LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work with Jimmy Coleman

For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad, and today we're going to talk about some lead generation methods that a lot of folks screw up. To be honest with you, years ago, when I first started this, I had an expert in LinkedIn, Josh Turner, come on the show and he talked a lot about what's working in LinkedIn for building relationships and connections, et cetera. But it's been like three or four years since I've had Josh on the show. And in that time, LinkedIn has changed quite a bit. And there are a lot of strategies that people employ that quite honestly annoy the hell out of people, myself included. From getting tons of spammy LinkedIn messages to people who just should not even be in sales whatsoever because they are completely clueless on how to reach out and build relationships. As a result, myself, a lot of my friends and colleagues, although we like LinkedIn, there's a lot of annoyance with it as well because of the ability for people to abuse it. At the same time. Some of the best relationships I've developed in business have come directly from just great connections that I've made on LinkedIn and done correctly, it can be extremely powerful. Now, this is not an area in which I currently employ myself to a large degree, but I'm looking to do a lot more of that for myself, my clients, and I'm always looking to gain an edge on really what's working now. And that's why I'm bringing today Jimmy Coleman on the show. So Jimmy's an expert in this area. He is close with two previous guests and close friends and clients of mine, Geeta Nankarni, as well as Aaron Biblo. Geeta has been on the show. Aaron was on the YouTube video Flywheel episode, if you recall both of those.

And.

And each of them just had remarkable things to say about Jimmy's proficiency in helping people generate leads on LinkedIn. And he is helping other folks, maybe like yourself, do the same thing. So today we're going to bring Jimmy on the show and really find out what's working, what are some of the mistakes to avoid, but what's working really, really well. So, Jimmy, welcome to Bacon Wrap business.

Thank you, man. So glad to be here.

Yeah, it's good to have you. So give me a Little bit about the backstory before you really decided to specialize in LinkedIn for lead generation. Give me a little bit of history and business and marketing and kind of what led you to this point.

Cool, sure. So yeah, I think a good place to start is I dropped out of college after two weeks and went full time to sell knives in people's homes. And so that was my first thing. A lot of people started you selling Cutco. That's right, man. That was a thing. And so I quit college to do that full time. Didn't make mom and dad happy at the time, as you can imagine. But I was just making more money than most adults that I knew in the small town that I was in. So it just sort of made sense. I went from being like super so passionate all of a sudden about working hard on something, like I was forgetting to eat and then sitting back in a desk when school started, it was just a contrast with just ridiculous. And so I just couldn't continue. And that's where I learned a lot of my. I don't get to talk about this enough, but that's where I learned a lot of my like guerrilla marketing, like just hardcore marketing tactics, like playing the numbers game and things like that. Eventually went in after three years, went into the financial industry and realized I couldn't just be so like bull in a china shop anymore because now I had to, I had to be positioned myself as an advisor to my clients. I had to actually be more mindful of my long term brand. Even in my short term brand it was really hard to go from just annoying the heck out of people, you know, making 40 calls a day, doing all the LinkedIn messages and stuff like that, to then having a relationship with them where I would advise them on something and act like I was the guy. Right. And this is actually a common struggle. A lot of coaches deal with, a lot of consultants deal with, a lot of premium brands deal with because they want predictable, the predictable sales, predictable revenue. At the same time they got to like play it cool to some degree. So I'm from a really small town too in Waynesboro, Virginia. So a lot of the people I enjoyed working with coming from like, you know, being a top performing sales guy and sales manager. I really liked working with the entrepreneur crowd and other top performing sales reps, EPs of sales or C level executives at larger companies. And again, it just wasn't the right place for that. So I had to start experimenting on LinkedIn. And I made a lot of mistakes four or five years ago that a Lot of people are making now today, now that, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk is telling everyone to rush over to LinkedIn and everyone's sort of trying it out. And again they're playing the numbers game, but not very stealthy about it. And so I made a lot of those mistakes four or five years ago. And again, a lot of this advice that I teach people now, it doesn't come from just, you know, out of nowhere. It just came from making more mistakes than everyone else by the thousands a long longer time ago, sort of finagling with it and experimenting. And I can go over some of the strategies I eventually learned, but started getting meetings with millionaires when I was 22 years old as financial advisor, didn't know what the heck tell them to do with their money. But I got the meetings and that's what I cared most about and eventually took that principle to a medical company, medical startup company in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was part of the expansion team. Everyone knew who we were in a completely different side of the state and they needed help expanding and so moved down to Charlotte and we implemented these strategies and in the first year we did a couple million. And actually one of the coolest parts is we doubled the size of our sales team from about 25 to 50 people just in the first year. And obviously it took a lot more conversations than that anyone is familiar with recruiting in order to get to that 25 number. But then we deployed this strategy across the team. The following year I became a partner in that company. And so we trained the rest of the team on it, created easily extra eight figures in revenue for the company. And within a couple years our company went from 60 million in revenue to 125 million in revenue. And that didn't all come from LinkedIn, obviously.

No, but it sounds like it was integral in the growth of it. So let's dive into some of the biggest mistakes people make and then I've got a handful of questions that I'll ask you about some of the more effective things. So yeah, what are a handful of the biggest mistakes folks make besides just blasting out like terrible? I mean one mistake is just being a terrible writer and not knowing, you know, what to say to people. But yeah, go into some of those mistakes.

Yeah, and I usually break it up in four phases, but just an easy low hanging fruit. What everyone is telling people to do on their profile is to set it up so that it's good for search engine optimization on LinkedIn. As if people are going on LinkedIn and searching for Your services. And whoever shows up at the top is who they're most likely to buy your services from. But from helping a lot of people. Most people don't have people looking for their services on LinkedIn. It's not like Google in that way. If people are using the searching tool, it's usually because they're the hunters and not so what I tell people to do. Because the main time that someone's going to be going to your profile is usually when you're trying to connect with them or you're in a message conversation with them and you're trying to take that relationship to the next level, offering a phone call or your lead magnet, welcoming them into a Facebook group, whatever it is. And so they're going to check you out, see what your intentions are. And if they can't box you in, if they haven't figured you out quite yet, then they'll keep the conversation going. Or they'll also keep the conversation going because of the two things I really coach people hard on. And the first one is you might look like an influential person. You might look like you are an authority to some degree in a field or the field that they are in. So if you can create a lot of social proof all over your profile, if you guys end up going to mine at some point, you'll see that I have one of those selfies. You speak at an event and you take a selfie with the group and that crowd of people are behind you. That's showing social proof that people are bought into what you're saying. There's other people that agree with you to some degree. Your profile picture showing you maybe explaining something, you're engaging with someone. It's not a headshot. Everyone goes for the headshots because it's supposed to be so professional. And a lot of the things I teach break the common rules. Because what most people are doing is they're targeting the same people that their competitors are targeting. You know, if all your competitors look the same, including you, your target audience is going to start to, you know, get. Get smart and also get really annoyed and stop connecting with people like you, stop responding to people like you. So the other thing I tell people to go for is how can you look extremely relatable. So you kind of combine the influential and relatable, likable, trustable, all those versus what I call like the basic boring bot. So I have a client who his target market is just happens to be. He like helps people with day trading, but his target market happens to be like people 35 years old, plus or minus. And they're usually parents and they're usually dads, actually. And so his profile picture is him giving his son a piggyback ride, which breaks all the rules of what people tell you to do on LinkedIn. Right. But when someone goes to his profile and he's taking massive action, he's doing the whole checklist I give people and getting people, you know, getting his pipeline full, people go to his profile and. And he looks so innocent. You can't box this guy in. As a matter of fact, you look at this picture of this guy and you think, man, like, if I knew him, if we were, like, live close to each other, we would totally be friends. The summary is not a sales pitch. It's more about, like, who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. Their headline isn't just their job title. It creates some sort of intrigue. So my main thing is with, like, when people ask me what people are doing wrong on LinkedIn, it's such an easy place to start because everyone is just kind of boxing themselves in. There's these unwritten rules of professionalism, like, break all those rules if you want to win.

