’s been a terrible week for me with the shocking news coming from Manchester and being personally touched by the tragic events, it’s made it really hard to focus at times. This week I want to focus on managing your home page feed on LinkedIn. It’s a critical aspect of using LinkedIn effectively and most people ignore it so it’s time for a good clean up! But first….. Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week LinkedIn have changed the wording from ‘Try premium for free’ to ‘Reactivate premium’ and whilst it was a good idea to change it, I think the wording is terrible! I listened to a very interesting and revealing interview with ex LinkedIn social selling guru Koka Sexton on the ‘Linking into Sales’ podcast this week. You can listen to the interview here, it’s definitely worth an hour of your time. The most interesting part for me was when Koka revealed that LinkedIn are driven by data and this is why they drop features that many ‘superusers’ love (Answers, Amazon Reading List, Signal etc) which is, in my opinion, absolutely nuts! It makes sense to be informed by data but to be obsessed with it shows just how dumb LinkedIn can be! If a feature is not widely used, it normally means that people are either not aware of it or do not know how to use it. Many of these features added a richness to LinkedIn that it now sadly lacks….all because they only listened to data! LinkedIn introduce ‘Pregnancy Pause’ a feature that allows women who are taking a career break to add a Pregnancy Pause period into their experience section. This is a good idea, it’s hardly groundbreaking as all they are doing is effectively creating a company page for Pregnancy Pause. I wonder how long it will be before baby care products or nurseries start targeting Pregnancy Pause ‘employees’?! The new photo filter feature has finally appeared on our desktop profiles this week…it’s OK but I can’t see much point in it really. LinkedIn have introduced an improved InMail analytics tool for their Recruiter and Recruiter Lite customers. It looks great but why on earth wouldn't they introduce this for Sales Navigator customers…probably because LinkedIn work in ‘silos’ and it will no doubt make its way to Sales Navigator soon. LinkedIn have also released a handy step-by-step guide to Sponsored InMail. If you are considering paying to send inMails to a targeted audience, this is definitely worth a read. Introductions are making a return! At the moment this feature is only available on the mobile app but it actually works pretty well. Lets hope it comes to desktop pretty soon. LinkedIn are changing their profile background images….again! I don't mean the change that occurred in line with the new desktop design, this is another change! If you are using a background/cover image in your profile (and you should be!) then you may find it looks pants once this new design has been fully rolled out! The previous size was 1536x768. The new size will be 1584x396.  Here's what the new dimensions will look like; And this is how my profile currently looks with the old background image dimensions (the image is exactly the same). I actually think my background image looks better with the new dimensions although when it is fully rolled out I will need to drag the image a little lower. "Why have they made this change?" I hear you ask. Well, whilst frustrating, it does make some sense actually. The wide 'stretched' image when optimised for desktop, didn't look great on mobile (where 60% of your viewers are). This change fixes that and looks great on all devices and screen sizes. Free background Image If you don’t mind having a generic, cool looking image I have made 20 images that are exactly the right dimensions for you. Complete your details below to get access to the download page and pick the one you like the best…..with my compliments! If however you would prefer to make your own image with your images and text then I would recommend using Relay. It's free and their 'LinkedIn Cover' templates will work OK with the new dimensions - they are still set to the old dimensions but will work, to a degree, with the new and they will no doubt update the templates once the roll-out is complete (I have made contact to give them the heads up). It’s Time For A Clear Out! Your LinkedIn homepage feed is one of the most important features on LinkedIn So what do you do? You ignore it!!! Why? Well because 90% of what you see there is of no relevance or interest to you! And you blame the algorithm…which is partly correct but what are you doing about improving your feed? It’s time to take control and get your house (homepage) in order! To do this effectively you will need to be brutal. It’s like clearing out an attic or your wardrobe of old clothes….it only works if you are really honest with your self and admit ‘I’m never going to wear that’ but your ‘inner doubt devil’ will keep whispering in your ear “but maybe you will….perhaps if this happens or you go to this event”! Your LinkedIn feed is the same…..”Oh maybe they will post something important one day”…Really? I doubt it….dump them and unfollow! Ignore the little devils warning and unfollow…unfollow…unfollow. Trust me, it’s very liberating! More importantly you are taking control and commanding the algorithm. Rather than being it’s victim, you are now it’s master! And now you can enjoy your feed..and engage..and build relationships…and build trust and start to really benefit from LinkedIn. Here are the five questions you should ask for every post you see on your homepage feed; Do I personally know this person? Is this relevant to me? Is this useful to my followers (inc connections) Do I wish to engage with this person? Does this person normally post relevant content? If you can’t answer yes to one of the above questions then unfollow them…..be really honest with these questions - are you sure? Be brutal! You won’t regret it This week we had another voicemail question. Click below to listen to Jaz Greer’s question about post notifications. This is clearly a design fault in that I can see no logical reason why LinkedIn wouldn’t want you to see who shared your post. I’m sure they will fix it soon but a short term workaround would be to add your own unique hashtag to every post and then search on that hashtag to see who has shared it. I’m using #MrLinkedIn on all my posts until they fix the problem. What will your hashtag be?

trust sales manchester signal homepage recruiters linking relay sales navigator koka declutter your home reactivate inmail inmails koka sexton

LinkedIn Articles. What Can I Write About?

videos prospects viewers creating content inmails

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2017 53:00

Welcome to episode 162, well I’m still standing! I’m approaching the end of my second week standing and my legs and feet finally seem to be adjusting! I definitely feel a lot fitter and have more energy so I’m going to stick with it. So this week I want to return too the subject of LinkedIn Articles (formerly known as published posts) because I sense that many people are holding back and the main reason for that is that they don’t know what to write about. So this week I’m going to go through my 12 point plan to removing LinkedIn writers block! But first….. Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week LinkedIn are adding a ‘suggested summary’ to your profile and it sucks! This solicitor has one of the best LinkedIn profiles we’ve ever seen…Really?! Sham Uddin’s LinkedIn profile Is Facebook Replacing LinkedIn as the New Professional Network? Alerts Issue: A Listener sent me the thread of an issue they had with job alerts recently. I also think search alerts are playing up at the moment Referral Request Posts It seems as though some people are subversively misusing this type of post to generate leads! It’s an interesting point, I have asked for referrals and it can be very effective but I have never thought of going back to say I had sorted it. LinkedIn Article Writers Block I was helping a client this week who was reluctant to write articles on LinkedIn. My advice is that; “Everyone should write an article on LinkedIn” When pressed she admitted that the main thing blocking her was thinking of what she could write about. I think this is a pretty common problem so I have produced a 12 step approach to generating ideas for great LinkedIn articles. You can access the step-by-step guide by completing the form below New Video recording and sharing Chrome extension. Thanks to Darrel Griffin for highlighting this one. It’s free and works really well. This week we have a voicemail question from Greg; Firstly I have never tried it but I am sure you can have a Sales Navigator account as well as Recruiter Lite account. It would be cheaper than going for the full blown Recruiter account but probably unnecessary. Let’s first exam why LinkedIn believe you need to upgrade to Recruiter. Below is a table explaining the difference and I have highlighted the advantages that are relevant to you You could make an argument for the extra filters but I’m not convinced. Therefore it comes down to InMails. Do you really need 150 a month? If you need some more InMails you could always consider upgrading your basic account to one of the following premium accounts which would also be cheaper than Recruiter. The question on whether Sales Navigator is the right option for you is probably answered in this post I wrote; Sales Navigator Vs Recruiter Lite

write chrome recruiters new video sales navigator inmails darrel griffin

46: Sending Videos within LinkedIn InMails to New Prospects

Sales Integrity

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2017 9:50

“Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text." [Source: Insivia Reports] We continue with our theme of “Creating Content” as a sales professional. Today we focus on sending videos within LinkedIn InMails to New Prospects. It’s not as easy as it may sound. People who don’t know you typically won’t click a link for fear it could be a virus or something less desirable. Within InMails LinkedIn doesn’t convert a link to a preview of the video like it does on its activity feed wall when you post a link in an Update. During this episode we provide you with a “sales hack” on how to get around this challenge within LinkedIn. We also provide you a quick blueprint and outline for how to structure your message within the 300 character limit LinkedIn imposes on you when sending messages to 2nd degree contacts or beyond using InMails. If you want to learn a creative way to send videos to target market prospects within LinkedIn that simply yields results, then you will want to listen to this episode.

