A super tactical session.
Much more than ‘tidy up your profile and post some content’.
Learn advanced social selling strategies on how you could reach out and restart conversations with either those you’re connected to but haven’t conversed with yet or those you are wanting to connect with.
All without being a SPAMMER.
Key strategies here for you are:
Join Mark’s VIP twice-monthly newsletter:
https://markmc.co/salesmail/
Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/
Catch all versions of me here.
https://linktr.ee/markmcinnes
LinkedIn profile
VIP sales mailer
Tactical Pipeline Growth
BOSS Podcast
1 on 1 Consulting
A super tactical session.
Much more than ‘tidy up your profile and post some content’.
Learn advanced social selling strategies on how you could reach out and restart conversations with either those you’re connected to but haven’t conversed with yet or those you are wanting to connect with.
All without being a SPAMMER.
Key strategies here for you are:
Join Mark’s VIP twice-monthly newsletter:
https://markmc.co/salesmail/
Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/
Catch all versions of me here.
https://linktr.ee/markmcinnes
LinkedIn profile
VIP sales mailer
Tactical Pipeline Growth
BOSS Podcast
1 on 1 Consulting
Welcome to The Boss podcast. This podcast provides today's sellers with sales tactics that will help them to reach their goals. Your host, Mark McGinnis, brings you diverse guests, high quality discussion and valuable insights on every single show. Mark is the author of Tactical Pipeline Growth, as well as an Intiman sales trainer and coach for B2B companies all over the world. If you want to be better at outbound sales, you're definitely in the right place. Now let's get into the podcast. Welcome to The Boss podcast. I'm Mark McGuinness. If you're in sales and you're looking for some great tactics to help you start more conversations and land meetings with your audio buyer without being spammy. You're in the right place. Today, I have something special. We're going to start with a little bit of a flashback. So over a year ago, I started this podcast, The Boss podcast, and it was all about social selling, was all about using LinkedIn to start sales conversations with your ideal clients. And as much as I love the concept, it just became too bland really quickly. All of a sudden, we had lots and lots of guests and all they were able to talk about was what content we needed to post or maintain or how to chart up your LinkedIn profile. So it was, in inverted commas, optimize. Not many people could really bring very many techniques or tactics to the show. So we end up changing the show to be the best of sales skills. So Boss is gone from best of social selling to boss best of sales skills. And we've broaden the horizon to look at all the sales strategies and sales skills that people need to be good in sales tonight. But tonight, we're going to take a bit of a flashback and I'm going to share with you some of the best LinkedIn tactics that I'm using and my clients are using right now on twenty twenty one to start conversations with their ideal clients. So I think we're going to go back even a little bit further and just so I can get this straight. So why should you listen to me about using LinkedIn? So in 2015, 2016, I was ranked the number one search center on LinkedIn, Burlington. To give you a little bit of context here, in 2015, my buddy Don Doogan and I were working together at sales on TV. And Don's now the global sales capability guy at work there. It's a massive organization based out of the US. And he and I were working at Salvatori, and together we were focused on driving sales conversations through LinkedIn. And we're talking to people about sales training. And John was important to the annual LinkedIn awards, like the annual event. And he was awarded the number one social seller, the highest assassi school in Australia. And as he got up on stage in the ceremony, so he and I had been working together and he said, look, guys, this is great. But it's actually there's a guy in the office in my office who's got a higher Associ score than what I've got. So how 2016? Of course, I got an event, an invite to the LinkedIn awards. No, how I won it again. Well, I won at that time and was awarded that time. So how did John and I take it out? Two years in a row. And this is when, you know, the social selling index and SARS-CoV-2 was really massive. And the simple answer is we had and have some systems and processes in place that we can apply those strategies to LinkedIn to make it more likely that people are going to connect with you, that people are going to accept a message and converse with you. And then applying those strategies over and over allowed us to end up with such good results. So understanding and using messaging strategies that got us more connections, more conversations and more meetings than just about anybody else in Australia. The fact that we're able to replicate that year on year tells us that the systems that we used were rock solid. So coming forward to that, I you know, I have a lot less of a focus on the value of our SSR. And LinkedIn has simply haven't run those awards ever since 2006. So it was a tool that I ran for a couple of years that basically was a promotion vehicle to get everybody to use sales navigator. So because I haven't run those awards since 2016, I'm going to hold on cheekily to the title of Australia's number one social seller on LinkedIn until they rerun those awards. But today, I thought it would be a good idea to share my social engagement strategies with you. So instead of having a guest talking about what theater, we've just haven't had anybody that's come along and really had solid LinkedIn strategies that I think are easily repeatable, easily actionable. So today what I'm going to do is share with you the strategies that I try my sales consulting clients with and things that I use myself. Hopefully you're going to get something out of it. And I guarantee if you put these in a apply, you're