Okay, I want to drill down on that a little bit. So, for instance, I'm on your profile here, and as it says here, I'm just reading this out. So Chief Giving Officer at Grow and Give. And then when it goes down to your about area, this is, you know, where most people just talk about what they do and who they do it for, et cetera. Like you were mentioning, you go into your 2020 Vision Statement and your various goals and a lot of that stuff. I didn't read every single bullet, but I don't know if you're actually talking about how, you know, you help people with lead generation, especially on LinkedIn, et cetera. So this is all purposeful then, that you're not. You mentioned you're not letting people box you in as one thing. Is that accurate?

Yes, it's extremely intentional. Like, for me, if I get someone on the phone, I'm very confident that I'll win the rest of that relationship. The goal that I'm trying to achieve will happen. Most people aren't going to read your summary and say, oh, like that sounds really interesting, or read why you're the best at what you do. And then it converts from there is just what we're realizing. So a lot of those things, again, can just box you in. So in that vision statement, the reason I came up with that is because maybe four or five years ago I wrote that down in a journal. And yes, a journal, not a diary, but a journal, and just wrote down all the things I wanted to be. To do to my why, essentially. And some of the things were more surface level. Some of the things were things I thought I would never share with anyone. And then one day I kind of. I just worked up the courage to eventually make that public and step out on ledge, be vulnerable and share with people. And you know what's neat about that is ever since I posted that on LinkedIn, I've had one or two people just reach out to me every week and just say that they connected me on some level about, you know, maybe my faith or my. How I talked about my girlfriend or something like that. And these are all people, by the way, that I'm targeting, which is all about phase two, is all targeting the right people. So I'm starting relationships with prospects on a much more intimate level versus just transactional conversations, which is how I like to do.

Right. And there is no blowback on. I don't want to say blowback, but because if I were to just come here, not having known you, if I could just kind of stumble across you, I wouldn't have any idea what you do or who you do it for unless I drill down super deep. So are you kind of trying to create just enough of that? Because, yeah, you're right, it is totally counterintuitive. I would think that it's like, look, you've got only a handful of seconds to really capture somebody's attention. And most people want to know what's in it for them. And you're not really giving that to them. And I'm not, I'm definitely not arguing with you here. I'm just saying it is counterintuitive. It goes against, you know, what I would. What I would definitely think. But I can also see how this could be a really good conversation starter because these are little hooks so people can be like, oh, wow, this guy doesn't. Number one, I might find something in common with this person. But number two, this guy doesn't seem like he's just trying to use LinkedIn as a phishing net to try to get something out of me. So I imagine that's a big part of the philosophy there, right?

Correct. And the other part, too, that you might notice is the part where most people might put their sales pitch or whatever in their summary. I put that in my experience, like when it talks about what, what growing give is and all that stuff, that's all the experience. So if someone really did want to find out what I did, it is on my profile. But I know that those other things are better hooks to get conversations going rather than just the generation side of things. It can be a very crowded market and so I'm using this to sort of to stand out and be a bit of a purple cow, if you will. Yep, love it.

Seth Godin reference for everybody else. All right, so what are some of the other mistakes that people make?

This kind of rolls into phase two, but just being really on purpose about who you're connecting. And this is where a lot of people ask questions about whether they should have the premium or the Sales Navigator or just the free version, which, real quick, I'll just mention that if you get a notification saying you've maxed out your commercial use limit on LinkedIn, then it's a good time for an upgrade. It means you're using it enough to where you'll probably get a good return on investment from that upgrade. Sales Navigator allows you to target people based off of their seniority level. So you can make sure you're only talking to business owners. And as you probably know, a lot of people are pretend business owners. So you can make sure that they have a certain number of employees, employees of the company. You can make sure that it's like a private company versus public company or versus a non profit. You can make sure that a certain region, even if you're searching on your phone a certain zip code, if that's important to you. You can actually filter people based off of what groups that they're members of. You can do all kinds of filtering, which is a whole other technique. Just side note that there's people who are coaching people how to basically target people on LinkedIn because it has a much better target search for if you're trying to get business owners and then scraping all their emails and then retargeting them on Facebook, whole nother conversation. But I made the mistake early on of connecting with anybody and everybody. And what ended up happening was back in the Financial Advisor days, I was getting meetings at one minute with BP at a huge energy company with thousands of employees. I'm just so pumped living on Cloud nine and then driving, you know, rushing through traffic to get a meeting with someone who, you know, was basically living off the government. And I couldn't really help to the same degree. And so I just realized that the difference in the energy change and started becoming much more on purpose with making sure I'M talking to all the right people. I'm not having to kiss frogs in order to find the right people. So just being really serious about who it is that you're connecting with so that every interaction you have is with someone that you can do business with. LinkedIn is the best platform for people to get to know someone that they don't know, but they'd like to know. You can have 30,000 connections, so it's expected that you're going to be talking to people that you don't know already. It's not weird for you to send a connection request to someone you don't know. It's expected on LinkedIn. So make the most of that. Be extremely on purpose about who those conversations are with because some of the strategies I'll talk about on the call today, it'll make that process way more efficient.

Perfect. So are there any other top of the head, big mistakes that people are making? I know that one of the things I want to talk about is use of tools, automation, things to broadcast out a lot of messages or do with some of the other things that, you know, some of the other automation aspects versus going in one by one. So I want to dive into those and I don't know if there's, if that topic kind of falls into any of the mistakes at all.

For sure, yeah. I mean this is a mistake that people make. I've talked to companies before who they have. They themselves like the decision maker at the top of the company themselves, spend a few hours a day on LinkedIn and they have sales teams spending three hours a day on doing things that they should be automating and won't even make the other person that they're automating, so to speak, feel like they're being automated. So it's not. You don't even necessarily have to auto message people. Auto connecting makes a ton of sense. Auto, even auto endorsing I like to do. And we can talk about that's more of like a phase three type of thing. But essentially there's a few tools that are out there that work. There's a lot of tools that are like going out of business because LinkedIn doesn't want you to use Chrome extensions. But rule of thumb is if it's a cloud based automation tool, you're probably really safe to use those. So that's main thing just to keep in mind, I like to use a tool right now called We Connect IO.

