LinkedIn Riches Episode 2 Transcript John: LinkedIn Riches, Episode 2 ABC. A, always, B, be, C closing. Always be closing. Always be closing. Male 1: Surely you can't be serious. Male 2: I am serious. And don't call me Shirley. Male 3: Put that coffee down. Male 4: Coffee's for closers only. Male 5: Come after me! I'm a man! I'm forty! John: Welcome back to the LinkedIn Riches podcast, Episode 2. I love it! I hope you guys are excited. My name is John Nemo. This is a podcast that is all about helping you discover one key thing: how to use LinkedIn to generate leads, right? And when you generate leads on LinkedIn, you're going to add clients. You're going to add customers. And you're going to increase revenue. Now, if that sounds agreeable to you, keep listening. So I want to start this episode with a story of why I was running around a boardroom at about 9:30 in the morning, high-fiving people as I sprinted around the table, pumping my fist like Arsenio Hall, whoo whoo whoo. Remember Arsenio? I'm dating myself very badly. But those of you that don't remember, Google Aresenio Hall Show, and you'll see the fist pump that I just referenced very poorly here on my podcast. I was running around high-fiving people because I was doing a LinkedIn training onsite. And I had this awesome, real time example of the
power of generating leads on LinkedIn, how instantaneous it is, how quickly, how easy it is to generate leads. So let me set this up. What I did was I was doing a training for a company. They're a vendor for a certain industry, and they want to reach high-powered consultants that get into these big companies and then deploy the type of product that this vendor supplies. So this vendor's goal was, "Hey, we want to build relationships and get on the radar of these high-end consultants so that they put our product in the companies, because these are hundreds of thousands of dollar contracts and this and that. We have such a hard time getting their attention. We can find them on LinkedIn, sort of, but what do we do? Do we just send them a generic invite? How do we bridge that gap?" And I'm like, "This is so easy, you guys. Watch!" So what I did was I showed them one of my favorite techniques, which was first, going on LinkedIn and joining a group where all of these high-powered consultants were hanging out, because one of the great things about LinkedIn that you'll discover is the professional groups. There's almost three million different professional groups on LinkedIn. And if you think about it, it's basically like categorizing everyone at a dinner party. So if you walked into a dinner party or social gathering and there were big signs hanging down from the ceiling, maybe one said, "Consultants, gather here." And in another corner of the room, it said, "Business owners, gather here." And then in the center of the room, there was a sign that said, "Administrative assistants, gather here." That's how LinkedIn is. Imagine walking into a party and having everyone colorcoded and sorted by job title and sorted by industry standing together talking to each other, because that's what you can do with these LinkedIn groups.
So I had, in real time, as we're doing the training, I said, "Okay, give me access to one of you sales guys' profiles." So we're like, okay, and we logged in, and I'm doing it on the big screen in the conference room. I'm like, "Watch this". So we join one of the consultant groups, and I go in and ask the sales guy. And now that I'm accepted as a member, I can click on the members tab of my professional group, and it pulls up 10,000 different consultants. Well, that's pretty hard. I don't want to try to start messaging them all at once. So I sorted within the member tab. Once you click on that in the group, there's a search box, and you can then type in search terms to narrow the group of members that it pulls up for you. So you can sort it by location. You can put in Chicago or Minneapolis. You can sort it by industry or job title or certain product experience. So I said, "Okay, let's sort this by the exact product that you guys are looking to sell, as far as the type of product. And let's see which consultants are selling that or doing training on that in these big companies. So I did that, and I got this list of 100 consultants that use that product or deploy that product at the companies they consult at. So I'm like, "Watch this." So the first person on the list, what I did was, using this sales guy's profile, I just opened up the first prospect's profile on LinkedIn, spent about ten seconds looking at it, saw that he was in Madison, Wisconsin, and saw that he went to the University of Wisconsin. Okay, great! That's all I need. So now, I go back into the group, let me explain, and since we're both members of the same group, there's a functionality in LinkedIn that allows you to send them a direct message. You don't even have to be connected to each other. You just get to send them a free InMail. That's one of things LinkedIn will try to sell you, or upsell you, is these InMails, "Oh, message people you're not connected to. Pay extra
money." You don't need to do that. Just join the same group that they're in, and then you can send them messages from within the group member page. So, I go to the first guy, and I did one of my key things, which is send them a personalized message that's not about work. So I sent the guy a message, and the headline was "Bucky Badger?" Now, if you know anything about college athletics or the University of Wisconsin, Bucky Badger is their mascot. So imagine being a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. You're a high-powered consultant. And you're used to, on LinkedIn, only getting messages that are all work-related or product-related and very stiff and formal. And then one comes across your LinkedIn inbox with the subject line "Bucky Badger?" Right? So right away, we had caught the guy's attention. And then in the body of the message, I had this sales guy say, "Hey, Joe," or whatever the consultant's name was, "had to ask you, are you a huge Badgers fan? If so, I reserve the right to revoke this message." And I was poking fun at him because we're in Minnesota. So the Minnesota Golden Gophers, go Gophers! Minnesota and Wisconsin, we hate each other. I don't know if you're aware of that. We hate each other. We are bitter, bitter, sports rivals. Minnesota, of course, is better, because that's where I am. The Gophers, the Vikings... Oh wait, we can't talk about football. We have no authority. But I immediately knew, just my sales brain said, "If this guy went to Wisconsin, he had a good time there. He knows Bucky Badger. He's going to at least open the email out of curiosity." That's one of the keys to getting your messages opened on LinkedIn is there's two things you can do. One is utility. Show them something useful in your subject line. The other one that I love doing is curiosity. People will always open an email if the
