Isaac Anderson: Generating High Quality B2B Leads Through LinkedIn | SaaS District

Hello, hello everyone. Welcome once again to another episode of SaaS District. I'm your host, Akeel Jabbar. As many of you experience with your own business, with any service or SaaS business, Leads are considered the blood of your business. On today's episode, we'll be talking about how to generate high-quality B2B leads through LinkedIn for your startup. With that, we have our expert guest, Isaac Anderson, with us. Isaac has his LinkedIn Industry Top 1% SSI certification, meaning he's an expert in everything LinkedIn, including marketing, consultation, conversion optimization, and business strategy. Isaac was the former COO at an online marketing agency, TEV Marketing, where they specialize in LinkedIn, AdWords, and SEO. Isaac is currently the CEO of Zeko, zeko.io, a platform that uses LinkedIn to create real meaningful relationship between clients and customers so that businesses can improve their ROI. He is also a LinkedIn instructor and educator at Data Driven U, which is where I found him, an online training program platform for people who want to master the skills of digital marketing. He has a course, a video course called LinkedIn Jumpstart, which helps other business owners how to use LinkedIn to do market research and create the relationship-driven leads, which we'll cover more on today's conversation. So welcome, Izett. Thanks for taking the time today and glad to have you on our show.

Thank you for having me. So I think that we are going to have a really good time geeking out about LinkedIn.

Love it. Can't wait.

All right.

Is there— did I speak enough about your background, or is there more you want to kind of get into and tell us, you know, about your background?

No, that, that's great. I'm most excited just to talk about LinkedIn and talk shop.

Okay, let's do it.

Cool.

Before we get into that, I'd love to hear though, like, you know, from your entrepreneurial journey, you know, how did you kind of get started to, you know, building, you know, Zico to where it is today?

Sure. So I, I feel like the word entrepreneur is kind of overglamorized. If you ever have friends that started a company, they'll be honest with you and they'll go, oh my gosh, it is so much work, long hours, delayed returns. But no one ever says that because they want to save face, they want to look good. So I feel like most people that wind up being called an entrepreneur, I don't feel like they wake up one day and they're like, I'm going to suddenly have a lifestyle change, right? It's mostly like a personality type that is presented with an opportunity And then they have to decide if they want to take the plunge, right? And then taking the plunge is what gives you that E word. But for, for me, I mean, I always have enjoyed learning. I enjoy building things. I get bored, you know, and so that's kind of just how I am. And then when I was working in the past at a couple different startups, the one before I started ZECO, you just kind of like realize one day Is, is there a career here for me? What am I doing? You know, and so I just, I decided where I was at, uh, when I had learned a ton about marketing, I was just like, man, I'm self-motivated. I, I've learned a lot. There's a niche here that I see major potential in. I'm just going to take the plunge and start my own thing. And it's been, it's been hard and awesome all at the same time.

It's Yeah, sounds about right.

Yep.

Cool. So let's dive into kind of the LinkedIn marketing stuff here. Let's go specifically for SaaS companies here, since that's most of our audience here. What are the first steps or research resources if somebody is just looking to get started with a, you know, LinkedIn campaign? What do you suggest to them?

Sure. So this is, that's a really good question. I would say before you consider being proactive with using LinkedIn, you need to do almost like an internal audit, because that's one, one thing that I see a lot of companies not do. And then because they didn't like take inventory and be smart about what they're going to do, their strategies flop. So even when we're doing a sales meeting, I need to vet companies. And so I'll kind of give you some of the under-the-hood stuff of what we're looking for, because that tells me if you're even ready to do LinkedIn.

Right.

And again, there are lots of different ways We probably should have said this earlier. There's a lot of different ways that you can make money on LinkedIn, right? A lot of different strategies that can genuinely work. I mean, there's— you can do tons of content marketing, you can do paid ads, you can do direct one-on-one prospecting. So our wheelhouse, just to kind of give the framework for what I'm about to say, so our wheelhouse is find your target audience, the individuals who work at the accounts. that you wanna sell to, and then surround yourself with as many of those people as possible. Get those individual decision makers who work at the companies that you wanna sell to, get them to know you, like you, trust you. And as their companies move through the sales cycle, when they're ready to buy, you are the person that they know, like, and trust. So that's the kind of the framework for what we're doing there. So the thing with that is there's a hidden time that I don't hear a lot of people Talking about when they're doing direct prospecting on LinkedIn, the hidden— or the hidden cost, sorry. The hidden cost is time.