Say that again.

We Connect IO.

We Connect IO.

We as in, as in you and I, we Oh, okay.

I think you said re. So we connect IO?

Yes, sir. Yep. In the past I've used something called Linked Helper. It was a chrome extension. They're building out a cloud version right now. I might even scoot back over to that one. So that one's called LinkedIn helper, like LinkedIn but Linked helper and that is a really good tool. They just need to get a cloud version of that software. I know that there's some other guys that Coach people on LinkedIn that use that tool called U Link for my strategy. U Link is not the best based on the tools that it has, but it is really effective and efficient. So when I just told you guys to like target all the right people, I didn't mean do what I did when I my first 12,000 connections all came from people. I was like clicking and you don't want to do that. So I now like, I just connect with people. I target the right people, connect with them in my sleep. And that's the best one. Those are some good automation tools to look at.

Okay, so take me through a typical workflow, some best practices of what, you know, what does it look like? Let's say you're trying to generate. I don't have an example off the top of my head of something somebody might try to generate leads for on this. Feel free to use any examples that you know that are working, whether it's what you're doing, whether it's what some general client is doing. And take me through kind of the overall workflow of what that would look like using best practices.

Sure, sure. Well, we've covered, we've covered phase one pretty well. So phase one, profile optimization, not being a basic boring bot, using something to stand out from everyone else, turn heads and get people hooked into who you are versus what you do. The second part is just, you know, being really efficient with your targeting and went into some details with that. And the third part is just driving traffic into your inbox. So you asked for an example, like a fun example for this might be I'm talking to someone right now who has a top performing Allstate agency. Okay. And now he's actually going to be switching from being, having an Allstate agency to now consulting all state agency owners. And so we're having some fun with his. We're targeting Allstate agency owners in phase three. We're driving traffic into his inbox and I'll explain some of the things we're doing in order to make that happen. And then in phase Four, instead of just converting people right off the bat and trying to line up a call right away, he's actually funneling them into a community that he has for all the agency owners. And so when someone sends him a message that says, thank you, we can again, I'll get into exactly how we're getting that to happen. He's messaging them back and he's saying, hey, sure thing, Stacy. We actually just started a Facebook group for all the agency owners where we share best practices and questions. Want me to send you an invite.

Just to really quickly interject here. So you're taking them from LinkedIn messages to Facebook groups, not LinkedIn groups.

So it depends on the market. There's actually a few places you can go. Facebook groups is one I love. Building community, right? And having something that helps you position yourself as the authority, like you having this podcast is helping you position yourself as an authority. So podcasts are actually another platform you could use. You could use LinkedIn groups, you could use live events, even like meetup groups. Meetup groups are fantastic. But LinkedIn is the place, and this is a big part of the principles. LinkedIn is the place that you target the right people. You drive traffic. It's really good for that. But where's the traffic going? So something to keep in mind with LinkedIn is that there are literally people who are therapists that specialize in helping people with addictions to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat. I don't think any of those therapists are helping people with their addiction to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not a very addicting platform. People hop on there, get the job done, and usually hop right off. People aren't like scrolling through the timeline all day long. It's not that kind of platform quite yet. So I really don't mind if someone starts there and then gets shoved somewhere else. I want to build my community in a place where people are going to spend their free time. Right? It really depends on who you're targeting. For him, we found out a lot of his target market is on Facebook. I actually own a lot of people to my Facebook group. I have another client, by the way. He actually works. He's a sort of a performance coach and speaker for companies that have commission sales people. So you think of like car dealerships, you can think of real estate agencies, insurance agencies. The list goes on and on. And so what he's doing is. It sounds a little crazy, but he's doing a very low budget podcast. So think of like top tips in 10 kind of podcast. It's all over the phone. No video and maybe like no. Almost no editing. And he's just using that. Instead of offering a phone call to talk about his speaking engagements and his workshops and stuff, he's actually offering the decision makers to go on a podcast with him for top tips in 10. He builds a relationship with them and then discusses what it looked like to work together. Yep. And it's just. It's almost too easy for him. It's scary how easy that is. Like, these people that he's offering this to, by the way, they're kind of like the unsung heroes to some degree. Because everyone wants to interview entrepreneurs and stuff like that, right? Well, these guys are like hustlers, but they're working in other companies and so they're not getting offered to be on these podcasts. They want to be able to go home and tell their wife, tell their husband that they're on a podcast today. So it's like it's giving them status. So I always talk. One of the principles I talk about real quick.

It's funny you say that because that's actually been one of my secret strategies I've worked with some clients on. I'm working with another one now. I have a name for it. I actually call Lipstick on a podcast, which is just my way of using a podcast specifically for B2B sales. And kind of. And kind of what it really ends up being is like the back door, side door discovery session. So doing this with a friend of mine and who's a client who is a hospitality consultant. So we're going to be producing a hospitality podcast to where, you know, he's going to be going around and he's very connected in the industry, but he's going to be going around interviewing people who are doing great stuff, like restaurateurs and hoteliers and etc. Who are perfect clients for him. But he's going to be featuring them as like these kind of heroes of hospitality. And on the back end, you do discovery. It's funny, I wrote a. I'll put a link to it. I wrote an article about this strategy on digitalmarketer.com a couple years ago and how there's a secret part of podcasts that makes this really, really easy to do, which is the fact that nobody knows your statistics. It's not public, so nobody knows but me and my producer how many downloads this show gets. It could be a million a day, and it could be one a day. But when you do that and you invite, like you just said, it Though, perfectly. Like, these are people who don't normally get invited to podcasts. They're not promoting a book. They're just normal people, and it's very flattering for them. So, yeah, that's great that you said that. You're the only other one that I've heard really talk about that, and it is such a gangster strategy.

Oh, yeah. I excited talking about this stuff, and I get a little scatterbrained. So I've listened to a couple of podcasts. They're pretty good about keeping people online. So if you need to reel me in, then do it. But this really correlates well with what I call the three levels of salesmanship. So at the very bottom level, this is where 90% of the people hang out. You're a vendor. You are playing the numbers game. You're talking about your features and benefits all day long. And people who are decision makers in that realm, they say, well, what do you got? You know, they're like, pitch me your thing. Right? It's all about who can knock on the most doors, have the smoothest sales pitch, whatever it is. And honestly, I hate being in that place. Some of it's out of pride, and some of it's out of, like, I don't feel like I'm ever building a foundation when I'm in that place. It's just never ending. Hustle, right? And that's no fun. So that's the most competitive place to be in as well, where 90% of people hang out, and then you have, like, the next 9%. So from like, 90 to 99%. And that's where you have people who are the experts. So the experts have, like the whole Alphabet after their name. They're, like, certified in what they do. It's like you think of, like, a doctor or something like that, or a financial planner who has been in the business for 15 years and again, has the whole Alphabet after the name. They still need to bring in the business. It's just that they have more respect when they walk in the room or when someone walks in their room and people value what they have to say a little bit more, right? Well, the very next level is, this is the top 1%. You are the authority. And when you're the authority, you're in a position where your prospects want to get to know you more than you want to even get to know them. You have more value or they have more value from having a relationship with you than you have value from having a relationship with them. And so I always think to Myself, how can I kind of turn the tables on my market? And people don't mind, by the way, because all you're doing is you're just creating more value outside of what you sell.

