A Knoxville entrepreneur spent years mastering LinkedIn to escape the limits of local networking, then built a business teaching others her system. She trained her sales team using the same methods, and when the pandemic moved everyone online, demand for her LinkedIn training exploded.
So tell me, why LinkedIn over all the other options out there? Oh my goodness, right? Well, about, I don't know, 8 or 9 years ago, I realized I really wanted to expand my reach and had done all of the, like, in-person networking in town. And we're a pretty small town here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And, you know, you see the same 20 to 50 people every week, right? Yes, with that in-person networking, right? Right? And I was either doing business with them already, or it wasn't the right time, or whatever. So I thought, I've got to, you know, expand. So for my own uses, I really— I spent thousands and thousands of dollars and hours and energy reading, learning, digging into every aspect of LinkedIn, and then created some systems for myself to get business. And it worked. So then I trained my little tiny small sales team on my, my product, our stuff, right, to use it. And it worked. So that went on for years, and I knew that LinkedIn was the place for business owners, right? And then, um, it's so funny, I started— when the pandemic hit, started showing up on networking, online networking, and somebody would have a question about LinkedIn and I would know the answer, so I would just put it in the chat, you know? And that became commonplace. And then it started with Do you train on this? Is there a course? Do you know, can I consult with you? And I said, sure, I train on this, and proceeded quickly to create some options. But yeah, and you know what I found is that when you understand how to use LinkedIn, you can get business there. It doesn't have to be a headache and it doesn't have to be overly complicated, and it works across industries.