Right.

That's the one thing, because even if you pay, like, I wouldn't pay for premium. I don't think premium is worth the cost. Spend $20 more a month and get Sales Navigator. It's a totally different platform. Targeting is way better. Lots of reasons there. But the hidden cost is time, even though Sales Nav is cheap, right? So B2B, your leads, if you're doing anything like Google Ads or whatever, it's going to be expensive. Sales Navigator is cheap. $80 a month. I mean, that's like 10 clicks on Google Ads. So it's relatively quite, quite cheap, but the hidden cost is time. And because people aren't aware of that hidden cost with time, that's what really ends up stinging them in the butt. And so here's, here's why, all to kind of come full circle. Before you decide you want to pull the trigger and do one-on-one prospecting on LinkedIn, What you want to do is figure out what's my annual client value or your lifetime client value. You have to put a dollar or whatever, wherever you put a number on that.

Yeah.

And a good rule of thumb for what we do, if you're doing the organic one-on-one prospecting, if it's going to be less than— if you're doing it yourself, less than $5,000, it's probably, probably that's too cheap. Might not be worth your time investment, right? If it's— if you're wanting to work with a service provider, it seems like the sweet spot is $8,000 to $10,000. And so usually if you're into B2B, that's not an issue, but just something to keep in mind, especially if you're selling like— I don't know, if you're selling something that's a subscription, it's $100 a month. What's that worth over a year? Like $1,200? How much time? That's where people don't get is like $1,200 is great, but how much time do you want to sink into that to get one close? Not a lot if it's just $1,200.

That's right.

You know, so that's where you need to figure out what your annual, your lifetime value is. You have to be able to identify your target audience. You'll be shocked how many successful companies still can't do that. I'll be talking to a company, they do millions. And I'm like, tell me about the companies that you work with. And they, they, they can't. And I'm thinking to myself, how did you get this far, man? But they do. But there, you have to be able to, to describe the type of account or the company that you want to sell to. And you have to be able to describe the individuals who work at those companies. Because when you're on LinkedIn, you're not talking to a company, you're talking to a person, right? And so people will say, oh, we work with companies that do this much revenue and this many headcount in this industry, in this location. I'm like, that's great. Who are the people though that are either your cheerleaders or the decision makers at those companies? Those are the people that you talked to, that you have to talk to. You can't send a connection request to a company, right? There's no contact form on LinkedIn. It's A 2-way dialogue. So you have to be able to describe the accounts, you have to be able to describe the individual leads. And if you can't do that, when you— you'll get— you end up creating a list that you want to sell to, but it's going to be not very focused. And because time is the hidden cost, without it being a very targeted list, because you don't know who to target, you can just blow through so much time, it's not gonna be worth it. So make sure before you pull the trigger with doing LinkedIn direct prospecting, you have to know your target audience. You have to be able to find them on LinkedIn. You have to be able to know what your sales messaging is to that target audience. Otherwise, again, you're just going to be wasting a lot of time saying something that no one cares about. And I always tell people too, when you first start, it's, it's going to suck. So don't feel like, don't feel like it has to be perfect before you pull the trigger. Just get something that is structured enough to work but loose enough to change and evolve as, as you release it into the wild. So annual client value, figure that out first. Make sure it's at more than $5K. Make sure that you can describe your target audience, specifically the people at the accounts you want to sell to. Make sure you can find them on LinkedIn and then know what you should say to them. Those are the— oh, and also, sir, one more thing. Super critical. You've got to have your sales process set up. Right. So make sure you have, especially if there's a lot of startup companies here, please, pretty please just get a CRM. I don't care. Like use HubSpot free, get something. Because if you're using a spreadsheet, that might work up until the point where you start putting people into a funnel.

Right.

If you have, You know, 20, 30 people that get plugged into your funnel month 1, month 2, that turns into 60, 90. Pretty soon you're like, oh my gosh, this spreadsheet is not cutting it. People are falling through the cracks.

Right.