Mm.

So, you know, creating it. Sometimes all people want is for you just to connect people to each other. So just by creating a community, all of a sudden you're positioning yourself as an authority, and people love you for it because you've connected a community of people. Like, I'm. I'm working with a client here in Charlotte. They have a software for nonprofits, like a CRM, all encompassing kind of CRM, to help them reduce the number of tools that they need to run their nonprofit. And they have the name.in their name is what I'll say. And I was like, perfect. What we're gonna do is we're gonna call our community some along the lines of connecting the dots. The members of the community are gonna be dots. You think about executive directors of nonprofits is very lonely. They're going through very similar struggles. I'm sure that's a community that would just love to be able to communicate with each other, share ideas with each other, share best practices, share struggles, whatever it is, and just have an open forum for them to share, you know, positivity, negativity, whatever it is. And just by you connecting them to each other, you're all of a sudden an authority and the most valuable person in the room, and you just happen to have a software that can help them too. ClickFunnels is actually a wonderful example of that. Obviously, they're just a SaaS product at the end of the day, and it created a bunch of other deliverables around that. So another amazing example of that. Sometimes people want content. Like you creating this podcast, you know, you're kind of positioning yourself as an authority to two markets. Both people that will honestly never be invited to your podcast. Right. And will still buy your stuff and, like, want to hopefully one day be invited to your podcast and things. And then you're also building relationships with people who are on a higher level who might be invited to your podcast. And if you have something that they could benefit from, well, now you have a dialogue with them, now you have a relationship with them, and you're providing value to them. So you're providing value to both parties, Right? So all of that, all those principles helps people understand the value of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is such a good place for you to drive traffic. And then if you can drive traffic to a place, like you said, you're not that active on LinkedIn. No biggie. Then take the people from there and take them to a place that, like, you probably have a Facebook group for this community as well. Like, take them, take them over there. If you're targeting the right people, they will say yes to wanting to join your group. So I'll pause real quick and then go back into phase three, but do you have any questions about that?

No. So I like that. Which is invite them into a community. Don't go direct for the sale or necessarily direct for the phone call. I mean, unless it's just there's great rapport there and somebody's like, man, I'm actually looking for something exactly like you got. Let's jump on the phone. And those are great. So go ahead and go into phase three.

Yeah. So phase three is the reason why I stopped doing cold messages. So that's where I was, guys. I did an amazing job of optimizing my profile. As a matter of fact, the financial company I worked at, it was Northwest Mutual. They used to rank your profiles based off of how many profile views you have within your company. And week after week, out of 26,000 people, I had more views on my profile out of everyone else in the company. I just. I owned it while I was there, but I wasn't like making money when I was owning it because I didn't do the right stuff in phase two. Got the stuff in phase two done, you know, started targeting the right people, and then I started spamming all of these A plus prospects that I wanted to get in front of and just ruining my reputation in my market. So what I did was I started playing around with it. I think someone maybe wish me happy birthday. I wish them happy birthday or something like that is one of those kind of messages. And then they replied back saying, thank you. And then I did my script, I did my sales pitch. You know what? I actually got much better results when there was actually a dialogue with them. So I'll get into this. And basically the theory is that it's actually. It's not even theory anymore, but the concept is that you take a connection into a conversation, conversation into relationship, relationship into transaction. And again, LinkedIn is the best place for you to take someone you don't know and turn into a conversation and relationship and into a sale. And some evidence around that is, I'll use the birthday example, but there's again, a list of tools I'll give people, you know, on this call. So one of the tools is the birthday thing. When it's your birthday on Facebook. I know that there's a place for me to find out, but I don't get notified, that's for sure. Unless it's like, someone that they know I'm really close friends with. I don't even know where that place is anymore. When it's on LinkedIn, every one of your connections is getting a notification. Not only are they getting a notification, they're getting a little button that has a call to action that says, say Happy Birthday.

I've never seen that on LinkedIn.

You might have taken the setting off.

Okay, yeah, I've never. Granted, I'm not on LinkedIn a ton, but so I've probably missed a lot. But so you're saying, obviously, reach out, wish people happy birthday. These are your connections though, right? I mean, it's not strangers. These are your happy birthday. I think that's a great idea to do anyway.

Right.

And the birthday thing is just an example. There's some other things you could do too, but so they get. Say Happy Birthday button. They click that button. Literally, the message is already typed out. It says, happy Birthday, exclamation point. And all you really need to do is click send. So also think about this. When it's your birthday and you're like me, and you have over 20,000 connections, it's like not that crazy for you to find a way to monetize your birthday. You get messages coming in all day long, and then you have a script for it, and we could talk about that later, but basically you have a conversation that is now starting. Another thing you can, when it's someone's job change, you get a notification says, say congrats, Congratulations. Click the button. Messages typed out, click send. When it's someone's job change or when someone's work anniversary, which LinkedIn just kind of made that up out of nowhere. Like, work anniversaries weren't really a thing, but they made it up. So now you have another reason for you to have a conversation with one of your connections. And so this is. This says it's so and so's 8th work anniversary at so and so Company say congrats. They click the button, the message is already typed out, and all that good stuff. And so, so it sounds safe to.

Say that there's a lot of different things that LinkedIn gives you as little conversation starters for your people or, you know. Right. So one of the things, and you may be getting to this, but I want to make sure I understand something you mentioned, which was driving traffic to your. Did you say driving traffic? To your profile?

To your inbox? Yep.

To your inbox. Explain that. Unless I'm jumping ahead and you're getting to that. I really kind of wanted to understand that because I understand the get your profile set up, you know, correctly. Look for, you know, whether you're using tools or whatnot to target people and just get those, you know, early stage connections. But now you talked about getting traffic to your inbox and that. I hadn't really heard that framed like that. So I definitely am. Is that part of what we're talking about here or is that another part of it?