going to find that your time on LinkedIn is going to be significantly more effective. So the number one thing that we need to do before we start off is what I like to call is we need to slow down the activity in order to speed up the result. And this is all about focusing on helping people on social rather than trying to sell them for us. So if we can think about what is it that people want? How can we help them get that? That's going to enable us to start a conversation. And that conversation will then move towards a conversation about how our goods or services might be able to help that client or that prospect. And, of course, you know, we're going to have a hundred percent success rate. You know, it doesn't matter who you talk to, even if they've got a pain or they've got a need, they're not always going to be a great customer. So what do I mean by slow down to speed up? So we all know how typical our race plays out on LinkedIn. It typically goes like this, right? So you either get a connection and then you get a pitch. A couple of days later, the, hey, you know, connected, by the way, you know, a blog, his or whatever. Let's grab 15 minutes in my diary or any variation somewhere between that. So there's a very short timeframe between somebody sending you a connection request and then pitching. And in recent times, LinkedIn have done a great job of limiting the amount of connections that you can have now. One hundred per week, which I think has done a really good job of getting rid of the automation system. And that means that the connection request that we're getting nowadays are much more targeted and seem to be of more value. The other thing that we get would be, of course, a pitch and connect in the same message. So you get a connection message to say, hey, Mark, this is what I want you to do, and he's going to go and do that. The third thing that we see all the time, of course, is people just send you a connecting request. Sometimes I depersonalize it, but most of the time they don't. And then nothing happens. They just adding you. They're just collecting connections. So if we know that those are the three things that happened ninety five percent of the time, why don't we slow the process down and not acts for a connection in order to speed up the result? And the result, of course, is having a conversation. So if you think about finding a perfect prospect on meeting, can you go in? You know, let's call it socially circle. Right. Our social listening. Go out like some of their content. Have a look at their profile. Let's not forget, every time we look at someone's profile, they get a notification that someone's looking at your profile. Now, not everyone's on LinkedIn all the time. The numbers are about 50 percent of people are on LinkedIn at any given time. Sorry, within 50 percent of the total members are on LinkedIn during the month. And they're a lot less people are posting than that. So, you know, we have to be careful about who's actually on LinkedIn, who's not on LinkedIn. And that's my next point. If we can go out to the LinkedIn profile, we look for opportunities to interact so they can see that we've actually deliberately trying to start a conversation with them or that we're, you know, liking some of their content if they are one of those people posted or making comments. There's a lot of other things that we can do. And I'll come to those in a minute that will allow them to see you before you ask for a connection. And if you're doing that, then they subconsciously I haven't asked for connection yet. This is a little bit different. So it's a pattern interrupt to what most other people would do. And if you're doing this from the heart, if you're doing this with focusing on helping them rather than selling, it's really easy to climb over that wall to start a conversation. One of the great things that I wanted to share with you today. Another strategy is, you know, the follow on follow. So if you follow somebody on LinkedIn, of course, you don't need the permission to do so. And now we get a notification that you are following them, people that are on LinkedIn a lot if you're in the same industry, the same sector. They may well turn around and say, hey, I see that you followed me. Let's connect, you know, or simply send you a connection request. And that's a really easy way for you then to get inside the network. Of course, you can always unfollow them and then re follow them. And all you need to do is basically find their profile and click on follow. And whilst LinkedIn says that it's a three week delay between unfollowing and following, my research and my experience says that that's not the case. So you can follow and follow and then Refah and get a notification that you're following. I'm sorry if you followed somebody for two weeks and you need to figure out a way to send a notification to their inbox, but you can unfollow and then Ruffolo likewise connection requests. So if you've sent a connection request to somebody and they haven't decided to accept your connecting request and you believe that you still want to be connected to, let's say, potentially you send a connection request with a short personalized message, you can go in to manage your network , look at invitations sent, and simply go to that person and withdraw that connection request and then resend that connection request, potentially this time as a blank connection request and see if that works or vice versa. If you send a blank connection request the first time, maybe you want to send back your request the second time with a little note saying, hey, you know, I wanted to connect. These are the reasons why I think would be a good connection to work together. So not many people that I know of are using that strategy. And that's really a soft and easy way to get extra notification before you've even tried to connect in the following situation and allows a really strong way for you to make sure that people know that you're deliberate, trying to have a conversation with them before you send