So make sure that you have a CRM set up. Just get something started. Make sure you have your sales process ironed out, even if it's just a little. Like, what are the email templates you send when someone asks for more information? Piece of paper and a pen and just draw it out. And then so that you know what your next actions should be, should be. Otherwise you can be super efficient and hit a home run on LinkedIn. But if you don't have that CRM set up, if you don't have your sales funnel mapped out, if you don't know what to do, people are going to fall through the cracks and your cost per lead might be low, but your cost per acquisition is high because you didn't close very many people. And that's where I see a lot of people get hung up too. So just make sure you do those. It's kind of just like business 101, but a lot of people are like, I wanna grow my company, I just want leads. And they go to LinkedIn and they won't do all those things, and then they end up getting cynical because they wasted a bunch of time.

They can't close their leads. Is there a certain stage, so you have this kind of threshold, okay, I'm above $5,000 in terms of lifetime value or ACV. Is there a certain stage that you recommend people start exploring LinkedIn as a sales and lead gen channel, or like, Or even if you're just starting off, would you recommend that? Or, you know, should you have a little enough traction?

So are you asking a stage in their company? Like just getting— yeah. So great question. I would say this, at every single point in your life and the life of your company, you need to know the right people. The type of people that bring you the most value that might change as time goes on. It's always going to be a good idea to be surrounded with potential leads. It just is. But you'll find, you know, as your company grows and you are doing less of the sales, I mean, some people, they'll move— usually the owner, the founder starts doing sales and then eventually they'll pass that role off. So in that scenario, they're less concerned about talking to leads because they never do that. But they still want to make strategic alliances with other companies. They might want to know people that they might want to hire, all kinds of stuff. So start yesterday, start using LinkedIn yesterday. Just know who is going to bring you the most value. And for— I'm guessing for this podcast audience is going to be leads. So start, start immediately.

Okay. And then, you know, you build a list, super qualified, targeted, you know, you have the ideal profile size. You can either go towards LinkedIn and start going through them one by one, or you can throw them into cold email as another avenue people use. How do response rates and would you say conversions compare if you're comparing those 2 channels?

So that's a great question. I'll tell you this as a kind of qualifier. Cold email is not our wheelhouse. So I don't really have any firm numbers on the cold email, but I I can tell you what we commonly see on LinkedIn. So if you're an email guru, you can kind of cross-check there. So what we usually see— it does depend. This is going to be a broad stroke.

Sure.

Because the type of individual that you're talking to may be more or less likely to be on LinkedIn. I'll give the example. If you're a construction worker, you're probably not on LinkedIn all the time. If you work in HR, you probably are. So who you're talking to, there's a really big That's a big variation there, big wildcard. The industry, the location, if you're in a big metro, people get that they don't wanna sit in traffic, they would rather do it digital. If you're talking to someone in like Iowa, or they're like, I'll just drive across town, I don't care.

Right.

So the engagement rate really, it just is so, it varies so much. Anyways, with that in mind, broad strokes, we usually see about a third of the people of connection requests get accepted. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. Usually if you're at the very beginning of a list, it's higher because LinkedIn's putting the best people first. And then so you might say, wow, I'm getting like a 75% acceptance rate. Isaac's an idiot. I'm amazing. And then you get to like, you know, page 50 of 60 and nobody is doing anything. You're like, oh yes, that makes sense now. So we call that list decay. The farther back you go in the list, the less quality it is, the less engagement. So usually though, once you go through the whole list, you're going to shoot for about 30% of people will accept the connect and then about 50% will engage in messaging.

Okay.

And then about, about 5% of your total network will convert to sales funnel. And then if half of people are not replying, so if you exclude them, that 5% turns into about 10%. And then depending on what, depending on what your call to action is, that's, that's a big variable there as well. So if your call to action is more top of funnel, maybe more educational, you know, you're gonna have higher conversion rates because it's less of a commitment. If your call to action is, I want to do a phone call with you, it's gonna be less because people are like, whoa.

Yeah.

I've messages on LinkedIn and now you want to talk to me on the phone? This is 2020. And that's too awkward for me.

Yeah.

So anyways, but those are kind of the common KPIs we see. So I'll just blast through those one more time. Usually about a third of invitations get accepted. Of the people that accept, about half engage by messaging, and then about 5% of your total network, 10% of active, end up converting to sales funnel. And then the higher conversion rates get higher The easier the call to action is, the less commitment.

Makes sense. So what I've seen is, you know, I've seen other LinkedIn lead generation agencies where they approach like a numbers game. So they'll throw, you know, say 100 a day or whatever, 200 a day, and whatever the limit is on LinkedIn. And so you kind of deploy a kind of slightly different approach where you're a lot more targeted, you know, higher quality leads, you speak, take more time to kind of approach it. What's your reason for using that approach? Yeah. And what do you think works best?