Episode 455: How to use LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline like a pro, with Stephen Woessner.

Onward Nation

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2017 55:36

Stephen is the CEO of Predictive ROI and the host of the Onward Nation podcast. He is the author of two bestselling books, speaker, trainer, and his digital marketing insights have been featured in SUCCESS, Entrepreneur, The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and other media. Good Morning Onward Nation – I’m Stephen Woessner and welcome to Episode 455 – this week’s solocast. I am excited about the lesson that I prepared for our time together because it addresses the gaping hole that exists inside most businesses. I have been talking about it for a while now and the hole is the lack of qualified leads flowing into a business owner’s sales pipeline for his or her company. Here’s the most recent data…of the 28 million small business owners in this country – over 43 percent of them cite “growing revenue” as being their top challenge in their company. That is over 12 million business owners. And yes, the challenge in growing revenue can be complex – it can certainly be impacted by value proposition – perhaps a business is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Or, perhaps their pricing is off. There could be a myriad of factors or obstacles in the way of a business owner’s ability to grow revenue. But, in my over 20+ years of experience in owning five companies – and having interviewed over 450 of today’s top business owners for Onward Nation – I will say that the ability to generate leads – and – to generate leads at such consistency that a steady stream of well-prepared prospects flow into a business owner’s pipeline – represents the most significant challenge. So that is going to be where we spend our time together today. We will focus on how to use LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline like a pro. Today’s lesson will provide you with the tools, resources, and step-by-step you and your team need in order to begin using LinkedIn to fill your sales pipeline like a pro. And if you want to take the process even deeper, I encourage you to register for the web workshop I am teaching tomorrow called the 4-Steps to Filling Your Sales Pipeline. Just go to OnwardNation.com/webinar for the details. That’s OnwardNation.com/webinar. Rest assured — I know you are busy. I will respect your time by delivering a workshop packed full of real, actionable strategies, that when followed, will fill your sales pipeline in 30-days or less. I look forward to seeing you there. Okay, let’s bring our focus back to today’s lesson…how to use LinkedIn like a pro so you and your team can generate a steady stream of well-prepared prospects, grow revenue, and scale your business. Before we dig into the tactical step-by-step…I want to first make ensure that we get your mindset right. Generating leads is not hard work…in fact…is it simple work…especially when you have the right recipe to follow, which I am going to share with you in full transparency in this solocast. But…just because the work is simple does not mean it is easy. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you will be frustrated at the beginning, you may even pound your first on your conference room table and wonder why the results are not better, and you may get upset at your sales team for their lack of results. All of this will most likely happen…initially. I am sharing this with you so that when it does happen – instead of getting frustrated and thinking that success will always elude you – I want to you to say to yourself, “Ah, Stephen said that I would think this right.” And then push forward. Because pushing forward, whether we are talking about generating leads, or pursuing your life’s passion, is what it takes to be successful. As Vince Lombardi once famously said, “The man at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.” In fact, let’s think about the path of one of the most successful Hollywood actors of all time, Sylvester Stallone. I learned this story from Tony Robbins. Stallone knocked on the doors of 1,500 talent agents in New York City and many of them multiple times. And each time, Stallone was rejected, made fun of, and utterly ridiculed when he was thrown out of their offices. But he didn’t give up. He knew his goal – he knew his destiny. He didn’t send out one direct mail letter or email campaign – receive zero results – and then thought – “Well, the market doesn’t want me so I guess I will try something new.” NO! He was committed to what he wanted so he continued to adjust his presentation…he adjusted his offering…and focused on delivering even more value to the market. And ultimately…that led to him delivering a huge amount of value in the form of the script of “Rocky”. And then – Stallone “Made it.” He appeared on the silver screen in the starring role as what seemed to be an overnight success. But that couldn’t be further from the truth, Onward Nation. He had gritted it out for years and years and stood fast in the face of brutal and cruel rejections, in being dirt broke, and having to sell his dog just to buy some food. But he didn’t quit – he kept getting up – to take another swing. You need to continue taking your at-bats because if you don’t…you may very well miss your golden opportunity for success. Case in point…let’s take a look at Derek Jeter…arguably the greatest New York Yankee to ever wear the pinstripes. Jeter is a lock to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer with his long list of impressive accomplishments including five World Series Championship rings. But…what most people don’t know about Derek Jeter is that of all players in Major League Baseball history, he is number 12 on the list of total strikeouts. So to say that another way…there have only been 11 people in the history of baseball who struck out more often than Derek Jeter. In fact, Jeter struck out 1,840 times during his 20-year career. So in baseball terms, Jeter failed 1,840 times – but yet – he continued to get up there – to take another at-bat – to keep on swinging. And through it all – he recorded 3,461 hits, which is 6th all time and he finished 11 of his 20 seasons with a batting average of 300 or better. A Hall of Fame resume to be sure. But he never got up to the plate – struck out – and then headed back to the dugout and said, “Well, I guess I don’t have what it takes to play ball after all. Thanks for having me Skipper, but I am hanging up my cleats after that at-bat.” The stories of Stallone and Jeter are perfect illustrations of how important it is to remain focused on the long-term – the long play – the end game – and getting better every single day so you continue to deliver more and more value — whether that value is delivered on the silver screen, the ball diamond, or in your marketplace as a business owner. If the market rejects you – celebrate it – because that feedback is priceless. Then be smart and use it – learn from it – apply it – get better – and take another at-bat. Onward Nation, if you remain focused on continuous improvement – you will be successful in implementing the lessons I have prepared for you in this solocast. This is a long haul – it requires data collection – testing – adjusting – testing again – scaling – making mistakes – testing again. But, if you stick with it…you grow and scale your business in such a way that your competitors will wonder what your secret recipe is. And how will that change the game for you? It’s exciting to think about. No doubt it’s substantial. I believe the great Archimedes had it right when he so wisely said… “Give me a lever long enough, and a prop strong enough, and I can single-handedly move the world. So, what will your lever and prop be, Onward Nation? You guessed it…chocolate cake. I know – chocolate cake sounds silly, right? But let me explain why this metaphor makes so much sense. Let’s say that I happen to make the world’s best chocolate cake. The absolute best. And I have spent the last 20 years perfecting my process. And then you come along and ask me to teach you how to make my cake – the same cake – the one that took me 20 years to master! How could this be possible? You, Onward Nation, may not have spent the same 20 years perfecting your baking skills. How could someone other than me even come close to duplicating my chocolate cake? What would I need to give you to prepare you – that could ensure your success? For one…I would need to give you my recipe, right? Because with my recipe, you can see my full process. You can see the strategy behind the chocolate cake. With the recipe, you begin to get the overall picture of what needs to happen. But, what else? What else do you need beyond the recipe? Yep, you need the actual ingredients! With both the ingredients and the recipe, you now know how to put all of those things together – in the right order – in the right amounts – at the right time – and how long to bake the cake and at the right temperature. And if you follow the recipe – and if I didn’t accidentally leave anything out of the recipe card that I gave you – you now have the ability to duplicate my success. In fact, duplicating my success becomes easy – IF – you are willing to make the EFFORT. So here’s the key…with the right recipe, you are able to compress the process of learning 20 years of my knowledge down into the audio of this solocast. Learning and then compressing the outcomes into a shorter time period is one of the powerful benefits to getting the right training and aligning your business with the right mentors. So let’s dig into the recipe. First…some quick words as to why we love LinkedIn as much as we do…and why it should be the