that connection request. One of the other things I say, the mistakes that people make is when people are talking about how can we interact with people on LinkedIn, how can we make sure that we start conversations? Is typically people say, oh, well, you go to the content and whatever they've posted on LinkedIn, you then make a comment. Or you, Richet. Now, that's great. But as I said a minute ago, there's probably only about nine percent. And I'm not sure on this figure exactly. But it's something like 99 percent of people post content on LinkedIn regularly. So out of 100 perfect prospects, you know, you're only going to find a very small amount of those people are going to actually have content for you to interact with. And this is one of the challenges that a lot of people have when we're talking about using social selling as part of an Afghan guidance is what they go onto LinkedIn. And you say that they might have a picture, they might not have a background. The headline might just say the general manager or the head of ITSA or one of the Rollie's. So it's indicating to you that there's not a lot of activity there. The key thing that we need to do here is go to the activity piece and have a look at the general activity versus their past going to their posts. And if you can see that they've been posting something and it's relatively recent, so, you know, two or three months and you've got an opportunity there to go make a comment or a like, and chances are they're going to see that that notification come out, even though it might be a little bit late. That's a good strategy. But as I said, not many people are going to have that. So what you might want to do is just check the regular activity just to see what they're liking, because look is on LinkedIn and people who go onto LinkedIn but don't interact a lot, but they're liking activity will show up in that part of their profile. So, again, you got an activity, you click to see more and then you'll get to see if they're liking stuff and when that. Content was posted, and typically what we see is even that people might look like they're relatively static, they're not very active. You can see that people are actually liking content once a week or thereabouts. What this tells me is that if you do something like you follow them or you send them a connecting request or you send them an email, it's highly unlikely that they're going to respond. But it's still a valuable touch in the sense of a cadence. So if you're going to try and break out over a number of different channels, remember, not every touch needs to be a knockout blow. So whilst you might send them a message on LinkedIn or you might send them a connection, request is highly unlikely. They're going to see that notification and respond. Hi, Mark. Great to connect. Let's have a meeting that's unlikely to happen, right? Well, we're trying to do in this instance is create a situation where we're more noticeable on LinkedIn, creating some really soft notifications. Their LinkedIn profile is optimized. We always had to come back and we profile is optimized. And then we send them a interactive email and perhaps we give them a telephone call. By the time we've done those three chapters across three channels, we're going to be significantly more likely to be able to start a conversation with them and say, look, you know, I was noticing, you know, I was just on LinkedIn, whatever the case may be, rather than just trying to go all in on LinkedIn or going all in on an email or going all in on the telephone. So these are really easy things that you can do to make it more effective that you're going to get to start a conversation. One of the other things that I think is really ideal that lots of people don't take advantage of is the ability to be able to create polls on LinkedIn. Now, you're probably saying, Mark, there are that many polls on LinkedIn. Why are you telling me to create a poll? I get it. But polls are typically being used or being underused. I'm not really sure what the correct term is. They're not being used correctly. One of the guys I really like, Matt Wante, wrote a book, something about like a BET app and Siles. And his whole book is based off the back of research you did through polls. So he'd post something and say, hi, sales people vote on this poll. And then he did, you know, 15, 20 polls and then took all of that information and created a little book. It's a really great little book. I listen to it on Audible not too long ago. And that's a really good play. So what we can do is we can create a poll and you want to create a poll that is interesting to your ideal clients about what's happening in the industry or about some challenges in the industry or about maybe some transformation that's happening in the industry, maybe some new regulation. So you don't have to creating a poll saying, you know, what's your favorite football team or what's your favorite color, red or blue? Well, what do you like better? Cats or dogs now? Lost those two. You know what? You would be really easy for you to get a couple of thousand people voting on cats or dogs. How are you then going to follow up on those couple of thousand people to start that conversation? And what's the value of the Palta afterwards? Very little. But if you created a poll or was talking about something that was happening inside the industry that you were working, let's say it's talking about, you know, if you're in the high cost base, for example, you know, at the moment, as I talk to you here in July 20, 21, there's a shortage of candidates. There's a shortage of good candidates. There's lots and lots of jobs, but there's not a lot of people applying for jobs. So that's a real challenge. So we could have a poll, a talk, something about the shortage of candidates and what we think is going to happen moving forward or how people are overcoming their shortage of candidates and have three or four things for people to vote on. And then if you're in this space, chances are you're already connected to a bunch of