Yeah, great question. Okay, I'll answer your question with 2 questions. Okay, but you have to be honest with me.

Okay.

And then I'll banter a little bit. So question number 1, Akeel, are you— you have to be honest for your whole audience here. He's like, oh my gosh, what is he about to say? Are you a person or are you a number?

Tough one. I'll go with person.

Okay, see, he's a person. I can verify you look real. And would you rather be treated as a person or a number? You'd rather be treated as a person for sure.

Yeah.

Human beings want to be shown, you know, dignity and respect. And there, that's what earlier when we were talking about time being the hidden cost there, there's this thing that I call the automation temptation.

Yep. Yes.

The cheaper the product or service that you're selling, the lower your ROI is going to be. And so what happens is, as you're— if you— for everyone listening, it's like my hand is going down here. As your sale, your product cost goes down, you feel this pressure to be more efficient, eventually using automation. And that's one reason why, is because there's that hidden cost of time there. But if you are selling an expensive service or product, it is a high trust— there's a high trust sale. And the guy that went to Harvard and he's got his Harvard business degree on the wall behind him, he is going to sniff out some stupid auto-posted messaging sequence. He's going to know.

True.

He's just going to know. And That what happens is because that's become very wholesale, very common the last few years, and there's a lot more tools available for, for message automation now, what's happened is it's created a lot of cynicism because people, you know, 3, 4 years ago, they weren't aware that it could be like an automated thing. And they're like, oh, this is a person, I'll give them time of day.

Yeah.

And now they're so used to so much Automation stuff, they know it's possible. Cynicism is higher and you have to do a better job to get high engagements.

So would you say you've seen a difference in ROI? So let's say you send like those super personalized messages. I take a lot of time, you know, maybe half an hour to research it, put together some, you know, even I think when I reached out to you, right, I've done your course. I used that as, you know, didn't use it, but that was my kind of point of conversation versus like a semi-personalized message that goes out with more people, but, you know, obviously less time. Like, hey, you know, name, you know, this is your company, this is your title, how many employees you have, and you kind of build those into the system. Is there a number or a sweet spot where, you know, one makes more sense?

Um, part, part of that is, again, and I keep coming back to that, how much is what— what's the value of what you're selling? You know, if you're like one company we're working with, if they close a deal, it's like $1 million. Another company is maybe $10,000 per sale. So the more expensive what you're selling is, typically the higher quality messaging and the more time makes sense. And those people will mostly only engage with real human behavior. Yeah, you know, yeah. And again, there's There's a place where, like, I'm not anti-saving time. I'm not like anti-automation. I'm anti-garbage. You know what I mean?

Yeah, it makes sense. Do you use any tools though, like yourself and your staff?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That was on your list. So I'll give you a couple, I'll give you a couple things here. So we— so I'm not a fan of message automation. I think it's better to be specific and choose a group of people where you want to be able to save time and say something nearly the same, right? That's just smart, you know, process efficiency. So what we'll do is we'll make sure that we can get a really laser-focused list. It's nice to start with that list. I'll talk about the tools here in just a minute, but the tools help in this context. You want to make sure that you can find things that matter to the people you're going to be talking to using search. So maybe you all went to the same university, you know, it's like, go, go Cornhuskers, or I don't know, like, so it's just an easy talking point if you start with your list where you all have that common ground. So if you can get an outreach list and include in there something that you have in common, it just makes it way easier to customize faster. Plus 10. And then once you get that list, we like to use— there's a Chrome extension called iMacro.

iMacro.

iMacro, yeah. It's for browser automation, but basically I got sick of clicking add tag, add to list, and my hand's hurting. So this is— you maybe need to be more of a developer for this, but you can just push a button and it'll go add tag invited or update the tag to Whatever, or add to this list and kind of pull in a message for you to customize. So iMacros is one that I've really enjoyed over the years. We obviously use Zapier, right? Because that's just great for CRM integration. LinkedIn is a, is an island. They don't want their information to just be passed willy-nilly to CRM. There are some cool, some cool features that they're rolling out to enterprise-level SalesNav accounts where you can auto-create a contact from LinkedIn into Salesforce and Student Dynamics, but that's so expensive. It's for larger enterprise-level companies. Anyways, so Zapier is very helpful for that. I've, um, been messing with an extension called ZapInfo, which is a— it's a recruiting tool, but it does a really good job at grabbing people's info from LinkedIn and then passing it to your CRM. Big time saver there. Oh, let's see. We use for like if you've got a team of people that are like tag teaming the communication on your LinkedIn account, Google Doc, obviously. So you might— somebody might be doing something and go, you know what, I've typed this message 100 times now. We need to change it a little bit because it— to make it better. And it just makes the collaboration a lot easier. And maybe you need to like COVID-19 happens and suddenly you need to retool all of your messaging. Right, right. It just makes it easy to do that in one place and be dynamic and fast.