Yeah, it's a part of it. So there's a few things you can do. And here's a simple checklist for anyone that's listening literally every single day, congratulate everyone on everything and what will end up happening. As you're growing your network, you're gonna have a steady flow of people saying, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you coming in. And again, keep in mind, like, we'll get to what the script is gonna say because. Okay, well, what do you do with it? Thank you. Right, well, I've kind of figured that part out now the next thing you can do. So we talked about congratulating people is endorsing people. By the way, for those who don't really know, like LinkedIn, endorsing doesn't really carry a lot of weight. It's actually more of a. Funny enough, it's actually an SEO tool. So if you want to be the leadership guy on LinkedIn and people search leadership and you want to show up at the top, one of the things you could do to help that is to have a lot of people endorse you for leadership. And 80% of times people you don't even know that have endorsed you for leadership. And you might have even like 800 endorsements or something for the leadership on your profile. As soon as someone clicks that button though, all they gotta do is click the button to endorse you for a skill. All of a sudden they will show up and maybe your email, they, you might get a banner drop down or lock screen notification that so and so endorse you for something. My favorite part though, I love showing up in notifications, right? Because you know, again, the LinkedIn timeline people, it's kind of boring to a lot of people. It's like growth charts and you know, whatever. It's just really boring stuff. But people definitely check their notifications. As a matter of fact, if we were talking right now, And I'm looking at my LinkedIn or Facebook, I see that red dot. I'm like, what is it? Right? It's just how people are nowadays. So I want to show up there. And so people are always going to open that up. Check it out. They see my picture, they see Jimmy Coleman endorsed you for leadership. And then it says say thanks. So all you have to do is click that button, say thanks, and then it says, thanks for endorsing me for leadership. And all you got to do is click send. So taking that at the value that it actually has, most people just overlook this part. I know it's the thing that people already know that it happens, but people don't understand the value of it. So 60 times a day, let's say we're endorsing 60 people a day. And I do that in my sleep. I automate it 60 times a day. My targeted, highly targeted connections that I specifically connected with are two clicks away from starting a conversation with. And at this point I've become very confident in knowing that if I get a conversation going, I can have a high percentage chance of converting that into something else. So I just want a conversation. So I'm getting a ton of people messaging me back for me, saying congrats on their whatever or happy birthday. And then also on the endorsements, I'm getting a bunch of messages coming in. And by the way, when I first discovered this, it was so cool because I had people that I was connecting with and I was just banging my head up against the wall, how am I going to get in front of of this person? And then the next day I woke up, I had like 20 messages in my inbox and it was all the people, all the A prospects, and they were starting the conversation with me. And now I'm the jerk if I don't reply back to them. It was a really cool thing. Now, another small thing someone could do if they want is they can when they make a post. This is pretty simple. You can just anyone that likes or comments on it, you can just say message them and say, hey, thanks for liking my post. I what do you do at XYZ Company is normal for you to do something like that on LinkedIn because it's expected that you're going to be talking business versus Facebook, where it's expected that you're not going to be talking business, even though people like you. And I definitely do offer to the general consumer, not as much the case so you can do that. And then they say, hey, that's awesome. And Then you can kind of funnel them from there and we can get into more of the scripts on that. But basically from that three tier attack, we got the congratulations on everything. The endorsements that maybe 60 times a day and then just, you know, engaging with people that comment and like your stuff. Those are tons of conversations that you can get rolling. And my goal is to always get them to say something first and then hit them with the thing. Now that kind of rolls into phase four because what started happening was I was getting people to say thank you, thank you, thank you. I get all these messages coming in and then I just took that script, that was that salesy script I had and just said awesome. Now I'm going to copy and paste this after they said something to me. And I actually got a much better response, response rate. Even though it was a very direct salesy approach, but I still felt like there was money being left on the table. So in phase four, you really have two options because you got this conversation started and you can either. Now what I do, I call it convert or die. That's option A and it's a very direct message to the point if they say yes, it's game on. Like you're probably going to actually close that sale even if you're not good at closing. Option B is a little bit more of like, I call it a funnel and usually you have some sort of lead grab or something. So a typical script for option A convert or die is something like, hey, sure thing, Stacy. We actually just got XYZ result for another XYZ company last month, week, year, whatever it is. Are you open minded to having a conversation about how we did that? Very direct, very to the point. If you wanted to extend that cycle a little bit more, you could always again ask that question of hey, sure thing, Stacy. Can you tell me more about what you do at XYZ company and then wait for them to reply and then hit them with that more direct script. But long story short, you're trying to convert them right then and there in the inbox. And that's one option that you have if you don't want to play the game of building a community, building a larger brand, or funneling them into that real quick. Any questions on that?

No, not on that.

Okay, cool. Now the second option you have is again funneling. And that's like my client that has the worst all state agency consulting business. It was, hey, sure thing, Stacey. We actually started a Facebook group for all state agency owners. We share questions and best practices. Want me to Send you an invite. Now imagine being an Allstate agency owner, getting that message and not already being in that group. It'd be weird. That's like the most ideal situation if you could be that specific. Because like, the conversion of that is just ridiculous. Right. Versus something more open ended of like, hey, we actually just started a group for people that want to learn how to live their best life. Want me to send you an invite? Like, no, I don't have time for that. Right. So the more specific you can be in that offer, the better. I have some clients, like I told you before, that speaking engagement client, he doesn't even wait for that whole phase three thing of like, you know, getting them to message you first. As while he's sending the connection request, he will literally invite that person to his podcast. He will say something like, hey, Stacy, check out your profile. Looks like you're. You're absolutely crushing it at XYZ Company. You can automate it so it puts in their company name and everything. I actually think you might be a great fit for my podcast. Top tips and 10, what do you think about that? And he can get a super high response rate. He's going for quantity over quality, obviously, but that's just a whole other approach you could go offer. But the main thing is that the funneling approach means that you're having some sort of delayed gratification. For my own group, I tell people, hey, sure thing, Stacey. We actually have a group for people that want to learn how to grow their business using LinkedIn. Want me to send you an invite? And when they say yes, we say, awesome. Does that link work? So that way if they actually have to check it out and get back to us, they check it out, answer three questions, and then I'm gonna shut up after I tell you these three questions.

Yeah.

The first question is, are you looking to grow your business using LinkedIn? And they have three options. A is yes, but I haven't gotten any yet. B is yes, I've gotten some, but I want more. And C is no. And put in parentheses, if this is the case, then this group is probably not for you. So everyone's going to probably qualify themselves and say yes. The second question is, we send each new member a welcome video. What's the best number for us to text that to? I like getting phone numbers. I know people actually check their phone numbers. And then the third question is, we are not short on new members. Any incomplete applications will not be approved. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So because even I request to join Groups and don't always answer the questions. But if I know that I'm wasting my time by not answering the questions, then I'll definitely answer. So that actually handles the objection I get sometimes of people saying that, oh well, like I want the results and stuff but I don't want to build a free group. And then like I need to pay my bills this month. Right. Well now I'm getting calls lined up right away. I'm sending a welcome video over the app called Sideline and it's like, hey, welcome to the leaders of LinkedIn. So happy to have you here solely. You said something about looking to generate leads on LinkedIn but haven't had a ton of luck yet. We actually just got XYZ results for another XYZ client last month. If you're open minded having conversation about how we did that, we actually have a free 8 to 10 minute mini course on exactly our whole process. Or we could just send you our.

Call and you can discuss whether or not LinkedIn's a good platform for you.

To build your business with to begin.

With and just text me back, let.

Me know which one you want me.

To send over to you.

That's great video.

That way they actually watch it and stuff.

Yeah, okay.

And earlier you mentioned something about the replies to the hap, like Happy Birthday or little endorsement stuff. Just like little things. What do you typically if some, if you wish me, if I'm an ideal prospect for you and say happy Birthday, we don't really know each other but we're connected, I say, hey, thanks. What would you typically reply back to there in order to kind of get that going?

If it was me, I would say, hey, sure thing, Brian. We actually just started a Facebook group for people want to learn how to grow their business using LinkedIn.

Want me to send you an invite?

Okay, I'm not wasting a lot of time.