cornerstone of your lead gen strategy. There are approximately 433 million LinkedIn members — yes, 433 million. Hugely valuable community — just ask Microsoft — they agree since they acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion in an all-cash deal. Next…want to guess the average number of LinkedIn connections for a CEO? 933. Interesting. Why? Because if 933 is the average — some are higher — some are lower — but you tend not to get 933 connections by accident — you work at it — so if someone has 933 connections — it is likely intentional. Meaning, LinkedIn is a platform that he or she values — and a place where they spend time — that that is great news for you. And yes, you should be reaching out to the CEO — the top decision maker at your prospect client — but that can be a topic for a completely different solocast. Okay, next…some additional insight into why you should care about LinkedIn…27 percent of all members are between the ages of 30 and 49…and another 24 percent are 50 to 64 years old…and 13 percent are over the age of 65. So to say that another way…over 64 percent of LinkedIn members are over the age of 30…and 38 percent of total members earn $75,000 or more per year. Bottom line…there are 433 million people on LinkedIn…64 percent of them are over the age of 30…and 38 percent earn more than $75,000 per year…with the average CEO having 933 connections on the platform. All of that speaks well to your opportunity of finding and connecting with the prospects who can accelerate you biz dev, Onward Nation. So let’s press forward by reviewing the seven ingredients within our recipe. Our recipe consists of seven core ingredients, and they are: Ingredient #1: Improve your LinkedIn profile by adding video / audio clips, value proposition, etc. to the Summary. Again — we will get tactical here in just a minute — and I will give you tangible visual examples within today’s Show Notes for each ingredient. Ingredient #2: Import your existing email list in LinkedIn and send connection requests. Ingredient #3: Export your LinkedIn connection list and import into your client’s email list. Ingredient #4: Personalized thank you message sent to each new connection Ingredient #5: Build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search tool. Ingredient #6: Send InMail messages to your top prospects — and be sure to speak the language of your “client avatar.” Ingredient #7: Create and send consistent nurturing email campaigns with exclusive content just for your LNKD connections so they feel valued to be part of your growing community. Okay, now that the high-level view of the forest is complete — let’s dive in and go tree-by-tree so you can see all of the tactical ingredients of this recipe. Ingredient #1 is all about getting ensuring that your LinkedIn profile is not just good — but that it is excellent. Why does this matter? Because when you send InMail messages as part of Ingredient #6…the very first place your recipients — your prospective clients will go to learn more about you — is your LinkedIn profile. And if it is sparsely populated with value propositions, your connections count is low, you haven’t taken the time to include a quality profile picture, you have zero recommendations, etc. — then it looks like you don’t care — and they won’t respond to you. Maybe your InMail was just spam — you are ignored — and they move on. Or, if you have taken the time to include audio and video clips, Slide Shares of recent presentations you delivered, links to articles you have written recently, blog posts, recommendations from current clients — it not only takes advantage of all the profile building tools that LinkedIn provides you — but — you also visually demonstrate your thought leaderships and expertise to your prospective clients — and that is a very good thing. Now when they receive your InMail message as part of Ingredient #6 — they move from skeptical questions like “Why did she send me this?” to “Oh, interesting…they would like to talk with me? Awesome.” Think of your LinkedIn profile as your personal landing page and it needs to be excellent — just like everything else in your business. If you would like a tangible example — check out what my team has built for me on LinkedIn…look me up…send me a connection request…and you will see illustrations of each step I just shared with you. Let’s move on to Ingredient #2 — import your existing email list into LinkedIn and send connection requests. To make sure we are on the same page here — I am talking about taking your email list — the list you communicate with often — consisting of customers, prospects, maybe even vendors — people with whom you have a relationship — and then uploading that list into your LinkedIn account and inviting them to connect with you on LinkedIn. But why? First…when you increase your number of LinkedIn connections — your network and credibility grows. Instead of having several hundred connections — you move to several thousand. And the next time a prospective client checks out your LinkedIn profile — they may see the number — and be impressed. Second…your number of 1st-degree connections in LinkedIn impacts the number of prospects you will be able to see during Ingredient #5 of this process — when you use LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search. To cement this into place — let’s quickly review what LinkedIn defines as 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. A 1st-degree connection on LinkedIn is — let’s say you are listening to this solocast — you like what you hear — and decide to send me a connection request on LinkedIn — and by the way — you should totally do that — anyway — when I receive the request — I personally accept it. And so you and I become 1st-degree connections. Now, here’s what’s interesting. My nearly 4,000 1st degree connections instantly become your 2nd-degree connections. And all of my 2nd-degree connections become your 3rd-degree connections. Again, why is that important? Well, back to my connections…my nearly 6,000 1st connections extrapolates out to a total network of 20 million people when considering 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd-degree connections. That means…I can search through a huge number of people during Ingredient #5 in finding our ideal prospects we might want to reach out to. So, Onward Nation, building your number of 1st-degree connections is essential to your success on LinkedIn — and uploading your email list and sending out connection requests is a quick and easy way to boost your connection count — and the size of your network — with a couple mouse clicks. Very powerful. Here’s how you complete the step. Roll your mouse over the “My Network” section of the LinkedIn menu…and then the option “Add Contacts” will appear. Then click “Add Contacts” and you will see a screen with options to connect LinkedIn with your email service — definitely do that — as well as the option to upload your email list and send out a massive number of connection requests all at one a couple of clicks. Moving on to Ingredient #3: You should export your LinkedIn connection list and import into client’s email list. This might seem a bit backwards after you just uploaded your email list into LinkedIn — why am I now recommending that you reverse the process and export the list back out and import it into your email list? A couple of reasons: First…LinkedIn is the only social media platform that gives you the ability to export the contact and profile details of your connections — and that is just plain awesome! Second…the email address someone used when getting onto your email address may be different than the email address they use within a professional community like LinkedIn — so you should have both inside your email list. This gives you the ability to cross-pollinate — ensure your high-quality email content that you will be sending (ahem — only high-quality content here, Onward Nation) — will be able to reach them via LinkedIn posts — as well as via email. And third…there may be some hundreds of people who connect with you via LinkedIn — and not know how to signup for your email list. No problem…if you are importing and exporting on a consistent basis…you will solve that problem to ensure you are fully covered. Okay, onto Ingredient #4. Do you feel the momentum starting to build, Onward Nation? You just beefed up your profile so it is ready to be checked out by the highly targeted prospects who will soon be coming your way. And then you expanded the size of your network so you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions of people you can sort through to find the right prospects. Rock solid awesome! With ingredient #4…I recommend that you send a personalized thank you message to each new connection — and — that the message includes something of value — and — it is a personal message. Not one of those automated messages that feels like a heavy-handed sales pitch as soon as you connected with someone. Ugh — those are awful and I tend to remove someone as a connection as soon as I receive one because I feel as though I got duped into a sales pitch. Yack. We will not be doing that with Ingredient #4. Here are several examples of thank you notes my Predictive ROI team used following the interview I did with Gary Vaynerchuk — our guest for Episode 42 of Onward Nation. When someone connected with me on LinkedIn, I sent a personal thank you message to my new connection — with a warm hello and thank you — some personalized context so he or she knew that the message was just for them and then a link to the video. Now, here is a little scaling secret, Onward Nation — you — you personally — do not need to be the one who sends each of these messages. You can and should delegate this to a