And what do you use Zapier to integrate? So from like ZapInfo to like a HubSpot, is that what you use, or?

Yeah, it kind of depends. So we like to work with whatever sales funnel our clients have. So we'll work with a lot of different CRMs, you know, Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot. So we like to have that utility where we can use Zapier to plug it into whatever they currently have going on. So yeah. Yeah. And sometimes though, sometimes it's better. And this is maybe getting a little bit more advanced, but you can break up your prospecting to weekly increments. And then you can like grab everybody's info who has not replied or not accepted, and then maybe do an import into your CRM and then queue up like a HubSpot email sequence where it's not, hey, I'm opting you into my newsletter with an unsubscribe. It's a, hey, sent you an email, a message on LinkedIn. Maybe you didn't get it. I know people aren't on there all the time. I was talking, I was wanting to talk about X, Y, and Z or whatever. So, so sometimes it's better to do direct import. Sometimes better to do Zapier, but yeah, Zapier is so much utility.

Sure. Yeah. Efficiency. So it does make sense to also include, so you're going to LinkedIn, no one happened, you know, no response. Now actually jump into email and try to try that channel as well.

Yeah. Yeah. But with, with that, you just have to be really careful because people do not like it when, when you did a, casual handshake on LinkedIn and then suddenly you're in their email marketing and there's no— oh my gosh, sorry, soapbox. There's like 3 companies that keep emailing me and there's no unsubscribe.

Yeah.

And I know that they got me from LinkedIn and I'm so angry. So don't do that. If you wouldn't do it to yourself, just don't do it to other people. So you can do an email, but it has to be Done well, it should be a continuation of what you said on LinkedIn, and that tends to do well.

Yeah, it makes sense. And our team uses LinkedIn, uh, pretty, you know, uh, regularly for our deal flow at Horizon. Um, you know, I don't think we've perfected our process to scale yet, but I don't even know if that's the right word or if we should be thinking of that. Is there a right time to scale this marketing channel? Um, if so, You know, what are some rules you have to be aware of so you don't get banned? Obviously, I know a lot of people, there's some limitations around LinkedIn as well. Yeah. Or if you're doing it properly, you shouldn't even worry about it.

Yeah, for sure. So there's, there's a few ways you can go in here. So I'll say this just to get it out there. It is technically against the LinkedIn rules to share your logins because this is one place where if you're talking about scaling, it usually means you're too busy. I want someone else to do it. So you have 2 paths you can go down. Either path A, somebody is on your LinkedIn account doing what you've already done that's working so that you can maybe spend your time closing leads instead of getting them. That's what path A. Path B is you have another person doing what you were doing. It might look like someone like a sales team member or just someone at the company, maybe, you know, whatever. So there's the 2 paths that you go down. Path A, where you're sharing your logins. I've never really heard of people getting in trouble for that, but just To let everyone know, technically against the rules. At what point does it make sense? It really makes sense when— so I'll say this, don't do scale year.

Okay.

Scale year is scaling your failure. So what I see a lot of people do is they'll, they'll go, oh, I know that LinkedIn, I know my clients are there, I know that I could get leads from there, I've been trying, it's not working for me. I should be doing other things. I'm going to pay a VA $5 an hour to go in my account and try doing what I was doing that didn't work.

Right.

What happens is they don't know the company as well, and it just— they're scaling their failure. So all that's the, like, don't go down that path. The path you should go down when you're wanting to scale is this. Number 1, pretty please develop a standard operating procedure, like proof of concept. Make sure It works, right? Make sure you know your target audience. Make sure your message resonates. Make sure that, that those people are converting to your sales funnel. And once you have that SOP, that proof of concept, standard operating procedure down, then you can ask yourself, all right, should I keep using my account and hire a VA, or should I show my new sales associate To how to do exactly what I've been doing. And both of those can work. Usually the process just naturally, right, is hire a VA so you can get more money, larger client base, and then you bring in a sales team and then they do it. That's usually the progression that happens. Yeah.