I'm being pretty, you know, kind of.

Jumping a little bit, but I'm doing that instead of just sending mass messages out. So a few things I'm doing right is I'm not saying, hey, we help people generate leads from LinkedIn, yada yada. Just got XYZ results for another person last month and never having any conversation with them before, like taking them straight to bed as they would say. Right.

Jimmy had just been talking about different ways to respond to people, going from the just the little thank yous and using those two things. Want to go directly into the convert or die or do you want to kind of lead them into a funnel or Lead them into a group, something else like that. So, Jimmy, some of this definitely plays into driving traffic into your inbox. Are there any other ways that you do in order to get drive traffic to your inboxes besides just the ones that you've mentioned right now?

Yeah. So you have a simple checklist that's like. It's like driving traffic to your inbox.

For Dummies kind of thing. Like, anyone can do that, right? Yep.

The other stuff is obviously posting really good content. And I've had a handful of posts get hundreds of thousands of views. And I tend to. It's funny, I actually usually go for quantity over quality with posts. I try to make one post a day. But I can give you guys some simple tricks on getting a lot of engagement on LinkedIn. Posts that will organically obviously drive a lot of traffic.

We like simple tricks. Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, There's a guy who, he actually calls it like the Trojan horse.

Type of something like that. But basically where you post something that.

You know is going to get a.

Lot of engagement and then following that.

You like the next day or something.

You post an offer that's a little more direct, something that usually gets less engagement. But every type of engagement is like a hot lead. So I'll actually use a really good example. This past weekend, I got engaged and.

Congratulations.

Thank you, man. Yeah, super pumped. Been together literally since high school, so really cool. And I posted. This isn't something you'd usually post to LinkedIn. Again, I break all the rules, but I posted a slide. So something you can do on LinkedIn is you can put pictures on a PowerPoint document or PDFs and it'll actually show up as a slide, which is pretty neat. You could even do that with like slide decks if you have, or pitch decks or whatever. You could, like put it on there. But in this case, I put pictures of our engagement. And what I said, I said something along the lines of my first line was, I just closed the biggest sale of my life. And how, you know, like most sales.

It took a lot of hard work.

And, you know, the feeling you have after that big sale. And I talked about how that felt, but it felt like that times 10. I talked about how on LinkedIn most people try to keep themselves buttoned up, but at the end of the day, what we're all trying to do is make the people at home happy. Something like that. Long story short, what I did was I took something you normally find on Facebook. I tied some sort of business or life stuff to it. That's the common core principle of all.

My posts that do really well.

I take something you'd normally find on another platform, even Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and I put it on LinkedIn and just tie some sort of business life lesson to it. So another example of that might include, you know, that video of that guy who he was on America's Got Talent, he special needs and did an amazing job. And I brought that same example of someone on the other side of the world. He knew of that video as well, super viral. And the next day after it came out, I saw on YouTube that there was someone that chopped up another version of it. It wasn't on America's Got Talents page. And I used that and just kind of downloaded the video and put it up into LinkedIn as a native video and tied a business lesson to it. Something along the lines of, regardless of what it is that you're doing, we all have a gift that needs to be shared. And again, something along those lines of something you'd find on Facebook, tying a business lesson to it, something that all people can relate to, like you and I. Like, we're working hard and we're doing it some, maybe sometimes for our ego, but also because there's people in our life that we don't. We want to make proud, we want to provide for and things like that. Things that most people don't talk about in conversations but are the most important to us. I try to talk about those things in my post while everyone else is sharing their growth charts and statistics and whatever.

Yeah, you're humanized.

Humanizing, exactly. I talked about it all the time. Humanizing it. And so when you're scrolling through the timeline and you see something, you know, chart, chart, chart, you know, whatever, boring stuff. And then you see engagement pictures. And by the way, like, I posted that yesterday, within a day, had like, within 24 hours, it had over 85,000 views on it. And so it's just going to keep blowing up. And Morgan doesn't like me talking about, like, things that she's involved in, like.

In a businessy way.

So hopefully she won't listen all the way through. But I definitely, any post with Morgan in it is the easy 10, 20,000 views. People like seeing peaks into your life, right? So when you're making a post, try to even go through your photo library.

Your video library, find a video of.

You playing with your kid or something. And oftentimes the people you're networking with, you're trying to do business with, they're also Parents or they're also in relationships, they're also working hard for someone else too. And that's going to grab their heart way more than your statistics will. And so I make a post like that and I know it gets a lot of engagement and part of it is just continuously showing up, right? Because you have to convince LinkedIn's algorithm that you're an interesting person. So.

Yeah. And I mean all humans, at the end of the day, it might be, it might be a platform for business, but it's humans who are on there. And humans don't really change just because of where they're at. Are there any other strategies that. Because you do this for a living and you know, you charge money to help people learn this stuff, but are there any strategies out there that absolutely pain you to reveal for free here on this show?

For sure, yeah. I mean, one of them.

Like how I did that, by the way.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Let me, let me share one more like trick. I mentioned it briefly earlier, but I can just kind of go through it in a little more depth so that know how to use it. So retargeting. I actually, I'll say this.

Most people who are coaching people on.

LinkedIn right now, no one's doing it really the way that we just talked about for the majority of the call, but most people are either they're either connecting with a bunch of people and then spamming everyone and whoever is the best copywriting wins or what they're teaching is something that I actually think is pretty cool. And it's basically just a LinkedIn retargeting strategy. So this is really good for people that know how to do Facebook ads or even Google Ads or anything else where you're retargeting people through their emails so that we connect IO app. I told, I talked to you guys about when you guys are going through and auto connecting with these people, what it will do actually is it will scrape their profiles for all their information.

You know, their name, what they do.

With a company, but most importantly their email. And you can export that into, you know, a CSV file or whatever and import that into Facebook, you know, your Facebook ads campaign. So that now imagine basically you've just added more. You just stole all the filters that you can put through on LinkedIn to connect people. Business owner, company size 200 to 500, this industry, you know, private company, they're in this LinkedIn group, all that stuff. And now you've added all those filters into Facebook and you can retarget them So a big complaint people have about Facebook is that the average income of a Facebook user is $40,000. So that you're not hitting a ton of decision makers. Really good for E commerce. But a lot of people in business to business are struggling with it. Even though decision makers there, they just not the filters aren't good for finding them. So you take all of LinkedIn's filters.

Scrape the profiles that people you're going.

And connecting with, then you retarget them on Facebook.

There's people who are building courses around.

That whole strategy in itself. But you guys just follow that system of Download, we connect IO, do like a 14 day trial. No, I don't have an affiliate link or anything. Just, just check it out and download it. It has videos on exactly how to like go and connect people, how to scrape profiles and stuff and then download the CSV file and plug it into Facebook and see what happens. But now what you'll find is that you're going to be able to target people who are actually like LinkedIn's average income per user is $80,000. So literally double of any other social media platform out there right now. So yeah, that would be one strategy that again you don't need to buy someone's course in order to do like you can just start doing it.

And I think one of the questions.