people, that that poll would be interesting, too. So we go and ask all of those people. We send them a direct message and we say, hey, hey, Margaret, I've got this poll that I'm trying to generate a whole bunch of activity from. Would you be so kind to go and vote? I'll be really interested in what you think's going on or if you've got something else to provide. Another comment underneath. And what I'll do in return for voting is I'll make sure I send you the results as soon as I come out. Does that sound fair? If you're already connected to people, it's a really easy way for people to interact with you. So it's a great way to go and restart conversations from people inside your industry. But of course, what you can do is you can go and find people that you're not connected to and ask them to respond to the poll. And it's a bit like when you have those events where you're only allowed to invite, you know, five people to when you go and invite people in, even if they say no, they still feel obligated because you've made the effort of inviting them. So Apple's got the same sort of response, so particularly if it's industry related. So you could reach out to people that you're not connected to and say, hey, Mark, look, I've got this poll that I'm creating. You look like somebody who's I really value their input. Would you mind jumping across and voting and in return, I'll send you the results as soon as the polls completed. And of course, what this does is it makes it sets you up as an authority. So they're much more likely to, you know, accept a really simple blank commission request off the back of that email or, you know, if they've got an open profile, you can send them those messages or potentially send that through a LinkedIn connection requests if you had to. But then, of course, once the poll finishes, you then can go back to all those people who are in your audio profile and send those results to them. And of course, if you've been clever enough and you've got that power built out to be something that seemed. And you can then say, well, you know, these are the results, is that what you thought or I noticed that you voted a different way? Why is that different? And it's a really simple way for you to start having a conversation. And in fact, one of my clients did this recently and we had two hundred and fifty seven or forty seven hundred fifty seven people respond. And that gave him enough leads for the month. So he was able to then go and engage with all two hundred and forty seven people. Of course, there were some people that weren't in his space or didn't need to engage with them. But the new people that he dragged into his network and the people from that he was already connected to that he hadn't spoken to for a long time. He was able to drag them back into the pole. And of course, when you start those interactions with your old network, with the people that you're connected with, they then come back to the top of your feet and of course, you come to the top of their feet. So it's a great way to reengage existing connections and to start conversations with new connections and people that you want to have our sales conversation with in a way that's not particularly spammy and sets you off as somebody as a thought leader. Now, you could take a leaf out of Matt's book. And if you created two or three or four of these polls that talked about your industry and about some challenges that were happening right now in mid twenty twenty one, you could probably run that over two months and then create a white paper that'll go to one of those offshore graphic design places or your marketing department, get somebody to put that together before you know it. You'll have a very valuable white paper that you'll be able to send around to all those people or to send to other people or to publish with your name on it. So, again, it'll be a really easy way for you to create a thought leader. And I think these things aren't terribly unapplied. I think it's a really, really easy for us to do. Is your outreach getting you labeled as a spammer? Well, once worked in B2B outbound doesn't work anymore. The goalposts have moved and so much your approach to sales. Sure, you might land on conversation or even a reply to an odd called email. But is it scalable? Will it provide you with enough revenue to hit your yearly goals? Having worked with sales teams all over the world, we see what works and what doesn't. Our new PAL coaching program provides sellers with access to the very best training available today. It doesn't matter if you're a team of 50 or a team of one. We have split traditional sales training on its head and allow you to learn in your own time and still get the important coaching help that you need. Grab all the details at Mark McColm slash pile. One of the other things that I think people don't do that I'd like to see more of is, of course, referrals are the absolute lifeblood of sales. So the more referrals you can get, the better off we are. And if you're lucky enough to work for an organization that's a little bit larger, then you've probably got a whole bunch of people that are going to be really open to a really quick and easy conversation and enabling easy referrals for you, sir. Have a look at all the people that you used to work in, the organization that you work for now that no longer do. And of course, you can do that in Sales Navigator. And when you click company, you can then select people that work currently in your organization or in the past, click past, click search, click on geographical location app will come a whole bunch of people who used to work in your organization and you can use them. Some of them will now work in organizations that you do want to talk to. And if you think about a sales perspective, because that's who this podcast is predominantly for. You can then go and talk to those iise or those Beadie Aimes or whatever who are working in your target customer. Say hi. You know, I'd say that you used to work with us over there at ABC. How open