Yeah. And I know you mentioned your course. So now we have, you know, our list qualified. We've kind of identified that this is the right system. We want to go out and start, you know, contacting our This list of qualified, you know, people, humans, and, you know, we have custom messages for each of them. You know, I know you also mentioned the first message is the most crucial in building that relationship. Can you share your framework that makes that— how to make that message more effective and get more response rate?

Yeah, absolutely. So when you're doing cold outreach on LinkedIn, it's like opening A book, the first paragraph of the book, it sets the whole stage, right? It sets up the whole stage. It's the same thing when you're first starting a conversation with someone you don't know on LinkedIn. Maybe it's the message you send along with your connection request. Maybe it's the first message after connecting, but that, that first communication That's what sets the tone for what is your intent, you know, like why are you initiating knowing me? What is the value of me knowing you? You know, all of those things. And what most people do is they, they, they, they do it backwards. They, when they're first talking to someone, they do it backwards. They go, what's in it for me? And Their messaging reflects, reflects that. What's in it for me? Here's a message to you. What's in it for me? Here's a message to you. And people hate that because it doesn't mean anything to them. Like, you should be bringing them value. So most people think, what's in it for me? And then do their messaging. They should be thinking about what's in it for them. And a really easy way to get a new connection who doesn't know you to start talking and to set That set that, that first paragraph of a story, that first message to set off well, is to, to be like an interviewer.

Hmm.

And instead of talking about yourself, because nobody gives a crap about you, you know what I mean? Like, they need to know why they should. So you need to be like an interviewer and get them talking about themselves. Everybody loves having their ego stroked. You talk about yourself, no one will listen. You ask people to talk about themselves, they'll sing like a parakeet.

Yeah.

So if you can be an interviewer and get them to talk about themselves, but related to what you both do, that's the path of sales.

Right.

And it's about them. It's not about you. And what's happening is you're positioning yourself as a guide because you've listened, you've got all kinds of insider info, and now you know what their company needs are, you know their personal pain points, and whatever you say is very, very relevant. And the framework for that we call the QUAD method, which is just an acronym for question, answer, discussion. So most people do like the self-promo, you know, method where it's like, I do this, you know, churn and burn through connections instead of, hey, I'm not going to make any assumptions. You might— maybe your profile is out of date, you know.

Yeah.

I have no idea where your company is at. I don't know if you even need this now or not. So do the QUAD method where you're asking them questions, focus on them, be an interviewer. They'll talk and you'll have insider info to be able to give them solutions that, that for real, because they told you, matter for their immediate needs.

Makes sense. Yeah.

And then they're viewing you as a giver, not a taker.

Yeah.

And then, sorry, and one more thing, like 6 months, a year from now, when their company is at the end of the sales cycle, if you didn't burn that bridge because over self-promo, They're going to be sitting on their board meeting on a Tuesday and go, man, who do we know that does that? Oh yeah, you, right? Yeah. So don't burn the bridge with self-promo. Use the QUAD method.

Cool. And then I know you guys really focus on, you know, doing the outreach and, you know, building those relationships. What's your perspective on using, for example, like LinkedIn ads for lead gen? And I don't know, you also are familiar with Google ads as well. You know, what kind of ROI difference are you seeing between, you know, all those maybe 3 channels?

Well, for firm ROI numbers, again, you know, like cold email is not our wheelhouse. Google Ads is not our wheelhouse, even though I'm personally familiar with them.

Yeah.

The paid ads on LinkedIn is not really our wheelhouse. AJ Wilcox, if you can get him on here, he's— I don't know, he's great at paid ads, does a lot of podcasts. He's full of awesome info. So AJ Wilcox, he owns BeetleLinked. Yeah, check him out. You can tell him you talked to Isaac. Uh-oh, I said that live.

Everybody will be on it.

But so, for ROI, it's such a— it varies so much because what is the annual client value, right? So, it's really hard to tell. What I like to do is have a spreadsheet that says, Here is common acceptance rates. Like I was saying earlier, 30, 55. So we got to— we'll have a spreadsheet where we say this is— did you get that from the AppSumo course?

I did, yeah.

Okay. So you can take those KPIs and you can take it one step further to estimate your ROI. You can say this list This list has 10,000 people. That means I can expect 3,000 new connections.