Probably ask is how people can get in touch with me. If someone has a question about that, I'll just help them out with. That's great questions they have about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Things like that make a, you know, make a ton of sense. You know, let me go back, let's try to summarize the overview of this strategy here in a way that is extremely self serving for me. Selfish and self serving, which is my favorite qualities of myself. Just kidding folks. So I mentioned before that I've got a client that we are in the early stages of helping him reinvent and transition from employed expert in hospitality operations, consulting culture, you name it. He's got like crazy experience. So I'm helping him create this like a high end hospitality consulting business and we're doing multiple things as it applies to LinkedIn for the various strategies. Let me try to sum up a couple things and this is in a very compressed way. Correct me wherever I may mess up and then add anything that I leave out. Okay, for sure.

Yep. Cool.

So one of the things he's gonna do is obviously he's been working on identifying his ideal prospective avatar which would be people who are like restaurateurs and people Big in the, you know, hotel industry. Any. Anybody really in hospitality. But that mainly falls into restaurants and hotels and things with guest experiences. So he would. Now would he go to WEConnect IO, which I hadn't even heard of that one. In order to start to build do automated connections with people.

For sure.

All right, great. So they're going to get the automated connections on that. And then after somebody by the way does a accepts a connection request, do you manually or automatically. I don't know if this does that. Send them a thank you for connection email with any kind of open ended questions or is that part of the strategy?

No. And the reason why. And I experimented with it because it hasn't always been the case that you send a message when you go to connect with someone, then they've made it a thing. And I thought it was awesome at first.

I loved it.

But then what I realized is that no one is replying to those messages because I guess my answer for it is that people are smarter than what we give them credit for. And even though your message might be innocent, you might just be saying, hey John, so glad to be connected.

Hope you have a great day.

People, their brain tries to find an answer on why you just sent them that. And oftentimes this is just because people are getting blasted with spammy messages on.

LinkedIn all the time.

People assume that at some point that's going to turn into a sales pitch. It's like a financial advisor offering you coffee is an innocent thing, but we all know what the whole point of that coffee is, right?

No, exactly. So you don't hit them up right away on that. You just kind of let that go and then you look for other opportunities to engage. Right. Or to use your content.

And here's why I've broken that rule a couple times. One time is with that client I told you about who we built our custom thing where he's literally inviting every person he connects to onto his low budget podcast and then building a relationship from there. If you're offering value right out of the gate, like something like that, it builds their ego or like then go for it. That's totally fine if you don't want to do that song and dance waiting for them to send you a message.

Right.

Like as long as you're offering value right away, you can shortcut it. But I'm just letting everyone on the call know that they're going to get a higher response rate if they allow a conversation to happen first.

And the other time that we've broken.

That rule is, I have a client who. He's just such a good, like, authentic guy. Like, he's such a. You can just tell, much like Malcolm.

Gladwell's book, like Blink.

Like, you can just get this honest impression of, like, just a genuine guy when he's on video or when you meet him in person. And so he loves using BombBomb. So maybe 10 connections. Yeah, amazing tool for those that don't know. You get like a video in the email and you can personalize it. And so he actually does a BombBomb video for 10 of his new connections every day. And he's just such a genuine guy that it works really well for him. And so we're taking his strength and showcasing that.

Right.

And not to say that like other people shouldn't, because they're not as genuine as him, but kind of at the same time, like, that's just his serious strength. He has an aura about him. And so we're getting him on Bombbomb videos and people could try implementing that.

Too, if they'd like.

Another neat trick, if you guys do want to try that strategy, is get.

A little mini whiteboard, put their name.

In it on the video in the first three seconds so that they can see that it's not just a canned video that is actually made for them. So that's just another neat strategy. But yeah, that kind of goes back.

In answering your question, I think. Perfect.

And then look for opportunities after all these connections are made. Look for opportunity, obviously, whenever the, you know, whenever somebody's made go in, especially in his role, take a look at who it is, see just how appropriate they are, decide to reach out, and either because one of the things he is going to be doing is that podcast strategy and will create and likely a Facebook group for this as well. Those are both on the docket. So I'm glad that you said both of those things. And invite them to. Obviously invite them to the group. And then if it makes sense, invite them to the podcast as well. Then as he goes about his day, look for the opportunities to a endorse people. And did you say you can do the endorsements? Yeah, you can automatically. I am familiar with that. Does we connect, do auto endorsements or. I know there's other.

It does. Yeah. And that's why I chose it over something like you link because it has that endorsement tool.

Nice. Okay, so I've used Phantom Buster for some stuff like that. I don't know if you've used them. So auto endorsing, wishing people happy birthday Obviously, I mean, commenting on some people's stuff, but also putting out good content and then looking at your stats and seeing if people comment on it or like it and use that as an opportunity to reach out and get into conversation. Is that correct?

Yeah.

So phase one, stand out on your profile.

Phase two, target the right people. Phase three, do that checklist we just talked about to drive traffic to your inbox. Plus, a little bonus thing is creating good content, which we talked a little bit about. And phase four is choose which way you want to convert them. Whether it's offering a very direct approach, phone call sounds like, you know, probably it's not the case. I recommend for most people, or the other option is funnel them into something that creates value for them immediately. Podcasts, Facebook group, meetup group. Here's one time I break my own rule of not reaching out first is if I have a meetup group. We're starting a meetup group here in Charlotte for coaches, consultants, speakers, authors and stuff. And if someone is one of those things and they're in the Charlotte area, I'm going to send them a message saying, hey, John, we're actually hosting a meetup group for top coaches and consultants, you know, next week in Ballantine. Thought it'd be crazy not invite, you want me to send you more information? And then they say yes, then we send the link and all that stuff. I'm definitely going to be doing that as an outreach approach because it offers so much value and it's crazy for me to not message someone first about that and allow that missed opportunity to pass us by.

Absolutely. No, that's strong. Maybe the last question that kind of comes to my head and this is off of this example, LinkedIn ads worth a damn or not.

Yeah.

So the time that it's worth a damn is if you usually, if you have an offer that's worth more than $15,000, then go for it. As a matter of fact, I almost had the opportunity to work with Jordan Belfort's team, but they, they're going to go through a LinkedIn ad strategy. And I do have a good guy for that. I refer to guy over to them who he's. He's gonna get them really good results. Like, he works with big companies on those things. But it's usually big companies or people have very high ticket offers in order for it to be worth their money because you have to pay more pound for pound on LinkedIn.

Okay.

LinkedIn is like a premium social media company. It's like, you know, Lambo versus Honda for other platforms. So you just got to pay more to play Perfect.

Now this, this has been great. You've definitely opened my eyes to a handful of things here that I hadn't really thought of. And. And the nice part about it is it's not rocket science. It's relatively simple, but you just have to kind of dedicate yourself to it. You have to use the right tools, the right processes, framework systems to where you don't get overwhelmed in all the potential options and end up spending five hours a day on here. I know you offer a training, I believe. Do you offer done for you services? Tell me about your business specifically and how you help people who take this and go, man, yet I need to do more LinkedIn. How can Jimmy help me?

Yeah, we at one point we're doing.

