Welcome to the Virtual Antics Podcast, where we help entrepreneurs streamline their business to six figures and beyond. These short, sweet and info-packed episodes will inspire, educate and leave you feeling motivated to take one more step forward in your business. So put down your never-ending to-do list, because in this podcast, we are interviewing the best of the best in the entrepreneurial world as they spill their secrets to success. This podcast is sponsored by Nendora, the all-in-one software for entrepreneurs to grow their business, with unlimited landing pages, automations, emails and text campaigns, and so much more. I'm your host, natalie Guzman. Now let's get into it.
Natalie GuzmanWelcome to Virtual Antics, the podcast where we explore the dynamic world of business automation, virtual assistance and entrepreneurship. I'm your host, natalie Guzman. Today, we have an exceptional guest on the call. It's Colin Hirdman. His entrepreneurial journey began just a week after graduating college and he has since built and sold multiple businesses. As a co-founder of Monkey Island Ventures, named after a childhood park super cool. Colin and his partners have created over a dozen successful software and service over the past years. Now Colin is focused on their newest venture, rainmaker, which helps founders, business coaches and sales teams grow their LinkedIn networks, leads and sales through their innovative, authentic engine. Colin's insights into entrepreneurship and LinkedIn strategies are sure to inspire and provide valuable takeaways. Welcome, Colin. How are you doing today?
Colin HirdmanI'm doing great. Natalie, Thanks again for having me. I'm really excited.
Natalie GuzmanI'm so excited, like I told you a little bit before, this is that I really brought you on for me because I love LinkedIn. I think it's such a cool tool, but I'm not utilizing it for my business. I'm like if I'm needing this, then my listeners are totally.
Colin HirdmanAbsolutely, yeah. No, I think there's some educational stuff that I'll be able to share today that your audience will be able to put into practice later today or right after they end up listening to it.
Natalie GuzmanAll right, so let's get into it. So how'd you get into LinkedIn? I know you own several other companies. Is that kind of what brought you on to the venture?
Colin HirdmanYeah, it's certainly been kind of a winding road.
Colin HirdmanSo, yeah, in 2007 is when I started Monkey Island Ventures with Josh and Zach. We've all known each other since we were about five years old and it is, in fact, named after a park we played at when we were kids named Monkey Island, located in St Paul, minnesota, and yeah, so we built a bunch of different SaaS and service companies over the years and probably about five years ago I was doing a lot of like cold email outreach and LinkedIn automation and just really kind of working across those two avenues and LinkedIn. I ended up realizing I was getting more and more traction with, and so over the last six months I have really focused in on LinkedIn and that's when we started Rainmaker and that's what my entire, 100% of my role is focused on growing that as a business and it's been an absolute blast. I love it. And so I'm ready to kind of share the way that I think about Rainmaker If there's any specific questions you have, or else I can kind of get into the way that I think about it.
Natalie GuzmanYeah, I'm really interested because one of the things I've heard about is that you know we always say, try to find you, go to the social media site where your target's right, and a lot of us. Our target market is business owners and we're business owners. That's on LinkedIn, and I've heard through my research that LinkedIn is one of the most underrated social media platforms, especially if you're using it to highlight your business. Is that correct?
Colin HirdmanOh, no, no, no question. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, linkedin is still a social network it's all human beings but they are there for business purposes, and so it's really the perfect platform to to grow, as long as you stay authentic. And I think I bring in an educational mindset. Some of the stats that I talk about are, you know, like I think three new people are joining LinkedIn every second, and decision makers are on LinkedIn. I think you'd be really surprised at how many of your prospects I'm talking generally are on LinkedIn, and you know, most people are lurkers, regardless of the network. Very few are the ones creating content, and most people are lurkers, regardless of the network, very few are the ones creating content. So there are a lot of active people on LinkedIn daily, weekly and monthly. That are your prospects.
Natalie GuzmanSo what? Yeah, you can kind of take it from here, kind of give us a tee on how business owners can really use LinkedIn to leverage.
Colin HirdmanNope, that sounds great. So the way that I think about LinkedIn is on three layers, okay. The first layer is philosophy, the second layer is audience and the last year are the campaign. So, philosophically, what I found, you have to come at LinkedIn from a mindset of being authentic number one. So you have to be authentic to who you are as an individual and communicate in the way that you'd normally communicate with people. And then you also have to be authentic to the brand, or brands that you're representing. Okay, so if you're coming in authentically, you're already coming into it the right way.