subject line makes them curious, even better if the subject line is about something from their life. So again, he opens the message because it says "Bucky Badger," and then we get into a fun joke to begin like, "Hahaha, Minnesota vs. Wisconsin." And then I get into the gist of the sales guy's pitch or ask, which is, "Hey, I work for company X. We supply product Y. I see that you're a consultant doing this and this and this, and you may need product Y from time to time. Hey, just wanted to get on your radar. Would love to chat. Find out if you ever have a need for product Y. We would love to tell you more about our product Y and why it's really good, blah blah blah blah blah. Thanks. And by the way, go Gophers!" A little cheap shot at the end. And then I went to the next person, and I opened up the next person on the list profile, looked through, and saw that they loved downhill skiing. Because on your LinkedIn profiles, you'll see people will list hobbies and interests. They'll list personal things. My big strategy with LinkedIn, my big piece of advice for this episode is when you're connecting with people on LinkedIn, when you're sending messages, send it about non-work stuff. I don't know about you, but I can talk football all day long. If you send me a LinkedIn message that says "Vikings?" I'm immediately going to open it. I'm immediately going to want to know what you're saying about my favorite football team. And chances are I'm going to reply because I'm passionate about it. Or if you send me a message about guitar or my other interests, I'm going to engage with you. And again, see what I was doing? The second person, I sent a message, and the subject line was "Best Place to Ski?" And that was a LinkedIn message to this other prospect, this other consultant, who listed downhill skiing as a hobby. And then the opening message from the sales guy was very simple. It was, "Hey, I see
you love downhill skiing. What's the best place to ski? I've been thinking about going on a va-." I ask the sales guy, "Do you ski at all? Are you thinking about doing a vacation?" He's like, "Yeah, I'd love to. Maybe Spring's coming up, blah blah blah." I'm like, "Great! Well, let's ask this guy". So I asked in the beginning of the message, "Best place to ski? Any advice on where I should take my family this year blah blah blah?" And then I went in, and I just pasted in again the ask, "Hey, I'm with company X. We sell product Y. I see that you're a consultant who uses product Y from time to time with your consulting gigs. Just wanted to get on your radar, let you know A, B, and C about our company. If you ever want to connect and talk more, would love to." Right? Boom! And then on to the third person, opened up another new profile, again from that member list and looked for something to personalize it with and repeated the process. So I did that in a span of probably ten minutes with five prospects. Just opened it up, sent a personal message. While I was doing that, I then finished, started answering some more questions. And the guy started getting alerts on his LinkedIn profile on the big screen. I'm like, "Oh, what's this?" People were instantly writing back! The first guy, Bucky Badger, writes back. He's like, "Aaah! Go Badgers! Yeah, we're going to take the Gophers down and duh duh duh duh duh. Hey, I looked at your profile. Yeah, we should talk. I've been thinking about product Y, and I might have an opportunity coming up. So yeah, let's set up a time to talk." Everyone in the room's like "Oh my gosh! What?! I can't believe it! We got one to respond to us!" And then the next email comes in and like, "Yeah, love skiing. Dude, you totally have to go out to Vermont. That's the best place to go. Nobody
ever does it. And by the way, yeah, that's interesting. Tell me more about your company." Boom! There's two in a row. The third message comes in. The same thing, they responded around the personal, non-work thing. And then because my client that I was training was a good fit for that consultant, because my client had something that consultant could use and presented it in a way to the consultant that was like, "Hey, this will help you." The consultant wanted to talk. So, they're all excited. I'm running around high-fiving people. They're like, "I can't believe it! Did you set that up? Do you know all these people?" I'm like, "No, this is the power of LinkedIn." And I found out later, a week later, they already closed one of those guys and got revenue out of it. So that was just a simple, ten-minute way to use LinkedIn. And it's all about personalizing those invites, personalizing those messages around non-work stuff. I do this all the time. It works like a charm. So now, I want you take this a step further. I want you to go over to linkedinriches.com/2. Not that number two! Get your mind out of the gutter. See, I have three little kids. I hear "number two," and I know what that means. Anyway, for those of you non-parents, go to linkedinriches.com/2, just the number two, and you'll see some scripts that I use. And these are scripts that I normally only make available in my premium training. So you're going to get one or two of these for free. And it's going to really walk you through the anatomy of these messages that I'm talking about, how to personalize it, how to do something really unique and get memorable and get an instant response from people.
So go over there. Check that out. One of the other great things about going over to the linkedinriches.com website is you can leave me audio messages. So if you have a question for another episode, for a future episode, you want answered, leave me an audio message. You just literally click a button on your computer or your phone or whatever. You can record a message. It goes directly to me. You can leave comments on there. There's all kinds of other free downloads. I should say get on the email list. That's where I give you all my best tips on how to leverage LinkedIn, to gets leads, to get revenue, to get clients. So make sure you get on the email list. linkedinriches.com. Sign up. Go get them. I will talk more with you soon. That's the end of Episode 2. I hope you guys are loving this. If you are, I need a favor. I need a favor. I need you to leave me a review on itunes. The only way to get this podcast heard and to get it out there and to get it discovered is itunes reviews. That's a huge, huge, huge factor in how they rank podcasts and how they show up. So if you've gotten any value out of this, any value at all, please leave me an itunes review. Please. I'm begging ya! Glory! All right? And I will talk more with you soon. Thank you so much for listening. This is John Nemo, and I will talk with you again on the next episode.