The done 40 model and that's actually what Guido is doing. She's actually. We kept our clients for that, but we're not offering it to new people. So what we found as an improved model from that and honestly more scalable for us, is training their team on how to do it in house. So they're still getting it done for them, but that way they're able to tailor as, you know, when someone's running agency, the more clients they get, the lower the customer satisfaction becomes because the more people you bring in, like, the more boxy you have to make it in order to scale as a business. So what we've kind of transitioned to what our deliverables look like is we do have a course that someone can do as a done for you thing. We have a handbook that's like 97 bucks just that way that anyone could check out our strategies. But the thing I get most excited about is we actually have a retreat and we're probably going to do one of these once a quarter where, you know, we cover everyone's food, we cover their stay 20 people max, and we all just implement. It's not about learning the strategies. It's everyone brings a laptop, we open it up, we go through the whole system together and like, get it done as we're talking about it, answer questions. Tina, actually, who's my assistant and runs all this stuff for me, she actually does one of the talks on how people can train their assistant or people on their team to do this for them. A lot of entrepreneurs don't want to do this stuff. They want the result kind of like.

How you were talking about, but they.

Don'T want to do it. And so we train them on how to train their team on how to do this. And so we have that retreat model, which is also, by the most fun way you can make people money.

Yeah, I love it.

You get to build like, I'm big on relationships and so it sounds crazy. I've listened to some of the podcasts and stuff already, but, like, I get excited when I get that cha ching on my phone and it's like, it's.

Like a sale from someone I've never met before.

But I also, like, dang, I want to reach out to this person and like, ask them how I can help them and become successful and stuff. I just want to get to know these people. And so I get really excited about the retreat model being big on relationships and stuff. And on the much higher end, it's. We work with companies that have teams, so we usually come into a workshop and then look at working together on a more fractional chief marketing officer type of basis. Then they usually pay anywhere between 10 to $20,000 a month for us to just keep working with them. But we wouldn't work with more than five companies at a time doing something like that.

Makes sense. So where do people find out more information on these various offers, whether it's the digital programs or the retreats, etc.

Sure.

I think if it's a retreat, then I'd rather someone just send me a personal message. I don't even offer it on my website. I want to have. I want to have it be done through a very personal basis so they can reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn. I'll probably be the top result. Running out of capacity for friends on both platforms, but you can follow me on either one and send me a message that way. The other offers, you can easily find them on our main site, which is www.grow and give company.

And that's our main website.

Fantastic. Are there any nuts you're trying to crack right now besides just, you know, the obvious one is, you know, you'd love to have more clients and customers, et cetera. Right. Is there anything right now you're trying to specifically learn? Any skill you're trying to master, any person specifically you're trying to meet. This is where myself or my audience can think about how we can get back to you.

That's an awesome question. So, and this was the big battle, actually that I'm starting to understand the answer to. Like you just asked about the deliverables, Right. Because when you offer information product, it's figuring out what is the best way to deliver this to the market. That is the Most valuable and also the most scalable and profitable.

Right.

And, you know, to be honest, I have. I have the course and things. I'm not the type of guy that would buy a course, so it was really difficult for me to get excited about selling that to people. And I also know the statistics of 9 out of 10 people don't go through it. And I can tell myself that it's their fault a certain number of times until it becomes like, all right, well, why am I even working hard anymore if I'm not changing the world?

Right?

So I get a lot of value from the retreat model. But if you guys have other ideas on just models for offering the. The service, I'd love that because I have this information. I know that people are getting really good results, but in order for us to help the most amount of people, the delivery is key.

Right.

So that's a big thing there. And then I love filling up a pipeline, but I also don't like details in organization, so.

Or being responsible for it is probably a better way to say it.

Yeah. Responsibilities for grownups, we got no time for that.

I'm with you. Right, Right. Yeah.

Serious, like, oh, you can imagine, like, with the whole engagement thing going on this way, like, I get excited to see people send me congrats messages, but it also, like, it stresses me out and. And. And wears me down to have to.

Reply to all of them. Right. Yeah.

That's just kind of how my brain is. So that's why Tina is awesome and I put a lot on her plate. So, you know, just feedback on stuff like that is always really helpful from other entrepreneurs who fighting the same fight, you know?

Awesome. You know, one of the things you mentioned, I just interviewed a friend of mine named Marisa Murgatroyd. Have you heard of Marisa before?

No.

No.

So one of the things that I think this might help crack the nut you're talking about with when, as it comes to, you know, digital courses, memberships, they're great, but the statistics of completion and success are insanely low. And it doesn't have to do with how good the, you know, the product is necessarily. Like, it could be the best content in the world, but it's just human nature. So she's cracked this nut wide open. And she's got an entire process that she calls. Well, one of the words is called experience. Ifying the program. And she has got the most insanely high course completion rates and success rates of anybody I've ever seen out there. And for the past several years, she's been offering this program, which. I'll send you a link. There'll be a link in the show notes for everybody. Because I cannot remember off the top of my darn head exactly what the link is for this. And she teaches this program once every or maybe once or twice a year. I know she's coming up with one in October, but it really is. And we went into depth. I'll send you the link to the audio recording as well. So you can really kind of understand the way she creates everything from the certain types of challenges to the way she frames her information product, which becomes an experience product, and how that really is the way of the future. Because when you do, as you know, when you do have clients that actually go through your material and then they actually do your material, and then they get results, they become these massive evangelists, and it makes the other marketing so much easier. I think she said she's. She even gamified the aspect. She's got like 700 testimonials of successful people. And it's through this gamification and experience ification of what she does. So I will. I'm letting all of my listeners know that, yeah, the link to that episode, or as we call them, epicizzles, will be in the show notes. And then I'll also send that to you privately, and it might be something that can help you out.

Yeah, man, I really appreciate that.

My pleasure. Well, Jimmy, this has been a. This has been a real treat having you on the show. As I said, you came very highly recommended from two people I trust very much, and I really appreciate all of the insights. As I said, I've learned a handful of new things and you've given me some new perspectives, make me kind of go back to my own profile, which I like the way I've done it. But based on some of the things you've said, it makes me go, huh. I think there I might be able to change some stuff up here and add a little bit more of the, you know, the aspects that you were talking about. Maybe, you know, especially in the first part of the episode for anybody who wants to get ahold of Jimmy and find out more. Obviously, he mentioned how you can send him a message on any of the social links. You can also go to growandgiveco.com all of this will be in the show notes. And for everybody else who's listening to this, if any of the things that I said or Jimmy said struck a chord with you, you have other questions you'd like a second opinion on something that's going on in your business or life, you can always shoot an email to ask bradakenrap business.com Jimmy thanks a lot for joining me today on the show, bud.

Thank you so much for having me, man.

Okay, this episode is almost done, but our time together doesn't have to end. At least not yet. Subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next episode and head on over to Bacon Wrap Business, where you can find more bonus material. And you can leave me a voice message with your question. If it's good, I'll read it on the air. And if you have a business problem you'd like my brain on, send me an email to ask bradbacon wrapped business.com tell me more and I might be able to give you a second opinion on what's keeping you stuck. See you on the next episode.