Colin HirdmanBut the other thing to really realize is that nobody wants to be sold on LinkedIn. Okay, we've all gotten, you know, those spammy messages and all that. You won't ever succeed by doing that on LinkedIn. So nobody wants to be sold. But virtually everyone is willing to be educated on LinkedIn, and so that's really that educational mindset that you have to come into LinkedIn with. And the last thing I'll say is that if you're a founder, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a salesperson, it's really incumbent on you, it's your responsibility, to understand what it is that your prospects want to be educated on. What are their pain points, where they're willing to learn and, more specifically, where are they willing to learn from you? And if you're not able to figure that out, you're going to have a lot of struggle on LinkedIn. So, again, it's up to you as the founder or the marketer, as a salesperson, to figure that specific thing out so you can approach them with an educational mindset. You know, one thing that shifted a lot for me over the last probably six months is that I'm spending a lot more time thinking about how I can engage my audience quickly with educational materials and less so around, like the individual posts that I'm making and seeing, like how many likes or comments I'm getting, because I really want to hone in on how I can grow a larger first degree network of good quality prospects, but I also want to generate leads and sales, again, all doing this with authenticity and education in mind. Okay, so that's the philosophy that I think everyone needs to have when they come into LinkedIn. Then the second one is audience, and the way that I'm building out audiences for myself and our Rainmaker clients is most of the time it's through sales navigation, and I'm generally able to build good audiences that perform well just off of that.
Colin HirdmanBut one of the things that I've been thinking about the last couple of months is around audience intent. So how do you better see prospects that are already further down the pipeline, further down your sales funnel, and how do you identify them so you can reach out to them and hopefully help them make a purchase decision soon? So one of the things that I think about are two areas I'll get into right now. One is LinkedIn events. Okay, so if one of your competitors or if a industry, association or organization is putting on a LinkedIn event that has to do with what you do specifically or what you might do tangentially, if you go and you press the attend button and you attend that event as well, you are now able to see the entire audience that is also attending that event. So one of the things that you could do is you could say, okay, I'm going to attend this event. Now I can see everyone else that's also attending the event, and I want to build an audience of all the people that are attending this event that are also business owners of these size companies or within these industries. I know they're attending this event because they're interested in this topic and if I can help solve for that topic, I would want to create first connections with those kinds of people as well. So that's one shortcut around audience intent.
Colin HirdmanAnother one would be using a person as a proxy. So one of the things that I've done is I identified a few people that are on LinkedIn and they publish a lot of content about how to succeed on LinkedIn, and I reached out and created a first connection. Well, I can go into Sales Navigator or LinkedIn search and say, ok, here's this person, I want to see everyone. That is a first connection to this person, but as a second connection to me, that is also a founder or a sales executive or a business coach, right, and so I know that they're probably following this person on LinkedIn because they want to learn how to grow on LinkedIn. Well, if they want to learn how to grow on LinkedIn, then they're probably would be interested in Rainmaker. So that's another way of like kind of short cutting into an audience is using a person as a proxy.
Colin HirdmanSo we've talked about philosophy, we've talked about audience and audience intent, and then the final one, our campaign. And the way that I think about it is I'm typically, for myself and for clients, reaching out to 25 new people a day, monday through Friday during normal working hours 125 people a week, 500 people a month and, across myself and all of my clients, getting between like a 15 and 50% connection rate. Okay, so that that by growing out your first connection audience of prospects, that's giving you an opportunity, that when you post content or when you create events, that you have a larger audience to pull into seeing your, your content or attending your events, and you know, a lot of times. Another foundational thing is we'll plug in like a drip message campaign to those new connections. But again, this is where you have to experiment. But you also have to come with like a go-giver mindset like how can I benefit this person? So I'm imploring everyone on that the message that you and just really quick, when we do the outreach, we're not sending a message when we do the initial outreach connection, Because I think even that can feel a little bit weird, a little bit spammy. You know, if you say, hey, I want to connect with you because we went to the same college or I want to connect with you because I think your content is, you know, is really great or something you know that's already putting off, you know, some red flags to people, the number one reason why people connect with each other on LinkedIn is mutual connection, and so that's one of the kind of filters that we look at. So, but that first message after someone connects with you should just be like a thank you message. You shouldn't be trying to help them, you shouldn't be trying to sell them, you shouldn't do anything, but just have a nice thank you for connecting message, and then what we'll do is we'll follow up, like three to seven days later, if they haven't responded to, with another message. So I'll give you an example One of my clients owns a law firm and is breaking into the blockchain space, and the follow-up message to his first message would say something to the effect of like hi, natalie, I find myself more and more writing about the intersection of blockchain and law, and I'm wondering if there's any topics you'd have interest in me writing about.
Colin HirdmanOkay, so a couple of things are happening there. Number one knows that for blockchain founders, there's a huge pain point around law and block okay, and that those founders are always looking for more information around you know what what they can and can't be doing here in the United States around blockchain. Number two he has established himself as an expert, as a lawyer and he's writing about topics and he's opened up dialogue now for them to respond back to him with yeah, I really love it. You know if you might write about this or I'm having problems here, could you help me? Could you write about this? Right? So he's really opening up an area for conversation. He's giving an opportunity to write about these topics based off of feedback he's getting.
So those are some examples of just authenticity around your outreach and your connections. One minor detail, just kind of around like hygiene of your LinkedIn account, is that after 30 days we rescind the LinkedIn connection request if they don't connect, and then there's a three-week period of time that you can't go out and invite them again, but after that three weeks you can invite them to connect again, and so you're kind of creating these pools of people that you could reach out to again in the future. But a lot of times people aren't connecting back. It's not that they don't want to connect with you or they think you're a bad person. A lot of times is they're not paying attention and your invite might get pushed down in their alert. So those are a couple of just kind of general things. So maybe I'll pause right here and see if you have any specific questions. Um cause, there's another area that I think would be of high value to talk about from a campaign's perspective, but I'll stop here and see what questions.