member of your team — maybe even an unpaid intern on your team — and my team at Predictive ROI has been blessed to have worked with 24 rock star interns who were assigned this project as well as other front line — forward facing activities. And if you’re thinking “unpaid interns — he is out of his mind — there’s no way we could recruit unpaid interns in this market.” Let me just say…we have worked with interns who were students at Duke University, Ohio State, Purdue University, University of Northern Iowa…and many other schools around the country — all unpaid. If you want our recruiting recipe — go take a listen to Episode 137 — because I share all of the step-by-step of how we do it in full transparency. Okay, back to lead gen and Ingredient #5: How to build your prospect list using LinkedIn’s Advanced People Search tool. From within this powerful tool…you will be able to search through your entire network of connections using several powerful filters, such as: Keywords First Name Last Name Title Company Name Location — or mile radius from your office or location And then you can take it deeper and make your searches more refined by including your prospect’s years of experience, their function within their particular company, seniority level, what they are interested in, company size, and so forth. By taking the time to get specific about your prospect — you leverage LinkedIn’s database — to deliver back to you a list of prospects who match your criteria and you eliminate the time wasting of sending direct mail to a purchased list and hoping for a better result outcome than the last campaign. So let’s say that in your first attempt — LinkedIn returns a list of 100 people. You can then click on the profiles of each person (see — Ingredient #1 is really important) and from their profile — you can better determine if he or she is a good fit for your lead gen efforts. If yes, add the person and their details to an Excel or Google Sheet so you can keep a running list of who you have reached out to…and no…LinkedIn does not offer any sort of automated CRM functionality. This is tedious work — I get it — I completely understand — but — it is also where the rubber meets the road in the success of your business and it will fill your sales pipeline. Okay, so I’m going to assume you did all of the work you needed to do up to this point. You have built a solid profile — you expanded your LinkedIn network by leveraging your email list — and being smart — to also reverse the process and cross-pollinate your connections back into your email list…and now…you have mastered the Advanced People Search tool with the resulting outcome being — a highly targeted prospect list — perhaps the most targeted list you and your sales team have ever had. Now what? Ingredient #6 is next. Crafting your InMail message and sending it to each of the people on the list you just created. There are seven sub-ingredients, if you will, that make up the InMail message…and they are: Include the first name of the recipient in subject line Your first 255 critical characters need to be awesome Speak to your “Avatar” Include credibility indicator(s) Include a client testimonial Include a call-to-action – reason for your prospect to reply to your message Include your email signature Here is an actual InMail message — a template — you can use to create your own. Please use it. My Predictive ROI team has sent thousands and thousands and thousands of InMail messages on behalf of our client’s lead gen efforts — as well as for our biz dev — and the template we included in today’s Show Notes is the resulting outcome of all that testing and hard work. You will dramatically shorten your learning curve by using the template. One last point about the InMail and the template you will see in the Show Notes — there is a reference to “speaking to your client avatar.” And yes, we have a recipe for that, too. If you go to Episode 208, I explain in full detail how to identify your client avatar — how to speak directly to him or her — and how to deliver value in the process. Having and mastering this knowledge is a must in writing effective InMails. And now we have arrived at our final ingredient…Ingredient #7…creating and sending consistent lead nurturing content to LinkedIn connections. When you export your LinkedIn connection data — and then import into your CRM like InfusionSoft, etc. be sure to add the emails to a special list tagged as “LinkedIn Connections” or something else that lets you know these email addresses are super special. This list represents your MVPs and your goal should be to create content just for them — exclusive — and then share it with them — letting them know it was created just for them — and that your connection means something to you — your connection is important — that you value their opinions — that you want to hear from them and how you can do better — and that you share your insights and expertise along the way in such a context that you are providing value that can be incorporated into their business straight away. So that when you do reach out to them to explore the potential of a business relationship — you are not reaching out to a stranger with a cold call — you are reaching out to someone who already knows you, already likes you, and may already trust you because you offered tremendous value first — and that is an awesome way to begin a business relationship. Before we close out for today…I’d like to leave you with a couple of important thoughts. Now that you have learned the recipe – and have seen the typical result outcomes – there are two questions you and your team need to answer. First…how will we take immediate action based on what you learned here today? How will you apply it right away to fill your pipeline? And that leads to the ultimate question. Are you committed…or are you just interested in having a steady stream of well-prepared prospects flowing into your sales pipeline? Being committed means knowing exactly how much new business you are seeking, from what sources, and having a strategy in place to fill the pipeline to get it. Let me share a quick story about Coach Nick Saban from the University of Alabama – who, in my opinion, represents the epitome of being committed. Alabama is consistently one of the top-ranked teams in college football each year. They were the 2015 National Champion and played again this year for the title but lost to Clemson. Coach Saban’s reputation is one of precise detail and process. And once he uncovers a “recipe” for success…he uses it over and over again. But he also freely shares his secrets without fear that his competitors will be able to duplicate his results. How is this possible? Case in point…my good friend, mentor, and three-time guest on Onward Nation, Don Yaeger, interviewed Coach Saban as they considered writing a book together. During one of Don’s visits with Coach, he asked if there was a secret formula or recipe that gave Saban an edge to recruiting the best talent out of high school year-after-year. Coach told Don that his recipe is simple. He committed himself to watching every single play that any of their 85 scholarship athletes every played while in high school. Every play…so he could evaluate talent, effort, and other qualities. Let’s just think about the magnitude of that for a minute. Alabama has 85 scholarship athletes…who likely played at least 2-years of high school football…at 10 games per year in high school…and many high school players play both offense and defense during a game, so let’s call it 100 plays per game. All totaled, Coach Saban watches film on 170,000 plays to make his recruiting decisions. It is an overwhelming number, right? How could anyone do that? But Coach Saban does. And the resulting outcome is that Alabama is consistently the best on the field each year. So Don asked him, “Coach…aren’t you worried that if we put your secret recipe into this book that people will steal it from you?” And Saban looked at Don and said, “Nope…not worried at all. Because no one is going to be willing to put in the same amount of effort that I am willing to commit to our success.” So my hope is that you don’t leave this solocast thinking – yeah, I knew LinkedIn could do that. My challenge to you is…but is your business doing it? And as Tony Robbins says…“A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” So I hope you will decide to put this sales pipeline-building recipe into action and then please drop me a line and let me know about your success. So with that said, Onward Nation… I want to say again, thank you for taking the time to be here with me today. It is an honor to have you here — thank you for tuning in — your time is sacred and I am delighted you chose this episode to be what you listen to, study, and take with you on your morning run, or maybe Onward Nation has become part of your daily commute, or in some other way has become part of your morning routine. However our daily podcast fits into your daily routine — I want you to know how much I appreciate you sharing some of your invaluable 86,400 seconds you have in your day with me and the strategies we learn and share each day from today’s top business owners. And remember… if you want to take the pipeline process even deeper, then register for the web workshop I am teaching tomorrow called the 4-Steps to Filling Your Sales Pipeline. Just go to OnwardNation.com/webinar for the details. That’s OnwardNation.com/webinar. Rest assured — I know you are busy, Onward Nation. I will respect your time by delivering a workshop packed full of real, actionable strategies, that when followed, will fill your sales pipeline in 30 days or less. I look forward to seeing you there and thanks again for being here — today. Onward with gusto!