Yeah.

That means I can expect this many conversions. What's my normal acquisition rate? What's my, what's my sale price? And then you can actually look at that list and estimate the financial value of that list. And part of that's your ROI. And then the ROI just gets a little bit more tricky because it's like, are you doing it yourself? And not paying yourself? Are you working with a VA? Are you paying your sales associate? Yeah, so it gets a little bit more hairy. Yeah.

And what about if you're, you know, you're— you've built this connection of, let's say you have like 1,000 people on your LinkedIn. Now you want to kind of get some exposure. You know, writing on LinkedIn has their own kind of blog post versus sharing content from your own website, blog, or Medium. Yes.

Yeah.

What's your thoughts around that?

Okay, so I really prefer people to visit my website.

Yeah, sure.

Because I have total control over that, right?

Yeah.

I can do remarketing, I can do opt into my email, all kinds of stuff that I can do when someone visits my website. Someone visits my LinkedIn article, you know, party popper.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe they're on LinkedIn and they take the initiative to view my profile, and then maybe they creep onto my website, or maybe they send me a message, or maybe they send me a connection request. There's so many hoops to jump through.

Yeah.

But so I prefer, I prefer writing thought leader content on my website and having people go there. However, there is a place for LinkedIn articles and content in the newsfeed. I typically find that the, the value you get as a publisher with a, like a Pulse article or in the newsfeed is people while they're on LinkedIn view you as a thought leader.

Right.

So if you already have a network of maybe potential leads and they're on LinkedIn and maybe you've already spoken with them so they know who you are, if I see something in the newsfeed, or an article and I don't know the person, I don't care. Like, I'm never gonna realize that that was Akeel, you know, unless you've already talked to me. So now, now we've had this, I've been looking at your face, and if I see you share something in the newsfeed, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna stop and I'm gonna go like, oh yeah. And then if it's about, you know, whatever, I'm gonna view you more as a thought leader.

Right.

But you already had to have— I have to know you beforehand for it to like really go farther. So I feel like the post articles and the content articles They're valuable and the big value is for your existing network to view you as a thought leader for trust. And then yes, some people, that'll be their first handshake with your brand. I've gotten phone calls, like sales calls and stuff from people that they were in the newsfeed and they did that bunny trail, but it's not as common.

Okay, so you say it's more kind of like middle of the funnel than top of the funnel type of content to be doing.

It's just a mix. Yeah, because you have no idea where they're at, you know, like it's totally shotgunning it.

Yeah, makes sense.

So it's worth it. Oh, here's one mistake I made. Okay, so for all of you people that do content, this was a couple years ago. Had this one article on something, it's something simple like how to update your interests on LinkedIn, or no, it doesn't matter. Got a lot of traffic from organic search, from search engines. And I thought, sweet, this is, this is a great topic to write a LinkedIn article about.

Right.

Lots of, you know, confusion about it. Let's bring some clarity. I did a, I did a LinkedIn article and the content was similar, but I rewrote it. But it was similar enough to where I was at the zoo with my family and, uh, I quick checked on my phone and my analytics like had plummeted.

I was like, What the heck?

So I did some digging. I was like panicking, trying not to be the dad at the zoo who's working, right?

Yeah.

Daddy, where were you our whole childhood? And so what I realized was Google had switched my LinkedIn article with my website article, even though my website article was longer and had already been indexed for like a month. They swapped it out and I lost traffic to my website and I was like, Crap.

Oh wow.

So I deleted the LinkedIn article and then the next day everything was back to normal. So all that to say, LinkedIn has a high domain authority. So if you're publishing like a long-form type of content, just be aware you, you might not get the traction on your website if you do the LinkedIn article.

Right. So they might steal your traffic. Just be aware. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So I know that's a good, that's a good, actually really good tip or lesson that you had to unfortunately go through. So I know we're talking about, you know, qualifying your list. So now I have a list that, you know, I know you want to say the goal here is to say no, you know, you have maybe 10,000, probably want to get that down to say 5,000. You don't want to take every opportunity and spam everybody. And then, you know, you want to segment that as well as possible. If you're working with a client who's already doing, you know, LinkedIn, maybe some outreach, how do you go through a process of like starting to eliminate that to get, you know, better results and better response rates to get that from, you know, maybe they're getting 10% to like up to that, you know, 33% connection rate?

For the acceptance rate or the conversion rate?