minded would you be to be giving me a hand? I want to talk to you very Premiere sales. What's the best way for me to get through to them? You know what's happening in your space around USCIRF. Where do you think we'd be a good fit, et cetera? You know, who else can you refer me, too? Because my salespeople are prepared to have a chat. And if they've worked in your organization previously, you don't need to sell on the value prop. They already know what it is that you do. They already understand why the business works and what the products and services do. So it's really simple. The other thing that you can do if you want to get a little bit more crazy is you can do the same thing for people who used to work and your competitors. So what you can do is go and reach out to people who used to work at a competitor, but now work somewhere, who would be a call your client and say, hey, look, you know, I know you understand the space you used to work for these guys. You know, I know we used to be competitors, but I was just wondering whether you be open to playing and why you go. Really easy conversations to have. You don't have to sell a concept because the people will really understand it. Easy emails to send, emails to send, easy, direct messages sent on LinkedIn. And if people see in their inbox their old company or their old competitor pop up in the subject line, they're going to be significantly more likely to see that because just of our confirmation bias and just seeing that pop up there, bang, that's going to ring a bell much more than any other third party. I'm sorry. Give that an absolute shot. One of the other things I wanted to share with you, too, is referrals around interacting with people. So how can you build a level a little bit of reciprocity on LinkedIn if you don't have a lot of content? Well, you don't have a lot of resources. And LinkedIn is designed as a networking vehicle. Right. So if you find somebody that's in all of their fleet services, for example, and I'm connected to somebody in fleet services and I have a look and see that they're not connected to that person, why can't you reach out to that person and say, hey, I'm just wondering whether, you know, Mark, over an ABC flight, it looks like you're not connected, but you guys should definitely be connected. I'd be happy to organize an introduction if you're interested. And just doing that is a really great way to start a conversation between those two or three people. And if even if they're inside your audio client, I say, hey, if they're your audio buyer, you're bringing value to them in the back of LinkedIn. It's not terribly spammy. It's not terribly pitu is something a little bit different. And they're more likely to start a conversation with you as a result of that. So there's four or five things there that you can do to be more effective on LinkedIn, whether it be sales navigator polls follow on follower connect on Connect, you know, making sure that they're on LinkedIn in the first place or just having that helping rather than selling mindset. But of course, I said the reason why we stopped doing so much social selling is because the main thing that everybody wanted to talk about was their LinkedIn profile. So just before I sign off on this special episode, I wanted to share with you, of course, that you have to optimize your profile. This brings some really interesting research recently on even a couple of thousand people, and it was done via apol. And the question was, when somebody sends you a connection request and it's blank, what do you do next? And seventy seven per cent of the people. Said they go and look at your profile to see if they want to connect with you, to decide whether it's worthwhile connecting. So you need to make sure that your profile is absolutely optimized for your ideal client. I know you've probably got this back to front, but make sure it's not a CV. Make sure it's not doing any damage. Make sure it's not super easy. Make sure your headlines right. Make sure your pizza looks friendly. You know, only this week I saw somebody in there, about six in the first line of their bad section said I am solely driven by profit. I mean, if I was a buyer and I saw that in someone's headline, I'd be thinking, well, if you just based on profit, why would I connect with you or be scared that you're going to try and just take money out of my pocket with no desire to provide great customer service? So, you know, if you're still making those types of mistakes, then get out there and get that stuff Chinee, look at it, make it look good, because it all leads back to your profile. Everything you do on LinkedIn comes back to your profile. All right. So my name is Macrina, so I hope you found those four or five tactics somewhat helpful. Who knows if I get a good response or I want to hear some more tactics. I think there's enough there to keep you all very busy. If you liked this episode, please do me a favor. Send me a message on LinkedIn. You know, we love it when we get writings on podcast vehicles. So please go to write us a review. We love it as much as we can, sir. Thanks very much for listening. And watch out for the next episode, spokesman. Bye. How would you like Niteroi copy of tactical pipeline growth sent directly to you for free? You see any little help from prepared to swap you for? All you have to do is leave us an honest review on Apple Podcasts, as it would really help other listeners to find us. And it helps us find more great guests in the future. And of course, the better the guests can better the sales strategy. So we get the good news is it only take about 60 seconds to do and you can probably access the review function directly from the device you're using right now to listen to us. I really appreciate it. Simply leave us a review and then screenshot that and send it to me, either Vahn D.M. on LinkedIn or directly through my email, and I'll send you a copy of the book straight away. So that's it for me, Shahade. Catch you in the next six hours. Thanks for listening.