12: Apply Professional Persistence with Systematic Sales Messaging

Sales Integrity

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2017 14:52

Today we discuss how to tactically apply the power of professional persistence as a B2B tech sales professional. Since the average sale occurs between the 7th and 12th touch point, we walk through a step-by-step approach to creating a customized systematic sales messaging strategy. This strategy involves a mix of phone calls, emails, InMails and other communication methods that will include the use of value-based messaging and Tangible Value Assets to continue to reach out to prospects well beyond that magic 7th touch point. If you are wanting to increase your sales pipeline with more qualified opportunities, and add value every step of the way while building your sales pipeline, then you will want to listen to this episode.

sales professional b2b persistence messaging systematic inmails

MM 065 - Using LinkedIn for Business Development

Manufacturing Marketing Matters

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2017 38:00

Download the mp3 file. In this episode, we discuss the power and potential of LinkedIn for business development in manufacturing organizations. Bill Sterzenbach from Upward shares ideas, suggestions and real stories about how you, the manufacturing marketer, can and should use LinkedIn for business development; more qualified leads, higher conversion rates and a full sales pipeline. or go to mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook Guest: Bill Sterzenbach, Partner at Upward Brand Interactions Highlights: There seems to be a bias against social media, therein lies a huge opportunity for the industrial enlightened. [2:50] LinkedIn is a place where professional go for growth. [5:50] 62% of B2B marketers find LinkedIn to be the most effective way to engage with their target audiences. The people who get the most benefit are those who understand the people who make up their target audience. [7:00] It's about people talking to people more than a brand talking to an audience. [9:30] Bill shares a case study about Parker Hannifin and Caterpillar are using LinkedIn well and having had great success on LinkedIn. [12:20] Here are three things you can do right now to have better success with LinkedIn: [15:20] Put in a practice to get more followers and set an objective. Post at least weekly on a regular basis. Use your internal team to help promote the channel. Learn about how paid or sponsored content works on LinkedIn. [19:10] It's a good practice to use both pay-per-click and LinkedIn sponsored content. [25:40] Get out there and do it badly, don't wait until it's perfect to start. [26:50] Interview Questions: Question 1 – Let’s start of broadly and talk about social media in general. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to their business development? Is it table stakes in this day and age? Is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Question 2 – Let’s zero in on LinkedIn. Rather than assume everyone knows what it is, would you first share, what is LinkedIn? How does it work? Real example of how a manufacturer might use LinkedIn… Question 3 – Sounds like it could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Suppose there is a manufacturing marketer out there listening, they have a LinkedIn company page, but aren’t doing much with it. What are 3 things they could do right away towards using that page for business development? Question 4– I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. How does that work? A couple of examples would be great. Is there one ad type you recommend over others? (which one and why that one?) Is it for everyone? Challenge Question: Send in your challenge question! This week our challenge question comes in from New York, a manufacturer of industrial gases. Here it is, “I’m the VP Sales and Marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like Nitrogen or Oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you throw out a couple of examples on your next podcast?” Helpfulness is a great differentiator for commodity products. In a survey, purchasing and buyers will choose a company offering helpfulness over all others. The larger, more premier companies value helpfulness most. Better customers value service on the front lines and all around helpfulness. Use social media to prove your brand is helpful. TOMA + credibility + reciprocity = differentiation and bigger market share Takeaways: Set some goals for your social media program. Get buy-in from stakeholders. Offer from Bill and Upward - free lunch and learn in person or via webinar. Prefer if you can bring at least 20 people. Fill out the form here and request to learn more about LinkedIn. Transcript: Bruce McDuffee: Welcome to Manufacturing Marketing Matters, the podcast produced by the Manufacturing Marketing Institute, the center of excellence for manufacturing marketers. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Thank you for listening. Hello, manufacturing marketers. A quick reminder today, I'm still offering a free digital copy of my book. It's called "The New Way to Market for Manufacturing." You can get one with a short registration form at mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook. I'll put that in the show notes, too. Now on to the show. Our guest expert today is Bill Sterzenbach. He's a partner at Upward. Welcome Bill. B. Sterzenbach: Pleasure to be here, Bruce. Bruce McDuffee: Great to have you on the show today. Looking forward to it. Folks, the topic today is about how manufacturers can use social media. Mainly we'll be talking about LinkedIn, how you can use it for business development. I saw Bill present this topic at FABTECH down in Los Vegas back in November, and I can tell you it's powerful stuff. If you listen up, you can really learn how to use a tool that's available in social media to really grow your business. Before we get in to the interview, Bill, could you please introduce yourself to the audience and a little bit about your expertise and experience around using LinkedIn or other social media to grow a manufacturing business? B. Sterzenbach: Sure. I'm a partner at Upward Brand Interactions. We've been doing online marketing primarily for about 10 years. I've been at the online marketing business for about 15 years myself. I primarily focus at our place on business growth for global industrial brands. We tend to look at tool systems and processes that can grow the business without respect to channels so much. That's kind of how LinkedIn made its way into our world. We were just looking at the different channels that are available objectively that may help businesses grow their pipeline. Bruce McDuffee: Great, thanks for background. Bill, I know a lot of manufacturers have put up pages on social media. Probably the most common are Facebook and LinkedIn. I don't hear of too many manufacturers or industrial companies who are on Instagram or Pinterest or Snapchat, for example. Before we can get in to the questions, are you seeing the same type of thing? Or what do you see as far as adoption of social media by industrial companies? B. Sterzenbach: I do see a strong sentiment or a bias against social media by a lot of the especially industrial B2B folks out there. I see that as a great opportunity for the enlightened marketers ... Bruce McDuffee: There you go. B. Sterzenbach: ... because there is quite a bit of opportunity out there. A great example, we'll talk to clients or I'll even talk to guys I know in the space, and they'll say, "Well, okay. Maybe I can do something on LinkedIn, but I'm certainly not going to be on Instagram." I'll say, "I personally just bought a $2,000-tool because of a company I follow on Instagram. Bruce McDuffee: No kidding. B. Sterzenbach: It was a B2B tool. So Instagram is a powerful channel as well. I would be hard pressed to name a channel that I wouldn't recommend. People say, "Is this the answer?" I say, "Well, we just need to help you with the question. The answer's always, 'Yes.' You just need to know what's my question. Each channel has its fit in your mix." Bruce McDuffee: Got it. Good. That's interesting. Frankly, I didn't expect that answer, so we're already off to a great start here. B. Sterzenbach: Good. Bruce McDuffee: Let's start broadly and go more into that topic and talk about social media in general and develop [begin 00:03:50] what we were just talking about. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to business development? For example, is it table stakes this day and age, or is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Where is it on the spectrum? B. Sterzenbach: I think it's table stakes if you have a pretty well rounded platform for your marketing. I think the companies that are out there doing it well today are in all the spaces. So I would say if you're playing in a space where they're doing it well, it's table stakes. If you're in, I'll pick on somebody, powder coating, for example, you look at powder coaters, a lot of those guys are working for OEMs and they don't really need to do a lot of marketing, and so it really isn't table stakes for those guys. They're getting most of their business right from two or three large OEM clients, and they're just chugging right along. But if you're in a space where you need to find those new clients, it's a must have. It really is. I think a lot of the folks that are out there doing it but they're doing it so badly that it doesn't really even count as doing it at this point. Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I see the same thing. That's interesting. You mentioned earlier that there's a big opportunity here, and I agree with you. It's like everything in manufacturing, not everything but a lot of things in manufacturing marketing, there's so much bad practice out there that there's an opportunity for those, what did you call them, Bill, enlightened. B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Bruce McDuffee: A huge opportunity. In this show, folks, we're going to talk about how you can capitalize on that opportunity. Let's zero in on LinkedIn because I know that's a specialty of yours, Bill. I guess we probably shouldn't assume that everybody knows what LinkedIn is, so maybe, Bill, give a good, quick description of what is LinkedIn. B. Sterzenbach: It's broad. It's a social network for professionals. I used to say it's Facebook for grownups, but now everybody on Facebook is a grownup. Bruce McDuffee: That's true. B. Sterzenbach: It is a social network for professionals, but more importantly in terms of how we would look at LinkedIn as industrial marketers it's a place where professionals participate for growth. They might be growing their career, growing their business, or just trying to grow knowledge around the industry, but typically people that are out on LinkedIn participating are trying to grow in some way. If you keep that in mind and everything you do in LinkedIn, you're going to find a much higher success rate as opposed to just yelling at everybody on LinkedIn. If you know they're there to grow, you can tailor what you're putting out there to meet the needs of someone who's trying to grow in one of those three ... or some other way I haven't thought of but primarily in one of those three ways. The crazy thing about the social media and the LinkedIn space is the greater majority, probably three quarters of B2B buyers are halfway done with their buying process before you hear from them. If they're out there making more than half of the decision before you talk to them, you have to ask what percentage of that decision is being made in the LinkedIn space? Without exception, when you stack LinkedIn up to all the other platforms, it's not even close. I think the latest statistic I looked at said 62% of marketers find it to be the most effective social channel for B2B marketing. Bruce McDuffee: LinkedIn? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. Bruce McDuffee: Wow. B. Sterzenbach: There's numbers that are even more telling than that, but LinkedIn is an extremely powerful network. Again, the people that are getting the most benefit from it are the people that understand their target. I tell people sometimes that if you were going to go deer hunting, it's so much more convenient to do it in a Walmart parking lot. You could get your little chair and you could put it in the parking lot. You could have your little cooler and just sit there and be comfortable all day, but that's not where the deer are. It's a little like LinkedIn. If you're not in it, you have to go in the woods to get the deer, and these people are in LinkedIn. You have to go in to LinkedIn. You have to actively participate. Then one thing I recommend to people all the time is don't be in such a hurry to drag them out of the woods. If you can engage them in LinkedIn and stay in LinkedIn, you're going to find that the engagement's going to be longer and more meaningful as opposed to immediately trying to pull them to your website. Bruce McDuffee: Interesting. That's a great metaphor: the LinkedIn forest. B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bruce McDuffee: Love that. What about, Bill, LinkedIn versus Facebook? Let my share my impression and tell me if you think it's right or wrong. I feel like Facebook is where people go for ... share pictures of their grandkids or their kids. They do family things and talk about vacations and non-professional things. Whereas I see LinkedIn as where you educate yourself on professional aspects. You improve your career. You make professional connections. Is that a clear separation? How do you see it? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. Bruce McDuffee: Yeah? B. Sterzenbach: I think you're right. I think when you're prioritizing or you're triaging your marketing efforts, you have to start with the most obvious things. If you're just getting started in a social space or you have a limited set of resources, I would definitely start with LinkedIn. But once you've played out the LinkedIn space, once you feel like, "I think we're doing everything we can do on LinkedIn," then I think it does make sense to have a look at Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter. I should have changed the order. Twitter would have been number two and then the rest of the guys. I'm not saying that I feel like your position is this way, but I don't think Facebook is without merit for the B2B. There's a guy, I think he works at [Etón 00:09:20]. He has this ... I don't know if he came up with it or if he just shared it with me, but he calls it B2I. He says it's business to individual. You have to stop looking at ... No one wants to be talked to by a brand, and nobody wants to talk to a brand. His point is as a brand let's stop talking to demographics and let's stop talking to categories. Let's just understand that people are on all these networks, and it's a matter of using the network in way that's comfortable for the person. If you are going to market on Facebook, you just need to craft your message to fit within that ecosystem. But there is still a place, even on Facebook, for industrial B2B activity. Bruce McDuffee: You've seen some industrial folks have success on Facebook then? B. Sterzenbach: I certainly have, yeah. They've been ... I guess the word would be sophisticated in their use. Again, it's an enormous channel. You just have to understand what the audience is there for and what they're after, and there's use there, for sure. Bruce McDuffee: I guess that's the key. If someone says, "Which channel should I be on?" You should ask, like you said, the people who are in your target audience where are they, and what are they doing on the channels? Is that fair? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's right. I would start with if a person said to me, "Which channel should I participate in?" I would say all of them starting with LinkedIn, then Twitter, then Instagram, then everything else. You're not probably going to attack them all simultaneously at least not with the same fervor that you would one. A case could be made for going after them all cohesively, but I think it's a little like to go to someone who's just getting into social and say, "Yes, you need to be on LinkedIn, but you also need to be in these other spaces, and let me start telling you about all the work it's going to talk to get there." It's a little like advertising a Caribbean vacation by showing the guy sitting next to you coughing in the airplane the whole way there. Nobody is going to get excited about the trip. They're going to get excited about the destination. It's nice if they can get in one of the platforms. LinkedIn, obviously, being probably the most immediately effective and they get to sample the destination a little bit without going in to all of that background work that it would take to approach all of the channels simultaneously. While that might be academically a better approach, I just don't think you're going to influence people to do it by having them go through all of those fundamental steps just to prepare for approaching all channels. Bruce McDuffee: That makes sense. That's good advice. Let's get back to LinkedIn. I strayed a little bit on that. I got excited about you sharing that information. On LinkedIn, could you share a real-life example of a manufacturer or industrial company who's having great success on LinkedIn and how they're getting that? B. Sterzenbach: I would go straight to Parker Hannifin. They're a pretty large company. They're probably a, I don't know, $9 billion manufacturer. You don't get as industrial as Parker. They are in there. They are doing the stuff in the industrial space in a big way. They've a great brand, and they've got phenomenal products. Their presence on LinkedIn is staggering in a word. I mean they really have done a phenomenal job. They've got ... I haven't looked recently, but a shocking number of followers for their company page, and they get a very high level of engagement from their followers. They're really, really thoughtful in how they use LinkedIn. We don't do Parker's LinkedIn stuff so this isn't a plug, but when they put something on LinkedIn, you can see the thoughtfulness and the care that they put in to the post. I believe that the readers see that, too. People respect your organization if you show some respect for them and what you put in their feed. They'll tend to stay with you a lot longer if you're putting quality things. Maybe not every single post that you put out there is directly applicable to their need, but if every single post looks like you put some effort into it and you respected their time, they won't unfollow you, so to speak. So I think Parker does a really nice job of working LinkedIn. I'm trying to think if there was another manufacturer that I saw out there. I think Caterpillar actually does a really nice job. I don't know how ... Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen that. B. Sterzenbach: I don't know how orchestrated it is. I don't really follow them too closely but I see them in my feed. Just anecdotally, I've always had a pretty positive impression of what they were doing out there. I don't know what kind of results they're getting, but I feel that there's a couple of companies that are really capitalizing on LinkedIn well. Bruce McDuffee: Is it fair to say that Parker Hannifin ... are they not pitching their products so much in their feeds and they're more sharing helpful information? Is that one way they're being more thoughtful and engaging? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. It's a little bit of a mix. Every now and then you'll see something pop in there that is pretty directly tied to a valve or an assembly or a product, but it's always, not always, but most often when I see it, it's couched in some sort of usefulness or at least plausibly objective usefulness to the reader. Bruce McDuffee: Fair enough. B. Sterzenbach: I think that's the key is not being overly pitchy. Bruce McDuffee: I've heard folks talk about a formula where you share four to one or three to one where four posts for helpful information and then one pitch for your product. I do that with some of my clients. It's pretty effective. B. Sterzenbach: Then we'll talk a little bit about paid advertising. There's a whole nother channel within LinkedIn there that's even more directly and quantifiably effective. But I know I'm jumping ahead of you a little bit as far as ... Bruce McDuffee: That's okay. That's okay. It sounds like LinkedIn could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Let's imagine there's a manufacturing marketer out there listening, which I hope there are a lot of them, and they have a LinkedIn company page. They put up the information; they're not doing much with it. Maybe they haven't even posted much at all. What are three things that that person, that manufacturing marketer with a LinkedIn company page could do right away to start leveraging it for business development? B. Sterzenbach: I would say if you're directly approaching how do we build our company presence on LinkedIn, the first thing would be to start building a list of followers so think about what activity should you be engaging in to just get more followers. Because if you have followers, people are going to see your posts and engagement's going to increase so creating some sort of an objective around building followers. Now the second thing would be post at least weekly to get started. If you're not posting regularly, habits can't be formed. That's where number three comes in, which is promoting your LinkedIn presence internally. I tell a lot of our clients support starts at home. What often happens is you'll have these marketing groups start a LinkedIn presence and the members of the marketing team aren't even supporting the posts they're putting out there. Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen [crosstalk 00:16:12]. B. Sterzenbach: It's not out of some desire to be malicious. It's just everybody's so busy and you can't mandate it. If you tell your team, "You're required; your review will include how many times you've liked our posts," that's not going to work. But you can influence the behavior, and there's things you can do to incentivize your team to participate in your company's presence on LinkedIn without making it feel like some sort of fundatory activity, because nobody wants to participate on a social media platform from a mandatory perspective. Bruce McDuffee: Fundatory. That's a good word. B. Sterzenbach: That's right. That's right. It's fundatory. Bruce McDuffee: So you just got a company page. The three things are, number one, make an objective to get more followers. B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Bruce McDuffee: Number two, at least a weekly post on a regular schedule. B. Sterzenbach: Correct. Bruce McDuffee: Number three, use your internal people, your employees, and encourage them to share without making it mandatory. B. Sterzenbach: Exactly. That's why number two comes in to play because if you're not posting regularly, you'll never get your internal teams into a habit of supporting it. If you're only posting once every quarter or once every blue moon, they're not going to get in the habit of jumping out and looking for your posts so they can support them. So the consistency allows them to develop habits as well. Bruce McDuffee: Makes sense. Can I ask on number one, in addition to posting on a regular basis, are there any other tricks you could share about getting more followers? B. Sterzenbach: A big one is having folks in your organization that have an existing network to participate. For example, if you have a couple of people on your sales team and they have a pretty good LinkedIn network, going out to them and evangelizing your LinkedIn activities a little bit and asking them, "Could I ask you as a favor to help support our LinkedIn presence? It's going to bring you new leads. It's going to grow our business." So you're generating that activity. There's a couple of just tactical things you can do. One of them is there's a button that you can download from LinkedIn. It's just a little piece of java script code. You can place that on your webpages of your website, and it just can live anywhere on the page. If the viewer of your website if they're logged into LinkedIn, the button'll say, "Follow." They can click it, and it'll just automatically follow the company without too much fuss. There's a couple of other things like that you can do to promote follows, but the idea is that first you have to start engaging in some activities that could even create an interest. Bruce McDuffee: Sure. Okay, great. Thanks for that. Finally, I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. You alluded to it a little bit earlier when you were trying to jump ahead. Let's talk about how does that work. I know a lot of the social channels now you have to pay to play when you're a business to show up. How does the LinkedIn paid advertising work? Maybe a couple of examples would be great. B. Sterzenbach: I'm a big advocate of the sponsored content campaigns. There's a couple of ways you can use LinkedIn. You can do essentially display advertising, which are the ads that live across the top and down the right side. You can use their InMail platform, which is essentially sending mail. LinkedIn sends mail on your behalf to a list that you've created. Or you can do sponsored content, which essentially places a post in your followers' feeds, and it looks very organic. Now, when you sponsor a post, they're not your followers. They're anyone that you've targeted with the post. There's some pretty funny stories about how specifically you can target ... The story I like most is a guy who was trying to get a startup going and he was looking for investors. He had a specific investor that he wanted to attract. He went in to LinkedIn and he created a sponsored content campaign. I don't remember the guy's name. Let's say it was Ted Phillips. He created an ad that said, "Ted Phillips, this is next your company. You should invest in it and here's why" or something like that. In the targeting he said, "I want to target my ad to this company, this role, and some other criteria." LinkedIn requires that your list be of a certain size, so it first said, "Your list isn't big enough." So he said, "Okay, also this role." It was CEO and vice president. He had to add vice president. It added two more people to his list. Pretty soon, he was putting this ad right in that person's feed regularly. He actually did secure funding. Ultimately, he said he spent $1.80 on the advertising. Bruce McDuffee: That's awesome. B. Sterzenbach: That's how he secured his funding. That's how finitely you can target your advertising. We'll run ads for clients that we say, "Engineers that have eight years of experience that work for companies that have 500 or more employees or 10,000 or more employees that are in these states." I mean you can get really specific. That really is, in my opinion, probably the most powerful aspect of LinkedIn is how tightly you can control that filtering. You're not getting the waste that you get on so many other platforms. You really are putting that ad right in front of the people you want to see it. You're always going to have some people who either accidentally categorized themselves incorrectly or intentionally categorize themselves incorrectly, but by and large the majority of the people who see your LinkedIn ad are exactly the people you want to see it. We see that evidence playing out time and time again in these campaigns where we'll run a LinkedIn advertisement either for ourselves or on behalf of a client, and the people that arrive at whatever ultimate objective that we set for the program are exactly the kind of people we targeted with the ads. It is remarkably accurate in the targeting. It's one of the things, I think, LinkedIn has done really well. Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I agree. I've done some sponsored ads myself, and it's amazing how specific you can get. B. Sterzenbach: That's true, yeah. Bruce McDuffee: It's incredible. You're right. That's the real power of LinkedIn paid ads is that selection because I don't think any other platforms get that granular. B. Sterzenbach: No, they certainly do not. Again, if you're targeting these ads in a way that speaks to someone who's there for growth reasons, you not only target the people that you want to target but you get an actual response. So many platforms, their click-through rate ... and in a lot areas, a 1%-click-through rate is phenomenal. Bruce McDuffee: That's great, yeah. B. Sterzenbach: So you're getting a great response rate and the type of people that you want to respond are responding. Another thing that's interesting about LinkedIn, if you're in a business where you would like to attract clients that are growth-oriented or that like to try new things or would like to learn or even if you target a demographic of prospect by the sheer fact that they're active on LinkedIn ... Bruce McDuffee: Can you? B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. If they're active on LinkedIn, they are probably interested in growth in some way. Bruce McDuffee: That's a good point, yeah. B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. For example, I know a guy who advertises on LinkedIn. He doesn't work through us. He just does it on his own. One of the reasons he uses LinkedIn is that he wants people who are working to better themselves in some way, and so it's a perfect platform for him because most of the people on LinkedIn are there just to do that. Bruce McDuffee: That's a great point. I never even thought about that. But it does; it's almost a self-selection segmentation. B. Sterzenbach: It is, yeah. Bruce McDuffee: That's great. Is one ad better than another? You mentioned sponsored content, InMails, the ads. Is one better than the other have you found in your experience? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, sponsored content is head and shoulders above everything else. Now, I haven't done much with the InMail yet. I just haven't really found a good case for it. Not that there isn't one. To be honest with you, we spend so much time on the sponsored content campaigns, we really haven't had a reason to venture into the InMail yet. And people are a little uncomfortable with what they perceive as interrupting their prospects or their clients. So I suspect that InMail might be pretty effective. Personally, I haven't used much of it. We've used it a little but not a lot. The other thing on the sponsored content, you can choose whether you want to pay by click or by impression so CPM or CPC. Paying per click, at least in our experience, is much more effective. It just looks like you get more at bats when you pay per click because I think economically LinkedIn looks at it like, "Well, if I'm going to get paid every time somebody clicks this thing, I'm going to show up more." It just seems like your ad gets shown a lot more when you go on the pay per click advertising basis. Bruce McDuffee: I've seen the same thing. B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's funny. Bruce McDuffee: I've heard also that LinkedIn cost per click is a lot higher on LinkedIn than it is, for example, on AdWords. Is that true? B. Sterzenbach: It might depend on the company, but our experience has been that that is true. As a matter of fact, we ran a campaign for our company, a test campaign. I basically took on one of my AdWords guys. There's a guy in ... Bruce McDuffee: Oh, yeah? B. Sterzenbach: His name's Jerrod, and he's ridiculously competitive. I said, "I'm going to run this LinkedIn program against the AdWords program you're running. I think I'm going to whip you." He was like, "Let's do it. Let's see what happens." He cleaned my clock. Bruce McDuffee: He did? B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. The cost per click AdWords, it wasn't significantly lower but it was lower. The difference being, though, that a lot of the clicks on LinkedIn, I still maintain, were probably more directly targeted to the people I would want to see, but I think you can get more looks for the same money on AdWords. I tell everybody it isn't one or the other. It is not an either/or. If I were advising a manufacturer, I would say, "Don't even go near LinkedIn if you don't have a working AdWords program." Start with AdWords because that's just a good foundational advertising activity. Then go to LinkedIn but I wouldn't try to replace AdWords or Bing or [Thomas 00:26:00] with LinkedIn. I would at it as one more channel that I'm using to promote my business. Bruce McDuffee: Got it. That makes sense. It sounds like from our discussion here, Bill, that every manufacturer out there should be using social media and at least using LinkedIn. Is that fair? B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that statement, absolutely. Bruce McDuffee: That's what I'm getting here. I agree. This is the world we live in. This is the age we live in nowadays. Email's still powerful. You got to still do your email marketing, but you got to be out where your audience is. They're doing that investigation. They're checking out options. You have to be there so they can find you in that 50% of their first part of the buying phase. B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, I would agree. I would encourage, especially your manufacturing, your industrial marketers, just get out there and do it badly. We work with enormous global brands. It would be easy for us to say, "Don't do it if you can't do it well." But quite honestly, so many things would never get started if that were the requirement. Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely. B. Sterzenbach: A buddy of mine I worked with for years used to say ... His parent company was in another country; I won't say where because I'm sure it's not true, but this is how he felt. He said, "They will start nothing perfectly." He said they're masters at planning and planning and planning until it's not even important to do anymore. I think people get caught up in that sometimes. I'd said go out there and do LinkedIn badly for a couple of years. If your option is to do it perfectly or not do it at all, I would say take option three, which is just get out there and start doing it badly. It's better than not doing it at all. Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes was by Voltaire, I think in the 17th century, and it's, "Perfect is the enemy of good." B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Bruce McDuffee: That's one of my favorites. B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that. Bruce McDuffee: Great. That takes us to the second part of the show here, Bill, and that's the challenge question. Folks, send in your challenge questions. Email them to me: bruce@mmmatters.com or hashtag them on Twitter @mfgmarketing. Any question you have about business development, marketing, even sales, send it in. I'll pose it to one of our guest experts. This week our challenge question comes in from New York. He's a manufacturer of industrial gases. By the way folks, these are usually anonymous. I just give a little bit of background. Here's the question, Bill. "I'm the VP of sales and marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like nitrogen or oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you give me a couple of examples on your next podcast?" Bill, what do you think? B. Sterzenbach: Absolutely. Every commodity still has differentiators. As the builder of your brand, you get to pick what those are. The one thing I would say that we see time and time again, especially in commodity-type spaces, is a big differentiator is going to be service, or more accurately what we call helpfulness. We recently interviewed a group of, I don't know, I think 11 enormous B2B industrial buyers so procurement and purchasing folks from companies that buy things like valve seals and the components that make up products. One of our questions was, "What's one of the top criteria you have for working with a discretionary partner?" so someone who isn't on some list of 'go here first.' By and large, they said, "Helpfulness." Bruce McDuffee: Really? B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. What we heard time and time again was the vendors that are able to help us solve problems and are helpful in walking through our decision process are the vendors that we'll typically select. I was surprised. It isn't surprising when you really think about, but I was surprised to learn the larger, more premier organizations tended to value helpfulness and service, and the smaller, what you might call your core customers, tended to value speed and price. There's no crime in valuing speed and price. It's just when there's a lack of anything else, speed and price are important in a commodity, but if you can illustrate helpfulness or customer service, you are going to differentiate yourself from most of the people in the commodity space. One of the things that we do with our program is we listen to all calls, and so we listen to literally thousands and thousands of calls every month. One of the things that we find is the evidence that we had ... Actually this is what led us to do this study. We found that better customers typically value services. So you end up with the self-fulfilling prophecy situation where you have organizations that maybe they don't value helpfulness or service and they don't include it in their brand, they don't talk about service, so when customers call, the customer doesn't typically experience great service. So the customers that are wonderful move on, and the customers that are core stay. They end up getting more and more core customers, hiring more and more people who really don't value service because they customers really value price and availability first. Bruce McDuffee: Self-fulfilling. B. Sterzenbach: It's just a terrible cycle. It's not a terrible cycle. Some companies really do want to serve those are only after price and availability. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to move up that quality of customer ladder a little bit, the go-to is going to be service. It's not easy either. The first thing that has to happen is your team has to understand that helpfulness and friendliness is part of who you are as a company. If they aren't taught that regularly, they're not going to demonstrate that day-to-day. To circle back to your question, it feels like we've taken a big loop here, but my point is you can use social media to illustrate that a core component of your brand is helpfulness and service. It's not so much talking about how helpful and what great service we provide, but talking about the things that support that element of your brand. If you say, "98% of our industrial customers have been with us for three years or longer," that says that there's something that's keeping those customers. That's the kind of you can share. Now, that might be a little salesy, but that's the kind of thing you can share on social media where people can scan through, see that, log it away, and move on. You're communicating something other than the typical commodity elements about your brand. Bruce McDuffee: Great, great answer. I'm going to add in my two cents here, folks, is on that helpfulness aspect. The way you differentiate with content is to develop content that addresses a problem or a pain point that's common to the people in your target audience. B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Bruce McDuffee: We've been talking about that today. You've got one company out there that says, "We've got this feature, this feature, this feature. We're low price, and we're fast." Then you come out and say, "Well, let's understand our audience. Let's understand a problem or a pain where we have expertise. We can help you. We're going to help you solve that problem." The problem, of course, is related to the thing you're trying to sell, naturally. Solve that problem and you get three things from your audience. You get credibility because they're going to say, "These people know what they're talking about." You get top-of-mind awareness because they're going to remember you. Just like Bill mentioned in the LinkedIn feed, you start to see a regular trickle of helpful content. They're going to remember you. You're going to be top of mind when the day comes and they're ready to buy nitrogen or oxygen, you're going to get the call. The third thing they get that you get is reciprocity. When you give a gift of knowledge, helpful content, useful content, the person who received it wants to reciprocate. The way they do that is by buying from you even if it's at a higher price. That's what I would look at. Anything to add there, Bill, before we move on? B. Sterzenbach: No, I would agree with every bit of that. It's one of those things you almost have to experience to truly believe. Bruce McDuffee: You do. Once you experience it, boy, is it powerful. B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Bruce McDuffee: The final part of the show, Bill, is takeaways. I always ask our guest expert to share one or two takeaways. It could be a summary of a couple of things we talked about, or it could be a couple of actionable nuggets to go forward. What do you have for our audience today, Bill? B. Sterzenbach: I would say the first thing would be to set a goal today. It's going to take five minutes. Sit down and say, "By July, I want to have posted this many posts and gained that many followers." Even if you say, "By July, I'd like to have 10 posts and five followers," set some goal. Then get buy-in from your internal team. You can't force them to do it but you can influence them. Bribe them, beg them, do whatever you have to do to get them to participate in your efforts, but start by just setting a simple goal and move forward with it. I share this people and often they'll say, "But it's just something I write on paper." I say, "Yeah, but it's like a diet." A diet is just an empty wish until we don't eat the first thing. It goes the same way here. Until you do the first thing, which is write your first post, even if it's terrible, you're really not doing it. It isn't that hard if you set out to just do something. Even if it's wrong, just get started. Bruce McDuffee: And give yourself permission to be bad at it, right? B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Because you're not going to be as bad as the worst no matter how hard you try. Bruce McDuffee: That's right. That's true. Great, two great takeaways. Thanks Bill. Before we sign off would you like to share anything about yourself or your company with our audience? B. Sterzenbach: Sure. To your point of reciprocity, we are big on giving. If there's anyone out there and they have a sales force of 20 people or more, that's where it gets worth it for us to do these complementary lunch and learns, Upwards does offer ... it's a free lunch and learn if you can get 20 teammates to come to either the webinar or in person, and we'll take you through specific things you can do tailored to your organization to grow your pipeline through LinkedIn. You can bring your sales guys into the call. You can bring them into the meeting, and we'll give them actual activities they can start engaging in right away to build their personal pipelines. We've found that either in a webinar or in-person formats, the sales guys walk away feeling like it was a really, really effective use of their time. You can just go to our website at goupward.com and you'll see there's a 'Contact Us' link and just say, "Hey, I'd be interested in having you guys talk to us about LinkedIn." Bruce McDuffee: Great. That's a great offer. Thanks Bill. I'll put that in the show notes as well, folks, so you can ... I'll put a direct link and you can go sign up if you feel the want. Bill, thank you so much for being a guest today on Manufacturing Marketing Matters. I know I learned a lot today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience and just thank you. B. Sterzenbach: Thank you, Bruce. It was great being here. Bruce McDuffee: That was Bill Sterzenbach, partner at Upward. For more information about Bill and Upward, visit the guest bio page and check out the show notes at mmmatters.com. By the way, if you are subscriber on iTunes for this podcast, consider leaving us a review. It helps us get found and helps us spread the word to help manufacturers advance their practice of marketing. Thanks for listening to Manufacturing Marketing Matters. If you find this podcast helpful and useful, please subscribe at iTunes or Stitcher.com. You can download this episode of MMMatters and get the show notes and learn more about the podcast at mmmatters.com. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Now let's go out and advance the practice of marketing in manufacturing today.

Are You Ready For The New InMail Changes?

The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2014 5:00

Transcription: (This is a direct transcription please excuse any Typo's.) Hi there listeners! This is Denise and today's podcast is all about InMails. For those of you that have a LinkedIn Premium account, you are probably using InMails to a greater or lesser degree. Obviously there's the different recruiter [...]

inmail inmails

Episode 34. 5 Ways to Find Jobs on LinkedIn