Let's go all the way to conversion. Yeah. Which is probably the most important.

So, well, the conversion is a little bit more downstream. So there's a few different dials that you need to turn, right? And it all starts with who are you targeting? And that I cannot stress enough, whether we're first getting started with someone and they've never done LinkedIn or they're currently doing LinkedIn, it all comes down to who are they targeting?

Mm-hmm.

And if, if they can describe to me, these are the types of companies and the really big one is their job title.

Okay.

That across the board almost every time is what's a make-it-or-break-it thing in search is their current title. And as long as you are targeting the right title where historically that person has gotten you like their account, signed the papers, and they were your point of contact, that's, that's a win. I don't know that you can do much better. You know, because you're just targeting people and the title is, is the crux there. So turn that dial, make sure that you're targeting the right person. Title's huge. And then from there, it's, it's really what's your message to them? And the message is so contextual. COVID-19, we had to like pivot everybody's message because you can't go on tone deaf. So it's, it's, and it's, there's not like a, there's not like a cookie cutter script where you just switch out scripts. It's so contextual, right? Does that answer your question?

Yeah, no, it does.

Upstream, it's about targeting, you know, midstream, it's about what does that conversation look like?

Yeah.

And then at the downstream, it's what does the call to action look like? And sometimes, sometimes people are not familiar with what you do and it needs to be an educational call to action, right? Where you send them more info.

And just last question on that kind of upstream side. So you say you have a list, I'm targeting CMOs, you say focus on CMOs. Do you just go there or do you say, let's go CMOs, head of marketing, head of growth, VP of marketing, and then, you know, let's cluster those all together even though, you know, maybe they have the same title. same team size, same industry, or do you say, okay, let's just focus on CMOs and then compare it segment to segment from that? If you've seen anything, if not, that's fine too.

Yeah, no, that's a really good question. I like to do as large of a list as possible, as long as it's appropriate. So if they're— and again, that's gonna kind of vary based on your target audience. So with the marketing group there, You know, like a— yeah, I would do like CMO or Chief Marketing Officer or Director of Marketing, all those similar things. I think that's totally, totally fine because what happens is once you start splicing up a list into, into like little tiny lists, you lose efficiency. You end up changing your message and you're dealing with another list and it's just Too many pieces to juggle. So get as large of a list as possible, but make sure that they're all like the same thing but with different words. And again, that changes too. This is where you got to stay agile. Chief People Officer, that's a thing.

Yeah.

You know, like 10 years ago, if you were using LinkedIn, you go like, who's a Chief People Officer? No, it's HR, you know. So that's just one thing where you have to be agile, stay on your toes, and know what the market is.

Makes sense. Yeah, Growth Ninjas, we got all that. Yeah, cool. Well, thank you so much, Isaac. This was great. I learned a lot from here. Just kind of final thoughts, where can, you know, our audience who are listening get in touch with you, learn more about your LinkedIn process, or access your course?

Sure. So I would say there's 2 really great handshakes that you can do with our brand. Number one is, and this is, it's temporarily on, so, you know, if you're listening to this years from now, the AppSumo Bootcamp is so awesome. I love that, so proud of it. The other one is we do have daily videos that go out, which people absolutely love. So the, the thing is, when you're learning something new, especially people that are in startup mode or business owners, they know conceptually that LinkedIn is valuable, but they're like, I have no idea where to get started.

Right.

And then maybe they buy a 10-hour course and they're like, this is so overwhelming. And so what we've done is we've said, all right, I totally get that. Let's do short, 2-minute actionable videos every weekday for a year. People love it. So that's another great way to kind of get started.

Where do you publish that?

So those are, you have to sign up through our website. Okay, and then it's just dripped out by email.

Okay, okay, cool. And your website is— okay, we'll put your links to your websites in.

Yeah, ziko.io.

Perfect, got that. Awesome, thank you, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun. We'll do it again sometime for sure.

Take care. Thank you all for listening in to today's episode. Don't forget to join us for another episode where we interview top leaders and experts in the business business and SaaS industry. If you enjoyed this episode, I ask that you please give us a 5-star review on iTunes. That would be really, really appreciated. Otherwise, if you have any feedback, suggestions, or improvements for this podcast, please feel free to send it directly to me on our website at horizoncapital.com, or you can just tweet me @akeeljabbar. Thanks again, and hope to see you guys on the next episode. Thank you.