Natalie GuzmanYeah, could you just explain for listeners? Um, I understand what sales navigator is, but can you give a review of what it is and why business owners might want to utilize?
Colin HirdmanYeah for sure.
Colin HirdmanYeah, so sales navigator is a tool created by LinkedIn that you have to pay for and I think it's like around $100 a month, something like that and it allows you to build audiences of prospects and then you can save these prospects to lists, and you can do that through accounts, you know, which are. You know the businesses. You can also do it across leads which are people, and there's a bunch of different filters that you can use. Do it across leads which are people, and there's a bunch of different filters that you can use, and there's a bunch of ways that you can kind of use account lists in lead lists and really continue to refine down the types of people you want to get in front of. With a lot of my clients, they don't have sales navigators, so I'll just use mine to build the audiences, but sales navigator is a great tool for anybody that wants to really hone in on the types of prospects that they want to get in front of. Awesome, yeah. So another really great path, I think, for any founder that wants to go down the educational path, is using LinkedIn Live, and the benefit of LinkedIn Live streams is really what I want to talk about here, and so I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, natalie, after this, I'll send you a PF. It's just a one pager and it just shows my entire process, from beginning to end, of how I create these live streams. But they are really, really valuable, and here's why. So the first thing I do is identify an audience, right, so I create an audience and sales navigator, and then I'm using the same topic, which is learn how to grow your LinkedIn network leads and sales using authentic automation, and I do this live stream once a week. Okay, and so I'm using the same content about once a week, so I'm not having to create all this new content all the time.
Colin HirdmanBut then what I'll do is the first slide of the event is I will put you know for founders or for sales executives, or, you know, for business coaches, and then, when I identify that audience, I will create a LinkedIn live stream event and then I will send all of those people an invite, a LinkedIn invite, to that event. Okay, and so when they go to their alerts, they'll see, oh, colin Herdman has invited you to this LinkedIn event and they'll click through it, and then they'll get to the event page and they'll see. You know what my event, my live stream is all about, and then they can choose to press the attend button or not when they get there. If they choose to click the attend button, you know a number of really kind of magical things happen. Number one you have verified that your topic is relevant and that your audience is relevant. If you are pushing out this LinkedIn event to an audience and nobody's responding, then one of two things is off or both your audience or your topic. Okay, so the these live stream events allow you to experiment a little bit on like topics and um um prospect groups that you'd want to target. Uh, the other thing on the backend of I'm clicking the attend button that is truly magical is that when they do that, they are in those uncertain terms saying that they um see you as a thought leader. They trust your business enough to press the attend button so you know who they are and you're creating enough of an emotional connection that they're publicly giving you all of these cues.
Colin HirdmanAnd so what will happen after I do the live stream is that I will follow up with each attendee and I'll thank them for attending the event or registering for the event and say if you happen to miss the event. Here's a link to the recording and I'll point them back to the LinkedIn event page where the where the recording is. But then I'll follow up and say you know if if you're, if you're interested in having a one on one strategy session to talk about LinkedIn and more. You know. Here's a link to my calendar strategy session to talk about LinkedIn and more. You know. Here's a link to my calendar.
Colin HirdmanSo what you can see is that I have gone from creating a discrete audience and identifying a topic for that audience.
Colin HirdmanI have gotten them to click the attend button and I've gotten to the point where I can send them a calendar and it doesn't feel icky to me or salesy. And it doesn't feel icky or salesy to them either, and it's because I am sharing my knowledge around LinkedIn and it has driven prospects and it has driven clients for me in the last three months. So I'm actually closing a new client tomorrow that I did a live stream with two weeks ago. So I would highly encourage your audience to look into that and, like I said, I'll send you a PDF of my whole process and if someone wants to get that from you or reach out to me, they can certainly do that as well. But at the end of the day, what Rainmaker is doing is we are really just automating the best practice manual actions that everyone should be taking on LinkedIn. So it's the exact opposite of anything spammy. We're just bringing a little bit more strategy and scale to your process and ability, I think, to thrive on LinkedIn.
Natalie GuzmanI absolutely love that. Thank you so much for sharing all that knowledge. I know I'm going to go and apply that this week. I think that's a genius. I really like everything they explained using the live events and using that as a way to's a genius. I really like everything they explained using like the live events and using that as a way to build a genuine. So thank you so much for sharing. And where can we find more about you and your business?
Colin HirdmanYeah, so you can certainly look me up on LinkedIn at Colin Herdman, h-i-r-d-m-a-n. And then Rainmaker is rainmakergrowscom, and one of the pages on the site is called campaigns, and if you go there, you can see 12 different campaign types that you should be considering running on LinkedIn, and all of them but one you can go do yourself. You don't, you don't need me a rainmaker for.
Natalie GuzmanAwesome, I'll make sure I put that all that in there as well, but thank you so much for coming on virtual antics. It has been a pleasure having you, thanks so much, Natalie. And we'll talk to you guys next.